Don't be evil, Netflix! Or annoying, in this case.

Back in the early days of Netflix, just after people began to believe that it wasn't some creepy mail-order, book-of-the-monthish semi-scam for draining your bank account, I remember feeling an odd counter-culture exhileration every time I recommended it to people. Blockbuster had driven indie video store after indie video store out of business, and now Netflix was sticking it to them with a remarkably well planned model for using old technology (the mail) and new (the internet) to get DVDs to customers all over the country. I remember telling friends and family members how amazing Netflix would be for art house movies, which would now be available to small and rural communities who would never have access to them in the theatres or in the meager selection at their local Blockbuster (oh the number of Blockbusters I have visited that don't have anything but wide releases, and nothing older than five years ago).

And then, at some point, Netflix went over to the dark side. Perhaps they were always there. But my innocent idealism died a little as light was shed on the company's corporate practices. First, there were the law suits that revealed a systematic practice of "throttling," which involves giving the customers who return movies most quickly (resulting in the least profit for Netflix) slightly inferior service to lower-volume users (the obsessive returners, like me, would often encounter overnight delays before their movies were sent out, or would receive movies out of order).

Then, as part of the legal settlement for a case about throttling and false advertising, Netflix granted its users a month of a higher plan (more DVDs at any one time) at no additional cost, but it was revealed that after that month had expired, they intended to keep users at the higher plan while charging them full price, rather than returning them automatically to their normal service. So, essentially, they were using the façade of contrition as a marketing device to make more money off of their confused customers.

It was hard not to give up on them then. Or when the abysmal level of customer service (which for a time would only allow you to consult a very limited set of FAQs rather than pose a personalized question -- I guess they didn't relish getting thousands of "So, the more movies I return in a month, the more enthusiastically I make use of your service, the crappier you treat me?" type questions) was brought to the forefront as the company's CEO couldn't find Netflix's customer service number on the website when asked on "60 Minutes."

Just a couple of days ago, Netflix attempted to stem the loss of customers to Blockbuster (sigh), which allows you to return their mail-service DVDs to stores and get new movies immediately, by lowering a few of their plans by $1. Well, that might be great for new customers, but, from my point of view, $1 a month is less important than a history of treating your loyal customers (and Netflix has some VERY loyal customers) with respect.

This rant was sparked by an excellent post on the ArtsJournal's About Last Night blog, in which CAAF very astutely suggests that if Netflix really wants to win this battle against Blockbuster, they would operate on the same hours that the post office does. It has long been a thorn in my side (ok, so that is the kind of sheltered life I am leading) that Netflix warehouses don't operate on weekends, for (I can only assume) cost-saving purposes. But, I ask you, Netflix, wouldn't giving your customers as many movies as they couldn't possibly get their grubby little hands on in the 3-at-a-time (or 4, or 2...) program be less expensive than losing disgruntled people to Blockbuster in droves?

Netflix, you have an opportunity to provide a very good service to a lot of people, and in this case I think my idealism (you can provide a diverse and rich array of cultural experiences to people all over the country for a very affordable price!) is not incommensurate with good business. Happy customers will provide market dominance. To beat Blockbuster, prove that you have a different corporate ethos.

Sleepless Nights

Elizabeth Hardwick is the possessor of an amazing life: founder of the New York Review of Books, married to Robert Lowell, critic, novelist, essayist. Sleepless Nights, an odd hybrid of genres and ontological stances, may be her account of that life.

Or perhaps not - she did say, as Geoffrey O'Brien recounts in his introduction to the NYRB edition, that "A good deal of the book is, as they say, made up." This "as they say" is a bit of brilliance; it plays off the convention that memoirs are as much exercises in the weaving of fictions as novels are devices for sublimating personal demons, but it also asserts Hardwick's nearly infinite capacity to inhabit two stances at once. There is the fictional character Elizabeth, the protagonist of Sleepless Nights, and the outsider observing her fraught fictionality. Creating a protagonist who is both you and not-you is innovative, but it also reveals the anxiety of fiction writing, which demands a complex dance of revealing and concealing from the author.

In these identity games, Sleepless Nights reminds me of Martin Crimp's play Attempts on her Life, in which various efforts at the creation of a central character (via the lenses of screenwriting, celebrity, journalism, autobiography, archeology, fiction, and performance) reveal their inner violence as well as the multiplicity of identity. Attempts on her Life, famously, can mean either efforts at the ineffable holistic understanding of identity, or murderous attempts to eradicate it. But Hardwick's novel/memoir/genre-cracking performance also reminded me strongly of Adrienne Kennedy's work, perhaps because of the strong presence of New York as an environmental character, and perhaps because Kennedy chooses both writing and the stage as a means of negotiating the relationship between art and personal trauma, fiction and biography.

It seems strange to me that Sleepless Nights should fall into dialogue (in my mind) primarily with dramatic texts when, for all its generic experiments, it is fairly clearly prose. It is a novel of fragments, in which the events of Elizabeth's life are recounted as through the diffusing impulse of memory, an impulse which seems centrifugal, but in fact connects disparate elements as no linear narrative could do. Time never presents a problem for memory: associations skip freely over the years on thematic or imagistic lines, outlining a character, a relationship or a place without any reference to temporal development, to the arcs or lines of a well-made play or a realist novel.

