Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages

Minding Each Others' Business ...

2009-10-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

The book's crippling flaw is Striphas's decision to ignore the other half of an indivisible subject

- Full review below.

Minding Each Others' ... Book Cover

2009-10-21T17:08:00.001-07:00

Minding Each Others' Business: Publishers and Booksellers in the Late Age of Print

2009-10-21T16:47:00.000-07:00

The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control

Striphas, Ted, New York, Columbia University Press, c2009 - 978-0-231-1814-6

242 pp., rrp $27.50

– Review by M. F. McAuliffe, Contributing Editor, Gobshite Quarterly

Striphas suggests that we are currently living through a paradigm change, "tectonic plates pushing against one another". It has also seemed to me that we are living through an epochal convulsion. The convulsion in this particular case is from printed books to e-books.

The Late Age of Print is essentially an investigation of history to make three arguments. The first is that the move from printed books to e-books is (no more than) another turn of the wheel in the evolution of communication from personal utterance, to handwriting, to print.

The second argument is that through digital rights management, a matter of copyright law, e-books finally offer publishers a way to stamp out the 2nd-hand book trade. Striphas assembles evidence to show that this "uncompensated" circulation of books has exercised publishers for over a hundred years.

The third argument is that major publishers, using copyright law to prosecute locally affordable (pirate) editions in the 3rd world, notably in eastern and southern Asia, are actually penalizing–and suppressing some parts of the cultures of–those regions, for the poverty which western commercial interests, such as the currency manipulations of the late 1990s–have themselves created.

In the Harry Potter chapter Striphas describes publishers and booksellers both now artificially creating scarcity–simultaneous, world-wide release-dates for mega blockbusters–in order to maximize sales; publishers hiring lawyers to police the printeries of the world in order to quash pirated editions (book-alikes, knock-offs, parodies), and to physically destroy these locally-affordable products; publishers going to court to assert that Bengali and Chinese knock-offs, which also may include folk-variations from those cultures, are both actionable and suppressible.

That's most of the book in outline.

Striphas's account of the lock-downable features of e-books is fine; his history is unexceptional–literary history, industrial history–supermarkets were actually modeled on bookstores, built-in bookcases were designed to stimulate book sales during the Great Depression–until the case study of the Barnes and Noble Superstore in Durham, North Carolina.

Striphas points out that the establishment of a superstore is a complex, multi-dimensional affair, not the simple fall from grace–the friendly, organic, local independent bookstore–it is often claimed to be. As a general claim, that is also unexceptionable. He goes on to point out that though the Durham store did increase traffic, and did have the deleterious effects on the environment the Charlottesville protesters said it would, it gave jobs to Durham's black residents, who had been unfairly denied jobs for decades.

Immediately following this, the matter of possible unfair trade advantages given to chain bookstores is set aside very quickly with a not-proven verdict in one court-case, and a possible future court-case prevented by the death of the original plaintiff (pp. 75-76).

There is no further mention of the chains' effects on publishing decisions or of their dealings and decision-making with major publishers. Redressing unfair unemployment in the black community is a trump card, a conversation-stopper; at this point the book takes on the smell of special pleading.

It might be said that the focus of Striphas's book is book-manufacture, delivery-infrastructure, and bookselling, that his subject is the evolving mechanism of delivering the objects we call books in sufficient quantity to meet ever-growing demand; that his subject also includes some unexpected consequences of maximizing profit via copyright law, such as publishers' expanding the definition of pirate editions to an unprecedented degree and prosecuting them globally with unjust and unprecedented force; and that that the chains' dealings with major publishers in terms of book content (particularly fiction) lie outside the scope of this subject.

I would argue that books are objects, but we read them for what they tell us or invite us to imagine; they are experiments in controlled consciousness. What we buy is that experiment. Ignoring the changes to the way books are bought, and changes to which books are bought via the way books are sold, is to ignore the at an ever-increasing profit half of supplying the ever-increasing demand.

The book I was expecting after reading the first two chapters of The Late Age of Print would have contained an examination of the chains' effects on publishing; it would have shown the employment-bump in Durham as part of a much larger complexity.

It's not just the 2nd-hand circulation of books that's being controlled in new and absolute ways.

For decades corporate publishers have sought to control consumers' behaviour via copyright. See, for example, The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture–Levin, Bob, Seattle, Fantagraphics, 2003–a book that details the ways in which Disney, using copyright laws, defended certain social norms and condemned others. The war abroad is the war at home, and always has been.

See also Other Peoples' Words–McPhee, Hillary, Picador, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2001–where the backstory to the rise and fall of a small Australian publishing house is Penguin UK's requirement of Penguin Australia to return ever-increasing amounts of revenue to the home country, regardless of what that meant for Australian books and the Australian book market.

Corporate publishers have demonstrated, over a considerable time, a determined and quite conscious decision to quash any kind of competition, even of material which has nothing to do with previously copyrighted works.

After Star Wars, movie studios decided to concentrate on blockbusters to generate unprecedented profit, instead of making small movies that generate modest profits. The major publishers, which had just been bought by the movie studios, followed suit: they decided to kill the mid-list–small books by fairly unknown writers, which made modest profits – and to produce blockbusters instead. That decision was the single greatest factor moving the publishing industry towards its current grotesque shape. The major publisher, with its bulk copies sold through bulk stores, large objects with EAN-numbers, whose evolution Striphas details, precisely shipped all over the world, oppressively priced, absurdly well-guarded, at amazing cost in money, trees, labour, industrial production and design, pollution and planetary stress, has constructed a boggling chain of transport and management… to deliver the object but not the goods.

In the late '80s representatives from the chains' marketing departments sat in on editorial meetings. The vote of the marketing department or an editorial consultant was equal to the vote of a senior editor. The chains' demand for ever-increasing sales, if unmet, resulted in a writer's next book either going out under a pseudonym (the writer having to begin to establish a reputation, from scratch, with a new body of work), or not being bought by that publisher at all.

