One of the go-to books on my Kindle is The Collected Stories of T.C Boyle (which I think is actually just his first three collections. While unable to sleep, I read ‘Green Hell’ and it reminded me of just how much ground you can cover in a short story.
'Kala' by Colin Walsh
Well, I had a whole post about this, but Squarespace ate it and I can’t be bothered to write it again.
This is a pretty good thriller, albeit without the most original premise. Old friends reunite in their hometown, haunted by the disappearance of a childhood friend when they were teenagers.
I’d tried a couple of duds on my Kindle and was very pleased when I found this. It cracks along and the characterisation is pretty good.
Buy ‘Kala’ by Colin Walsh at bookshop.org
Excerpt
…at one point I made a comment about Auntie Pauline’s softness, and Rossie said, ‘It only looks like softness from outside.’ We kept working. But a few minutes later he piped up again and said, ‘It takes strength to be that delicate.’
‘Quint’ by Robert Lautner
I’ve bounced off a few books lately, starting them and not feeling any desire to continue. One of the books that’s sat on my shelf for a while is Peter Benchley’s original novel of ‘Jaws’, which I got for Christmas. I think I’ve read it before and even though I don’t remember it being great (apart from the cover of the 70s edition I had) I probably would have read it if we hadn’t watched the film on Christmas Day.
Anyway, this prequel by Robert Lautner was pretty good. I tend not to be a fan of prequels, but got this from the library because I was mildly interested but not enough to actually buy the book.
It’s pretty good. There’s a fair amount of grisly details as you might expect, given that it covers the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in flashback and a fairly bloody bit of shark fishing contemporaneously. Years ago, a couple of friends were raving about Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ and, honestly, I found all the fish talk pretty dull. Maybe I’ve matured as a reader since then. Maybe not. Perhaps reading ‘Moby Dick’ has radically reshaped what I think too much detail about fishing is. Anyway, this was pretty good, although it mainly made me think about how great Robert Shaw was in the film.
Excerpts
The devil
God never turns up. The Devil tips his hat to you, walks right beside you. God sits on a throne, keeps you beneath. You can get to know the Devil on first-name terms. He'll come to dinner fi you ask him. God sent his son and angels. The Devil comes in person. Gotta respect that a little.
– p131
Kaitens
You know what a Kaiten is? That's a suicide torpedo. Got a man or two on board, guiding by periscope. Hatches close and they got no opening on the inside. They used kids from poor families, eighteen years old, with the promise that their families would get a great pension. I know bad ways to die but that tops a lot. Fired out of a tube ni hte dark, into the night, into the black water, and if you don't hit, don't explode and burn, you'll sink to the deep and suffocate or blow up from the pressure. blow yourself out your own asshole. Got to give it to the J*ps. They really wanted to win. I just wanted to eat.
– p143-144, (censorship mine.)
Baby Sharks
Sharks birth live young. She has eggs like a fish, sure, but they hatch inside her and they ear the weaker ones so thems that come out are the strongest. They come out killers. Killers of their siblings to start their life. Earn their place.
— p171-172
‘The Medium is the Massage’ by Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore
Slightly shitty scan of the cover. Soz.
Weird book, picked up at a discount at a shop that was closing down. Although I’ve heard of McLuhan, it’s really only as a cameo in Annie Hall and for the phrase ‘the medium is the message’, which I heard a lot at one time (not so much anymore) and which I felt I understood on an intuitive level without ever really interrogating what it means.
Anything with interesting layouts and weird typography is going to get my attention and after a few months on the shelf, I read it during a couple of hours downtime.
My brain tends to hear Charlie Brown’s teacher when text gets too academic (bwah-bwah-mwah-bwah), but I’ve picked out a few bits that I found interesting. I will say, though, that as I was going back to scan a couple of spreads, bits started leaping out at me. It might have spared itself from the charity shop, at least for a while.
Anyway, some stuff:
Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. […] Anti- environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.
Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The "expert" is the man who stays put.
I also liked this, quoted:
“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and note remember of themselves…. You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” – Socrates, “Phaedrus”
and:
The Balinese say: “We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.”
