We went from bar to bar, listening to one song per band, at most two, if the band was good - I thought more of them were good than she did – and the whole while, she looked and sounded tired, but moved faster than I could, in the door as soon as the bouncer or ID check guy had waved her in, out sometimes before the band’s one song, or second song, was over. That day, her father had gone to prison. She didn’t mention this. We’d met at a party a couple of weeks before. I called the next day, and she picked up on the first ring. Our second date, she told me about her father, said that first time I called, she was waiting to hear from her mother, who didn’t speak to her father – it had been some years – but did talk to his lawyer, and had promised to let her know about the sentencing. He’s not my black parent, she said. I hadn’t asked. I’d enjoyed going to hear all the bands – I was in a band, not so serious, still I liked comparing mine to the ones we heard, liked the sort of people who were in the clubs. I’d suggested doing it again, on our second date, knowing this was her job, assistant A+R person at a record company with a name that impressed me. She said she needed a day off from music, so we went to a play and afterward downtown for dinner. Thai, not a great place, but one she’d been going since she was a girl, with her father first, then with her mother and sister for years afterward. We walked to the train and went down into the station, a hot night, a storm coming, though still hours away, maybe a day even, or longer, the air danker and heavier as we descended. At the turnstile, I fumbled in my pocket for a token, we were talking about my family, not hers, then as she stood on the other side, waiting for me to come through, she changed the subject and told me about her father. I came through and she held out her hand for mine, the first time, and I wanted to stop there, talk to her about this, she must have needed that, but she took my fingers in mine and turned away, not speaking, not wanting to speak, I could tell, and led me down a flight of stairs, onto a landing, one more flight down to the platform, the uptown side to my place or the downtown side to hers, the air here heavier still, but more alive, music coming up from the platform, a violinist and singer, and on the landing we kissed, and she slipped a hand around my waist and under my shirt, her long fingers on the small of my back, the train coming in on the downtown side, brakes squealing, headed toward Brooklyn, and her place. She sang, beautifully, or so I heard. She never sang for me. She played piano, also beautifully, mostly Schubert and Mendelsohn – I knew this only from records my mother’d had, recognized a couple of pieces, and she was pleased by this. She’d studied to sing opera but had a weak lung, from a swimming accident, and so only around the house, when I wasn’t there, did she sing lieder, what she loved. Not long after we met, she got a part in a play where she was supposed to sing. She talked the director into letting her talk the song instead. She sings so beautifully, her roommate told me, some time later, after we’d split up – this was how I knew that she sang well, cared about it, though she’d never told me as much. It’s terrible you never heard her, her roommate said. Her room didn’t have a door, just a sheet hung from tacks - there’d been no door when they moved in, the landlord promised he’d replace the one he’d taken out, then never did, and after a while they stopped asking. They had good rent and a view of the harbor and lower Manhattan. We stood at the open window - it was horribly hot, the storm still not here - and I caressed her stomach and breasts, trying not to touch the rest of her, knowing she wanted to cool down, to let the sweat dry and what breeze there was blow over her. Her breathing was shallow. If she breathed louder or made some other noise, we’d feel self-conscious and I’d stop. The lights of the buildings downtown were murky in the haze, and the ferry horn sounded. Her roommate had a door and in the morning it was still shut, even at ten when we woke up. I wondered if her roommate had gone out without our noticing. She shrugged. The phone rang. I was pouring myself coffee. She asked if I’d step out. There was no outside but the hall, outside the apartment. I hesitated, and she opened the door and pointed. I drank my coffee in the hall, and listened to her, tried anyway, but she spoke softly and mostly was crying. After she’d finished – this took a few minutes after she hung up, and she let me back in – she wouldn’t tell me who’d been on the phone. Her roommate came out to the kitchen, smelling the coffee, and they started talking about something or other, who’d paid the gas bill or the phone bill or something else minor, and she’d finished crying and I didn’t know how to ask. Later, I understood that the problem was my not asking certain questions – how could she not have wanted this. Four, five days after this, we were out to dinner in Chinatown, she had to see more bands that night and seemed exasperated by that. She had to find someone worth signing, or at least having into the office to talk to her boss, after she’d heard them and gotten their demo tape, and it was good and she’d passed it on to him, and he’d liked it or at least was curious. There wasn’t a commission system, formally, though basically that’s how it worked, and so far she hadn’t had any luck. By ten I was tired and wanted to go home, a long week at work, and I fell asleep in the middle of some band’s second song. She took me home and put me back to sleep, and only in the morning did I notice she was on the couch. When she told me about her father, she was matter-of-fact, no crying or anything near to that. I was working in the fundraising office of the college I’d gone to, writing reports on other people who’d gone there and made money and might donate some of it. I didn’t care much about the work, but it was a job and I wanted to do well, and that summer I had problems with my boss. She listened when I complained about this - my boss was going through a divorce, her husband had taken up with a neighbor, or perhaps a babysitter, no one at the office was sure which. Why do you care? she asked, finally. We were in the park, in front of Borough Hall, on a bench, with takeout coffees. I think it’s more interesting if it’s the neighbor, I said – the babysitter, that would be trite. She laughed. It was Saturday and I was hung over, but she had energy and wanted to walk over the bridge and up through Chinatown, maybe then to the East Village, to Sounds, so she could look for a Marianne Faithful album she couldn’t find anywhere else. Her coffee was cream, no sugar. She took a sip and repeated the question. You’re too Midwestern, she’d said, when I complained about my job, you get some task that’s meaningless and don’t think about that, you just do it, and if you do it well, you’re fine with everything, proud even, and it takes you months, years even, to see the thing is bullshit. She was coughing that day, a cold, her office was air conditioned to death and she could never remember to take a sweater. My coffee was empty; I’d drunk it too fast. The night before, I hadn’t sleep, worried I’d be fired. I’d gotten up around three and had a couple of beers, listening to the radio at the kitchen table, the volume low so as not to wake her. The paper was there and a novel I’d brought from my place, but I couldn’t concentrate to read. I wanted to say, Your job, do you really care about it? It’s music but so what, you don’t like the bands and going to those clubs, seeing all those losers who’ll never make it, whatever that means, how hard it is to make even cab fare. You want to play something yourself, get better and see what comes of that, but you freeze up. I must have made a sour face. She offered me the last of her coffee and her bagel and I took both. She stroked the back of my hand. There were winos on the bench opposite. Her father hadn’t wanted to go into the family business, the grocery where he’d worked, after school, from fifth grade on. He didn’t have other plans, but the idea of going back there, after City College… he’d suffocate. When he called her from prison he talked about the theater. He’d been going to a lot of plays, before he went in. The store did well and rather than worry about the details of books and orders and all that, details he couldn’t remember and would never master, he’d hired someone, or rather, years ago, convinced his mother to hire someone, and he’d spent his energy finding and buying other stores, decrepit family groceries, in neighborhoods that had gone bad enough to make them cheap. He’d come in and talk a bit about Odessa, where they, he and the owners, desperate to get out of the business, must have had relatives who’d known each other, and this, and his knowing which apples were which, and what they should cost, and picking up if a cut of meat was priced wrong, and pointing this out gently, helpfully, tended to get him a good deal. He’d buy them out, his father’s money not doing anything else, and he’d promise to keep the business going – to keep the family name on the sign, even. Within a year, he’d sell the lease to someone who’d make more from the space, and would pay for that, and would have paid for it before, had he not gotten there first and bought cheap with his charm. He had an idea to produce plays. She thought maybe he was writing one, but was shy about saying this, figured it more plausible that he should produce. He cares about this, she said, in a way he never cared about the store, and the business – that was a game for him. When I did lose my job – it was my fault, I got angry at the wrong time, about nothing – I called her and she left work and met me, was there with a carnation, in front of my building, before I got home. She bought me dinner and I tried to eat a lot, to be appreciative. I was panicked, what would I do, to pay the next month’s rent.