(Full disclosure: I have friends and acquaintance whose careers and occupations and, sometimes, health, have been ended by chains' decisions not to carry any more of their titles and by publishers' consequent decisions not to acquire more titles from them. Sometimes their earlier titles had been doomed by the same chains' lack of publicity and shelf-time, or overlap between the return-and re-order cycles.)

Refusing to print certain books is not beside Striphas's point about copyright law being used for cultural suppression; it is an earlier exemplar of his point about the book trade evolving in order to keep increasing sales and profits. It was as maximum-profit-driven a decision as Barnes and Nobles sliding book-display panels and as Harry Potter's global roll-out date.

If the advent of e-publishing means that publishers can lock down the reader's ability to control the text after "buying" it, the previous deals between publishers and chains locked down readers' content choices before those choices could even be made.

There is no prohibition anywhere against corporate censorship.

However, desiring only blockbuster-level profit and sales-driven deals between chains and major publishers has mummified a lot of Anglo-American fiction.

Profit-level requirements have led to endless series, held to guarantee readership no matter how thin or uninteresting the later installments may be. (See Dune–everything after Children of Dune, which is when the original conception became the Herbert family's, and Bantam/Doubleday's, bread and butter and cheese and jam.)

They have led to branding by the author's name, held to guarantee readership no matter how thin or uninteresting the later volumes may be. In James Patterson's case the only thing done by Patterson is the outline and the editing of the final text. He can no longer actually write the books, there being too many to be published before the market is saturated.

Brand names not to be trusted: Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, Jack Higgins, Ken Follett – who would have thought James Michener to be a precursor–all began with one book of fair average quality or better, and have continued to pump air or sludge long after the well ran out of water; John Grisham's Bleachers is so stereotyped and derivative that reading the first 30 pages is like eating the packet instead of the cornflakes. The Saxon Shore, by Jack Whyte, was clearly sold on 3 chapters and an outline...

These novels contain no factuality, such as Oprah's Book Club espouses (and which Striphas does a sterling job of explicating); no truth of imaginative insight such as Flaubert used to illuminate Madame Bovary. (45 years after Tolkien, epic fantasy–Sara Douglass, Steven Erikson–is now written for people addicted to a particular story-arc. In that it is the counterpart of the romance novel. Both genres now function as narcotics, rather than stimulants.) It could be said that in their attempt to make novels as mass entertainment (which they never were, movies were that) the major publishers have attempted to empty them of all content. Isn't the advice to writers to explain which of the publisher's previous releases his/her book most resembles and to pitch his/her manuscript to the editor of that book?

The last thirty years of print have been defined by the paradox of booksellers deciding what major publishers will publish; the late age of print is defined by the paradox of publishers deciding that the 2nd-hand book trade will end–and being able to enforce that decision technologically.

But, through fundamentally misunderstanding books, confusing the object with the process of conceiving and constructing the text, what the major publishers have done is made the e-book necessary to writers. New publishers, sick of corporate control, are working on new web-publishing software and formats. Sites like Smashwords are open to any writer.

Killing the mid-list turned a great many acceptable popular, non-literary writers into the kind of new brand that's good to begin with and then, once the market for the brand is established, lowers the quality and raises the price. (The loss of quality is not necessarily intended by writers; but how many very good books can you write, one after another, in quick succession? The first time I came across the word potboiler was in a book on Joseph Conrad.)

Killing the mid-list told all writers that continuously increasing sales (the percentage of increase specified) leading to blockbuster books was the only way to a future in writing.

Killing the mid-list meant a great many other writers couldn't get published at all, or, if they did manage to sell a book, would be paid about enough to run a small household for 2 weeks.

No wonder writers will take to the web. And for a while the web will solve some problems.

In the short term, for everybody else–the cost of e-readers will exclude a lot of readers; reading onscreen itself will exclude a lot of the old, who read a lot; eastern and southern Asia will make pirated works available on pirated devices.

Striphas's 3 main points are good and well made, as far as they go. The flaw in the book, and I found it a crippling one, was his decision to pull up short at the edge of the other half of an indivisible subject.

But there is one more point that Striphas makes.

His fourth and final argument is that the lockdown capacity of e-books may come to prevent "cultural politics" (such as embodied in the pirate works, if you envisage them as disputing the cultural hegemony of the originals' copyright holders).

The State of Victoria has tried to do this with respect to graffiti: to buy spray-paint you need a builder's (contractor's) note/purchase order. If large corporations succeed in controlling the web, the end of unauthorized, web-based works and cultural disputation may well be the future.

This situation is implicit in the capacity of the technology (see the recent Amazon Fail matter, for example). Striphas probably outlines something of the truth of the future. However, with so many of us struggling to keep our homes/jobs/health-insurance or health-care, these possibilities are too remote to get the attention they might turn out to have needed.

And then again, as Bobby Sands once pointed out, people will write in shit if they have to.

1 – Striphas argues that superstores are selling a new image of bookselling, rather than a new type of book, and that the old image, where sales depended on the virtue of a particular book, is what is being superseded.

I have worked in libraries, and have found some new books to be less useful than their titles would suggest: though it is better now, given to chapter outlines and more flow (the "global warming" title), when they began (e.g. "Windows 95" title), the For Dummies series chopped its subjects into innumerable small bits, leading to cul de sacs of frustration and confusion; for learning about computers For Dummies was noticeably inferior to the Teach Yourself Visually series. But people ask for For Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide. When people wanted to learn how to operate Windows and PCs, I had to hand-sell Teach Yourself Visually, as it were.

I suspect the difference was the result of advertising, as it turned out to be in the case of Ingles Sin Barreras and Rosetta Stone. Pimsleur's and the other language-learning packages are no worse than these, but are not advertised on radio and TV.

In this sense Striphas is right–sales do not depend on the virtue of even the non-fiction book in question, but on how thoroughly advertising has trained people to ask for the series. Another case of branding.

Obama, Nov 4 2008

2008-12-27T15:48:00.000-08:00

I volunteered for the Obama campaign: these pix are from the Democratic Party results-watch and celebration at the Convention Center...

