Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

A number of writers are doing quite well selling short erotic stories for between 99 cents and $2.99. The latter may seem outrageous if you think of it as the price of a short story. It's less so if you think of it as the price of an orgasm.

The whole article is a really interesting read, not least because it explains the subtle dance authors have to carry out when putting up their self-published porn in order to ensure that interested readers can find something that matches their precise tastes without using any forbidden terms on the cover material:

Marketing on Amazon is done largely by inputting keywords when uploading your book. Keywords and phrases are search terms readers use. For instance, "gay young adult novel" or "strong female characters" or "zombie steampunk." In erotica, you can use the real terms in keywords even if they're banned from blurbs. So if you go to Amazon and type in the banned word "orgy," you'll get books that used that as a keyword but have discreet titles like The Arrangement. (Or less discreet titles that at least don't include "orgy.")

Amazon is aware of this, of course. It seems that they're less interested in outright banning all erotica than in banning certain types and in keeping a virtual brown paper wrapper over graphic language visible in the storefront.

Call me as out of touch as a high court judge, but I had no idea dinosaur erotica was a thing until I read about it in a Guardian books post and now I know, I'm not sure whether it is something I wish my wife or my servants to read or not...

Well, hey. Sure. We’re all a bit ground-down by life, I know. We all want to get a little drunk, from time to time, so as to ameliorate the grind; to step through the portal to somewhere more appealing. But getting drunk doesn’t have to mean sitting on a park bench with a 2-litre plastic bottle of strong cider. It is possible to get something more refined from the experience. How can I communicate this fundamental truth about art to you? Is there any point in me telling you: ‘look, if you just try this Château Margaux 1787, you’ll get all the intoxication you want but also a really beautiful drinking experience …’? Because, here’s the thing; with alcohol, supermarket cider is cheaper than fine wines (that of course dictates why different people drink the one and the other). But with books the difference in quality is not reflected in the cover price! Maybe it should be. Maybe it ought to cost £1:99 to buy a Robert Jordan novel and £45.99 to buy a Vladimir Nabokov one. But it doesn’t! Amazingly, it doesn’t! There is nothing stopping you going for the higher quality experience! Honestly!

To mention Mill in the same breath as Grayling, however, is to do a great liberal a grave disservice. Mill refused to allow his passion for freedom to blind him to gross inequality. By contrast Grayling is the kind of liberal who is prepared to let equality go hang.

And yet it's perfectly possible to imagine a Rawlsian liberal accepting just such an inequality, provided that charging rich kids 18k a year for a liberal arts education is offset by something that ensures that the worst off benefit more than they would otherwise, by, say, providing them with educational opportunities that they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise, subsidised by those paying through the nose for Grayling's super expensive college.

Indeed Rawls himself somehow managed to combine his work on distributive justice with a 40 year career at Harvard, so there are prima facie reasons for suspecting that it may be possible for people to reconcile their own liberal values with the private provision of university education.

Whereas Eagleton's position on private universities looks slightly wobbly given that he's "Excellence in English Distinguished Visitor in the Department of English" at Notre Dame, where the fees are, ahem, a mere $39,919 a year...

ETA: Sarah Churchwell's response to Eagleton (and Grayling U) is sharp and informative:

What the US system shares with the UK is that most of its state-funded universities are going broke, partly because both nations are full of people who fervently believe in the principle of universal education and just as fervently object to paying higher taxes or tuition fees...

Let's be clear about one thing: the people selling out the study of humanities in this country are not AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins, but those on both sides of the political aisle in Whitehall who agreed to publicly fund only the Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). The government already plans to rely solely on fee-paying students to finance university humanities. At least the NCH believes the study of the humanities is worth £18,000 a year.

Attempts to do so often end up in trouble. "The council once asked us for an assessment of outcomes, not output," says Ian Stringer. "Output was how many books we'd stamped out, and outcome was something that had actually resulted from someone borrowing a book. So say someone took out a book on mending cars and then drove the car back, that's an outcome; or made a batch of scones from a recipe book they had borrowed. It lasted until one of the librarians told the council they'd had someone in borrowing a book on suicide, but that they'd never brought it back. The council stopped asking after that."

Librarians 1, bureaucrats 0.

Arditti: The choreographer gives her the most extra-ordinary directions. "Go home and touch yourself..."
Ravenhill:That was one of the best! "If you want to get better at classical work, go home and masturbate!" I thought that was a great note!
Arditti: You can't hear Frederick Ashton saying that to Margot Fonteyn. Or saying to her, "I don't care about your technique..."

After much laughter and a few further points, Tom Sutcliffe finally brings the discussion to an end by saying, "Perfect for the ballet obsessed teenager in your life. You might not want to be sitting next to them while they watch it, though..."

Priceless.

I really felt for Robert Service (Comment, 24 April) after reading about the turmoil caused to him and his family by someone calling his book crap. News stories of poverty, war and starvation often overshadow the intense difficulties faced by academic historians. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding how he stoically continued to eat sea bass and go jogging while his wife went to yoga during that terrible fortnight to be truly inspirational.

God bless the stiff upper lip!