Cantara’s Notebook

Why the Movie Industry is SO Wrong About SOPA

2012-01-28T19:53:00.000-05:00

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims that SOPA and PIPA are aimed at stopping online piracy. But as this infographic demonstrates, it’s really about fighting innovation. Thanks to Matador Network for this infographic. (Click on illustration for larger picture.)

Just a Shout-Out to Annette Haven

2012-01-07T20:45:00.000-05:00

Lovely, tiny, elegant woman. I never did scenes with her, but some of my scenes may have been interpolated in her movies.

Rules for the Revolution

2011-11-06T10:45:00.003-05:00

Do I have to come back to America and slap you all upside the head? Even the Weather Underground wouldn't have fucked up as much as you have.

All right—here are the rules for the revolution:

DO NOT bring the children. For Christ's sake leave them with the sitter. Children who are too young to understand the cause shouldn't be put in jeopardy for the cause.
DO NOT make life harder for the elderly and infirm.
Appoint leaders. Yes, you're going to have to do this. You can throw them to the wolves later.
Hide the money! Your leaders can do this for you.
DO NOT let in spongers.
Cut out the luxuries! NO MORE organic chicken dinners and sheep's-milk-cheese salads!
DO NOT disrespect your food crew!
DO respect your environment—which includes its permanent residents.
Rally to a SPECIFIC CAUSE. This is a strength, not a weakness.
ARTICULATE THE FUCKING MISSION!!! Failure to do this is what undid the Weather Underground.
If you're going to long-term live/demonstrate in the street the cops and the conservatives aren't your worst enemy—it's the street itself.
Put down that fucking laptop and stop blogging. THIS ISN'T SPAIN AND YOU'RE NO GEORGE ORWELL. Orwell was up in the hills with a rifle. After the war, then he wrote.
STOP PLAYING TO THE CAMERAS!
Update: And for Christ's sake--literally--DON'T STEAL FROM OR VANDALIZE CHURCHES!

My husband marched in Selma specifically to protect black voters and defend the Voting Rights Act of 1965. My aunt in Manila was part of a human cordon of nuns who protected ballot boxes from being stolen and destroyed by Marcos's thugs. I'm part Catalonian and for all I know I had cousins up there in the hills with Orwell.

Now, behave yourselves or I'll strap you all to a chair and fucking make you watch Running on Empty till you puke.

The Requisite Condiment: A Parody

2011-10-31T02:36:00.000-04:00

[This is the website photo. Really.]

A Parody on BBC 4 Extra of
THE EXQUISITE CONTINENT

The Requisite Condiment: An expedition led by the stalwart Colonel Dijon Mustard, accompanied by his loyal aide-de-camp Major Grey Chutney and their driver, the young but resolute Corporal Malt Vinegar. They propose to take the A-1 to Worcestershire where they will immediately head for the Great Wasabi Range in search for the legendary Miracle Whip of the lost tribe of Bovril. But will their plans be thwarted by the mysterous villian known as "The Horseradish"? In five episodes.

Episode 1: It's a Long Way to Piccalilli
Episode 2: An Adventure to Relish
Episode 3: What's Sauce for the Goose...
Episode 4: The Creaming of Horseradish
Episode 5: The Grilling Conclusion

The Unfinished Legacy of 2010 by Frank Viviano

2011-10-20T08:09:00.000-04:00

Take a close and objective look at the angry demonstrators now gathered on Wall Street, and at similar protest encampments burgeoning from San Francisco to Madrid. What you see is not simply a vast expression of rage at the crisis enveloping the world of democracy.
The demonstrations also frame a fundamental contradiction—a profound source of strength that has been transformed into a disabling weakness.

They deserve enormous credit for drawing a global spotlight to the perpetrators of that crisis: a sinister cabal of financial scamsters and rightwing politicians, backed by the dubiously “grassroots” electorate of the Tea Party. What almost no one, on the right or left alike, wants to talk about is that the cabal was empowered by the very people who are now denouncing it.

Progressives, out of a mixture of political correctness and embarrassment, carefully avoid the subject. The Republicans are delighted at the silence, because it masks what should be fatal weaknesses in their own position.

It may not be pleasant to hear, but a massive Democratic voter copout in last year’s elections is what put the reactionary right in the driver’s seat, creating the disastrous logjam in Congress, and bringing to a dead halt the hyperactive first two years of the Obama Administration.

Copout at the Polls

In 2008, more than 65 million Americans cast Democratic votes in Congressional races, a 13 million-vote edge over the Republicans. In 2010, the Democratic vote plummeted to an abysmal 35 million, 6 million less than the GOP, which took decisive power in the House and paralyzed the Senate.

We think we know this story. But the truth is, we haven’t begun to absorb its full details and implications yet:

The number of voters under 24 who bothered to go to the polls in 2010 dropped by a stupefying 60 percent, and those between 24 and 29 by almost 50 percent. Altogether, the participation of young people—who had been overwhelmingly pro-Obama in 2008– declined by 11 million votes.

Among over-65-year-olds, the core of the Tea Party Movement, the voting numbers barely changed, from 17.6 million in 2008 to 17.5 million in 2010.

The African-American vote fell by 40 percent, and the Hispanic vote by almost 30 percent.

Among the mostly white voters who earn more than $200,000 per year, the turnout fell by a scant 5 percent, from 7 million to 6.5 million.

Voting by those with annual incomes under $30,000 dropped by 33 percent, more than six times the figure for the affluent.

In effect, the abstainers turned a potential Democratic landslide into a full-scale collapse—with nightmarish consequences for civil rights, for the U.S. and world economies, and for social programs that range across the board from health care and educational funding to employment programs, pension benefits and the sagging national infrastructure.

It was a dream come true for the radical right, the sworn enemies of all public services. Their vote, measured at exit polls asking whether government was too intrusive, scarcely changed between the two elections, dropping from 50 million to 47 million.

At the same time, the number of voters believing that government should do more for its citizens—the central plank of the progressive platform—sunk from 60 million to 32 million, a staggering 47 percent slide.

These are astronomical, game-changing numbers. It makes no sense to argue that the Democratic voting collapse was a matter of demoralization. Decisions on whether to go to the polls were made by the early autumn of 2010, just 20 months into an Obama Administration that had pushed through what many analysts regard as the most ambitious legislative agenda in modern US history.

Half a century ago, Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez understood that genuine change could only be achieved through long term, patient struggle—and that the prize, in King’s famous words, was full access to the nation’s key institutions, notably the ballot box and the governing seats it fills.

The leaders and foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Era fought with unflagging commitment, and King himself was martyred, in a two-decade campaign for the voting privileges that 2010 abstainers dismissed as unworthy of an hour’s time on a single Tuesday in November. The Wall Street demonstrators are now debating an even broader boycott of the 2012 presidential election.

Yet if two-thirds of the 28 million progressive stay-at-homes had gone to the polls last year, the U.S. Congress today would be in the hands of a solid Democratic majority beholden to liberal votes.

The Republicans’ Best Hope

The nation’s key institutions stand at a momentous crossroads, ripe for fresh ideas and energy.

But in response, the anthem so far is nebulous anti-institutionalism, a “leaderless resistance movement,” as the Occupy Wall Street web site proudly boasts, without defined structure or goals. “It’s not any more about parties, organizations or unions,” declares the manifesto of its Spanish counterpart, the International Commission of Sol, which also calls for mass abstention from voting.

Visceral impatience is endemic today, especially where the young are concerned. The Internet Age, with its virtual substitutes for the real thing—for tangible community, for productive struggle—promises to deliver on every desire, easily and instantly. Just twitter a crowd into the streets, and the rest will fall into place. But the hard truth is that it takes far more than that. Ask the Iranians, the Tunisians and Egyptians, who are invariably cited as models by the Spanish and American protestors.

Neither easy nor instant solutions are possible when a society faces the challenges that greeted the incoming Obama Administration in January of 2009. The nation’s first African-American president took office amidst two unwinnable and unfunded wars and a global economic crash unparalleled since the Great Depression. He was confronted by a rabid political opposition that challenged the new president’s very right to govern on trumped-up charges that he is not certifiably “American”, when their transparent subtext was that he is not white.

As much as anything else, Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency was about the slow work of acquiring power and responsibility in the machinery of representative government. So too were the many milestones that preceded his victory: the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that dismantled segregated schools; the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin; its elaboration in 1965 with a Voting Rights Act that removed the last obstacles to the polls, and a presidential executive order enforcing affirmative action guidelines.

Each of those institutional steps flowed from the pressure exerted by election results, and each of them helped rewrite the terms of national life. Only someone who was not alive in the 1950s, when the struggle began in earnest, could maintain that nothing important has changed in the United States since then.

It is far more accurate to say that almost everything has changed—which is what terrifies the conservative right. They recognize that the institutions of representative democracy are expressions of collective interest, and that the crucial vectors of population and age are aligned against them.

Their sole hope for turning back the clock lies in a new majority that doesn’t bother to vote.

A Poem for Occupy the Streets Global Day

2011-10-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats

Under the Volcano Bookstore Opens Today

2011-10-14T11:18:00.000-04:00

The time has come. The only used English bookstore for decades in what foreigners call “Mexico City” is about to open its doors, and we proudly invite you to be here on our first day.

Come by anytime from 11 AM to 7PM to check out the digs, have a cup of joe, meet new friends, buy a book from our thousands of titles—the largest selection in the city—and later in the day enjoy fresh-grilled burgers, Gringo guacamole, and delicious, transcendental pulque in our elegant Old World courtyard.

DJ Zorrita will play the Goth and punk rock records of our youth, we'll get some fiery games going in the alley and there'll be a surprise or two.

I'd like to take this opportunity also to thank the many donors, investors and supporters who have for more than a year been pushing this to where we are now: the list is too long to put here. But when you get to the store, step inside and look up.

—Grant Cogswell

UNDER THE VOLCANO BOOKS
Cerrada Chiapas 40-C
Col. Roma Norte
Del. Cuauhtémoc
Distrito Federal
Mexico City
MEXICO 06700

Google Map: g.co/maps/2a66z
Website: underthevolcanobooks.com
To Donate Books: underthevolcanobooks@gmail.com

Mission Statement: To establish an embassy for the soul of the English-speaking world—its literature—in Mexico; an educational resource for Chilangos learning English and eager to explore the artistic reach of the language; a foundation for an international literary magazine, Mexico Review, appearing in 2011; a web-free, Kindle-less island of analog time in the digital sea; a community center for Commonwealth and American expatriates in the most exciting, vibrant and accessible city on Earth; an institution that will pay tribute to that city's magnificence with the best our native culture has to offer.

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Mother and Son, Courtesy of Nichols and May

2011-08-30T19:00:00.000-04:00

What can I say about Mike Nichols and Elaine May that hasn’t been said before, except to pass on this anecdote: When Tommy Smothers paid an on-stage tribute to Elaine May, he asked her in his typical aw-shucks way:

Tommy: So did you guys have an affair back then, or what?

Elaine: Exactly.

Here’s their perhaps most famous sketch, I think it was from the Jack Paar show. Heck, even I remember it.

(As ever, click to play, right-click to download.)

[Son's Phone Call to Mom]

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Paul Carr Thinks Graham Swift is Another Old Fart (And I Agree)

2011-08-26T13:17:00.000-04:00

It's a generally accepted rule that you shouldn't take too seriously anything an author says while promoting his book on the radio. Or at least I thought it was a generally accepted rule. Certainly, Christopher Buckley tells a great anecdote about the time he was asked by a radio host whether, per the author bio on his novel Little Green Men, he really had acted as policy advisor to William Howard Taft. Not only did Buckley happily confirm that he had advised President Taft, but he spent the remainder of the interview discussing the specific advice he'd imparted to the (very) late statesman. Of course Buckley said something ridiculous on the radio—he had a book to promote.

And so it was that Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift appeared on the BBC's World At One program this past Wednesday to promote his new book, Wish You Were Here. Asked for his views on the rise of ebooks, he said this:

"I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can't make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect."

Or put in simpler terms, Swift suggested that would-be novelists are likely to look at the low royalties paid on ebooks and think "screw this writing lark, I'm going to become a plumber."

Such a patently ludicrous statement should have led to a collective rolling of eyes. "Oh that Graham Swift," we all ought to have said, "he'll say anything to sell a book." Incredibly though—perhaps because Swift won the Booker, or maybe because the publishing industry is so frightened of technology that they'll repeat any old scare story, and perhaps at least in part because the Internet will repeat any claim at all—Swift's words made (SEO-friendly) headlines around the world. From the Telegraph and the Daily Mail to the Hindustan Times and the Huffington Post, all repeated his opinion as terrifying fact. "Digital rates could dissuade authors from writing."

Now, of course, Mr. Swift's standing in the literary world gives me pause before I call him a fucking idiot. Furthermore, his status demands that I take a deep breath before suggesting that he is a clueless old fool, babbling about technology he doesn't understand to a BBC journalist too awestruck to challenge him. And it certainly requires that I at least count to three before breaking down all of the ways that, from start to finish, Swift's interview was a towering tidal wave of horseshit.

One, two—okay.

Swift's first assertion—that low royalties mean would-be authors might choose not to write—is idiocy, pure and simple. Ask a roomful of successful authors why they decided to write and not one of them will answer "for the money," any more than a hooker would say she chose her profession "for the flowers and candy."

Even for those of us lucky enough to have won a book deal, being an author is a pretty ghastly way to earn a crust. If being paid was our primary motivation, we'd have been far better off working in advertising or PR or posing as African princes to con idiots out of their savings. The reality is, those of us who write books for a living do so because we choose to: either because we have some burning desire to tell a story, or because we've tried real jobs and found ourselves lacking. We'd write for free (and frequently have done so)—but winning a book deal means we get to sleep till noon and spend our afternoons dicking around on YouTube when we should be typing. Moreover, the notion that authors have to choose between writing and a proper job has no basis in reality. Trollope, Kafka, Faulkner, Heller, Bukowski, Eliot, Grisham, King, Fleming, Chaucer... the list of authors who held down day jobs while working on their masterpieces is likely longer than those who didn't. You can add Graham Swift to that list too: his first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner, was written in short 5AM. bursts before the author headed to his teaching job.

But still Swift drones on about the evil of ebooks, his argument growing wider—and weirder—as the interview progresses. It turns out, digital publishing is going to starve all authors, not just newbies:

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it… I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of ‘everything belongs to everybody’ to increase because it means they don’t have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

Nurse, the screens! If I understand Swift correctly—and, depressingly, I do—he's suggesting that the purveyors of ebooks want people to believe that books are free, so they can get away with paying smaller royalties to authors. It's unclear who Swift means by "the purveyors of ebooks." Perhaps he's talking about Amazon or Apple—companies whose ereaders contain more anti-piracy measures than a Somali oil tanker, making it near-impossible for readers to re-sell, loan or even quote text from their legally purchased ebooks.

No, you're right, he can't mean them. It must be the publishers, then, who want us to see books as "just in the air to be taken." Except that everything the publishing industry has done so far—from forcing Amazon to charge inflated prices for ebooks to trying to block Google Books from indexing their authors' text—suggests they value ebooks very highly indeed; perhaps a little too highly. (I can't speak for Swift's publisher, but my own contract with Weidenfeld &amp; Nicolson—part of Hachette—offers perfectly agreeable terms for ebooks; and I haven't even won the Booker.)

Next up, Swift takes aim at those who suggest impoverished authors should find other ways to profit from their work: "You can't perform a book—so if writers go and give readings, or whatever, that's not as it were the equivalent of their book. It's that wonderful reading experience… that matters."

Anyone who has read Last Orders, the novel which won Swift his Booker, will know what he's talking about. It's a truly beautiful piece of writing, and one that can only really be appreciated in its original, printed form. How heartbreaking it must have been, then, for Swift to find himself forced to allow Last Orders to be adapted into a critically acclaimed movie starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. And how he must have wept when he read the New York Times review of the film....

For Mr. Schepisi, who wrote and directed the film version of Last Orders, the principal challenge must have been how to translate the specific gravity of Mr. Swift's prose, with its multiple narrators and its stripped-down cockney lyricism, into the light and shadow of cinema.... Mr. Schepisi... has succeeded beyond all expectation.

One can only hope the big fat check Swift will have received from the movie company went some way towards fucking his pain away.

And so finally Swift's horseshit tsunami reaches its greatest height with the tale of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) who, Swift tells us, turned the publisher-author relationship on its head by convincing Macmillan to publish Alice In Wonderland ("and pay for that process"), with Dodgson keeping a literally incredible 90% of the proceeds.

"In my view, that is the correct arrangement," Swift tells the BBC, "but of course it would be sheer wonderland now to go to a publisher and say: 'I can give you a royalty.'"

Yeah! Except that's exactly not what happened. Alice In Wonderland was published by Macmillan, and the publisher did take a very small percentage of the proceeds, with Dodgson pocketing the rest. But that's because Alice, like many books in the 1800s, was published "on commission." Today we'd call it vanity publishing: Dodgson's deal with Macmillan required that the author pay all of the costs of printing and producing Alice, with the publisher acting as a distributor. If the book did well (as it did, in Dodgson's case), Macmillan only received its 10% commission—but if it failed to break even (as most books did then, and still do today) the author was in the hole for all of the costs.

Frankly, I'd rather stick with my greedy old regular publisher for my next book than risk financial ruin going it alone, but if that's really the deal that Swift wants, he's in luck: today, any budding Charles Dodgson need only upload his work to the Kindle or iBooks stores and up to 70% of the cover price will be his to keep—accessing an enormous consumer base with one-click purchasing enabled, all without a single penny due in printing costs. (This is, after all, how Ars Technica just made $15,000 in 24 hours, with their 27,300-word assessment of the new Mac operating system, and how Jon Krakauer moved 20,000 copies in a few days of his latest essay.) A wonderland indeed! You fucking idiot.

