Books and Buffalo: Both deader ’n Elvis, some misinformed reports would have you believe

Poor old J.K. Toole, so thoroughly brilliant and correspondingly nuts, sucked the exhaust-pipe back in ’69, having determined that self-asphyxiation was the answer, just because Simon and Schuster wouldn’t publish his satirical novel about New Orleans oddballs. I guess he showed them. His book, A Confederacy of Dunces, appeared posthumously, in which state it won a Pulitzer Prize and sold a million-and-a-half copies.

You might say Toole had the last long laugh: He’s doorknob-dead, sure, but so is the D.H. Holmes department store that was the hub of his story, so is the entire city of New Orleans, and so too, for good measure, are book publishing and book retailing. (I can’t recall the make of the automobile wherein the author chose to end it all, but to complete the chain I’d guess it had to be a smoke-emitting Oldsmobile, or De Soto, or AMC Ambassador, or some other now-defunct American brand.)

This phenomenal string of Toole-related mortalities deserves to be called something, so we’ll name it in honor of Toole’s protagonist. Gather round, and hear about the Curse of Ignatius J. Reilly.

Dead books. The British author Simon Winchester, whose middle-brow investigative subjects have included the Oxford English Dictionary, recently told the Guardian newspaper: “Until six months ago, I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last forever. Since the arrival of the iPad, I am now wholly convinced otherwise. The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed.”

His comment was prompted by the report that the venerable old OED – which, you could claim, forms the very building-blocks of all English-language literature – may migrate entirely to an exclusively electronic format.

Does it follow, then, that days are numbered for the printed word? There’s scads of well-publicized evidence to support Winchester’s view.  Amazon.com claims their sales of e-books for the Kindle device already exceeds the volume of hardcover books they ship. And Sony, which sells competing e-readers, figures there will be more digital books than paper copies produced, within a mere five years.

Mom and pop book retailers: Hello, we must be going

You already see signs of the radical restructuring in the book business. It’s most noticeable in the UK, where the act of lollygagging around High Street bookstores is, or was, a cherished tradition – for me, anyway.  But the Borders chain seems to have disappeared during the last year, following the exits of Ottakar’s and Books Etc. The independent booksellers are long, long gone. W.H. Smith appears to have drastically reduced its book inventory, and The Works, formerly a cheerful source of remaindered book titles, now features a range of old videos (“Carry On Nurse”) and strange tsotchkes, such as commemorative teaspoons and glue-on tattoos.  That leaves only Waterstone’s, which is owned and run by HMV, a disorganized and unpleasant music and video chain that consumers have hated for decades.

It’s creepy to see the number of book retailers shrinking before your eyes, but more disturbing yet is the emerging confusion over what a book is supposed to be. The current choices are print or digital, but some publishers insist on blurring the edges. I was surprised the other day to receive an e-mail message from MyNovel.ca, offering the opportunity to “Write a novel and make someone close to you the hero of the intrigue.” Many people (especially them wot’s got writerly inclinations) would initially decline this suggestion, knowing that it typically takes most of an entire weekend to hammer out a medium-sized novel, sometimes with a couple of evenings thrown in for proofreading — as poor old Toole used to complain.

But this new service, which originated in France, brings the novel-creation process within everyman’s reach, providing a boilerplate and the chance for you to fill in the persona of anyone you choose, to function as the cleft-chinned protagonist. There’s 21^st century efficiency for you.

For around sixty bucks, you can jointly scribble a 160-page whodunit, or cowboy yarn, or bodice-ripper, or even a medical thriller, with Herve Mestron – yes, the Herve Mestron – and feature yourself, or a chum, or a co-worker, or your mom, in the plot. By inserting your chosen party smack dab into the narrative, you can transform anyone into an integral cog in the great wheel of literature.

Unfortunately, if the excerpt provided on the company’s website is anything to go on, Herve Mestron is no Michael Crichton. Monsieur Mestron’s paint-by-numbers epic, “Short Circuit,” strikes this critic as perhaps a tad trite in plotting, with unconvincing dialogue, and a style best described as Franglish, of a sort translated with painstaking care by the distinguished craftsmen at the old 5e arrondissement house of Google et Google. Here’s a snippet:

“We never really know what is going on inside a skull. Unknown, artful mechanics, whose laws cannot be found in any textbook. The human mystery. Well, here it is. Doctor Chaveleau, sporting his eternally snowy smile, welcomes him into his den with an iron fist.”