Buy ‘The Medium is the Massage’ by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore from bookshop.org
'Burn Book' by Kara Swisher
I mostly know Swisher from her various podcasts. She's fairly funny and level-headed about the inherent stupidness of much of the technology industry. I tried her earlier book There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere, but didn't make much headway, largely because I wasn't that interested in AOL as a company. I vaguely remembered reading an article about the company in Wired back when it was still a going concern and even then it was categorised as dull. I'm sure there's more to it and Swisher's book probably explains a lot of the now-incomprehensible AOL Time Warner merger. But it wasn't for me.
I tend to read books about business and technology when I go to sleep. I find them weirdly comforting. I particularly like books about ambitious hardware or software projects, such as ‘Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft’ by G. Pascal Zachary, which is full of technical detail or ‘Careless People’ by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which is full of weird, subhuman behaviour. The latter surprised me not with the callousness and ignorance of the technology entrepreneurial class, but more that anyone was shocked by it. The most surprising part of that book was that the author ever thought that Facebook could be a tool for genuine social good. It felt like an idea from long, long ago.
Swisher’s book is more of an overall precis of Swisher’s career and a round-up of the most notable figures in Silicon Valley. Although there’s promise of gossip, there isn’t much. Although fairly blunt, none of the commentary feels unfair, which is a fine line to tread.
Extracts
I’m not saying these are the best bits, but I’m trying to clip things from books that I find interesting. Just imagine the pencilled notes in the margins saying “yes, so true”.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Sandberg, for her part, listened and then said in her silky-smoothest of voices some version of “Calm down, Kara. We’re handling it.” Well, they didn’t handle the propaganda. Not from the Russians. Not in Iran. And not in Sri Lanka, where a Buddhist mob attacked Muslims over false information spread on Facebook, prompting a government official to tell the New York Times in the most perfect of metaphors: “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.”
Spalding Gray’s show Interviewing the Audience, which I saw five times at the Kennedy Center in the 1990s. You could actually see it countless times because each show, Gray pulled three audience members onstage to talk.
the much-discussed Section 230 gives the sector an unusual amount of protection. Still, most regulators and politicians are utterly missing in action. Europe has done a much better job in large part thanks to the scourge of Silicon Valley, Margrethe Vestager, the Danish politician who headed the European Commission for Competition.
goat rodeo
The New Old School
I’m enjoying using Word at the moment. It feels like a return to a very familiar tool, even though there are other programs I’ve probably used more. More than anything, it takes me back to my first laptop, a Dell with a rattly keyboard and external CD-ROM drive. I remember purchasing a CD from Computer Exchange that had Word 2000 and Outlook on it and it may have been the first time I paid for software. It’s crazy to me that this happened over twenty years ago.
Anyway, I’m using Word not only for fiction, but also instead of a notes programme. Having flicked between Bear, Apple Notes and Obsidian and not being wholly convinced by any of them, I remembered the massive feeling of relief I felt the first time I uninstalled Evernote. I’m not really convinced by the usefulness of digital notetaking. I think it’s something you do instead of actually working on something – a stopgap measure that makes you feel as if you’re working, while not actually getting closer to the goal. You sit at the keyboard hammering away at half-thoughts, but that’s not the same as actually writing.
To be clear, I don’t feel the same way about writing by hand. That, to me, is a different process, using another part of the brain and a separate physical action that allows for different types of thought. I know it’s rough, but that’s OK, because I’m just working things out on the page. There’s no confusion that writing by hand in a notebook is a final product. I’m not sure the same can be said for typing in a digital notetaking app. It feels the same as working on a manuscript, so the brain feels satisfied in a way it shouldn’t.
This is a long way of getting around to what I’m trying to say:
Write it down. Type it up.
That’s the new philosophy. It’s that simple. Write down things as they occur to you and if it’s worth something, type that idea up into a draft. No more documents filled with question marks and sentences that begin ‘Maybe’. All that stuff goes in the notebook. Other stuff goes into a Word document with a descriptive filename that I think is going to go into a folder on Dropbox.
