My arts center's latest original book finally came out last week, a day-after-tomorrow novella called Life After Sleep by a local sci-fi vet named Mark Brand that I have to say I'm very happy with; and like the other three books that CCLaP has now published, it's had me thinking recently about my life, my career, aging, and other subjects along those lines. Because the fact is that these little ebooks the center puts out are ridiculously far away from being any kind of decent moneymaker; if history is any indication, for example, I can expect to make absolutely no more than $400 or $500 from this latest title, with half of that of course going to the author, which means I'd have to publish over a hundred of them a year just to make the same kind of salary as I would as a low-level office secretary (i.e. around $25,000 a year, the absolute minimum I need to live in Chicago). And so until CCLaP has the capacity to pay me that kind of money, it's always essentially going to be more like a toy or hobby than job or career, no matter how seriously I take it, no matter how close I am at any given point to it being my main source of revenue; so while I'm very happy with the release of Life After Sleep, right now it's hard for me to see it as much more than having just played my latest move in a giant game I've been conducting since 2007, that game being "Let's Convince People To Give A Shit That I've Started An Arts Center," and my opponent being the entire rest of the human fucking race.

But then again, now that I'm in my forties, I find myself thinking a lot about middle-age, the questions that middle-aged men ask themselves at this point in their lives, and how I might or might not be reacting differently to them if the circumstances in my life were different; for example, how it's highly doubtful that I in particular am going to go through a mid-life crisis, and that if I were the type of person who had one, doing something like opening an arts center would be my exact response to it anyway. And that's not something I take lightly, because over the years I've learned at least one of the great lessons that life has to teach us, that we tend to blow off the problems that people in other life circumstances have that we don't, instead of being happy and grateful that we've managed to avoid those problems ourselves. And now that I'm middle-aged, I gotta say, I can quite easily see just how miserable so many other middle-aged men around me are, and how even my friends deal many times with some pretty dark issues that I never have to even contemplate; and in fact, this is one of my greatest pleasures in publishing fellow middle-agers like Brand and his peer Ben Tanzer, is that they are both middle-class husbands and fathers who examine all kinds of fascinating moral issues in their work regarding these subjects.

The fact is that I shouldn't blow off the relief of knowing that I'm not going to have a mid-life crisis, because the fact is that I'm exactly the kind of guy who has one; or, that is, in an alternate universe, I'm exactly that guy who was a creative and motivated young artist but who in his thirties turned to a life of middle-class corporate mediocracy (for any of the ten thousand reasons that people do, both legitimate and il-), then right around 42 has a big giant freakout over it all, and leaves his family and quits his job and motorcycles across Asia or opens an arts center or whatever dumb shit I do in that particular space-time thread. And I'm glad for that, because that's an extremely important part of my life -- the fact that I can definitively state what I do, the fact that I can take a clear moral inventory of myself and ultimately come out on the positive instead of negative side of the karmic balance range. This used to be not much more than a platitude when I was young, but is something I find more and more important with each passing year, the issue that mainly influences whether we're to have a mid-life crisis in the first place -- the question of whether we're a decent human being, of whether we're doing something decent with our lives, something constructive or destructive, something that adds a tiny bit more to the world or that takes a tiny bit away.

Say what you will about the lack of money, stability and health, but I'm at least ethically proud of being in the arts for a living, of my job being to present new and beautiful things to the world instead of convincing preteen girls to spend every cent they own on dressing like a slut. I'm not trapped in a loveless marriage, like some of my unnamed middle-aged friends are; I don't slightly resent my children for ruining my aspirations; I'm not stuck like an indentured servant in a job I detest because of a loan I won't get paid off for decades still to come. Or, you know, if you want to be less dramatic -- I'm not a high-school principal. My job is to expand minds, not belittle them. To create things that used to not exist, not take away things that someone else has declared a threat. I'm proud of every single thing I've done in the last ten years that's made me money, something I bet that less than five percent of the population can say, and that's not something to take lightly at all, and especially not in the particular age we live in.

And so I balance all this agains the more pressing question, the one also asked more and more with each passing year, and the question that most usually kills artistic careers -- of whether I'm kidding myself that I can ever have a career doing this in the first place, of whether I'm one step closer to winning that giant lottery that the arts is. And the professional arts is a lottery, make no mistake, which is why so many give up on it; and the irony is that you have to be at the top of your A-game at all times even to be eligible to randomly win it, whether or not you're ever given that random opportunity. Because you never know when tomorrow is the day that an Oprah producer downloads Life After Sleep and changes my life permanently; but it's all for nought if that producer comes by on their random day and the site's not up to its full potential, or the book itself isn't impeccable, or you don't already have a ton of people out there talking about it, meaning that you have to be on top of all this at all times no matter what kinds of rewards you're currently receiving from it. And so that makes it extremely difficult to determine the difference between a good plan that merely hasn't come to fruition yet, and a bad plan that's never going to succeed no matter how many random opportunities it's given.

That's why I say that the whole thing feels like a game so often, because it often is; and the maddening part is that it's nearly impossible to tell whether you're doing things exactly correctly, so that things really will explode that random day that that Oprah producer comes by, or whether in fact you're completely deluding yourself over whether you have what it takes to be a big success, whether this "game" you're playing really is one, just some giant complicated round of Solitaire to distract you from the fact that you'll never really be a commercial success. That's another hard realization to make as you get older, of how many people in the arts are in reality just "playing" at the arts, and having legitimate successes even as they come nowhere even close to what one would consider an actual career; that's the big danger of electronic books, after all, which was the same danger of performance poetry back when I was involved with that in the '90s, that the petty instant rewards (downloads, praise, booze, sex, a pocket full of cash) help distract a person from the fact that they're really accomplishing nothing long-term or substantial, that they are again just another piece of this giant game they're playing.

And so that's what happens when a project like Life After Sleep is finally finished and comes out, is that I ask myself a series of questions and make a series of observations, to help determine where on the "pointless game/worth my time" scale it belongs. It's going to make very little money in the grand scheme of things; but I'm not some ennui-filled professor having a pointless affair with a 19-year-old student. There's no paper version of the book; but I didn't have to hide in a public toilet from an asshole boss a single time this entire year. CCLaP's last book cracked the Amazon Kindle Store Top 100 in its category (sports memoirs); but that still only accounted for an extra ten sales. But did that lay some kind of groundwork at Amazon that didn't exist before? Was one of those readers someone who might be able to randomly help out five years from now, and will only do so because they happened to have such a good experience five years previous? Or even if I make no money at all, isn't this still better than having a bitter wife who's drunk by lunchtime each day and a resentful daughter who cuts herself when no one's looking?

They're questions without definitive answers, of course, but something I go through every time I release a new book or host a new event through CCLaP. In any case, though, absolutely I'm very proud of the new book itself; and I have to admit, no matter what the other circumstances in my life at any given moment, there's still a real thrill that comes with being able to say, "I publish books for a living." Take away everything else, and being an arts administrator is still almost worth it just for that alone.

But before anything else, perhaps I should first describe how CCLaP's first big live Chicago show went, my talk a couple of weeks ago with AV Club head writer Nathan Rabin, for which I spent several hundred dollars renting out a 150-seat theater; because in a nutshell, although the talk itself went great, audience turnout was lousy, only 25 people and with half of them comped in for free, which when all is said and done caused me to officially lose $220 on the whole thing, or pretty much every penny of profit CCLaP had generated in the last two years. And yes, there are a number of external factors beyond my control that I could point to, to mostly rationalize the low turnout -- it needed to be held in the busy month between Thanksgiving and Christmas to sync with Rabin's existing tour schedule, was done on a Monday night for cost reasons, with me only having a month to promote it because of my first theater deal falling through at a relatively late date, and of course with the eight-hour freaking ice storm Chicago saw that actual evening not helping things at all, thank you very much, God! -- but as my friend Carrie indadvertedly reminded me, while talking about her and her late husband's own forays into producing artistic events in their youth, even if you can come up with half a dozen legitimate reasons why it's not your fault that your show lost money, it still remains that your show lost money, which means you either need to get smarter about how you're doing them, or give up on the idea of making money in the first place, and simply accept the loss as the cost of doing something impressive and fun.

And that's brought up a larger, more existential issue this winter, which has had a big influence on CCLaP's plans for 2011 -- that plainly speaking, the best way to guarantee success at your own live literary social events is to become active yourself in the local literary social scene, to attend everyone else's shows and talk with everyone there, make friends and generate interest in your own upcoming event. I learned this lesson in a profound way during my time in the performance-poetry scene of the 1990s, and is simply something I'm going to have to get involved in again if I want to pull off more expensive "Evening With..." events; but as I've learned with dismay this fall, as I indeed started attending a scattering of readings and open mics again for the first time in years, I now find such events to be for the most part fucking intolerable -- partly because of burnout from when I was a writer, partly because I'm a decade older and have a lot less tolerance for such things, partly because of my hearing losses over the years, partly because I'm no longer using such events as tools in a constant attempt to get laid. Whatever the reasons, though, when I look honestly at the situation, I realize how much of a chore all these things this fall have felt like as I've begrudgingly taken them on, making me realize that my time would actually be much better spent doing things I find fun but that will still hopefully generate attention and revenue. That was the entire point, after all, of opening my own arts organization instead of working for someone else's, so that I would never have to blindly adhere to what is "traditionally" done in arts administration to the detriment of what's more practical; and so if I need to put off regular programming of the center's bigger live events for another few years, until I can simply hire someone young and enthusiastic who's actually into all this social stuff I now find a chore, then so be it, because I certainly have lots and lots of other things to keep me busy.

In that respect, then, one of the things it's looking more and more likely that I can count on is surprisingly enough CCLaP's electronic books -- the three I've now published in the last three years have respectively made $200, $200 and $300 (making for a total take-home profit of $350 for the center), with I think it being entirely possible to get these numbers even higher, if I get more serious about marketing specifically to the Kindle crowd. So that's a no-brainer, then, to finally up the number of ebooks CCLaP is putting out to the four per year I've envisioned for awhile. And hey, what do you know, I already have four books lined up for 2011! And that's the side-effect of course of CCLaP simply being open for awhile now (three and a half years), and getting out some books that have impressed others: so coming up next, for example, hopefully at the end of February, will be science-fiction author Mark Brand's day-after-tomorrow novella Life After Sleep, regarding a device that can immediately trigger constant REM sleep, so that people now only need two hours of bed-rest each night, and how such a thing would change the way that society works; then after that (end of May?) will be a still-untitled project by local flash-fiction author Jason Fisk, a story collection about the skeleton-closets among a group of neighbors in a bland Chicago suburb, which interestingly is going to be presented "hyperfiction" style on the web (think "Choose Your Own Adventure" for grown-ups), including lots of multimedia elements like photos, videos, audio clips and text animations, and with a mobile EPUB version that contains the same hyperlinked layout. Then in September will likely come a new anthology called American Wasteland to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in which a group of writers pen stories set in a shared alt-history US, one in which McCain and then Palin became President after Bush and turned the country into a quasi-fascist state, where the squatter poor live anarchic Mad-Max existences in far exurbs full of crumbling McMansions, none of them able to escape because driving a car regularly is now an expensive privilege that only the rich can afford; and then to round out the year, in November will be Ben Tanzer's new collection of stories regarding small-town life in upstate New York, a companion piece to his 2008 Repetition Patterns which right now is without a title. And so if history is any indication, I should be able to make $400 to $500 of profit just on these four titles alone (or $800 to $1,000 total revenue).

And then speaking of Ben's stories, my long-discussed plan to put out CCLaP's first paper book is still on for next year too; because at the same time I'm releasing the second ebook, I also want to release an extremely high-end, handbound "fine-art" edition of the two volumes combined, simply called "The New York Stories." You can think of this exactly like a musician releasing a fancy limited edition of an album -- featuring full-color illustrations on vellum overlays, archival-quality paper, a signature page, hand-numbered sequencing and all kinds of other bells and whistles, it'll cost $75 and is designed as a coffeetable piece for Tanzer's most diehard fans (and collectors of handbound fine-art books), with people otherwise able to read the contents itself for free electronically, cutting out the middle layer of trade paperbacks where small presses seem to be literally bleeding money these days. That way, you only need to sell a minimum of books for a decent amount of profit; say for example that you spent ten dollars on materials for each copy and five dollars mailing it, that's $60 in profit for each sale, which if you only sold twenty copies would still be $1,200 after costs, leaving $400 apiece for Ben, the center, and the illustrator. And since I'll be making them myself, technically I only have to invest in material for small batches, say ten at a time and not bothering with the next ten until the previous ten have been sold.

And in fact I have a good idea for hopefully selling around ten such books next year to people who maybe wouldn't have otherwise bought them, at least guaranteeing that the project would break even, which ties into what I was talking about before; that even if I'm not going to be doing more big expensive "Evening With..." events next year, I still definitely want to continue doing some sort of live events in 2011, just to at least tread water with what I've already established instead of going backwards, if for nothing more than to mark time until I'm ready in the future to finally try expanding the program again. And so this coming March, for example, I was thinking of finally holding the center's next smaller themed event, which like last May's show in Hyde Park would feature a group of local writers doing new pieces based on a common subject for a show with no cover, done just for fun and to create goodwill among the local lit community; then in June I'm thinking of sponsoring some sort of city bike tour that would tie in with the arts somehow, maybe for example a ride up the entirety of Lincoln Park specifically to check out public sculptures, ending at a bar next to an el station up in Rogers Park, so that people can drink and take the train home at the end; then in September, I'm thinking of having an honest-to-God release party for the American Wasteland book, since anthologies tend to guarantee a big and varied turnout for such things; and then for next New Year's Eve, I'm thinking very seriously about establishing a new tradition for CCLaP, an annual New Year's fundraiser, designed to generate significant revenue from just a small slice of the center's most financially comfortable fans, essentially $150 a couple for a private party full of free food, liquor and entertainment, and with each couple getting a free copy of The New York Stories to take home with them. If I could get ten couples to go to something like this, that would pay off all the book's upfront fees, leave a couple hundred dollars for Ben, pay for all the party's expenses, and still leave a good $400 to $500 to stick in CCLaP's coffers, to apply to the upcoming projects of 2012.

Now, of course, it'd be nice to actually have something to sell at these events as well, which is where the next part of the plan comes into play -- after months of hemming and hawing, I've decided to indeed start up in 2011 this new hipster photography magazine I've been endlessly talking about at Facebook, entitled Imago and which I'm planning on putting out four times next year (January, April, July and October), featuring five artists each issue all collected around a common theme (the first issue will all be intense or cutting-edge portraits...and yes, there will be boobies), heavy on images/design and light on text in order to cater more to a global audience. The reason I've been on the fence about it for so long, frankly, is that I've wondered if the world really needs yet one more impeccably-designed minimalist hipster electronic photography magazine, and whether starting a new one might be an exercise in throwing a lot of effort into a bottomless cavern of no returns, much like how it currently is with all those endless thousands of online literary journals that now exist. (And by the way, when I say "bottomless cavern of no returns" to refer to these ezines, I mean financial returns, not the simple emotional satisfaction of publishing the work of people you admire. Don't forget that all of today's conversation is deliberately geared towards the bottom line.)

That's why I'm only doing four issues next year, as a test run that I can accomplish literally in my spare hours on the weekends; and that's why I'm planning not on making much money on the magazine itself (because frankly, you can't, not with the glut of sharp free hipster e-magazines already on the market that fucking no one is reading either), but rather on a series of print-on-demand merchandise that I will set up with each of the five photographers in each issue -- basically, a series of postcards, posters, refrigerator magnets, mugs, t-shirts and buttons concerning all twenty photographers I plan on featuring through Imago next year, each image branded with the center's name like you would find in a museum store. Then I want to do some t-shirts just for the center itself as well, something sexy and cute and anime-ey that people will actually want to wear, a bad example seen above and appropriated from of all things an ad campaign this year from the Wyoming Public Library system, but will be much better when I actually do the t-shirt; then all I have to do is order a small amount of all these items myself at cost from these POD places, which I can then have on hand to sell at retail price at CCLaP's local events in 2011, as well as any conventions or fairs I might end up attending, or if I go in with some others to rent a table at next year's Printers Row Book Fair, which I had a chance to do last year but now this year am seriously thinking of actually doing.

Then the magazine itself will be free in electronic form, both as a PDF for mobile devices and as an incredibly cool onscreen embedded "flip-through" version sponsored by Issuu.com, a central database and feature-rich service for electronic magazines that I've become a big fan of in the last six months (and seriously, try the "full-screen" option of the Issuu interface I've embedded above, and tell me if it doesn't feel exactly like flipping through a glossy paper magazine); and then speaking of a paper version, there will be one of those available as well, at $18 a pop over at yet another print-on-demand company called MagCloud.com, which I will purchase with each issue and perhaps not a single other person on the entire planet, which of course is the great thing about POD merchandise that makes up for it being so freaking expensive. So how much will all this make in a year? Sheesh, who knows? $20 in merch sales for each artist would be $400 for the year, or a take-home profit for CCLaP of approximately $100; or maybe this will make twice as much as that, or perhaps only half. Like I said, everything with Imago is basically a big experiment for now, which is why I'm treading only lightly next year; but I have to admit, I'm glad to be finally doing something through CCLaP that primarily supports the photography side of things, and can absolutely guarantee if nothing else that at least the magazine will look slick, and get people talking more about the artists being featured.

So, all said, that gives CCLaP something now to do or release every single month next year; and in a world where a whole lot of things go right for me, that could potentially mean a realistic top revenue of around $3,000, which after bills and royalties would mean a take-home profit for CCLaP of around $1,500. But of course, we don't live in a world where a whole lot of things go right for me, but rather one where a vindictive god pisses ice on my head for eight hours on the day of my first big event, so who knows what this number might actually be by this point a year from now? I mean, more than zero, that's at least for sure, which is the main justification for doing it in the first place, and certainly I'll be very happy if CCLaP was to have its first year of four-figure profit next year, which I think under this plan is absolutely a realistic goal that I have every right to shoot for, and especially now that I own my fancy-ass 27-inch quad-core Mac with fully functioning copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5 (thank YOU, bike-accident settlement check!), and can now put out electronic publications that will blow away in sophistication all the CCLaP books I've been putting out before, and that will let me produce actual interactive editions for iPads and the like. As always, we'll see how things pan out; but for now, at least I have a plan for next year in place, which of course is always the most important thing.

Oh, and speaking of all this, I imagine some people have been wondering how I might be able to do all these new things next year and still crank out 150 book reviews; and the answer is that I can't, which is why I'm happy to announce that CCLaP next year will finally be taking on its first outside writers, definitely at least one and maybe up to three or four, depending on the quality of the applicants. Yes, I am looking for suggestions and submissions, although please be concretely aware right off the bat that these contributors will not be paid in the traditional sense; instead, I'm hoping that each contributor will bring with them an idea for a funny, unique year-long essay series, much like the existing "CCLaP 100" or "Naughty Netflix" series that currently run at the blog, which at the end of the year we can put out as its own ebook that will hopefully generate the standard couple of hundred dollars, and that will serve as that critic's "paycheck" for the year. And in fact, to be frank, the perfect situation would be to find a young, smart writer who is eager to use this as a jumping-off opportunity for their own career -- to do maybe one book review a week and one chapter of their ongoing essay series, to generate and nurture their own core group of fans through supplemental outlets like Facebook or Goodreads, and then use all these things two or three years down the road to get themselves promotions to paid positions elsewhere, like at bigger publications or maybe an industry job. Given that these are essentially volunteer positions, I'm certainly not expecting anyone to stay long, and am of course more than happy to see a person use an opportunity like this for their own personal gain.

Anyway, as expected, it's a very certain kind of writer I'm looking for, one who matches the "ethos" of what I've already established at CCLaP: someone who brings a sense of history to their reviews yet still weighs contemporary factors, someone comfortable with blending high-art with low and mainstream lit with genre, someone who can add an academic sensibility to their reviews while avoiding academic language, someone who can sometimes court controversy with their opinions but isn't a controversial figure themselves. As with everything related to the center, just because it's an unpaid position doesn't mean I won't be exacting or demanding over who I'll bring on, since in this case content literally is king; and that's all the more reason for me to get exposed to as wide a pool of potential writers as possible, so that I can eventually find the handful of ones who best fit this decidedly narrow slot I've just described. Just drop me a line at [ilikejason at gmail.com] if you have someone in mind, or would like to apply yourself. As always, I look forward to hearing from you.

Another CCLaP-type space opened up in my neighborhood this week, a growing occurrence in these economic times; and by that I mean a thousand-square-foot retail space close to an el station that I could actually realistically afford as the first version of my arts center's physical headquarters. That way you could cram in 60 or 70 people on the rare occasions when things warranted it -- a popular show, or maybe a fundraiser; but it would also look quite full with only 20 or 30 people, which to be honest, will most likely be the more realistic size of most of CCLaP's live events. (And that window area you're seeing in the front is actually already a raised stage, which would be dramatic and perfect for live performances.) Paint the walls, then, and you have a perfect space for a photography gallery as well; then during the day the space could serve as my office, a retail space for the rare-book service I hope to eventually start up down the road too, and a recording space for local artists, especially once you install the kick-ass digital soundboard system I would want to put into place, to make the place and its ever-occurring live events a virtual factory for high-end recordings to use online and for CDs, DVDs, etc. You could maintain a BYOB policy at a space like this, which would keep the young poor artists happy because they can get wasted cheap; but since this is just a block from a whole string of hipster restaurants and bars, you keep the middle-class audience members happy too. Perfect!

