Parallel Imports

Allan Fels and Fred Brenchley wrote a reply in response to people wanting to keep parallel imported books out of Australia.

(Wiki: Parallel importers ordinarily purchase products in one country at a price (P1) which is cheaper than the price at which they are sold in a second country (P2), import the products into the second country, and sell the products in that country at a price which is usually between P1 and P2.)

Peter Carey and others claim that parallel imports will destroy the domestic publishing market and thus prevent Australian authors from being published. Domestic publishers hold the copyright for overseas authors thus if you want to see those books in Australia they must be produced by domestic publishers. Non-parallel importing is therefore protectionism.

I am a wannabe writer. Reading is my number one past-time. I read widely. I give a lot of books as presents. I am university-educated middle-class fairly bohemian and pink. I should be on the battlements staving off parallel imports and supporting Australian publishing with my last breath.
I’m not.
I agree with Fels and Brenchley.
Carey et al are wrong.
Domestic publishers are lazy pricks who do not support Australian writers.

By saying that they can only be profitable by printing foreign authors under copyright the publishers are admitting THEY CAN’T SELL DOMESTIC AUTHORS!
Yet these are the only guys we are counting on to support said Australian authors?! Protecting them doesn’t make any sense.

The crowning argument of the anti-parallel people is this:
"But if Australian writers can't afford to go on writing (and Australian publishers can't afford to publish us) then there will be many fewer books reflecting our unique Australian experience."

This is fatuous on two counts.
a) If I wanted to read about The Australian Experience..... why would I read a novel?
Surely I would read about real people?
Like Robyn Davidson: a woman who walked across 1700km of desert with four camels. That was a cracking read. Entertaining, touching, transporting and inspiring.
Or I would read biographies of Diggers surviving the Bataan death march or fighting in Tobruk. Or I’d read straight history. 'Leviathan' by John Birmingham is a triumph of a writer being authentically Australian. Birmingham’s style is a product of his personality. His personality is in part due to being Australian.
If the reason for having The Australian Experience is to either Tell-us-who-we-are or to convey that experience to foreigners then convey the REAL experience. Don’t try and manufacture it.
Simply having a novel set in Australia doesn’t automatically make it more worthy. To claim otherwise is nationalism, and there is very little that is more stupid and childish than nationalism.

b) Australian authors will not stop writing: they will get a job and still keep on writing.
Y'know, like 99% of artists in all fields.
Fulltime writers tend to disappear up their own arseholes, anyway. There is a reason why your old stuff is better than your new stuff - you were mining your life experiences in the old stuff. Your new stuff is written when you have become a full-time writer and you simply aren’t that interesting any more. This applies equally to musicians.
'Oh listen: a song about being on tour!'
'Oh, look. A novel where the protagonist is a writer with writer’s block.'
Spare me.


Main rebuttal.

1) Books are simply too expensive. How much money do they think readers have? Are readers going to pay $35 for one book, or are they far happier to pay $35 for two books or even three if you use the Penguin model. The $9.95 Penguins are proof right there that Carey et al are wrong. Why are people buying these Penguins and not another print? Because the other print is $25 perhaps? These aren’t new books. They have been out for a while now, and if the people buying them *now* didn’t buy them *back then* there must be a reason for it. Join. The. Dots.
This is a no brainer.
I am not going to impulse buy with $20.
‘But it costs so much to print books in Australia….’
So don’t print them in Australia. Ta daa.

1b) I buy remaindered books from England for about $6-8 each. As a result I have read any number of books I would never have even looked at if they were $20 let alone $35.
Any number of my friends buy books from Amazon because they are cheaper than getting them here; they are unavailable here; they are actually in stock.
Aside from print-on-demand, it is hard to think of a more direct way to get a book.

2) If Aussie publishers are making foreign authored books then they aren’t making domestically written books. QED. Not only that, but it is cheaper to bring in the foreign print books than to print them here, so it doesn’t make economic sense to do so except for reasons of protectionism.
How much sympathy do you expect me to have for a publisher who makes only $6 instead of $10. That $4 difference is MY money.