Why Dropbox?
I’ve been using iCloud to sync files between my Apple devices and for the most part it works fine. The problem is that it syncs everything – documents, spreadsheets, photos, scans, music, downloaded PDFs, Affinity files… it can feel overwhelming.
The idea of a folder just dedicated to the Word documents I produce feels right. It’s perhaps a validation of Apple’s thinking, introduced in Mac OS Lion, that documents should belong to the apps that create them. I never got on board with that, mainly because a good proportion of what I do is collecting different media types into projects. I don’t think I’m alone in that, but the current focus on writing means that blocking out some other noise is maybe a good idea.
It is handy to be able to access some files on the go, though. Dropbox works pretty well for this. I have a free account with some additional space due to referrals or something. Enough for many, many Word files, which – if they don’t have images in them – tend to top out at a few hundred KB at the most. (One of the things I didn’t like about Apple Pages was the fact that even a one-page short story seemed to require a file of about a megabyte. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot when your device has gigabytes of storage, but it contributed to a sense of uncertainty about the application as a whole. That and the use of a sidebar for formatting, which just felt wrong to me.
Thinking about Dropbox came about largely because of my experimentation with blot.im, which is ongoing. I thought I would have to install the Dropbox service on my Macs in order to post, only to find that the service now supports iCloud. There’s now a folder on my Desktop where I can post to blot, but exploring my Dropbox account made me realise that it’s largely a clear space where I can impose a structure, as opposed to all the chaos I’ve already created.
The other thing about Dropbox is that it conforms to my sense of what’s proper in cloud storage. Files should primarily live on my computer and go up to the cloud, not the other way around. iCloud sort of does this, but on devices that have less storage, I use selective syncing and this makes me feel uneasy. As for Google Docs, the idea that any of my work is in the hands of Google – a company I haven’t properly trusted since the discontinuation of Reader – isn’t something I can live with. They’re an internet-first company and while their word processor product is great for collaboration, I can’t live with the idea of my work living on their servers, in a file format that doesn’t really exist in any sense and can’t be opened by anything else. (That last point is another mark against Pages, as well.)
Folder structure
I haven’t implemented the folder structure yet, but I think it’s something like this.
· Ideas
· Roughs
· Revisions
· Ready
· Out
This should be fairly self-explanatory, but just in case I come back to this and wonder what I was thinking, here we go:
Ideas is for fragments. These can be documents with a few paragraphs in or perhaps even just empty documents with a file name. This is about as close as I would get to a digital file system, but they’re things that were worthy of being typed up.
Roughs is drafts of things, not necessarily completed. This is where it’s about pounding words out and getting to a thing that can be shaped and refined.
Revisions is where this happens. This folder should only be things that are in a readable state.
Ready should have the least in it. This is the directory containing things that are completed, but aren’t currently under consideration anywhere. Ideally, this would be an ‘outbox-zero’ situation, but things aren’t always that simple.
Out is the stuff currently being considered somewhere. There’s obviously going to be motion between this and ‘Ready’, but hopefully note too much, right?
There probably needs to be an Archive folder for when things get accepted / published / abandoned or whatever. I would prefer that these folders were alphabetical, but perhaps I’ll just prepend them with numbers.
Alternatively, tags
It doesn’t have to be folders. If I end up not using Dropbox for this stuff, it might be worth instituting these as labels in Finder and using a Smart Folder to collate them all from across my hard drive. It’s a possibility that allows for other types of files in all sorts of disparate places, which is perhaps more realistic for where I am at the moment, but undermines the sort of controlled experience I’m trying to create.
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually used Smart Folders. They might not be what I think they are. I think I’m going to investigate that. I’m running up against my Pomodoro timer and want to do something else for the next chunk, so I think I’ll finish here.
I mean...
…it’s a bit blatant, isn’t it?
Radioposter Launches Paper-fi: Analog Books with Synchronized Soundtracks
From the Colossal article about this melding of audio and print:
The system uses patented computer vision and other modes through a smartphone or smart glasses to track your place in the book and play the corresponding audio. Whether music, ambient sound, or narration, the soundtrack moves with you at your own pace.
