Category: Literature

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Steve Jobs: Marketing Megagenius

Earlier this week, the San Francisco Chronicle (and other sources) reported that

Apple’s Steve Jobs, in a display of his master-of-the-universe clout, had directed his company’s stores to get rid of books from a publisher that’s coming out with a Jobs biography in May.

Today, The New York Times gets around to the story. Much is made of the book’s title, “iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.” Call me obtuse, but when I saw that the other day, I thought it sounded like hagiography. The Times points out that many read “iCon” as a double entrendre — that the title intends to convey the notion Jobs is a con man. In the article, the book’s co-author, Jeffrey S. Young, is kind of confusing on that point, saying both that rendering “icon” the way he did was meant only as a play on popular Apple product names: iMac, iBook, iPod, and iTunes, for instance. Later in the piece, though, Young is quoted as saying Jobs “has an amazing ability to con people.”

But Young’s real offense isn’t the title — it’s that he tried to breach Jobs’s self-crafted image as creator and savior of the personal computer revolution, product visionary, anti-Microsoft guru, movie-animation mogul, and all-around superstar. Handsome as all get out, too. From what you read about this “iCon” book, that’s how he’s portrayed. But when you’ve risen to the Olympian heights Jobs has — and he’s just one of a growing circle of tech supergeniuses who have all somehow singlehandedly saved the world — you can’t just let some schlub try to tell the public how great you are.

Fair enough. This kind of thin-skinned, hyper-controlling egocentrism among corporate titans is an old story.

What’s not so easy to resign one’s self to is that Jobs, in his pique, feels it’s necessary to punish all the other authors who’ve had Apple-related works put out by John Wiley & Sons, the publisher of “iCon.” For the unauthorized biographizing of one, all must be banned from Apple’s stores. Wiley says sales at Apple’s stores don’t make up a significant fraction of overall trade for the books in question. Still, it’s the nastiness of Jobs’s gesture that counts.

Maybe the best part of the story is that, except for its subject’s meddling, “iCon” likely would have gone unnoticed except among the most devoted Apple acolytes. Thanks to Jobs’s megagenius marketing move, it’s guaranteed a much bigger audience.

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Who?

Doing a little writing assignment — and I do mean little — for a High-End Retail Catalogue that Will Remain Nameless, I hit a snag. I was trying to come up with some copy about an imaginary daydreaming dad. An adjective I might use for this person’s reveries popped into my head: Walter Mitty. For many readers of a certain age, there’s an instant recognition of who that is: the title character of a James Thurber short story, a fictional Everyman whose oppressively mundane daily existence masks a heroic fantasy life.

But something made me ask myself whether Walter Mitty would be too obscure a reference for a turn-of-the-new-century audience. So I asked the person who gave me the assignment, a literate and intelligent person, whether she had heard of Walter Mitty. Or James Thurber, for that matter. She answered no on both counts. Not surprising: She’s at least 15 years younger than me, and came along well after Thurber was a humor icon. Actually, I came along after he was a cultural icon, too — he began writing for The New Yorker in the 1920s, published “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” in the magazine in 1939, and died in 1961. But people still talked about Thurber in the ’60s, and there was even an NBC sitcom based on Thurber’s work, “My World and Welcome to It,” that ran for three seasons starting in 1969.

So I didn’t use the Walter Mitty reference. I could too easily hear people reading it and saying, “Who?” Just the way I probably gave a blank look to older relatives who mentioned Ring Lardner or George Ade (though eventually someone handed me a copy of Lardner’s “You Know Me Al,” so I know now that he wrote one of the best, funniest baseball books ever).

(Of course, Walter Mitty’s day may come again: There are old rumors floating around that Steven Spielberg and Jim Carrey plan to make a movie based on the story. After that’s out, the reference will be current once more.)

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The Last of Hunter

Two last notes and I think I’m done with Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, unless he comes back to life and kills himself again.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle did a decent obit on him today. Jay Johnson, the former Examiner news editor I mentioned last night, figures in the Chronicle’s account of Hunter’s work for the San Francisco papers. Here’s Jay’s part of the story:

Chronicle Executive News Editor Jay Johnson, who also edited Thompson’s columns when he wrote for the Examiner, said Thompson could not dictate over the phone, so he filed his stories page by page over the fax, sending multiple revisions as the two spent many hours throughout the night and into the morning “wrestling the column to the ground.”