The last night I saw her, she said, Sometimes I have a song in my head, and the feeling there’s one in your head, but they’re never the same. It was late, after midnight already but still hot, the end of a long Indian summer, after a summer of nights as hot or hotter. She left her window open, and the BQE traffic sound made it easier to sleep. We’d gone to movies, anything we hadn’t seen and occasionally one that one of us had seen, but the other hadn’t, and then afterward always to a bar, though for me it was odd to go with someone who only ordered coffee. She told me about the songs, and I knew I should go. She wore a camisole she’d bought earlier in the summer, and nothing else. I was irritated, her having broken up with me, and without saying so, before I could break up with her, but I wanted her awfully. She was half-lying on the couch, her head propped up on a pillow, and her legs stretched out toward me, her right next to my left, the camisole and nothing else. I waited for her to stand. She didn’t. For the longest time, neither of us moved. A few months after we split up, her roommate came to a bar where my band was playing. She stood in the front while we played. She was with friends but stood apart from them, closer to us. I played well that night. Several times I came up to the front of the riser - this was the only place we played, that had a riser, it was short, but still - and she smiled up at me. She knew a couple of other guys in the band - they’d gone to school together. This was how I’d met her, and then Jenny, at that party, which was for the drummer’s birthday. I think she’d gone out with him at some point, though once when I asked him about this, he shrugged and wouldn’t say anything. During the show I looked toward the back of the bar, for Jenny. I wanted her to stay for more than one song. After we stopped seeing one another, I began to think of things to say to her, or rather, of a way to be around her, and want to be there. I sang poorly but loved the songs, and my voice in a fashion fit with the music, and she would have had to stay for more than one song. Her roommate got bored or had someone to talk to or felt odd, standing in front, and so after a bit walked back to her friends. I’d called Jenny, several times, after we split up. The first time, I left a message, trying to sound cool, and said I’d call back. When I did - once after a failed date, with someone from work, the others, I can’t remember when – I didn’t leave messages. For a while after we’d finished playing, her roommate stuck around, with some friends, none of them getting more beer though nursing the ones they had. I talked to her roommate, and of course we spoke about Jenny. Her father was out of prison now. She sings, beautifully – it’s terrible you didn’t know this. Then one of the guys – her roommate’s boyfriend, I think, a guy in a button-down shirt and jeans, still from work – said let’s get some food, and they decided that’s what they needed to do. There were two Ukrainian places around the corner, open late. One of them, I went there first when I was 17, freshman year, they serve pierogis and though I’m not Polish my mother would make them, and so the few times I was homesick I’d go there and order them. Jenny liked the ones with mushrooms. One night we’d been at a movie uptown, then, for some reason – I think my roommate’s sister was visiting – we decided we’d go to her place, and on the train down, she was hungry, and we got off at 8th Street and walked over. We were drinking our waters, we’d just ordered, Jenny facing the front windows, one of them open to let in air – no AC, or perhaps it was broken – and she saw the guy, as he went through the closed window, then rolled a bit, ‘til he landed at the base of the counter. He’d been shot, so the cuts from the window were nothing. This wasn’t that late, midnight or a little after. The place was full. A waitress threw up. She was 19, 20. The older staff were calm, even the two or three who ran over to help. Jenny was distant. That night, in line for tickets, she’d been flustered by a woman, a few years younger, a college kid, I’d guess, who’d cut in front of us and given her a look when she started to say something. She couldn’t let it go, sitting, waiting for the movie to start, she thought the woman, a few rows down, was looking back at her. The guy who’d been thrown through the window was dying. We had to go somewhere else to eat. Afterward she wanted to go home alone. As the group got ready to go, her roommate invited me, but I was irritated by them leaving. I’d wanted to ask her more about Jenny. I hadn’t. I hadn’t thought I needed to hurry, to think how to bring her up again, after the conversation had moved on to other things. When they all stood, it was awkward for me to stand too – I had my guitar on my lap, still, and would have to put it somewhere, and not make a big deal of that, so as not to show I wanted, actively, to come with them, and later, asking about Jenny would seem like something I couldn’t let slide. She would start when the phone rang. Her father was supposed to call out only on Sundays, sometime in the early afternoon, I can’t remember the hours. This was a minimum-security place. He was in for embezzlement, of money that would’ve been his, had he not fought with his partner, in some scheme he had on the side, not part