While I think there’s lots to explore in the intersection of books and sound, this feels like a bit of a Juicero situation. I’m not sure there’s anything here that couldn’t be accomplished just by a playlist set to ‘repeat track’, with the reader pressing ‘next’ when they turn the page.
More info here if you’re interested: https://www.radioposter.com/blogs/paper-fi-blog/paper-fi
'Flesh' by David Szalay
This was a Christmas present that I just got around to reading. It’s funny – as I was describing the book to my partner, I realised it all sounded fairly conventional, but it didn’t feel that way as I was reading it. The main character goes from relative poverty in Hungary to London’s elite and… I don’t know… learns lessons along the way, I guess.
The writing is very sparse, which I quite like. It gave me some ideas for the thing I’m currently working on, which is always something to be viewed with suspicion.
It’s only as I try to find cover art to include here that I realise it won the Booker prize. It might be the first Booker winner I’ve ever read, as I tend to stay away from that sort of thing. It was good. I’m not sure I would call it ‘extraordinary and singular’, as the Booker judges did, but it’s all right.
These notes are supposed to be me just keeping track of what I’ve read and seen, but they do come across as quite grumpy, don’t they?
(I’ve missed quite a few books. I might have to bung them all in a round up post.)
Anyway, ‘Flesh’ was pretty good. I’d wait for the paperback, but whatever.
Chrome OS Flex... didn't work (for me)
I got very excited by the notion of prolonging the life of my old Macbook Pro by installing Chrome OS. It didn’t work, as it couldn’t connect to the wifi. As a Chromebook without wifi is like a flower without water, it wouldn’t allow me to go any further. Honestly, if it had, I might have explored that as a connection-free device can be useful for crashing out rough drafts.
But if you’ve got an old laptop that’s got pretty slow, then perhaps it will work for you. It’s possible to try it just by creating a USB key and booting from that, meaning you don’t have to wipe your hard drive to give it a go (thankfully).
Upgrade* your PCs and Macs to ChromeOS Flex
*Questionable, but whatever.
IOWA by OUYUNG
I’m trying to be a better ‘music citizen’ and not rely on all-you-can-eat streaming so much. I pre-ordered this based on the two preview tracks. Proceeds from vinyl sales go to to the Trans Music Archive.
via CDM
'The Ballad of a Small Player' by Lawrence Osbourne
I’ve had this sitting on my shelf for some time and it may be the recently released Netflix adaptation that made me pick it up again. It’s the story of a gambler, passing himself off as an English lord, losing money in the casinos of Macau.
Some books you re-start and wonder why you ever put them down, only to get to the point you reached and remember. That was the case here, where it was another entry in the canon of shitty-man-has-woman-dote-on-him-for-no-good-reason. I always find that a bit annoying, but pushed on through here.
I’m honestly not that interested in gambling. I count myself fortunate that whatever fascination people seem to have with losing money, I don’t share. Of all my vices, that’s not one of them. But the idea of luck and superstition have a certain appeal and when the book explores these, I found it a bit more engaging.
As always with page-to-screen adaptations, I would be interested to see what changes in transition. Colin Farrell has turned out to be an actor whose work I find interesting. I’d previously dismissed him, having seen him in iRobot and the poster for the sacrilegious Total Recall remake. But having seen In Bruges, my opinion came around. I really enjoyed the Apple TV series Sugar and although I wasn’t convinced at first about the necessity of The Penguin series, it turned out to be pretty good. Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be about Colin Farrell, but rather the book.
Because if there’s one main takeaway I have from reading The Ballad of a Small Player, it’s that I love little hardbacks. The dust jacket for this one got lost somewhere along the way and it’s just a perfect little red volume, pleasing in its size, weight and tactility.
'The Magician's Assistant' by Ann Patchett
I haven’t enjoyed a novel so much in quite some time. This was genuinely one of those books I didn’t want to end. I know those things are cliches, but sometimes they’re true. Just a lovely book with that blend of funny and sad that is my absolute sweet spot. I’ve just finished it and am still thinking it over, but what a great novel.