I've been having this pipe dream regularly since 2004, in fact, when I first envisioned CCLaP to begin with; so it's kind of weird, then, to know that this month, I officially started the process to make this pipe dream an actual attainable goal; and not just attainable, but literally attainable in just another five to ten years, if I play my cards right and have a little luck. And that has to do with the large settlement check I received two months ago, in compensation for a bad bike accident I was in about a year ago, which I have a policy of not detailing online but can tell you was originally in the six figures, until all the medical bills and legal fees started getting paid, dropping the number considerably. What I've decided to do with what's left, then, is something else I've been thinking about a lot for the last few years, which is to get all the old bills in my life finally paid off, and my credit back into decent shape.

After all, it's not like I have a lot of debt, but more that I've simply been "off the grid" for much of my adult life -- I've never owned a credit card, have only had two bank accounts in my life (for only a few years apiece), and have in fact learned this month that my credit reports show less than $10,000 in outstanding bills altogether, most of them frankly having to do with the bike accident. No, the main problem with my credit is simply that I've never given a shit about it, because I had never been in the market for the things that good credit gets you -- high card limits, car and house loans, good insurance rates, etc. But as regular readers know, back during my 35th birthday six years ago, which was also my tenth anniversary of moving to Chicago, I decided to reassess my life, and write another "ten year plan" for myself like I did when I first moved here; and one of the things in the plan is to get my finances in order, not only so I can finally get health insurance for the first time in a decade, but so I can establish CCLaP's bonafides so to get a legitimate business license, be able to set up a nonprofit wing if I want, and eventually be able to secure a loan so to sign the exact kind of small retail space like you're seeing above, helped by the fact that I'll have a so-so chunk of settlement money left over after all this is taken care of, not a lot but enough to help quite a bit with the securing of a little thousand-square-foot space.

Granted, it's a long slog, as I've been learning by reading up on the subject -- it starts with ordering your free annual credit reports like they're always talking about on television (that URL above, by the way, is the only single place on the web to legitimately do so; all the other places you see advertised are commercial scams), which are basically the three reports used to determine your credit score (which is administered by a group called FICO), with that single three-digit score actually being the thing that determines whether or not you get loans, what rates you receive, etc. It's complicated, because all four of these things are determined by four private companies, so no one knows exactly what goes into the complicated algorithms that turn all this debt data into a simple score; but in general the experts opine that roughly a third of it is based on how much past debt you currently carry, so getting rid of that as quickly as possible is the very first thing and most important thing to do to restore one's bad credit.

Those debts are basically all being handled at that point by debt collectors; and that's because it costs money and requires paperwork for these companies to report debts to these credit report services as well, which means that most places don't unless the matter is substantial enough to turn over to a collection agency, who file that paperwork and pay those fees for them, and call you a dozen times a day about paying it back, etc. All their information is listed in the credit reports themselves, so basically the next step for me is to start calling these places, and essentially start haggling with them over the final payment, like a tourist arguing with a shopkeeper over a Persian rug. And in fact this was an eye-opening part of the legal process too, when my lawyer was negotiating with the hospital over the six figures in bills I had racked up there last year; that even modern law still mostly works on the same principles that guided the Greeks and Romans in the Classical Era, that it's all about trying to find a practical space in the middle where both parties walk away fairly satisfied. Take away all the TV histronics and impossible legalese, and that's essentially the definition of "justice," which I hadn't really thought about before all this -- of reaching a point where everyone involved can walk away without trying to kill each other. So in this case, my lawyer talked the hospital down after my settlement to an immediate lump payment of about half my total bill, in exchange for them dropping the other half; and the hospital was grateful to see even half so was satisfied, and my settlement money easily covered that so I was satisfied, and since the insurance of the guy who hit me covered it too, I didn't have to sue him for the rest, so he and his insurance company were satisfied too. And that's...well, that's justice, in a nutshell.

So that's what I'll be doing with the collection agencies too, only acting this time as my own lawyer, and talking to another human there in plain language about what kind of deal we can make; and after those are all paid and the companies remove their claims from my credit reports (which you need to get them to agree in writing to do; don't trust a collection agency guaranteeing this over the phone), that alone is supposed to raise one's credit score high enough to at least quality for a simple checking account, the second most important thing for repairing one's bad credit. (And by the way, your credit score is never just a static number, but is literally redetermined every time someone requests it; that's why it's good to literally time loan requests and the like to specific weeks, ones for example where you've now paid that month's bills and they've been recorded and transferred to your credit reports.) Maintain this for just a little while successfully, and you should then qualify for a credit card somewhere, even if it's only for a low limit or even maybe if you have to maintain your debt limit in real money in a bank account tied to the card (known as a "secured credit card"); and at least according to all these "Credit For Fucking Morons" books I've been reading at Borders on the weekends, usually all it takes is a year of clean credit reports and responsible use of a checking account and credit card to quality for what's called an "installment" loan from your bank, which is usually just a few thousand dollars for something like a car (or in my case, the digital soundboard, amp and recording system I mentioned). And that's step four towards repairing your bad credit, and essentially the last step before your credit is theoretically good again.

Do all this over the course of five, six, seven years, at least according to these guides I've been reading, and you should have a good enough credit score by then (750 or above, on a scale of 350 to 850) to qualify for a major home loan at good rates, or in my case a loan for securing CCLaP's first Chicago headquarters; and we'll see of course if these guides turn out to be true, or bullshit like usual, but if they're right, that means I could be literally, realistically eligible to open CCLaP's first physical space by maybe even the age of 46 or 47, and almost definitely by my 50th birthday. And that'd be a hell of a 50th birthday present, I have to admit -- to go in a decade from no credit cards and no bank account to being able to open a retail business, and to finally for the first time make a real go at the idea of CCLaP being the thing that pays all my bills in my life, that is literally my full-time career. And in fact, I'm coming to realize that this has been a real key to why America has been such a prosperous place for so long now, because the entire system is designed to help and encourage those who are serious and determined to pull themselves into the middle class, and who simply need some systems in place to make this a little easier. Now compare this to a place like, say, Dubai, which famously has no bankruptcy laws, which means that someone there can be thrown in jail for a decade literally for missing one rent payment; and so that's why you've seen Dubai become a ghost-town in light of the economic meltdown, because of the tens of thousands of laid-off workers who have slipped past the borders in the middle of the night, so terrified of having their lives ruined and never being able to recover.

It's a remarkable part of the American System, I've come to realize this year, and a big reason so many immigrants are drawn here -- because this is a country that very much wants its citizens to succeed, and will help those citizens as much as possible if they're willing to put in the hard work needed to succeed, something I think we maybe take too much for granted here in the US, and that can easily get overshadowed in all the doom of the Great Recession we're currently going through. Anyway, so this maybe means that I'll have more and more good news over the next decade regarding all this? We'll see, I guess! If nothing else, it should make it at least entirely realistic that CCLaP starts doing bigger and bigger projects; just for one example, I now have the $2,000 in seed money I need to finally start up the center's paper publishing program next year, which as I've explained before will consist of extremely high-quality, handbound "fine art" editions sold at a high cost, which is why the budget is so high as well. And it will certainly also give me the chance if I want to set up a nonprofit "foundation" wing of CCLaP as well, which is another long-term goal; because when it does come time to get a physical space, I definitely want there to be a mechanism in place for people to make tax-deductible donations towards such a goal. That's why I'm happy to hand out all this free shit to you middle-classers these days, all the free ebooks and the like, because later this decade I'll be hitting you up for 500 bucks all at once. You've been warned!

One of the genres I've been getting really into during this "second indie renaissance" of mine is electronica, which has really just expanded in the overall music industry in a way we literally couldn't have even envisioned back when I was in college, and that has spawned a whole series of subgenres we would've never been able to even imagine; I could name dozens, but just take for one good example the rise of so-called "math rock," which essentially combines the sounds and rhythms of electronic music with the high energy of a live indie-rock show, a style of music that I suppose has its roots in such '80s experiments as Devo and Kraftwerk, but is an altogether rawer, more visceral experience than anything those two bands ever tried to do. (Or to think of it another way, a band like Devo took the sweaty reality of rock clubs and tried to impose a clean, shiny sterility to it, while math rock takes the antiseptic environment of a club DJ booth and tries to introduce an earthy, chaotic element to it.) Like I said, there are dozens of such sub-definitions in the world of electronic music now, a world that contains thousands of artists and that is now embraced in a live context in a way that would've made us laugh back in the '80s and early '90s, back when even a night of avant-garde live electronic music at some museum was considered a rare and weird event.

And the more I explore and learn about this scene, the more amazed I am by the business side of it all; because for all the talk recently about sampling and monetization and intellectual property and "pay what you want" experiments, it is electronica that has more quickly and passionately embraced these attitudes than just about any other subsect of any artistic discipline at all, with a lot of electronic artists no longer even attempting to make money from the music they produce, but rather seeing the singles as yet one more easy way to promote their live shows, tours and merchandise, no different than a MySpace account or a stack of club flyers. And so that leads for one example to just a tremendous amount now of "remixes" in this electronic world, where every time an artist releases a new song, two or five or a dozen other artists will take that song and cut it up and put it back together again in an interesting new way, and do the same for these other artists when they release their own new songs. And I mean, obviously some of this is above-board and all worked out in advance -- to cite one example, the Bacardi Rum company actually sponsors an entire remix series, and given their corporate nature I'm sure that they're legally crossing all their T's and dotting all their I's before any of those remixes are actually allowed to be released under the Bacardi name. But given just the sheer number of remixes that show up at these blogs and podcasts -- dozens and dozens of them every week -- I just know that a large number of them are being done without the original artists' knowledge or permission.

For this community to work rather smoothly under such circumstances, then, instead of being bogged down in an endless series of petty lawsuits like you see right now in top-40 music among the major labels, says something profound about the arts in the 2000s, I think, providing more general lessons that can be successfully adopted by all kinds of other forms of creative output. Because like I said, the main reason all these artists don't go apeshit over all these unauthorized remixes out there is mostly because they have changed the very way they even think about intellectual property; that as long as the original crediting information is still attached to these mash-ups of their work, for the most part they see it as simply free advertising, a case of other people literally running around doing their promotional work for them, raising their stature in the electronic world and thus getting them more gigs, better pay, bigger live audiences, a chance to go on television, etc etc etc. Because I should mention that this is the glue that holds the entire thing together, that there seems to be a sort of "gentleman's code" in the industry regarding these reappropriating artists correctly attributing the songs they're remixing; in fact, it seems that among remixers who want to be taken seriously by these blogs and podcasts, the standard action is to always list these remixes by the original artist's name and title, then only adding on the actual remix information in parentheses afterwards.

Without this attribution, then yes, such remixes would simply be stealing; but what amazes me is that once this attribution is given, how many electronic musicians don't really care if a bunch of strangers are out there cutting up their songs into new shapes or including them in longer "mixtapes," and in fact in many cases see it as a compliment, a sign that they've finally "arrived" in the scene and that their songs are popular enough to want to be remixed and re-distributed in the first place. And I'm sure that part of this is that electronic music is a pretty recursive genre on its own, fundamentally based on throwaway music where only a finite amount of sounds are mixed together in evermore subtle ways; and I'm sure that part of this is that electronic music is fundamentally digital and therefore virtual from the first step to the last, and relies much more on the internet and massive electronic sharing than other forms of music do; and I'm sure that part of this is that electronic musicians tend to be a nerdy lot, and therefore are already worshipping the online philosophers like Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky who are busy writing essays on why all this makes sense in the first place. But whatever the reasons, despite the horror stories the mainstream record industry tells about the evils of piracy and sampling, in the world of contemporary electronica this has all combined to produce a thriving, happy, cooperative community, one that right now is seeing more artists and generating more revenue than at any other time in the genre's history.

I've been thinking about all this a lot over the last two years, not just since starting this iPod challenge but since starting up my arts center's publishing program around the same time; because for those who don't know, CCLaP's publishing program has so far been an only electronic one, sort of foretelling the ubiquitous rise in ebook readers that is just starting to happen now, and so far all of CCLaP's books have been released under a "pay what you want" system, which means statistically that so far about 80 percent of CCLaP's customers have now read the center's books completely for free, with the center's full permission and encouragement. (For those who are curious, by the way, of those 20 percent of readers who make voluntary payments, over two titles now they've been donating an average of around eight dollars apiece, and combined total readership for both books is about 1,500 people now.) So that has me thinking about the issues that come with digital media and monetization in a way that a lot of other publishers aren't yet; and I have to say, at this point I've been pretty much sold on what these electronic musicians believe too, and plan on gearing CCLaP's publishing program much more along the lines of what's happening among cutting-edge musicians these days than anything you currently see in the traditional publishing world.

I mean, let's just start with the most obvious issue staring us in the face -- that instead of seeing those above numbers and getting pissed about the 1,200 freeloaders in CCLaP's audience, like a lot of publishers are tempted to do, I simply acknowledge them as 1,200 extra readers we wouldn't have without the free version, 1,200 people who are out there talking about the books and promoting the books and becoming passionate fans of the books' authors, versus the mere 300 so-so fans we'd have if we offered only the pay version. And in fact this number directly corresponds to the sales figures of most basement-press books these days -- that even when released on paper in traditional brick-and-mortar stores, most such titles are lucky to sell just a few hundred copies altogether, and in many cases mere dozens. (And the situation's not that much better for mainstream publishers, either; according to Publishers Weekly, once you remove the 40 or 50 titles each year that are massive bestsellers, the remaining tens of thousands of titles published in the US each year sell a national average of only 1,500 copies apiece.) I instead choose to find it more important that people are actually talking about CCLaP's books, that they are influencing the general popular culture around them, that they are helping to define what's going on in the arts instead of merely being a reflection; and in this there is a double benefit to CCLaP's pricing scheme, in that it not only gets the book into a profoundly larger amount of hands, but gives people an immediate interesting and unique thing to talk about regarding these books.

Just take for example a recent appearance on WGN radio here in Chicago by one of the authors I've published, Ben Tanzer, who was appearing with a group of other writers to talk about the upcoming Printers Row Book Fair; but just as soon as Ben mentioned the pricing structure of his book with CCLaP, as well as saying that magic phrase that journalists oh so love to hear -- "You know, just like Radiohead!" -- suddenly the entire conversation was shifted into this pricing scheme and the future of literature, and you ended up having CCLaP instead of the fair talked about for an entire ten minutes of that fifteen-minute segment. That simply wouldn't have happened without this unique and interesting aspect of it all, which is the lesson that so many small publishers don't seem to understand -- that in a world of fractured media, a world where hundreds of small presses are putting out thousands of titles a year just in the US alone, it's no longer enough simply to be good at what you do, or to be dedicated to putting out the kinds of titles that the mainstream presses won't. That's a huge problem in the publishing industry right now, is that those attracted to it in the 2000s tend to be extremely old-fashioned; and a lot of these people like to pretend in their heads that it's still 1956, and that their basement press is fated to one day be another City Lights or Paris Review breakout hit based only on the quality of their books alone, not even beginning to understand that we now live in a very different world, where the rise of a single organization based on editorial choices alone is now a practical impossibility, and especially in a world where the most avant-garde artist out there can now run their own instant free distribution network merely by signing up for a Blogger account.

But of course, none of this takes into account the other half of CCLaP's publishing plans, the thing that hasn't officially started yet and that the last two years have been basically a long build-up for, which is the paper side of things; and in this I am also taking a cue from how the smartest musicians out there these days are doing things, via embracing the fundamental idea that in a digital world, it's not the actual intellectual property that is worth any money anymore (or at least, not in a world where that intellectual property can be immediately and infinitely reproduced with no loss of quality, by any random teenager with a minimum of skills), but rather the pretty physical package that that intellectual property comes shipped in. Because for those who don't know (and yes, I know, I've talked about this a lot here before already), CCLaP's plans for paper publishing don't include traditional trade-paperbacks at all, but rather a much smaller amount of extremely high-end hardback "art books," hand-bound and with color illustrations inserted on vellum pages, on archival cotton paper and with a signature page and everything. The idea, then, is to sell just a hundred of these for $75, $100 apiece, just to that writer's most passionate fans, as well as those who professionally acquire fine-art books for collectible purposes, and to simply keep handing the electronic version out for free to those who simply want to read the story; if I were to sell out such a print run of the center's first book, for example, that would generate a total of $10,000, or the exact same amount I would make by selling a thousand trade-paperbacks for ten bucks apiece. And I gotta tell you, in all honesty, I think I have a fuck of a lot better chance of selling a hundred copies of a fancy, expensive coffeetable-type art book than a thousand copies of a normal cheap paperback, given that I'm only averaging 750 readers of each title even when the books are completely free.

Again, it all boils down to what I said before, the thing that the electronica community is rapidly figuring out long before any of the rest of us -- that in a world where information can be instantly distributed to billions around the world at once, so cheaply as to realistically be free, then the actual words on a page, the actual notes in your ear, no longer have any intrinsic monetary value of their own, but rather only the unique products and experiences that are wrapped around that content, like going with your friends to a concert hall to hear those notes, or reading those words in a handsome book that can be considered an artistic object unto itself. And so that's what I'm working towards right now, to be able to put out CCLaP's first high-end paper book by this time a year from now, which is going to require startup money of $2,000 -- five hundred so I can take a bookbinding class at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College, then $1,500 for the book itself. (Yes, I plan on spending fifteen dollars per book just on raw material; it should give you a good idea of just how high-end I plan on these being.)

And so that's what CCLaP's coming fundraisers this winter will be about, raising this two thousand dollars in seed money I'll need to do the center's first paper book; for example, our first fundraiser is going to be a formal sit-down dinner party in November, just for the fans of CCLaP with the best-paying jobs, $50 a plate which gets you a five-course meal and an evening of free entertainment, plus a chance to hub-bub with your fellow creative-class arts fans and local movers-and-shakers, which if I can get twenty people to sign up for would generate a thousand dollars in revenue, minus of course the roughly $200 in raw ingredients for the meal itself. So we'll see how it goes, of course, although I have a feeling that it's not going to be too terribly difficult to raise that kind of money by next spring, which will let me take my class and then be ready to actually make the center's first book by next summer. And that after four years will finally give CCLaP its first opportunity to start making serious money, money in the thousands instead of dozens of dollars; and needless to say, I'm highly looking forward to that day finally arriving.

Anyway, that's it for me today; and as always, I hope things are going well with you too these days. Next time, a mid-year report on how my "Summer of Museums" project is going, which by then will have included five of its twelve stops -- the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Clarke and Glessner House Museums in the historic Prairie Avenue district, and the Chicago Nature Museum. (Those links above take you to my Flickr photosets of each visit, for those who want to check out the detailed individual reports right now.) See you!

So it's official; I've now finally pulled off the first successful live literary event sponsored by my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP). Well, thank God for that! This has been a big part of CCLaP's plans since I first envisioned the center back in 2004, and is the way I plan on the center to eventually make a big chunk of its money, once I finally own a physical space for it somewhere in the city and can afford to do live events every night of the week; but based on the things I learned when studying small business in the early 2000s, it's also something I've been waiting awhile to actually start up for the first time, because of reading over and over in my book studies that the best thing a small business can do is wisely pick only a select amount of things to accomplish at first and do them very, very well, and to not even think about adding new projects until those existing ones are smoothly clicking along like clockwork. And so that's what I've been trying to do, starting with the book reviews in 2007 when the center first opened, then not getting serious about the podcast until the beginning of 2008, then not getting serious about the electronic publishing program until the beginning of 2009, and only just this summer starting to get serious about the live-events program.

And I have to say, such advice has really worked out well so far, and is something I recommend to others starting up small businesses; because just to cite this latest example, this first event of CCLaP's ended up getting four fairly major media mentions (Chicago Tribune, Time Out, Gapers Block, and even a full-length article at Chicagoist) with me having to do almost no work to make such a thing happen, and I'm convinced that the main reason for this was by the center building up a certain amount of trust and goodwill first by the other things it's done. As far as the show itself, then, I'm of course happy with how things went, although admittedly it wasn't the most earth-shattering event in the history of the Chicago arts -- it was simply a one-hour literary reading featuring a total of five writers, after all, all of them doing new pieces around a specific theme (urban decay and urban renewal for this show), the kind of set-up I preferred doing back in the '90s as well, when I was still part of the poetry community and was organizing and hosting a lot more shows, with this one garnering maybe 40 audience members total when all was said and done, perhaps 30 of them there specifically for the show and another dozen who were regulars of the actual venue. (If I haven't mentioned this yet, the show was held at this great "ad-hoc community center" down in Hyde Park called The Op Shop, founded and run by a friend of mine named Laura Shaeffer; she basically convinces the University of Chicago about twice a year to let her take over one of the unused retail spaces they own in the neighborhood, where for a month or two they'll run a full-time gallery, thrift store and performance/film center, eventually packing it all up and opening somewhere else in Hyde Park a few months later.)

The performers, however, all seemed to have a really good time (it worked out that they all got along together particularly well, which is always a great thing to see); and Laura seemed to have been really happy with how things went too; and we even had beer left over by the time the night ended, which is always a thing to celebrate, when you don't run out of alcohol halfway through and get grumblings from all the undergrads in attendance. And I'm grateful for all these things, because like I said I've been patiently waiting awhile now to hold CCLaP's first event, and so am glad that doing so generated all the goodwill and positive word-of-mouth that I was hoping it would; and of course I'm also grateful that the recording of the show came out decently as well (thanks again, Erik Cameron), which when run on the podcast and combined with all the Flickr photos and the upcoming electronic book version of the stories, gives the center actually four pieces of promotional product to come out of a single one-hour event. And this of course is a major component of CCLaP's operating strategy, as I've talked about numerous times here, to be like a Native American with a dead buffalo and to salvage as many different useful things out of that single kill as possible; as I've mentioned before, I see this as a key way for CCLaP to be able to provide an entire cultural center's worth of benefit for a fraction of the cost, and everything the organization does is in fact judged beforehand precisely by how many different tangible items it will eventually produce, in terms of either promoting the center or directly making money for it.

