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Amusing anecdote that lays out the theme
I made an old-timer laugh at the hardware store the other day. I say hardware store, but it was Lowes. We had a gift card. We were in the plywood aisle, on the hunt for some subflooring for a landing on the stairs (annoying update: after cutting a sample stringer to help us visualize the stairs, we figured out we really can’t build the stairs the way we want to because the dumbasses who designed our house didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, so we’re going to have to resort to the loft ladder that I didn’t want to do). I had told my wife we would need a sheet of Advantek (really nice water-resistant subfloor sheathing) and she bemoaned the cost. We only need one sheet, I said, before locating the sticker with the price, and supposedly lumber costs are supposed to go down. The old guy up the aisle who had been listening in thought that was funny. And once I tracked the sticker down—had to practically get down on my knees to find it—I got the joke.
Lucky we bought the lumber for our house when we did. If we’d waited a few months even we’d probably be living in our derelict RV that I want to renovate into a guest house even though no one believes (fair) I’ll do it. I will do it, you watch me. Those lumber prices, they’re never coming back down. Same with the price of paper—and the price of shipping. And the price of books. We’ve always under-priced our books, but in the last year we’ve been setting the prices for new titles higher than we had been. When I was setting up Steve Gergley’s story collection, The Great Atlantic Highway, it pained me to charge $17 for a 218-page book, but the truth is I probably should have set it at $18 or $19.
Musical interlude
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Silky Smooth Transition
One more thing is going up: the total on our kickstarter campaign. We’re up to $8,001, 70% toward our goal with two weeks left.
I should put another gimmicky subhead here but I don’t want to. I want, instead, to wrap up with a sort of rant. Like a lot of you, I am troubled by our culture, or lack, as we said in the nineties, thereof. Phones and the internet are not the lone causes of all our woes, but they have shortened attention spans. At the same time it’s difficult to describe the US education system, from preschool through higher ed, as anything other than “under assault.” It’s being attacked from the outside, hollowed out from within (often by the same people who bring us phone addiction). For those who don’t want to simply abolish education, education is still largely not viewed as a good in itself, but as a means to prepare students to “succeed” in the so-called real world. Students need to be able to demonstrate comprehension of a text in school so they can read a manual at work. I think this is an ugly way to run the world. It embarrasses me and makes me sad. If education is here to prepare you for anything—I actually don’t know where to take this because I don’t know. To some extent, I think education should prepare you to live a good life, but that feels pat. Students ask me sometimes when am I ever going to need this in the real world. I don’t fucking know, I want to scream at them, and that’s the point! Yes you should be able to read a manual, but you should also be able to read a poem. Nothing else matters if you can’t read a poem.