(tinycam pix m. f. mcauliffe)

12 mayo 2008

2008-05-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

12 mayo, 2008

HOLD THE PICKLES HOLD THE LETTUCE SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…

It was almost 30 yrs ago that the punk provocateurs first album came out, released by Warner Bros., & produced by Eno, after Eno & David Bowie had competed over who would produce this new band.

Devo were a bigger joke than the Ramones and equally as serious. (And ultimately Devo and the Ramones wound up with different franchises.)

People laughed and didn’t get it, or they laughed and got it.

And a few got the joke and got mad (cranky assholes afflicted with perception, like Robert Christgau).

The best, & most prophetic, lyric from that album was:

HOLD THE PICKLES / HOLD THE LETTUCE / SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY…

They firmly had their fingers on or up something of the emergent zeitgeist...the corpus politic…

Pulse, cock, asshole, whatever...

We were all bozos on this bus, all consumers in this shopping mall, and we were so determined to have it our way that the bourgeois individualists drifted apart...

& a true sign of the times was when public schools started removing social studies & history classes from the syllabus, hoping that college would pick up the slack (I had learned about the Hansiatic League in 5th. fucking grade)...

We have become so atomized & anathemized, that there are no common coins in the realm, no common references, no agreed-on map-coordinates.

A few years back and old friend died.

Her passing was mentioned on NPR, and on Salon, & in the Village Voice, and eventually in the New York Times.

She was an Afro-American science fiction writer and McArthur genius grantee. (And she was a better friend to me than I to her, even lending me money to attend a writing workshop and being gracious when I took years to pay her back; through the years we would get together for coffee when she was passing through town, and when appropriate she would give me the requisite son-of-a-bitch slap.)

I called a mutual friend to share the bad news, as this mutual friend was so against the wall as to not be able to afford internet access, not be able to afford the bus fair to the nearest library. (Absolutely tragic for a computer programmer.)

Even though he had been a friend of this decedent, he was much more upset over the death of an old radio-serial actor who had been in every sci-fi radio serial in the 40s and 50s.

He had met this person once, a long time ago.

Yet he did not want to hear about the death of an old friend, in her mid-50s, as he was still grieving over the death of this radio actor who he had only met once, an actor in his late 80s.

I know that there are elective affinities and that not every work of art will resonate with everyone.

Over a week ago I was greeted by an acquaintance who made an odd & sarky comment about Robert Rauschenberg dying.

At the time I thought he was kidding, making one his usual very bad jokes.

I went home and checked on-line.

Nothing in the Village Voice.

Later I found an item in the New York Times, and then on the Beeb…

I had been in a downtown gallery the week before and saw a very good Rauschenberg silk screen from the late 1970’s, a terrific knock-off.

And if it wasn’t Rauschenberg’s best, it was a very good self-parody.

And if an artist can’t rip themselves off from time to time, then who can they rip off?

Rauschenberg was a bridge between the abstract expressionism of de Kooning and the pop of Warhol and Jasper Johns, and he had obvious links to the surrealist and Dada couch boys. And he was king collagist…

Rauschenberg even co-designed an album cover for Talking Heads, a sort of sculptural jigsaw.

With Rauschenberg form not only followed function, but took notes and came back to take names and ask questions.

His work was a continually evolving demonstration of the William Carlos Williams axiom that the pure products of America go crazy.

And per L. Bangs or J. Feiffer, if anyone did a dance about architecture, it was Rauschenberg.

His work always had energy, a visceral and kinetic buzz that delights and informs the eye.

And it still does.

If you can’t get to a decent museum or gallery, then go to a few of these links.

guggenheim rauschenberg

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_133_0.html

rauschenberg link

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rauschenberg_robert.html

rauschenberg - erased de kooning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ

Seatac misadventure pics

2008-05-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

4 aprilis 2008 - Part II

2008-05-20T12:14:00.000-07:00

4 április, 2008
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE:
NORTHBOUND ON I-5,
PART II.

Elliott Bay Book Co. did a terrific calendar listing for their newsletter flyers & website: “The Elliott Bay Book Company / Seattle's legendary independent bookstore / R.V. BRANHAM & Friends / Friday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. / Various forms of fun will roll off the tongue no doubt, as a contingent of people arrive from the delightful, Portland-based, internationally-inclined literary journal, Gobshite Quarterly, in the presence of editor R.V. Branham and others, all to inform, educate (and entertain), with the newly released book, Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages (Soft Skull). Depending on where one is and under what circumstances, there is much that could prove quite handy. "Overflowing with invectives, curses and blasphemous belittlings, the book is more than a resource guide for becoming a multilingual potty mouth. This is a valuable book for bridging communication barriers, making it possible to say such important things as 'millananyawshanmi' - Quechua, for 'I feel like throwing up ...' - David Walker, Willamette Week.”

Channing had gone up to Seatac the night before ... he used to live there & has all sorts of ties, family & otherwise.

Channing would join us at the bookstore. Sarah, however, was studying for finals...

So twas just Moira & I.

We’ve been up to Seatac several times, usually for something at Elliott Bay, and have gone all the way up to Canada, & to Vancouver BC several more times. But we always stayed on I-5.

I am familiar enough with the highways & by-ways of Northern California & Oregon... & what problems could there be with Washington.

We loaded the icechest with tuarine energy drinks, lemonade, & proscuitto hoagies, & kettle chips, & mapquest quest maps, and left NE Portland at noon. (We live just south of the Columbia River, and a mile & a half east of I-5, so it was just a few miles to Washington State proppah.)

It was pouring, but I had just replaced the windsheild wipers, and the traffic on I-5 was not too insane. (What you have to worry about more than anything on I-5 are sudden fog banks, and their zero-visibility.)

We had to stop in Olympia & see someone at Evergreen College about some CURSE+BERATE related business.

This involved leaving I-5, & going onto 101, & entering the maze of Evergreen College.

Evergreen is one of those beautiful wooded campuses, like UC Santa Cruz, rendered truly hermetic by its physical isolation.

Once done, we asked about getting back to I-5, as our mapquest quest maps.