So anyway, hopefully another two artistic events like this will be coming before the end of 2010 -- one in September and one in November, the latter perhaps being a sit-down formal dinner and fundraiser for just a select amount of the center's readers, say twenty attendees at $50 a plate held in someone's home, with free entertainment and with me cooking (I used to be a personal chef long, long ago) -- so definitely let me know if you have any tips on venue/sponsor leads, or if you're an artist who'd like to be involved with a future event. And then hopefully over the next year, I'll be able to first put together a few hundred dollars so I can take some bookbinding classes at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, and then another $1,500 or so to actually put out CCLaP's very first paper book by this time next summer. And that will suddenly jump the center to a whole new level, because with its first paper book I'll finally have a chance to make up to a maximum of $10,000 on a single project (and in all realistic likelihood actually will make something like $5,000 or $6,000), which will make it the first time I'll be able to tell people that I run an arts center for a living without feeling the need to add an invisible air-quote asterisk to the end of such a sentence. So as always, I guess we'll see what the future holds; for now, all I'm concentrating on is getting an event pulled off in September that's at least as fun and as successful as June's was.

And another first in the last two weeks to report -- I'm back on my bicycle again! Well, how about that! Yeah, I know, I too consider it a miracle of sorts, that I should be back to daily urban bicycling literally less than a year after shattering my hip in a bad accident; but I've written about the wonders of modern medicine in earlier journal entries, so won't go into it again today. In fact, here's been the real surprise, that nine months now of daily physical therapy actually has me in better shape now than even before the accident; or at least, between my real bike and the stationary one at the gym, it's not much of a challenge to put in at least ten miles every single day and sometimes fifteen, a pace which I most definitely could not keep up with before the accident, and I also find myself able now to go five and sometimes six miles at a stretch without having to take a single break at all, not even a 30-second one to catch my breath and take a sip of water, when before the accident my absolute maximum for such a thing was four miles.

Surprisingly (and gratefully), being back on the bike hasn't been nearly as psychologically difficult as I feared it was going to be -- after all, I was freaking out so badly after first crashing, for a month I actually had to go on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. But then, I'll also admit this, that so far I have been sticking almost exclusively to either the lakefront bike path or the extra-wide streets in my neighborhood with dedicated bike lanes; plus I haven't biked even once yet at dusk/night or in/after bad weather; plus when forced for short periods on narrow side streets in my neighborhood, I tend to constantly check my rear-view mirror so that I can ride out in the middle of the street most of the time, in that I am still awfully skittish about riding anywhere even near parked cars along street edges (which of course is what caused my accident last summer, someone in a parked car flinging their door open a split-second in front of me). But still, in general I'm surprised by how easily I've been able to take up bicycling again; and this makes me very happy, in that before my accident, biking was one of the most effective ways I had for relieving stress from my life (like many, I often enter a state of trance-like calm when I'm exercising), so I'm grateful to be able to add such a calming influence to my life again, after a year now of perhaps the most stressful existence I've ever faced as an adult.

As I mentioned here last time, I'm trying not to have unrealistically fast goals, and in general am preferring to simply be grateful to be back on the bike in the first place; but that said, I think I will almost undoubtedly be attempting my first 20-mile day within the next week or two, an important milestone for me in that this was the maximum I had ever put on my bike in a single day before the accident, so doing so again would effectively prove that I'm finally back to "100 percent" healthiness (or, not really, but you see what I'm getting at). My whole goal last summer was to be able to put in a 30-mile day by the time Labor Day rolled around, which I was going to prove by biking from my place all the way up to the Chicago Botanical Garden in the far north suburbs (which believe it or not you can do via a 30-mile nature trail), then taking the Metra train back to the city afterwards, which only costs five bucks on weekends; I'm not saying necessarily that I'll actually be able to pull off a similar goal this summer, but certainly I see nothing wrong with shooting towards this goal. As always, I'll let you know the latest here in future updates.

So how am I dealing with the ruckus these days about Facebook's lack of privacy over personal updates? Easy -- I simply don't say anything there that I wouldn't want to be public knowledge, the simple solution for pretty much any grown-up with even a modicum of willpower. And yes, I know, this is an awfully glib joke (I know, I know), and is also the lazy justification used by supporters of censorship and government spying ("If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about"); and in fact, the entire reason I bring it up is actually to make an entirely different point altogether, which is this -- thank fucking God the web didn't exist when I was nineteen years old, when I was young and naive enough to go around blabbing about any ol' bullshit to just about anyone who would listen, which of course is exactly what a nineteen-year-old should do. It's a whole issue that the current generation of youth are going to have to deal with, that even my generation never did, of having each and every stupid little fucking thing you ever say in your life dragging behind you in a virtual paper trail no matter how old you get, to pop up for out-of-context misinterpretation exactly at the moments in your future where they'll precisely do the most damage. I mean, even the founder of Facebook himself has been a victim of this, when an old transcript popped up last week of a random drunken chat he once had with a friend when he himself was nineteen, unwisely boasting of the stupidity of his original Facebook customer base and professing amazement that they were so willing to hand out private information to a complete stranger in the first place. I shudder to think of some of the stupid shit I did and said at nineteen suddenly becoming front-page news in my forties, or being brought up during a job interview or whatever; it's going to be one of the major cultural issues facing society another twenty years from now, mark my words, as this current generation of pot-smoking, boob-shooting college students become middle-aged parents and community leaders themselves.

So can I talk about something sensitive here for a moment without being called a Jew hater? Because I'm not a Jew hater, just to make it as obvious as I can, which I've learned the hard way over the years is something I simply need to state in a basic way here sometimes when talking about sensitive issues...

I'm fascinated with the idea that the fracas going on this week with Israel opening fire on a flotilla of Palestinian aid workers might turn out to be a tipping-point catalyst of sorts, for it finally being socially acceptable here in the US to be publicly critical of things done by the Israeli government. I've been thinking about these subjects a lot this year, because of doing a lot more reading over at CCLaP recently about the beginnings of the Postmodernist artistic movement; and as I read more and more of these great older books from the '60s and '70s by people like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, I'm coming to realize just what a thorough plan was put into place in the US after World War Two to make it socially unacceptable to say anything bad about either Jews or Israel at any time or for any reason, a big reason why it's generally perceived that the US has a much friendlier relationship with Jews than with Muslims. (In fact, it's very common now for American Christians to fondly view their religion as the sort of younger brother of Judaism that ended up doing well for itself, while if you had suggested this to most Christians pre-Holocaust, they would've looked at you in horror.) But see, this came at the cost of simplifying the Jewish race in Christian eyes into a profoundly reductionist, almost cartoonish kind of caricature; this is what Roth and Bellow (and Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks and all the other great Jewish artists of Postmodernism) were complaining about back then, and in many ways you can see the entire countercultural period for them as being the struggle to bring a more complex, more realistic view of Judaism to their mainstream American audiences.

Far from being a sign of anti-Semitism, I think this recent wave of Israeli criticism here in the US is the best thing that could've ever happened to Jews; it means that Judaism has become legitimate enough and permanent enough in the eyes of the world to deserve a complicated viewpoint, to acknowledge that there are actually both conservative and liberal Jews, that they actually don't get along most of the time, that the radical fringes of both groups often actually do things that a lot of others find morally reprehensible. It's a hell of a lot better attitude to have than what you saw in the US in, say, the 1950s, when Jews were generally thought of in Anne-Frank-saintly, permanent-victim terms, and when it was considered in bad taste to even mention Judaism in polite conversation in any context at all. Like I said, this is exactly what the daring, envelope-pushing Jewish artists of Postmodernism were fighting against (with surprisingly the most important one of all perhaps being goofy ol' Jerry Seinfeld, who when you really look at it, did more to normalize the complex ins-and-outs of daily Jewish life to mainstream America than maybe any other Jewish artist in human history); and it's a real testament to these artists, I think, that in 2010 you can have a growing amount of Americans feel comfortable with calling out the radically conservative current leaders of Israel for their radically conservative actions, without fear of being branded a general Jew-hater by society at large. My two cents, anyway.

And finally, a recent observation I made about the tech world (yes, I still have them, "Great Fucking Start-Up Disaster of 2006" notwithstanding)...

Whenever I finish a new blog entry over at CCLaP, I almost always take the time to add a robust amount of helpful terms in that entry's "tag" field; and that's because I'm one of those people who have been updating websites since literally the mid-'90s, so have become inured to the idea of adding as many useful tags as possible, to make those entries much more popular at the various search engines out there. But I confess, on the days that I don't have the time or energy to add such tags, I no longer worry that much about it; because Google by this point has become so sophisticated, it hardly matters anymore whether you add useful keywords or not, in terms of it understanding what that blog entry was about and how it should be ranked during specific searches there. And that got me thinking about how Google in fact has pretty much ruined several sub-industries within the tech world that first got their start in the dot-com '90s, and if not for Google would now be multi-billion-dollar sub-industries just on their own; take for example the entire subject of "search engine optimization" (or SEO), which even a decade ago was a big enough issue to support thousands of people in this country getting paid millions of dollars, all in the name of trying to get their clients' websites to show up higher on result pages at the various search engines out there, which at the time mostly amounted to these quasi-legal scams involving complex backend coding, expert manipulation of these very tag fields just mentioned, and the hiring of thousands of flunkies to literally sit there hour after hour at their home computers, conducting thousands of searches for these client websites at Yahoo and MSN. Google eventually made the entire process so sophisticated yet so plain, that it's now patently obvious to just about anyone as to how to get your website listed high in search results -- simply talk in an informed, entertaining way about the subject at hand, and make sure that your customers are liking it and linking to you. That's it -- no complicated keyword schemes needed anymore, no paid Yahoo trolls, no six-figure SEO scam artists.

This is the thing that so many people in the tech world still seemingly don't get, and is one of the many things that makes me thank God that I'm no longer trying to establish a career in that industry -- that Google didn't become the juggernaut it now is by being the best at what all its competitors also do, but by literally changing the very rules by which the entire game is played, rightly deciding for example that if you spend 95 percent of your budget making a product that simply works amazingly, and almost none of your budget on fancy marketing and advertising (pretty much the opposite of the rut most tech companies found themselves in by the late '90s), people will just naturally flock to your product on their own, without you needing to pathetically beg them to through false promises and flashy distractions. Every time I see Bing announce another twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, or Yahoo announce another tie-in with some sad Hollywood actioner that no one wanted to see in the first place, I laugh and laugh at all the fucking losers in that industry who still can't see what is plainly staring them in the face, and marvel at the mass stupidity of most humanity that still somehow lets us function as a society at the rate we do. Sheesh, I can't tell you how glad I am sometimes to be an arts administrator now.

Well, it's official; for the first time since my accident last summer, this week I finally got my bicycle out of storage (aka my friend Patrick's garage, where it's been since my other friend Tom moved it from the hospital last August), and down to my friendly neighborhood hippie-owned repair store (and Critical Mass hotspot) Uptown Bikes, where I'm assured that it'll be ready to ride again by this coming Thursday. Well, how about that! I've been mostly thinking of this as ho-hum news, but it's actually much more profound a development than I usually give it credit for; after all, what we're really saying is that less than ten months after shattering my hip, and having a giant hunk of steel surgically implanted to hold all the pieces together again, I'm ready to resume an activity that even some healthy people can't handle, and certainly even 50 years ago would've seemed like an impossible dream to accomplish again after an accident of this nature. That's the thing, really, that strikes me the most intensely about this entire experience, of just how supernaturally quickly the medical industry as a whole has progressed since first adopting the scientific process back during the Enlightenment; for example, as recently as my own childhood in the 1970s, I remember it being generally accepted that an elderly person's chance of any mobility at all was pretty much dashed after breaking a hip, that they were fated after such a thing to essentially spend nearly the rest of their life in a wheelchair.

I mean, it's been a daunting challenge to get back into bicycling shape, don't get me wrong, with me for example now having participated in one form or another of painful rehabilitative physical therapy every day for something like 250 days in a row; and in fact there's an entire future entry to be written about my first-ever experiences this year with the subject of chronic pain, and how it is that most people you meet who complain of it tend to be a little crazy, because low-level pain that lasts 24 hours a day, every single day, is enough to drive just about the sanest person out there at least a little crazy, as I've discovered the hard way. (And this is not to even mention the bizarre things that start happening to your brain when you've been on painkillers every waking moment for weeks straight, which sounds delightful at first but, believe me, isn't.) But like I said, mainly I've seen these developments as the miracles of our modern (post-Renaissance) age that they are, and figure that as long as I live in a time in history where hard work and a little luck can get me back into nearly 100 percent fighting shape again, I might as well put in that hard work and gain control again over my life; and in this I suppose you can finally see a benefit to the intense stubbornness I've possessed my whole life and which usually causes nothing but problems, in that I tend to get wildly angry over the entire idea that some random act of a non-existent god could have such a permanent influence over the whole rest of my life. That's what keeps me motivated to stick with the physical therapy, frankly, no matter how painful it gets, is the opportunity to point to the Giant All-Knowing Finger In The Sky and scream, "FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!" Yes, I know, they won't be making any inspirational Lifetime movies soon about a man who overcomes his handicap as petty revenge against a god he doesn't even believe in; but hey, it seems to work for me.

To tell you the truth, I still sometimes get palpitations simply over the idea of being on a bike again at all, and out among vehicular traffic in general; for those who don't know, among other things I suffered from a pretty bad case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the first month after the accident, or at least bad enough that I had to go on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. But again, this taps into this overwhelming stubbornness I have regarding the world telling me what I can and cannot do, which as mentioned turns out to be a surprisingly effective motivation for doing things that are naturally difficult to accomplish; because I gotta tell you, I sometimes get just filled with disgust over the idea that some random dick with a car would be able to have that kind of control over me, that he could literally stop me from ever enjoying again what had been before the accident one of my favorite activities of all time. Many times in my past, when absolutely nothing else would do it, sometimes a long contemplative bike ride would be exactly what I needed to clear my head and get back in a good mood, and I'm looking forward to having that opportunity again, despite the unfocused dread I sometimes have right now over the idea of being back in the street again among vehicular traffic. Needless to say that for the time being, I'll be sticking a lot more than before to the non-vehicular bike trails of Chicago's parks (easy for me to do, in that I live just four blocks from the lakefront, which contains a "bike expressway" of sorts that stretches almost from the northern city limit to the southern one); but that said, I'm definitely looking forward to being back on my wheels in general, and as always will post updates here throughout the summer on how things are going, and hopefully some new videos soon as well.

So speaking of returning to fun activities I haven't done in awhile: at the end of this month, my arts organization CCLaP is finally throwing its first live literary event! Yeehaw! In fact, I've been meaning for awhile now to do just a general update here on how things have been going with the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, but realized a couple of weeks ago that I just don't have that much to say -- I continue to write book and movie reviews each day, continue to produce a podcast episode every two weeks (one interview a month, one music special a month), continue to publish and promote original eBooks, and CCLaP's audience continues to slowly grow each day as a result, as does the amount of media coverage the center receives. (In fact, just last week one of the authors I publish was the focus of a major article by the insanely popular PopMatters.com, including an incredibly astute analysis of the book he wrote for CCLaP, something I'm grateful to see because of this being one of the goals of the center in the first place, to help garner more academic-style respect for basement-press and self-publishing writers.) And this of course is exactly how it should be for CCLaP at this point in its history, as I've learned from my study of small business over the years; that the center is in the crucial stage right now of simply earning respect and loyalty from its customer base, and that it's much more important right now that I simply accomplish my humble stated goals regularly and reliably, than to be pulling off big splashy experiments that garner lots of short-term attention but no long-term rewards.

In fact, this has turned out to be one of the biggest lessons I've learned in general about the difference between a professional business owner and a mere dilettente, that the former makes sure to get all the stupid little shit crap work done that no one else wants to do, that they indeed garner an immense amount of respect simply from doing the stupid little shit work that stops so many others from being small-business owners themselves; and so that's why for example I concentrate so hard on trying to get a piece of original content posted to the site every single weekday, no matter how little I'm in the mood to do so, which then forces me to get a hundred pages of reading done every single day too, no matter how badly I've instead wanted to get CCLaP's events program up and running. And get it up and running I definitely have been wanting to do for awhile now, which of course taps into one of the biggest ironies about my life these days -- that I in fact have decades now of producing highly fun and successful live literary events (including co-creating and co-running all thirty daytime and late-night events at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, which were collectively attended by several thousand people, one of the biggest highlights so far of my entire career), a fact which is barely known by most of the people I currently count as peers, because of most of them being page-based writers who didn't meet me until long after I had quit the slam scene in 2001.

In fact, for those who don't know, I have a complicated relationship with Chicago's performance-poetry community, for a variety of complicated reasons: because I'm not nearly as liberal as most others in that scene, for example, so have a limited tolerance for the more ridiculously leftist things that happen within it; because of the community's aversion to all non-ephemeral elements of the literary world, making one's time in it essentially an ephemeral experience with no long-lasting benefits; even because of simply getting older, and no longer having the tolerance for the late hours and rampant substance abuse required to be a legitimate success within that community. (In fact, that may turn out to be my biggest lasting legacy within the slam community, of being the guy who invented the joke, "The poetry scene is like Menudo -- everybody eventually ages out.")

But then there are all kinds of things about that community that I liked as well -- the camaraderie, the chance to be regularly influenced by your peers in a way simply impossible with page-based work, the almost palpable sense of electricity that can be generated in the immediacy of a moment like that, and of course the increased sales of related product that results. And back when I was active in the scene myself, I used to especially love producing and hosting my own events, although (surprise, surprise) I tended to run mine a little differently than most others; mine were always based around a common theme, and usually I would make the participating performers write something brand-new for the show, and I would limit these writers to only one piece lasting between five and ten minutes, and I would hand-pick the order of the performers myself, and would put in the kind of attention to that order usually only seen among teenagers making a mix tape for their romantic partner. And unsurprisingly, audiences tended to really respond to details like these, especially within a world otherwise consisting of four-hour shows in the middle of the night with no microphones, and where the majority of the performers are doing the same old shit you've already heard at half a dozen other four-hour shows held in the middle of the night.

I mean, this was the entire reason I decided to open CCLaP in the first place, back when I retired from creative writing in 2004 and was deciding what to do next, because I have a bad habit of getting fatally bored with a subject once understanding the winning "formula" for making it work; with as grand a project as an entire cultural center, though, I can essentially put each new activity by the center on "autopilot" mode once finally learning this formula (which of course is another key part of making a small business a success -- figuring out what your customers want, then feeding it to them ad nauseum), while being able to turn my creative attention to the next big new activity I've decided to take on, once I have the older one running in smooth clockwork fashion. And it's just been this year that I've started feeling this way for the first time about the center's podcast, that I've discovered a format and publishing schedule that audience members seem to be really responding to in a positive, lasting way, and have gotten good enough at them now to be able to put together a whole episode in just two or three hours (versus the entire workday it used to take me when first starting out); and so that's allowed me to start more and more putting the podcast on autopilot while still churning out episodes I'm happy with, which then gives me the extra creative energy to take on a new activity this year, namely the live events (which I should mention will be recorded and aired on the podcast as well, thus making them a "value-added product" without having to spend any extra money, a key part of CCLaP's operational strategy as an extremely low-budget organization).

Anyway, this first show is centered around the theme of urban decay and urban renewal, because of the space in which it's being held; namely, it is part of the events schedule at a sort of ad-hoc cultural center in Hyde Park called The Op Shop, founded by a friend of mine named Laura Shaeffer, a former commercial gallery owner who last year somehow managed to convince the University of Chicago to let her take over one of their empty spaces around the neighborhood a couple of times a year, to turn into a deliberately transient performance center, gallery space and more. (This is a big hot thing in Chicago in these "Great Recession" days, in fact, figuring out cool artistic things to do with the hundreds of shuttered retail locations now found throughout the city, a fact which I'm sure heavily influenced the U of C's decision to greenlight this project.) Anyway, the latest version of the Op Shop is being held in an old Modernist commercial space at 1530 East 53rd Street (next to the Metra tracks), which among other things has been a bank, a clothing store and a video rental outlet over the years, and is slated to be demolished just a few weeks after the center moves out, which is why I decided to go with this particular theme; and it features what I think is a pretty fascinating line-up too, including short-story author Sally Weigel, novelist Ben Tanzer, science-fiction author Mark Brand, poet Jason Fisk, and blogger/urban explorer Katherine Hodges, all of whom will be bringing something unique to their look at urban decay and urban renewal. All the details can be found at [cclapcenter.com/events]; admission is free, and yes, you're encouraged to bring your own spirits. I hope to see all you locals there!

And I'll just tell you the simple truth, that the four-month period was one of the most trying experiences of my entire adult life so far -- not just for the obvious reasons, but also because my parents weren't able to come up and visit me in the hospital (ironically, my mom was recovering from hip-replacement surgery at the same time), meaning that I spent the majority of that month by myself in bed stirring in my own juices; and that plus the fact that I'm uninsured plus a bad little case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder kept me pretty much a nervous uptight wreck that whole time, so much so that for a few weeks I actually had to be put on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. Plus, I also have to plainly admit, no matter how much a person loves their parents and gets along with them like I do, it's a fact that no 40-year-old should ever live with them again, no matter how temporary the situation; and so I just didn't feel like airing all this dirty laundry while I was actually going through it, didn't want my journal to be a record of unedited misery full of anxiety-fueled statements I would regret later, which is why I decided to simply put it on hiatus until after the 2009 holidays instead; and then New Year's Day became Valentine's Day and then St. Patrick's Day, and here I finally now am, getting up my first entry in eight or nine months.