—Paul Carr

Source: http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/mr-swifts-moronic-proposal-ebooks-will-keep-writers-from-writing

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Tinikling, the Filipino Folk Dance I Could Never Get Right

2011-08-24T13:55:00.000-04:00

[Amoroso's famous painting of this Philippine folk dance]

In commemoration of the US wide release of John Sayles' new fiilm, Amigo, here are the Bayanihans in a rendition of that bane of Filipino kids everywhere. I always got my ankles caught between those damn bamboo poles. (Click to play, right-click to download.)

[Tiniking]

He Got Her Shrieking in the Desert

2011-08-24T11:42:00.002-04:00

I have come to realize the big mistake that Arthur Miller made when he tried to "save" his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.

From the Play Maria by Isaac Babel

2011-08-14T11:01:00.005-04:00

Who knows what can happen, Yasha? They might ask you to blow up the street you were born on, and you would blow it up. Or to blast an orphanage to bits, and you'd say, "A two-zero-eight fuse," and blast that orphanage to bits. That's what you would do, Yasha, as long as they let you live your life, strum your guitar, and sleep with thin women. You're fat but you like them thin. You'll do anything, if they tell you to renounce your mother three times, you would renounce her three times. But that's not the point, Yasha! The point is they will want more: they won't let you drink vodka with the people you like, they'll make you read boring books, and the songs they teach you will be boring, too. Then you'll be mad, my dear Red Artillerist. You'll be furious, your eyes will start rolling! Then two citizens will come visiting: "Let's go, Comrade Kravchenko." "Should I take any personal effects with me or not," you'll ask them. "No, you needn't take any personal effects with you. It'll be a quick interrogation, over in a minute." And that will be the end of you, my dear Red Artillerist. It'll cost them four kopecks. It's been calculated that a Colt bullet costs four kopecks and not a centime more.

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The Woman Who Knew About Steel and Sponge

2011-08-10T12:45:00.000-04:00

[Lorraine Hansberry 1930-65]

A little preliminary reading/research in preparation for my new novel which has to do with radical politics, radical chic, and sexual experimentation in New York of the 70s brought me to Hansberry's last Broadway play before her death, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, which has to do with private and political disillusionment in the 60s. Michael just reminded me that she was also a stone lesbian, which suddenly made me look differently at her photographs—oh, baby. Plus, as one critic put it, "she ha(d) an X-ray vision when it comes to spotting the steel or the sponge in a character." That's my kind of woman.

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Move Over, Darling

2011-08-09T11:39:00.009-04:00

[That's Polly Bergen you're massaging there]

In her campiest pictures Doris Day had more sexuality in her little finger than most of these zygotes today. Except for Monroe, she's the only screen blonde who's ever turned me on.

[Move Over, Darling]

The Voice of Words by Robert McCrum

2011-08-05T22:41:00.004-04:00

[Slow down and listen]

One paradox of literary culture is that, although speech precedes literacy, and the mother tongue the alphabet, it is usually the written, not the spoken, word that attracts the most attention. So, for at least 1,000 years, English literature lived on the lips and in the memory of Everyman, handed down in folk culture. Then along came Caxton and his Westminster printing press. We have been eating paper and drinking printer's ink ever since.

The spoken word, however, retains its ancient magic. The market for the audiobook has defied the recession. Poets draw full houses. Last week, in Norwich, I heard JM Coetzee give a memorable reading to a sold-out audience in the Playhouse as part of a lively and popular literary programme. Coetzee's dry, understated performance, mirroring his prose, was a vivid reminder that the spoken word rarely fails to entertain or console.

None of this would have surprised the Greeks. Apollo was God of poetry and healing. Literature does not have to be private and meditative, though that's what is often celebrated about the book. As a communal and collaborative experience, reading can be therapeutic. Increasingly, teachers and health professionals are coming round to the view, expressed by DH Lawrence, that "one sheds one's sickness in books".

The Reader Organisation, a national charity launched in 1997, has promoted its "reading revolution" to firefighters, psychiatrists and schoolteachers, in prisons, rehab centres, hospitals and schools. It's a mission that began in Liverpool after a reading by Doris Lessing. Today, the organisation champions the curative power of reading aloud. According to its director, Jane Davis, research has begun to uncover what most writers would willingly concede: the extraordinary connection between writing, reading and good health.

Davis describes how one of her colleagues had been holding weekly meetings with "Barbara", who was barely literate, and oppressed by a long-term relationship with a "difficult" partner. After each session, Barbara would profess indifference to reading until, one day, she chanced to read WE Henley's celebration of heroic Victorian individualism, "Invictus", ending with the stanza:

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

This time, Barbara repeated this passage to herself, unprompted. When asked why she had done this, she confessed that "It makes me feel happy." She is hardly the first. "Invictus", of course, is the poem that sustained Nelson Mandela during his long incarceration on Robben Island, and the title of the recent film, starring Morgan Freeman, about how it inspired him to unite South Africa. Lighter moments in this "reading cure" include an old lady, in a group reading Othello, who asked to take the part of Iago, because "I was married to that bastard for 30 years".

Listening to the spoken word is one of the most profound sources of comfort. The sense of being looked after, nourished and replenished, is like being fed. The listener can relax and place their trust in the reader. The experience is quite unlike reading to oneself. Part of this, claims Davis, comes from "the slowness of the human voice". When we are engaged at the pace of ordinary speech, we don't skip on, we engage with the many levels of meaning in the story. It grows deeper and more real. From this, people start to talk freely about what a text has meant to them – and become liberated in their personal lives.

To promote this programme, the Reader Organisation is about to launch an anthology of prose and poetry, A Little, Aloud, for reading out in one of the hundreds of "read aloud" groups that have been springing up across the UK. It's an eclectic volume, with well-chosen gobbets from Tennyson, Dickens, Saki and Yeats as well as Elizabeth Jennings, Anna Sewell, the Brontes, Louisa M Alcott and Joanne Harris.

"Bibliotherapy" is not yet in the dictionary, but if this campaign takes wing, it might turn out to be a really important breakthrough in the practice of mental health. Words becoming deeds: it's a winning formula.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/04/reading-aloud-therapy-health-books

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Americanisms: Dontcha Just Love ’Em?

2011-08-03T15:48:00.022-04:00

[Good Ol' Lord Chesterfield]

The BBC News Magazine's recent piece on Americanisms entering the language in the UK prompted thousands to email examples. Here are 50 of the most emailed.

1. When people ask for something, I often hear: "Can I get a..." It infuriates me. It's not New York. It's not the 90s. You're not in Central Perk with the rest of the Friends. Really." Steve, Rossendale, Lancashire

[This is lunch deli speech, and has to do with one's actual ability to be waited on when one is in a three-deep crowd at the counter. Literally it is, "Do I have the ability to catch your attention and receive my order?" ~Cantara]

2. The next time someone tells you something is the "least worst option", tell them that their most best option is learning grammar. Mike Ayres, Bodmin, Cornwall

3. The phrase I've watched seep into the language (especially with broadcasters) is "two-time" and "three-time". Have the words double, triple etc, been totally lost? Grammatically it makes no sense, and is even worse when spoken. My pulse rises every time I hear or see it. Which is not healthy as it's almost every day now. Argh! D Rochelle, Bath

4. Using 24/7 rather than "24 hours, 7 days a week" or even just plain "all day, every day". Simon Ball, Worcester

[This is 7-11 speech, and you're right. ~Cantara]

5. The one I can't stand is "deplane", meaning to disembark an aircraft, used in the phrase "you will be able to deplane momentarily". TykeIntheHague, Den Haag, Holland

6. To "wait on" instead of "wait for" when you're not a waiter—once read a friend's comment about being in a station waiting on a train. For him, the train had yet to arrive—I would have thought rather that it had got stuck at the station with the friend on board. T Balinski, Raglan, New Zealand

7. "It is what it is." Pity us. Michael Knapp, Chicago, US

8. Dare I even mention the "fanny pack"? Lisa, Red Deer, Canada

9. "Touch bases". It makes me cringe no end. Chris, UK

10. Is "physicality" a real word? Curtis, US

11. Transportation. What's wrong with transport? Greg Porter, Hercules CA US

12. The word I hate to hear is "leverage". Pronounced lev-er-ig rather than lee-ver -ig. It seems to pop up in all aspects of work. And its meaning seems to have changed to "value added". Gareth Wilkins, Leicester

13. Does nobody celebrate a birthday anymore, must we all "turn" 12 or 21 or 40? Even the Duke of Edinburgh was universally described as "turning" 90 last month. When did this begin? I quite like the phrase in itself, but it seems to have obliterated all other ways of speaking about birthdays. Michael McAndrew, Swindon

14. I caught myself saying "shopping cart" instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I've never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow

[A trolley rolls on a track. "Shopping cart" is correct. ~Cantara]

15. What kind of word is "gotten"? It makes me shudder. Julie Marrs, Warrington

16. "I'm good" for "I'm well". That'll do for a start. Mike, Bridgend, Wales

17. "Bangs" for a fringe of the hair. Philip Hall, Nottingham

18. "Takeout" rather than takeaway! Simon Ball, Worcester

19. I enjoy Americanisms. I suspect even some Americans use them in a tongue-in-cheek manner? "That statement was the height of ridiculosity." Bob, Edinburgh

20. "A half hour" instead of "half an hour". EJB, Devon

21. A "heads up". For example, as in a business meeting. Lets do a "heads up" on this issue. I have never been sure of the meaning. R Haworth, Marlborough

22. "Train station." My teeth are on edge every time I hear it. Who started it? Have they been punished? Chris Capewell, Queens Park, London

[I give up. What do the English call it? ~Cantara]

23. To put a list into alphabetical order is to "alphabetize it"—horrid! Chris Fackrell, York

24. People that say "my bad" after a mistake. I don't know how anything could be as annoying or lazy as that. Simon Williamson, Lymington, Hampshire

25. "Normalcy" instead of "normality" really irritates me. Tom Gabbutt, Huddersfield

26. As an expat living in New Orleans, it is a very long list but "burglarize" is currently the word that I most dislike. Simon, New Orleans

[Right on. It's "burgle". Really.]

27. "Oftentimes" just makes me shiver with annoyance. Fortunately I've not noticed it over here yet. John, London

28. "Eatery." To use a prevalent phrase, oh my gaad! Alastair, Maidstone (now in Athens OH)

29. I'm a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York

[Actually, the proper word is "semi-weekly".]

30. I hate "alternate" for alternative. I don't like this as they are two distinct words, both have distinct meanings and it's useful to have both. Using alternate for alternative deprives us of a word. Catherine, London

31. "Hike" a price. Does that mean people who do that are hikers? No, hikers are ramblers! M Holloway, Accrington

32. "Going forward?" If I do I shall collide with my keyboard. Ric Allen, Matlock

33. I hate the word "deliverable". Used by management consultants for something that they will "deliver" instead of a report. Joseph Wall, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire

34. The most annoying Americanism is "a million and a half" when it is clearly one and a half million! A million and a half is 1,000,000.5 where one and a half million is 1,500,000. Gordon Brown, Coventry

35. "Reach out to" when the correct word is "ask". For example: "I will reach out to Kevin and let you know if that timing is convenient". Reach out? Is Kevin stuck in quicksand? Is he teetering on the edge of a cliff? Can't we just ask him? Nerina, London

36. Surely the most irritating is, "You do the math." Math? It's maths. Michael Zealey, London

[Yup. The English use too many letters anyway. ~Cantara]

37. I hate the fact that I now have to order a "regular Americano". What ever happened to a medium sized coffee? Marcus Edwards, Hurst Green

[Take that up with Starbucks, s'il vous plait. ~Cantara]

38. My worst horror is "expiration", as in "expiration date". Whatever happened to expiry? Christina Vakomies, London"

39. My favourite one was where Americans claimed their family were "Scotch-Irish". This of course it totally inaccurate, as even if it were possible, it would be "Scots" not "Scotch", which as I pointed out is a drink. James, Somerset

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase "That'll learn you." The English (and more correct) version [has always been] "That'll teach you." What a ridiculous phrase! Tabitha, London

41. I really hate the phrase: "Where's it at?" This is not more efficient or informative than "Where is it?" It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating. Adam, London

42. "Period" instead of full stop. Stuart Oliver, Sunderland

43. My pet hate is "winningest", used in the context "Michael Schumacher is the winningest driver of all time". I can feel the rage rising even using it here. Gayle, Nottingham

44. My brother now uses the term "season" for a TV series. Hideous. D Henderson, Edinburgh

45. Having an "issue" instead of a "problem". John, Leicester

46. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as "zee". Not happy about it! Ross, London

[It is "zee", limpwrist. ~Cantara]

47. To "medal" instead of to win a medal. Sets my teeth on edge with a vengeance. Helen, Martock, Somerset

48. "I got it for free" is a pet hate. You got it "free" not "for free". You don't get something cheap and say you got it "for cheap" do you? Mark Jones, Plymouth

49. "Turn that off already." Oh dear. Darren, Munich

[And keep your paws of my lovely yiddishims! ~Cantara]

50. "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less" has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they're trying to say. Jonathan, Birmingham

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14201796

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The French Connection

2011-08-02T11:28:00.006-04:00

[Alejandro Rey as Frog One]

Why does the DSK rape case in New York remind me of one of my favorite films?

"He’d kill us if he got the chance."

2011-07-30T10:29:00.000-04:00

[Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest in The Conversation]

A recent, presumably "damning" telephone exchange overheard between a well-publicized rape accuser and an out-of-state prisoner is putting me in mind of the phrase used in Francis Ford Coppola's shamefully underrated classic, The Conversation. Read the title of this posting. Then read it again.

When Margaret Atwood Becomes Queen...

2011-07-25T09:17:00.012-04:00

[Nominated by popular poll to be "Queen of Canada"]

Margaret Atwood has always been at the cutting edge as a writer and as a celebrity. She invented a device that allowed her to sign books abroad from her Toronto based home. She did that for her novel Oryx and Crake, which is largely considered one of the finest science fiction novels published in the last couple decades. Add in the awards and near-universal respect and you have one of the best known and celebrated authors of our times. So one would think that if Margaret Atwood sent a communication asking city council to revisit their plan to close some of Toronto’s 99 libraries a councilperson would at least take pause to say something tactful in response. Not to mention maybe listening to her.

CBCNews reports that something contrary to such logic is in fact what happened when Atwood’s plea arrived in Toronto’s City Council. Councilman Doug Ford has dismissed Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood’s attempts to save the Toronto Public Library system from future budget cuts:

“If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is,” Ford was quoted as saying on Tuesday, referring to one of the most celebrated literary personalities in the country.

Later on he added a bit of advice for Atwood, should she want to find her audience:

Ford said if Atwood ran for office and got elected, then he would “sit down and listen to her.”

What’s important to note in this story, besides the level of anti-intellectualism achieved by Councilman Doug Ford, is that this is exactly the kind of heedless and uninformed decision-making involved in library cuts. Never mind the famous author, who perhaps you could harness for library fundraising purposes, and instead go headlong into reducing community services that could potentially provide help to the unemployed and marginally employed in those communities.

—Dennis Loy Johnson

Source: http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=35058

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Freedom from Want by Carlos Bulosan

2011-07-04T06:42:00.002-04:00

[Carlos Bulosan, American, 1911-1956]

So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us, so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves.

If you want to know what we are, look upon the farms or upon the hard pavements of the city. You usually see us working or waiting for work, and you think you know us, but our outward guise is more deceptive than our history.

Our history has many strands of fear and hope that snarl and converge at several points in time and space. We clear the forest and the mountains of the land. We cross the river and the wind. We harness wild beast and living steel. We celebrate labor, wisdom, peace of the soul.

When our crops are burned or plowed under, we are angry and confused. Sometimes we ask if this is the real America. Sometimes we watch our long shadows and doubt the future. But we have learned to emulate our ideals from these trials. We know there were men who came and stayed to build America. We know they came because there is something in America that they needed, and which needed them.

We march on, though sometimes strange moods fill our children. Our march toward security and peace is the march of freedom—the freedom that we should like to become a living part of. It is the dignity of the individual to live in a society of free men, where the spirit of understanding and belief exists; of understanding that all men, whatever their color, race, religion or estate, should be given equal opportunity to serve themselves and each other according to their needs and abilities.

But we are not really free unless we use what we produce. So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us, so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves.

It is only when we have plenty to eat—plenty of everything— that we begin to understand what freedom means. To us, freedom is not an intangible thing. When we have enough to eat, then we are healthy enough to enjoy what we eat. Then we have the time and ability to read and think and discuss things. Then we are not merely living but also becoming a creative part of life. It is only then that we become a growing part of democracy.

We do not take democracy for granted. We feel it grow in our working together—many millions of us working toward a common purpose. If it took us several decades of sacrifice to arrive at this faith, it is because it took us that long to know what part of America is ours.

Our faith has been shaken many times, and now it is put to question. Our faith is a living thing, and it can be crippled or chained. It can be killed by denying us enough food or clothing, by blasting away our personalities and keeping us in constant fear. Unless we are properly prepared the powers of darkness will have good reason to catch us unaware and trample our lives.

The totalitarian nations hate democracy. They hate us, because we ask for a definite guaranty of freedom of religion, freedom of expresson and freedom from fear and want. Our challenge to tyranny is the depth of our faith in a democracy worth defending, although they spread lies about us, the way of life we cherish is not dead. The American dream is only hidden away, and it will push its way up and grow again.

We have moved down the years steadily toward the practice of democracy. We become animate in the growth of Kansas wheat or in the ring of Mississippi rain. We tremble in the strong winds of the Great Lakes. We cut timbers in Oregon just as the wild flowers blossom in Maine. We are multitudes in Pennsylvania mines, in Alaskan canneries. We are millions from Puget Sound to Florida. In violent factories, crowded tenements, teeming cities. Our numbers increase as the war revolves into years and increases hunger, disease, death and fear.

Even when we see our children suffer humiliations, we cannot believe that America has no more place for us. We realize that what is wrong is not in our system of government, but in the ideals which were blasted away by a materialistic age.