'Wake Up Dead Man' is... fine, I suppose
I’m trying to think if I’ve ever been to a film on opening night. I’m not sure. I think maybe I saw the first of the Star Wars sequels pretty close to opening. It was almost fully booked and I got my single seat on the front row at the Barbican Cinema. My mum was seriously ill at that time and those two hours of escapism were very welcome. Actually, now that I think about it, my wife and I went to see The Last Jedi on opening weekend and a packed Saturday night audience made it a lot more enjoyable. That was directed by Rian Johnson, which allows me to get back to my original point. We went to see the third ‘Knives Out’ film at the cinema, as we had done with the first two. I had high hopes. My wife was expecting it to be terrible. The truth was that it was somewhere in the middle. It was OK. About what you would expect for a decent Netflix mystery film, but nowhere near as fun, inventive and assured as either of the previous two movies.
I thought it was too long and only really got going when Benoit Blanc showed up, which was surprisingly late into the running time. Octavia thought his hair was terrible, but I don’t think was the only problem she had with the film. It’s still fairly enjoyable, but staging a lot of dialogue in an echoey church made it all feel a bit distant - a problem that might have been exacerbated by our back-row seats, which might have meant we got more of the rear audio than those seated further forward.
(Speaking of which, we booked two of the last tickets in an almost sold-out showing, but when we got there several rows were empty. What’s going on there? Did people just decide to throw away their £15 tickets or (puts on conspiracy hat) are Netflix block buying seats to bolster… something?)
It’s fine. I wouldn’t say it’s worth seeing at the cinema, which is a shame, because the first two really were a good time.
Also, someone kept taking pictures of the screen with their phone. During the film!
'The Feral Detective' by Jonathan Letham
I’m not going to write a lot about this, because it’s 1.30AM and I really should be sleeping, but I did enjoy it. I’m a little bit tired of shaggy detective stories by now (and snarky narrators, as per my previous post) but this was pretty good. I’d previously read Letham’s ‘Motherless Brooklyn, as well as having ‘Fortress of Solitude’ out from the library for so long that I had to pay for a new copy. I never read it, though.
The trek through weird desert communities of ‘Rabbits’ and ‘Bears’ was interesting enough, but I suppose what struck me most was the use of the first Trump presidency as a point of historical reference. Not that long ago now, but it feels like it. As for all the outrage the narrator feels at the time… lady… you ain’t seen nothing yet.
'The Grownup' by Gillian Flynn / 'Homesick for Another World' by Otessa Moshfegh / 'Rejection' by Tony Tulathimutte
I’m well aware that the main point of this ‘Notes’ section is for me to keep track of things I’ve read, rather than anyone else actually reading these little posts. I’ve fallen behind a bit and now am in the position of having to collate a few things and try to work out what I think about them.
I’ve been working on a long piece of fiction for ten months and I think I’ve reached the end of the first draft. It’s a cobbled together thing that doesn’t always make a lot of sense, but I’ve reached the end of this phase of development. This is a difficult spot for me. Usually, I look at a first draft and wonder how to fix its many problems, while keeping the things I found interesting in the first place.
One of the decisions I have to make regards the tense used in the narrative. I went for a third person past perspective, even though it might have made a lot of sense to use first person present. It’s possible I will still do this. One of the reasons for it might be to give the main character more of a voice.
I was thinking of the Gillian Flynn story ‘The Grownup’, which I remembered for its kind of sarky, don’t-give-a-shit narrator. Recently I also read Otessa Moshfegh’s short story collection, ‘Homesick for Another World’, which from the off featured similarly messy protagonists with more than a little bit of snark about them. Then I read Tony Tulathimutte’s ‘Rejection’ and I came to realise that these kinds of stories are best - for me - in smaller doses. I can’t imagine living with this sort of voice for another ten months. All the books have their merits, but a little goes a long way.