“Just take 101,” we were told. It gets back to I-5 eventually.”

At this point we were theoretically 60-70 miles from Seatac.

Theoretically.

One of the problems with natives of the Pacific Northwest is that they lack the gene for giving directions.

Things like north or south or left or right are not in the vocabulary, not even filed in the cortex, not available conceptually, ontologically, not on any level.

In Oregon they will say, “Just turn at the next Freddy’s...” (Fred Meyer stores are everywhere in Oregon, and as map references completely useless.)

In Washington they say, “It gets back to I-5 eventually.”

Remember, we were at this point theoretically an hour or so away from Seatac.

But we were heading west & then north, passing military bases we had not seen before, and then suddenly in a National Forest.

We saw a huge deer with huge antlers cross the road and then a moose. After the deer, the moose somehow seemed anti-climactic.

And we saw a body of water, a part of the great Puget Sound, or one of its canals. But it was to our right. And sometimes there was a rail, and sometimes not. But there were no shoulders.

The traffic was one-lane each way, and heavy, and the rain made the road look like a creek.

And clouds came down to the trees to scratch their backs.

And more deer, and more traffic snaking each way, wanting to exceed the 45 mph postings.

We began to feel like location scouts for McCABE & MRS. MILLER.

Eventually, near Port Townsend, we saw a utility truck by the side of the road.

The worker, originally from New York or Pennsylvania (by his accent) said we needed to either go up to Port Townsend, still 50 miles ahead or go 15 or 20 miles to the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, which would lead us to the Kingston Ferry, which would take us to Edmonds, 15 minutes north of Seattle via I-5.

After 12 miles, & no signs, we stopped at a café, & were given semi-coherent directions on the turnoff for the Hood Canal Floating Bridge.

A nearby gas station, where we spent $60 on gas & got even more muddled directions.

A customer gave yet another version on finding the turn-off.

By triangulating the directions, and thoroughly fucking them up, we actually managed to find the turn-off for the bridge.

The Hood Canal Floating Bridge was one of the most impressive bridges I’ve ever seen.

The rain got heavier once we got to the other side and we were passing mile after mile of bed & breakfast & antique shop.

We were now on a two-lane highway, and the traffic was Friday-afternoon-heavy.

Finally a sign, indicating Kingston & a ferry. There were seagulls everywhere...part of the local ferry seagulls guild. (They were very different from the seagulls we occasionally see on the Columbia, naot necessarilly a different species, but a different seagulls guild.)

We queued into a parking lot to a far-end lane. Another twenty minutes, and we were directed onto the boat, and parked on a second deck. We were able to get out of the car, and consider the cafeteria, the restrooms, the various large scale maps, the stacks of the Seattle Weekly & the Stranger (which had failed to list us, the bastards, the fascist mother fuckers) and the observation seats with their floatation devices stored beneath.

Moira photographed gulls & other ferries & our ferry’s wake.

Just when we were getting comfortable, we had crossed the sound, and were about to land in Edmunds. We were told that the main road from the ferry led straight to I-5, and that it would be easy as pie from then on. It was still raining, and indeed was overpowering the local storm drains, if the curb tsunamis were any indication. Eventually we got to I-5, and into Seatac, with its Tarkovsky-Solaris freeway, and of course we missed our turnoff because we were coming from the north instead of the south.

Having gotten lost in Seatac more than once, I know some of the side streets fairly well, so we took the first turnoff into the industrial zone and dog-tailed our way back to Elliott Bay Book Co.

Elliott Bay is on First Street, near the Alaska Viaduct (where there is lots of free parking). We had agreed to meet an hour before the event so we could rehearse and tighten the sequence.

Rick Simonson was our contact person, personable & enthusiastic about the book. I mentioned that The Stranger had failed to list us, despite press releases & phone calls & review copies. Rick was very apologetic, and had been a Stranger intern, and knew were the bodies were buried, & told us how The Stranger had failed to list their calendar for the coming week. (Apparently Constant or Frizelle managed to get us into their on-line calendar with a suitably cheeky & snarky & accurate listing.)

Channing was running late, & a couple of cell-phone calls revealed that he was caught on the freeway in Tacoma.

We began without him. I did a brief reading from my intro, and Moira improvised some comments, & read a brief something from Channing’s intro.

There was an okay turnout, including Channing’s girlfriend & her mom & another friend. (Yet no Channing.)

And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.

We were in the Q & A section when Channing arrived, so I had him read some of his favorite invective & insults, especially the Japanese & Gaelic bits.

& I asked the audience members what were their favorite swear words, in whatever language. We signed an immense stack of books, & then retired to a local bar to gossip with an old friend who now lives on Vashon Island, but works for a stock photo agency in Seatac.

But that is the batucada of another carnivale, so here endeth this account.

4 aprilie 2008 - Part I

2008-05-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

4 abril, 2008

A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE: NORTHBOUND ON I-5

PART I

We had done one CURSE-&-BERATE bookstore event, on 7 february, 2008, with Looking Glass Books.

Looking Glass Books is a venerable 30+ years old bookstore which had moved from its downtown location due to ridiculous rent increases and the never-ending tearing up of streets for public transport strangling small retail businesses in central downtown Portland … essentially s. w.

We have history with Looking Glass Books.

We launched Gobshite Quarterly, back in February 2002, and have done many other events there, including two with Luisa Valenzuela…one by long-distance speaker-phone, PDX to Buenos Aires, and another in the flesh.

It was a tough night, raining like hell, still winter.

We were completing against two other events, and one of the local hipster weeklies (Portland Mercury) had not run us in the events calendar.

And the turn-out was small.

Still the event had gone well.

I had considered setting up a font of holy water to see if it would boil over during the reading, but with all the preparations I simply did not have the time to “borrow” some holy water from a local Catholic Church.

I did a brief reading from my intro, and Channing did a brief reading from his. And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.

I essentially conducted, as well as reading the Spanish & the German & Croatian.

Channing handled the Japanese & the Portuguese & the Scots & Irish Gaelic...