But sometimes we wonder if we are really a part of America. We recognize the main springs of American democracy in our right to form unions and bargain through them collectively, our opportunity to sell our products at reasonable prices, and the privilege of our children to attend schools where they learn the truth about the world in which they live. We also recognize the forces which have been trying to falsify American history—the forces which drive away many Americans to a corner of compromise with those who would distort the ideals of men that died for freedom.

Sometimes we walk across the land looking for something to hold on to. We cannot believe that the resources of this country are exhausted. Even when we see our children suffer humiliations, we cannot believe that America has no more place for us. We realize that what is wrong is not in our system of government, but in the ideals which were blasted away by a materialistic age. We know that we can truly find and identify ourselves with a living tradition if we walk proudly in familiar streets. It is a great honor to walk on the American earth.

If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of the living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building and molding structures. We are doctors, scientists, chemists discovering and eliminating disease, hunger and antagonism. We are soldiers, Navy men, citizens, guarding the imperishable dreams of our fathers to live in freedom. We are the living dream of dead men. We are the living spirit of free men.

Everywhere we are on the march, passing through darkness into a sphere of economic peace. When we have the freedom to think and discuss things without fear, when peace and security are assured, when the futures of our children are ensured—then we have resurrected and cultivated the early beginnings of democracy. And America lives and becomes a growing part of our aspirations again.

We have been marching for the last one hundred and fifty years. We sacrifice our individual liberties, and sometimes we fail and suffer. Sometimes we divide into separate groups and our methods conflict, though we all aim at one common goal. The significant thing is that we march on without turning back. What we want is peace not violence, We know that we thrive and prosper only in peace.

We are bleeding where clubs are smashing heads, where bayonets are gleaming. We are fighting where the bullet is crashing upon armorless citizens, where the tear gas is choking unprotected children. Under the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs. Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit. Where the honest man is hanged because he told the truth.

We are the sufferers who suffer for natural love of man for another man, who commemorate the humanities of every man. We are the creators of abundance.

We are the desires of anonymous men. We are the subways of suffering, the well of indignities. We are the living testament of a flowering race.

But our march to freedom is not complete unless want is annihilated. The America we hope to see is not merely a physical but also a spiritual and intellectual world. We are the mirror of what America is. If America wants us to be living and free, then we must be living and free. If we fail, then America fails.

What do we want? We want complete security and peace. We want to share the promise and fruits of American life. We want to be free from fear and hunger.

If you want to know what we are—We are Marching!

Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, 6 March 1943

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Seattle Mystery Bookshop Fights the Good Fight Against Amazon

2011-06-24T12:51:00.019-04:00

This week, we received a copy of a new book from an author who was interested in coming in to sign. [And if you want to read about one big-name "Amazon" author they've also rejected, go here.] The problem is that the book is from the new Amazon mystery imprint. They're making an agressive move into publishing and have lined up a list of new and known authors. The authors are understandably eager and excited and they have a hard time understanding when they run into our brick wall of NO. We start with my original message of explanation, then his reply and my return message. In the interest of everyone getting a better understanding of the issues and our point, here is the exchange ~ JB Dickey

Tuesday, June 21, 10:30 AM To: The Author

Sorry to say that we cannot offer you a signing. We cannot do anything to support, help or benefit Amazon. They're the enemy of independent bookshops and aiding them in any way—mainly ordering their books and selling them and promoting them—would be suicide. Things are tough enough without cutting our own throats. ~JB Dickey, Owner

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 5:49 PM To: staff@seattlemystery.com

Dear JB, I understand your concerns. But please know that the opposite is happening nationwide. Amazon is reaching out to independents everywhere and offering to send hundreds of thousands of Amazon emails promoting an individual bookstore. Happily sending Amazon customers to independents. The results have been spectacular. Hundreds have been showing up at these events. It is a tremendous show of support for the independents.

I know it seems counter-intuitive. Amazon is easy to demonize. But I've seen the result of their work with independents. And it is impressive. They wouldn't be putting in this kind of effort if they were out to cut your throat. My little book tour is not about to make or break Amazon. I truly believe that Amazon wants both the independents and the online stores to thrive. If I didn't believe that I would not have signed with them.

And as an author with a bestselling book from a conventional NY publisher, I can attest to the new life Amazon is breathing into books. Whereas an event might bring in the same ten or twelve people, now we are seeing many times that amount. New customers who then tell others about the event and about the bookstores. It has been great for everyone, especially the bookstores.

I know your mind is set, and I do not expect my email to change it. But I do want you to know that my experience with Amazon as an author has been second to none. They are incredibly supportive and responsive and beyond author-friendly. They flew me to NY for a book signing at BEA, something unheard of for a first-time author in my genre. And the list goes on.

If I can do anything to help your bookstore please let me know. And if you want to talk more about this or anything else book-related please call me at 555-555-1212. The author I am touring with is an English professor at University State X, and I know he feels as strongly as I do about the survival of the independents.

Sincerely, The Author

6/22/11, 10:56 AM To: The Author

What you say is all well and good but you're looking at it from your perspective.

From my perspective, this is a huge corporation that has not only taken massive amounts of sales away from me over the years but also sales reps (which means the attention of publishers) and has waged a price war with the NYC publishers over their ebooks. Remember when they removed ALL St. Martin's titles from their site in retaliation for St. Martin's insisting that they no longer undercut the price structure for e-books that the others were observing? Remember, too, that Amazon is the company that reached into the private devices of individuals and deleted ebooks (one of our very good/long time customers is a computer worker and had downloaded a technical book from Amazon and make copious notes in her reader—Amazon deleted the 'book' and she lost all of her notes/ and then they also deleted—what was it, 1984?—from people's e-readers). And let's not forget that they appeared to buckle to outside pressure to remove gay and lesbian fiction and, when caught, blamed technical problems, not mendacity. I cannot tolerate censorship of any kind or by anyone. If these people are not intentionally evil, they come damn close to it by their actions and policies.

You want me to buy books from them? Pay them money to continue their efforts and to have books in my joint that clearly say "Amazon", to give them free advertisement as well?

If they're like NYC publishers, they'd demand that I open an account with them. That means giving them my personal info (this shop is a sole-proprietorship), tax numbers and bank accounts and, probably, the account information from three other businesses (either publishers and/or wholesalers) as references.

Sorry—not a chance in hell I'd give all of that to Amazon. I do not trust them.

Even if I were to consider it, I haven't heard enough about their policies: what is the discount structure? are returns allowed and in what time frame? are they selling the same book at a discount that I can't/won't match or are they selling the books at the same price as I would?

I don't doubt that they're doing good things for you authors. It is fully within their interest to do so. First of all, they're launching a mystery/crime imprint and want to do all they can to promote it and its authors. Secondly, they want you to promote it and talk about it and to have more authors want to sign with them and to make more and more sales. I would bet that the intent is to take more and more business away from the major publishers who are very good at letting sales slip through their fingers.

Neither of us will change our minds. I'm the owner of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan. You are working for Mr. Potter. And Mr. Potter is always buying.

No one else may share my views. We're all doggedly independent. It might be that I'm extra-sensitive about Amazon since they started here. If it works for others and you, great. But it is not for me. ~ JB Dickey

For more comments, go here.

Source: http://seattlemysteryblog.typepad.com/seattle_mystery/2011/06/cant-shake-the-devils-hand-and-say-youre-only-kidding.html

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The Passing Glory of The New York Review of Books

2011-06-22T10:06:00.006-04:00

I faithfully read The New York Review of Books in the 70s and even got a response to my fan letter to Elizabeth Hardwick when I was nineteen, quite a thrill. The NYRB is mentioned in chapter two of My Watergate Summer.

A. Whitney Ellsworth [not to be confused with the famous comic book editor of Superman or Jim Beaver’s character in Deadwood], was one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, and its publisher for nearly 25 years. On Saturday at his home in Salisbury, Conneticut he died of pancreatic cancer. He was 75.

According to a New York Times obituary by William Grimes, Ellsworth was “a frustrated young editor at The Atlantic Monthly in the early 1960s when he began dreaming of a new kind of literary publication, in the spirit of British publications like The New Statesman, in which top-quality authors would be invited to contribute essay-like reviews of serious books.”

As Grimes details,

His dream was aided in December 1962, when a printers’ strike against New York’s main newspapers offered an unforeseen opportunity to start exactly the sort of journal Mr. Ellsworth had in mind.

The book editors Jason and Barbara Epstein had begun talking about the need for a new book review with Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and critic; her husband, the poet Robert Lowell; and Robert B. Silvers, an editor at Harper’s. Recognizing that a newspaper strike would deprive book publishers of their New York advertising outlets, the cabal pounced. With financial backing from Mr. Lowell and a few of his wealthy friends, notably Blair Clark and Brooke Astor, an experimental issue of The New York Review of Books appeared in February 1963. A few weeks later, Mr Epstein invited Mr Ellsworth to his apartment and offered him not an editorial position, which he had been lobbying for—those slots were all filled—but the job of publisher.

“Without much thought, and certainly not questioning the position offered, I accepted,” Mr. Ellsworth wrote in a private memoir, adding that he occasionally regretted not working as an editor, but that “the glory of the Review trumps the regret.”

—Dennis Loy Johnson

Source: http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=33498

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McLuhan: “The present is the enemy.”

2011-06-20T09:32:00.009-04:00

["You know nothing of my work!"]

In an exchange during a late 60s talk show on CBC called The Summer Way, Marshall McLuhan debated Norman Mailer over the future of technology in which Mailer comes off as the level-headed one. Still, why can't people debate like this anymore?

McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.

Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.

McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.

Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.

McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.

Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.

McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

Source: http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/

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The Last Word for Writers on the MacMaster Affair

2011-06-17T12:14:00.037-04:00

[David Berreby]

Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is one of the most famous novels ever written about combat, in general and in the American Civil War, where the book is set. Yet Crane, who was born six years after that war ended, had never seen combat when he wrote the story. This understandably irritated a number of actual veterans. One, Alexander McClurg, a brigadier general in the Union Army, published a long letter of protest, calling the book "the vain imaginings of a young man born long since that war, a piece of intended realism based entirely on unreality." But at least Crane knew where the lines were drawn: His work was fiction, and hundreds of years of literary convention told his readers how to separate his work from reality. That's not the case for Tom MacMaster, a presumably straight married man who lives in Scotland.

Like many a novelist before him, he invented a person—Amina Abdallah Araf, a Syrian-American lesbian blogging from Syria—but as MacMaster gave weight and character to her voice over five years, he neglected to tell readers that she wasn't real. He also neglected to tell a genuine lesbian in Canada with whom he corresponded as Amina. And he didn't mention it to Paula Brooks, whose lesbian news site helped him set up Amina's high-profile blog, supposedly written in Damascus. (Poetic justice: Paula Brooks, as the Washington Post reported, also turns out to be a man.) And the blogosphere has no conventions for fiction—no equivalent of framing devices like "I found these papers in a trunk" or "Marlow told me this tale on board a freighter," with which a literary work both claims to be true and signals that it is fiction.

MacMaster is, among other things, clearly a frustrated novelist. He's written a couple of novels, he told the Washington Post, and he talked about Amina in a way recognizable to any writer of fiction whose character is getting out of control: "I was going to end the story with having her be free, and get out of country—end of story. I didn’t expect the story to get so big .... I’ve been feeling for a while that it had gotten too big." He made Amina a lesbian, he said, in part for the writing challenge.

Now, McMaster is also, to judge by his responses to the brouhaha, a self-righteous prig and a vicious fraud, so good at deception that he seems to have fooled himself too (how else to make sense of his claims that he hasn't harmed anyone and has done the Arab Spring a good turn by presenting important issues to Western readers?). However, he is right about one thing. What he did is often considered harmless, when it yields forms of writing with which we're familiar, like novels, stories, plays and screenplays. What was exceptional about MacMaster's hoax isn't that he made stuff up. It's that he did it on a blog.

Because MacMaster's "piece of intended realism based entirely on unreality" was created in a new medium, his audience didn't have the hard bright lines that told them what was imaginary and what was not. This has happened before, when art met new technology. In 1938, for example, Orson Welles' radio-play version of The War of the Worlds left thousands of people with the vexing conviction that they were about to be vaporized by a Martian invasion. The conventions that would tell a listener this was fake radio news did not yet exist, and the warnings that Welles and his cohort had improvised weren't adequate.

Then, too, Shakespeare's plays are filled with reminders that the action is taking place "within this wooden O," where "all the glisters is not gold," and women disguised as men are actually boy actors. To modern readers this seems arch and clever and meta, but I think in Shakespeare's time it had a practical purpose: He was teaching his audience what the boundaries were in the newfangled entertainment technology called professional theater. He was giving them markers by which they could tell what was art, so they could avoid embarrassing themselves by, say, running a sword through the actor playing Shylock or Othello. (According to a critic, even centuries later, in 1902, there were problems with theatergoers confusing invention and reality: "Frequently I have seen a well-acted villain cursed and threatened by some one in the gallery carried away by his feelings," he wrote.)

Blogs do not yet have the literary conventions that allow a writer to layer one meaning upon another. Yes, blogging convention favors a style that sounds knowing and arch, but don't be fooled. Whatever its style, as a form of writing, blogging is more earnest and naive than The Cat in the Hat. Compared to the depths of meaning in a play or movie or TV show, or a book, in fact, blogs are flat and shadowless. In a blog, I am either straightforwardly what I say I am, or I mark that I am extremely not-straightforward by using something like this :} or this <#IsntThatSpecial?>. That's about the only string on the instrument, folks. To paraphrase André Gide, as a medium for writing, blogs are a piano without pedals.

And given that this is what we expect, we who consume blogs have developed no sophistication as readers: We aren't skeptical or wary or alert to the pleasures of a writing that only seems real. We aren't like the ideal reader of a meta-novel like Tristram Shandy, or the ideal playgoer who heard King Lear's Fool make a prophesy and then add: "This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time." Instead, the ideal reader of blogs is a literary cretin. And this cretinousness made us (yes, us, I joined that damn Facebook group) easily fooled by an artful dodger.

Which, come to think of it, may form the basis for a defense of teaching literature in the 21st century of "how will this class help me get a job?" education. If you don't teach people how to read literature they'll read with the expectation that writing is perfectly transparent, sincere and utilitarian. And when you read that naively, you're an easy mark for frauds and liars.

—David Berreby

Source: http://bigthink.com/blogs/Mind-Matters

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Happy Bloomsday!

2011-06-16T19:57:00.004-04:00

[Fantasy map of Bloom's journey]

This year, the 107th Bloomsday, holds particular significance for Joyce fans since it falls on Thursday, the same day Ulysses takes place. This is also the year that the novel falls into public domain.

Watson’s Wife and Seattle Homicide Detective Marty Crane

2011-06-09T19:32:00.000-04:00

[Lancashire-born actor John Mahoney]

I'm thinking of writing (one of these days) a couple of mysteries inspired by two intriguing off-page / off-screen situations which have a couple of things in common: Both involve doctors and detectives, and both contain seriously conflicting details in their back stories. One is in public domain, the other, I'm afraid, is intellectual property (but I think I can get around that).

1. Mary Morstan, Spy. What the heck was up with Mary Morstan Watson? Why was she forever on prolonged visits to her aunt? And why was she always so strangely understanding when her husband the good doctor would trot off with Holmes on another adventure? Every good Sherlockian has a theory, and here's mine: She had been recruited by Holmes to be one of Mycroft's operatives! It was a secret kept from Watson until the day Mary was killed by one of Moriarty's men when her cover was blown during Holmes's Great Hiatus, and he never forgave Holmes for her death. Oh, I'm sure a pastiche like this has been written by better minds than mine. But still, wouldn't it be fun to see the significant women of the Canon—Irene Adler and Mrs Hudson, as well as Mary Morstan—together in one story?

2. The Courtship of Dr Hester Palmer and Martin Crane. This one is trickier. In one version of the story of when they first meet, Martin is already a Homicide detective (with the rank of sergeant, at least) and Hester is already a research psychiatrist with an interest in behavioral pathology. In another version he's a rookie cop fresh from the Korean War and she's the young daughter of prominent Seattleites; they go on to have a sizzzling back-seat affair until Hester becomes pregnant (with Frasier, evidently) and they marry. However, both versions agree that they met in the course of a murder investigation. That's the thing that piques my interest: A murder in postwar Seattle sparking a romance between two interesting and totally disparate people—it's a classic situation. If I pursue this one, names (Martin Cain? Esther Palmer?) and details will have to be changed. Besides, I have too much affection for John Mahoney's portrayal of Martin Crane in Frasier to want to mess with it.

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It’s Called WRITING, Levine

2011-06-08T10:32:00.002-04:00

[Roseanne Barr]

Roseanne Barr is in my Google Reader, but so is Ken Levine too, and now, with what I consider the final word in the Roseanne-Levine flap, is Erin T. Hill. Here’s a portion of her analysis of the situation entitled “Roseanne, Ken Levine and the Created By Credit on Network TV Adaptations” (yes, Hill is a PhD candidate):

...What I do think is possible to tackle is this issue of creativity, the role of the “creative” in the hierarchy of television production (who ultimate creative power falls to and where they sit); the way that is represented by the Created By credit and, in this case, the struggle surrounding it. Levine devotes much of his initial post to Roseanne’s claim that the credit was stolen from her and given to Matt Williams by Marcy Carsey, ABC Television, and Williams himself. Roseanne describes the experience in her article:

It was at the premiere party when I learned that my stories and ideas—and the ideas of my sister and my first husband, Bill—had been stolen. The pilot was screened, and I saw the opening credits for the first time, which included this: Created by Matt Williams. I was devastated and felt so betrayed that I stood up and left the party. Not one person noticed.

I confronted Marcy under the bleachers on the sound stage when we were shooting the next episode. I asked her how I could continue working for a woman who had let a man take credit for my work—who wouldn’t even share credit with me—after talking to me about sisterhood and all that bullshit. She started crying and said, “I guess I’m going to have to tell Brandon [Stoddard, then president of ABC Entertainment] that I can’t deliver this show.” I said, “Cry all you want to, but you figure out a way to put my name on the show I created, or kiss my ass good-bye.”

