Seth Godin channeling Lewis Hyde at Cool Hunting on behalf of his new book, Linchpin:

What’s a gift? If I see a Chuck Close painting in a museum, I didn’t pay for that painting, I just get the benefit of seeing it. If I see a Karl Lagerfeld outfit walking down the street, it didn’t cost me anything to see it. If someone takes the time to use a beautiful Bodoni typeface kerned properly, it doesn’t necessarily communicate the words more clearly, but there was a gift element associated with it. We need to start with this idea that there isn’t just a transaction every time—I do something, I get money, we move on—that what gifts do is they create a connection, because they’re not even. Someone gave me something, I couldn’t give them anything in return. We’re not even-steven.

Also worth noting is Godin’s innovative PR model:

We started by offering a review copy to the first three thousand people who gave a donation to the Acumen Fund, which is a charity I support. And it didn’t take very long to have more than 2,000 people do that. We raised $100,00 in about a day and a half, exceeding our goal. So those books went out yesterday. We also sent 250 people who live internationally a shorter digital version (about a fifth of the book) so that they wouldn’t have to wait for shipping. It’s already showing up on Twitter. It’s already being reviewed. Some people don’t like it, some people like it a lot. What will end up happening, my prediction is, that between 500 and 1,000 reviews of one sort or another will get posted online, which will certainly reach far more people than a review in The New York Times ever could. My principle goal is to leverage personal interactions so that this book reaches the people it needs to reach, the people who are open to hearing what it has to say.

Two readings on the economics of attention. First, last week Design Observer posted Michael Erard’s A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention. The takeaway from this article will surely be Erard’s suggestion that we start “attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths.”

But, as creatively playful as that might be, I was most interested in the end of his essay, where he speculates on the price of attention:

I’m inspired by Lewis Hyde in The Gift, who says that what distinguishes commodities is that they’re used up, but what distinguishes gifts is that they circulate—the gift is never trapped, consumed, used up, contained or confined. That seems like the best basis for cultural production to thrive.

Erard’s starting point is Chris Anderson’s Free, and he describes Anderson’s concept of “free” as “the gift’s ugly negation.” A very thoughtful point, and one both Cory Doctorow and I have tried to make as well.

Second, via Fred Wilson, comes this article by John Hagel, in which he describes the article The Attention Economy and the Net, written by Michael Goldhaber. Here’s Hagel:

Goldhaber is close to viewing attention as a flow, rather than a stock—something that must continually be refreshed, if it is to be maintained. One can only continue to attract full attention if one offers something new along the way.

These are two sides of the same coin, of course. But I like the contrast of stock to flow, especially in business contexts like Anderson’s where “stock” is a more native term. Stock is static value, but the value of flow is only maintained through constant circulation.

Wired editor-in-chief and Free author Chris Anderson giving a lecture in Chile last October. Photo by Carito Orellana.

I’ve just finished Chris Anderson’s Free, which is available free on Google Books or as a free audiobook. There has been a debate raging around Anderson’s book for a week or two now. For those wishing to catch up, Eric Etheridge’s NYT Opinionator blog has a great roundup of yaysayers and naysayers, and it’s well worth a look.

Here’s useful tidbit from Malcolm Gladwell’s pointed critique:

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).

What’s really fun about reading Gladwell’s review is getting a sense of how his mind works. The quote above literally shows him sorting ideas into bins and tagging them as he goes. Fantastic.

Seth Godin responded to Gladwell’s critique in support of Anderson and added a few insights of his own. Worth repeating:

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people.

Very much agreed with Seth on that.

One of the great things about Anderson’s book is its broad look at the idea of “free.” As an armchair read, it’s hard to get bored by all the fascinating examples and stories Anderson shares. However, this breadth is also a trap, because each invested community will tend to read Free narrowly, complete with its own predispositions, seeing holes in Anderson’s arguments as a result.