And all this actually gets into a much bigger and more general issue I'm wrestling with these days, of what exact purpose this personal website of mine is going to serve in the future, and how much of my candid opinions and personal stories I'm exactly going to share with a random public from now on. Because the fact is that my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP), has been up and running this entire time too, and continues becoming more popular and respected by the day; and I'm convinced that a big part of that is that I'm no longer over here at my personal site making a jackass out of myself every other day, and that I'm also very attentive to what I say anymore at places like Facebook and Flickr. In fact, it's safe to say that a whole lot of changes have been going on with me internally since turning forty last year, and also since starting to spend a significant amount of time as an authority figure to a couple of little kids (but more on that in a bit), which goes all the way back to the thing I've talked about a lot over the last several years -- of how I see the implosion of my life during the early 2000s (including losing nearly all my friends, near-perpetual unemployment, dating someone for a year who turned out to be an unmedicated schizophrenic, etc) as a sort of karmic form of penance for being such an unremitting asshole throughout most of my twenties and early thirties, a period of monk-like solitude I was given by the universe so that I could take a cold, hard look at myself, see all the ugly things I had never noticed before, and learn how to best get rid of them. I was already feeling by last summer that that period of penance was coming to an end; and man, it's hard to deny the argument that a broken hip and a case of PTSD is more than enough fucking payment for whatever little was left on my karmic tab.

So what does that make me now, and what are some of the lessons I learned? Well, for one good example, I'm now an arts administrator instead of an artist, a much healthier career choice for me, and one of the biggest lessons I've learned about it is that respect in the business world largely comes from your level of maturity, which is itself measured mainly by how fairly and calmly you can approach any given situation, along with how much humility and common sense you can bring to it, etc. And so that's what I mainly try to do in public now, to as much as possible be fair and humble about whatever I'm talking about (and when I say "in public" I mostly of course mean "online"), even though I still retain a generous amount of the silly, angry, opinionated old me, just now channeled into more benign manifestations, like the occasional smartass Facebook tweet or book review. (Oh, and speaking of which, just ask me how many teenaged girls I pissed off with my recent review of Twilight. Truly, hell hath no fury like a pissed-off teenaged girl.) But what used to be appropriate when I was a trainwreck confessional creative writer, what indeed profoundly helped my career when I was one -- namely, the horrifically intimate journal entries I used to pen here, along with the tendency to just go around blabbing every single detail of my personal life -- is now a legitimate hindrance to me being a respected, fair-minded arts administrator and small-business owner, and thus needs to be scaled back to a mere fraction of what the journal used to be.

Now, for sure I've been thinking of perhaps writing an actual standalone memoir of all my experiences related to last year's bike accident, because there's some really fascinating stuff in there, and some really fascinating conclusions I make about hospital systems, contemporary nursing-care facilities, what it's like to have a literal panic attack, etc; but even if I did write such a memoir (which I still haven't decided whether I'm going to do), I would publish it as a non-HTML downloadable eBook fully away and unconnected from this journal, something that would only be found by those specifically seeking it, and who will already be prepared for the horrifically intimate stories within. I've decided instead that this journal is best served anymore as simply a fun part-time hobby, a place where I can still talk about personal stories and opinions but not in too crazy or intense a way anymore, and almost certainly never again talking about my sex life (helped immensely by the fact that I don't actually have a sex life); and if that meant a eight- or nine-month hiatus while I went through all the trauma of my bike accident and subsequent recovery, that's not necessarily such a bad thing, a chance for this journal's former fans (back when it really was all about embarrassing stories regarding my sex life) to gently fall away, and for me to quite plainly mark a new phase in this website's now-twelve-year history. (Twelve years. Jesus. And to think that that's actually supposed to be fifteen, except that I got fired from the ad agency I was working at in 1995 when first learning about the web, before I had a chance to set up my site.) Um, and that's that.

So what else has been going on with me the last nine months? Well, for starters, I finally finished my five years of dental work and received my final double set of dentures, which unfortunately happened the same exact goddamned week of my bike accident last summer, giving me precious little time to enjoy them before being immediately laid up again for another four fucking months (fuck, fuck); but now it's almost spring again, and my teeth look great, and I'm finally almost 100-percent mobile again, and I actually have a bit of revenue finally coming into my life a little more regularly again, which God forbid means that I might actually start going out on some dates again soon for the first time in six years, if that is hell doesn't freeze over first. And so there's no mistake, know that I definitely plan on getting back on my bike and being a regular city cyclist again, and in fact hope to be doing daily outdoor rides again by Memorial Day -- I actually now belong to a park-district fitness center, in fact, precisely to get myself into good enough shape by this summer to be able to accomplish this, and right now on top of my usual physical therapy am putting in seven miles a day on a stationary bicycle as well, and at a high-enough tension to produce a 75-percent maximum heart rate for a half-hour, qualifying me for the minimum of 30 minutes a day of "medium to hard cardio exercise" that doctors recommend for middle-aged men like myself.

But perhaps the thing to most profoundly affect my life in the last nine months, though, has been my continued weekend visits to the Hyde Park neighborhood (a 90-minute trip each way for me, precisely when I now plan on writing these journal entries each week), to spend time with my friend Carrie and her twin six-year-old boys, who sadly found themselves about a year and a half ago now with no father or husband. Carrie and I have an agreement that I will not talk about her life in any way here, something we actually laugh about a lot, because of so many events in our lives the last couple of years transpiring literally like scenes from some witty and emotionally moving indie film, and which would garner me a billion fucking readers and a Hollywood development deal if I were to actually write them down; so without going at all into their lives or the time I actually spend with them, let me confess that as far as my own life, I find it profoundly affected by now having regular interactions with rambunctious little kids, ones for whom I am now an official authority figure, albeit one with no power to punish, except of course for the dreaded punishment of telling their mom when they're acting up.

In this, then, I suppose you can imagine me going through the same issues these days that my contemporary Michael Chabon talks about in Manhood for Amateurs -- namely, the extremely slow growing-up of Generation X, of how to know when it's time to "put away childish things" after a lifetime of extended childhood yourself. And so I wrestle with these things all the time -- of whether I'm providing enough safety from harm for the boys when I'm with them, without unduly disturbing their independence, of how I can encourage the traits of theirs I think they should develop, downplay the ones they shouldn't, of how to reconcile all this with the non-romantic friendship I have with Carrie, and the boundaries that lay between me as the boys' playtoy and her limits as a mom. And frankly, this too helps with toning down what I say or do online anymore; because believe me, there's nothing like having a little kid around who looks up to you to make you very intensely scrutinize every single thing you ever do or say, and to endlessly ask yourself, "Would I be embarrassed if this little kid saw me doing or saying this?"

And in the meanwhile, based on watching me interact with the boys, Carrie has gotten it in her head that I should actually try writing some children's literature for the first time in my life, which would actually be the first creative fiction I've written in almost a decade now; and surprisingly enough, I don't actually find it that bad an idea, in that I've learned that a naturally fast writer like me who can pick up quickly on formulas and backstories can actually make some pretty decent money within that industry, even if they're not famous, getting hired semi-anonymously to kick out those endless 30,000-word chapter-books like you see in the "Babysitters Club" series and the like, which it turns out takes most of these ghostwriting professionals about a month to finish, and for which you get paid, whatever, let's say three thousand dollars just for being a hired hand, and of course a lot more if you're the single author of an original series that takes off. And $30,000 a year or whatever for writing "Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice" titles every month is a whole fuck of a lot better than working at Starbucks, and is money I could really quite desperately use these days.

And in the meanwhile, because of now starting to read a bunch of contemporary children's books this winter and spring for the first time, I've come to learn that the Young Adult wing of the industry (books specifically for 14- to 18-year-olds, that is) has profoundly exploded in the last decade, not only in popularity but in quality; sure, most of us adults are familiar with commercial juggernauts like the "Twilight" series, but may not know that most of the best YA novels around are now just as sophisticated and subversive as any adult book, just with teenagers as the main characters instead of grown-ups. (And in fact I've been doing write-ups about each book to remind me what I liked and didn't like about them, which I'm sharing publicly at kidlit4adults.blogspot.com, for those who are interested.) So in a perfect world, I'd start by getting signed a nice, simple, standalone 30,000-word book for junior-high-schoolers, which believe it or not I actually start work on beginning April 5th, a character-based dramedy called The Hotel Olympia, which I hope to have the same vibe as Susan Patron's Newbery-winning The Higher Power of Lucky (or Judy Blume's '70s work, for that matter), a laid-back atmospheric story about an overanalytical 13-year-old who takes a family vacation to an old Victorian hotel, situated in a picturesque village in the Ozarks that became famous in the late 1800s for its "curative" mineral springs, then even more famous in the early 1900s for hosting one of the first-ever Winter Olympics, which is when the crumbling grand hotel was built that serves as the centerpiece for the low-key plot, which is essentially about this kid learning how to calm down a little and stop overguessing situations, while simultaneously being introduced for the first time in his life to the concept of historic architecture, after spending most of his life so far while on vacations staying at cookie-cutter Holiday Inn concrete pillboxes on business-road exits of metropolitan suburbs.

Anyway, I can't imagine something like that making very big of a splash if actually signed and published, but would at least give me an in with places like Scholastic and the like, where I could hopefully finagle my way into some of these chapter-book contracts, and maybe even eventually start my own original series; and in the meanwhile, every year or two I could also kick out a funny, truthful, maybe even sometimes edgy character-based YA novel, stuff like what Sarah Dessen and John Green and Scott Westerfeld write, and try my luck at maybe scoring some giant bestseller and resulting film-rights moolah; but that way I wouldn't have to rely on that risky option to make my living, which let's face it, between Harry Potter and Twilight has become an intensely crowded and competitive part of the industry now, and is these days more like a lottery as to whether anyone will ever reach such "Percy Jackson" type heights themselves. And in fact I already have my idea for my first YA novel too, and will be attempting to write it this September, a comedy entitled Your Very Existence Fills Me With Contempt, about a smartass homeschooled nerd girl forced to go to a public high school her senior year, because of a therapist convincing her intellectual parents that she's having socialization problems, and all the surprising things that happen to her while there, including a secret relationship she starts with the school's biggest jock over their shared love of a "World of Warcraft" type online videogame.

It's all little more than a pipe dream right now, of course, but at least something to shoot for, and with a very realistic plan for possibly getting there; and in all honesty, after now reading something like thirty contemporary kids' books this winter and spring, I found myself saying after nearly each one, "Yeah, I could write something like that." (Of course, I also acknowledge several authors who will forever be much better YA writers than I can ever hope to be, such as the aforementioned Sarah Dessen and John Green -- you really should check out their work sometime, even if you're an adult.) There's a lot of "if"s and "but"s in the perfect scenario laid out above, but who knows? Maybe this time five years from now, we'll be seeing the big-budget movie version of Your Very Existence..., starring Parker Posey and John Cusack as the duped intellectual parents in question. Or, you know, maybe not. Hmm. And anyway, those are some of the things that have been going on with me over the last nine months; and like I said, I'm sure I'll eventually be getting to the rest as well, in that I plan now on finally getting new updates posted here once every week or two. Thanks as always for your patience, and I'm sure I'll talk with you again soon.

Like everyone else and their freaking mother these days, I too am looking for more paying work than I currently have; and instead of the ultimately frustrating process of trying to find the few existing job openings that currently exist, then fighting with the hundreds of other people also competing for them, I'm trying more these days to simply get the word out about what I can do, and then create new jobs for myself where none existed before. And I'm doing that this time mostly through a combination of my LinkedIn account and a special freelance page here at my personal site, both of which feature nothing but my corporate skills and prior work in professional environments.

In fact, I've racked up a whole complicated host of professional skills over the decades, so for clarity's sake I now group them into four different easy-to-understand sets: I do WRITING and EDITING for all kinds of different situations; I can MANAGE groups of creatives and ORGANIZE specific complex projects; I do short-term CONSULTING assignments regarding crisis management and time management (including a special weekend workshop for people just starting the "Getting Things Done" time-management system; drop me a line for more); and I provide expert FUTURIST advice to senior executives regarding what's coming next in the world of arts and entertainment. And it's this last category where one can really hit the jackpot if one is lucky -- $100 an hour and more for your services, sometimes a flat thousand for a one-day seminar, etc. I mean, obviously the numbers just go up from there, with it reaching ridiculous heights by the time you get to the fees of someone like, say, Malcolm Gladwell; but given that the lowest rate on my freelance pay scale is actually ten bucks an hour (to do editing work on self-published manuscripts), and that I'm damn happy for even any work like that that comes in, you better believe that even a hundred dollars an hour to me is like striking gold.

But there's a trick to getting work in futurism, which is establishing yourself as someone people should actually pay for their advice concerning futurism; because if there's one thing I learned during the Great Fucking Startup Disaster of 2006 (new readers, don't ask), it's that there are officially one million people running around out there with self-made business cards calling themselves futurists and consultants and media experts and more, all of them hustling for work and none of them actually getting any. If then you actually want to be someone like Clay Shirky or Kevin Kelly or Douglas Rushkoff (you know, futurists who actually get paid), and if like me you don't have some cushy academic or corporate job that naturally builds your reputation for you and lets you afford all these cultural conferences in the first place, you instead need to go through a series of steps if you ever expect to score any of these thousand-dollar-a-day jobs yourself:

--First, come up with a theory about all this stuff that no one else has. That's step one; that has to come before everything else.

--Write a book about it. Maintain a blog about it, full of examples of your theory coming true in the everyday culture. Give the book out for free if you have to. Get as many business people as humanly possible to read it or at least have heard of it.

--This then gives conference organizers an official excuse to bring you on as an official presenter; because even if they like you, even if they have a good personal relationship with you, they still need an excuse to bring to their own people to justify signing you on as an official presenter, and a popular book is always a great excuse. And even if they can't pay you, even if you have to provide your own travel and accommodations, that at least gets your $700 registration fee for that conference dropped; and that's the key step for self-employed futurists like me.

--Actually getting into the conference, then, is what gives you the opportunity to network your ass off, make friends, make contacts, etc. And it gives you official corporate cred too, being a presenter at all these cool cultural conferences. This is how corporations justify those $700 registration fees, after all; they expect the executives they send to them to find all of that year's consultants through these conferences, making it even more important that you yourself are there too.

--And that's it: original theory plus popular book plus regular conference presentations plus corporate connections equals a growing amount of thousand-dollar days in your life. And all of a sudden you're Clay Shirky and you're making a big stink at South By Southwest and you're pissing off all the hipsters.

So I'm still on step one with all this, developing a unique yet general-audience-friendly theory off which to base a future book, a theory which in its essential form right now goes something like this:

"With any given medium in the arts, from the beginning of the Renaissance all the way to now, there have been certain ways the public has thought of that medium during certain parts of that medium's history: from it being considered a daring new medium for experimental artists to a tired old medium now only for hacks and academes. And although we rarely realize it, almost all artistic media go through the same relative steps of such a history, too, so much so that we can pretty accurately predict what's next for any particular one. And not only THAT, but that at any given moment in history, the public needs a certain standardized ratio of all this material -- we need a little bit of experimental projects out there, we need a little bit of stuff that's old-fashioned and fussy, and we need a lot in between -- and this too can give us many clues on what artistic media are on their way out at any given moment, and which are set to become the next big mainstream dominant ones."

And that's today's backstory! Whew! Because as today's title indicates, what I really want to talk about today is television, because there's actually something pretty major going on right this moment in regards to the history of television as an artistic medium, and I've been thinking a lot about how it can be directly compared to the publishing industry during the Early Modernist years (1920s and '30s), how under the theory described above there are actually a whole lot of similar points that start lining up, but only by turning both examples certain ways so that their complex patterns line up. And this is what I'm talking about when I talk about writing a book concerning this theory of mine; the book would basically exist of examples like the one I'm about to detail today.

Because if you haven't noticed it, there's been a sea change going on in television the last ten years; that even as the grand total number of shows on the air keeps dropping, and the quality of most of the ones left dropping right into the gutter, there are also a handful that are smarter and more complex and more rewarding than anything before in the medium's history, in fact light years better than anything before, starting you could argue with HBO's The Sopranos right around ten years ago now (and of course with lots of experimental precedents in the '80s and '90s, but more on that in a bit). And there are lots of people who are confused by this, of how television could seem to magically move completely towards the extreme edges of good and bad in a single decade, of how the giant middle of fair-to-good television could've disappeared so thoroughly and so fast. But if you believe in this little relativity theory of mine about the arts, you'll see that there's actually a logical explanation for this, one that anyone who's studied history can see for themselves.

See, I'm starting to believe more and more that what society wants from the arts at any given moment in history is always the same thing, no matter which media are providing it, and that it can be broken down into a simple pyramid shape. So at the top, there's always a small amount of people in society constantly seeking out experimental and transgressive work; then a slightly larger hunger for the high end of what we consider "mainstream" projects, the ones that can make a million people all yell, "That blew me away!;" then a slightly bigger audience than even that for the low end of the mainstream, the stuff we like but don't necessarily love; then a bigger appetite than even that for so-called "comfort projects," ones we enjoy more for the sake of continuity than for their actual quality; and then at the bottom is a big huge pile of crap, all the stuff in the arts and entertainment that no one actually wanted but that managed to get made anyway.

Combine this, then, with the fact that like I said, every medium out there goes through a series of stages unto itself, as far as how it's perceived by the public depending on its age. When it's first invented, for example, usually that medium will be used only for daring, experimental projects, and most people in society will automatically associate that medium with that kind of work in their heads; then as its catches on more and more, it will often become the chosen medium for a lot of mindless entertainment; then as its grows into a dominant mainstream medium, various high-end "quality" projects will start emerging; then suddenly there will be an explosion of astounding high-end work, as the first children raised on that medium become adults themselves; and this is what first attracts the academic community to the medium, and starts making it something to be analyzed and dissected in a classroom and hung in museums; and that suddenly takes the fun out of that medium, and begins its downfall from the mainstream; and that means the abandonment of that medium by those who were doing mainstream projects, because by now of course the medium that used to be considered experimental has grown into society's new mainstream; and so that leaves only the high-end people in the previous medium, and the crap-peddlers as well, the ones who will hang around turning a quick buck as long as humanly possible, until literally they are chased out by religious conservatives and cuckolded politicians, at which point they scurry to the next underground medium that no one is paying attention to yet. And that leaves the medium by the end an obscure, historical one, practiced now only by a handful of old-fashioned experts who have academically studied the medium their entire lives, appreciated by no one else in society anymore other than their fellow obscure academes.

So to get a pretty sophisticated snapshot of the arts at any given moment in history, then, all you need to do is combine these vertical and horizontal charts; and to predict the future of the arts and entertainment industries, all you need to do is switch the positions of all the categories officially one step forward. So as of today, for a good example, spring 2009, we could say that the experimental arts in the US mostly consists of videogames and other online/computer projects; that the high end of the mainstream consists mostly of certain television shows, certain movies, certain recorded music, and most "general" literature; that the low end consists of the majority of TV shows, movies, albums and novels out there; that comfort projects include personal blogs, social-network feeds like at Facebook and Twitter, the dwindling number of soap operas still produced, nights out to see local "bar bands" play live, and all those endless genre novels within such fields as romance, science-fiction, crime, etc. And then when it comes to such former mainstream media like paintings, sculpture, physical photography, live theatre, poetry and more, these have all now passed their cultural primes, and are done mostly anymore only by a small collection of academically-trained artisans, of no real importance to anyone else besides their fellow academes within that hothouse academic environment they all live in. And that of course reminds us of the most important point of all, that these media are in constant flux on top of everything else, and are constantly in the process of moving either more and more into the mainstream or farther and farther away from it. So general literature may dominate the high end of the mainstream right this second, but in twenty years it too will likely have slipped mostly into academic-only, past-its-prime territory; and even though complex narrative videogames like the Grand Theft Auto series are right now a lucrative and mind-blowing (and much-mocked) anomaly, in twenty years you can likely expect such grand "storytelling" style games to dominate both that industry and the majority of society's free time, just like sitting around watching the television is what dominates it right now.

So that finally gets me to today's main point, which is that if you look at America in the 1920s and '30s, you see almost the exact same situation, but with all the media involved of course dialed back a couple of steps in their histories; how at the very beginning of that time period, it was radio, television, movies and recorded music (or what I'll just call "broadcast technology") that were the daring experiments, live theatre and poetry and photography that were providing the majority of high-end projects, the publishing industry and live-music venues providing most of the low-end stuff, and the cultural gutters of penny dreadfuls and vaudeville providing most of the comfort projects and unwanted crap. You see what I'm saying, right? Society needed the exact same blend of artistic projects even then, just that the media providing them were different than now.

But something big happened in these years, just as something big is happening in our own; that this formerly experimental broadcast technology went through a rapid stage of development, turning it by the late '30s from an expensive toy into the main medium in the US for distributing artistic content. And so this made the bottom drop out of the publishing industry, severely and profoundly, as all the people in New York who used to do dime novels and penny dreadfuls and the like all ran off to Hollywood to create radio serials and B-movies instead, because of there just being so much more money and so many more opportunities there all of a sudden. And it was all this medium-quality stuff that had been generating the vast majority of the publishing industry's collective revenue before the rise of broadcast technology, so its loss suddenly created a legitimate crisis within that industry, just exactly like what is going on in the television industry right now, as all the people who traditionally used to write and direct and produce all those great medium-quality TV shows have all started moving to videogames and self-owned internet projects and other media with much brighter futures. And when this was happening to publishing in the '30s, people were just as dire about that industry's future as they are now about television's future, and many wondered if it was going to survive at all in the face of radio and movie theatres and jukeboxes and this freaky new television thing everyone had seen that year at the New York World's Fair.