I went to complain to Brandon, thinking he could set things straight, as having a robbed star might be counterproductive to his network. He told me, “You were over twenty-one when you signed that contract.” He looked at me as if I were an arrogant waitress run amok.

I went to my agent and asked him why he never told me that I would not be getting the “created by” credit. He halfheartedly admitted that he had “a lot going on at the time” and was “sorry.” I also learned that it was too late to lodge a complaint with the Writers Guild. I immediately left that agency and went to the William Morris Agency. I figured out that Carsey and Werner had bullshitted Matt Williams into believing that it was his show and I was his “star” as effectively as they had bullshitted me into thinking that it was my show and Matt Williams was my “scribe.” I contacted Bernie Brillstein and a young talent manager in his office, Brad Grey, and asked them to help me. They suggested that I walk away and start over, but I was too afraid I would never get another show.

Based on what I’ve read about the show, this seems like a fairly accurate retelling of what Roseanne experienced and was told (and yes, other parts of her accounts in the original piece as well as the accounts in Levine’s rebuttal conflict and seem distorted at times, so I’m not saying we should take every story in both pieces at face value. Again, I have heard so many stories about this one set over the last fifteen years that it would be hard for me to put the larger debate about “what really happened” to rest here. The people who were there know what happened to them, but for me to weigh in is a recipe for the derailment of this discussion). Levine doesn’t actually take issue with the story’s veracity at all, but rather with Roseanne’s naivete, as well as her sense of entitlement. He says that Roseanne is a crybaby for saying she was robbed of the “Created By” credit, because, basically, every comedian who adapts their work to the episodic TV format has someone helping them, and what does it matter if someone else’s name is on a show that has your name in the title?

Here. Let him tell you (apologies in advance for the racist, pejorative slang used below):

If [Williams] had taken all her ideas, written a script, told the press it was his life story, and then hired Camryn Manheim to star in the show, then yes, I’d say we have a major case of identity theft. But everyone knows the show is based on Roseanne and her material. Matt even said as much in articles back then. The name of the fucking show is Roseanne for chrissakes! All she really is being gypped out of is royalties. And I think she more than made up for that in her salary and ownership position.

He follows this up by explaining that it was the writer of the pilot who deserved the credit, because:

it takes skill and experience to turn fragments of a standup routine into a cohesive television series.

I know it’s easy for people to see red after reading some of Roseanne’s statements in her original piece and her blogged responses to Levine. She doesn’t mince words, and she takes some cheap shots (so does he). But these two passages make me angrier than anything else in any of the posts ever could. Why? I didn’t see him refer anywhere to the material Williams (and Barr) adapted as anything more than jokes, bits, pieces—fragments. Of what, Ken Levine? Fragments of what? What raw material was Matt Williams using his skill and experience to adapt?

It’s called writing. What standups do is called writing.

And it takes great skill and experience to craft a “stand-up routine” like the one Roseanne agreed to adapt with ABC, or the one that Bill Cosby agreed to adapt with NBC, or, since you bring him up, the one that Tim Allen agreed to adapt with ABC. The fact that the people doing it aren’t initially members of your Guild, didn’t come up having to play politics in the writer’s room and thus don’t know that they need to fight for the credit that acknowledges that the work all originated with them doesn’t change that. And you not only advocating the disenfranchisement and marginalization of a fellow writer, but also shaming that fellow writer for not understanding their marginalization implicitly (something you only understand from having worked in the Cheers room when those standups were working in clubs) is a FUCKING SHAME.

Sources:
http://erinthill.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/roseanne-ken-levine-and-the-created-by-credit-on-network-tv-adaptations/
http://nymag.com/arts/tv/upfronts/2011/roseanne-barr-2011-5/
http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2011/05/roseannes-latest-insane-rant.html

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List of Don’t-Cares and Do-Cares

2011-06-05T10:45:00.016-04:00

Life is short. I no longer care about:

What Harold Bloom thinks
Who Jake Gyllenhaal finally settles down with
How many Twitter followers I have
Trying to figure out exactly what Twitter is good for
Scrubbing the stovetop after every dinner
Shaving my legs unless wearing a miniskirt barelegged

What I do care about:

Improving my Spanish and French
Timing my cooking more precisely
Whether Peggy and Don eventually have an affair
Helping my son to finish his book or film or whatever the hell it turns out to be
Shooting Teddy in the head in a way that he still lives in the second novel in my mystery series (this is not giving the plot away)

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Don and Peggy

2011-06-01T13:50:00.002-04:00

The yearning in Mad Men fans to make something deeply sexual out of Don and Peggy's relationship is palpable. All I know is, the most romantic line I have ever heard on television was Don's reply to Peggy when she considered not folllowing him to the new agency: "I would spend the rest of my life trying to hire you."

Happy 100th Birthday, Bel Kaufman

2011-05-10T00:00:00.035-04:00

"Teachers must not punch each other out." That's the line I most remember from Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman's classic novel on teaching life absurd in the New York public school system. That book (and Our Miss Brooks) made me briefly want to become a teacher myself when I was twelve. It sounded like hard work, but it kept your mind merry.

Well, Ms Kaufman turned 100 today, and she's still teaching! Not in the NYPS system this time around, but at her old alma mater, Hunter College. A class on Yiddish humor, in fact. Quite appropriate for the granddaughter of Sholem Aleichem.

Please, sit down. Are you comfortable?

(Shrug.) I make a living.

For the NY Times story (and to find out how Edna St Vincent Millay helped her get her first teaching job), go here.

To find out what "Bel" and "Currer Bell" have in common, go here.

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Hate the Politics, Love the Person

2011-05-07T12:19:00.005-04:00

For years, Orwell had ridiculed poet Stephen Spender in his writing, calling him a “parlour Bolshevik” and “pansy poet”, but when they finally met, their encounter was actually an amiable one. Spender was bewildered about this and wrote to Orwell asking him why. Orwell replied:

You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you… [Formerly] I was willing to use you as a symbol of the parlour Bolshie because a. your verse...did not mean very much to me, b. I looked upon you as a sort of fashionable successful person, also a Communist or Communist sympathiser, & I have been very hostile to the C.P. since about 1935, and c. because not having met you I could regard you as a type & also an abstraction. Even if, when I met you, I had happened not to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet someone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken with anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more.

They subsequently became good friends.

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One Guy Dead, Truth and Honor Restored (for Now)

2011-05-04T12:44:00.012-04:00

I for one believed from the beginning that a US force truly captured and killed bin Laden. I started to waiver in that belief a bit once the story about bin Laden firing at troops from behind the human shield of his youngest wife hit cable and the net, because that sort of trope is so Captain America and would not fool a comic book geek like me. Obama, however, is smart enough to quickly tell the truth when he's got the upper hand.

I also believe that it was perfectly proper to capture bin Laden alive then shoot him in the head, even if it was in front of his family. This was clean. This doesn't have to be soft pedaled. You believe in slippery slopes? Then petition the government to close Guantanamo. You'll get my signature.

I believe that the weasel in all this is none other than Keith Urbahn, the peabrain who leaked Obama's impending announcement on Twitter. Not that he put anyone in danger, or that he stole Obama's thunder, as it turned out. But this little bit of casual indiscretion could have only come from the former chief of staff of Donald Babykiller Rumsfeld. It was Rumsfeld, remember, who ordered/persuaded/strongarmed Washington columnist Robert Novak to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA agent just because he was pissed off with her husband. (What the hell was all that about?)

I believe in Truth, Justice, and The American Way. But I also believe Superman was perfectly justified in renouncing his US citizenship.

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Bid Laden Dead: A Twitter Story 10 Years in the Making

2011-05-02T11:10:00.005-04:00

This is the thread of the story, as far as I can understand it: Vice President Biden phoned Majority Leader Eric Cantor with the news at around the same time Obama was informing by phone the Speaker of the House John Boehner; both told the news to CBS news producer Jill Jackson (@jacksonjk) ; Jackson told Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld; and Urbahn (@keithurbahn) tweeted: "So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn." Naturally it spread like wildfire across the social networks. And that's how Twitter scooped mainstream news.

At the same time, CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller (@markknoller) tweeted: "Very unusual for the WH to lift the "lid" on press coverage and call network pool to the WH for a late night statement." Then "This suggests an announcement of unusual importance—but WH officials not yet will to give on the record guidance on the subject." Then he tweeted "CBS Congressional producer Jill Jackson reporting House Intelligence Committee aide says Obama will announce Osama bin Laden is dead."

Shortly beforehand, IT consultant and ordinary citizen Sohaib Athar (@reallyvirtual), on a rest holiday in Abbottabad, twittered: "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)," and unknowingly went on to describe the US raid on Bin Laden's compound. Naturally, his number of followers jumped by over 40,000 in a matter of hours and naturally, Reuters and AP were all over him nonstop. "Bin Laden is dead. I didn't kill him. Please let me sleep now," is his last tweet. I'm hoping that by now he is being allowed to sleep.

Jackson and Knoller have by now, of course, moved on to other stories. But if you really want to get a sense of where the world is today, read Athar's tweets.

Originally published in Facebook Notes.

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Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

2011-04-30T00:00:00.006-04:00

After a long period of suffering Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Nebula and Hugo Award winner Joanna Russ died yesterday in Tucson. She was a student of Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell, an outspoken feminist, an open lesbian, a fierce storyteller, and an articulate defender of slash fiction. Oh yeah.

But the singlemost work of hers that resonates with all women writers, whether in or out of the genre, is How to Suppress Women's Writing, published in 1983:

From the Introduction

If certain people are not supposed to have the ability to produce "great" literature, and if this supposition is one of the means used to keep such people in their place, the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which such people are prevented from producing any literature at all. But a formal prohibition tends to give the game away—that is, if the peasants are kept illiterate, it will occur to somebody sooner or later that illiteracy absolutely precludes written literature, whether such literature be good or bad; and if significant literature can by definition be produced only in Latin, the custom of not teaching Latin to girls will again, sooner or later, cause somebody to wonder what would happen if the situation were changed. The arguments for this sort of status quo are too circular for comfort. (In fact such questions were asked over and over again in Europe in recent centuries, and eventually reforms were made.)

In a nominally egalitarian society the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the "wrong" groups have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can't. But, alas, give them the least real freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so's will do it anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the "wrong" people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.

The methods indicated above are varied but tend to occur in certain key areas: informal prohibitions (including discouragement and the inaccessibility of materials and training), denying the authorship of the work in question (this ploy ranges from simple misattribution to psychological subtleties that make the head spin), belittlement of the work itself in various ways, isolation of the work from the tradition to which it belongs and its consequent presentation as anomalous, assertions that the work indicates the author's bad character and hence is of primarily scandalous interest or ought not to have been done at all (this did not end with the nineteenth century), and simply ignoring the works, the workers, and the whole tradition, the most commonly employed technique and the hardest to combat.

What follows is not intended as a history. Rather it's a sketch of an analytic tool: patterns in the suppression of women's writing.

Prohibitions
Bad Faith
Denial of Agency (deny that a woman wrote it)
Pollution of Agency (show that their art is immodest, not actually art, or shouldn't have been written about)
The Double Standard of Content (one set of experiences is considered more valuable than another)
False Categorizing (women artists are categorized as the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or lovers of male artists)
Isolation (the myth of isolated achievement: only one work, or a short series of poems are considered great)
Anomalousness
Lack of Models
Responses
Aesthetics

She has no living peer.

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The Title’s Better at Dan Wilbur’s BetterBookTitles

2011-04-29T10:44:00.004-04:00

Through the magic of PhotoShop, cute Brooklyn-living comedian (read semi-brainy) Dan Wilbur lets us know on his website BetterBookTitles.com what we ought to expect in that perfectly truthful bookstore up there in the pie-sky. Hey, anything to get more people to read Ulysses.

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William S. Burroughs “Hurting People's Moral Feelings” Once Again

2011-04-27T10:54:00.007-04:00

I’ve read The Soft Machine. It’s cool.

From Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily & Economic News:

The Istanbul Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into a book written by internationally renowned author William S. Burroughs. It was translated and published by Sel Publishing House in January.

The court referred to a report written by the Prime Ministry’s Council for Protecting Minors from Explicit Publications that accused the novel, The Soft Machine, of “incompliance with moral norms” and “hurting people’s moral feelings.” Sel Publishing issued a press release that included parts of their testimony in the court.

“It is impossible to understand the insistence in sending books written and published for adults to councils that specialize in minors. If we consider things from this perspective, then dozens of such reports could be written about TV channels, newscasts and thousands of books,” read the testimony given by the publishing house.

The testimony also argued that the Prime Ministry’s council had no credentials in literature, aesthetics or translation, thus causing what the representatives of the publishing house called a “freakish” decision by the council.

The council also accused the novel of “lacking unity in its subject matter,” “incompliance with narrative unity,” for “using slang and colloquial terms” and “the application of a fragmented narrative style,” while claiming that Burroughs’s book contained unrealistic interpretations that were neither personal nor objective by giving examples from the lifestyles of historical and mythological figures. None of the above, argued the publishing house, constitutes a criminal act.

The council went further and said, “The book does not constitute a literary piece of work in its current condition,” adding it would add nothing new to the reader’s reservoir of knowledge, and argued the book developed “attitudes that were permissive to crime by concentrating on the banal, vulgar and weak attributes of humanity.”

The representatives of the publishing house responded to these charges. “Just as no writer is under any special obligation to highlight humanity’s fair attributes under every circumstance, the measure of whether a book has any literary value or not, and the judge of what the book may add to the reader’s reservoir of knowledge, is not an official state institution, but the reader himself,” they said.

“Once again, societies comprised of modern, creative and inquisitive individuals are formed by reading and being exposed to literary texts and works of art that can be considered as the most extreme examples of their kind,” further asserted the defendants’ statement.

The testimony also invited members of the council to conduct “a simple Internet research” about the writer, and learn about the fact that Burroughs was one of the pioneers the “Beat Generation” that rebelled against the stagnant morality of the middle class in post-World War II America. The testimony also drew attention to the fact that the “cut-up” technique used in the book was once heralded as a great novelty among literary circles.

“Through this technique, Burroughs runs counter, not just to entrenched attitudes in people’s lifestyles but also in contradiction to older literary techniques. That being the case and since the aim of the book itself is to push boundaries, it is clearly absurd to search for criminal elements in the book by suggesting that the book does not conform with social norms,” further stated the press release.

“Moreover, it is also meaningless to expect William S. Burroughs, who was not raised in accordance with the National Education Law, or as an individual who ‘identifies with the national, moral, humanitarian, material and spiritual cultural values of Turkish society, and who always tries to exalt his family, country and nation,’ to have produced a text within this framework,” read the testimony. “It is clear and obvious that this case carries no weight nor any respectability outside of the borders of our country.”

“We demand an end to investigations that constrain our activities and the prosecution of books for any reason whatsoever,” concluded the statement.

Source: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=william-s.-burroughs-on-trial-for-corrupting-the-morality-of-turks-2011-04-26

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Zadie Smith’s Rules for Writing

2011-04-26T15:17:00.009-04:00

When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.
Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Don't confuse honours with achievement.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand—but tell it.
Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

These are the only "rules for writers" I've read so far that resonate with me. I suppose you could make up your own.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/22/zadie-smith-rules-for-writers.

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Playing Mad Men on Twitter

2011-04-23T21:04:00.011-04:00

There's only one role-playing online parlor game I'm into at the moment, and that's the ongoing exchange on Twitter among Mad Men fans who pretend to be certain characters―in some cases, certain aspects of characters―of the show. And not just major characters, some minor or even peripheral characters (like "Hollis the Elevator Man"―who, if you know the series, is writing a novel, or any of Betty's housewife friends in Ossining). As for "certain aspects of characters", there's Pete Campbell, right, but there's also "Emo Pete Campbell" and "Bad Pete Campbell", and as well as several Don Drapers, there's also "Old Don Draper", "Psycho Don Draper", plus I think one or two Dick Whitmans who, as everybody knows, is the true identity of "Don Draper". And then there are the ghosts ("Gene's Ghost"), the children ("Good Bobby Draper", "Old Sally Draper") and the inanimate objects ("Xerox 914", "Don's Liver"), who are turning out to be the most articulate and canny characters of all―the Xerox 914 mostly. I hope you get the general idea.

Who do I play in all this? Two very minor peripheral characters, but I believe crucial to understanding the narrative and character arcs, and the meaning of the entire story of Mad Men. The first is @blondeanna ("Anna Draper") and the second is @Greta_Guttman ("Dr Greta Guttman").

I am the first Anna Draper on Twitter. I started to play her after I recognized Melinda Page Hamilton in a brief scene in the second season and remarked upon it to a mutual friend, who told me that Melinda also happens to be a good friend of Matthew Weiner, who wrote the role of Anna just for her. With such a close connection to the creator of MM, I intuited "Anna's" purpose, so I wrote my first tweet: "I know he's not Don Draper. But that's all right."

The second role I play is the communications psychology expert Dr Greta Guttman, who was still with Sterling Cooper when the company was taken over by the Brits in season 3, but has not actually made an appearance since episode 6, season 1. I took her role for three reasons: I knew nobody else would take her on; she's European; and she's modeled after Dr Herta Herzog, who wrote a couple of original books about the soap opera fandom of housewives and about the effects of Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast on gullible radio listeners.

Now, here's where I could use a little help. I started to write back stories for both these ladies but quickly scrapped them because characters in MM tend to reappear with their own back stories, even when they're dead, like Anna, or, like Greta, long missing in action (just like in, you know, "real" soaps). Neither of them, as well, have been involved in the core action at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. So during Mad Mad season, I've mostly been using them as a sort of chorus to the main group―shoulders to cry on, advice aunties for Don, Peggy, Peggy's mom, Father Gill, Joan, etc.

But now with this prolonged interlude between seasons (no new Mad Men until early 2012!) there's this opportunity for me to really expand their characters, the way fan fiction writers reimagine their favorite heroes (although it's usually for the purpose of imagining them into bed with each other―Jesus, think of all the irritation Annie Proulx had to put up with with "Brokeback Mountain" fan fiction). Should I try to create their life stories out of whole cloth, or should I have them simply comment on their times (the 60s) within their various spheres (Anna's a hippie housewife, Greta's a cultured New Yorker)?