Sarah Barrett did the Russian & Yiddish & Italian…& Polish, too, I think.

Moira handled the French & the Icelandic.

I forget who handled the delicate & indelicate Latin, somebody did…

I called out a page number & the language & someone read the entry & then I read the English translation, & then on to the next language, the next translation, the next page.

We did a Q & A, & signed a stack of books.

We all went back to our various quotidian shuffles. Channing to teaching & semi-finals for his Masters in Applied Linguistics… Sarah to finals at Reed College… & Moira & I to the various GobQ projects…

We were setting up other CURSE+BERATE events in Seattle to the north, & Eugene, Bend, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, & Venice to the south, but due to various factors (including the price of gasoline) we had only one other event on the calendar.

Elliott Bay Book Co. were enthusiastic, as the book had been a staff pick since its (informal) (pre-publication-publication?) publication in January, and the book was (& still is) prominently displayed near the front cash register.

[cont’d...]

Protocover for Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages...isn't the nun better?

2008-04-17T11:50:00.001-07:00

fm and podcast filth

2008-04-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

A fortissimo-nacht or so ago, we did a very schizoid interview with Portland-based free-sprech radio station KBOO. A bifurcated affair: in the on-the-air part we could not say “shite” unless we preceded it wit “Gob” and added “Quarterly”…let alone utter the word “bitch” or “whore” or any other loverly words; in the podcast we were able to unleashed the power of the word, especially the specifically unkind word, and spent some time riffing & rifling through CURSE + BERATE IN 69+ LANGUAGES…. If you want to know what was specifically said, well….

…here is the url from a couple of wks ago for that KBOO fm podcast.........

http://www.kboo.fm/node/6559

8 Nov. 2007

2008-04-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

corresp. fr. india
8 nov. 2007

Dear RVB,

Now I'm really flummoxed. .....exact equivalents are tough because Indian kids, at least from the lower middle and poorer sections who would be likely to use more colorful slang, are too poor to buy Barbies and GI joes. The kids who have GI Joes would be anglicized and tend to use the original english profanities :-)

here are some untranslatable very Indian words. these are Hindi, but everyone uses them:

1. chakka= literally means hitting six on the toss of the dice. Colloquially used to mean a man who isn't a 'man', 'can't get it up', and his member remains limp like a six.

2. Ullu ka pattha= son of an owl. Owls are considered stupid because they blunder about half-awake in the daylight.

3.behen-chut= sister-fucker, maa-chut= mother-fucker These are commonly used very strong curses in Hindi, also appropriated by other linguistic comunities

Some Kannada ones which everyone in B_____ and neighbouring areas use, whether they speak Kannada fluently or not;

1. chattri = literally umbrella. an abject flatterer

2. terle= a fellow who messes up things, useless fellow, screw-up

3. bombaat = fantastic, teriffic

Hope this helps. Wish you all the best with this and future projects. Cheering you all the way.

Do stay in touch when time permits. Your mails are a joy to read :-) Hope the cats are not into Satyagraha, but behaving themselves and keeping fit and happy.

smiles from B_______,

M_____

==================================

corresp. fr. s. africa, via n.z.
8 nov. 2007

allo allo,

seriously, what you have here is pretty comprehensive.
i couldn't add much else.

i will mention one spelling thingamajig:

HALSSNOEMOORD (NECKLACE/NECKLACING MURDER)

i'm sure that should be HALSSNOERMOORD -- note the R after the E. ("Halssnoer" = "Necklace")

I would have said Soweto Necklace myself.

l________

6 noiembrie 2007

2008-04-17T10:34:00.000-07:00

corresp. fr. u. p. via iceland
6 Nov. 2007

Hi RV,

Here are your translation requests. B______ helped me with these.

FYI: B____ would like to be listed on this project as G______ J_______ (translator). I also have made a change in that regard. Please credit me on the byline as M___ L______.

I have attached this in word format as well.

FUCK YOURSELF WITH A BARBIE DOLL
Ríddu ﬂér me› barbídúkku

FUCK YOURSELF WITH A G.I. JOE DOLL
Ríddu ﬂér í rassgat me› hermannadúkkunni Jóa

FUCK YOURSELF WITH A STAR WARS ACTION FIGURE
Ríddu ﬂér me› stjörnustrí›shetju kalli

FUCK YOURSELF WITH A STAR WARS LIGHT SABRE
Runka›u ﬂér me› stjörnustrí›s geislasver›i

FUCK YOURSELF WITH A POKEMóN ACTION FIGURE
Ríddu ﬂér me› pókemon kalli

FUCK YOURSELF WITH A MR. PINK ACTION FIGURE
Ríddu ﬂér me› MR. Pink kallinum

FUCK EVERYONE ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE DIRECT DIAL
Ríddu öllum á hra›valinu í gemsanum ﬂínum

FUCK YOUR BABY JESUS IN HIS NATIVITY DISPLAY
Ríddu Jesúsbarninu í jötu útstillingunni

IS THAT YOUR PRICK/COCK OR A POKEMóN ACTION FIGURE?
Er ﬂetta tippi› á ﬂér e›a pókemon kall?

YOU DON'T FUCK WITH THE VIRGIN MARY
ﬁú fokkar ekki me› hina óspjöllu›u Maríu

IF YOU DON'T SHUT YOUR WHORING CUNT MOUTH I'LL HAVE THE TRAFFIC POLICE TOW YOUR CUNT AWAY.
Ef ﬂú heldur ekki saman á ﬂér ﬂínum hóru kuntu kjafti mun ég fá umfer›alögguna til a› draga píkuna á ﬂér í burtu.

IF YOU DON'T PISS OFF I'LL HAVE A UN PEACEKEEPER MISSION WRAP YOUR DICK/COCK IN RAZOR WIRE
Ef ﬂú drullar ﬂér ekki í burtu mun ég fá fri›argæsluli›a S.ﬁ. til a› vefja böllinum/píkunni á ﬂér í gaddavír

23 oktobar 2007

2008-04-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

corresp. fr. france
23 Oct 2007

Hi there

My father asked me to assist you, so here goes:

FUCK GOD.
J'encule Dieu
FUCK YOUR NATIVITY DISPLAY.
J'encule ta scene de nativite!
FUCK YOUR BABY JESUS IN A CRECHE.
Je l'encule ton bebe Jesus dans sa creche
FUCK THE NAZI POPE. (Also popular among Balkan Catholics.)
J'encule le pape nazi
FUCK YOUR MAY DAY!
Je l'encule ton premier mai!