But a remarkable thing happened to publishing, the same exact thing we're seeing with TV right now; that as the lucrative middle of the industry disappeared, and as these money people got more and more desperate, more and more smart artists and administrators were able to convince these money people to take a chance on their own ideas, these so-called "Modernist novels" or "self-contained serials" or "stories for grown-ups" or however you want to define them. Because let's not forget (and this is a big part of my entire point today), before the Modernist years, most people didn't believe that anything truly amazing or mindblowing could be created out of a full-length fictional book; people still mostly thought of publishing as the home for crap, crap like adventure and horror tales, even if that was sometimes well-done crap like Bram Stoker or Jules Verne. I mean, sure, there had been a growing amount of examples over the last 50 years of what could be done with the medium under the best circumstances -- people like Gustave Flaubert and Mark Twain and Henry James -- but these were mostly considered flukes, occasional flare-ups by geniuses but not something the medium could sustain regularly, not something of interest other than to the top level of elite intellectual audience members.

So what a surprise, then, that what at the time was considered a doom-and-gloom crisis within publishing would produce what many now consider the finest period in the history of novels; the explosive growth in mainstream popularity of such extraordinary Modernist scribes as James Joyce, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and on and on and on and on. It's so easy to forget now, but this group of writers and the editors who believed in them literally transformed the publishing industry in just a few short decades, literally proved to the academic community for the first time that a novel could be a legitimate work of art too. It sounds ludicrous now, I know, because now anymore the novel is our standard-bearer for "work of art" as society defines it, with our artistic judgement of other media usually based off of it as a sort of litmus test ("Was it as good as the book?"); but this was not a foregone conclusion for a long time, and in fact it was the writers of Early Modernism who first even made the argument in a way that actually convinced a lot of people. (And surprise, surprise, these happen to be the first generation of artists to have had novels around them as an everyday part of their lives since birth.) How extraordinary that this would happen right in the middle of a giant financial crisis for that industry, with most of the money and most of the help packing up at the same exact moment; how astounding that we don't remember that aspect of it at all, only the great things for that medium those times produced.

And so it exactly is with the television industry right now, exactly; that as so much of the talent and money involved quickly shifts to the emerging worlds of videogames, internet series, massively multiplayer online (MMO) environments and more, and as the TV executives left behind get more and more desperate, they've been more and more willing to put complex, experimental, daring stuff on the air, so-called "self-contained series" or "television novels" that are just so much exponentially more sophisticated than anything the industry has ever seen before (and once again the result of the first generation of artists to have grown up with that medium being the mainstream since birth). And sure, like I said, this has its precedents, just like the Early Modernists had their Flauberts and Twains and Jameses; we wouldn't have The Wire without Homicide: Life On the Streets, wouldn't have Mad Men without St. Elsewhere, wouldn't have 24 without Murder One, wouldn't have Heroes without Babylon 5. But that said, the stuff coming out these days far and away outshines any of these antecedents, and I argue that you can easily call such people as JJ Abrams, Matthew Winer and Ronald Moore the Hemingways and Millers and Joyces of television, and see their projects at the medium's equivalents to Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, The Sound and the Fury and more.

In fact, there was even more that I had been planning to go into today regarding all this -- I was even going to dissect two of these shows specifically, Abrams' Lost and Moore's recently completed Battlestar Galactica, to show exactly why they're so special and ground-breaking to begin with -- but sheesh, I've already gone on just so long today, so I think I'll wrap up instead. But you see my point, hopefully; and like I said, when it comes time to write my book on it all, there will eventually be an entire chapter on just this subject alone, and a chapter on the coming "smart videogame" revolution (think "Second Life" meets "i heart bees" meets first-person-shooters -- this day is coming, and it's coming sooner than you think), and a chapter on the near-complete collapse now in cultural relevancy of the old traditional gallery system for visual artists, as well as all kinds of other cool little specific chapters like this, appropriate for non-profit people and corporate people and fellow futurists and just everyone, please freaking read it, please freaking read it. And then I'll be asked to speak at freaking TED, and I'll get hired as a special new-ideas consultant at freaking Capcom for a thousand freaking dollars a day. Take that, Raph Freaking Kostner!

Anyway, just something that's been on my mind recently, because of the ultra-phenomenal year Lost is having this season, and of course because of Battlestar Galactica ending just so damn spectacularly last month, and it as a result officially now becoming the greatest filmed science-fiction serial of all time; and who knows, maybe soon I actually will sit down and explain why exactly I feel this way, which like I said had been the original point of today's entry to begin with. Another time, dear reader; another time.

All my life, I've always been very interested in the topic of presenting traditional things in new ways; so back when I was a photographer, that meant photography, and then when I was a creative writer and self-publisher, that meant creative writing and self-publishing. And now that I'm an arts administrator, and am reading a lot more traditional history as part of my job, I thought it'd be interesting to start exploring new and exciting and cutting-edge ways to present even this, even boring old stuffy traditional history and traditional academic-style research. And then this is all combined with yet another thing going on in my life these days, which is that I'm constantly in the process of trying to come up with yet another full-length publishing project to create and release through my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; as regular readers know, I release such publications for free there once every month or two, simply to maintain as big an audience over there as possible, plus to get X amount of people each time to say at their blogs, "Hey, wow, look at this cool freaky thing Pettus has yet again done," thus giving the entire center some free publicity, and with a message more powerful than any advertisement could convey. And then this also all doubles as a way of reinforcing all the time what I sell as my main strength during the day as a freelancer -- that I am a highly attuned, highly original expert on the future of the arts and entertainment industries, especially when it comes to emergent technologies, and that your company should hire me to give you expert advice as it pertains to all this stuff, and how you can incorporate less complicated versions of these projects into your own commercial endeavors. (I counsel both big corporate clients and small non-profits; seriously, drop me a line if you're interested. The first consultation is always free, my guarantee.)

So, one of the things I've been doing at CCLaP because of all this has been to take on a big major historical subject two or three times each year, just as a fun personal project concerning a subject I've always wanted to know more about; last winter, for example, it was Gilbert & Sullivan, while next summer will be India. And the way I do this is just like any other amateur history buff would; I simply sit around every weekend and read a little bit more about the subject at hand, every weekend for four or six months until I feel like I finally have a sophisticated understanding of that subject. And to be frank, most of this is done through what has to be my number-one destination on the internet besides my email account, which is Wikipedia; and every time I'm there doing one of these Saturday afternoons of research, I keep thinking of what a bizarrely modern and pleasurable thing it is to do amateur history-buff-style research at Wikipedia, of how a Saturday afternoon there reading up on a subject is such a different thing than a Saturday afternoon of reading through a paper encyclopedia, which I also used to do when I was a kid because I am a nerdy moron. And the difference, of course, is the hyperlinks, which in terms of pure ideological innovations is perhaps the most profound thing our entire internet age has so far created; because as anyone who's ever done an afternoon or late-night of web-surfing can tell you, the causal and magical connections we make in our heads through ideologically-linked reading is just so much more powerful a thing than any static collection of paper pages, no matter what order those particular pages were first put in. And that's because presenting such information in a hyperlinked way is like tearing off the spine of such books and throwing all the loose sheets into a cardboard box, yet attaching ultra-smart little robots to each loose page, so that one can pick up any of the sheets therein and say to its bot, "Go fetch me every other page in this giant box that's somehow related to yours, when it comes to this particular tiny little criteria that I've randomly picked," and have this bot return those pages instantaneously; and that verges on science-fiction, frankly, and becomes at the end just such a more profound way for human beings to learn academically about a subject, to just be able to intuitively follow a line of thought from related reference to related reference to related reference, as far as one wants until one's ready to backtrack again, and start going down yet another specific side-alley of history.

But see, once you decide that you want to put together some kind of cool project that takes advantage of the stream-of-consciousness that comes with hyperlink-based historical research, you immediately run into a problem; just how do you collect this "cloud" of not only the information you gathered but how it hypertextually relates, delivering the scattershot results of an afternoon of Wikipedia-browsing in a recordable way that others can exactly follow later in the same order you came across it? For example, I recently decided on the next research project I'm going to take on, which I definitely plan on doing a full-length book concerning for eventual free download at CCLaP; it's the most general subject I've taken on yet as an amateur historian, in fact, the entire subject of "The 19th Century," taken on deliberately as an extra-special challenge to myself, in that I feel like I've finally become a good enough amateur historian to try taking on a big huge subject like this. And given these global times we live in, and this new theory of historical research that says we should look at the events of a time period from around the world at once to truly understand that period, I've decided for the first time in my life to delve into my own research project from all global aspects at once: I'm not only reading about the three American waves of history that happened in the 1800s (the "nation-building" years, the Civil War, and the "Manifest Destiny" years), but also the British Empire at the same time, as manifested through the Regency and Victorian periods; plus the Napoleanic Age in France; plus the rise of the Tsarist Russian Empire to the global stage; plus the efforts for self-rule in such "white colonies" as Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; plus the British Raj in India; plus the massive and chaotic "Scramble for Africa" among all the world's "industrial nations;" plus the simultaneous declines of the Ottoman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire and Mughal Empire; plus the rise of the Barbary pirates; plus the Edo and Meiji periods in Japan; plus the Qing Dynasty in China; plus the Haitian Revolution; plus any other major national movements on the planet in the 1800s I come across in my research. Whew!

So at Wikipedia, then, if you start your first day of such research on the page labeled "The 19th Century," you'll find direct links to all the major global epochs and republics and empires and whatnot I just mentioned there on that main page; so what I did today, for example, on my very first official day of work on this project, was go to only one of these major split-off pages, the one for the British Empire, where over the course of around three hours and several beers I ended up reading from start to finish a total of 43 Wikipedia entries. And of those 43 entries I read on this particular Saturday afternoon, 30 of them are what I consider "complete" and that I never need to come back to again (shown in either black or gray in all of today's multi-color screenshots); five of them refer to major events that are arguably more important to other societies than to the British Empire (shown in red in these screenshots), meaning I should wait until I'm doing my major research in those parts of the world before starting to click through all the exotic links seen; and eight of them I imagine will remain only sub-topics to the main one of the British Empire, but just were too long and detailed of entries for me to finish on this particular Saturday afternoon (shown in all these screenshots in blue). So if I were to record my research this afternoon in a traditional hierarchal list in a traditional word processor, for example, the above screenshot is how it might come out; and while that's decent for at least recording all the Wikipedia pages I ended up going to this afternoon, and for being able to share those URLs with other people afterwards, it's lousy at conveying to others the beautifully messy way these subjects are all connected through hyperlinks at the Wikipedia site itself. And like I said, that's the main point I want to get across; that a major research project done at Wikipedia is ultimately a more complex and more rewarding thing than simply sitting down with paper books, in that the links inspire and teach us to think of the subjects in newly complex, interrelated ways.

(Click image for larger version)

So now take this second screenshot, created through a freeware program called Pathway, which is a pretty cool little program indeed; it is partly a Wikipedia-only web browser, partly a mind-mapping graphic-design program, so that every Wikipedia page you go to gets automatically added in real time to a giant visual map, along with lines showing how you got from one page to the next. Freaking brilliant! Do you know how long I've been waiting for a program that would do this, that would record the exact pathways of causal connections I take at Wikipedia on any given Saturday afternoon? Like I said, this is half the genius of doing historical research at Wikipedia in the first place, is because you get to follow an insanely intuitive order to your reading, not one arbitrarily based on dry historical dates or the random whims of some unknown professor; I love that this program so easily follows and tracks this order of reading I do on any given day, without me having to stop and laboriously track it all myself, including the loads of unvisited sublinks for any given page that I'm constantly having to come back to under such a system. So what Pathway does, then, is simply plop these graphic elements on a giant blank space as I web-surf, each of them evenly spaced from one to the next; then when I'm done with my actual surfing, I can go back to the white space and rearrange these icons with my mouse in any way I wish, like for example the pretty little cloud you see here. And this is great, because I can even arrange my unfinished research in an intuitive way if I want; like seen here, for example, where the farther out on the edge on the map I placed any particular topic, the more unrecorded side-links are left to explore concerning that topic. And that way on subsequent Saturdays this year, I have an ultra-easy way to determine where to start on any given afternoon, by simply glancing around the edge of that map and picking any of the subjects found there.

(Click image for larger version)

Of course, this being freeware, Pathway also has a number of serious drawbacks that you can do nothing about; as you saw in the previous screenshot, for example, there's no way to change the color or size of each particular entry being tracked, no way to format the text to reflect yet more sophisticated information. So to do that, then, I moved to yet another piece of freeware called FreeMind, a much more powerful mind-mapping application but that unfortunately does not have the automatic Wikipedia page-tracking of Pathway. And as you can see in this screenshot, when I go to the trouble of redoing the mind-map through FreeMind, I come up with a document both prettier and more useful; in this case, a map with better titles, once again displaying the contextual colors of my original text document (red: links away to other coming major maps; blue: British Empire sub-topics with still more links to come; black: "closed" entries, completely read and with no more links to check out), plus with the opportunity to draw tangential arrows across the entire diagram if I want, plus with the chance to make the text of each entry smaller or larger depending on how important I think it is to the overall development of the 19th Century. And like I said, this would be perfect if FreeMind simply tracked your Wikipedia-browsing automatically like Pathway does; and Pathway would be perfect if it simply offered the kind of formatting sophistication that FreeMind does. And that's simply what sometimes comes in the world of freeware, is a whole series of applications that each are nearly perfect but none of them exactly so.

(Oh, and a digression, as I sit here looking at the diagrams once again; remember that the connections being shown in them are not just arbitrarily chosen by me for sociological or historical reasons, but literally reflect the order I found the articles when doing random fuzzy-mind web-browsing over at Wikipedia. This is an integral part of the process, I'm convinced, to making such a multimedia, hyperlinked academic-style research project actually worthwhile, is to make sure to record the exact order that these links were inspired, of which subjects led you to being interested in which other subjects, which with any luck will be an order that will deeply and naturally resonate with many others as well.)

So here's the plan for now when it comes to all this, and you'll of course have to drop me a line and let me know what you think, let me know if you'd voluntarily slip CCLaP five or ten bucks afterwards if I actually did manage to get such a project finished and online for others to check out for free...

For the next six months or so, keep logging in a whole series of these three-hour afternoon Wikipedia sessions, whenever I have the free time to put another one in, hopefully adding up to an insane amount of articles eventually read about the 19th Century by the end, maybe close to a thousand altogether if I'm lucky, concerning subjects spread around the world and spanning literally the year 1800 to the year 1900. Then when I'm ready to present my results, post both my collected Pathway file on the subject and my collected FreeMind one online; it's easy to do both, after all, to post a file from both these applications online, so that others with these applications can download them and start using them directly. And not only are both of these applications free for all to use, but in both cases the files' "nodes" even contain active links to each Wikipedia entry being referenced, so that when using such mind-maps all you have to do is click on a title to get shuttled automatically to the article being mentioned. And that will officially count as the "coolest" way to follow along with the research project I've done, the option that most mirrors what I wanted to try to do with the project in the first place, the option I'll most encourage people to take on themselves, by downloading one or another of these freeware programs to their own computer, and then downloading the appropriate file.

But of course as we all know, most people won't want to go to the trouble of doing that; so I'll also prepare a traditional narrative book as well, where I take a plethora of screenshots of these mind-maps, and lay out the threaded lines of thought in as straightahead a way as can be done. And that'll be offered up like all of CCLaP's minor books are offered up, as a free download in PDF form for either American or European laserprinters, as well as a version for Sony Readers, along with a link to CCLaP's Paypal account for anyone who'd like to make a donation afterwards. So basically I would bundle all this up together on one page, an "online headquarters" just like I do with all of CCLaP's books; and hopefully this would all be enough to make a lot of people go, "Wow, okay, I get it, it's an entirely new way to even approach the idea of academic research, and of tracking that research, and of doing so-called 'dilettante' research as a weekend hobby on one's spare time." And like I said, would also hopefully help raise how my skills are perceived in the eyes of a growing amount of people, which would hopefully increase the amount of freelance consultation and futurist work I'm getting on any given day regarding these skills. Because seriously, I need to start making some significant money this year for the first time in a long time, or else I'm going to...I don't know, die of malnutrition or get hit by a car or some ridiculous pointless thing like that.

So...what? Does this sound like a plan for 2009? An interesting way to present a thousand Wikipedia entries about a given massive general subject? An entirely new way to even think of the idea of intuitive, productive information-gathering? I don't know how everyone else will react, frankly; but at least for now it seems like an interesting idea to me, if nothing else a project that's helping me in a personal way profoundly understand the 19th Century with a multifaceted complexity I never did before. I guess that's the real proof in the pudding, that such a style of research is at least working profoundly well for me; and hey, as long as I'm doing it this way, I figure I might as well record it, so that I can share the process in the order I did it with others, in the hope that it'll help them make more sense of an ultra-complicated subject too. As always, it's a work in progress; and as always, I'm sure I'll be posting yet another update concerning it all before too terribly long.

So like I mentioned here last time, one of the side-effects of me opening my arts center about a year and a half ago is that I'm simply making my way these days through a lot more artistic projects, from books to movies to photos to music and everything in between. This is in fact part of my job now, no matter how tempted some are to scoff at such a statement: as an arts administrator, it's simply part of my job to keep as caught up as possible with the general creative culture that exists, to have at least a dilettante's knowledge of as many different creative pursuits as possible, so to have a so-called "expert" knowledge on how they all relate and what's coming next. (And this is in fact part of what I do on a freelance basis during the day, for those who don't know, senior-level "futurist" strategy advice for corporate entities regarding what's coming next in the worlds of entertainment, online developments, etc; just contact me at [ilikejason at gmail.com] if you're sincerely interested in learning more.) So how this will often pan out in my particular life, then, is that the raw creative material itself will pile up over the course of a busy week -- all those songs featured at all those music blogs, all those sketches featured at all those drawing blogs, all those photos being posted at the Flickr groups I belong to -- and then on a typical Saturday or Sunday, I will sit down around lunchtime and go literally until that evening doing nothing but making my way through this material, a veritable multimedia orgy of Web 2.0 goodness: I will fire up Google Reader, start up 1001 (a photo-oriented feed reader just for Flickr accounts -- see the screenshot above), log into Facebook Chat, open up the folder on my hard drive with all the MP3s I've been downloading that week, maybe crack open a beer or load a bowl, and literally just lose myself over the course of seven or eight hours to this freeflowing instanteous sampling of culture from around the world at once, artsy things and candid things and silly things and astonishing things, eight hours of reading and looking and watching and conversing and laughing and crying and being moved and having my mind changed about certain things.

And that's what I really want to emphasize most of all today, how much I legitimately love and look forward to my Saturdays of doing such a thing, certainly as much as being on my bicycle on a warm Saturday and spending the afternoon out in the sun, most definitely a lot more than a winter Saturday afternoon of bad syndicated television while laying around on a couch eating potato chips, like I wasted so many Saturdays in my pre-internet youth. And that's had me thinking as well about this recent experience I had, of joining yet another online service that required me to fill out a profile, and having that service as part of filling out this profile ask me what my hobbies are, and me getting mystified in this deconstructionist way all over again regarding the question of what exactly a "hobby" is in the first place. Back in the sleepy '70s middle-class suburb where and when I grew up, for example, nearly all the middle-aged dads had at least one traditional hobby or another that kept them busy over the course of a Saturday afternoon too; and now that I'm a middle-aged man myself, it's had me thinking about what it is that you might call my own generation's shared set of hobbies, and of why middle-aged men are so fascinated with such pursuits in the first place. But since all our fathers were raised at the end of the Industrial Age, all of their hobbies of course revolved around physical objects and physical activities -- model trains, model rockets, rebuilding cars, landscaping their yards. So then is the lack of similar physical objects and activities among my own generation proof that the entire concept of hobbies is dying, that we are moving forward enough as a civilization that candid creativity is simply now an everyday part of all our lives, not something to be shuttled off as a special weekend activity? Or is it that since my generation was raised during the beginning of the Information Age, our "hobbies" are of course going to be of a similar aethereal nature, afternoons of reviewing and sorting and analyzing thousands of pieces of digital global creative culture like I just exactly described?

And so the more I look into it, and the more I study and parse the entire subject, the more I'm coming to realize (as far as I can tell, anyway) that hobbies can mainly be defined through three characteristics:

--They serve no direct useful purpose in a person's life, yet can be a powerful teacher of various general character-building traits -- patience, discipline, commitment, curiosity, attention to detail, etc;

--They're obsessively fastidious as far as the level of detail one can theoretically get into if one theoretically wants, all the way down to a scary meth-addict level of nervy fastidiousness if one chooses;

--And thus are these two things able to put the engaged hobbyist into a sort of happy trance under the best circumstances, what sociologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "achieving a state of flow," where the mind is open and receptive and churning along at this fantastically high level, while simultaneously losing all sense of the passing of time and indeed that it's even functioning at such a high level to begin with.