3) Editors. Where are the editors? Editors are there to ensure the quality of writing. Since publishers became more hard-nosed they demoted editors to the point where the quality of writing has suffered. Do you know why books are bloated overly-long lumps of filler these days? It’s because they cut editors off at the knees. It was the editor’s job to reign in the author. It is very easy to see which books had good editors and which didn’t.
Where, then, is our ‘proud and needed’ Australian Experience?
If it isn’t of good quality, should we be proud of it? Should we treat it as the ambassador of the nation? Of course we shouldn’t!!! Why are we celebrating mediocrity?!?!
The obvious conclusion is that Publishers don’t care about quality. They should therefore not be protected.

4) Anyone who defends the publishers defends Matthew Reilly. Since he is indefensible, their position is untenable.

5) If they truly cared about finding Australian authors and The Australian Experience they would make an effort to market them.
How many one-off authors produce really good stuff? Lots. They say everyone has a book in them, and maybe many people only have the one. And maybe those books are short.
Better to have seven one-off's than seven Tim Wintons I feel. Particularly if you are wanting The Australian Experience. Does Tim Winton speak for the nation? Of course he doesn’t. He speaks for a microcosm. To speak for the nation you need many voices.
And that means many writers.
Publishing houses have stables of authors. What this means is that they have a set number of established authors whom they publish. They put their effort into keeping these authors rather than finding untested ones because it is easier. Obviously it is easier to feed an established market with a new Peter Carey book than with an unknown.
Publishers buy shelf space in bookshops. New release books are on these shelves for six weeks. After that time a few go to the shelves for older books and a new title fills the New Release shelves.
Publishing is a business. Do not protect business – demand more from it.

Publishers are betraying readers. They patently aren’t doing what their defenders claim they do.
Their argument is condescending in the extreme.
They are an adult saying “If you don’t do it my way, you will not get dessert” to a child.
Don’t fall for the idea that if the publishers go they will take Australian Literature with them.
It’s a load of crap.

Yourdictionary.com crapness

I have never used yourdictionary.com before.
They are special.


"Einstein quotes

As Einstein once said, ordinary life in an ordinary day in the modern world is a dreary business. I mean dreary. People will do anything just to escape this dreariness.

-Pepys, Samuel"

Umm.
No.
Samuel Pepys was the famous diarist of the 1600s.

Also, the person to attribute the quote "ordinary life..." to is, surprisingly enough, Einstein.

Bizarre.
Also: douchebags.

"Tell us what you want:

1. What features would you like us to add to YourDictionary?

"

Is accuracy a feature?

Happy Chinese New Year

I had my 'Kung Hay Fat Choy, bitch!' all primed for Hilary the stores woman but she pre-empted me with a shril 'You suck monkeys balls!' which is also a traditional greeting for the time of year, but less geographically ubiquitous.
This saying is, of course, usually confined to the South East of China and loses a little something in the translation.
It is more 'Happy New Year' in flavour (if you'll excuse the pun) than it seems.

In her expanding feelings of New Years benevolence Hilary recruited Stan and Jason to also wish me well.

To which I was able to reply by email:

Colleagues,

Well, after a busy morning I have finally finished sucking all the monkey balls.
So many monkeys.

All that's left now is the penises and arseholes.

Stan, I have put you down for the penises.
And Hilary, you get the arseholes.

Happy Sucking!

Sir Harry Simspon KA

Christmas retro

I hosted two Englishmen for Christmas lunch or, as I explained to one of the girls at Uni, I was hosting some orphans. Her face softened and she obviously thought I was a good person. I explained it was just a figure of speech; they weren't real orphans, just guys away from home.

So, there were three wise men at Christmas aaaand we were Tom, Dick and Harry.

Jesus was happy and so were we.

Grab bag

Dubbya Bush talking about his last weeks in office and the incoming president on C-span:
"I would hate to have the next to last and last day of the presidency be one giant hug-fest … But I anticipate with great interest watching an historic moment, the swearing-in of the 44th president, who happens to be an African-American male. And that's a big deal for America. And I will have a front-row seat."

A bit revealing that. "African-American male" is how cops describe perps.
---

Apparently the email survey I replied to the Managing Director with the below *was* serious. I honestly thought it was a joke.
Oh well.