The idea being that the iron fist need not belong to Doctor Chaveleau. Pay up, and you can substitute the name of any evil dermatologist or periodontist of your choosing. (I have a list, in case suggestions are required.)

Sadly, the opportunity to collaborate with l’auteur Mestron comes too late for the departed Toole, who surely would not have taken the rejection of his manuscript quite so hard, if it only meant he was out-of-pocket to the tune of sixty bucks.

Dead cities. Five years after Hurricane Katrina laid the place to waste, and dispersed one-third of the burgh’s residents, New Orleans can claim to have achieved something of a minor comeback. The city recently ranked only fifth on a roster of America’s Dead Cities, compiled by a website called 247WallSt.com. Analyzing census data, combined with some stats gathered by MIT researchers, the website determined there are four towns in the US even worse off than the famously battered and depopulated New Orleans.

Not dead. Resting.

Here, however, is where I take umbrage, at the risk of replaying the Michael Palin role in Monty Python’s Dead Parrot skit. Judged to be the deadest of the dead cities is Buffalo, New York, a place I know extremely well, and, truth to tell, a spot I hold dear. Those are my credentials for rebutting this libel against the Queen City of the Great Lakes.

Yes, Buffalo’s political and economic leadership is much more than a little screwed up, as the most ardent civic boosters will instantly concede, and it has its ingrained problems, including a debilitating inferiority complex – which will not be ameliorated by the publicity in 247WallSt.com.

But there’s a wonderful vibrancy to city life in Buffalo that only a moron or Manhattanite would fail to recognize. To illustrate, I point toward the blocks of modest bungalows in the south end of town, from whence you can carry your golf clubs to Cazenovia Park Golf Course, a sweet little nine-hole municipal course that opened in 1929, and then stroll straight over, still carrying clubs, to the Blarney Castle or Doc Sullivan’s and knock back a cheap draught, or, better yet, several. That’s the type of everyday pleasure that is exclusive to millionaires in most places, but is available to working-folk, retirees, and college students in Buffalo.

But I’m not applying the same criteria as MIT. One of the measures I’d use to determine the vitality of a city is the health of its booksellers. Buffalo has not one but two branches of a great independent bookstore, Talking Leaves, both of which stock plenty of titles, some of them about the town and its inhabitants (here‘s a good one to start with.) The location on Elmwood Avenue features a snack counter that pours some good Chilean wines at five bucks a glass, which you can slurp while you browse, or take outside to a table and you watch the college  crowd flit past. If you wanted to sit there on a Saturday morning and thumb through your copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, it could appear to some blogging nitwit witnessing your behavior from a distant white-collar metropolis — say, Charlotte, Miami or Toronto — that you’ve parked yourself smack among the legions of the dead.  At least two would say otherwise: Ignatius J. Reilly, and me.

How to save the Buick brand? Let’s have a party!

Forget each of Vanity Fair, Congressional Quarterly, The Economist, GQ and the National Enquirer: The only contemporary publication that properly depicts the zeitgeist of this age, with all the attendant tumult and hullabaloo, is Brandweek. The others are all just so 2006. I can’t imagine how you might expect to know where you stand in the world if you don’t closely study each issue of Brandweek.

Here’s what I mean: Practically any news source will lead you directly to the conclusion that the managers of General Motors Corporation are hopeless imbeciles who haven’t the slightest idea how to run an auto company (see the latest stupidity here and here.) But only Brandweek details the full extent of their deficiencies — and, as an added kick, leaves you with News You Can Use.

Grab yourself a copy of the June 26 edition, and flip to Elaine Wong’s report headlined “GM Attempts to Redefine Buick Brand Via Partying.” Ms. Wong manages to cram more undiluted revelation into a mere 12 paragraphs than we, as information consumers, have any right to expect.

As deep background, let’s begin with GM’s ill-advised attempts to bring order to their mish-mash of legendary product badges. You’ve witnessed the follies as the General unsuccessfully sold and then folded Saturn, mothballed and then ditched Saab, bobbled and finally unloaded Hummer, cast off and then decided to keep Opel, and, lastly, without a pause for thought, mercy-killed Pontiac, which only happened to be one of their best-selling brands.

Not your grandmother's Regal -- but how, exactly?