“Nobody was as much his editor as his sounding board. He needed to talk it out and get reaction to it. It was not the average creative process,” Johnson said.

One morning as deadline neared and they were still working it out, Thompson, who was known to have an affinity for controlled substances, told Johnson, “Our real drug of choice is adrenaline.”

Johnson said Thompson was easiest to work with when he was covering a presidential campaign. But he was often just “riffing,” Johnson said.

He fondly recalled one night when Thompson told him how he had tried to cheer up a friend who was scheduled to go in for back surgery. He took a bunch of explosives out to the backyard and stuffed them into his Jeep. As the hood flew into the air and the Jeep exploded into pieces, the two friends realized what they had projected into the sky would soon come back down.

“They are like dancing around with this shrapnel coming down,” Johnson said.

Johnson told him to write it down and that became Thompson’s next column.

Johnson said it seemed that part of the reason Thompson enjoyed writing his column for the Examiner was that he had a burning desire to be plugged in. In the days before the Internet, Thompson turned to Johnson to give him the latest news.

“By calling in, he could ask what was on the wires. He would ask me to read him stuff. That way he could be involved in the business,” Johnson said.

And second: I’ve been hearing and reading some of the “Hunter went out on his own terms” and “Hunter never wanted to die in a hospital bed” stuff that’s out there. I’m not buying the nobility or courage some seem to see in his suicide. God, or who- or whatever, rest his soul. But over the last few years, I’ve seen several people who were close to me die with what appeared to me to be real strength and forebearance — yes, even when they died in hospital beds. I’ve watched others go on with their lives despite the kind of loss I could hardly bear. From where I’ve watched, one thing they all seem to have in common is a belief that every day they got was a gift of some kind, if only a chance to see what would happen next, even when they saw the course their stories were taking. We’re surrounded by people going through the same thing every day, really. Nearly silent. Barely seen. Never celebrated. But what courage.

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More Hunter

Just two things:

One, his most recent column at ESPN.com: “Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray.” I didn’t even know he was writing for ESPN.com. It”s actually an entertaining and at times lucid piece.

Two, just checking on Technorati to see how the blog people are taking the news. I’m surprised by how much comment there is, from the outright sappy (“Hunter, we hardly knew ye” — apparently meant seriously) to the self-consciously neo-gonzo (“Too wierd [sic] to live, too rare to die“) to the actually original and humorous (like the blogger who asks, “What kind of God lets Hunter S. Thompson shoot himself, but is cool with allowing Dan Brown [author of “The da Vinci Code”] to go on living?”).

Like I said, surprising. I assumed Thompson’s act was so old, inebriated, and stuck in the glory days of Nixon-McGovern that folks had moved on. Maybe “Doonesbury” and the movies (both the Johnny Depp one and the Bill Murray one) endeared him to the post-me (me, not Me) generation.

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Hunter Thompson

From The New York Times site, where I first saw the news (The Rolling Stone site, which still lists Thompson as “national affairs desk,” doesn’t have an item posted yet):

DENVER (AP) — Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.

“Acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism.” Well, the AP’s got to play it straight. But I don’t think a description like that begins to touch what Thompson did. What do they mean, “books like ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”? Fact is, there’s nothing like it. And what Thompson did wasn’t to popularize a form of fictional journalism. He invented a new, sort of quasi-journalistic literary genre that challenged readers to figure out just what in it might reflect the writer’s experiences. The exercise was more to distill and intensify the reality he experienced. But no more stabs at explication and criticism from those ill-suited and unqualified to do it, like me.

