Author: davidbiddle

What We Mean When We Say the End of Books is Coming

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Image representing Seth Godin as depicted in C...
Seth Godin (Source: CrunchBase)

Seth Godin is one of the most insightful mainstream bloggers you can find on the Internet. His fame comes from popularizing, among other things, the ideas of “Permission Marketing” and Internet “Tribes.” The dude has been involved in marketing, development and innovation in the computer and Internet media world since he began work with Spinnaker Software in 1983.

Godin posted a particularly insightful piece in mid-August called “An End of Books” that pretty much anyone who gives a crap about where we’re headed as a global community needs to check out. Whatever your politics or your religion, books as the vessel for ideas and vision have been the single most important element of civilizations at least since the invention of the printing press.

The gist of Godin’s post is that electronic text is changing everything. Nothing new, right? We all know this — even those of you die-hard “I wouldn’t wipe my ass with a Kindle” purists. What I like about “An End of Books,” though, is that Continue reading →

The Rhythms Fall Slow

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Source: purpleclover.com

A friend recently sent me a link to a very moving first-hand remembrance of Jeff Buckley called “Be Your Husband” from over at PurpleClover.com. The piece stayed with me all day until I recalled an alternative prologue to my novel Beyond the Will of God written a few years before I went to press with it. I decided against this particular prologue because at the time I didn’t want to insult the memory of Jeff. I hope that is not your perception here. I offer it just because I think it’s a great tribute in and of itself, and, in the end, this same spirit finds its way into my novel — a spirit you should not forget.

The Rhythms Fall Slow: On Jeff Buckley and the Eternal Life of Music

On May 29, 1997, exactly 660 days after the day Jerry Garcia died, Jeff Buckley decided to cool off in the Mississippi River on his way to a recording session in Memphis, Tennessee. According to the only eyewitness, Buckley, fully clothed, waded into the Mississippi for a swim right around dusk. He went out to where the water came up to his waist, lay back, began to float and sing at the top of Continue reading →

A Click Away: Where the Good Stuff Is

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BeautifulMorningBlues in Philly
It’s morning in Philadelphia…

We go to people’s websites and blogs following a link from somewhere else. Usually we don’t so much read an article, post, or essay as we absorb it. I have to tell myself to slow down ten times a day when I’m visiting content online. “Slow down, dude. Pay attention. What else is there connected to this site? Read the article. Don’t just link away from it on the first promising reference. Relax!”

There’s interesting stuff at almost any blogger’s site. Certainly there’s a treasure trove of archived information and articles at all the online magazines and professional websites you go to daily. The good stuff is often just a click away. I was recently at one of my favorite author’s sites because I referred to his work in this blog post. Anthony Continue reading →

Read “Nirvana” – An Esquire short story by Adam Johnson

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Rarely do I bump into a short story in a mainstream publication that knocks my socks off. The last time that happened was about twelve years ago when I read Anthony Doerr’s “The Hunter’s Wife” in The Atlantic (that was before they stupidly discontinued stories in each of their editions).

That said, “Nirvana,” by Adam Johnson, is in Esquire this month. Johnson’s novel, The Orphan Master’s Son won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. He is clearly an author who deserves every good reader’s attention.

It’s a very tender piece, but it’s so full of who we are at the moment: ghost musician gods, a wise President still dispensing his thoughts to the world although he’s dead, a cute,  quixotic drone; tangles of hair; a spider moment that is perfect; app coding; Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft — only just enough; the future; the past; encryption busting; an Indian boss with flare; and love — tender, desperate, sweet, awesome love (and a bit of sex).

“Yes, hearing the President whisper is creepy because he’s been dead now, what—three months? But even creepier is what happens when I close my eyes: I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she’s paralyzed from the shoulders down.”

What amazes me about this story is that it can, and should, be read by everyone. It is serious, intelligent fiction, but it’s also fun, interesting, humorous, and timely.