This is all just a game, you understand, but it wouldn't be fun without some rules. Suggestions are appreciated.

Orignally published in Facebook Notes.

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All My Children Canceled!

2011-04-14T17:14:00.008-04:00

A world without Erica Kane? To be honest, I never really kept up with AMC after the Golden Age of TV Soaps, the 80s (All My Children, Santa Barbara, Guiding Light, Ryan's Hope). But if like me you remember how hot and sexy those shows were, you will mourn their passing. Oh yes, and they had great stories too. Another narrative form gone the way of all flesh.

Joining us in our grief are the many AMC characters at the funerals of:

Kate Martin (Joe's mother)
Mona Kane Tyler (Erica's mother)
Stewart Chandler (Adam's twin brother)
Myrtle Fargate (Pine Valley's boarding house landlady)
Palmer Cortlandt, born Pete Cooney (Adam's nemesis)
Dixie Cooney Chandler Martin Lawson Bodine (everybody's ex-wife)

Mad Men on Trains

2011-03-29T16:31:00.012-04:00

Harry Crane and Pete Campbell (otherwise known as Rich Sommer and Vincent Kartheiser) got together recently to write, produce, and act in this short film to promote high-speed train transportation.

This is a hot subject! With plans for a Los Angeles-San Francisco high-speed route still stalled, it's time to email your US senators and let them know you want a long-term commitment from Congress to realize this vision of high-speed, public-friendly, environment-friendly travel.

"A new competitive high-speed rail network will reduce oil consumption, traffic congestion, and global warming pollution. It will also give us all a way to avoid the headaches and pat downs at the airport. In order to make this vision a reality, we need a long-term commitment from Congress."

Mad Men On Trains from Rich Sommer

(See "Another Showbiz Pro Carless in LA".)

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Judy Garland on Command Performance

2011-03-20T16:45:00.009-04:00

Sixty-eight years ago a young Judy Garland sang the new hit song, "That Old Black Magic", on Command Performance, a radio show...

...presented each week and every week till it's over, over there!

~~Don Wilson~~ was the announcer and US Army Captain Meredith Willson (this was before he wrote The Music Man) led the orchestra. This program's guest performers also included singers Kenny Baker, Virginia O'Brien, and baritone John Charles Thomas, as well as Woody Herman and his swinging band. Wow. But my favorite part of the show has always been the special personal dedications to men and women of the Allied fighting forces all over the world. What stories they hint at!

(Command Performance, March 20 1943)

The American and British forces were still in North Africa and about to start their offensive up the boot of Italy (they reached Sicily that July), hence the reference to Rome.

Murder He Says

2011-02-28T12:43:00.017-05:00

I can't get enough of Betty Hutton these days. All that energy! Below is one of her best numbers, sung on that legendary radio show for the war effort, Command Performance.

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Jack Kerouac on Steve Allen

2011-02-20T11:36:00.000-05:00

Last week's Jimmy Kimmel Live! (see the posting "Jake Talks About His Boyfriend Then Pimps Out Own Mother on National Televsion" on ImStalkingJake.com) depressed me so much with its host's talentlessness and lack of wit I scoured YouTube to find the TV talk show hosts of my youth, who brought out the best in their guests rather than their worst:

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You Blow a Fuse

2011-02-14T11:01:00.007-05:00

First heard this song sung by Betty Hutton on one of her early 50s albums when it was called "You Blow a Fuse", then famously by Bjork, then in a curiously satisfying movie called Happy, Texas with the wonderful Illeana Douglas, who is never used enough.

Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams

2011-02-12T23:47:00.000-05:00

[Geraldine Page as Alma Winemiller]

Don't try to comfort me. I haven't come here on any but equal terms. I said, let's talk truthfully so let's do. It's no longer a secret that I'm in love with you. It never was. I have loved you as long ago as when I first asked you to read the stone angel's name with your fingers. Yes, I have remembered the long afternoons of our childhood when I had to stay inside to practice my music and hear your friends calling you—"Johnny! Johnny!" And how it went through me just to hear your name called... And how I rushed to the window to watch you jump the porch railing... I stood at a distance halfway down the block, only to keep the sight of that torn red sweater as you raced about that vacant lot you played in... Yes, it began that early, this—affliction of love, and it has never let go of me since, but just kept on growing. I have lived next door to you all the days of my life, a weak divided person in awe of your singleness, your strength. And that is my story! Now I wish that you could tell me—why did it not happen between us? Why did I fail? Why did you come almost close enough—and then no closer?

Maria Schneider (27 March 1952—3 February 2011)

2011-02-08T21:41:00.017-05:00

One of my favorite movies when I was twenty was The Passenger—I went to see it again and again. Maria Schneider played The Girl, but don't let her lack of name throw you off. In fact, she’s the title character. Beautiful, intelligent, strangely emotional movie about alienation and identity crisis. The long next-to-last scene (with an offscreen murder) has never been duplicated. Maria Schneider as The Girl shows up in my stories as Gina the Backpacker. Maria, you are more tenderly remembered in death than you were in life.

Come for the Gyllenhaal, Stay for the Story

2011-02-01T08:43:00.009-05:00

I can't understand why this movie didn't get better reviews. I suppose I'm feeling more sympathy now that I'm on the medication merry-go-round myself.

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Happy Birthday, Janice Joplin

2011-01-19T00:00:00.004-05:00

Twenty-seven years, not a lot of time to pack a lifetime in. Mais elle vive encore! Janis Joplin's death at the Highland Gardens is mentioned in Chapter Six of my Hollywood-set mystery, Cold Open.

I was fifteen and taking classes at the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis when she died. The director-teacher Bain Boehlke (who had a small but memorable role in Fargo) took her death pretty hard, and had an insert made up to be slipped into each of the programs for the play of the moment, which was Little Women: "Take One for Pearl".

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Elijah Wood Loves the Bunny Museum

2010-12-31T00:00:00.018-05:00

This is my friend Candace’s place in Pasadena, which is portrayed in Cold Open as “Angeltown”.

Hallelujah at the Food Court

2010-12-27T13:03:00.003-05:00

I’m a sucker for a good flash mob.

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Brenda Fassie Sings Vulindlela

2010-12-07T22:26:00.002-05:00

So we’re back in the big city again after a soggy shopping weekend in Otavalo and Matt over at the Revolution is playing Stump the Panel (meaning Michael and me) with his online video mix. Michael guessed most of Roky Erickson and Syd Barrett; I was completely taken for the first time by this South African singer who died in 2004 at the age of 40, Brenda Fassie.

And speaking of Syd Barrett, what to make of this trippy session with The Beatles?

My Generation is 45 Years Old

2010-11-20T11:47:00.012-05:00

I mean the song. Legend has it that Pete Townshend wrote "My Generation" when Queen Mary, the mother of Queen Elizabeth, had Townshend's vintage hearse towed away because the sight of it was offensive to her. Another legend has him writing in the stutter to pay respects to a former classmate who stuttered. You're a good kid, Pete.

"Hope I die before I get old..."

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Funny by the Numbers or America, This is YOU

2010-11-08T20:32:00.017-05:00

Look, I'm more or less a fan of William Shatner too, but what does this say about American tastes?

Thanks to Splitsider for this scientifically rigorous report.

Saint Mary MacKillop

2010-10-17T00:06:00.013-04:00

Australia gets its first saint today. Just canonized: Sister Mary MacKillop, co-founder of the Sacred Heart of Saint Joseph, Josephites for short. Sister Mary was not only a tireless worker for the poor and disenfranchised but a defender of those sexually abused. Upon canonization, Saint Mary MacKillop will be available for intercession.

The Price of Freedom is Not Suicide by J.E. Freeman

2010-10-11T14:16:00.011-04:00

An old friend from San Francisco, the tough-guy actor and outspoken gay activist J.E. Freeman, just sent this poem to me and asked if I could repost it for National Coming Out Day, which I am very glad to do, as the suicides of those young people are also weighing heavily on my mind:

Unfortunately to be free requires sometimes that one fight back
The most expensive quality in life is freedom.
Freedom is never free.
Never without cost.
The price is not caring what the price is
The price is to dare to be unafraid.
Or if afraid to stand any way in fear
and to take what comes.
For what else makes courage?
How else are heroes made?

It is by facing that which we fear
and surviving.
It lies in requiring
in demnding
the haters to stand exposed
in the light of their hatred
which is only their own fear lashing out.

To kill one's self is to become one's own executioner.
It is to buy into the verdict of the hater.
If one must die for one's freedom
make the hater do the killing
do not accept that responsibility.
Don't do it to your self.
That is not your burden.
Do not accept the blame.

If one must die for freedom
then die in love with it
just as one should live.
In love and acceptance of the self.
What another says is not true unless we agree
in silence
or acquiesence

Do not agree.
Do not succumb.
Be a witness for your own freedom.
Stand up
Fight Back
Do not be a victim.
Be a hero for yourself!
What better sight to see in the morning
than a hero's face looking back at you
in the mirror laughing.

Ghandi stood up in a crowd.
Jesus stood up on the cross alone
King stood up on a balcony.
Matthew Shepard stood up tied to a fence.
They died yes
But they did not kill themselves
They did not accept the fear and hatefilled
judgement of others.

Surprisingly though if you stand up
strong with conviction
sometimes
the bully just might fade away,
Shamed in the glare of his own hate
and his own fear.
I know I came out in the Marines in 1967
I've never been afraid of being gay since.

Freedom isn't free.
It's our most expensive right.
It's priceless.
it requires every person in search of freedom
to ante up.
Even if it kills you
just don't kill yourself.

Love yourself instead.
Scream it from the roof tops
Scream your love of self in the face of the hater.
scream....
"LOVE IS ALL THERE IS!
Why are you afraid?"

That's the Cost of Freedom
All the love you've got.
Especially for your SELF!

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Jane Austen’s Novels Were Heavily Edited

2010-10-09T21:38:00.003-04:00

Jane Austen, one of the greatest novelists in English literature, had her work heavily edited to fix original manuscripts littered with spelling and grammatical mistakes, an expert said Saturday.

Professor Kathryn Sutherland studied 1,100 original handwritten pages of Austen's unpublished writings and concluded that her efforts had been polished to correct the errors.

It's widely assumed that Austen was a perfect stylist—her brother Henry famously said in 1818 that 'everything came finished from her pen' and commentators continue to share this view today," the Oxford University English literature academic said.

"The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on this issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation.
But in reading the manuscripts, it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing."

Sutherland said that Austen's unpublished manuscripts "unpick her reputation for perfection in various ways."
We see blots, crossings out, messiness—we see creation as it happens, and in Austen's case, we discover a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing. She broke most of the rules for writing good English," the academic added.

In particular, the "polished punctuation and epigrammatic style" typical of some of her novels is missing, suggesting someone else was "heavily involved" in editing her work, Sutherland said.

"Letters between Austen's publisher John Murray II and his talent scout and editor William Gifford, acknowledging the untidiness of Austen's style and how Gifford will correct it, seem to identify Gifford as the culprit," she added.

Austen, born in 1775, lived most of her life in Hampshire, southern England. She died in 1817, aged 41, from an unknown illness.

Her novels, published from 1811 onwards, include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Murray was Austen's publisher for the last two years of her career, overseeing Emma, the second edition of Mansfield Park and Persuasion.

Sutherland's discoveries about the author's prose style came as part of a project to create a free online archive of all Austen's handwritten fiction manuscripts.

The archive is officially launched on Monday at www.janeausten.ac.uk.

It will bring the manuscripts together in one place for the first time since 1845 when they were dispersed among family members under the terms of Austen's sister Cassandra's will.

[Source: Agence France-Presse]

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To John Lennon, Who Would Have Been 70 Today

2010-10-09T13:12:00.006-04:00

A fan at one of the Beatles sites wrote, "If John Lennon hadn't written this and I hadn't heard it, I might have killed myself." Remember that, you artist wannabes.

As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and class less and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

If you want to be a hero well just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

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Another Showbiz Pro Carless in LA

2010-10-01T22:05:00.010-04:00

Dateline Los Angeles: Like film producer Marcia Nasatir and fictional film actress Nina Lee, heroine of the Hollywood-set comedy-mystery novel Cold Open, Vincent Kartheiser of Mad Men is among the eleven percent of Angelenos who rely on public transportation. So on a Thursday night he and a reporter got around using his preferred, and for now, only, method of transportation: mass transit.

“I guess I’ve been shopping for cars for three and a half years,” said Mr. Kartheiser, whose last car was damaged by street flooding. “I have some commitment issues. I’m the guy who stands in the soap aisle for like 40 minutes. Old Spice! Speed Stick! Old Spice!”

Before heading out to a favorite restaurant in Thai Town, Mr. Kartheiser got ready in his single-room Hollywood apartment, which has a bed that can be airlifted to the ceiling and sliding doors that hide his bathroom. He emerged, wearing a faded green T-shirt imprinted with a mosaic of Edie Sedgwick images, a sharp contrast to Pete Campbell, who dons suits starched to perfection. On hiatus from shooting Mad Men, he sported a beard.

“In New York all the guys have satchels,” he said, as he slung a tattered black bag bearing the logo of his fictional workplace, Sterling Cooper, over his shoulders. “Here, you just have...Porsches,” he said with a tinge of sarcasm.

A drive east to the Thai Town neighborhood would have taken six minutes (without traffic). By subway, the trip was closer to 30 minutes. First there was the walk north along Vine Street to the corner of Hollywood Boulevard, for the Metro Red Line station, during which Mr. Kartheiser, 31, revealed his giddy—and decidedly un-Pete Campbell—side. He gave in to outbursts of song, and alternately hummed and whistled. A trained dancer, he treated the station’s stairs like Fred Astaire would, gliding from one side of the step to the other.

He also ruminated about getting around Los Angeles, which is daunting even with a car and a GPS device. But Mr. Kartheiser was unfazed by the bus and rail system.

“The buses stay on the streets they are on,” he said. “If you get on the 4, it’s going to stay on Santa Monica until it becomes Sunset. I don’t even know the names of most of the buses. Like the Fairfax bus—it’s just the Fairfax bus.”

“The hardest part of riding the bus is dating,” he added. “Girls, as much as they are independent, want on a certain level to have certain things.”

Porsches, perhaps?

To go downtown where Mad Men is filmed, he takes either the Red Line or two buses. He reads, does crossword puzzles and goes over his lines.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “Instead of driving and being stressed out about traffic, you can work your scene, you can do your exercises or whatever on the bus. Everyone’s got their own deal.”

When he goes on auditions, he often changes into a suit at the location, so as not to get “schmutzy,” and says he is not often recognized. (“I was on a bus once and it had Mad Men on the side,” he said. “That was pretty funny.”)

It helps that he’s nothing like Pete Campbell, who has become a cult figure, with several blogs devoted to the character, and a Tumblr titled, What Would Pete Campbell Do?

“I can’t even tell you how much fun I have playing this character,” he said.

After dinner, he and the reporter ventured by bus farther east to the Gold Room, a dive bar in the Echo Park neighborhood. There, he ordered scotch and struck up a conversation with a young man, who after learning that Mr. Kartheiser uses mass transit, explained that he had spent the day doing the same—his first time after living in Los Angeles for five years.

“They’ve done a study and they’ve found that people under 30 no longer view cars as status symbols or even positive things,” Mr. Kartheiser said. “They look at them as pollutants.”

Earlier in the evening, on the way to the restaurant, Mr. Kartheiser had ruminated about his choice to be carless.

“I like that my life slows down when I go places,” he said. “I have all these interactions with the human race and I can watch people living their life and not just in their car.”

He added, “Of, course, now I am getting to a point...”

He drifted off as he climbed the Metro station stairs, when as if on cue, a man ran down the stairs, followed by another with a video camera.

“Yeah!” Mr. Kartheiser shouted. “That was amazing!”

Vincent Katheiser is the model for “Vincent” in Solve for X.

Source: New York Times

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The Sound of Music on Oprah

2010-09-29T18:41:00.004-04:00

Harpo Productions says the entire cast of the 1965 Academy Award-winning movie musical The Sound of Music will appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Friday, 29 October, one month from now! That includes stars Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Plummer will talk about his relationship with the film over the decades. The show will include a performance from the singing group The von Trapp Children, which features members of the real von Trapp family.

Ol' Chris is mentioned in Chapter Ten of my Hollywood-set mystery, Cold Open.

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Happy 60th Birthday, John Sayles, or Which Three Books Would You Choose?

2010-09-28T00:00:00.024-04:00

“He attended Williams College, where a small incident provided an inkling as to his future career. In 1972, while participating in the school’s semiannual trivia contest, Sayles’s team was tied with another after eight hours, forcing the game’s first sudden death overtime Sayles was able to cite a particular line of dialogue from the 1960 film The Time Machine (based on H.G. Wells’ novel) to clinch the championship.” [From Wikipedia]

And I think I know the line of dialogue. It’s in the last few minutes of the film. By the way, which three books would you choose?

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Which Beatle is Sally Draper’s Favorite?

2010-09-26T23:25:00.006-04:00

Your favorite Beatle reveals your personality, they say. At first I thought Sally might prefer John, but if she really had a thing for Ilya Kuryakin, then Paul would be just fine.

[I Just Saw a Face]

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Peggy and Don as Madonna and Child

2010-09-18T09:43:00.005-04:00

I just found this over at the Lipp Sisters’ Mad Men site Basket of Kisses and had to share it with everybody. Painting is by Florida artist Katie Turk Truman.

Sometimes I think being a MadManiac is like being a Deadhead, only with city smarts.

Jared Harris Does a Little Wodehouse

2010-09-17T11:10:00.003-04:00

Lane Pryce fans (come on, you all can't be slavering over Don Draper) may be pleased to note that during the recent season break Jared Harris recently lent his talents to a audio production of PG Wodehouse's Blanding's Castle series.