of the family business. He’d charmed someone, she thought, fixed things so he could call anytime he wanted, or at least at those times this whoever he’d charmed was on duty. The phone would ring and she wouldn’t move right away to answer it, but if we were sitting or lying somewhere, even in bed, she’d tense up, and how could you not know. He’d been cold to her when she was a girl - he and her mother had never lived together - but of late he’d become doting, not explicitly taking blame for anything that had gone wrong in her life, anyway she understood he wanted to make everything up to her, whatever that everything was. He’d seduced the woman who let him use the phone – she was sure of this. He sounded so relaxed and confident when he called, and Jesus, he was in prison, how else could that be. Her mother was working, still worked in fact, as a cashier in the grocery store his family had owned forever, and one evening, after her shift, when she stayed after, in the office, to count the take… She hated that she knew this. Her mother’s family had liked him, but never went further than liking him. When the phone rang, I wished she would just jump, and be done with it. One night, three a.m., we were sleeping, and it rang – it turned out to be someone for her roommate – and even at six, the sun coming up, she hadn’t gone back to sleep. I wanted it to ring, the last night I saw her, so she’d stand up first. Her roommate and her roommate’s friends were by the door, and I stood up too and put my guitar in my gig bag and Dave the bass player said he’d take it. I walked out after them. That night, standing with her, at her window. I never asked her to sing. A few days before we split up, I came to one of her late-afternoon rehearsals - not a dress, a round or whatever before the dress rehearsal - I never saw the show itself - and she was happy to see me, as she waited just offstage, to go on. I’d called a few places, leads from friends, about other work, and that day had an interview, and it went well, then at the end the guy said the position had been filled, he’d keep me in mind for something else. I went to a bar after and had a beer, and then was set to go home, but the theater wasn’t far, fifteen blocks, and the weather was o.k. so I walked over. On the way I tried not to think about the next month’s rent. I stood in back, and she waved me down into a seat. I’d thought, I’ll stop by, tell her I have something lined up. This was her first play, something she hadn’t thought of doing before. She’d mentioned the rehearsal, not with any thought I might come. I knew one of the people who ran the theater, anyway had talked to the guy at a party she’d taken me to, and happened to run into him a few days before, and he said why don’t you come by. There was a line she started to say, of course she remembered it, then stopped a few words in, and had to be prompted. She wasn’t looking out at the house but I felt her eyes on me. Could you please go out for a minute? she said, and when I didn’t quite get it, she handed me my coffee and nodded toward the door. If I’d left right then, it would have been worse. In the scene, her character tried to seduce someone she worked with, much older, though not her boss – she’d made an excuse to come to his place, sat on the couch, and when he was turned around, took off her shirt. He turned back around and saw, still standing, stunned, perhaps excited though not sure what to do – he was too stagey about this, the actor – and he hesitated, a bit too long, and said something that didn’t quite fit the moment. As she saw this unfolding, she was supposed to sing - the song she’d agreed to talk - out of nervousness or something, the play wasn’t clear on this and I sensed it wasn’t that good. After the first few words of the song, she stopped. In the light - the stage lights were on, they were testing them - her skin was pallid and she looked cold, and afterward she cried and wouldn’t say why. One Sunday afternoon, a few months later, I was coming up from the train, a C stop on St. Nicholas, going to a friend’s place, and as I hit the top step of the stairs, a quiet Sunday, not many people on the street, a cold sunny day, there was an apartment building right there, first floor place, window open and blind down, and, soft, something by Schubert, someone playing one of his lieder on piano, and singing along, even softer. I stopped to listen but after a moment the music stopped. I waited, two, three minutes, people irritated by my blocking the stairs, but it didn’t start again. Within a couple of blocks I’d fallen behind her roommate and her roommate’s friends, feeling crummy about following them, just to ask about Jenny. I had the number still, of course I had the number, and could’ve called. Cabs were passing and I could’ve hailed one but I was too slow, that third beer, and then there weren’t any more. They were a block ahead of me and didn’t notice I wasn’t with them. The F stop was right there. I walked past it. They turned toward 1st Avenue, I didn’t expect this, but no matter, this was better, I could keep straight on without having to excuse myself, and in the distance, ahead, was all of 2nd Avenue, and no one I knew, and nowhere I’d been or would ever go, and the cold wasn’t so bad, the snow still light, the wind cutting but I’d pull down my hat, and I could walk for hours.

