Notes from two short books read over the weekend:

— Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68: Not as interesting as it should have been, sadly. I wanted more about Ra and fewer draft images of middle late-’50s album-cover art. Sun Ra was such a freaky amalgam of sci-fi, jazz, and proto-P-Funk afrofuturism that he deserves better.

— Seth Godin’s The Dip. Most business/career books don’t ring true to me, since writing careers share little of the traditional corporate superstructure. Talk of sales forces and client happiness and advancement paths don’t make as much sense in a career where (a) you’re a drag on the bottom line, not adding to it, (b) your job is often to make the people you deal with mad, and (c) advancement within the company doesn’t necessarily mean more money, more prestige, or more fun. But Godin has a few lines on newspapers that made me sit up:

If you work at a big city newspaper . . . circulation is dropping . . . Every day you stay is a bad strategic decision, because every day you get better at something that isn’t useful — and you are another day behind others who are learning something more useful.

I don’t completely agree — since while newspapers may go the way of the Mascarene coot, reporting and writing are skills easily transferable to other lines of work — but there’s more than a smack of truth there.

14 May 2007

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