The reviews are cool but they burn out

[koganbot]

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.

Comments

[koganbot]

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.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

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.

[koganbot]

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.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

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.

[koganbot]

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.)