From the outset, though, GM was determined to hang on to Buick, which it insisted (on the basis of scant evidence) had a brilliant future. The linchpin of those prospects is the introduction of the Buick Regal, a re-branded Opel Insignia, Europe’s Car of the Year in 2009. There’s nothing whatsoever new in the slightest about GM slapping American emblems on last year’s Opel models. In fact, the discontinued Saab 93 and Saturn Aura – not to mention the still-extant Cadillac CTS and Chevrolet Malibu – are all different permutations of the same flavor of Opel. That’s the same Opel division that GM tried to sell to Frank Stronach, until they changed their minds on a whim.

According to Brandweek, what’s fascinating about the challenge GM faces in pitching the Opel as a Buick, is that the market the company has targeted — the youngish North American managerial class that digs Audi, Mercedes, and Acura — wouldn’t be caught on a dare behind the wheel of anything labelling itself a Buick, which Ms. Wong accurately, if uncharitably, calls a “stodgy, driven-by-your-grandparents vehicle.”

Well, it’s been proven that you can revitalize the career of 89-year-old comedy actress Betty White, by getting her to talk dirty on late-night TV. How do you reconstruct the Buick image into something that ignites the passion of Skippy the e-marketer, or that sassy Nicole from down in the HR department?

I know. Let’s have a party! Woooooohh.

Yes, a party. And so, GM has engaged the services of the Cohn & Wolfe PR consultancy, and something called Thrillist, to invite groups of 500 taste-makers to ‘Regal Remix’ parties in five cities. (Thrillist, we learn, is an e-newsletter aimed at ‘trendsetting urban males.’) The party assembles these bonny wee swingers to “sip cocktails, listen to music, check out the new Buicks and change their perceptions in between.”

This is not my beautiful house

As anyone who has ever groggily found themselves in a Rodeway Inn in Yreka will confirm, it’s no big deal to jump from slurping Mojitos and White Russians, to waking up and discovering you’ve changed perceptions. However, Billy Fuccillo himself might advise you that there’s many a slip twixt getting these pigeons to drink your free booze at night, and getting them into a cubicle in the dealership during daylight hours to sign the goddamned lease agreement.

Mr. Fuccillo: The name of the game is moving product

But there I go, sounding like the kind of brown-shoed fogey who has never previously heard of Shill-list, I mean Thrillist. What I meant to say was: Listen, daddio, this party idea is gangbusters. To demonstrate how we know that’s the case, here’s a quote direct from Brandweek: “Data from Zeta Interactive, an interactive marketing agency in New York, shows that Buick moved from being No. 17 to No. 8 in terms of auto tonal buzz (a ratio of positive versus negative chatter about the brand) as of June 1.”

Pity that the GM brain-trust didn’t have that factoid in hand, back last year when they were pleading for handouts from the governments of the USA, Canada, and the EU: “Senator, have I told you about our auto tonal buzz? Through the roof!”

I rather admire the advent of tonal buzz, a patently farcical concept, as an attempt to quantify, and monetize, nothing whatsoever. The very phrase seems like a cartoon punch-line in search of a hilarious situation. “Sorry I wrecked your Buick, pops, but the good news is that you’ve moved from No. 12 to No. 3 in terms of parental tonal buzz.”

Indeed, I doff my Kangol cap to the cheeky lads at Zeta Interactive for their astonishing bravado, if that’s what it is. If you or I were to encounter a group of executives so stupid that they had convinced themselves their only shot at survival was to tie their corporate future to a brand that was irredeemably out-of-date, we might feel a kind of pity. These marketing cats only see opportunity.

Someone persuaded poor, pathetic General Motors to first treat a bunch of deadbeats to the par-tay of the year, and then, to top it off, they sold GM a sure-fire system to quantify that they weren’t just taking a fortune, and blowing it on whiskey and loud music. That must have been the night they invented tonal buzz.

I’m grateful to Brandweek for shedding light on this magnificent new process that takes taxpayers’ money, and converts it into tonal buzz – a precious substance that has to be worth at least as much as equity in the General Motors Corporation. That is to say that if you jumped in your mom’s creaky old Buick and drove your stash of tonal buzz down to the bank branch and tried to deposit it in your account, you would be met by a group of tellers laughing at you and shaking their heads.

But no one’s laughing at GM — are they? Say, do you think you might pass me over one of those fine-looking Mojitos?