Buy ‘The Grownup’ by Gillian Flynn at bookshop.org
Buy ‘Homesick for Another World’ by Otessa Moshfegh at bookshop.org
'Code is Just' by Shahid Kamal Ahmad
I’m a sucker for a recollection of 8-bit computing, so Shahid Kamal Ahmad’s recollection of his beginnings as a programmer in the Commodore and Sinclair era was a quick purchase for me. I always like hearing tales from the early days of any creative industry and little mentions here and there made my heart swoon a little, such as Silica Shop on Tottenham Court Road. I can’t understand anyone wanting to buy an Atari 400 with its horrific touch sensitive keyboard, but I empathised with that sense of excitement about what it was possible to do with computers then. I never got into programming and some of the details about programming in Assembler went over my head, but there’s a lot in the book besides technical info. Ahmad discusses the racism he experienced in 1980s London and how that shaped both his perception of self and the people he worked with. There’s also a lot about his diabetes and these were the sections I struggled with the most, as he did not manage his condition well. Hearing about him gorging on sugary snacks and then going hypo was difficult to read and I found myself worrying about the young man, even though I know he survives to the present day.
The text was originally a series of Twitter threads, which hasn’t really been altered. A series of 280 character paragraphs flow with a digression here and there. There’s also a problem with the footnotes in that they’re not properly marked at the end of each section, so the coherent narrative feels like it goes on a series of odd tangents. The files are also pretty large, which made sending them to my Kindle a little tricky. That shouldn’t stop you having look, though, particularly as it’s available for pay-what-you-want on Patreon.
Buy ‘Code is Just - The Compiled Edition’ by Shahid Kamal Ahmad on Patreon
'The Librarians' is inspiring and depressing, in unequal measure
I’ve been wanting the opportunity to see The Librarians since reading about it on social media a few months ago. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that it was screening on iPlayer as part of the BBC’s Storyville strand.
I think it’s probably not a surprise to anyone to learn that right-wing populists are on the ascent, but it’s still incredibly scary to see the effects of that. This feature-length documentary follows the struggles faced by librarians in the face of aggressive campaigns of intimidation and abuse. A pseudo-grassroots book-banning campaign to remove LGBTQ+ books, books about race and books about fascism from library shelves becomes incredibly ugly when seen up close. The amount of intimidation and hatred faced by these librarians - librarians, for god’s sake - is incredibly depressing.
It’s amazing to see what they endure. It is utterly unsurprising to discover that the campaign run against them is calculated, co-ordinated and run by a millionaire who is slightly to the right of the kaiser. School boards, it seems, have become the latest target of the right’s strategy to consolidate power. It makes me wonder how progressive politics can ever effectively counter such an organised and calculated approach. You have to believe it’s possible. You have to.
'White Riot' by Joe Thomas
On a recent trip to the library, this was the last thing I added to my pile, but the first thing I read when I got home. A fictionalised version of the racism and corruption within the Metropolitan Police in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this multi-threaded crime story reminded me of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. Like that, I absolutely hoovered through this and wanted more by the time it was over. It’s only book one of a proposed series, a fact that I both like and loathe in equal measure. It’s disappointing that there isn’t really a sense of conclusion here, but I’m already looking forward to the next installment.
I think I also just miss London a bit. I know the streets and estates talked about here.
Don't Buy Anything for Prime Day
As much for myself as much as anybody else, a little reminder not to be tempted to buy things from Amazon, particularly not on the gluttonous carnival of ‘Prime Day’.
I’ve really reduced my usage of Amazon over the years, but still find myself looking at the listings when big ‘bargains’ present themselves. I still have a Kindle, but I’m trying not to buy any new books from Amazon, partially because I want to read more physical books but also because the company appears to be run by bloodsucking ghouls who feed on human misery. But that’s just conjecture. I’m trying to find other ebook vendors, although getting them onto a locked down device is an issue to be sorted out.
In case you need reasons as to why shopping at Amazon is bad, I reluctantly recommend this Guardian article by Corey Doctorow. Honestly, I find a lot of Doctorow’s articles seem to boil down to Me and my friends used to be able to do whatever we want and we should go back to that, without ever addressing issues like how artists get paid for their work online. But whatever. The article does a good job of going through the numerous ways Amazon screws over vendors, customers and workers.