koganbot | The reviews are cool but they burn out

Current Music: Aly & A.J. "Silence"

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The reviews are cool but they burn out

In three months through June 2006 my book moved about 1,450 copies, so I said to myself, "It'll probably top out at about 2,000," which I guess wasn't too bad considering I didn't get many reviews, the most high-profile being Tom Breihan's Pitchfork rave ("Don't even attempt to fuck with Real Punks Don't Wear Black") that didn't even go up until July.

My statement for the year through June 2007 finally arrived yesterday, and I was thinking I might get a royalty check for another two hundred, which'd be nice. Shows how much I know about the book business. What happened was I got clobbered by returns, over 600 of them, with only 89 new copies sold (so much for Pitchfork's effect on book sales). So now I'll be lucky if I even top out at 1,000, and I'm sure I'll never get another royalty check on it.

What those returns mean is that UGA Press did a good job of getting my book into the stores, but the stores couldn't move 'em off the shelves. Of course, I didn't do anything much on my end other than feature the book on my MySpace: didn't try to arrange a reading at Tattered Cover or think about talking the thing up myself, getting my life together and flying around to book fairs here and there. This had to do with my own financial lassitude (which is a nice word to cover what is basically an on again, off again dysfunction); I wasn't thinking of how to push this as a project, just stumbling from check to check. But really, I needed some high-profile reviews and didn't get 'em. The reviews I got were nice but there weren't enough. Smartest was this one from Frieze.

The book still looks beautiful, has a great title, you can probably get it real cheap used through Amazon, and your library might order it if you ask them to. In the meantime, I'm reminded that my way of thinking just doesn't entice a whole lot of people, much less inspire them to join in.

I kind of had a grump about that at the end of my column, which goes up in about nine hours. Something about seeking a vector to the unfound reader, though I said it more articulately than that.

This does remind me to rev up my thinking about the Department Of Dilettante Research, and the search for said vector.

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books with academic presses can take a long time to find their readers.

i keep thinking to myself, someday i could write a review of 'real punks' for the journal of aesthetics and art criticism. the delay would not be at all strange for that journal.

Who returns a book?

Shops do. They order in stock from the wholesaler because a book looks interesting, it doesn't sell, they send it back so they have space for more books.

If it's any consolation, everyone who read it went out and started a band.

Unfortunately, few of these bands sounded like Ashlee Simpson.

You haven't heard The Beaties yet!

i would like to subscribe to this product or service :)

Also, everyone who read it called his or her local Top 40 stations and requested they play Aly & A.J.'s "Potential Breakup Song."

i bought my copy.

I'd forwarded your request for a review copy, but they'd run out. Of course, now they could give 'em away like candy, having all these pieces of dead tree that they can't dispose of.

Btw, I still owe you an email. It slipped my mind. Apologies. I'll try to get to it.

the book was difficult, problematic, with out a clear narrative, and the essays were not tradtional enough--and i dont know if you were famous enough for a marcus dead/elvis style bricoulouge.

that sounds mean, but i can imagine that the work wouldnt sell because of it. i also dont know how well the electronic handles the dead tree, they seem to have a combative realtionship.

i thot it was really impt, vital even, but i also can understand how it didnt sell well

Yes, it was a compilation of pieces stretching over 30 years, and I thought we organized them well in-book, and there were certainly common themes throughout (and a title that hit those themes, and an intro that told the reader what those themes were), but there wasn't a single hook line to say "This Is What This Book Is About." To sell what is in essence The Portable Frank Kogan, people have to know who Frank Kogan is.

I bought a copy from Amazon. I put a number up on the board!

We could have a "Save This Book" telethon, like Jerry Lewis for muscular dystrophy.

dr vick has one of my copies tho i've spoken to her so little in the last month (she's hyperbusy w.term starting and being overworked) that i;ve no idea if she's looked at it

(the other is the pre-release)

my continued pitches to write extensively abt this book have gone a bit dark these last couple months -- the l*r*b never bothered replying to my reply to their reply

Two weeks ago I had dinner with Andrew Berzanskis and his girlfriend Maggie; they're genial, smart people, and we had a great time. Andrew'd become my acquisitions editor at UGA Press when Derek departed for a while, is now working for a Lynne Rienner publishers in Boulder. He and Maggie decided they wanted to live in Colorado. (He's the acquisitions editor for sociology and criminology, for those career criminals among you who contemplate publishing their memoirs.)

Anyway, Andrew told me that last year a rumor had reached UGA Press that the L*R*B was considering running a review of Real Punks. Given your experience with them and their antipathy to popular music, I told Andrew that this was highly unlikely. He said yes, but that this is why it would have been so amazing.

!! well that explains the subterranean sense of an in-office battle from their response to me!

Oh, I doubt that anyone else even pitched it. My guess is that that rumor was just a rumor.

I ordered the book over a month ago now but Blackwells keep pushing back the date of delivery, even though they'd initially said they had it in stock. Bastards.

Maybe they're creating a "clean" version, or working on a remix.

I get high like a Superword and never reach the top
Till I hit that bottom crash, more like hit the bottom *plop*
I can't stop, cuz PBS is ineffectual
If they try 'n' stop me I'll shout anti-intellectual
Disco Tex, yes, got himself a smorgasbord
Disrespect Elvis cuz he never wore a mortar board
Ain't feelin' Wittgenstein, ya better learn to fake it
Ain't feelin' Frankenstein, ya better learn to make it

Frank -- just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your bk. It ws a borrow of an ilxor, but I look fwd to many re-readings once I bloody get my own copy.

