Not the O.K. Corral

My recent reading includes THE LAST GUNFIGHT by Jeff Guinn.

This is a 2011 publication, from Simon & Schuster, about the showdown popularly known as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. More broadly the book is about Tombstone AZ and its surroundings in its heyday as a mining town.

And a mining town is what it was. Its brief golden age began with a major strike in 1878 of so-called “horn silver”  in the San Pedro Valley. The location of the strike was too far away from Tucson for that town to serve as a home base for the wave of prospectors who inevitably followed the first strike. So Tombstone grew up -- impression one gets from this book is that it almost immediately sprouted up out of the Arizona Territory desert floor!  and fulfilled just that function.

At its height it was important enough that when a San Francisco based acting troupe did a tour of the southwest, bringing a performance of the hot new comic opera “HMS Pinafore” to the unwashed – Tombstone was inevitably one of its stops.

But nowadays we only remember Tombstone for the confrontation on October 26, 1881, when seven men faced off, four to three, separated by only six feet of air, and fired about thirty shots at one another over the course of about as many seconds. It would have been four against four except that Ike Clanton, who had been very busy for hours provoking this confrontation, actually fled the scene just as guns were being drawn, or perhaps even five to four had not another of their companions likewise made himself scarce.

Ike Clanton’s brother and two of his friends were killed in that exchange. Among the party opposing, Doc Holliday and two of the Earps were seriously injured. Only Wyatt Earp walked away unscathed.

The fight was not literally at the OK Corral, although it is known as the “Gunfight at the OK Corral” because that became the title of a movie in 1957, which was still the golden age for westerns.  John Sturges’ movie made no pretense of historical accuracy.

Nonetheless, the connection between this confrontation (a block away) and that particular corral is not entirely accidental.  At one point in the crowded timeline leading to those terrible 30 seconds, the Clantons and their allies postured in that corral, in what Guinn calls “the worst tradition of overweening male pride” they were there “boasting loudly about what they would do if the Earps were foolish enough to bother them any further.”

There are a lot of reasons to recommend this book. I won’t recite them now, though. I’ll simply say that it inspires thought not only about what happened, but about how we know what happened, about the epistemological troubles in sorting through the conflicting accounts.

Detail from the history of US home financing

Here's a passage from the book Fixing the Housing Market, by Franklin Allen at al.

In chapter 2, the authors are engaged in some historical stage setting. They write that a major result of the 1890s economic downturn in the U.S. was "the virtual elimination of the so-called national institutions [in the building-and-loan market.]. This type of institution developed in the 1880s by gathering deposits and making mortgage loans on a national scale through the use of branch offices and the mail. Although the downturn of the 1890s hit both nationally based and locally based institutions, local associations attributed their problems to the improper loan strategy and subsequent failures of the national institutions. They claimed that customers were unable to distinguish between the two types of firms during the panic of 1893. The increased competition engendered by the nationals also led to the establishment of the US.League of Local Building and Loan Associations. This group became very influential during the subsequent years and successfully lobbied the state legislature to curb the acrtivities of the national associations, a move that eventually drove the nationals out of business."

The Book Market

Here's a passage from an article in the Feb. 2012 issue of Harper's.

"A generation ago, America's book market was entirely open and very vibrant. According to some estimates, the five largest publishers in the mid-1970s controlled only about 30 percent of trade book sales, and the biggest fifty puyblishers controlled only 75 percent. The retail business was even more dispersed, with the top four chains accounting for little more than 10 percent of sales. Today, a single company -- Amazon -- accounts for more than 20 percet of the domestic book market....In many key categories, it sells more than half the books purchased in the United States. And according to the company's estimates, its share of the e-book market, the fastest growing segment of the industry, was between 70 and 80 percent in 2010."

Resolutions

Last year my New Year's Resolutions were straightforward. I have achieved four out of five of them.

1. I promised to take good care of my car. Well, I did, although the "car" involved in that resolution changed through no fault of my own!  An idiot ran a red light in February and ruined my old Toyota.  But it was in great shape right up to that moment, and I've done a fine job thus far with its replacement.

2. Keep up with the insurance on car.  Done. 

3. Venture outside of the borders of the U.S. Oops. Never got that done in 2011.  I did get as far as Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, though. 

4. Make progress toward the publication of another book.  This, I've accomplished. I've accepted the fact that the publication of this book will have to be self-financed, but that is more of an observation on the state of the commercial publishing world today than on the merits of my book. At any rate, I've come to a point where the wording of the corresponding resolution for next year will be unconditional.

5. Keep track of Nassar Saber.  Done.  He is still writing about how he is working on his next book.  Maybe 2012 will be the year it actually comes out.  But I've decided not to include such tracking on my next list.

This year....

1. Get my car ("Doug") through December 2012 in good working order

2. Make an entrepreneurial investment. Shouldn't just talk a good game on the anarcho-cap stuff.

3. Regarding technology: enter the 21st century.  For example, get audio back for my computer. Get Skype capacity for it. Learn how to use -- heck, become comfortable using -- my scanner.

4.  Publish GWBCs and sell at least 1,000 copies.

5. Venture outside the borders of the U.S.

A Coincidence of Wording

John Steele Gordon likes this sentence.

