Book Store Nostalgia

Do you remember when we fretted about how the big box bookstores were killing independent book shops? Now, it seems like Barnes & Nobles and Borders will be inevitably gobbled up by Amazon, who also seems to be leaving the book business for the greener pastures of electronics and apparel.

This evening, my wife and I visited our local Barnes & Nobles to look at books and sip some coffee/tea. I must admit that the scene there depressed and disappointed me. Rows of toys, e-readers, music, and comic books captured my attention. I went looking for a few books but after passing the self-help section and that paranormal teen romance section, the selection of "good books" was rather paltry. When we found our way to the cafe, most folks had books but not history, literature, or current events. Rather, self-help books or magazines ruled the coffee-house crowd.

I remember when I would visit the small, overcrowded bookstores (Crown,Walden's, and B. Dalton's) of my suburban youth. Piles of books dominated the horizon, and my teenaged brain was amazed by the wealth of knowlede and erudition contained by those strip-mall walls. Every once in while, I would get to visit an independent bookstore in Chicago or NYC and be blow away by all the good books I had been missing.

I remember walking into my first Borders bookstore sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Covering what seemed like a football field, the store held more books in philosophy than my local public library. More cool new novels thann those independent bookstores. And more music than the biggest stores in the mall. The store was also brightly lit, had comfy chairs for perusing books, and a cafe to drink those fancy new drinks called lattes and capuccinos. I was hooked. I knew that the stores were probably hurting the hip, independent bookstores but I just didn't care because I gained access to a world of knowledge that I did not know existed. Even better, this was a cool place to hang out with friends. The hours even fit my early-twenty something life-style, allowing me to look at books until 11 pm, much longer than the bookstores of my childhood and even later than the local library. In Borders and Barnes & Nobles, I scribbled my hopes and dreams in journals. I also made decisions about attending law school, leaving law, marrying my wife, and attending graduate school. I wrote big chunks of my dissertation in those bookstores. There were spaces for reflection and growth.

Now, I don't have so much time to hang out in bookstores. Heck, I rarely have time to read or think. I even buy many books online. But, I am still struck by how those same bookstores have fallen on hard times. They seem like dinosaurs on the verge of extinction. The book business is dying and the very model of enterprise they brought to the business is doing them in. You just cannot sell that much jazz, Plato, or Monet's in that amount of square footage. So, they increasingly sell things to a wider audience. The only problem is the wider audience doesn't want the very books that drew me to the place initially. Consequently, the selection of books is getting smaller.

With the independent booksellers hurting and the publishing industry in disarray, I guess I am left with nothing but the nostalgia for the promise of bookstores and the hope that some brilliant entrepreneur will figure out a new way for the bookstore, and those they love them, to thrive.

Good Books

The semester is killing me but I wanted to give a quick shout out to Christopher Weingarten's Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Million to Hold Us Back. It is nice to read a well-written book about hip-hop that is not "scholarly." Even though it frequently strays from Public Enemy, it, with all of its asides into James Brown and Parliament, is interesting. A good quick read!

Also, I am really enjoying Zadie Smith's WhiteTeeth. I cannot figure out why I did not pick it up when it come out!

The Punishment of Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Jammie Thomas-Rasset is a name you should remember. She is the "mother of four" who shared 24 songs over the internet and a jury has ordered her to pay a $1.5 million fine (or about 62.5K per song) after her third trial. (See ).

While she is not the most sympathetic defendant, it is not entirely clear if posting songs to a website is exactly what Congress had in mind when it prohibited the distribution of copyright material.

I want to focus here on the logic behind the huge fines associated with copyright infringement. The U.S. Code authorizes juries to fine infringers as much as 150 K per infringing act, so Thomas-Rasset might have gotten off kind of "light." Compare this to the maximum fine of $5000 for involuntary manslaughter or second degree rape in Missouri or $100,000 for the same crimes in Wisconsin. It makes one wonder why the penalty of copyright infringement is so much stricter than for manslaughter or rape that the U.S. Code punishes much more harshly.

Ironically, if she had been charged with stealing 24 cds from her local store, the maximum fine would have been 1,000 per cd. (See Sec 609.52 Minnesotat Statutes).

Something tells me that we will hear more about this case before it is finallly settled!

Anthology of Rap

The (long-awaited) Anthology of Rap, published by Yale University Press, is finally out. As this slate article discusses (http://www.slate.com/id/2272926/), there is a controversy that a number of the lyrics contain errors and that those errors make it appear that the editors merely copied the lyrics from a number of websites.

Because I am still waiting to get my copy in the mail, I cannot quite speak to every aspect of the controversy. However, I do think the slate article and the many comments to it miss some key issues:

• The editors and scholars more generally are not simply printing the lyrics but "translating" them. Most rap songs are oral texts, not written ones. This means that there is not an authoritative text as in a poem or a short story. In addition, many rappers and emcees, such as Jay Z and Kanye, intentionally don't write things down.
• As I have argued elsewhere, hip-hop is full of irony and ambiguity. As some folks note in the comments, one of the pleasures of hip-hop is how it can be impossible to figure out exactly what the rapper's intended meaning was. Sometimes the meaning might be "both".
• Frequently, hip-hop is extremely local. This, combined with it being an oral form, means that many listeners - myself included - have only been hearing the "incorrect" lyrics because we miss the local context/meaning. While I agree that this kind of collection ought to be more precise, it does raise the question about a form that intends to create such interpretative barriers.
• It also seems like the problem with the transcriptions is overshadowing a more crucial question about whether the editors picked the right songs to include. Should this collection follow popular taste or embody a scholarly consensus of the most important hip-hop songs? What kind of rubric ought they have followed to determined either or both of these lists?

I am still excited to get my hands on the book and to use it (eventually) in my classes!