saw that last week...
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/15/online-shoppers-unknowingly-sold-souls/
<http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/15/online-shoppers-unknowingly-sold-souls/>it
is funny.
On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 1:27 AM, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> That's plain hilarious.
>
> On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 5:57 PM, David Bircumshaw
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Also somewhat apropos, but rather veering off the edge:
> >
> >
> > http://uk.videogames.games.yahoo.com/blog/article/11851/
> >
> > a dire warning
> >
> >
> >
> > On 18 April 2010 01:36, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> Apropos of discussion: some of you might be interested in this blog
> >> post of Chris Goode's, where he talks about Salt's marketing
> >> strategies, which was posted elsewhere. xA
> >>
> >>
> >> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >> From: David Lace <[log in to unmask]>
> >> Date: Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 7:54 AM
> >> Subject: Blog post critical of Salt's marketing method's
> >> To: [log in to unmask]
> >>
> >>
> >> Found the following blog post criticising Salt's marketing methods:
> >>
> >> http://beescope.blogspot.com/2007/04/johnnys-so-long-at-fair.html
> >>
> >> The blog post is very long and deals with lots of things other than
> >> Salt. So I've taken the section about Salt and pastd it below. If you
> >> want to read it on the blog then scroll down the blog post till you
> >> get to paragraph 15:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> A depressing thing worth mentioning in passing: I think I have to
> >> confess I've finally reached my elastic limit with Salt. If you don't
> >> know Salt, it's been for the past few years an incredibly busy
> >> independent press, based in Cambridge, mostly producing poetry, about
> >> half of which I suppose falls within the ambit of my particular
> >> interests (in late modernist work and its close allies). They've
> >> harnessed print-on-demand technology to enable them to be more active
> >> and in some respects more daring than any publisher in this area has
> >> ever been before. Their list is huge and growing and, when they
> >> finally get The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk out, I'll be (in a
> >> very small way) on it. The books themselves are not that robust as
> >> objects, but more and more attention is obviously being lavished on
> >> the cosmetics and that's probably not a bad thing. Perhaps the most
> >> contentious aspect to Salt's operations is that Chris Emery, who's the
> >> prime mover behind the press -- and, whatever I'm about to say, is an
> >> excellent bloke doing what he takes to be the right thing -- has from
> >> the get-go been boldly pragmatic about trying to get the work to new
> >> audiences by borrowing techniques, particularly around marketing and
> >> merchandising, from other (bigger) players and sectors, and allowing
> >> Salt to conform as far as possible to those pressures and assumptions
> >> that shape the literary publishing industry.
> >>
> >> So a few days ago I get their newest print catalogue and at this
> >> point, with the best will, I have to hold up my hands and say I no
> >> longer recognize my own aspirations and commitments in this material.
> >> This really is the ugliest motherhugging brochure I've ever seen for
> >> poetry, possibly for anything. Salt is describing itself as "the UK's
> >> hottest independent literary press", as if any meaningful
> >> reconciliation could ever be made between the words 'literary' and
> >> 'hottest'; a block of text on both covers insist that I should
> >> "HURRY!" to claim an online discount -- in other words, I should HURRY
> >> to concede that poetry is a kind of material that need not be
> >> categorically distinguished from, say, cut-price carpets. Across two
> >> dozen pages, huge photos loom of these indescribably unprepossessing
> >> poets' faces -- I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen (and three
> >> ladies) in question, some of whom are friends, I'm just wondering at
> >> what point we decided to agree that promoting poetry on the basis of
> >> what its authors look like was a decent or honourable trade-off with a
> >> personality-obsessed literary culture. Substantial but entirely
> >> uncontextualised samples from each text are dumped on every page in a
> >> wretchedly outmoded and barely legible grunge typewriter font. Seeing
> >> writers of the stature and integrity of John Wilkinson and Alan Halsey
> >> peering out of this mess like nervous animals in a deregulated Russian
> >> zoo is, honestly, painful.
> >>
> >> It's like that moment a few years ago when J.H. Prynne was suddenly
> >> the object of a media spasm due to some survey of British literary
> >> activity being published which suggested that he was, you know, a good
> >> poet: and suddenly Iain Sinclair's popping up on the Today porgramme
> >> with one brilliant pre-worked line (that trying to settle the
> >> precedency between Prynne and Philip Larkin was "like comparing
> >> electricity to nougat") and a lot of mischievous and strenuously
> >> disingenuous playing-down of the difficulties by which a novice reader
> >> is confronted in reading Prynne for the first time. As a dissenting
> >> friend wrote to me then: "It's good that people are talking about him,
> >> but there's no point pretending he's Patience Strong."
