got pynched yet?

[MASCARO at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU]

 j. minnich writes:
>
>
>Yeahbut...  lacking opportunities to have readings/book-signings ala David
>Foster-Wallace and nearly every other writer these days, what's a bookstore
>to do?  If they were using the book to pedal tennis shoes or motor scooters
>or soft drinks, then I might be offended.  I haven't visited the web site to
>see what they've produced for a trading card yet, but since I live close I
>may actually try to make it to the event.  And as far as I'm concerned, any
>passing urge to re-read _The Confidence Man_ ought to be indulged.  
>
>
I appreciate your point here.  I know that as booksellers go, there's lots worse than these 
folks.  It's just that I'm so struck by the way market thinking has swallowed the booktrade.  
I'm not hearkening back here to some (illusory) pristine eden of the republic of letters (old 
Herman himself--whom you seem to share my affection for--wrote those wonderful tales 
for Putnam's and other mags. at hack rates; I ain't utopianizing about this) but the sheer 
level of poseurism is absurd.  Check out how the website and note the descriptions 
accompanying those trading cards.  How they pigeonhole writers to associate w/ some 
cultural soft spot--the *luscious* authoress (who's also a sex explorer!); the lionhearted 
hemingwayesque honest guy writer, etc.--I guess TRP here becomes the *Romantic 
Incognito* or something, the Heroic Recluse.
 BTW hey, Manta-Ray, I'm not really *bitchin*; I'm not even offended, really.  I was 
bummed out by it, because it just seemed like another small line crossed in the ever 
creeping incursion of cheap commercial tricks into every nook and cranny of my life as a 
'Murrcan. Today, I'm finding it all pretty funny; gallows humor, I guess.

john m