The person I immediately thought of upon reading this news was Jay Johnson. Jay was one of the news editors at The San Francisco Examiner when Thompson was writing his column for the paper, and it often fell to him to be Hunter’s “editor” (he was just “Hunter” around the newsroom, though he was never there) — the person who would sweat in increasingly unquiet desperation as Hunter’s Sunday night deadline came and went. Hunter often (perhaps always, when it came to The Ex) communicated by fax. Back in the mid-’80s, when Hunter’s Ex saga began, fax machines would accept and print out long scrolls, not neat single pages. And Jay would be the one who would get Hunter’s scroll. The column was typewritten, but it was usually preceded or accompanied by a long, scrawled personal note to Jay or maybe just an off-the-cuff diatribe to set the tone. Long after Hunter stopped writing the column, he’d still fax his late night screeds to Jay. I sure hope he kept them. They’d be a minor (or, who knows in this world? — major) treasure.

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TV Is Very, Very Bad

Television will rot your mind. Really it will. I say that knowing that it’s too late for me. But go on — save yourself.

With that public-service message out of the way, let me just say that life has finally regained a bit of its equilibrium. I’m working some, everyone in the family is healthy and happy as can be expected in the age of Bush, the Sequel, and the new season of “Survivor” has begun.

This installment is set in Palau. The producers are playing up the area’s heritage as scene of a bitter struggle between the United States and Japan during world War II — including a long, savage and perhaps needless battle on the island of Peleliu (the subject of Eugene B. Sledge’s memorable “With the Old Breed“). Lots of striking video of shot-down planes and wrecked ships. It’ll be interesting to see whether they talk about how awful the fighting really was. Probably not.

Too early to come to any conclusions about the new crop of people, although the producers did throw in a couple of mean tricks right from the top. They sent 20 people out to the islands instead of the customary 16 (or 18 who have appeared on the last two installments). Then they devised a way to choose up sides after everyone had been there a day or so, with a provision that only 18 of the 20 would get chosen; two people would get sent home right then and there. So, if anyone had been getting on the group’s nerves, they were gone. Of course, there was one middle-aged woman who, apparently to show her individuality and mettle, had shown a predilection for bursting into tuneless, self-composed “Survivor”-related arias. She was eliminated, along with one young guy who just seemed like a cipher. Bye!

An immunity challenge wound up with a third person sent packing. Again, it was a woman who all but campaigned to get voted off by assuming the role of her tribe’s boss. I sympathize. The idea of competing on “Survivor” is actually attractive to me — just for the show biz, not the million bucks. I’m just afraid I’d get spotted as the biggest jerk on Day One and voted off first, too.

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Happy Groundhog, Happy Jim

If there were any groundhogs in these parts, they’d be able to see their shadows today, whatever that portends in this Mediterranean climate of ours.

Meantime, it’s James Joyce’s birthday (1882, in Dublin). By way of The Writer’s Almanac, a couple of quotes:

To a publisher who objected to the vulgarity of some of his writing in “Dubliners”:

“It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization [sic] in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

A life observation:

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

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Snowflake Guy

Snowflake2_1

Kate pointed out an article in the January issue of Smithsonian magazine about Wilson Alwyn “Snowflake” Bentley. He was a Vermont farm boy who got to fiddling around with a view camera and microscope in the 1880s so that he could make images of snowflakes — or more accurately, the ice crystals that make up the flakes. And that,  to fit a lifetime into a sentence, is how we know that no two snowflakes are exactly alike.

Having never heard this guy’s name before, what’s a little surprising is how well known a figure he is and how much information about him is floating around. The historical society in his hometown, Jericho, Vermont, has a Snowflake Bentley site dedicated to his work (with a small but dazzling gallery of some of the original images. Dover has republished the book Bentley published just before he died in 1931, “Snow Crystals.” Since Bentley was curious about other precipitation phenomena — he published his research on raindrops — weather scientists eventually discovered his work and celebrated it, and one has written a biography, “The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley.” There’s a critically well-received children’s book about him.

The reason for all the attention is apparent when you look at his work. He was meticulous and scientific in his approach, and he was convinced he was revealing something profound:

“Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated., When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

(Image and quote from www.snowflakebentley.com.)