Most elections are lost, rather than won, and I figured this one would be decided by Obama losing, with McCain just standing by, making the occasional patriotic bleat, then swooping in to collect the spoils. Oops. Turns out McCain’s the loser, and Ryan Sager explains why.

More on literature soon, but for now, a bit of economics. I subscribe to a listserv for the editors of literary magazines. Today the editor of a small print litmag posted a question about distributors, and her post contained some revealing numbers. (I won’t reveal her name, or her mag’s name - that wouldn’t be sporting, given that the listserv is closed.) She and her staff publish about five hundred copies of each of their semi-annual issues, and typically sell about one hundred of each, giving a bunch more away, and entrusting the rest, several hundred, no doubt, to a distributor that takes them to bookstores and who knows what happens next - unclear if she gets some income, or the little magazines just fly into the ether, never to be seen. Whatever - the point is, she gets a few hundred readers per six-month issue, at a cost of $5000. Let’s be generous, and assume she’s only paying $50 per reader, and if she’s selling each issue for, say, $12, she’s making, say, $240 back. I should add that while her journal isn’t great, it’s not the worst one out there. Right in the middle of the pack, quality-wise. So we’ll take it as representative of little magazines, or at least those that aren’t affiliated with a university, which has predictable effects on budgets (they grow) and quality (it sinks - logrolling and lack of editorial incentives in full effect.)