Oddly, the novel begins with an assertion of time, the time of writing, before establishing memory's power to transform the order of history: "It is June," goes the first line, "This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today." Living and writing cannot be separated. Both are actions that irrevocably transform everything that came before, as well as everything that comes after.

In one very famous section, Billie Holiday's bold and shattered life kisses up against Elizabeth's, and yet these encounters are no more or less formative than the quasi-marital relationship she develops with her gay roommate in roughly (always roughly!) the same period. Elizabeth lives life as an experiment in hybridity; a relationship cannot simply be friendship, but must partake in complexities of eros and convention that confuse the received wisdom on sexuality.

Some of the novels fragments are set out in letters, some as reflections on character (it is primarily a work about character, rather than about plot), some as responses to epigrammatic interjections from other famous writers. In fact, Sleepless Nights is considerably more aphoristic than it is novelistic, as you can probably tell from this unusually abstract review. Any attempt to summarize the plot of Sleepless Nights seems to me to be a flirtation with madness (Susan Sontag spoke beautifully to the subtlety of its shifts when she called it "a novel of mental weather"), but there are passages from every part of the short work which make this a thrilling read.

Hardwick on travel:

I took a journey, and of course, immediately everything was new. When you travel, your first discovery is that you do not exist. (5)

Travel as self-annihilation, as an exercise in proportion. How very different from the common assumption of tourism, that travel means having the world conform to your comfort, your wishes. Touristic travel is a way to bring back the whole world in convenient, manageable, diminished photographs. To reassert the reality of your quotidian life.

Speaking of photographs:

Photographs of marriage. records of blood, decisions, sacraments observed. In my apartment, around us, in the old fading red-pine chest, in the mahogany desk, in the Swedish desk too, in the fumed oak blanket chest, in manila envelopes marked "trip to Europe" are my own photographs, three hundred or more, that bear witness to form; pictures in the drawer, in the old box, photographs that make one his own ancestor. Of others I have cared about, cared for years - not a trace, not a fingerprint. As it should be. Those who leave nothing behind cannot be missed for long. (60)

And, perhaps my favorite, Hardwick on possessions, family, and sharing:

Of course these things are not mine. I think they are usually spoken of as ours, that tea bag of a word which steeps in the conditional. (6)

Here we are back to social hybridity, the double-stance of the "usually spoken of," cousin of "as you say" - myself/not-myself.

This is a fairly extraordinary document of a life and a character. Sleepless Nights feels as if someone had written the most vivid and witty of diaries for several decades, then ripped out all the pages and tossed them into the air. The reader wanders into this experiment in Dada with Hardwick, picking up a moment here, an encounter there, trying to make meaning out of seemingly random conjunctions. And how, after all, does one make meaning out of a life?


Sleepless Nights (1979)
Elizabeth Hardwick
****

• You can find Sleepless Nights (New York Review Books Classics) at Amazon, or most other booksellers and libraries.
• I read and reviewed this book as part of the Slaves of Golconda reading group project. After July 31st, a copy of this review will be posted at their website, where you will also be able to find other bloggers' responses to the book.
  

Poll!

As you can see, I am experimenting with Blogger's new poll function. The current poll (which you can find to the right of the blog) asks those of you who are participating in the Unread Authors Challenge whether you would like to have a group blog devoted to the challenge.

For those of you who are wondering what a group blog is in this context, I will explain: it is a blog in which all the (willing) participants have permission to post their reviews for the challenge, their lists, updates on their progress, questions for other members, recommendations, etc. You don't necessarily have to create any new content to post to a group blog; many members just post copies of or links to the reviews they have written for their regular blog or book journal. The New York Times Notable Books Challenge blog is a representative (and quite active) example of this sort of project.

The PROS for our challenge (as I see it):

• a one-stop location for viewing the lists and reviews of other participants
• (a corollary to the above) the opportunity to be reminded of authors you haven't read... because you have forgotten they exist. Or never knew in the first place.
• a haven to seek encouragement when the challenge gets tough or to share enthusiasm when it is exhilarating.
  

The CONS:

• I tend to think that group blogs work best when the challenge is limited to a subset of available literature (a single genre, for instance, or an awards list, or a language/geographical region). This means that there is more overlap in what participants are reading, and the reviews provide an impetus for a detailed discussion.*
• Blog weariness
  

So go vote in the poll, and if there is widespread support, I will set a blog up. Feel free to leave comments if the preordained "answers" from the poll don't suffice to express the fervor or nuance of your opinion.




*For instance, I have set myself a personal challenge to dedicate each calendar year to a different nation, region, or language's literature (reading at least a book a month within this theme). This year, the country is Australia, and I am having a great time. In 2008, I would like to make this a public challenge, and this seems to me to be an ideal situation for a group blog -- the members could then recommend authors and books to one another as they read, and discuss some of the regional classics that many people are reading. If you would be interested in participating in this challenge, keep your eye out for my next poll in September, which will ask potential participants to vote on which of a few possible nations and regions will be 2008's theme.