Harris's voice as Rupert Baxter is impeccable and unmistakable, all the characters are pure upper-crust nutty, and the story is hilarious. Something to do with a pignapping...

[Summer Lightning 1 and 2]

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Ken Russell’s Song of Summer

2010-09-15T10:10:00.032-04:00

I saw Song of Summer on PBS back in, I think, 1972. A black-and-white film written, produced and directed by Ken Russell, it portrays the final six years of the life of Frederick Delius when he was blind and paralysed, and when Eric Fenby lived with the composer and his wife Jelka as Delius's amanuensis. The title is borrowed from the Delius tone poem "A Song of Summer", which is heard along with other Delius works in the film. It has received wide praise since its first screening, and Ken Russell himself said it was the best film he ever made and he would not have done a single shot differently. It was broadcast on the BBC this day in 1968. For obvious reasons, it means much more to me now than it did when I was seventeen. Thanks to Xwsftassell at YouTube for uploading the entire film in eight parts, audio only, which is just fine.

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My Spec Mad Men Script

2010-09-09T12:48:00.006-04:00

I have several predictions about season five of Mad Men:

Peggy will marry, probably that nice Abe whom she snogged at the Washington Market happening. In other words, the husband she chooses will be an artistic and progressive young man who won't feel threatened that his wife has a business career and is the major breadwinner;
The sex will be great, but Peggy will continue to be ambivalent about having a child;
The conflicts between Peggy and her husband about whether or not to have children, as well as the pressures of work, will lead her into Don's arms and they will eventually have a brief affair;
In some way or other, this will contribute to compromising the future of SCDP.

Making story predictions like this can be fun, not because it's great to be proven "right" or win bets but because it stimulates the imagination. And, all right, it is great to discover you're in synch with a brilliant narrator like Matthew Weiner. This happened for me last year toward the end of season three, when for my own amusement I started to write a spec script for MM. I placed this episode in the chronology as season four, episode six, and here were the major situational and plot points:

Don and Betty were separated but not divorced.
Don's drinking problem was worse.
Peggy was living in her own apartment and not seriously going with anyone. Therefore Don was feeling free to occasionally drop in on her unannounced, drunk, and lonely.
Sterling Cooper was going after the Honda account during Honda's first disastrous attempt to introduce their flimsy automobiles to the American market.
The presence of Japanese clients awakened awful memories of the war in one of the Brits, who was a POW forced to work on the Burma Road.
Don traveled to LA for a meeting at Honda's headquarters.
However, he missed seeing Anna, who was visiting her half-black son protesting in Berkeley.

I named this episode "Burma Shave", referencing the product whose most famous advertising gimmick was the placement of eye-level signs displaying clever verses along country roads, one line at a time at intervals, such as:

Ben met Anna
Made a hit
Neglected beard
Ben-Anna split
Burma-Shave

The first scene was Ken Cosgrove showing around the office a souvenir from his recent drive in the country, a single Burma Shave sign he'd stolen from the roadside.

At one time there were about seven thousand of these sign sets all over the US. They stopped making new Burma Shave signs in the early 60s, but old weatherbeaten ones could still be found here and there. I remember as a little kid spotting them during family drives and being very proud that I could read them.

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Mad Men Under a Misbegotten Moon

2010-09-06T10:30:00.004-04:00

When Matthew Weiner cribs, he cribs from the best. The scene in "The Suitcase" (episode 7, season 4) where drunken Don falls asleep on Peggy's lap is a deliberate echo of the famous scene in Eugene O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten, where jaded city poseur Jamie Tyrone, shaken to the core by the death of his mother, finds rest and redemption in the arms of farm girl Josie Hogan, the only woman in the world who knows him and loves him, and whom in turn he loves purely.

I was extremely lucky in my youth to have seen the definitive 1973 production of Moon that starred Jason Robards Jr and the great, great Colleen Dewhurst. It was staged at the legendary Morosco Theater which was later torn down to make way for a hotel—not a Hilton, fortunately.

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Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury

2010-08-22T21:07:00.006-04:00

And you think I go overboard. "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" is probably the greatest fangirl love song ever written.

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Jerry, Still Dead After Fifteen Years

2010-08-09T23:05:00.027-04:00

Here's Jerry Garcia back in '68 singing "Mountains of the Moon" on, of all TV shows, Playboy After Dark. That's Bob Weir in the foreground. We still miss you, Jerry!

Michael, by the way, does a very nice job of recreating the Grateful Dead's 1974 New Year's Eve concert at the Fillmore in his novel A Hole in the Fog. Here's the excerpt from the free Spring issue of Cantaraville:

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Thank You for Bringing My Keys

2010-08-04T09:58:00.034-04:00

Oh God, I loathe Don Draper now. Not for what happened on his couch but for what happened the following morning at the office. Clueless boys!

From The Awl re this episode:

If real intimacy comes from shared vulnerability, perhaps there is nothing that makes one feel more used than false intimacy. We saw examples of this all throughout last night’s episode: the invasive psychological test that went straight for the Freudian soft spot (how do you feeeeeel about your father?); Peggy’s wormy baby-faced boyfriend cajoling her into sex; the instant kinship between creepy Glenn and Sally; and of course, the great climax featuring a broken Don Draper who, after a lonely Yuletide party, breaks all his own rules not so much for a quick plow on the couch but for a sleepover with the woman who knows what his kids want for Christmas. It’s also the betrayal of intimacy that can bring out the most savage impulses in us—why Glenn was willing to trash Betty’s kitchen, in a ploy to help Sally out of the house she hates—and I can think of few other scenarios more humiliating than having your desire for intimacy taken advantage of… especially when you’re given a half-hearted non-apology and two crisp fifties the next day.

What's interesting to me is how opinions of the Don-Allison storyline seem to differ according to the sex of the blogger. Men seem to think that Allison—the receptionist-turned-ideal-secretary (who's appeared, by the way, in 20 episodes since season one)—has had a thing for Don from the beginning, despite all indications otherwise. There's also a strange taint of "she got what was coming to her" in their comments. Women, on the other hand, like Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune seem as a whole to have interpreted their relationship correctly:

What was awful about that scene between Don and Allison is that he didn't even know how terrible his behavior was. He had no clue that all he needed to say was, "Hey, things got pretty crazy last night. You're amazing, really, but I don't think we should let that happen again." Just a couple of sincere sentences and Allison, who appeared ready to move on from the unexpected hookup, would have been fine. Everything would have gone pretty much back to normal.

But Don just couldn't do it. That kind of emotional availability and directness is beyond him. And that may well be his undoing...

Allison, who clearly has a serious flirtation going on Joey, was willing to hook up with Don but expected some kind of acknowledgment of what had happened between them. She's knows there's no hope of a relationship—which she didn't even really want. But she just wanted Don to show a little tenderness and vulnerability to her the morning after, just for a minute. To be so stiffly rebuffed and then handed money? That is simply insulting to a modern young woman like Allison. Don's behavior is simply jaw-droppingly clueless. She wasn't asking for an emotional striptease, just a moment of honesty. Don couldn't do it. It may not be in his DNA.

Don and Joan are just one generation ahead of Peggy and Allison and Joey, but they observe a different code: Nothing is said about these things. No expectations. You put your pain away where no one can see it and carry on. Well, that won't fly. A different generation with different ideas is coming up...

The good news is that I'm channeling all my anger and frustration over this fictional character into my Hollywood-set mystery, Cold Open.

PS—Whether that letter she was typing at the end of "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" was her resignation or just another piece of SCDP correspondence, Allison is making an appearance in at least two upcoming episodes, next week's "The Good News" and after that, "The Rejected". Place your bets, ladies.

PPS—A interview with Alexa Alemanni, who plays Allison, can be found at AMCTV here.

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Self-Styled Siren Checks In with Handsome Directors

2010-07-21T00:00:00.049-04:00

On a pleasanter note than Monday’s posting, my favorite classic-film blogger Self-Styled Siren posted her list of Hollywood's handsomest directors, and smack dab between Frank Borzage (Three Comrades’ screenplay by my beloved countryman F. Scott Fitzgerald) and the sleekly elegant Vittorio de Sica was this devastating photo of John Cassavetes (from, I think, Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Mrs Matheny is fanning herself.

Cassavetes favorites: Opening Night with Gene Rowlands and the great, great existential TV private eye series, Johnny Staccato, episodes of which have yet to be collected on a single DVD. (Note to SCTV fans: This is the TV show parodied in the skit "Vic Arpeggio" by Joe Flaherty.)

[The Way You Look Tonight]

Where Are the Headlines?

2010-07-16T21:53:00.003-04:00

Not very long ago, the typical American newsroom had three types of jobs: reporter, editor and photographer. But lately, as newspapers have been frantically converting themselves into high-tech, 24-hour online operations, things are more complicated. Every few days at The Washington Post, staffers get a notice like this: "Please welcome Dylan Feldman-Suarez, who will be joining the fact-integration team as a multiplatform idea triage specialist, reporting to the deputy director of word-flow management and video branding strategy. Dylan comes to us from the social media utilization division of Sikorsky Helicopters."

Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.

Everything is different today, and it's much more confusing. For one thing, there are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as "a subspecies of goat".

Fortunately, this new system enjoys the services of tens of thousands of fact-checking "citizen journalists" who write "comments". They will read the Uzbekistan story and instantly alert everyone that BARACK OBAMA IS A LIEING PIECE OF CRAP.

I basically like "comments", though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

My biggest beef with the New Newsroom, though, is what has happened to headlines. In old newsrooms, headline writing was considered an art. This might seem like a stretch to you, but not to copy editors, who graduated from college with a degree in English literature, did their master's thesis on intimations of mortality in the early works of Molière, and then spent the next 20 years making sure to change commas to semicolons in the absence of a conjunction.

The only really creative opportunity copy editors had was writing headlines, and they took it seriously. This gave the American press some brilliant and memorable moments, including this one, when the Senate failed to convict President Clinton: CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR; and this one, when a meteor missed Earth: KISS YOUR ASTEROID GOODBYE. There were also memorably wonderful flops, like the famous one on a food story about home canning: YOU CAN PUT PICKLES UP YOURSELF.

Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don't seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian. That's because, on the Web, headlines aren't designed to catch readers' eyes. They are designed for "search engine optimization," meaning that readers who are looking for information about something will find the story, giving the newspaper a coveted "eyeball." Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers.

Early this year, the print edition of The Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O'Brien's decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: "Better never than late." Online, it was changed to "Conan O'Brien won't give up 'Tonight Show' time slot to make room for Jay Leno."

I spent an hour coming up with the perfect, clever, punny headline for this column. If you read this on paper, you'd see it: "A digital salute to online journalism." I guarantee you that when it runs online, editors will have changed it to something dull, to maximize the possibility that someone, searching for something she cares about, will click on it.

I bet it'll read "Gene Weingarten Column Mentions Lady Gaga".

Lady Gaga.

—Gene Weingarten

[Source: Washington Post]

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Publishing is the New Literacy

2010-07-11T22:04:00.006-04:00

Clay Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus, imagines something daring—a world without television. To celebrate the appearance of the revered futurist’s latest volume, we’re delighted to share a February discussion between Shirky, Barnes & Noble Review Editor-in-Chief James Mustich, and BNR contributor Andrew Keen. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation about the future of the book, of the reader and the writer, and, most intriguingly, the future of intimacy.

James Mustich: Clay, I was very taken with that post you wrote about the early days of the Gutenberg revolution.

Clay Shirky: Oh, yes. Eisenstein’s book.

JM: Right. It had a very insightful historical perspective that’s generally lacking in conversations about today’s publishing turmoil. You also had an interesting piece at edge.org recently, about how publishing is the new literacy. You said, “It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race—a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity.”

Andrew Keen: This idea of publishing as “the new literacy” sounds like a sexy, kind of Twitter remark, but what actually does that mean?

CS: We have this whole complex of words, “publish,” “publisher,” “publicity,” “publicist,” that all refer to either jobs or the work of making things public. Because it used to be incredibly difficult, complicated, and expensive to simply put material into the public sphere, and now it’s not. So I’m comparing it to literacy—literacy used to be reserved for a specialist class prior to the printing press, and, much more importantly, prior to the spread of publishers and the rise of a real publishing industry.

AK: What do you mean by “reserved”?

CS: That it was reserved for a professional class. There was no point in educating people to read and write who weren’t also going to have access to books, and the people who had access to books were generally in centers of learning or churches. You couldn’t have mass literacy without also mass availability of things to read, which didn’t happen until after Gutenberg. So literacy went through this curious transition where it became more critical to society, and you could no longer make a living just by the ability to read and write.

So when I say “publishing is the new literacy,” I don’t mean there’s no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way. You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an internet café or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.

So what happened to literacy in the 1600, 1700 and 1800s is that it went from being reserved for a specialist class to being a general feature of the middle class. The same thing is happening to publishing—the ability to put something out in public is becoming more important to society, but the delta between “I can put something out in public” and “I can’t put something out in public” is no longer so great that you can automatically make money simply by having access to the means of publication.

AK: Is that change technological or cultural?

CS: Well, it’s a technological change whose ramifications are mostly cultural, and culture is I think lagging the technology, as it often does, because the raw capability isn’t what changes society. As I put it in Here Comes Everybody, “society doesn’t change when people adopt new tools; it changes when people adopt new behaviors.” So in the 1990s, we had a population of some tens of millions of people in this country who had access to online material, but that wasn’t yet the majority of the popularity. More importantly, those people hadn’t yet fully formed behaviors around what was possible digitally. Now, having gone through the first decade in which digital freedom was a normal part of life for more than half the country, we’re seeing the cultural change that comes about as a result of the technological change. So the ability to publish, the ability to put things in public no matter who you are, as long as you have access to, again, a public library or an internet café—that’s a technological change. But the change in perception and reaction to what gets published and why, that’s the cultural change.

JM: What interests me in what you wrote about the printing press, and the immediate changes its advent provoked, is how unclear the effect of its influence was to those subject to it at the time. Today, in the throes of another massive technological change, we’re trying to see very clearly what’s happening, and part of the point of your piece is that we can’t see it either, because we don’t know what the behaviors are going to be that are engendered by the technology. But as a book guy, what I have often looked at is how much the book publishing industry defines the situation only in the context of its very recent history...

CS: Yes, right. Absolutely.

JM: ...which makes them think of content in terms of these finished products, books; that’s the only way people get information, or the only way creative work gets to people. But those products in that form are really consequences of industrial organization, or management decisions made in the very recent past. If you look back to the 19th century or before that, printed creative work was much more dynamic. It came about in pieces, then it was collected in books. Very few people were sitting down and writing books the way they do now.

CS: A whole book, right. Dickens was paid by the word in newspapers, and then Pickwick Papers came out of the assembly of that work.

JM: Exactly. It seems to me that what we’re seeing is, in some ways, that technology is allowing us to go backward to a more dynamic kind of form of communication of these works. I’m wondering if you’ve given any thought to that, and what that thought might be.

CS: One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we’ve just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities—London, New York, and Los Angeles—around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media. This is the media landscape where getting your television in through a wire rather than through the air constitutes a revolution. That was a really big deal. Cable was supposed to be a huge change. And indeed it was, within the context of television, a large change. It’s just that now we’re actually dealing with a change that’s a shock across the whole environment.

I have this theory. I call it the Russia-Poland Theory. Which is: one of the reasons Poland did better than Russia after the collapse of Communism is they’d only had one generation under the Communists, so there were still people who could remember that it had been different. Whereas, under Russia, no one alive remembered what life was like in 1916. When people go through two generations of stability, it’s easy enough to adopt an attitude that it has always been this way. So for somebody entering the book publishing business in, say, the year 2000, some 23-year-old just out of school, it has ALWAYS been this way. No one in the publishing industry has known anything but the postwar landscape. What you get when a situation like that happens is that one word comes to stand in for a business, a production method, a product, a cultural signifier—the whole range of it is all compacted into that single thing.

You can see it really clearly with television. You go to the store to buy a television, and then you come home and you watch some television. But the television you buy isn’t the television you watch, and the television you watch isn’t the television you buy. We use the same word to refer to the object and the content flow, and nobody gets confused because we all know what television is. Now all of a sudden, we have video spilling out of phones and personal computers, and the question “Is that television?” becomes really complicated.

To books specifically: books are a considered form of long-form writing. They’re a physical product, and then, as you say as “a book guy”—there are book guys, right? There are people who live their whole lives in the context of producing this long-form writing and turning it into those physical objects. And all that stuff is coming apart.

AK: But books are Russia. Not Poland.

CS: Yes, books are Russia, not Poland. That’s exactly right.

AK: Whereas you could argue television or the music business is more like Poland. They’re all relatively new. Whereas the book business is much older.

CS: You’re right. The book business is, in this metaphor, Russia, which is to say the stability of the book business predates the Second World War. In fact, you read all this stuff about the rise of paperbacks, mass market paperbacks in the 1950s—people were freaking out that it didn’t have a hard cover. That constituted a revolution in books.

But what we’re dealing with now, I think, is the ramification of having long-form writing not necessarily meaning physical objects, not necessarily meaning commissioning editors and publishers in the manner of making those physical objects, and not meaning any of the sales channels or the preexisting ways of producing cultural focus. This is really clear to me as someone who writes and publishes both on a weblog and books. There are certain channels of conversation in this society that you can only get into if you have written a book. Terry Gross has never met anyone in her life who has not JUST published a book. Right?

JM: [Laughs] Right.

CS: It’s like every judge thinking that criminals dress in blue suits all day long. Terry Gross’ experience is only talking to people who have just written books.

AK: Why does Terry Gross only talk to the traditional author?

CS: I think because the cost of writing a book is very large. Someone has committed a lot of time to it. They’ve put a lot of their thinking into it. But also, a whole bunch of other people who have significant amounts of capital on the line have said, “This is worth publishing.” They’ve either said it in the context of the academic press, which says, “This will redound to our credit,” or they’ve said it in the context of the commercial press, which says, “Revenues will exceed expenses.” We use the phrase “self-published author” to mean “vaguely suspect.” Right? Or take painters. Anyone can be a painter, but the question is then, “Have you ever had a show; have you ever had a solo show?” People are always looking for these high-cost signals from other people that this is worthwhile.