Also, in French:

CATHOLIC COMMUNIST (also a popular Roman term of abuse)
Catho coco
SITUATIONIST WANKER
Situationiste de merde
Connard de situationiste!
FUCK FOUCAULT
J'encule Foucault
FUCK BAUDRILLARD
J'encule Baudrillard

Hope that's helpful!

Best

S__________

PS The film which my father mentioned is called _______

15 Oct. 2007

2008-04-17T10:28:00.001-07:00

Corresp. from Britannia:
15 Oct 2007
chase the dragon: courir le dragon, chasser le dragon

the other, classy insult: si tu ne fermes pas ta putain de gueule, j'appelle les forces de l'ONU pour qu'elles patrouillent autour de ta chatte cernee de fil barbele

will that do??

[In a message dated 15/10/2007 CORRESP. FROM BRITANNIA writes: Can you handle this? They are OK people with a lot of nerve. xx _. Talk later???]

corresp. from Britannia
15/ Oct 2007

[In reply to A request for a couple of terms: One "Chasing the dragon," or "Riding the dragon".... junkie-speak for that opiate buzz... I've heard it used by French & French Canadiene poisonnes & the phrase is more or less used throughout the world. rv]

My French son says that the equivalents are very, well, equivalent. Viz:

chase the dragon: courir le dragon, chasser le dragon

the other, classy insult: si tu ne fermes pas ta putain de gueule, j'appelle les forces de l'ONU pour qu'elles patrouillent autour de ta chatte cernee de fil barbele

I hope this will take care of your appetite for stronzi.

Bien de choses,

_. _.

...Deck chairs on the Titanic

2008-04-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

Been reading all the stuff in Salon abt the the publisher's distributor hassles...really parlous.

At this point it really is down to compiling & proofing. We'll try to give some sort of estimate in a wk or so but it could be another 6-8 wks. Still rattling various contrib/consultants chains. & stuff dribbles in which we can compare & proof against wot we got.

We're mostly finished with a massive proofing of the files, & for abt a wk have been laying in the texts. We originally had 4 interns lined up, but 2 left, & another 2 came on board, but they too left. The two that we have, besides Channing (Japanese/Mandarin/Cantonese/Gaelic Scots & Irish/Welsh/Portuguese) are very good indeed. One, Sarah is one of those bicontinental kids (whose parents live respectively in Roma & Ellay -- she lived near my old digs in Ellay), & she is fluent in Italian & Russian & is enow an expert in the cyrillic to be able to transliterate & write the cyrillic for 10 Asian & Middle Eastern languages that are still in the Russian or at least Cyrillic sphere on influence -- downside is that she is really into Emo.

Another kid, David, doesn't speak other languages, but does have a very good eye for detail & very good pattern recognition...so his work is good. I really do hope to be done with this by summer's end. He's more Thievery Corp & other haus mutanta bee-pea-em cardio-pulmo workouts.

I've been on this weird jag where all I want to here is Astor Piazzolla or Sonic Youth & I got about 15 hours of each on the iTunes, so the interns retaliate with Sufjan Stevens or Bright Eyes. (I pretend to hate Magnetic Fields -- they haven't noticed the ceedees on the shelves -- so we listen to something everyone likes.)

We're all getting good at typesetting in Cyrillic & Greek & even Arabic. (There are Arabic fonts buried towards the bottom of the InDesign Creative suites fonts inventory -- but we leave the Mandarin & Cantonese to Channing -- there are thousands of characters in several different files, each having to do with a particular dialect or region, with lots & lots of overlap, but a lot of characters that are occasionally used are hidden in one of those files. Channing says that after 3 or 4 years you can do Mandarin or Cantonese in yr sleep. Do I want to be counting ideograms in my sleep...?)

18 maggio 2007

2008-04-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

corresp. from a recovering roman:
26 Apr. 2007

Hi,

Here's the Italian file again, with some interesting phrases added, and a few additions or corrections made:

So Œmpallato (I‚m busy; I‚m balling) Rome

C‚ho il mascarpone alle palle (I‚m really bored; I have mascarpone in my balls) Rome

Brutto Œn culo (really ugly, ugly in the ass) Rome

C‚ho Œno stronzo Œn forigioco (I need to take a shit; I have a shit offside.) Rome

The prick/dick/cock section is really thorough, I just clarified other uses in a case or two.

s_____

7 Mai 2007

2008-04-17T10:13:00.001-07:00

corresp. fr. croatia
Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 14:15:55 +0200

RV, G__________ took a look at these, added some, and did the diacrites..some stuff we just don't really use...most is mommy, Jesus related, as you might have noticed...the two most intense concepts in croatian culture...

we don't have pinky commie or hippies phrases or all that nonsense....we don't like fags, either. and forget about screwing dads, that doesn't happen, only moms..

take it and run...will let you know on the program, it looks like it's going to go..

give m___ a big hug, i'll write her later. xoxo ____

26 avril 2007

2008-04-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

corresp. fr. Finlandia:
26 Apr. 2007

Hey!

Thanks for your mail. Yup, we had a meeting concerning your list last week. Just to start things off, your question about the phrase WHALE FUCKER:

There is no such expression in the Finnish language. Whales almost never go through the Kattegat and Belt Sea straits to reach Finnish waters at the Gulf of Finland or the Gulf of Bothnia. Thus, whale-related vocabulary is absent in common Finnish. The literal translation is "valaannussija", if you want to use it.

That brings me to your list:

I hope we haven't done things wrong, though we tried to follow the job-description on page one.