This weekend, in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, I read a review of two new books about railroad history. The reviewer, John Steele Gordon, begins thus:

"One technology replaces another only because the new technology is better or cheaper or both." His allusion, in this context, is to the rise of steam engineering as a replacement of the application of muscle power by humans or horses.

Here's a link to that review, though you may need to get a subscription.

Through some random unmotivated googling, I found those same words in another context, in a story published only three weeks before. The website of The American Enterprise Institute ran a story about the death of the old-style printing press and, for that matter, the contemporary dying of dead-tree books.

Here's a link to that one.

I thought I had uncovered a bit of plagiarism until I checked for the author's name at the top of that article on The End of The Book. It was ... John Steele Gordon. He is entitled to re-use his own sentences without quibble from me.

Don't use it too often, though, Mr. Gordon. It's not that great a sentence.

Resolutions

Here's a straightforward list.

1. Take good care of my car. If all goes well, I should complete the payments on "Hirohito" as 2011 comes to an end. I need to keep it maintained properly so it won't die on me before then.

2. Keep up with its insurance, too! Yes, I know that's the law. Doesn't hurt to remind myself in the form of a resolution.

3. Venture outside the boundaries of the U.S. I had gotten spoiled with traveling back in 'the day.' I've remained within the U.S. for each of the last two years. Hope that doesn't becomes a three-year streak. (I love my country -- I just also love travel.)

4. Make progress toward the publication of another book. My last book, the secondary education textbook on economics I co-authored, came out a decade ago. Too long a dry spell.

5. Keep track of Nasser Saber. Will his long-promised book be published in 2011? Am I going to be mentioned therein? I have a feeling in my bones, folks.

The Broom of the System, concluded

A final few words, if I may, about Wallace's first novel, as I described it last week.

I'm attracted to the sensibility behind it, as regular readers of this blog will probably suspect. The rapid moves from high-brow to low, from Wittgensteinian philosophy to Gilligan references, make for a hybrid of challenge and comfort.

Another strength is dialogue. He has a fine ear for the way people really talk to each other. I'm reminded of the Woody Allen move "Bullets over Broadway," because that is the criticism that the artistically gifted mob soldier directs at the not-so-gifted playwrite, "Nobody in real life talks like your characters. You gotta real problem wid dat."

Anyway, people in real life do talk like Wallace's characters. Or, at least, the stylization of necessity in fictional dialog never draws attention to itself. Here is one character, whose job entails reading a lot of manuscripts submitted to a journal, talking to his lover.

"Do you know where all the really sad stories I'm getting are coming from? They're coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I'm starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America."

That's the way people old enough to worry about "kids in college" do talk -- and the sentiment advances the story, while introducing one of the book's stories-within-the-story, because of course this editor proceeds to describe an example of one of these sad submissions.

I was a little disappointed in the ending. I won't describe it, out of deference to any of you who may wish to read it yourself. But a plot this intricate needs a neat tie-up at the end, or the intricacy can feel like a cheat. As, alas, it does.

Still: there was a lot to admire, and finally reading Wallace allows me retrospectively to mourn his passing.

Have I mentioned my recent discovery that Wallace was the target of satire by The Onion?

The Marne, 1914

I've been reading a book by Holger H. Herwig, THE MARNE, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (2009).

Herwig is a professor of history at the University of Calgary.

A random quote. Herwig notes that although the onset of war in 1914 was cheered by crowds in the capital cities involved -- St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris -- the countryside took matters in stride, or perhaps glumly.

"The July Crisis found the agricultural sector at a critical stage. Grain and legume fields were maturing, as were fruit orchards and vinyards. Soon, armies of farm laborers would hasten to bring in the produce before the sudden arrival of fall rains. War would mean the conscription of young male labor needed in the villages; the loss of secure urban markets; the requisitioning by the army of thousands of horses and wagons; and the likely imposition of price controls."

Dead-Tree Books

I had hoped to write something about animal language again here, and about how a certain philosophical way of thinking about animal language can help us negotiate our way, in the contemplation of our own verbal behavior, between the upper dogmatism of a Chomskyan rationalism and the lower dogmatism of a Skinnerian positivism. But anything worthwhile along those lines would take more time and effort than I'm prepared to put into it right now, so I'll beg off with a simple observation about the (not entirely unrelated) question of the publication of books.

How long will the dead-tree book publishing industry last, in the face of Amazon's Kindle and other forms of digital competition?

For a sober discussion of the issue go here. But for a more amusing take, I prefer blogger Jeff Matthews.

His point? Try to think of it as if it were a new idea and consider how insane it would sound. If everyone was using digital screens to read, and accustomed to it, then the idea of creating tree farms (or deforesting continents so we need to rely on tree farms) so that we can produce pulp with expensive machinery so that we can spray ink onto tiny slices of pulp known as "paper" so that we can then market ideas and stories years after they were first conceived, hoping that they have remained topical in the interim ... all this would seem insane.

Yet it doesn't seem insane, because human beings are creatures of habit. We love our dead-tree books like some of us love our old vinyl records, and the transition to the newer ways of reading will take some time.

Ah, and that new book smell. Like the new-car smell, it has its addicts. And the flying buttresses of Gothic architecture offer a ready example of how an arrangement at first adopted for reasons of utility can come to seem valuable in itself, to be beautiful, even when there are other ways of keeping the walls up.