Dear Mr Pxxxxxxx,

Thank you very much for your email.
We _have_ outsourced the IT helpdesk to Uzbekistan.
The new IT helpdesk jockey is more jockey than help, but he is a world class shepard. His name is Balga.
He is a direct decendant of that great Uzbek warlord Tamerlame* who killed seventeen million people during the mid Fourteenth century, and Balga has a similar attitude to IT enquiries.

No, we have not just 'handed out' his IT qualification - we had it presented to him by the nearest Australian Ambassador.

Balga is not in the office at the moment because currently driving his sheep across the southern steppes in search of pasture, but he does have intermittent satellite contact.

We think is a convicted arsonist but I'm sure it was only a small fire.

regards,
Harry Simpson
(soon to be ex-)IT Helpdesk

Edit: *Should read as 'Tamerlane'. Tamerlame only killed seven people and most of them was due to a donkey accident near Samarkand.

I just walked into the office at my other job and my boss greeted me with "Harry, I'm disturbingly obsessed by ammunition."
It was a statment of fact, not a cry for help.
He then started singing "Ammo's always on my mind. Ammo's always on my mind."

Lazy New Year

Song for the new year: Sons of Butcher Possibly the greatest song ever.

Why hiphop is excellent part 1 DJ Format

Part 2 Beardyman beatboxing in the kitchen

Bond

Jason Bourne threw down the guantlett and the Bond franchise failed to meet the challenge with 'Quantum of Solace'.

It was a sequel and it felt like one. It was lazy, poorly written, had a weak story and was badly directed.
Also the main title singer has no balls. It was Alicia Keyes and she simply can't deliver. Bond theme tunes are meant to be powerful, sexy and have a hint of menace - the song is meant to be a challenge. Keyes couldn't challenge a wet paper bag. And she couldn't sing her way out of one to mince metaphors.

They have invested too much money in Dench and now feel obliged to give her lots of screen time which hurts the story and the pace. Her only role is to try and reel Bond in. It's boring.

The action seuqences were far too choppy - the camera angled changed too often so that you couldn't follow what was going on. All this forced me to the conclusion that they were covering up for sloppiness. The fight scene on the scaffolding was lazy film making. You had no clear idea of who and how good a fighter the badguy was. And worst of all it didn't show how Bond shows his immense cool and talent by thinking his way through a fight which enables him to take advantage of luck. Smoothly taking luck in his stride is what Bond is all about. Oh, and in the trailer you see Bond perform a Spanish Web maneouvre - where he starts at the top of a rope with a loop around him and spins down it in a controlled fall, and arrests his fall at the very bottom shooting his gun back up the rope and killing the bad guy. Doesn't happen in the film. Stupid.
Makes it look like the director doesn't know what he's doing. Heard of storyboarding and blocking? Do it.

As if to fully convince us that this was a half-arsed piece of cinema the big building at the end blows up for no good reason. And continues blowing up bit by bit like all those villians' lairs at the height of Bond ridiculousness of the 70s. Trouble is: IT'S A HOTEL!!!
Stupid.

Everything was just too easy for Bond. It was boring.
The best change that Pierce Brosnan made was to show Bond absolutely knackered after a fight - y'know, sitting in the hotel room, collar popped open, having a smirnoff. It showed Bond was human - that he actually was making an effort.
Casino Royale showed how Bond became gritty and ruthless - another human side to him.
Quantum of Solace showed him getting handsomely cut on the face but not having to draw on reserves; and showed him being completely void of feeling rather than toughly ruefully when a helper dies.

The Bondgirl was missing almost all the elements that make a Bondgirl a Bondgirl. The fighting and fleeing are meant to serve as foreplay. They didn't get it on, and he was too much her white knight. Disappointing.

The main problem was that it couldn't get over how to show Bond was still crushing over Vespa.
Surely the whole point would be to show that he is carrying a shadow yet still doing his job for Blighty. (a) Don't make it a fucking sequel, and (b) show the shadow by having a few little 'tells' where he gets reminded of her. Ta daaa! He's English for god's sake.

It is far cooler if M is just an incidental character. She should be just a light touch on the film - not a fucking point of plot revolution - that's what the Bondgirl is for and the badguys are for. Remember them?! Bad Guys.
These ones were lame. It was not even half an idea.

Also the name sucks.

So Hollywood, when you want the next Bond, call me.