We added many current ones, not only in the brackets specifying "add more examples,” and we rearranged the previous, corrected grammar, removed some obsolete terms, adding more familiar terms at the top, removing ones that had no business being in that category in the first place.

The four of us in the panel, well adversed in obscenities, had trouble recognizing some terms.

Some slurs, particularly the ones pertaining to copulating with various members of one‚s family (fuck your mother, father, sister, uncle, etc.) are uncommon in the Finnish language. Slurs such as these, I believe, are more frequent in the catholic countries.

Finally: we only had a day at this, so any questions you may have and/or revisions (if possible, we'd like to check the final draft for the Finnish section) will be more than welcome.

The sub-groups between phrases was quite specific, so I'm sure we've ignored repeating a few. Also, we've corrected the English translations ONLY where the meaning of the phrase was incorrect. I'm sure you'll go through these while editing.

I'll get back to you on the pseudonym to be used between the 4 of us later. In answering to this mail, would you please press the EPLY ALL button? Thanks!

Till soon,

k____

P.S. Worth mentioning: In the book “Mother Tongue,” the famed author Bill Bryson mentions that the Finns don’t swear at all (page 210, the Penguin Books paperback edition, 1991). Judging by the list enclosed, someone’s f***ked with Bill Bryson’s research.

19 febrero 2007

2008-04-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

corresp. fr. croatia
19 Feb 2007

F___ is working on it...gawd some of those are hilarious, i did a study on Croatian profanity ages ago for a linguistics class, did i tell you? the "may-God"-etc.-ones are pretty damn imaginative. Croatians don't go in much for some of those categories, thankfully. what we have is more than sufficient.

anyhow, our weekly culture TV program is thinking aobut doing a whole bit on the project and profanity in general, based on the project..will keep you posted. if they do, they will probably want to talk to you.. more later, j___

[this was reiterated during further discussion exactly a year later…. Something about Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, nu…?]

prosinec 2006- styczen 2007

2008-04-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

corresp. from france & quebec, can., via indiana
décembre 2006 — janvier 2007

People have asked how I found participants.

A lot of the contributors had been people I knew in Southern California in the 1980s and very early 1990s.

Some were co-workers from international banks or from aerospace, some bartenders or busboys & wait staff in various bistros & restaurants & diners.

Many of the more recent project participants just happened to be volunteers or interns for, or contributors to, Gobshite Quarterly, the polyglottal magazine I founded and edited the magazine.

Some were friends seeking post-graduate degrees in Europe.

If I noticed a foreign address on email or snailmail I would query them as to their willingness to participate, and/or if they knew anyone else who would/could/should particpate….

For each language we always sought second & third native-language speakers, so as to capture dialect variations, & also catch any errors unintentional or any errors intentional….

Below is a typical chain of call-&-response for more recent participants:

7 decembre, 2006

Dear F.J. ____________,

Sorry for not getting back to you yesterday, as promised.

I read yr pieces, & wanted to offer the following comments, thinking the works singular enough to merit comment/criticism.

Yr work submitted is intriguing but these pieces at least are not quite there yet.

D________, the last of these 3 submissions, seems to work best. I like yr mutant (?) couple & how they are so mismatched as to be perfect for each other. Still, the poem meandered. (Which is hard to avoid when you are using surrealist tropes.) But I like your the sense of narrative closure, which works best in this poem.

I__________ is droll & amusing, but too gnomic. & you have to be careful with your rhetoric in this piece.

P________ worked the least for me, in part because of the title, but only in part. Still, there are good images, & the images seem to be in service of an idea. (It also made me think of Wallace Stevens -- not at all a bad thing.) But P_________ is too ponderous, too portentious. Again, the rhetoric is a tad too close to the fatuousness of official speech to come off as parody or satire or comedy.

Let these fester a few months, look at them again, & do some revising & some cutting. You have a real knack with surrealist tropes, & good feel for the merging of the quotidian & the marvelous, & that's not nothing. & also you strive for a narrative thread -- at least in these three poems -- again, that's not nothing.

I like what you are doing, & it is different from what most people in North America are doing with poems, even some very talented people who are tunneling through dead-end projects but Surrealism is really exacting in its deceptive off-handedness.

& yes I would definitely be glad to see more from you, but after May 1, 2007, at the earliest

But not these pieces please.

There is something in editorial work called a palimpsest effect -- also in workshops. If I have read a piece which I somehow find wanting & cannot see a way to fix it, then I have a hard time reading revisions with the original piece bouncing around in my head. Unless the revision is very radical I tend not to want to see them.

Unfortunately things are on hiatus with the magazine because we are working on a special project for Soft Skull. It is a multilingual project (just 90 or so languages – we had to jetison 110 languages a couple of few months back because things were too-too & tutu unweildy), & we have to get the first 1/3rd in by January, & the rest by April. I hear a thuderous HA booming,ka- and thundering from the skies.

So unless you are a polyglot, or can proofread or typeset in Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, Belarus, Cambodian, Cypriot Greek or Russian, please wait until May (at the very earliest) for any new submissions.

However, IF YOU ARE POLYGLOT or HAVE CLOSE FRIENDS OR FIENDS who are polyglot, please contact us about this project.

yr obdt svt

rvb, / Gobshite Quarterly / rvb, editor / P.O. Box 11346 / PDX OR 97211-0346

=========================

8 decembre, 2006

Dear R.V.,

Thanks for responding to my inquiry so quickly. I really appreciate your thoughtful and helpful comments on my work, and will definitely submit new work in May.

Unfortunately, French is the only language in which I am fluent; I have a minor familiarity with Latin. If that could be helpful, let me
know.

Sincerely,

F. J. ___________

=======================

8 decembre, 2006

If you would like to proof our French entries, & emmend, ammend, or modify, your contribution would be welcome & we might be able to get a contributor copy to you.

The same applies for Latin.

yr obdt svt

rvb, / Gobshite Quarterly / rvb, editor / P.O. Box 11346 / PDX OR 97211-0346

=========================

29 januarius 2009

I don't think I'm sufficiently familiar with contemporary slang in French. However, I have forwarded your e-mail to a friend of mine, the poet and performance artist Francine Conley, who has a superb facility with colloquial French, in hopes of a mutually beneficial relationship.