Certainly, for example, this is the state I can often get into during these weekly inhalations of global culture I do, and in fact I've talked in former essays about this being a major reason why I do it in the first place -- this concrete sense suddenly of being a member of a whole new kind of organized society, one based not on geography or race or religion but on the shared virtual destinations so many of us end up at online, the hundreds of millions of us who are regulars at Flickr and YouTube and MySpace, all the people around the world who update blogs and podcasts and Twitter feeds on a daily basis. I love the science-fictiony feeling this produces in me, that suddenly I'm not sitting in an apartment in Chicago at all, but rather some fantastical city that could never actually exist, that I could step out the door of my building that moment and somehow magically be in London and Capetown and Mumbai and Mexico City all at the same exact time. This is very much how it can start to feel, I think, after spending several hours casually devouring several thousand pieces of global creative culture, photos and videos and indie-rock songs and written blog entries, and funny little Facebook updates and live chats with random friends; it's during these periods when I can literally feel time slipping away from me, when I can feel my mind cleaning itself of its cobwebs and making new synaptic connections in unexpected ways.

And then of course all this takes on an extra dimension for me in particular, in that it's online where most of my socialization these days takes place too, because of what I've talked about here plenty of times before, of how I lost most of my Chicago friends during the early 2000s and now have only a handful of acquaintances here I physically get together with at all. And don't get me wrong, I still think that the complex benefits of physical interaction are a very necessary part of any person's life -- I still can't even imagine, for example, how people possibly presume to say that they're in a "romantic relationship" with someone they've never physically met, and still argue that such relationships are doomed to crash and burn every single time said couple actually do start spending time together physically. But that said, I do wonder many times these days just how much of what we consider traditional human physical interaction can in fact be faithfully duplicated through technological means, of exactly which aspects of being a "social creature" can absolutely only be accomplished through physical means, versus virtual ones that trick our physical senses. After all, what really is a dinner party but merely a group of friends gathered around a table, so that they can observe each other in real time while conversing? If the same group of people gather in a webcam-based chat room with full audio and video, and with the capability to have quiet little private conversations away from the main group, will the resulting evening be much different? I mean, certainly it would never be 100-percent the same, I definitely agree with that; but I find myself wondering a lot these days whether such a thing could eventually at least be 95-percent as good as a physical dinner party, given the continual rise in technology when it comes to this exact subject? Are we in fact in the process as we speak of constructing an artificial yet very real new space in the cosmos for human existence, a place where people around the world gather at once and interact just like they would if they all lived in the same city? The same one-billion-person city?

And that of course is why the very best way of all to end these Saturday afternoon-evenings of online global cultural inhalation is to eventually end up at a neighborhood pub around nine or ten o'clock in the evening, sometimes meeting up with a Chicago friend or a drink or two and sometimes just going out on my own, to have a nightcap and do a little flirting before yet another early weekend night to bed, because I'm middle-aged now and middle-aged people are fucking pathetic. Especially now in the winter, I find, just that ten-minute walk out in the bracing cold weather can be like a refreshing splash of cold water on the face, after eight hours of sedentary sitting and typing and mouse-clicking, a reminder of how great it actually is to be a physical creature out in the physical world; and then of course getting half-lit in a public space is a great reminder of what is so important about physical meet-ups, that the last five percent of human interaction the online world can't provide is the most important five percent of all, the five percent of smelling someone's hair or touching someone's arm, of body language selling a joke, of nervous stuttering making you fall in love.

Like millions of others, I'm trying to figure out where this balance lays in my life, this balance between living my life online and living it out in the physical world. But also like millions of others, experiences like these Saturday afternoons of culture-gorging are starting to force me to acknowledge the internet itself as a legitimate "place" in my head, a place where I legitimately "reside" for X amount of hours each day instead of residing in Chicago, where I have essentially left my body behind and become for all intents and purposes a virtual citizen only. And this is a hard concept for us humans to wrap our minds around, because of the ephemeral nature of it all -- of the internet not really "existing" in the way we traditionally think of existence, of not even the physical mechanics behind its existence being centrally located somewhere, of the shared billion-person space we know as the "online world" actually existing within the silicon guts of a billion little servers scattered evenly across the globe. It's hard for us to think of such a thing as an actual place, an actual destination that you can spend time at, apart and away from the physical world (and don't even get me started on the magical portals known as "cellphones" that connect these two worlds in mysterious real-time ways); and I'm sure that's why so many of us, myself included, have such a hard time defining our relationship with the internet these days, of what exactly it means to us and of how exactly it is both adding to and subtracting from what we've traditionally defined in the past as a "good life." Anyway, just some random thoughts on a Sunday afternoon, after yet another Saturday pondering all these subjects yet again.

But as always, first a few caveats are in order; for example, every time I refer today to the "arts" or "artistic projects," I also mean projects designed primarily just to entertain, since the arts and entertainment are so intricately linked in human culture. And of course, when I refer to the history of television, I actually mean the entire history of broadcasting in general, in that many aspects of how television stations work even to this day are still based on rules first established at the dawn of commercial radio, a hundred years ago now back at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, I'm convinced that this is part of why all these media's histories are so relatively similar when it comes to their ups and downs -- because of most humans' bad habit of establishing quick rules for any given medium right after its invention, then blindly and irrationally sticking to these hastily established rules for the entire rest of that medium's history, no matter how problematic they're eventually proven to be, no matter how inefficient they become in a changing future society. For example, why do novelists get paid a percentage of every book sold, while screenwriters are simply paid a flat fee no matter how many people see the movie? Because those were the norms first established in these two media when they originally coalesced into industries; and once such industry norms are established, most people find it a herculean effort to break with such norms.

See, at the beginning of their histories, both TV and radio were experimental media, with just a few adventurous early adopters willing to invest the money and patience needed to be regular listeners and watchers, almost exactly for example what you saw with the videogame industry in the '70s and '80s. (And in fact radio barely even got out of its experimental stage before TV was invented in the first place.) Back when they were first established, these "broadcasting networks" were happy for any kind of revenue at all they could manage to sweet-talk their way into, and considered themselves lucky to have just a handful of hours a day of original programming, while the majority of the public's attention and money was still devoted to such things as paper books, live theatre, vinyl records and more; and again, you can see this exactly in the same kinds of terms as videogame companies in the '80s, happy for any sales at all in a world where people still mostly spent their entertainment budget on other things. But this all changed for television after World War Two, when a whole combination of factors contributed to TV becoming the most dominant medium in the country for distributing artistic content: the quick rise of high-technology in those years; the decentralizing of what was then mostly a packed urban population into millions of isolated suburban homes; the need to convert a heavily-producing military-based manufacturing industry into a peacetime domestic-goods one; rising household incomes combined with rising consumerist peer pressure (i.e. "Keeping Up With The Joneses"); and let's not forget the pure science-fictiony gee-whiz allure of the medium itself, always a huge driving factor behind any new artistic medium.

And so that led to the national cultural focus shifting so much to TV in the '50s, '60s and '70s, and therefore so much money shifting to that medium too; and that's what pushed these broadcast networks to start providing eight hours a day, twelve hours a day, sixteen hours and more a day of original programming, so that they'd have an excuse to sell more and more ads to what at the time was an unending line of cash-flush clients queued up out the door and around the block. And then this is also when the television industry established so many of its rules for itself, ones that sometimes seem so ridiculous now but made more sense then -- for example, paying all that money for all those pilots each year, just to reject most of them and then eventually cancel even most of the ones they green-lit, which made a lot more sense when TV shows were so profoundly less expensive to produce; or the industry standard of 22 to 28 episodes per year for the average weekly series, which was much more easily accomplished back when television-writing was much less sophisticated and there was much less expected of it, and therefore such scripts could be shat out by the dozens each year without breaking a sweat. (In fact, let's not forget that many early TV series would actually do a full 30 to 35 episodes a year, one almost every single week except for summers.)

But then just like every other artistic medium in history, by the '80s most people within the television industry had come to mistake its thirty years of cultural dominance for a belief that it had always been this way, and will always continue to be so. And so it's this period, extending throughout the '90s as well, that you suddenly saw everyone in this industry get greedy -- network owners selling out to huge corporate conglomerates for obscene amounts of money, the invention of cable, the gradual expansion of the number of stations at one's disposal from a handful to then 30 or 40, then quickly into the hundreds, every single one of them relying on the traditional industry model of 24-hour programming and ad-based revenue. And even worse, this attitude from the TV execs that such a system would be able to support limitless expansion, that the ad dollars would simply never dry up no matter how many channels one opened. And even worse than all this, now that all these places were being run by corporate conglomerates, and with billions of dollars now exchanging hands, suddenly it was the people with business degrees not only making all the business decisions like they should, but all the creative ones too; and see, there's a reason why serious problems always develop at creative companies when you put business people in charge of creative decisions, because the first thing that's tossed is any sense of sanctity for the creative process itself. See, I don't mean this as an insult (such people are an important part of any creative-based company), but business people are trained from the start to see creative projects merely as sellable and purchasable commodities, interchangeable products where the actual quality from unit to unit doesn't really matter, which is the whole reason that creative businesses have two different kinds of employees to begin with -- it's the creative people who decide what the company is going to produce, then the business people who figure out how to sell the thing the creative people chose.

But here's the funny thing, that this paradigm actually worked deceptively well throughout the Postmodern Age; and I say "deceptively," of course, because now in the 2000s we've suddenly seen a series of developments that have quickly shattered this whole shell-game illusion the industry had set up, more quickly in fact than anyone thought possible:

--The production quality of TV shows going up and up, for example, with more and more movie stars being hired for them too, driving budgets up to astronomical levels;

--The growing sophistication in TV storytelling too, leading to these dense and complex serial shows, whose writing staffs simply can't churn out 20 or 25 episodes every year, or at least not do so while maintaining the extra-high level of quality that make those shows hits to begin with;

--The death of traditional advertising as a cost-effective way to sell products to the general public anymore, and the growing weariness among most traditional clients to spend so much on television advertising anymore;

--The pure contempt these corporate television executives have shown the creative members of their industry over the last decade -- the endless production notes, the endless show-tweaking, the endless forced compromises -- driving more and more of the legitimately talented creatives in their industry straight into the loving embrace of other creative media (see for example the spike in new online multimedia production companies, during last year's strike of the Writers Guild of America);

--And related to that, the growing simple realization that most audience members won't in fact just sit through any crap you put in front of them -- that the only reason they did so in the first place was simply because no viable alternative was available;

--Which of course leads to the biggest complication for the TV industry of all, the astronomically fast rise of the internet, and the collective serious challenge to audiences' attentions that these most recent streaming-video, home-broadband years have suddenly started providing -- from Facebook to YouTube, podcasting to blogging, and 40 million other diversions in between.

What we're actually seeing these days, then, is not nearly the full-blown cultural crisis some people are making the meltdown of Hollywood out to be, but merely the inevitable passing of television as this nation's primary means for distributing artistic expression and light entertainment, and all the fiscal ramifications that come with that -- less audience members, hence less advertisers, hence less need for 24-hour programming, just less less less less less, exactly like what happened to live theatre in this country during the 1950s, '60s and '70s. And just like any other medium's moment of losing national dominance, the execs within the TV industry have mostly tried to respond to all this by clinging to all these established rules of their medium, no matter how ridiculously inefficient or outdated they've become: just to cite one good example, how they just keep going on producing a dozen new series every year, just to eventually reject or cancel eleven of them, despite each of them now costing several million dollars for every single episode. And the only reason it seems to be such a bigger deal this time, versus for example the demise of live theatre last century, is that the now-corporate-dominated television industry had pushed expectations to such a ridiculous level to begin with, trying to squeeze an amount of money out of an artistic medium that no artistic medium could ever possibly be expected to maintain for long. And so of course when one particular artistic medium starts losing billions of dollars a year, of course it's going to seem like some kind of cultural cataclysm, instead of the simple changing of the guard it is, a simple readjustment of an overinflated market.

It's no coincidence, no coincidence at all, that in a mere ten years we have seen the accidental and almost complete 180-degree shift in the television industry to the paradigm that now exists -- how roughly 90 percent of all original programming anymore is ultra-cheap disposable crap, game shows and reality shows and clip shows and the like, while the dozen decent traditional scripted shows collectively still on the air are not just good anymore but all them very, very good; think Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost, etc etc etc. After all, this is exactly what happened to live theatre during the second half of the 20th century, exactly what happened to paper publishing during the first half, exactly what happened to representational painting after the rise of photography in the mid-1800s; all of them became profoundly smaller in their general scope after their day in the cultural-dominance sun, but with the average project now produced being much higher in quality than the average project from before. And again, this is simply how the arts works -- that as the audience shrinks for a particular medium, simply less of it is needed in order to sate this smaller audience, and with only the smarter stuff of that medium now being produced, in that of course the hacks responsible for most of the crap have already moved on to the next new hot thing. (For a relative example, think of just how many more places have opened online in the last year that are devoted to making money from so-called "viral videos," those endless 30-second clips of some fat kid dancing shirtless to Britney Spears or whatever, that manage to get a million hits anyway from a million bored middle-class office workers.)

The dozens of hours of reality and game-show programming we're currently seeing on television these days is ultimately an aberration, the last gasp of a medium that is just about to lose its cultural dominance, the last desperate attempt by a bunch of spoiled, overpaid industry executives to keep the 24-hour ad revenue flowing, hence the party going just a little longer. And just like every other artistic medium in history, this endgame stage won't last much longer, and in fact by just ten or fifteen years from now I'm willing to bet we'll see a profoundly smaller industry altogether -- the abandonment of 24-hour programming, many less cable channels, the permanent closure of at least one broadcast network (which let's face it, will probably be FOX, and probably because of the bottomless Bush-supporting hole they dug themselves into during the 2000s). Or in other words, not even an attempt anymore to produce so much original crap, but rather more of the attitude that you're already seeing the smartest cable channels adopt, to simply get a handful of extra-high-quality shows on the air and then surround them with repeats of the best stuff from the industry's past, for a grand total of maybe 12 hours a day of on-air programming.

As mentioned before, for example, this is exactly what happened to paper publishing in the years between the Victorian Age and the Modern one (i.e. 1900 to 1940) -- a profound shrinking of the number of penny-dreadful publications and other cheap serialized crap, the stuff that at one time made up the vast majority of that industry's revenue, as the people responsible for that stuff moved on to the more lucrative world of radio serials and soap operas. And so that then brought a much bigger concentration to the publishing of extra-high-quality full-length novels, the exact period that brought us the rise of such artists as Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and Woolf and Miller and Fitzgerald and Joyce and on and on and on and on; and that's why we ironically now think of this period as a so-called "golden age" for publishing, even though the industry itself was under an immense amount of financial turmoil at the time. (And in fact, this is yet something else I'm willing to bet; that a hundred years from now, society will ironically look at these years as actually a golden age for television, and that grad students will do endless papers about the rise during these years of such "historically important pioneers in long-form moving-image storytelling" as Bochco, Milch, Kelley, Sorkin, Chase, Winer, Abrams, Whedon, etc etc etc.)

Like I said, I'm not nearly ready yet to sit down and start writing out the details of this growing "Grand Unified Theory" of mine; but hopefully this today at least shows you what I'm talking about, of how the more I learn about the histories of other artistic media, because of all the reading and writing I now do for my own arts center, the more I'm coming to realize just how cyclical this entire process is, and how what can sometimes seem like the utterly chaotic developments of modern Hollywood can in fact be easily tracked and predicted, precisely by looking at the rise and fall of other media in the past. As always, I'm sure I'll have a whole lot more about this subject to say in the coming months and years.

Well, greetings on this late-autumn Chicago evening, as I sit on the red line here writing in my paper notebook, making my way across the city to go visit a friend. I'm still kinda taking it easy at this point, frankly, after finally getting my arts center's first-ever original book out on Monday, a "story cycle" called Repetition Patterns by a local author here named Ben Tanzer. As the book's sole editor, designer, PR agent, tour organizer and web programmer, I knew in advance that exactly one gajillion details would pile up in the week before release, and that I alone would have to deal with them all; and I actually managed to deal with all one gajillion of them, so am "rewarding" myself by taking a little time off from most of my usual daily life obligations (emailing, writing, etc, although sadly it's back to the usual grind come Monday). And as a matter of fact, as of this entry the book's official numbers for the first three days are in, frankly smaller numbers than I was hoping for but still not bad for the circumstances: without a promotional budget or any book reviews or any external help, for a book that's not available at Amazon or in bookstores, it's now had 220 people in 72 hours come by and check it out, 25 people download it, four of those people actually voluntarily pay for it, for total revenue so far of a whopping twenty bucks.

Now, would CCLaP have sold more than four copies in the first three days if it weren't offering a free version? Perhaps, but not likely, not based on the dozens of other basement-press eBook experiences I've heard about. Meanwhile, has CCLaP gotten the book itself into twenty more readers' hands than the usual eBook with no free version? Yes, very definitively it has. Will these people go on to mention it at their own blogs, write up critiques at Goodreads, essentially become free walking advertisements for the book? Why, it's already started happening, in fact. To tell the truth, actually, about the only number right now I'm sincerely disappointed by is the 220 total people who have checked out the book's online headquarters; given that Ben and I collectively got the word out to several thousand people, I was expecting a higher initial-visitor rate than that. But we've got plans to raise this number after the holidays; for example, we're putting together a "virtual book tour" for him over the last half of January, in which we set up in advance a daily schedule of "guest appearances" by Ben at other blogs, sometimes interviews and sometimes a guest essay, sometimes a prerecorded audio file and sometimes an excerpt from the book with new background notes. (By the way, if you'd like to be a part of such a virtual tour, just drop me a line at ilikejason [at] gmail.com.)

It would be easy to be disappointed by the amount of revenue the book has so far generated, I admit. But frankly, I went into this entire thing de-emphasizing as much as possible the topic of revenue as a qualifier of success; that's why I give out a free version, after all, is because I still believe eBooks to work better simply as promotional items than as professional products for sale, even if the electronic version is the only one that exists. In fact, especially if the book only exists electronically, since there are now officially one fucking million hacky subpar writers online these days, with officially one fucking million hacky subpar eBooks for sale, and with all of these authors for some reason thinking that big crowds are going to suddenly show up and automatically pay nine bucks for a badly-formatted PDF that no one in the publishing industry wanted in the first place, and that offering a free version is somehow going to fatally compromise that entire prospect. Back when I was a creative writer myself, I ended up having tens of thousands of people collectively download my books, precisely because they were free, precisely because people are so much more willing to take a chance on an unknown writer when their book is free; and in the meanwhile, several hundred of these people ended up donating close to three thousand dollars to me over the years because of these free books, which I guarantee you is a much better ROI ("return on investment") than 99 percent of these crappy eBooks with no free version, polluting the internet like some kind of information plague.

Not to mention, back when I first started up plans for CCLaP in 2004 (or three years before the current version opened), I realized very quickly that anything I did through it would ultimately have to be entirely self-motivated; because in all this time, I can still get barely anyone I know to believe I'm actually going to be able to pull CCLaP off (to the point of eventually acquiring a permanent physical space in the city, my ultimate goal), much less anyone to believe it enough to invest money in the plans. No no, CCLaP Publishing's goals are much more ephemeral and long-term in nature; merely to put out exquisitely great books, to develop a reputation as an extremely high-end limited-edition press, showcasing a series of more daring mid-sized projects by mid-career writers, ones with several other books already under their belt. This will help cement the overall quality of CCLaP and anything it puts its name on; this will get CCLaP bigger attention from the exact industry professionals and middle-class couples I'm seeking. And this will make people believe in CCLaP more, talk about CCLaP more, recommend CCLaP to others more; and then when the center is finally ready to take on some more high-profile, high-profit projects (like expensive "fine-art" paper-book runs, regular live events, getting local writers signed to bigger agencies and presses), lots of these middle-class couples and industry professionals will be ready to join the cause, and jump head-first into the projects because of CCLaP's previous reputation for quality. That's what I say, anyway -- Don't be stingy with the stuff that was barely going to generate any revenue anyway, like electronic books; better to use them promotionally for a greater and more profitable purpose, like generating bigger audiences during tours, building goodwill towards a bigger project in the future, etc.

So in those terms, I'm incredibly happy; Repetition Patterns turned out exactly how I had pictured it in my head, and I had been holding myself up to fairly ridiculously high standards in my head. And I have to admit, although I don't think it appropriate to talk about at CCLaP itself, a big part of why I'm so satisfied with it is because it was my very first highly successful experience as an editor; one where I changed a lot of stuff (like I've done before in editing jobs), gave some stories an entirely different flavor (like I've also done on past jobs), but this time with the author actually liking the process and results, instead of damning and cursing me at the end of it all (like has happened most times in the past). And in fact, this gets into the whole subject of how I hope to be eventually regarded among artists, as my new role as the owner of an arts center and a full-time administrator: namely, as a former artist himself, one with an artistic sensibility, who is qualified for a job with a major press, but turns down the opportunity in order to have a more personal, nurturing relationship with the writers he edits and publishes. This is a huge problem within mainstream publishing these days, for those who don't know; now that all the major presses are owned by giant corporate conglomerates, they've turned them all into the same high-profit, high-turnover ventures as their television holdings and record-label holdings and DVD-manufacturer holdings. But the fact is that the publishing industry throughout history has always been a low-profit venture, done more for the love of the arts than to make a gajillion dollars; and this has caused a huge problem in these corporate times, with it now being the marketers and PR specialists and national retail liaisons at these places who make the decisions over what's to be published, and a business model that now places a poisonous emphasis on getting just a few explosive dumbed-down bestsellers out per year, and virtually ignoring every single other book they put out.