Many thanks (you and everyone else).

Btw, I voted your choice, Gloria Jones, first place in the Pop Open - as a matter fact, I think all four of us who'd not heard it voted it number one. I'd had no idea that her (original) version of "Tainted Love" even existed. She's not well-known in the U.S., we having no "Northern Soul" fanbase and not knowing who she was married to. I looked her up yesterday on Wikipedia. Her story brought me up short. (After having minor success as a singer and being a second-level writer for Motown, she ended up in England and married to Marc Bolan. She was the driver, possibly intoxicated, of the crash that killed him. She fled Britain to avoid prosecution, raised his son, became involved in charitable activities in Africa, now works at an orphanage in Sierra Leone. Of course, who knows how those bare facts relate to her actual story. I imagine that the car crash is a Big Fact, inescapable. I've known a fellow in that situation. Hard.)

I must re-read your stuff on PBS, since actually I spend most of my time on what I suppose could be called PBS related music :-)

There ws a documentary about Marc Bolan's life screened recently with some extensive contributions from Gloria.

I'm not sure I would call that music "PBS-related." I don't know enough about that music, for one thing. And for another, I was thinking of "PBS" in two ways, neither of which would necessarily make any particular piece of music "PBS" in itself. (1) I was saying the indie-alternative music and fanzine network was playing a role for the "youth" (at 33 I still considered myself among the youth, I guess) analogous to the one that the Public Broadcasting System (the U.S. TV network devoted to "educational" and "quality" programs) played for TV watchers. But any music could be approached and extolled in a "PBS" way, whether it was old rockabilly or free jazz or hair metal, but this doesn't mean that everyone who listened to this music was listening to it in such a way. And of course the youth "PBS" wasn't approaching and extolling things in the same way, or approaching and extolling the same things, as the TV network. The real PBS wasn't embracing GG Allin or Psycodrama or the Mentors, for instance, but I definitely would include them within the PBS I was talking about [so some music I would include within PBS and some music I would say could be approached and extolled in a PBS way; this is one of the many unworked-out things about my metaphor]). (2) I was thinking of "PBSification" as a culture-wide process, perhaps inevitable, where something vital discovers a sense of its own significance thereby losing certain psychological protections that had allowed it to fool around and maybe not grasp its own potent nature (thinking of '50s rock 'n' roll as being pre-PBS and then the British-invasion groups such as the Stones setting rock on a PBS path), whereas PBS would maybe reverse this: bands imagining Significance for themselves that they didn't in fact have. Bit this part of the PBS metaphor was not worked out very well either; it needs to be, since it's far more intelligent than calling something "rockism" ever was; for one thing, unlike antirockism, my use of "PBS" assumes that PBS is at work culture-wide and that we (not some other guy) are PBS ourselves, and not just on our bad days. I'd include

poptimists within PBS, by the way. I don't assume that non-PBS is in all instances better than PBS; and I obviously prefer some amount of PBS - though maybe not too much - to no amount of PBS. Definitely prefer Stones to Elvis. And one thing I adore Ashlee Simpson for is the ambitiousness that makes her claim, "I'd walk a thousand miles to find one river of peace/I'd walk a million more to find out what this shit means," which certainly stakes out a territory of capital-S Significance.

In any event, my thoughts about PBS were never worked out nearly as well as they need to be; this is one of my hopes for the future, that I can get people thinking about these issues. My antagonism towards antirockism is that it's what people did instead of trying to think their way through ideas like mine. I don't think anything about the drive towards authenticity or Significance has been well-discussed, much less laid to rest.

OK, actually, when I wrote my last post I didn't recall enough of the central points of that PBS article in enough detail, but I said what I did bcz the music I spend most of my time with is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 (public broadcasting). Many of the commissions for composed works come from Radio networks throughout Europe, the Arts Council of those countries, but also certain privately established foundations (one of my favourite CDs I got hold of this year ws a series of recordings of the music of James Clarke, which ws funded by the Britten-Pears foundation). Its talked about in grand detail in academic journals, though the internet has opened up access to much of the music and discussion of it. Academia is also increasingly allowing space for composers to teach (there ws always some...much of the early electronic music ws developed in music centres at Universities in America and Publicly funded radio stations in Europe).

But as you say its a question of approach.

What you describe on (2) is interesting...I wonder whether a lot of avant-garde classical I like has that 'fool around' quality. Much of it comes in ready-made with a THIS IS IMPORTANT, then years later its all about the mistakes that were made as the music moves to its next important thing. I suppose its all about being ready to take the work with its flaws and strengths at the same time rather than going for one or the other in its sum total.

Heavens! I misquoted Ashlee, though only slightly.

"I walked a thousand miles to find one river of peace
And I'll walk a million more to find what this shit means"

(Important to say it right, so you understand that as far as she was concerned her long walk was well underway. She was 19 when she did this song.)

My suspicion is that the Sante quote on the jacket - about the samizdat pass-around - is kind of prophetic: I can see the people who've read and been affected by Real Punks keeping a drip-feed of references going until it becomes one of the 'great rock books' by osmosis and then gets reissued by some future Da Capo, a la the Aesthetics Of Rock (which I guess didn't sell too many back when it came out). Obviously that isn't a great deal of help to you now, though.

i can email gr3il to suggest he give it cooties!

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The reviews are cool but they burn out

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in all honesty

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"Real Punks Don't Wear Black (Rmx)" f. Lil Wayne

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