I see two faults in it as a book, one minor and one major. Minorly, it feels padded: Anderson repeats himself often. (I assume this is because he feels much of his audience will skim the book, not read it in full in order.) Majorly, it feels overreaching: while it’s true that “free” is a game-changer, Anderson occasionally lapses into what an economist might call “irrational exuberance” over his thesis. I think this happens because Anderson wants to fit Free into a category of business book that we all know well from airports and conferences: the “how to think about, recognize, describe, and potentially monetize a current cultural trend” book. This is, of course, a category owned by Gladwell, which is why it’s so fun to see them locking horns here. With this book, Anderson may have triggered the Tipping Point of Free. We don’t get much intellectual bloodsport like this these days.

Continue Reading →

“At present, U.S. copyright protects an individual’s work for his or her lifetime, plus 50 years; corporations with works ‘made for hire’ hold rights for 75 years. Under [Sen. Christopher] Dodd’s proposal, at the end of each of these terms, the rights to an additional 20 years would be publicly auctioned, the proceeds going to build an endowment dedicated to the arts and humanities.” Sen. Christopher Dodd reads into the Congressional Record an article by Lewis Hyde from the L.A. Times on the so-called “Arts Endowing the Arts Act,” which auctions off copyright extensions on fading copyrights (like Mickey Mouse), in order to build an endowment for new arts and humanities work in the future.

Daniel B. Smith has written a lengthy profile of Lewis Hyde for this week’s New York Times Magazine. In addition to delivering an endearing (and enduring) profile of Hyde and his practice (a favorite phrase: “I worked on how I work”), the article traces Hyde’s development as a poet in Minnesota, his work as an alcoholism counselor at the Cambridge City Ward, his travels to Cuernavaca to meet Ivan Illich, and, most interesting to me, his writing and the initial public reception of The Gift: “Hyde worked on The Gift for seven years, barely scraping by, spending long months hunting through obscure folk tales for narratives that reflected what he came to call ‘the commerce of the creative spirit.’ When the book was finally published, the critic Martha Bayles castigated it in The New York Times for naïvely ‘esp[ying] a noble savage in every struggling artist’—a critique that was echoed elsewhere. Yet the artistic community immediately embraced Hyde’s work. A bevy of poets, including Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall and Gary Snyder, published a group letter in The Times responding to Bayles’s review and praising Hyde’s ‘search to regain the unity of economic, aesthetic, social and religious life.’ Bill Viola, the pioneering video artist, remembers New York artists in the 1980s excitedly exchanging dog-eared, marked-up copies. ‘In a society that mostly talks about money,’ says Margaret Atwood, who keeps a half-dozen copies of The Gift on hand at all times to distribute to artists she thinks will benefit from it, ‘Lewis carved out a little island where you can say, “Life doesn’t always work that way.”’” I routinely give copies of The Gift to friends as well, but I love the idea of exchanging it with notes. (Hyde would call this “giving increase.”) Last but not least, Smith shares that Hyde is at work on a follow-up (of sorts) to The Gift, which focuses on the idea of the commons from its development in medieval times to its arrival in America. An abstract and 11-page PDF excerpt is available (free) on Hyde’s website here.

“I always quote a guy called Lewis Hyde who wrote about primitive cultures where there’s an exchange of gifts that cannot be kept but have to be passed on. And the passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing one another, because they all become part of a single experience. And [Hyde’s] leap of imagination occurs when he says this is what artists do. Artists provide that gift to the culture, so that people have something in common. And I think that all of us who identify with the role of artists in history want our work to serve that purpose. Certainly as much as we want to work to sell product. (Although not everybody feels the same way.)” Milton Glaser, from this wonderful short film by Hillman Curtis from a few years ago. I never knew Glaser had read Hyde when I compared his thinking on design ethics to Hyde’s book in my essay “Form-giving,” but of course now it makes perfect sense why the two are so beautifully in sync. Perhaps an even bigger coincidence is that I just happened to stop by Glaser’s office the day Hillman Curtis was shooting there, and you see me for a moment in the film as I shake Glaser’s hand just after he finishes saying this quote.