Most of you know you should read more short stories, but just don’t manage to find the time. This is something to spend the time on. I’m a slow reader. It’s hard for me to find the time, too, but I’m so glad I read “Nirvana.” It’s everything a modern short story should be and then some. Check it out. Click below (if you really can’t do the reading yourself, they’ve magically added an audio link with Mr. Johnson reading the piece himself).

Read “Nirvana” in Esquire

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Pulp fiction in the digital age | China Daily

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Chinese EReaderThe article (link below) is a bit mind-blowing when you read the scale of things in China. It starts out reporting the demise of a digital author who worked himself to, well, death…

Pulp fiction in the digital age|Society|chinadaily.com.cn.

There is a great deal of illumination and unvarnished truth in this piece. In some ways it defines the edges of the new publishing frontier better than almost anything else you can find on the Internet. The result of literally millions of people thinking they can make a killing in the e-book world means viciously low quality work in every genre and category you stumble into on Amazon or iBooks or Smashwords — in China and elsewhere.

Worse, if you really do have a committed interest in producing high-quality literature for general consumption by intelligent readers, the rabble writers just in there to make a lot of money buries you under their five million boots and oodles of variations on the dogged belief that anyone can write a novel.

China is roughly five years behind much of the rest of the world with digital books. It’s important to realize, though, that that market is by far and away the biggest in the world. How things shake out there with e-books may determine a great deal about how things shake out for the rest of us.

When Novels Become Assassins: The Problem with Writing on the Edge

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Not feeling so good...
Not feeling so good…

A version of this essay was adapted for The Huffington Post. Read that here.

I nearly died just after completing the first draft of a novel called Beautiful Morning Blues. The story I came up with is unnerving, possibly amoral, anarchic, and, certainly, nihilistic as hell — but it still tries to say life is a magnificent and magical journey. I’m convinced that this dualism, this story at play with big metaphors and dark issues, was working to assassinate me — the messenger — from the moment I conceived it.

I struggled for two years to bring the whole 438 page draft into existence. Beginning with writing the first paragraph on a whim in 2002 (a guy gets offered $300 by a neighbor to have sex with her), over the next two years I battled depression, a growing addiction to alcohol, struggles in my marriage, sexual insecurity, and a weird sort of self-centered lunacy that you really have to call psycho-narcissism. On top of all that, every few months or so I just felt really crappy. I would run a low-grade Continue reading →

An Unexpected Short Book Review and Appreciation

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Roger Raufer on right end of table, fully interrupted by bottles and cans.

The review below tells the story as well as I ever could here in an intro. Let me just say that Roger Raufer was one of the great teachers in my life when I was learning the ropes in the energy and technology economics world. Because he thinks about technology systems for a living, many of our conversations over the years have found us discussing global futures and technology advances on the horizon. More often than not, Roger has been on the money with his predictions. Roger is the first person I ever heard give a cogent and meaningful talk about climate change — that was back in the early 1980s. But if you really want an earful, get Dr. Raufer to tell you about China. He’s been Continue reading →

Divergent Paths: The Most Influential People I Ever Met

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I spent the first 30 years of my adult life as a consultant in the world of energy and the environment. I’ve done energy and solid waste audits of over 600 institutional and corporate buildings throughout the United States. During that time I wrote eleven separate manuals on energy conservation and recycling.

I was pretty good at what I Continue reading →

More on the Price of Books in America: addendum to a Talking Writing op-ed

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various e-book readers. From right to left iPa...

The Apple vs. Department of Justice anti-trust, book pricing case came to an end this past week. It offered a rare and important glimpse of the private nether regions of both the publishing world and the new corporate media industry controlled in large part by Apple and Amazon.

I co-authored an op-ed piece on this case at Talking Writing magazine with TW’s editor in chief, Martha Nichols. It’s called “Thank You, Apple, for Going to Court Over E-Books.” Unlike most of the pundits in the publishing and high-tech worlds, Martha and I took the long-term perspective of authors — not corporate publishers and consumers. Apple and the big publishers were trying to change the business model of retail book sales. Rather than allow retailers control of pricing, Apple and the Continue reading →