> >>
> >> I'm sorry to say I think (on this evidence) Salt has now reached a
> >> place in its development where it is quite cynically and grossly
> >> misrepresenting some of the work on its list. To place Wilkinson's
> >> work, or D.S. Marriott's, under a banner that says 'sensational' and
> >> 'hot' is to distort that work and the kinds of relations it's
> >> interested in establishing with readers. I'm the first to agree that
> >> seeking a wider readership for difficult poetry in these modes is a
> >> necessity. I also think the breadth of Salt's list may help with that
> >> task. (I can imagine, for example, a reader taking a chance on Anthony
> >> Joseph's genuinely sensational -- and very finely made -- The African
> >> Origins of UFOs, and taking the leap from there to Marriott or to
> >> Bruce Andrews even, and all of that being OK.) But in its promotions
> >> and some of the language it uses to talk about the work it represents,
> >> it is plainly and quite actively aping a broader culture that seeks to
> >> soothe or airbrush or neutralize difficulty as if it were an
> >> embarrassing but remediable fault in self-presentation rather than an
> >> index of certain deep engagements that are integral to the original
> >> positioning of the work, not a reducible feature of its surfaces.
> >> There is no clue anywhere here that the work is not simply challenging
> >> but actually demanding -- it requires a kind of bravery and
> >> attentiveness on the part of the reader (I think attentiveness is
> >> becoming a kind of bravery in itself, actually) without which the
> >> standard contracts simply fall into a sort of disconsoled nullity. And
> >> this is the urgent problem with Salt's strategy: it is making promises
> >> that the work cannot, must not, endorse or hope to honour, and the
> >> result of this, downstream, is bruised and disenchanted readers who
> >> will not be able to understand -- and why should they? -- why it is
> >> that non-mainstream poetry has let them down in a way that the dull
> >> gestures of the mainstream never have.
> >>
> >> The odd thing is that I'm pretty sure Chris Emery would say all the
> >> same things about the poetry that I'm concerned about here. Perhaps
> >> he'd say it's just a matter of degree -- presumably there are some
> >> lines he wouldn't cross because they'd seem disrespectful to the work
> >> and to its audiences, and he and I just draw the lines in a different
> >> place. But I'm not sure about that. Last week I did a reading gig for
> >> the literary society at my old school in Bristol and had a fascinating
> >> discussion afterwards with an extremely bright young woman who's
> >> working on Kafka and who rejected, pretty much out of hand, my 'two
> >> streams' account of recent mainstream vs. modernist poetic practice:
> >> she was insisting (not without strong argument) that the differences
> >> in approach to language-use and, for example, pictorialism were simply
> >> matters of degree. What I didn't quite manage to articulate at the
> >> time was that, in so far as she's correct, nonetheless such matters of
> >> degree are determined in part by the priorities that individuals and
> >> groups of writers establish for themselves, and these priorities may
> >> exert quite absolutely contrary pressures on writing activity that may
> >> in some other respects seem broadly continuous across the spectrum. On
> >> this newest evidence, Salt's foremost priority is selling books, not
> >> supporting and promoting poetry. Perhaps that's fair enough --
> >> "supporting and promoting" is the kind of phrase that normally crops
> >> up in the mission statements of charitable organizations, and that's
> >> not what Salt is. I'd be interested to know, though -- in the week,
> >> incidentally, when the Arts Council's Grants for the Arts scheme is
> >> cut back by 35% (as part of the current push to ensure that in 2013
> >> this country has absolutely nothing going on of any artistic or
> >> cultural merit or importance whatsoever) -- how much the significant
> >> recent ACE award to Salt has had a bearing on, or was from the outset
> >> dependent on this kind of lurid promotional crap. Or whether, as has
> >> recently been the case with a project of mine, it's simply a case of
> >> putting out the advert that generates the largest number of sales,
> >> with no particular regard for the sensitive management of the
> >> audience's expectations or a scrupulous fidelity to the ambitions of
> >> the artwork at -- or perhaps no longer quite at -- the centre of the
> >> activity.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> >> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> >> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > David Bircumshaw
> > "A window./Big enough to hold screams/
> > You say are poems" - DMeltzer
> > Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> > http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
> > The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> > Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw
> > twitter: http://twitter.com/bucketshave
> > blog: http://groggydays.blogspot.com/
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>
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