That I think is one of the big changes in book culture, that it used to be a pretty safe way to say, “I’m talking to the people who I should be talking to if I’m talking to the people who’ve written books about the subject,” and now that is less the case for two reasons. For one, the book world is opening up—the maw of production of the book world is opening up—the iUniverses and so forth of the world. Getting a physical object no longer means somebody else took a big economic flyer on it. At the same time, more thoughtful long-form writing is happening outside of the traditional publishing industry. So the old rough-and-ready, “I’m vetting for quality by only talking to authors of books” model is suddenly up in the air. Books are less valuable as signifiers, and people who you ought to be talking to, some of them don’t write books.

AK: One example of this type of new author is Andrew Sullivan. He is a classic 19th-century guy who now is in the 21st century, who has decided that the long-form world doesn’t work. But he is a star of both the old and the new world. He actually proves that the arguments about elitism of the old world are in some ways just as relevant in the new world.

CS: You said to me on Twitter the other day, “Oh, you’re secretly an elitist.” I remember thinking I’m actually, I think, kind of openly an elitist.

AK: You’ve said it now. That’s the end of your career [laughs].

CS: That’s the end, right [laughs]. I’ve always adopted the Bill Burroughs mantra, which is, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Which is to say that if there is any intrinsic value in writing or expressing yourself or taking a photo, it’s worth doing even if the results are mediocre. Whenever the production maw has opened more widely, whether it’s cheap photography or it’s weblogs, the average quality falls. The average quality of a piece of writing is now lower because the denominator has exploded. The question becomes how do you find the good stuff in this much larger group. I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed. What’s interesting now is that the old gatekeepers for identifying, anointing, and promoting talent are different in this generation than they were previously.

There’s an interesting natural experiment going on around this very question of elitism with Nick Denton’s Gawker empire. Denton is the person who discovers Elizabeth Spiers. Denton hires Anna Marie Cox. He finds this great group of early writers, who then all get picked up by traditional media and switch jobs, because whatever else you can say about the platform for Gawker weblogs, they don’t pay that well. So all of a sudden, Nick is now the recruiter for traditional media. And the question becomes: is there a large enough, an unlimited enough talent pool that Nick can do that 100 times in a row? It doesn’t matter how many times mainstream media recruits these people away from him, because he can always find somebody else—or, is he going to run out of the talent pool, and end up just being a recruiter. We don’t know how widely distributed the talent that he relies on is; if there are only ten writers as good as Cox, he’s got a problem. If there’s a hundred writers as good as that on that subject, then instead it’s the mass media that has a problem. If it turns out that the medium can’t employ everyone who’s talented, the supply and demand equation switches, and the premium you get for talent actually turns out to be a premium for talent plus happening to have the microphone in your hand. We don’t know yet. Plainly, supply is larger than the current available slots in the mass media. But we don’t know if it’s 10 times larger, at which point we see a rebalancing, or if it’s 100 times larger, at which point we really see a restructuring.

AK: Can we go back to the book? It occurs to me that one of the reasons the traditional book lasted so long—one of the reasons it was Russia—is that the form and the function went very well together, and the book was a great way of tracking talent. Take the birth of the 19th-century novel, which is the classic way of putting together a finished product, which then the Industrial Revolution was able to polish and distribute. So when Poland went, it wasn’t so dramatic. But when Russia goes, it’s going to be really dramatic. We haven’t even seen the beginning in the book revolution, have we?

CS: I think we are literally just seeing the beginning now. Just yesterday, Google says “Our negotiating position vis-à-vis the publishers has changed dramatically in the last 30 days.” Google has been doing this stuff quietly, one way or another, since 2005—Google Scholar, Google Books, digitization, negotiating digital rights, and so forth. It was because they were essentially going to be the second entrant in a monopolistic environment largely dominated by Amazon. The rise of the iPad and the at least not completely accidental renegotiation of the MacMillan-Amazon relationship at the same time has meant that supply and demand are more nearly balanced now, and that the publishers have greater leverage to use that platform.

That is a two-edged sword, which is to say that the ability to engage in price competition with one another cuts both ways in a digital environment because the marginal cost of distribution is still zero. But I think that the last 60 days are the beginning of the real change.

I’ve got a book coming out in June. The first one, I signed—I started the proposal in 2005, started to work on it in 2006, finished it in 2007, it came out at the beginning of 2008. So I’m sitting down at the beginning of 2010, almost two years to the day since the previous one came out...well, it’s actually 2½ years since I was having these kinds of conversations, and in that 2½ years the eBook has gone from being an afterthought, “let’s try it if we can,” to an absolutely normal part of the process.

AK: What is the book, and who is publishing it?

CS: Oh, it’s Penguin Group. It’s currently called Cognitive Surplus, and it’s about being able to treat people’s free time as an aggregate rather than as a series of individual silos.

AK: Ok. But digitalizing a book doesn’t change anything about it in grand historical terms, does it?

CS: I think it does, because it puts it into an ecosystem where more people have access to more books. The digitizing of a book adds to searchability, it adds to portability, it adds to...

AK: Searchability.

CS: Search is essentially the current model of information-finding, where the old model of was you go to the library and they tell you that you have to know what database you’re looking in before you look. That’s fine when there are 500 databases, maybe, and someone can help me decide. But when there’s an unlimited number of data sources, search becomes the intellectual model of the age. I remember knowing when I’d switched over to thinking digitally when I picked up a copy of Naked Lunch, and I wanted to find a little passage called “Hauser and O’Brien,” about two cops in New York City. I realized, “I can’t search for that.” I had to remember that it was about three-quarters of the way through the book, and I can kind of vaguely remember it was midway on the right-hand page or something. That experience of not being able to recapture what you’ve done before is one of the great infelicities of the book world, and I think it’s especially frustrating to people with nonfiction when there is a particular point they want to go back to.

The other thing it does, though—which is good or bad, depending on your taste—is it encourages the ability to skip ahead to the parts they want to read. I mean, nonfiction books are going to be transformed, I think, much more dramatically than fiction, precisely because their utility means that people are going to essentially disassemble them mentally even if they’re sold as a single package. So to your point about Dickens being assembled in the book after having been created in this disassembled way, we may potentially be seeing something like that on the demand side, which is: I’d like to be able to take this nonfiction book and take it apart again, and preserve or flag the parts I’m going to refer to continually.

JM: That’s an interesting idea for me, because we’re not just talking about the object, Because the book shaped our model of knowledge: when the index was invented in the 12thcentury, that made a book a certain kind or ordered thing, and it led to three centuries of Scholasticism—the whole university system where knowledge was contained in these ordered things and could be found in these books by looking a certain way. And all the content to come was shaped by this intellectual etiquette, if you will. What’s important about digitalization, when the model is search instead of an alphabetical index, is that it changes what one’s model of knowledge is.

CS: Right.

JM: Which is really the subtext of Here Comes Everybody—that there is a different way of apprehending the world now because of this.

CS: Yes. I think one of the ways of apprehending the world that’s actually showing up already in the academy is the so-called “one-box search,” where you don’t have to say, “This is the database I’m looking in.” One-box search privileges interdisciplinary work. Because if I search for a particular string or phrase, I am suddenly getting back results from psychology, sociology, economics, political science—all in the same search query. Disciplinary boundaries are just assaulted, rather than doubled down; if I have to know the database before I search it, then to become a good political scientist I have to know which journals are relevant.

AK: Do you think that that’s one of the reasons why you’ve been intellectually successful, because you cross boundaries so naturally? You started life as a creative artist. You’ve been a technologist, a theorist...

CS: I’m not sure that I’ve gotten to the level of theory. In the academy, there’s a pretty rigid definition.

AK: But, in a recent Vanity Fair piece, Michael Wolff referred to you as the Marcuse of the early 21st century.

CS: [Laughs] That’s on my to-read list. I haven’t read it yet.

AK: So you’re in high company now. You’re the Frankfurt School 2.0.

CS: I will tell my wife, who is a political philosopher. She’ll be tickled. But certainly, there are revolutions in which people’s principal skill is not being afraid of what they don’t understand. These people do well in revolutionary times. I jumped into this not because I was good at it, but because I didn’t have much to lose. That will give way—in fact, it even is giving way now. I started doing this in a day when you had to understand something about how the Internet works just to use it. Literally. There was no web, there was no graphic interface or anything like that. You had to understand something about the plumbing just to go to the bathroom. It’s like having to know how your car started to own a car. Those days are long gone. In fact, some of the interesting commentary on the iPad considers it as a new model for how little you have to know about your computer in order to get it to do what you want to do.

AK: Which is why the techies don’t like it.

CS: Exactly! But I do think that early on in any revolution, people who are comfortable operating without strong disciplinary boundaries are liable to do well, just because nobody knows where the next good idea is going to come from. Louis Menand just put four of his essays in a very interesting book on higher education. It’s clear that disciplinary boundaries are a response to the profusion of knowledge; that response says, “This is where psychology ends and sociology begins, and if you cross the hall, you’re operating in their discipline and not ours, and they have different choices.”

These kinds of boundaries become really significant in two different areas. They become significant intellectually, and they also become significant for the development of things like tenure. So the really mundane—“This is how the profession works, recognizes quality and promotes itself”—and also—“This is the intellectual output that’s consumed by society and shapes people’s ideas” and so forth—all get bound together tightly, and nobody inside the system can really imagine a change.

I think one of the other questions right now arises because we’ve plainly lowered the threshold of disciplinary boundaries in the early days of this change, because there are so many inputs. There are people who are willing to dive in and try stuff and are getting things done. But as people get better at things, we are starting to see the return of some kind of discipline—people specializing in different aspects of the service. At Google there are people who do nothing but optimize the file system all day long. So it’s not just service side and client side. It’s really, really specialized.

But are the disciplinary models of the new medium going to be more like a network or are they going to be more like a series of silos? I’m going to bet on the network model, which is to say it’s likelier that disciplines in the world we’re entering are going to have not so much a canon that says, “This is the edge of what’s important,” so much as, “This is the core of what we’re interested in wherever the currents come from.” There is still going to be a strong difference between psychology and sociology at the center of those two professions—a concentration on individual thinking versus a concentration on group dynamics. But I think there’s going to be less of a sharp edge between them, and I think there will be more people—or really, probably, more pairs or groups of people—who are doing and publishing research that crosses that boundary back and forth.

AK: When it comes to books, though, one of the big traditional boundaries is between fiction and nonfiction. Do you think that that’s done away with?

CS: Ah. The James Frey problem.

AK: Yes. But as the book becomes alive, and the novelists can write more factually...

JM: I’m not sure that this concern isn’t a very recent development as well, created by the industry to shelve books in bookstores and to disseminate books in the trade, and then inflated to another kind of discussion...

CS: Look at the difference between how a library shelves books, how serious fiction as a category exists in bookstores but not in libraries.

JM: If we go back to Dickens again, there’s a combination journalistic and storytelling impulses. Our obsession with whether a memoir is true or a novel is based on real events—in any interview you hear with a novelist, the interviewer is general asking again and again the same question of the author: “Did this really happen to you?” We don’t—we can’t—observe those boundaries in our imaginative lives as clearly as the industry or the media does, or wants to.

CS: There was this moment when Oprah got called out on the James Frey thing—in what must in retrospect have been a moment of absent-mindedness, she told her audience the truth, and she said something like, Look, if it’s out in the public eye, it’s been massaged. Anyone telling a story is telling a story. There is no such thing as unmediated expression, there is no direct access to truth. Those weren’t the words she used, but that was the message, in which she said, essentially, the Frey made you feel something, and your feelings were real, and don’t get so hung up on this. Her audience went berserk. And because they went berserk in an age where they could amplify one another’s anger using all the tools we’re used to, there was a public relations shitstorm—she was called to task for possibly the only time in her career, or certainly for the most public time in her whole career.

If I want to talk about the border between fiction and nonfiction getting erased, I point to Oprah’s audience. For the mass of the population, I don’t think that we are going to quickly enter a new world in which the truth or falsehood of an assertion is ever thought of in complicated and subtle ways. This may be truer here than it is in Europe. The U.S. is unusual in a lot of cultural ways. People want to know if this really happened to the author. The radio interviewers ask that question over and over again, because the demand for there to be an uncomplicated answer to that question is in no way assuaged by telling them that there isn’t an uncomplicated answer.

AK: It’s no coincidence that technology enables this kind of intimacy.

CS: Yes, exactly. The ability to invent a persona whose signature can be so managed is possible because there’s less face-to-face contact on the Internet, and even less telephone contact, much more digital traces of leaving websites. People didn’t just love the Frey memoir because they thought it was true. They loved his memoir because it seemed impossible that it was true, and they were still being told it was true. Augusten Burroughs, same thing. For as long as memoir culture is in its current mode, there’s always going to be a premium on a kind of faking it, because those are the books that sell well. It’s the stuff that’s right on the edge.

I remember years ago, a guy I worked with in the theater found a ten-year-old bottle of moonshine in his basement in North Carolina. He said, “I don’t know if I should drink this or not.” So he called up a friend of his who knew a little bit more about moonshine than he did, and he said, “I found this moonshine; can I drink this?” His friend said, “I’ll tell you what. Just pour out a little capsule of it and set it on fire, and if it burns blue, it’s fine—drink it. If it burns yellow, don’t drink it. If it burns blue with a yellow tip, I’ll pay you ten dollars for a glass.” That’s the memoir, right? If it burns blue with a yellow tip... You can’t even believe it’s true, but also it’s just barely palatable to consume. That’s what James Frey and J.T. Leroy and Augusten Burroughs write, these impossible crushing circumstances of their life, after which they acquire a kind of literary ability to tell it as a story.

The demand for that is going to remain there. So I think while the line between fiction and nonfiction may be increasingly blurred in practice, I think the public’s demand to be told there’s a sharp line is unlikely to shift quickly.

AK: Actually, I don’t agree with what you said earlier, Clay. I think technology has caught up with culture, rather than the other way around. In this sense, technology now is feeding our appetite for intimacy.

CS: Yeah, that’s right. I will agree with Andrew here.

AK: Not for the first time.

CS: Not for the first time. [Laughs] One of the things that freaks me out about the music scene is that hip-hop preceded the digital encoding of music. They were doing sampling and remixing and intercutting and mashups—call it whatever you want—with turntables and a microphone. When you hear what Kool DJ Herc or Double Dee and Steinski were doing—insane! Insane stuff you would never try and do with only analog equipment, except that that was all they had. So when digital music came on, it was like gasoline on the fire, because all of a sudden, all the stuff that they’d just barely been able to hold together with two tables and a microphone turned into something that was able to be cut-and-pasted.

I guess what I’m saying about technology preceding culture versus culture preceding technology is: when there’s deep change, it takes a long time for the culture to catch up. But deep changes never happen without some precursor. Take, for example, the early history of the book. Scholastic culture arose around the book as an object, and it was the automation of the production of that object that Gutenberg was responsible for, not the fact of the original intuition that folded and cut pages were better than rolled parchments.

TV, weirdly, created a grid of intimacy among 10 million. You would not think that a medium that reaches 10 million people would have intimacy as its core virtue.

AK: That’s why the most valuable TV guys were the late-night talk show hosts whose whole premise, whose whole value was building intimacy with their audience.

CS: There’s was a really interesting article in the Atlantic about George Noory, the guy who does a late night show called Coast to Coast, and about exactly this—that late night is when you’re reaching people. QVC—Quality Value Convenience—I think that was the original home shopping network. QVC has this long training course to be a phone sales person, because you don’t get on, make the sale, and get off. You get on, you talk to the person, you compliment the person. Because what do you know about the caller? That this is a person who is sitting alone at 3:00am. So it’s very clear what the value of a phone call is at that point, and it’s not just reflected in the transactional value.

So I think that Andrew is right in that the desire for intimacy in a largely dissociated environment, coinciding with the decline of social capital, created a demand that made the Internet, again, like gasoline on the fire.

AK: We’ve talked a little bit about what new books are or might be, but to me a more interesting question is who or what the new author is. Do you want to say something about that?

CS: This is the literacy question again.

JM: It circles back to why it’s important that publishing is the new literacy. What strikes me is that, if you look at other periods of great cross-disciplinary ferment, the early years the Enlightenment, say, you had people who found ways to communicate across disciplines effectively—through pamphlets and international newsletters then, rather than the internet.

CS: Right.

JM: Your piece, for instance, on Eisenstein, which we got on the web, because you could publish it there easily, is not that different from what Diderot or Melchior Grimm were doing in sending these newsletters back and forth between Germany and France. It’s just easier now, and everybody can do it. That’s what I was trying to say before about writing being free of the book for a long time before the modern commodity of the book contained it. I’m not talking about the history of the codex and Gutenberg, but of the act of setting something on paper and sending it out into the world without imprisoning it in the book. Self-publishing—publishing as the new literacy—allows that on a massive scale.

CS: Yes. Putting something on paper used to be a way of increasing the number of copies in circulation, and now it’s a way of decreasing the number of copies in circulation, by comparison to the digital media.
It’s interesting. From my point of view, I am a writer but not an author, which is to say I am a person who writes. My introduction to this medium was on Usenet, a medium with no graphic capabilities, and so to have a presence, literally to be there at all, was to write all the time. And I write in a very conversational style. It’s not the same style as an essay style. But nevertheless, it’s where I learned to write. I should have learned it in college, but alas, instead I learned it on Usenet.

There are still people in this city—I went to school with many of them—for whom the kind of Algonquin Club energy of authorship and being a writer and so forth is the aspiration. My sense is there are fewer of them now, fewer 23-year-olds.

AK: You went to Yale, right?

CS: I went to Yale.

AK: Are you saying that you didn’t learn to write at Yale? You did theater studies at Yale, right?

CS: Yes.

AK: [Laughs] You must have been semi-literate to get in.

CS: [Laughs] I was not illiterate prior to applying.

AK: So what do you mean when you say you learned to write on Usenet, having been a Yale grad?