Sorry, Canada, but we happen to be fresh out of drugs today. Try again tomorrow

This is what your prescription would look like, provided you could find a pharmacist to fill it

Dependability is what Canadians look for from public utilities, and come what may, the suppliers live up to expectations by reliably cranking out your electricity, pumping your tap-water, collecting your recyclables, and processing your sewage. Similarly, Tim Horton’s, rightly regarded as the greatest of all Canadian bulwarks, achieved its exalted status in part because it never exhausts its inventory of double-doubles while you’re making your way to the counter. Following those principles, it should never have to occur to patients that Canadian drugstores might run out of drugs. Except that it has. And they have.

The great drug shortage of 2010, documented recently on the front pages of newspapers from Saskatchewan to Newfoundland, arrives at an especially suspicious time. For more than a decade, patients have hearing suggestions that Ottawa’s price controls on branded pharmaceuticals, in a globally driven marketplace, might one day suppress needed local supplies of newly introduced products, including difficult-to-manufacture biologicals.

However, this current situation seems to have nothing to do with new branded drugs. According to reports, the shelves seem to be increasingly bare of mainstay generic therapies. The Star-Phoenix newspaper of Saskatoon reports community pharmacies on an average business day are short of up to 40 prescription drugs (full story here.) Says one local druggist: “I’ve been a pharmacist for 17 years and I’ve never seen anything like this before. And I’ve never seen it be such a mystery, such as why this shortage is happening. Even our provincial registrar, our top boss, said that he doesn’t know why.”

The scarcity has challenged the ingenuity of pharmacists. Pill-counters have been forced to brush up on their long-dormant compounding skills. According to the Telegram of St. John’s, pharmacists in Newfoundland are reformulating children’s liquid versions of Rxs, to compensate for the inavailability of adult-strength tablets (check it out here.)

The shortage, while officially inexplicable, seems to have been on the horizon at least since this January, when Apotex announced without explanation that it would discontinue Apo-Levocarb CR, its version of anti-Parkinsonian Tx Sinemet CR (Bristol-Myers Squibb.) The company, known for its exceptionally loquacious founder and management, lately has been close-lipped on supply matters, and the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association, which previously has been able to explain just about anything, is uncharacteristically at a loss for words. However, the CGPA’s Julie Tam did seem to infer that changing economics might play a role. Ontario recently enacted Bill 16, reducing formulary pricing for generics, effectively slicing the price it pays by up to half. Other provinces appear poised to follow. Ms. Tam, acknowledging that margins have been tightened, tells the Telegram: “Depending on the drug you don’t always have the luxury of making lots of extra batches.”

Some anxious commentators have rushed to conclude that generics manufacturers may be dialing down supplies as a means of protesting Ontario’s actions. While I have found some fault, on occasion, with certain practices of the generics industry, I just can’t accept that the current drug shortages are part of a design intended to punish politicians by alarming the public.

It is more plausible to blame Barack Obama.

No good deed goes unpunished. Is Obamacare the reason why you can't buy pills in Swift Current?

By enacting expanded health coverage in the US, President Obama has broadened the stateside market for generic drugs. Resultantly, Canadian generic manufacturers have sought FDA certification to produce medicine for export to the US, which first requires a stringent review by inspectors of operating and quality assurance procedures. The process, according to some accounts, may be responsible for slowing or disrupting domestic supply lines in Canada. It’s one theory that, in the absence of other explanations, has some resonance.

Health Minister Aglukkaq: Open up competition in generics, can'tcha?

Regardless of the cause, the shortages must be viewed with grave concern. A recent article in the journal Neurology (2009;73:213-217) entitled “Causes and costs of a generic drug shortage” examined the consequences of the inavailability in the US of Parkinsonian Tx selegiline (a compound for which, coincidentally, five out of six scrips are filled by Apotex.) The article’s authors provide a prescient comment: “Generic drug shortages carry economic and health implications. Given ongoing consolidation in the generics drug industry, these shortages may become more common and may require heightened regulatory scrutiny of the generic drug industry.” Here’s the link to the article.

For Ottawa, this should be a simple puzzle to solve. The way to ensure a dependable and affordable armamentarium of generic drugs is to encourage a greater degree of competition in the sector — which can be quickly achieved by opening up our market to reputable foreign suppliers. Honorable Leona Aglukkaq? Where do you stand on this issue?