I help run an online magazine that gets about 1100-1200 unique visitors per day. I’m assuming she’s not including any salary figure in her budget number, so I won’t include any in ours - every six months, our total expenditures come to $48. That’s six months of web hosting fees, if you’re counting. Let’s assume that day-on-day, we got a lot of repeat visitors, so we’ll knock our number down by half. I’d love to know the exact figure here, but I don’t. Anyway, let’s say 400 x 182 = 7280. That’s $.006 - six tenths of a cent - per reader.

Why do print literary magazines continue to exist? I can see them as coffeetable fetish objects, or convenient for reading in bed, at the beach, on the train, and so forth. I understand too that overall, print litmags probably get “higher-quality” readers, because the literature-inclined, in the main, are also the tradition-inclined, and so prefer to read on paper, and neither Kindle nor Sony Reader nor any other device has done much to win them over. Still - are they worth more than 8000 times what our readers are worth? Can a writer, by reaching those readers instead of ours, really do more to advance his career, qua writer - i.e. make it more likely that he’ll get a book contract, from a “real” publisher, and then make enough in royalties to live on? We’re not talking about the New Yorker here - I understand that it, and a very very few other journals, are in a different league, in terms of quality and quantity of readership.

What about editors? Well, the answer is, editors mostly don’t stick to putting out print journals, if they’re doing so on their own dime, once they realize how few people they’re reaching, or plain run out of money - and let’s be clear, not a single literary journal makes money. In the vast majority of cases, editors who stick to the game do so because they have a patron or benefactor - a Microsoft billionaire (Tin House), government grants and some private donations (A Public Space) - or a family trust fund (Paris Review, under Plimpton). Or because they’re funded by a university, which funnels them tuition revenues in exchange for a publication that looks academic-literarish on student lounge coffee tables (”This must be a serious school - my tuition dollars are buying a real education!”) and runs pieces by MFA grads (”Look - MFA grads get published! It makes sense to get an MFA!”), which MFA grads can then cite such publications as quasi-peer-reviewed, enabling them to… get a job teaching in an MFA program.

Circling back now to writers - what about writers who want to reach, you know, a lot of readers? Who write because, you know, they have something to say, and want to say it to as many people as possible? Who realize they’re not going to make a living by it - almost nobody does, unless you count teaching in an MFA program as “making a living by writing.” Where should these writers publish?

This Marginal Revolution post made me smile, though not for the obvious reason. If you don’t feel like clicking through, it’s a reference to a David Frum piece in which Frum notes that George W. Bush never asks questions, because “he doesn’t know what it’s okay for him not to know.” Whether that’s true, I can’t say. But this strategy - never asking questions, so as not to reveal one’s ignorance - I always think of as the first cardinal rule of grad school, and one I learned the first week in my Ph.D. program. Pretty quickly thereafter, I learned the second rule, which occasionally supercedes the first: try only to ask questions in order to reveal that you know the answers. (Which rule has a corollary, or variant, or something of that sort: If you don’t know the answer to a question, try to rephrase it as a question the answer to which you know, or to show that the question is trivial or irrelevant. This could be called “the cardinal rule of Ph.D. qualifying exams.”)

Why the death of the midlist author? This question vexes book industry insiders, and not only those quoted in the New York Mag article I just blogged, because so many houses have, for so long, made a good deal of hay from such authors - those who write book after book, one a year or so, over the course of a number of years, and whose books never sold a ton of copies, but could be counted on to sell a respectable number, every time out. And now these books aren’t selling. Of course everyone (in book publishing) cries that that the problem is that what with the ‘net, no one reads anymore, and so forth.

Are they right? No, but they’re right that no one’s reading midlist authors. Why not? Because their books aren’t good enough to stand up to the competition of new forms of reading, and, yes, other new forms of entertainment. Go to a used bookstore, pick up an old, I don’t know, Mary Morris novel, and start reading it. Most of you will put it down within a few minutes, and grab another book off the shelf, and start reading it instead. That might not have been the case fifteen years ago. Now that we know we have access to a ton more reading, and general-entertainment, options, we have less patience with fair-to-middling books. When books, and three TV networks, were all we had, well, why not buy and read a Mary Morris novel? It’s not like you had many other options, so by doing so, you ran a much lower opportunity cost than you would now.

