My ol’ pal and sometime colleague Doug Nufer looks back at a decade in which he got four books out somehow amid an ever more confused book industry and an ever more precarious alternative-literature subsegment within that industry. He offers no solutions, but I will:

• All of book publishing (heck, all of the traditional offline media) need new business models and more efficient, dynamic ways of doing what they do.
• Alterna-lit needs to build its audience. Yes, I believe even the genre’s geekier, tougher material can find more readers and more lovers. I’m sure of it.

New York media vet and gossippeer Tina Brown has issued a brief list of “Things to Stop Bitching About in 2010.” Among them, she’d like to banish the notion that “newspapers are dying because of the Internet”:

What a load of Spam! American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long a whole generation gave up on them. They needed to innovate back in the Fax Age of the 1980s but were too self-important and making too much money with their monopolies to acknowledge it.

From that addicted-to-verbiage NYTimes, here’s graphic designer Phillip Niemeyer with a handy chart illustrating and categorizing the past 10 years in logos and buzzwords.

As self-help author Eckhart Tolle proclaims the beneficial Power of Now, essayist Pico Iyer grumbles about “the tyranny of the moment .”

Knute Berger at Crosscut mourns the decline of soap operas (evinced by As the World Turns’ cancellation) with a tribute to his late aunt, one of the show’s, and the genre’s, most enduring performers. Berger rightly notes that “the soaps are the daily newspapers of daytime TV, once everyday staples that are now dying off like dinosaurs in a meteor-induced dust cloud.”

Our ol’ pal Tim Egan chortles at the New Yorkers who’ve just discovered Costco, now that the big Seattle-founded retailer finally set up shop in Manhattan. Then Egan wanders, like a shopper through oversized aisles, into a more generalized rant about ignorant East Coasters.

Blogger Jim Linderman cites our longtime fave Sherman Alexie on a big failing of e-reader machines’ “content”: its lack of textual permanence. Then Linderman adds an aside of his own: If KIndles had been around 50 years ago, would we ever remember that the Hardy Boys didn’t use to be rock musicians?

As a wickedly haunting holiday offering, the New Yorker offers a fictional remembrance of childhood wonder, excerpted from David Foster Wallace’s posthumous last novel.

We didn’t learn about it until today, but Bob Kondrak passed away late last month at age 61. He was an avid photographer, an early documentor of the Seattle punk scene. His son Kuri currently DJs around town.

Also recently deceased is Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic, 80. Pavic became an international success with his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, a nonlinear revisionist history of the western world.

His works dealt deftly with the clashes of races, religions, nationalities, genders, and schools of philosophy over the tumultous centuries, and treated all the parties in said conflicts with equal humanity. But when it came to his own time and place in history, Pavic chose sides, defending Milosovec’s violent but futile drive to hold onto the mini-empire that was Yugoslavia.

The Onion’s A.V. Club has a list of 30 “best books of the ’00s,” heavy on bestsellers and hype-beneficieries.

One might not think of Stephen King (commercial horror storyteller supreme) and Raymond Carver (the late local crafter of exquisitely serious short stories) as working the same side of the street. But King, in an NY Times review of a new Carver bio, sees a lot of himself in Carver’s early career, particularly the chain-drinking and chain-moping parts.

But the biggest lesson King takes from Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life is that we should think more (and more kindly) about Maryann Burk, the first Mrs. Carver. It was she who supported and suffered from the struggling (and often violently drunk) early Raymond. The better known second wife got to live with the sober, successful Raymond.

The NYTimes opinion section’s former token far-rightie and well-regarded grammar snoot had previously written some of Nixon and Agnew’s most infamous lines, in a speechwriting staff that also included MSNBC’s token wingnut Pat Buchanan. But by modern standards, he was an example of that rapidly dwindling species, a sane Republican who believed in rational persuasion rather than X-treme demagoguery. He’s already missed.

…I spent a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to liberate writing from the shackles of Serious Lit, the smug treacle of post-hippie nature poetry, the convoluted code of academia, and the stiff cliche-worship of “genre” bestsellerdom.

Now, in the PowerPoint era, the lesson’s simple: “Write like a rock star.”

IT’S MID-APRIL, and that means two topics are filling the op-ed sections across America’s newspapers:

(1) Calls for income tax “reform” (i.e., commentators wishing lower taxes for members of their particular favorite subcultures, and higher taxes for members of other subcultures); and

(2) Conservatives (plus a few highbrow-academic liberals) pontificating prosaically about baseball as The Most Perfect Thing On Earth.

I happen to like baseball. I just don’t like most of the people who write about it as some secular/sacred rite.

Herewith, some of the real resons folks such as George Will love the sport:

• It’s got lots of numbers and stats. Those academic types love such abstract-logic building blocks. So much more fun to keep track of numbers and stats than to follow a sport where raw athletic prowess makes more of the show.
• It can be long and boring, and hence reward its diehard adherents with the sanctimonious feeling of being able to appreciate something that puts ordinary people dozin’.
• It’s not based around a male sexual metaphor. Instead of relishing in something as crudely pagan and life-affirming as symbolic insemination moments (like football, soccer, hockey, et al.), it symbolizes an obsession Republicans can more easily identify with–
• It’s all about control vs. chaos. That PBS miniseries five years ago noted that baseball’s “the only game where the defense controls the ball.”
• The defensive star is at the literal center of the action. A soccer or hockey goalie merely stops offensive attacks. A baseball pitcher, by contrast, is the start of every play, the instigator of all action, the man who’s personally credited with winning or losing the game for the whole team.
• The game ends with the regaining of control (i.e., an out). The only exception is a bottom-of-the-last-inning play that scores a go-ahead run. The offensive side can only cause enough moments of chaos that cause enough damage before order is regained.
• It has a historic hierarchy. Major League Baseball as we know it was formed in 1903. The same 16 teams were in the same 11 Northeastern cities for 50 years. And in most of those years, the three New York teams regularly stood atop the standings; the old St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators regularly occupied the cellar. Everywhere else, baseball was “The Minors,” teams graded AAA to D and usually controlled by a major-league team’s farm system.
• A “Perfect Game” is one in which nothing happens. In bowling, the only other major sport to have the concept of a perfect game, such a game is one in which everything happens.

But you don’t have to dislike baseball just because certain tweedy butt-kissers like it. There’s plenty to enjoy about the game. If the Repubs can root for the defensive players who maintain order, you can root for the hitters and runners who, every so often, succeed in breaking through for glorious moments of triumphant chaos.

TOMORROW: James Twitchell, an academic author who (hearts) the culture of marketing.

ELSEWHERE:

• If you liked the They Might Be Giants cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, here’s the original, along with the rest of the Science Songs LP series! (found by Memepool)…

I’m thinking of becoming a freelance book packager, leveraging the lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Here’s a sample lesson:

Book publicity is a two-headed monster. Or rather, it wants you to become a two-headed monster. Your first head’s supposed to quietly conform to hidebound notions of tweed-suited authenticity and NPR-mellow good taste. Your second head’s supposed to go all manic and aggressively hustle after every sale like Billy Mays hawking OxyClean in a late-night commercial.