I haven't been much interested in all the lists that are going around lately– in addition to the end of the year, we just saw the end a decade, which brought so many changes to publishing, and what changes could the next decade possibly hold? and blah, and blah, and blah. But for once, one is worth your time. And of course it belongs to Richard Nash.* An excerpt:   

5. The mechanically reproduced object will have its aura restored in this Age of Digital Reproduction and we'll wish, again, that Walter Benjamin could have seen all this.

6. In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.

7. In 2020 some people will still look back on recent decades as a Golden Age, just as some now look back on the 1950's as a Golden Age, notwithstanding that the Age was golden largely for white men in tweed jackets who got to edit and review one another and congratulate one another for permitting a few women and the occasional Black man into the club.

*Richard (former head of Soft Skull) is a brilliant guy. If you don't believe me, read his manifesto, a description of his new social-publishing project, Cursor, that is so far-thinking it left most people of us who read it saying "I'm not really sure how it works, but I think it will make sense in time." For semi-regular doses of Richard-wisdom, read his blog.

 A piece I wrote this summer has just now run over at Bookforum; it's called Chorus Girls, and it's run in Bookforum's "Syllabi" section. As in, if I were teaching a seminar on chorus girls, these are the primary sources we would read. 

From the cabaret to the nightclub, from the theater to the ballet, women who perform in public have attracted writers and artists for as long as women have performed in public. Unlike the prostitute, who, as Walter Benjamin once said, is "saleswoman and wares in one," the chorus girl is not exactly selling herself—she's selling a dream of who she mightbe. The gaze that falls on her is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes singular, sometimes multiple. Onstage or off, the chorus girl is defined by her relationship to a necessary other—her audience—who, after all, may just be the reader. 

(Read more)

 The latest issue of Tim House features an interview with Amélie Nothomb, by the magazine's Paris editor, Heather Hartley. In between talking about Rilke, writing as pregnancy, and the importance of boredom, Hartley asks Nothomb about her concept of being a jamaisien– a state of being without country, of having never had a country, that struck me as an interesting way of looking at a familiar problem.  Here's the passage:

[Read the full interview here.]

Being a jamasien is about a tension between supplement and lack, about having one country too many or too few, about the productive strangeness of being alien to a place and yet at home in it… occupying this grey area that most people couldn't stand to inhabit.  Even for the jamasien (is the word becoming too precious?)  to stand it, one must make use of it. It's quite a demanding position, not a passive one at all.