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Abe Lincoln, Gay Republican

Gaylincoln Giving “Lincoln bedroom” a whole new meaning: The New York Times has a story this morning on a new book that says  Abraham Lincoln, our gloomiest president, was “gay.” The work, “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln” by the now-deceased psychologist and sex researcher C.A. Tripp, focuses on two men with whom Lincoln shared a bed: a four-year bunkmate in Illinois and a bodyguard who hunkered down with the chief executive for a time during the Civil War.

The Times quotes Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist, as saying, “… the most important president in the history of the United States was gay. Now maybe they’ll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded.” (He’s got to be kidding: This is going to send the anti-gay conservatives into paroxysms of rage about the “home-a-sekshool conspiracy to turn America home-a-sekshool.”) One historian, Jean H. Baker, speculates in the article that Lincoln’s gayness could explain his willingness to break with popular opinion on slavery and issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

It turns out the stories about Lincoln bedding down with dudes are both true and well-worn (examples of past online posts here and here, and the discussion is said to go back to Lincoln’s lifetime; in my own sheltered experience I hadn’t encountered this idea before). But here’s the thing: Even if it’s true that, apart from sleeping under the same covers, he was sexually involved with these guys, isn’t there something false or forced in mapping the modern idea of gayness onto him, as the people reacting to this book are doing? As the Times notes, the word homosexual was coined only in the 1890s; ideas like gay consciousness and queer liberation have emerged much more recently. Just consider the world Lincoln emerged from: Homosexual sex was a criminal offense, and had been for centuries in Britain and America (the Wikipedia notes in its review of the history of sodomy law that the first such statute on the books was Henry VIII’s Buggery Act).

Not that we can’t interpret the past with our own knowledge and understanding of the world today: We really don’t have a choice. So in the case of Thomas Jefferson, we see something odious in the fact he couldn’t bring himself to free his slaves and had a prolonged conjugal relationship with one of them. But that doesn’t make him a member of the Jim Crow movement or the Klan. Likewise with Lincoln: If he did have a thing for guys, it’s a much more complicated matter than simply labeling him the Gay Emancipator to figure out what his homosexuality meant both to him and to history.

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‘When All the Laughter Died …’

My usual chain of random thoughts just led to this recollection: That one Christmas, my mom gave me a copy of a book called “When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow.” It’s the autobiography of Lance Rentzel, a good Dallas Cowboys and University of Oklahoma wide receiver whose career was pretty much killed after he was arrested for exposing himself to some little girls.

Why did I think of that just now? I was contemplating an excellent Washington Post story from the other day talking about one big problem the United States is having in Iraq is simple wear and tear on equipment. Since the war planners made such blithe (or unforgivably superficial) assumptions about how the military action would go, they grossly underestimated how many tanks, Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles and other workaday army equipment the campaign would need. Since the toughest duty expected in Iraq after the first few weeks was dodging bouquets flung at the liberators, the repair budget was grossly underestimated, too. (Eventually, that leads to things like National Guard troops looking for armor scraps in garbage dumps in Kuwait.)

And thinking of that story made me think of Saddam and his henchmen and their laughable warnings that

Baghdad would become the graveyard for the invaders. I laughed to myself, anyway. And then I thought about how we’ve had 1,300 troops killed in Iraq so far and 10,000 wounded. Yeah, that’s hardly a morning’s work in some wars — check out the Civil War battles of Antietam. Or Fredericksburg. Or Chancellorsville. Or Gettysburg. Among many, many others. But Iraq, of course, is a much different kind of war. And numbers aside, there’s nothing about that old “graveyard” rhetoric that seems funny anymore.

And that made that book come into my head. I always misremember it as something like “When All the Laughter Turned to Tears,” or some variation on that. It’s a tragic story. From what I remember of it, Rentzel talked about how hard he’d driven himself throughout his childhood to excel. The book was part of his therapy, as I recall, part of coming to terms with why he’d done what he’d done. The book was praised, critically, and I imagiine Mom just saw it at Maeyama’s, the dependably good bookstore in Park Forest, and picked it up for me. Judging by the publication date, I must have been 18.

I’ve always wondered whether there was some kind of message in the gift, whether Mom was afraid I was a pervert in the making or something. Probably not. I hope not. It still occurs to me, though.