That's not why editors become editors; editors become editors because they want to have a very old-skool effect on the arts. They want to be the "Modernist Hero" definition of an editor -- the person who plucks an artist from obscurity, guides and shapes and molds them, helps them understand things about their writing they didn't understand themselves, buy them drinks and slip them rent money when they need it the most. Editors become editors because they want to influence and contribute to the national conversation on the arts, not be a follower of what's already being said; they want to set the actual tone of the conversation, not just ceaselessly pour through demographic spreadsheets and worry about whether some mouth-breathing "Joe The Plumber" redneck is going to like it. And this is causing bigger and bigger problems at these major presses, because you suddenly have a whole generation of people like me who are highly qualified for these editor jobs, but won't touch them with a ten-foot pole because of knowing how impotent editors have become at these places, that virtually any decision you make now can be instantly vetoed simply by some schmuck in a tasteful business-casual outfit at the end of a conference table quietly muttering, "That'll never sell." And that leads to ever-worse and ever-worse editors at these major presses, and a bigger and bigger takeover of artistic decisions by people with business degrees; and that leads to more and more smart authors abandoning these major presses, and flocking to the exact independent micro-businesses these maverick editors are starting up on their own or with friends; and that leads to more and more crap from these major presses, more and more and more and more; and that leads to massive losses, massive layoffs, bankruptcies, and eventual shutdowns of all these corporate places.

Great arts administrators understand that you will never get anywhere simply by playing catch-up to the national cultural mood, like all these corporate-influenced major presses now endlessly do; the great ones understand that it's their mature, informed, intuitive choices that set the national cultural mood, that help determine that mood. It's not me giving the audience what they want; it's me telling them what they want, based on taking the pulse of the country that moment and then extrapolating a couple of steps ahead. And this too is part of the job of a truly effective arts administrator, and why the job is actually a lot trickier to master than it may seem at first; they need to not only be technically proficient at making artistic projects better and better, but also be a bit of a fortune-teller, to partly guess what the audience is going to want and partly tell them what they want. And that's why I don't worry so much these days about exactly how much money one of my projects or another is making, why I find it more important right now to actually get my projects into the hands of others, even if that means literally giving them away for free. Money always eventually comes to talented people who work hard and have a little luck -- that's the very freaking definition of capitalism, after all, a fact proven so many times in the US now that we can safely accept it as a truism. The important part of the arts is to always boldly forge ahead, albeit with wisdom and education and an intuitive understanding of societal wants and fears; and that's how you become a great book editor and successful publisher, not by putting the suits with advertising degrees and laptops full of spreadsheets in charge of creative decisions.

Anyway, if you haven't gotten a chance yet, I do hope you'll have a moment soon to stop by the book's online headquarters, download a copy and have a read. As you can tell, I'm pretty proud of the book, and proud to have my name associated with it; I hope you'll like the reading experience just as much.

That's what's made it so surprising, after all, that I should keep having this whole series of pleasant little pipe dreams lately, every time I walk by this weird little commercial mini-space in my neighborhood that recently went up for rent; I keep having all this nice little fantasies, in fact, about what I could do with such an odd little space, of how for example it could serve as a shared space for CCLaP's first live events, this rare-book dealership I've been thinking more and more recently about maybe starting in the future, as well as a private office for me during the day when activity around the space is slow, all of which I've been detailing here at the journal over the last couple of weeks simply because I could. (And here are links to part 1 and part 2 of those details, by the way, for those who originally missed them.) And now we're at the final part of these pipe dreams I've been having, of how you could turn the back room of such a space into a little book-making factory, specially for the contemporary small-run art books I plan on producing as part of these overall plans for CCLaP and the rare-book service and whatnot.

Because make no mistake, this has been my plan for CCLaP's paper-publishing program from the start; not to ever print the same kind of mass-run trade-paperbacks like you would see from a major press at a corporate bookstore, but specifically to do small-run handmade "fine art" editions, $50 to $100 in final cover price and with the goal of only selling a few hundred copies of each title, otherwise publishing the stories for free electronically for people who are only interested in simply reading the stories. Because ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the future of publishing, and the future of publishing most definitely does not lay with mass-run paper editions; in fact, when it comes to small factual information like is found in textbooks and newspapers and telephone directories, even in 2008 we have largely done away with paper versions of such info, most people instead rapidly acknowledging the benefits of simply plucking the latest version of such info from online sources in an electronic format, and reading them on your computer or phone or Kindle or whatnot. This is the way all textual information is heading, a process that will especially speed up once these publishing companies finally let go of some of this corporate greed of theirs, and start making both eBooks and eReaders that are free of DRM and work well across different competing brands and standards. This day is coming, and it's coming sooner than you might expect; and basement presses will do nothing but benefit by acknowledging this as quickly as possible, that paper books in the future will be admired and treasured mostly as artistic objects, not for the actual information they contain.

Like I said, this has been my plan for CCLaP's publishing program from the start, something I could pull off even with the organization based out of my apartment like it currently is; but this would become especially feasible if securing a physical space like the one being mentioned today, not the least of which is because you could turn the back room of such a space into a standalone factory for these books. Although not necessary, I admit that it'd be a real treat to have an actual physical space for CCLaP and its various obligations -- a space with its own public mailing address, a place where I could easily accept packages, a place where an intern or assistant could comfortably run around, a place where I could store and make things without it completely subsuming my personal living space. Ah, but much cooler than this, with a space like what I'm talking about you could actually throw big parties in conjunction with each publishing project; and if you did this right, if you did this in the way I'm envisioning, you could end up selling 50 or 100 copies of the book right at the party itself, make a good $5,000 or $10,000 and ensure that the project breaks even on a single solitary night, ensure that you'll be able to take on future projects like the one just pulled off.

See, I think it's clear by now, how much I think a strong social aspect can contribute to the success of the kinds of small, artistic businesses we're talking about today; in fact, when it comes to businesses like rare-book dealerships and small publishing companies, where so many people are conducting operations through online means only, I think adding a physical social element can produce a legitimately powerful competitive edge. If, say, you create an overall environment like the one I'm always talking about with CCLaP, an environment where you're bringing poor artists and wealthy patrons directly together and getting them to interact, then such a high-end small-run publishing wing becomes a lot more than simply the opportunity to own cool books; it also becomes a physical symbol, a very concrete way for such patrons to support these artists, to have a direct hand in helping that artist be a success and to financially survive to at least their next project. This I'm convinced is the way to make a long-term success out of such artistic mini-operations; not to emphasize the individual commodities themselves (although they all have to be cool for this to work, make no mistake), but rather to sell the idea of the entire thing being a long-term investment in the Chicago arts, that your evenings of hanging out and drinking top-shelf liquor and shooting the shit with a bunch of bohemians and taking home an extremely cool book is not just a fun experience unto itself, but also directly benefits the very bohemians you're sitting around having such a fun time with in the first place.

With the kind of commercial mini-space I've been talking about, then, you could actually throw a big high-end party to celebrate the release of each new small-run book; and instead of the party being free and you putting the hard-sell on everyone while they attend, you simply charge people instead, a high price (say, $150) that includes a free copy of the book (which would normally sell, say, for $100). How you convince people to attend, then, is by throwing the most kick-ass parties imaginable, ones just full of free high-end liquor and sneaky back-porch drugs, packed with interesting attractive wealthy patrons and crazy sexy young hungry artists, featuring great live music and great live literary performances, late-night deals between gallery owners and emerging hipsters, over and over and over so that the parties just unto themselves develop a city-wide reputation. Combine this, then, with the usual work you would be doing through the arts center and the rare-book service, as far as developing a regular clientele who simply support everything you produce anyway; and you can see that with a little luck, it wouldn't be ludicrous to imagine 50 to 100 people attending such a high-ticket party at such a weird cool little space, at 150 dollars a pop, every single time you put out a new book. And that way, you get the hard business of breaking even out of the way right on the very first day the book is out; all sales of the book after that party are simply additional profit, with you essentially having several hundred extra copies to be sold at the store and online at whatever leisurely pace you want, and with no big pressure to sell X units by Y date like is the case with major presses.

I confess, after a year where seemingly every single thing in my life has been going wrong or badly, I salivate over this little pipe dream of mine with the rabidness of an infected bunny -- this idea of owning such a cool little space in the city somewhere, something half Dutch Minimalist art gallery and half Victorian book parlor, of making exquisite new books and selling exquisite antique books and providing a supportive place for contemporary cutting-edge writers all at the same time. Of combining all these endeavors into a powerful new community of artists and fans here in Chicago, a new way for these people to interact at a highly unique space that provides legitimate benefits for all of them. How...nice it would be to have a life doing that, and to actually get paid to do it on top of everything else. What a...lovely thing it would be if my life ever got to that point. Sigh.

Things will get better in my life, they will; if I've learned nothing else by getting to the age of 39, at least I've learned that, that life is an endless series of up and down waves and that eventually the opposite side will come crashing through yet again. If I can just be patient, if I can just keep doing the things I need to be doing, no matter how I'm feeling or how unmotivated I am, I'll be in great shape once the big wheel of karma eventually points in my favor again, once all these accidental great things start randomly happening to me again, instead of the endless accidental shitty things that have recently been randomly happening to me. That's why I love having little pipe dreams like I've been having these last couple of weeks about this space, of why I think it's so necessary for everyone to have these kinds of unrealistic dreams, even though I also think it's highly tempting to make fun of me for having such dreams while they're still so far away from being a reality; as I've learned this year, it's only by having such pipe dreams that I remain motivated enough to do even the little things in my life that are constructive instead of destructive, that I achieve any kinds of successes at all. This is what the New Age movement means when they talk about the power of "visualization;" that your simple mindset about the world, whether or not you're looking at your future in positive or negative terms, has a direct influence over what you physically do with your time right this moment.

Simply maintaining a positive outlook on your future is no substitute for the hard work it takes to actually get there; but as I can attest, it can sometimes be the final motivation needed to actually do this hard work, and at the very least helps the process along instead of hindering it. That's why I've been particularly alarmed by the shitty year I've been having in 2008, because it's seemed sometimes that I've lost even the ability to think optimistically about the future, a scary new first for me that I don't quite know what to think of; that's why I'm always so glad to have goofy little pipe dreams about the kind of stuff I've recently been talking about, no matter how far away I am in reality from making those pipe dreams actually happen, because at least it keeps me thinking about a future that may one day actually be. I will always take optimism over pessimism, which is why 2008 has particularly bothered me, because I feel like my pessimistic side has recently been winning out a lot more, that I've been getting in touch with the black nothingness at the center of the universe more this year than even usual, and I already spend too much time in touch with the black nothingness at the center of the universe as it is. I'll always take a little optimism in the face of all that, which is why I don't mind these recent little pipe dreams about this weird little space in my neighborhood at all.

I mentioned here a few weeks ago how there's this tiny little space that recently went up for rent in my neighborhood this summer, a weird little leftover space in a building mostly taken up by a popular neighborhood pub; that's it you're seeing above, which if you want to get an idea of cost-wise in terms of your relative local economy, probably rents for the same price as the high-end two-bedroom private apartment located next-door. (This is about four blocks from an el station, one block from a major bus line. And don't forget, you then start tacking on several hundred dollars for every specific little license you want to have too; one to sell liquor there, one to hold live events there, one that allows you to have outdoor seating on the public sidewalk, etc.) You'll want to read that original entry, of course, for my first thoughts concerning this recurring fantasy I'm having these days, whenever I pass by the space (which is often; this is literally two blocks from my apartment); how great it'd be if I had the money and resources right now to take over this lease, and turn it into a dual space for CCLaP's first live events and the burgeoning rare-book service I've been thinking more and more about opening in the future, as well as to serve as my office during the day when things are slow. And of course I've been thinking just even more about it since the last time we talked, and of course have more thoughts to share, so thought I'd do so today.

Because, see, through a complicated set of circumstances, I've actually gone on a tour of this space in the past, back when it was being molded into a business that never actually opened, what would've been an incredibly cool little wine shop and tasting place, that could snugly seat parties of maybe up to thirty inside if they didn't mind scooting in. That's actually a three-room complex you're seeing there, which then opens in the back to an outdoor patio on the edge of a private courtyard parking lot, with the whole thing probably the same size as a convenience store altogether; but it's cut into three very distinct rooms, see, all with small doorways, making it difficult for this to serve as a traditional retail space, but more like three parlor-esque spaces instead. And in fact, this is a good term to use (which is why I used it), because I've been thinking about how if I did have the chance to put all this in motion this second, I would transform that inner middle room into not just a parlor but a space I would nickname "The Parlour," English spelling and all, because my idea is to decorate the space like a private Victorian library, and have it serve as my main showroom for the rare-book service. (More on the size of collection I'm picturing in these theoretical perfect-world plans, and what kinds of books they are, in just a bit.)

See, that's the whole tricky thing about me starting up just a few live events through CCLaP, or trying to maintain a daily retail space for a rare-book service, or shelling out money for me to have a professional office away from my living space (something I would love); none of these things would generate enough revenue on their own to justify an entire commercial lease, no matter how low it is relative to other commercial spaces. Ah, but if you combine them all, then maybe you have a shot; then suddenly you have at least one thing that most online booksellers don't have, which is a permanent physical retail space in the third-largest city in the US, while you also have something most online arts organizations don't, a private physical space in the evening to do with whatever the hell you want, whenever you want, provided you get the right licenses and all. It gives me an excuse to start up, say, just three or four regular live events through CCLaP and still justify the cost of the space, to have just a select roster of clientele for the book service and barely any walk-in traffic; it gives me a justification to make a private office out of the whole thing too, given that I envision large periods of time during the day with no one there besides myself and maybe an intern, plus an excuse to turn the back room into a factory for the art-book service I plan on starting up (but more on that in a bit too), plus of course have the whole space available for a whole series of incredibly kick-ass expensive parties (but as always, more on that in a bit as well).

As I was mentioning in my last entry on this subject, I see the key in a rare-book service like the one I'm envisioning to be impeccable service, exactly what the old boutiques of the big cities lost as they started turning into conglomerate outlets, total consumerist environments for tourists, etc. I envision the center rock of this dedication to service, for example, to be the shop's headquarters, this Parlour space that's open to both the public and for private appointments; I just love the idea of really doing up the middle room of such a space right, building these stained wooden shelves wrapping all four walls, floor to ceiling, with differing heights and widths of shelves all the way around to allow for knickknacks, slanting easels, computers, etc etc. After all, you couldn't use the front room for this anyway; you don't want all those rare old books exposed to direct sunlight for such a long time each day like that. The Parlour, then, would be a little haven, a little urbane oasis in the middle of a busy urban environment, where a client or new customer or simply a CCLaP reader who's in town as a tourist can stop by and get whisked in and be taken immaculate care of. I envision just a few luxurious leather chairs and an antique table in the middle of the room, lit easels along the walls so that various volumes can be pulled out and displayed for discerning customers, tea and coffee and cocktails always at the ready. What a lovely idea, right? Right? I'm just drooling already, thinking of the nerdy Harry-Potteresque sumptuousness of such a room and discrete inner-city sophisticated retail service held within, which I can realistically fantasize about because it'd be such a small space, and not ludicrous to think that I could maybe one day afford to pull off in such a manner.

Anyway, so what would I fill this room with, then? Even if padded out, after all, you'd still need...oh, what, 200 books to make this room look full, to really have a shot of first starting to make serious money on such a service on a regular basis. This is such a tricky business, this one of being a rare-bookseller, because there is no proscribed path to success whatsoever, and a lot of room for dramatic improvement in an industry that despises change. For example, for fun I've recently been quickly reading through a bunch of book-collecting beginner's guides I've been getting from my library, which has had me thinking about a lot of things concerning the subject I've literally never thought about before in my life; for example, almost all of them say that you must start out as a passionate collector first before ever thinking that you'll be able to make a profit, never the other way around because that way never works. The most useful one I've read so far, Robert Wilson's 1980 Modern Book Collecting, suggests that you start simply by thinking about what gets you excited, to pick some fairly specific subjects or time periods or whatnot, and to really concentrate on those at first and try to build as "complete" a collection as possible. And what is complete? Well, that's a different answer for every collector, isn't it, which is what makes it so fun and intriguing, so goes the argument, which is what will then draw admirers to your collection, questions about it, advice concerning it, and finally offers to buy some or all of it. And that's how you become a dealer yourself, not any other way at all, so sayeth the purists who actually write these big 300-page beginner's guides to the subject.

So here's a very good hypothetical situation for me, for example, someone who maybe (hopefully, god forbid, fingers crossed), six or seven years from now might have enough revenue coming into my life, have a credit card and PayPal account and trusted profile at eBay and Amazon, so that I can devote, say, $5,000 or so over the course of a year to first build a serious collection, or in other words about as little money as possible and still have a 200-book collection at the end that others will be impressed by. I could then concentrate, say, on novels from the Victorian and Early Modernist ages, since those periods are of such intense interest to me these days; most of my money, then, would be spent on lesser-known writers from the periods, lesser-known works by major writers, and on trying to complete obscure bibliographies of prolific genre writers from the period (Jules Verne and the like; you see what I mean). To round out the year, then, say maybe I get to pick up one truly outstanding rare book (a signed first-edition Mark Twain, for example); one special limited-edition work (say, the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s sponsors a thousand-print run of a Hemingway story illustrated with Picasso drawings, originally as gifts to high-end members); one oversized Victorian book of exquisite lithographs, owned purely to have something visually stunning to show off (think Audabon bird guide from the 1870s, for example); and then maybe five or ten boxes of books that are pretty much worthless from a financial standpoint but cool nonetheless, picked up for a dollar a box at book fairs and the like, all of them at least 75 years old, consisting of weird titles and cool shapes and bizarre illustrations, I imagine many of them in pretty bad shape too.

That way, then, you have a little bit of a bunch of different things to show off to anyone who stops by, a lot of memorable ways for you to stick in their brains; let's not forget, there are already 1,500 freaking rare-booksellers in Chicago alone, tens of thousands more scattered around the nation, geographical distance no longer really a factor because of eCommerce sites, with Amazon and eBay and the ABAA keeping all those sellers honest. Like I said, I believe the real key to success with something like this (if I were to open it tomorrow, that is) is not actually the books themselves, the size or breadth of your collection, what postal service you use, blah blah blah; it's all about the personal relationships you build with each and every person you come across on a professional basis, of worming your way into their overtaxed mind and sticking in there, so that the one time a year (or maybe ten if you're lucky) they just happen to decide to buy a book that's hard to get ahold of, as a gift or for collecting purposes or whatever, it's automatically you their brain turns to.

Oh, and let's not forget, this space will be doubling as CCLaP's official space (my arts center, that is); I would turn that front room, for example, into a teeny-tiny photography gallery, essentially a blank modern-looking space where I could also hold 30-person literary events too. (This particular space, in fact, already has a new hardwood floor; all it would essentially need at this point is a new paint job to be ready as a mini-gallery.) That means not only wealthy regular clients for the book service coming in and out occasionally, but drunk young broke artists constantly wanting tours of the Parlour too; I can imagine this becoming part of my life if I were to open such a space tomorrow, of constantly holding a series of private "soirees" (salons? after-parties?) in the Parlour late in the evenings after live events, little bull sessions with artists and thinkers and collectors and patrons who have all stuck around, which of course would fulfill a major goal of CCLaP's since the beginning, to get broke artists and wealthy patrons introduced and directly hanging out with each other as much as possible. I can imagine some late night after the weekly slam or author reading or art-book party or whatever, with a hodge-podge of broke young artists and middle-aged middle-class collectors, sipping brandy or maybe malt liquor and paling around the Parlour and asking for a tour of everything I have; I admit, as a nerdy intellectual I relish the idea of holding my own regular late-night private salons full of brilliant thinkers, and would consider such a thing part of my non-monetary "payment" for running such a space. (But of course, more on these evening CCLaP events I'm envisioning in a bit...or, probably tomorrow, actually, in that today's entry is already getting so long. I'll wrap up today soon, I promise.)

I could start, then, with these boxes of financially worthless books I mentioned, taking up what I expect will be the majority of shelf space and making things in the Parlour look all full and cool, all those bizarre outdated medical guides and waterlogged whaling novels; I could give them all a flat price of ten dollars, say, so that even broke drunk contemporary poets could walk out that night with something cool, or of course have incredibly memorable things to donate to local raffles, poetry slams, fundraisers, etc etc. (Oh, and yet another fucking digression, I'm sorry; I should mention, as part of this six- or seven-year gap between now and the point I envision being able to open such a space, I plan on taking a series of bookbinding classes down at Columbia College's Center for the Book and Paper Arts; they're an internationally respected organization that just happens to offer inexpensive powerful classes to the general public. So I imagine, then, that some of these books from the "boxes o' crap" are ones I would use to test my burgeoning book-restoration skills; since they would only cost me a nickel apiece in bulk or whatever, there's not much at stake with each one while I'm a student and making a lot of mistakes, leading either to a success and me turning that nickel book into a ten-dollar one, or a failure at which point I take the book apart, remove the title page and illustrations and whatever else cool is in there, put the sheets in a big box at the store and sell any loose page in there for a quarter apiece, or give them out as door prizes at parties or whatever. Whew, digression over!)

So everyone at my private little soiree has fun for 20 or 30 minutes just looking through the 150 or so ten-dollar specials lining the room, and listening to me tell them bizarre stories about them I've discovered online, under the warm glow of antique stained-glass lamps while mingling and drinking and smoking and flirting. Then when I get around to showing the mid-priced books, the so-called "Core Collection," the 30 to 40 I'm envisioning owning the first year that would sell for anywhere from $50 to $200 apiece, I have suddenly the very best thing as possible at my disposal, which is a great story; my collection of 30 to 40 core pieces are not just random acquisitions, but tell a grander story about a time in history, or about a particular author from that time. Imagine our little menagerie mentioned before, for example, now nearing midnight and everyone drunk and stoned and whatnot; imagine the magic of me suddenly pulling out ten Jules Verne first editions at once, in a dramatic wooden box, laying them out one at a time for the assembled group on the middle table, encouraging all to pick them up and handle them and feel like big-shots, all of the books minor titles from the more obscure side of his bibliography but mightily impressive when all yanked out at once, when all of them are in very-fine condition. Believe it or not, you can get many such books at places like eBay, Amazon's ABEbooks and the like for sometimes $50, $60, just not very much at all; even someone with a basic office job could afford one book every week like this, and be able through online means to put together a formidable collection merely by the end of one year.

