AGOODBOOK.COM
                                        &
                   INTERNET  MONKEYS  !!!

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."

Thus Robert Wilensky, professor of Information Science at the University of California at Berkeley, quite
good-naturedly characterized the omnipresent detritus of our Cybertimes.

And now, permit me to tiptoe through the tulips of our basic aesthetic dilemma:

• If a monkey (or a million monkeys) produced the works of Shakespeare, would it be art?  Not from the monkey's point of view unless the monkey understood the inestimable insights it produced.  Not from the reader's point of view, unless the reader is similarly capable of understanding the insights.
• If the Works of Shakespeare were produced on the Internet (by monkeys or otherwise), how would we (the general and, presumably, curious public) learn about them, read them and find art therein?
• No matter how we tiptoe through the tulips, our path leads to a fundamental notion of DISCRIMINATION, of the necessary and fundamental task of distinguishing art from junk, music from noise.  It is the act of making a judgement based on one's PRINCIPLES and one's UNDERSTANDING.
• The "Marketing Revolution" has been largely successful in removing the notions of discrimination, principle and understanding from popular awareness and replacing it with the far less taxing phenomenon of IN-YOUR-FACENESS, once the exclusive domain of demanding children and street-vendors.  With in-your-faceness to light one's way, one chooses from what is thrust upon one and the labor of marketers acquires the dignity of a Presidential news conference.
• The response to this New Age, to this new onslaught, was brought to us by the most unlikely of guru's, Nancy Reagan: JUST SAY "NO!"

            We are using the reach and economies of the Internet to do
                what a million monkeys cannot: to distinguish art from junk.
 

                  Steven A. Bassion
                 publisher@agoodbook.com

• THE WINNER IS......Elijah Fung <sjhivctr@asiaonline.net>.    Our subscriber from Hong Kong is the winner of a copy of Trillion Dollar Tricks.  Register for the June giveaway, Kiss Houston Goodbye, when you visit  www.agoodbook.com .
• Ponderable of the Month:  Readers are invited to submit the name of the best satire they have ever read.

AGoodBook Pick of the Month:
                                   KISS HOUSTON GOODBYE

An African country is starving - again - and a group of university students decide the answer is nuclear blackmail.

Opposing their well-intentioned terror is a real and never-before-written-about top security U.S. military unit: N.E.S.T., Nuclear Emergency Search Team.

For whom are you rooting when one side is starving and the other side is innocent civilians? Do you have any
friends in Houston?

This techno-thriller was written with the help of a Los Alamos physicist. It will keep you on the edge of your seat
from start to finish.

A SIMPLE MISUNDERSTANDING, by David  Lesson, (284 pages,  430K) is available only as a downloadthrough the Internet from www.agoodbook.com , and for only $4.95.
                                            Read Excerpts

                                                                    Order the book ($4.95)
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