You’ve got to read this NYT piece on entrepreneur Philip M. Parker to believe it. Parker has written and published some 200,000 books via Amazon.com—making him the most published person on the planet—using computer algorithms to mine publicly available information. Among Parker’s current projects are books of poetry, crossword puzzles, and, of course, romance novels. This latter genre reminds me of the opening sentence of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, where Hyde writes, “At the corner drugstore my neighbors and I can now buy a line of romantic novels written according to a formula developed through market research.” Parker is more succinct. Referring to the nature of the algorithm used to write the steamy books, he says, “There are only so many body parts.”

Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts! Listen to Lewis Hyde on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm. Or Keith Jarrett on his magical Carnegie Hall Concert (iTunes). Or Robert Haas on NPR’s Poetry Off the Shelf (iTunes). Or even a podcast about Thriller (iTunes)?

Above: The author Lewis Hyde at home.

No doubt familiar to L&UL readers by now, one of my favorite books is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. (Here are at least five posts so far: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]) Published in 1983, it is now being issued in a 25th anniversary edition by Vintage. This article by Jeffrey MacIntyre of the New York Observer, while it wanders a bit in the middle, does come to a satisfying conclusion on the book’s significance:

Though it’s always enjoyed a small cult following and word-of-mouth circulation […], The Gift was generally overlooked when it was first published. But what once puzzled critics about Mr. Hyde’s ambitious and complex thesis looks prophetic today. He shines particularly in anticipating the issues of culture in the age of the Internet. The radical democratization of access to media of all forms, from the print newsstand to blogs, from user-pay Radiohead album downloads to the long tail of Amazon’s back catalog, has irrevocably shifted our sense of the cost as well as the shelf life of art. It’s now cheaper than ever, in most cases, to produce and disseminate art—as well as to curate, discuss and appreciate it. Mr. Hyde’s central idea about art’s social function—that the consumption (and enduring value) of art ultimately transcends any commercial transaction—is looking increasingly like an idea tailor-made for our present moment.

The 25th anniversary edition’s subtitle has been changed from Hyde’s slightly awkward original “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” to the closer (but blander) “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.” The cover has been changed too, redesigned here by Angus Hyland in the UK and here by Mark Abrams in the US. I admire both of these designers’ work, but unfortunately both covers lose Hannah Cohoon’s iconic apple basket in favor of clichéd graphic hearts. I fear that Hyde’s opening observation has come true:

At the corner drugstore my neighbors and I can now buy a line of romantic novels written according to a formula developed through market research. […] Even the name of the series and the design of the cover has been tailored to the demands of the market.

Happily, the 25th anniversary edition also includes an expanded prologue and afterword by Hyde, both of which are valuable. (A PDF of the afterword is on Hyde’s own website here.) Like his introduction to the book, Hyde’s prologue deals with the marketing of books themselves, and particularly how it was difficult in the beginning for The Gift to find support from book merchants because its contents couldn’t be summed up in, as Hyde writes, “ten words or less.” By the end of the prologue he proposes a ten-word summary line anyway, which I think is fantastic: “Bad-boy critic takes on vampire economy.” The poetry of Hyde’s tagline reminds me of this little book by Eva Weinmayr of headline placards written for the Evening Standard. It’s another book that’s full of poetry and well worth picking up.

Two great things from writer Jonathan Lethem: 1) “The Promiscuous Materials Project,” in which Lethem offers “stories are for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt. They’re available non-exclusively—meaning other people may be working from the same material—and the cost is a dollar apiece,” and 2) a monumentally important essay entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” nearly all of which (spoiler alert) Lethem “stole, warped, and cobbled together” from other sources. Both projects are heavily indebted to what I think is one of the most important books of the last few decades, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (for which Angus Hyland of Pentagram has just designed a new cover). More about The Gift in my essay “Form-giving.”