As the retail reseller, then, I could turn those books around in such an awed, late-night environment for a hundred dollars apiece, I'm sure of it, or maybe even convince an impressed middle-aged middle-classer just starting to get into collecting seriously to take the entire thing home right then, wooden case and all, for a cool thousand. If it was the right kind of customer, someone say my age and seriously getting into it all for the first time, using me as a friend and guide and regularly accepting free advice, coming by the Parlour every two weeks for a martini and to look at new books; yeah, that kind of customer, on a very special night, I could see myself successfully convincing him to ring up a thousand on his credit card in the heat of that moment, and walking home with an exquisite boxed set of ten Jules Verne first-editions, all from the 1860s to '90s, something that would look absolutely astounding on a condo coffeetable or new corporate office. That's what loyal customers of a detail-oriented seller do; they occasionally say 'fuck it' and lay an extra thousand on their credit card in a single moment on a very special Friday night.

And then finally, of course, as the climax to your salon and excuse to kick everyone out about ten minutes later, you pull out the three jewels of your collection: in my case, as mentioned, the signed first-edition Mark Twain, the Hemingway/Picasso MoMA limited-edition, and the oversized 1872 Audabon Member Guide to British Birds lithograph album and accompanying box. I picked them up for $500 apiece, which none of them know; I sell them retail for $750, maybe even a thousand if I feel the mood is right. And see, this is exactly what I'm talking about, when I say that a business like this depends so much more than usual in my opinion on setting a mood, building an atmosphere, educating your customers as much as possible, creating a community and environment and movement instead of just an always-bigger collection and always-prettier website, as 1,400 of Chicago's 1,500 current rare-booksellers are currently doing it. You gotta add some drama to it all, really sell it, here at this climatic moment exactly 90 minutes after this private drunken late-night salon began; you need to bring out the books in a hushed silence, ask for special care from your guests, for drinks to not be set down near the specimens. You bring your wooden book easels from the walls and set them on the center table in a triangle; open each of your three jewels so they face outwards to the room, let the assembled awed crowd gather around and mill and rotate, flip through pages with hesitant fingers, knowing they are touching history as they sit there in a dark, warm, smoky private library in the middle of Uptown, drunk and high and feeling like they're part of something special, something bigger than themselves.

And then suddenly it's two hours after the soiree began, and you're collecting glasses and printing up receipts and digging out provenance statements, tying up purchases in cool antique wrapping paper and loose-leaf gold ribbon (tsk, no pedestrian shopping bags for you here, no no, my dear sir, not even if you're buying a ten-dollar nothing book -- that's a big part of its charm, after all, and yet another reason my place sticks in your mind long afterwards), shaking hands and clapping backs and whistling for cabs and sending people on their way. And in a two-hour spiel, among a private salon of ten interested parties, you make total sales of 2,000 bucks (one gem, the Jules Verne collection, another two from the core collection, and a dozen junker books). And that, my friend, is how you sell rare books. Er, in a perfect world, i.e. the world I like fantasizing about every time I walk by this tiny little space for rent in my neighborhood. Sigh.

Okay, so this has already taken up a hella lotta space today, so I'll wait until Monday to post part 2 of all these recent thoughts; of the contemporary art-book publishing service I would also want to run through this space, a joint project between my bookseller service and CCLaP, convincing mid-level slightly famous authors to do something weird and special and exclusive, pair them up with astounding illustrators and a decent budget, to make just a limited run of 100 or 200 or whatever extremely delicate and exquisite works of book-art, assembled and dried and bound in the back factory/workshop of this space I've been talking about, on sale for $100 apiece, all of them with fancy-pants investor-worthy signature pages and provenance sheets and publishing history, etc etc. And not only that, but plan on selling half of them on one single night, by holding an ultra-cool ultra-ritzy ultra-exclusive party at this three-room (and back-porch and front-sidewalk) space, for a fixed ticket price of $150 which includes a copy of the book to take home, plus all kinds of fabulous perks there at the party like gourmet food and liquor, impressive entertainment, the chance to hob-nob with Chicago's artistically elite, performances from the book by a series of local talent, i.e. your slam regulars who come every Thursday anyway, etc. That's $15,000 in revenue in a single night, with a hundred copies of the art-book left over to continually sell at the store and online; that's enough to justify flying the author in just for the party, no matter where they are, making it even more special if they're coming in from a long way in that case. But again, more on all this on Monday!

P.S. And just to make it clear one more time, I understand that these are nothing more than pipe dreams right now, and that a whole series of other complicated steps need to happen in my life before such a vision could even theoretically become possible: I need to first get my credit rating back in order, have a regular amount of income steadily coming in, get a bank account and credit card set up, establish accounts at eBay and Amazon and FedEx and PayPal and the ABAA, along with all the work of actually starting up a legitimate eCommerce company. Then after my collection finally grows to a value of maybe $10,000 or so, I'm hoping that would be enough collateral for, say, a $25,000 small-business loan; that then would finally be enough to sign the lease of a space like seen today, get the construction work done inside that I've been talking about, and have enough left over to keep things running for maybe six months. Even better, all the things mentioned would only need to raise half the rent; you could justify paying the other half out-of-pocket each month, as rent on a private office, resting comfortably knowing you can deduct the entire thing off your taxes at the end of the year. I'm years away from this, people, I'm years away; just that it's been a particularly shitty year for me this year, and I've found it difficult to remain optimistic regarding just about anything, so to walk by this space each day and have all these perky little thoughts suddenly about a future that one day might be is a rare enough occurrence to justify having it be specially noted. Sigh!

--How I can make more money. This is a huge subject in my life these days, after all, in that I'm mostly unemployed these days, living in a country that is in the middle of an economic depression, with a spotty resume that doesn't allow me to compete whatsoever in the traditional corporate world against more boring and loyal "company men" during economic downtimes like we're going through in the US right now. And so that means that my entrepreneurial radar is up these days, since sadly that's actually the most realistic chance I have these days to actually make something substantial happen financially in my life, is through some little business or little service that I simply start up on my own and finance all by myself.

--The idea of trying to get a physical center for CCLaP up and running as soon as possible. You know, my arts center, right? The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography? Right? Because I've been actually working on CCLaP since 2004, for those who don't know, three of those years in theoretical form only (i.e. the center only existed on paper), albeit admittedly with much larger plans at first, plans to get a small-business loan and get a physical headquarters actually up and running here in Chicago right away, get physical events happening on a regular basis, and a weekly poetry slam, and a retail store in the front half, etc etc etc. I haven't given up on this at all; in fact, on a pretty regular basis, I still find myself spending an afternoon contemplating the question, "I wonder just how fast it will take me to eventually open up this physical CCLaP headquarters that I so pine for?" Will it happen two years from now? Three years? Six months from now? A decade?

--The changing face of paper publishing. I haven't talked about this a lot yet online, to tell you the truth, but the fact is that I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the future of paper publishing, since of course one of the money-making things I want to eventually do through CCLaP is run a publishing program, both electronic-based and paper-based. And in fact this is the biggest observation I've had to make now about the whole subject; that we are rapidly, rapidly moving into an age where paper books are no longer going to hold any intrinsic value for whatever actual information they contain. Because let's face it, despite the lack of commercial breakthroughs yet regarding the subject, the fact is that we're moving more and more into a situation where we track down all factual information we need through online means; we never consult paper encyclopedias or dictionaries anymore for simple factual information, almost never consult any paper reference materials anymore for simple factual information. We are rapidly moving to a place where paper books are going to be mainly appreciated for their artistic value, for their aesthetic value; and I think any smart publisher needs to acknowledge that right now, right this second (summer 2008), and start making plans right this second to take advantage of those two classes of publishing as much as possible.

--The changing face of "luxury," and how a person can take advantage of a retro definition. I admit it, I admit it -- that since I've been thinking a lot recently about the whole subject of "how can I start making more money by any fucking means necessary, goddamnit?", I have definitely been thinking of the concept of taking advantage of rich, stupid people; of what self-run business I could possibly start up that would rely mostly on charging outrageous amounts of money for things that shouldn't cost nearly that amount of money, sold specifically to obscenely rich people with low self-esteem, people who are basically walking around the streets with cash hanging out of their wallets, fairly screaming at whoever will randomly listen, "Please pluck this money out of my pocket, in exchange for a warm, safe voice of authority and respect telling me that I'm an okay human being, in exchange for a sense of well-being from the world at general for wearing a certain designer or staying at a certain hotel or having a martini at a certain bar." That has always seemed to me to be a great way to make a profit; to take advantage of rich idiots with cash literally falling out of their pockets. I don't feel bad at all about taking advantage of such schmucks, to tell you the absolute truth.

Ah, but then after thinking about it for just a tiny little bit, you realize -- that it's not really the objects themselves that's at the center of the "luxury experience," that it's actually the level of service, the level of individual attention, the amount the sellers of the world are willing to suck things up and let their clients believe that they're the center of the fucking universe. Why do certain hotels on Michigan Avenue here in Chicago get to charge a thousand dollars a night for a goddamn double bed and four walls? Well, I'll tell you right now, it's not for the physical quality of that bed, of those walls; it's mostly because the person staying in that room can pick up their phone at two in the morning, get a concierge up to their room 120 seconds later, can whisper furtively, "I'm looking to do a little skiing and have a little companionship," and a half-hour later have an anthill's worth of coke piled up on the glass desk in their room, while a naked Polish supermodel sits on their lap and feeds it to them. That's why a person pays a thousand dollars a night for a hotel room; not because it's a thousand-dollar mattress, thousand-dollar walls, but because the staff there makes them feel like the kind of person they always assumed was the kind of person who can afford a thousand-dollar hotel room. The kind of person who can call room service at two in the morning and order a pile of cocaine delivered by a Polish supermodel hooker, and have them all discretely there a half-hour later without even the room's phone ringing once.

--Becoming older, becoming more elegant, becoming more into refined things in life. Now, all the above things said, let's admit as well what I've recently learned about the world -- that there really is such a thing as legitimate elegance, legitimate class, legitimate refinement; that there are people who all of us run into on a regular basis where we simply pause and sigh and say, "My God, are you a classy human being." I admit, I rebelled very profoundly against this portion of the population for most of my youth; I spent most of my twenties and thirties, in fact, despising such people, of believing that the only legitimate experiences worth having in life are the sincerely mentally intensive ones, the ones where an abandoned loft full of unwashed artists with motor oil in their hair sit around on ratty couches talking about Beauty and Truth and Truth and Beauty. I still believe in that, don't get me wrong, in fact still mostly believe in that; just that, now here at the cusp of 40, in a persona that I now admit has always been kinda fussy and dandy and elegant even from childhood, I find myself now finally ready to admit and embrace this side of myself for the first time in my life, to admit there might actually be something good to be said about being together and with-it and well-dressed and on top of things and smelling nice and perhaps with a big ol' chunk of gear-based Swiss marksmanship wrapped around one's left wrist. Hmm. Maybe.

--My ongoing growing fascination with the history of novels.You know, of course, that this year and next, I'm actually reading and reviewing over at CCLaP a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time in my life, right? You don't? What the fuck ever led you to my personal website in the first place, then? Anyway, my point is that I'm coming to realize just how relative the entire subject of "The Arts" is to begin with; that although we as humans have constantly had the need for storytellers in our lives, in our societies, going all the way back to the dawn of human history itself, how those stories are told to us can rapidly change and expand and contract and metamorphize before you even know it. And since so many of these artistic standards can sometimes last as standards for 50, 75, 100 years or more, at those fast moments when public favor does start changing, it can come as a big shock sometimes to those existing fans of that particular artistic standard.

Anyway, my entire point is that in 2008, I think most of us can agree that novels are still seen by most intelligent people as the so-called "standard-bearer" in the arts, in that every time we look at another project in the arts, it seems that we're always comparing it to how it would be as a novel. ("How is the movie version compared to the novel? What are the newest cable shows to be inspired by novels? In what way would this short-story writer be better if they only sat down and wrote an actual novel?") And it's easy, I think, because of the following thing being a reality in 2008 -- to erroneously think of novels being an end-all, be-all output in the arts forever and until the end of time; but the simple fact, I know now because of reading so many of these older novels, is that the format itself didn't really catch on in a big way until the early 1800s, or in other words the beginning of the Victorian Era. There have been book-length manuscripts around for long before that, of course; but really, when you stop and look at the actual historical record, what we consider a modern three-act single-bound novel has only been around since Charles Dickens or so. And that everything we know about novels, all of that medium's history and maturation, has literally only happened over the course of the last 200 years.

--The process of binding books myself, and the process of creating special "art-book" editions myself. And this of course gets into what I was saying earlier, about how the entire definition is changing of what we consider "financially valuable" in literature; that between what I said before and the rise of so-called "copyleft" authors as Cory Doctorow et al, it's becoming more and more clear to me that it's not the actual words being said in a story that are financially valuable, but the actual objet de art that publisher creates of that story. If you just want to read a great story, we now live in an age where you can simply go online, simply digitize a paper book, simply xerox a friend's copy, simply check a copy out of the library; there are lots and lots and lots and lots and LOTS of ways now to simply read an author's story for free, if you're determined to read an author's story for free. I'm convinced that the real way publishers in the future will make significant money is from a two-fold process: from attracting smart readers to their company through the conceptual strength of the manuscript choices they make, just like was important historically; but with the actual money being made coming through cool, handmade, small-run "art book" paper editions of those manuscripts, ones selling for $100 or $200 or whatever specifically to those who appreciate "books as art" in the exact way we're talking about here today, otherwise publishing the story completely for free in electronic form for the people who simply want to read the story itself. Let the people who want to read a book for free actually read the book for free, and make it easy for them too; that's ultimately not where publishers are going to make their money in the future anyway, I'm thoroughly convinced.

--All the weirdo little retail spaces for rent in the Uptown neighborhood. Is is just my neighborhood? Or is it just Chicago? Or is this the nature of all large cities? In any case, I've been noticing recently all the bizarre little small commercial spaces for rent here in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago where I live, these tiny little 500-square-foot spaces tucked into the corners of larger commercial venues, an afterthought to some bar or club or store or whatever that is taking up most of that first-floor of that big large building at the corner of Important Street Everyone In The Neighborhood Walks Down and Other Important Street That Everyone In The Neighborhood Walks Down. The good news is that, since such spaces are so tiny, many of them go for the same price of a residential apartment in that neighborhood (in Uptown, for example, $750 to $2000 a month), an insanely great price for a commercial space given how much more jacked-up those types of zones usually are in cost.

--And finally, of the quiet, hidden importance behind thinking optimistically in one's life on a regular basis, to simply spend some time each week walking around on a sunny day listening to your iPod and thinking about subjects from your life in terms of a best-case scenario. Which of course is the entire subject of today's entry. But more on that in a bit.

So what does any of this have to do with today's entry? Well, I'll tell you what any of this has to do with today's entry; because tonight, while coming home from the grocery store, I passed yet again this tiny little weird space in my neighborhood that I've been talking about today, some odd 500-square-foot space that no one seemingly knows what to do with. And every time I pass this space, this $1,200-a-month space that is pretty much as cheap as an actual yuppie apartment in this neighborhood, I think, "How amazingly great would it be to open a service-oriented rare-book service in a space like this, that just happens to double as CCLaP's official public space? How amazingly fucking great would that be?"

Because let me make something as clear as possible as soon as I can; that when I think about the entire concept of opening up a "used-book store," a "rare-book service," I don't think of the usual ways we think of such subjects, but rather as a fascinating experiment in high-end, variable-price, highly-tailored, always specialized service. I picture the point of buying books from me (versus, for example, the other 1,500 freaking used-book dealers in Chicago) not just the pleasure of actually getting the book you're looking for, but the entire experience of coming to my space, of being treated as the most important customer I've ever had while you're there, of the conversation that happens between you and me as the customer and broker.

For example, the space you're looking at above, it's basically two rooms, a front and a back, each of them roughly the size of some executive's office in some corporate headquarters in the Loop. Every time I walk by this space, then, I think to myself, "How great would it be to design and decorate this front room in the style of some old-fashioned, dark, smoky Victorian-Age private library? How wonderful to walk into my space and suddenly be surrounded by oak, by divans, by rare and exquisite and plain wonderful books in every corner, climbing up 20 feet from literally the floor to ceiling? With chairs and a table and a tea set and a humidor in the middle, literally transporting you into a different era of history every time you walk into the store? So that when you're my customer and you come visit me, no matter what your level of financial commitment, each of your visits is hailed as a singular event, with you being ushered into this private Victorian chamber in Uptown with coffee and brandy and cigars and pot or whatever you want all ready and waiting for you? Ready for a whole afternoon of lounging around leather chairs and looking at cool old books and chugging down cups of gourmet coffee?"

That's what high-end customers pay for, after all, in their high-end retail experience; not the objects themselves, but the level of attention paid to them, the sumptuousness of their retail surroundings, the sense of exclusivity. BUT, my whole point is this -- that this doesn't necessarily have to be the EXCLUSIVE domain of simply rich people looking to buy old dusty things. Because this then gets into one of the other things I was mentioning above, how I see the entire industry of paper books moving in this direction; that a discerning bookseller seeking a direct relationship with his high-end clients doesn't have to rely at all exclusively on old dusty rare antique important books; that if you cultivate an elegant client base who appreciates books as artistic objects first and as historical objects only second, you also have the opportunity to sell them high-end exclusive art-book editions of contemporary books too.

And so in that sense, this space I'm talking about could ultimately serve a much bigger purpose than simply as a stuffy smoke-filled showroom for all my snooty little Victorian first editions for sale; it could be a headquarters, a social center, for the thriving subcommunity in the US (and especially the Midwest) for contemporary small-run art books. If you did this right, I keep thinking, if you actually ran such a company in a way I keep picturing in my head it could be run, it'd be a lot more than simply selling yellowing old manuscripts by a bunch of dead white guys to a bunch of dot-com assholes; it'd be about building a relationship with these people, getting these people to invest in brand-new contemporary books too, not for collector financial reasons but simply because they are quality books and worth investing in, worth investing in the "future" of that writer and that publisher and that designer. That you could use this space I'm talking about, for example, for exclusive little expensive parties, ones that for example cost you 200 bucks to get in but you're walking away with an exquisite, hand-done, hand-signed art book at the end, plus an evening hanging out with that artist, that designer, all the other people who are buying the book, drinking top-shelf liquor all night and doing all manner of illegal substances for free on the back porch, the hottest musician in town doing a free performance and with four-star appetizers being forced on you every ten minutes.

That's not a bad way to earn a living, right? RIGHT? That's always been my biggest problem, in fact, when it comes to the entire subject of making a living by preying on the gullibilities of the rich and weak-willed; I've always felt like I would be taking advantage of someone in that kind of situation, that I'd be basically walking in and playing up the idea that money equals class, that money equals taste. Under the concept I just detailed, though, this wouldn't exactly be the case; it'd be much more in that case about finding customers who appreciate the "fine things" in life, who appreciate art objects for what they are and are in a position to support such projects, which like I said I spent a huge part of my twenties and thirties not understanding why someone would appreciate in the first place, just now getting to the point for example where I can finally understand why a rich person might sometimes spend tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, pursuing such a thing. Of why I shouldn't feel bad about this, even if I'm the person directly benefiting from some random rich schmuck deciding to spend a hundred thousand dollars trying to find themselves, trying to support the underground arts.

And this finally (FINALLY! sheesh) gets me to my last point; of what a wonderful little thing it is to have all these kinds of thoughts every time I walk by this space, this space that is just two blocks from where I live, meaning that I always end up back at my place still thinking of all the nice little theoretical things that could happen if I actually owned a space like this. Because let's make no mistake -- I am still only theoretically able at this point to think about actually owning a space like this, with so many other first steps needing to still happen in my particular life that it's a fucking joke to even contemplate. And this gets into yet another thing I mentioned above, yet another thing I've been spending an extended period of time thinking about these days -- of just how much our day-to-day lives are affected by what exact mental attitude about the world we maintain as we walk around doing our daily things. Are the New Agers right? Do we actually influence the things that happen to us merely by what attitude we have about these things? If we expect the best, do we in general receive more good things in life than bad? If we want to be a small-business owner, do we need to first actually visualize that small business in our heads a hundred times? A thousand times? Do we need to fantasize a hundred times about that business gone right, gone insanely right, before we'll ever bother putting in the insane amount of work needed to make it go even partly right?

I've been thinking about this a lot more in my life recently, about whether my past successes have been mainly attributable to my willingness to dream about those things gone really well (which I actually used to do quite a bit), versus now in 2008 when so many things in my life seem to be falling apart, expressly at a time when it's hard for me to even picture my life going well at some random point in the future down the line. That's what so much of my yearning and dreaming has been when I walk by this weirdo little 500-square-foot space in my neighborhood; not necessarily even thinking that something realistic could happen for me through that space, but merely allowing myself to believe that it's okay for me to yearn for something like that in the first place. And that by allowing myself that, by allowing myself even the permission to dream of something bigger than myself, that's the first step that eventually leads to something bigger than myself actually happening.

Okay, ENOUGH. See you later.