F. J. ___________

[note: through the next several months this contributor helped us with both French & Latin, as promised.]

2 dekabr 2006

2008-04-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

corresp. from pdx to the city so nice they named it twice
2 dec. 2006

Dear L___,

Some months or years or aeons back, ie, in an earlier Email I had told you that we were working on a book project, Sinister Wisdom being the title. The book is a cross-cultural 69+language compendium of insults & invective.....

We had to cut from 170 to around 90 to be able to get the book under 300 pages.

You had offered to include the Shit-In-100 languages songspeil from yr recent U__ play.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to this letter.

Soft Skull books has said yes to the project, for publication next fall.

Also, I'd like to use yr cartoonys for the book, esp. the one where a person is talking to someone who's turned into a pretzel or toroid by shoving their head up their ass/arse. (I forgot the caption, which was funny, but the image makes people laugh before they even read the caption.)

yr obdt svt

rvb / Gobshite Quarterly / rvb, editor / P.O. Box 11346 / PDX OR 97211-0346
=========================

corresp. from the city so nice they named it twice
3 detsember. 2006

yes.i will get it to you asap-tomorrow it's a music score-but you'll be able to get the words from it.cartoon will take me longer-unless you have it-i have to search!

let me know.

what's yr fax?

keep the money and use it towards your very fine magazine.

i
rmn
yr
cnstnt
fn

mzlz

8 Juli 2006

2008-04-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

corresp. from buenos aires
8 julio, 2006

this is great fun but it takes time.

will take care of it when back from france,

sorry!!

love

luisa valenzuela

[at this point L.V. was helping us with Spanish entries, & our Spanish file was approx. 80 pages, 2 columns, single spaced, in 9 point pica. And yes it DID take time. -- rvb]

9 janvier 2006

2008-04-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

corresp. from beijing via melbourne, victoria, oz
9 shirer yue, 2006

Dear M___ & R.V.

I am not too sure of all the languages he speaks, definitely Mandarin, his email address is a______ @ _____ . com . cn …. The [transliterated] spelling is Q____ but Qang but prefers his english name A____. Sent everything to him and see what he can do. Its bloody hot and smoky from all the bushfires, tomorrow will be even worse. The exhibition looked interesting from the photos.

regards, G________

[We eventually received Mandarin entries….]

16 agosto 2005

2008-04-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

16 agosto, 2005

Hello!

Thank you for your note.

You have to excuse me because I could not get your name; I'm really bad for that.

I'm thinking about your proposal; brainstorming; I'll need sometime and research... However I'll give two things to consider; one a sample of a short article explaining the last stretch of the Catalan literature since Franco's dead; the second is this:

I'm imaging something like a sample of 7 literary pieces by 7 authors of different takes; generation, style, thought, etc... but homogeneous enough to give an eagle view of the Catalan literature landscape; each sample translation, would be accompanied by an introduction that situates briefly the piece in the context of Catalan literature, history...

This structure of 7 samples; repeats in a series of 13; each time broadening or narrowing the scope to form a collection that could be printed separately as a whole. The objective is to promote, to inform, to awake interest without great academic, scholastic deep. Also the collection will situate Catalan literature in contrast with Castilian , Italian, etc... briefly but correctly. I could contact some authors and academics from Catalunya and ask for help, and offer their names to be mention; like I could coordinate, write if necessary, translate, etc.. but the beautiful would be if I could get collaboration from the academics and authors active now... As I said... I'll think about it more, a lot more...
Here a Catalan article about the authors of the Balearic school:

x_____ p_____

[note: attached doc., De la generació dels 70 a la actualitat, La generació dels 70: La narrativa, & ext. links not included due to intellectual property issues. But Catalan is fun to suss out, perhaps even stranger than Portuguese. Indeed what would Caligula say about all these Latinate descendents? -- rvb

11 julio 2005

2008-04-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

corresp. from pdx to barcelona via pdx
ll julio,, 2005

Dear X___,

Twas good to meet yz at W___'s gallery show on Wednesday & again at S___'s W____ A_____ show on Friday.

(Sorry I had to duck out early Friday, but I had lots of work to do this wk-end.)

We had discussed the possibility of yr translating work by Catalan writers -- either contemporary, ahora, or 20th century writers. (Also, Sabrina sd that y're a writer, so I wld be glad to see any
of yr own work which y've translated into English.) We have been publishing lots of Croatian work, including a series of essays on the 20th Century thru a Rear-View Mirror, on such topics as the Automobile, Baader-Meinhof Gang & the Summer of 77, Lenin-Dada, Coca-Cola, & etc. (There are also 33 more essays from that Croatian collection,
so should our magazine continue, we will have plenty to say about certain aspects of the 20th C. (from a Balkan perspective).

Also, we've printed new translations of Petronius, a translation of a Machado poem by Walt Curtis, translations by Doug Spangle of a few 18th century poems by the German poet Holderlin, some very important writing by Luisa Valenzuela from the 1970s which has mostly not appeared in English (there are 30 or so self-contained sections from a novel, & only 4 or 5 had been translated & appeared, & we have done 8 more, & are working with another publisher to get her book published bilingually), & some stories by the Czech writer which were written in the 1920s & 1930s, so we are very open as to chronology.

What I see as very useful, if possible, wld be to feature some older pces, showing an evolution of Catalan thought & culture during the 20th century & its opposition to -- & suppression by -- the Franco regime. It must also be remembered that writing illuminating a commonplace from a different perspective -- brings a spark of the marvelous to the most quotidian thing -- can also be very important -- Bertold Brecht notwithstanding.

I was going to bring a few issues for you, but I forgot; Sabrina & Navid have some, & there are back issues at Looking Glass Books on 3rd & Alder....

I wld love to get together with you for some coffee some time in the nxt wk or two & we can discuss this further.

yr obdt svt

rvb / Gobshite Quarterly / rvb, editor / P.O. Box 11346 / PDX OR 97211-0346