Cool piece in this week’s New York Mag on the state, i.e. the decline, of book publishing. a dead horse, to be sure, but the details are pretty interesting. I came away from it convinced, more than ever, that our sort of publishing - small-scale, web-focused, driven by our tastes, rather than market research - will kill big publishing dead, and soon. Also I loved this quote, about the publishers of yore: “Their competitive advantage was not efficiency or low costs but taste.” supposedly this is the sort of thing that book publishing “needs to get back to,” in order to save itself. If only we just signed books we love, we’d be fine! But of course Max Perkins et al had another big competitive advantage: barriers to entry were so high, for anyone who wasn’t in publishing and wanted to get in. Only a few companies could publish, distribute and sell books (or magazines, or newspapers) on any real scale, because doing so was so expensive. And since print was the only way to get text-based content out to the world, established print publishers had it pretty good. Unfortunately for them now, print publishing is still pretty expensive - and epublishing is incredibly cheap. So they really need that killer taste they’re sure will save them. Do Harper et al. really have it? They must, right? They live in New York, and work in expensive digs with great views! They have cool apartments, and wear a lot of black, and stylish glasses! They all went to Princeton and took classes with Joyce Carol Oates! But look at their industry’s current lot, and you’ll have your answer.

Though of course the book industry won’t die, per se - it’ll become a boutique operation, serving several niche markets, and a mostly upscale clientele. In the future, book publishers will be like horse breeders. Up ’til the mid-20th century, to get anywhere, you needed a horse, which meant there was a big demand for same, and horse breeders had it pretty good. Then came trains, and finally cars, and now the only people who need horses are ranchers, and the rest of the people who ride, do so by choice, as a leisure activity. We’ll do most reading on a screen, and only read printed text for pleasure, or in the infrequent instances when a screen isn’t convenient - on the beach, for example. Most literary work will still be available in print, and because its readers have a lot of free time and like books, that’s how they’ll read it. And no, Jakob Nielsen and Mark Bauerlein, this doesn’t mean many fewer of us won’t be “reading,” unless your definition of reading is restrictively narrow. But I’ll leave to the Katherine Mangu-Ward the job of explaining why this is so.

A while back, I wondered, where is the literature of the New York of my youth - the New York of the early to mid-80s. Then I happened on an essay by the indefatigable picker of great topics, if occasionally dimwitted, in a mannered LES-cum-Upper West Side way, and never-quite-on-the-mark Luc Sante, about that New York. It was in my college alumni magazine; you can read it here. I wanted to write something about it, but… well, it’s pretty good ’til halfway through, though it falls into all the aforementioned Luc Sante traps, and then just falls apart. So I didn’t. But now I’ve happened, or rather looked for, and found, a much better piece about, I think, that New York, or at least a New York just like that New York, if perhaps also timeless, or cross-era, or something, like all the places in all those confusing what-year-is-this-happening-in bits in Low Life… and of course it’s by the very same Luc Sante. So I take it all back, and say, unreservedly, read this, it’s really good.

If you dance at an indie-rock show, notes economist Robin Hanson, you probably talk at the opera.

A while back, I suggested that Kindle 2.0 might be the device that makes ereaders the default way to read book-length fiction and non-fiction, and other content people still tend to read in printed form. I also said that “Kindle 2.0″ could well come from someone else, if Amazon’s not quick enough to bring out a better ereader - one with more computing features, and a more sensible content-pricing policy. Now Amazon’s announced that K2 won’t come ’til next year (sorry, can’t find the link just now), while Sony’s set to sell its Readers in Targets, and, rumor has it, will announce a new version thereof, on October 2nd. Hmm…

Or rather, what factors shape the standard personality types in each region of the country? I’m guessing that, in order, they’d be 1) traditions, particular those related to self-perception and individual interactions with in-group and non-in-group individuals, (by ‘traditions,’ I mean long-standard practices of the original ethnic groups of most people in the area), 2) current and historical main economic activity (trade makes areas more open, simple extraction probably makes them less so), and 3) current and historical prosperity, relative to perceived peer-areas. But I haven’t yet clicked through to the article - perhaps I’m wrong.