CS: What I mean is that what I wrote at Yale was for an audience of a single person, my professor, and that it was intended to convince him that I knew what I was talking about so he would give me a good grade, rather than being intended to communicate something to him that would convince them to change him mind, or trying to give him a framework for thinking about something. In a way, writing a college paper in its current structure is almost custom-designed to crush in the student the idea of writing as a communicative act, because it feels like a long, highly structured interoffice memo rather than an address to the world.

I’ll tell you two things I’ve done here at NYU with the writing my students do for me. One, I assign them write for each other. So they think, “My peers are going to read this and also my professor is going to read this.” You’d think they’d be more concerned about me reading it, but the quality goes up when they know their friends are going to read it.

The other thing I do, with some of their stuff, is publish it online. I took a whole bunch of papers by my students from a class we did on the effect of the Internet on the 2008 Presidential election, and I just put them in a big folder and put them online. People’s reaction to this was: “Oh, I may actually be communicating something; I’d better get it together here.”

I never had that experience at Yale, not because Yale was not good at teaching writing. In fact, famously, the Daily Themes course is a boot camp for writers essentially. But in my ordinary classes, my experience of writing was that it wasn’t a communicative act to people I didn’t know.

AK: You’re basically saying that the disappearance of privacy might be a good thing for writers. Although I think Proust or certain other confessional writers might disagree with what you say.

CS: Right. The Saint Augustines of the world are always going to need to remove themselves from this. But writing is a big tent. The kind of writing I do has always been designed either to elicit a conversation or to provide some framework for thinking about a problem, and you do that better if you’re dealing with people whom you don’t know in advance and who may not be inclined to agree with you. Usenet is a much better environment for that, frankly, than the Yale campus.

AK: Let’s say some of these kids at NYU grow up to be 21st-century professional authors. Given the kind of training they’re getting and the media they’re growing up surrounded by, why would they be different as authors from you or me?

CS: First of all, I think we will see fewer authors and more writers. There’s this long, long, lonely gap between the 8,000-word New Yorker article and the 80,000-word book. And there are a bunch of interesting things that are about 20,000 words long. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where, if you’re reviewing a nonfiction book, it’s commonplace, if you like it, to assure the readers of the review that this is not just a magazine article inflated to 80,000 words so that it can be sold on the shelves at the bookstore. Which, in a way, is saying there’s a bunch of stuff that actually would be better at 20,000 or 25,000 words than at 80,000 words.

If that stretch opens up, then I think one of the things we’ll see is that an enormous amount of long-form writing that was kind of just pushed past the finish line of 80,000 words is going to revert to 40,000, or 20,000. If I could read an 80,000-word essay by a science writer about a particular branch of science, or a series of 20,000-word essays from scientists working in different disciplines, for anybody except for the best science writers—the people who are actually adding their own thoughts to the mix rather than just concatenating—I’d rather read the essays. The big question for me isn’t so much what happens to writers (although I think it’s an interesting question), but rather, what happens to the support writers typically get from the publisher?

The hard question, I think, is: long-form writing benefits enormously from a second set of eyes, or a second-third-fourth-fifth-sixth set of eyes—a copy editor, proofreader, etc. When I do a book manuscript and hand it over to Penguin, the amount it improves after I’m nominally done with it is astonishing. I can handle a process of going over it and over it and over it to get a 2,500-word essay, like the Eisenstein one, into that sort of form. I can’t do it for a book-length manuscript. Yet, once the book moves away from the bottleneck that allows the publisher to charge for the scarcity, which is where the copy editor’s fee comes from in the first place, I don’t know how writers of the future, at whatever length, take advantage of those capabilities.

People often ask me, “Why are you writing a book, given that it gets folded between the pages of dead trees?” And so on. My response to this has been, from the beginning, that I’m not getting edited and copy-edited and fact-checked and legally checked as the price I pay for having my name on the spine of the book—that has really never been a goal of mine. I didn’t grow up with that sort of Algonquin Club energy. It’s the other way around. Right now, the way you get other people to look at your book and comb through it for inconsistencies and talk about more felicitous phrasing is to agree to publish it. If there was some way to support that ecosystem—the ecosystem of “we are going to make long-form writing better by treating the question of quality and accuracy and felicity as a group effort”—that would work for weblogs, I’d be all over it. I think a lot of people would.

One of the things I noticed doing the first book is that you learn a lot of things doing a book that are lessons you can only apply to doing another book. They are really specialized things you do that aren’t about the argument you’re making, but about being part of the publishing industry. In a way, the notion of authorship retains it power in part because that hazing ritual is still high enough that, once you’re on the far side of it, doing another book is the most cost-effective use of your time, because you’ve already mastered these somewhat arcane skills. To the degree that writing—long-form writing in particular—becomes more broadly produced, I think the question will be reversed: how can we make the skills that publishers have mastered now flow outwards to new forms of long-form writing? That requires new business models that are yet to be on the horizon. And I’m not the business model guy.

That to me is the interesting part—not so much what the writers of tomorrow will be like, but rather, what’s the ecosystem for improving writing going to be like? Because right now, you’re basically either self-published and there’s no ecosystem, or you’re published by a publisher, and then you get copy-edited and legally edited, and all the rest of it. It’s that second set of values that are, in fact, more at risk than the writing itself in the current environment.

AK: Tell us about the new book, Cognitive Surplus. What’s it about?

CS: It’s about the idea of treating people’s free time as an aggregate resource that’s used for joint collaborative projects, Wikipedia and Open Source being the two most famous ones. But I’m also interested in things like environmental groups, ride-sharing, the responsible citizens who are a group of kids in Pakistan cleaning up market streets to try to create a broader civic culture—all of these ways of trying to use our new tools to create collective and not just personal value. Whereas the last book, Here Comes Everybody, was just “How did we get here?”, Cognitive Surplus is: “We’ve got this set of capabilities, where are we going?”

What’s different I think about Cognitive Surplus is saying that the cultural norms that we set now will determine the difference between how much of what we’re doing online is essentially self-amusement (mutually created value, and so you get something funny to look at on your coffee break or whatever) versus stuff that really throws off a lot of significant public and civic value. I like lol-cats as much as the next guy, and actually maybe more. But the precious end of the scale, and the end of the scale that’s hardest to get going, is the civic value. The book is essentially about why that civic value matters and how to foster it.

[Source: BarnesandNoble.com]

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John Sayles and Philippine Independence Day

2010-07-04T00:00:00.087-04:00

On this, the 64th anniversary of the independence of the Philippines from their American mentors/overlords—a day given to them, ironically enough, by those very mentors/overlords—I’d like to give a mention to John Sayles’ new film Amigo, which was done on the most modest of budgets and is now in post-production. I can’t begin to tell you what it means to me personally to see the most crucial story in the history of my people’s country done justice by the American master of morally complex film narrative (Matewan, Lone Star, The Brother from Another Planet, Lianna).There was a time in the US when Filipinos weren’t just ignored, patronized or exploited—we were loathed. But you won’t find that in your history books. I didn’t even know it myself until I was thirteen and heard it from Pete Seeger on the Smothers Brothers show (at the 2:00 mark).Thanks for letting me know, Pete. You raised my social consciousness that day.

[Turn Turn Turn]

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A Memory of the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslavakia

2010-06-20T10:40:00.012-04:00

The story of how my husband Michael was coerced into becoming a spy for US Army intelligence, sent into Soviet-invaded Prague, and ended up killing two men and fleeing for his life I will leave for another time. For now hear actor Robert Vaughn’s dramatized account of how he and the cast and crew of the WWII-set, Czech-shot film The Bridge at Remagen fled the Russian army during that tense August of 1968. Happy Father’s Day, Michael.

[Solo Behind the Iron Curtain]

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The Iliad, or The Poem of Force by Simone Weil

2010-06-20T10:30:00.004-04:00

Simone Weil (3 February 1909 in Paris, France--24 August 1943 in Ashford, Kent, England), was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Most of the writing for which she is known was published posthumously.

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L'Appel de 18 Juin

2010-06-18T09:39:00.013-04:00

Les chefs qui, depuis de nombreuses années, sont à la tête des armées françaises, ont formé un gouvernement. Ce gouvernement, alléguant la défaite de nos armées, s’est mis en rapport avec l’ennemi pour cesser le combat.

Certes, nous avons été, nous sommes, submergés par la force mécanique, terrestre et aérienne, de l’ennemi.

Infiniment plus que leur nombre, ce sont les chars, les avions, la tactique des Allemands qui nous font reculer. Ce sont les chars, les avions, la tactique des Allemands qui ont surpris nos chefs au point de les amener là où ils en sont aujourd’hui. [more]

[Theme from 'Allo 'Allo]

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Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy

2010-06-16T09:16:00.006-04:00

[Angeline Ball as Molly]

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because [more]

A Carless LA

2010-06-07T10:38:00.009-04:00

Ross Ching's vision of a carless LA. That's what I love about this city, all the possibilities. This posting is dedicated to my favorite car-free film producer, Marcia Nasatir.

Bronte Power Action Dolls

2010-05-16T18:16:00.006-04:00

[The Bronte sisters, painted by Bramwell]

What, no Bramwell?

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I’m Now a Fan of Candy Matson, PI

2010-04-22T09:22:00.012-04:00

Heard on NBC radio from San Francisco 1949-1951, Candy was the toughest and wittiest of all the female private investigators on the air. Candy Matson, YU 2-8209 created by Monty Masters—husband of the star, Natalie Masters—also had some of the cleverest dialogue and well-plotted mystery scripts in broadcast drama. An added plus are the real-life Bay Area locations woven into each story. Candy’s love interest, SFPD Lt Ray Mallard, was played by Henry Leff, while her sometime sidekick, aptly named Rembrandt Watson, was played by Jack Thomas. Astonishingly for the early 50s, Rembrandt is obviously gay—probably the first favorably portrayed homosexual on radio. This episode, entitled “The Fort Ord Story”, is dedicated to my husband, novelist-editor Michael Matheny, who took his basic training in Fort Ord in 1967 before being shipped overseas. (Click to play, right click to download.)

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How to Make a Dollar Bill Ring

2010-04-15T11:32:00.003-04:00

The first person who ever made this for me was Randy Pratt, an English teacher at Edison High in Minneapolis. He was as cute as Davy Jones of The Monkees and boy, did I have a crush on him.

GET THE GOODS ON THE INDIE WORLD. GET CANTARANEWS.
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Twin Peaks is 20 Years Old Today

2010-04-08T18:45:00.033-04:00

The greatest television series ever began airing on Sunday, 8 April, 1990, with a 2-hour pilot; I'm happy to say our entire household was part of the viewing audience that momentous night.

Mad Men Does Bye Bye Birdie

2010-04-07T17:46:00.005-04:00

Behold the cast and crew of Mad Men performing their spoof of Bye Bye Birdie for the pleasure of Matthew Weiner. Dance, vixens, dance! (And check out goofy goofy goofy Jon Hamm and January Jones at :59, 1:31, 2:32, and 3:01).

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The Sign of the Cross, a Pre-Code Erotic Epic

2010-04-04T10:44:00.007-04:00

Yes, those are Claudette Colbert’s bare breasts.

I was saving this for today, Cecil B. De Mille’s 1932 epic of Roman depravity and Christian faith, The Sign of the Cross. Not only does it boast excellent performances by Frederic March, Claudette Colbert, Elissa Landi and, in his first American film, the legendary Charles Laughton as Nero, Sign contains some of the most fiendish scenes of cruelty and violence ever filmed as well as the most lurid.

The most notorious, of course, take place in the coliseum—a naked girl garlanded with flowers is tied to a post to await rape and mauling by a gorilla; another naked girl, similiarly bedecked and bound, awaits being devoured by crocodiles; gladiators are slashed to pieces; a chained man is stomped to death by an elephant; an amazonian warrior beheads a dwarf—and this is even before the Christians are thrown to the lions. There’s also a rather nasty scene of the torture of a teenage boy made even more hateful by the showing of a Roman official’s obvious lustful pleasure in it, and the subsequent roundup and murder of a band of people that include the old, weak and young as they practice their religion. All eerily prescient of WWII but also of our era. Does nothing change?

Two erotically-charged—but, thankfully, less morally problematic to enjoy—scenes are also memorable: the scheming vixen empress enjoying a milk bath (and yes, those are Claudette Colbert’s bare breasts) and the imposingly handsome Frederic March attempting to seduce the captive Christian maiden, played by Elissa Landi, by employing the catlike charms of a female slave. You will never, ever again, in any other movie he ever did since, from A Star is Born to Inherit the Wind, see Frederic March cop a feel from a skinny lesbian slave dancer.

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Tim Cooney, American Philosopher, American Original

2010-03-20T19:28:00.003-04:00

Tim Cooney in New York in the 50s.

Just posted on YouTube today is an hour-long talk with Timothy J. Cooney (1929-1999), author of the book Telling Right from Wrong: What is Moral, What is Immoral, and What is Neither One Nor the Other. The blurb says:

An important contribution to the field of moral philosophy, this book provides an objective and precise answer to the question, “What is morality?” Moral philosophers, the author claims, have gotten bogged down in meta-ethical questions and now find themselves in a hopelessly relativistic position. Cooney develops a unique moral theory and isolates and explores the core of morality, separating actual moral issues from apparent ones.

It’s a slim book, only 158 pages, published in 1985 by the small press Prometheus Books after Random House rescinded their contract when Cooney admittedly forged a letter from the chairman of the philosophy department at Harvard that attested to its brilliance. And that not insignificant anecdote points to the reason I’m more interested at the moment in the man than in his philosophical definition of morality (which was lucidly discussed in a New York Times review of his book). Cooney was an improviser, an autodidact, a self-publisher (of his first two books), an academic without affiliation, who was proud to claim:

“My ideas evolved from long hours in local bars, talking, talking, talking, always about morality. People were always asking, ’Who do you think you are? Socrates?’ They said it with contempt, but I would smile and say, ’Thank you.’”

All through his life he had few possessions but a mountain of debts and got by, as the Beatles song goes, with a little help from his friends. One friend was his ex-wife Joan Ganz Cooney who, even though she went on to marry a former US Secretary of Commerce and win awards and fame for creating Sesame Street and The Electric Company, never changed her last name.

A fine eulogy is posted by John Haber, Cooney’s editor, here. A summation of his philosophy is here.

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A Reminder of Leonard Gyllenhaal

2010-03-07T16:00:00.007-05:00

While doing the washing up after dinner last night I got to reflecting on Ed Gyllenhaal’s latest posting over at New Church History, which led to a train of thought that ended with the odious TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live! I should explain: Around last Christmas a young woman who claimed to be one of Kimmel’s producers contacted me to ask if I had in my possession, of all things, an original (!) copy of Swedenborgian entomologist Leonard Gyllenhaal’s 200-year-old masterwork Insecta Suecica that the show could borrow for an upcoming appearance by Jake. I could only wonder how my interest in the history of Swedenborgianism had gotten around, but I was pretty damn sure that Kimmel was planning to bring up Jake’s great-great-great-great grandfather in order to crack a few “bug man” jokes—the same way he tried, not coincidentally, to crack a few cheap jokes about the Gyllenhaal noble line when Maggie was on. Of course I don’t possess a copy of such a precious volume, and I really wanted to tell the producer to go to hell, but I didn’t think it within my rights. So I advised the woman to email Ed in Bryn Athyn with her request, certain that Ed, who’s definitely within his rights, would tell her go to to hell. (Although I think he’d do it in a nice way—nicer than the woman deserved—as Swedenborgians are nice people.)

Anyway, as I came back from the kitchen after doing the dishes I was startled to encounter in the middle of the living floor a huge black water beetle—how it got up here from the river way below our terrace God only knows. But beetles were a specialty of Leonard Gyllenhaal, so I took it as a reminder of his legacy and a good sign.
By the way, I’ve got the feed to new entries at New Church History in this posting, so if this subject interests you check back again if you're in the vicinity.

New Church History and Fun Facts

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The Greenwich Village Townhouse Explosion, 40 Years Ago Ago Today

2010-03-06T11:09:00.016-05:00

"The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense that is." — Harvey Klehr, Professor of Politics and History, Emory University

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Edward Woodward and A Muppet Wicker Man

2010-03-05T19:02:00.005-05:00

In a weird way it works, except for a rather unsettling PhotoShopping of the head of Miss Piggy onto the luscious nude body of Britt Ecklund. Dedicated to the memory of Edward “The Equalizer” Woodward, who died last year at the age of 70.

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Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance

2010-02-28T20:08:00.039-05:00

I'm outlining a novel inspired by the life of this man. Jacques Lusseyran (19 September 1924—27 July 27 1971) was born in Paris. A school accident caused him to become totally blind at the age of eight. However, he soon learned to adapt to being blind and maintained many close friendships. As a young teenager, alarmed at the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany, he decided to learn the German language in order to listen to German radio broadcasts and understand his country's perilous situation better.

In the spring of 1941, during the Nazi Occupation of France, Lusseyran formed a Resistance group called the Volunteers of Liberty with fifty-two other boys; the group later merged with another Resistance group called Défense de la France.

In July 1943 Lusseyran was arrested by the Gestapo, betrayed by a weak-willed member of his group. He was sent to Buchenwald with two thousand other French citizens where, because he was blind, he was exempted from forced labor. Lusseyran helped to motivate a spirit of resistance at Buchenwald particularly within the French and German prisoners. In April 1945 when the British and Americans liberated the camp he was freed.

After the war Lusseyran taught French literature in the United States and wrote books, including the autobiographical And There Was Light, which chronicles the first twenty years of his life. He died together with his third wife Marie in a car accident in France on 27 July 1971. He is survived by his four children.

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Susan Boyle 1, Elaine Paige 0

2010-01-30T07:49:00.030-05:00

Says columnist Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail today:

Subo, It’s Who You Know—Anyone who saw Elaine Paige sing “I Know Him So Well” with Susan Boyle would have been struck by SuBo’s hero worship of the Evita star. So it came as something of a surprise to hear Ms Paige describe Susan as unworthy of fame and fortune, dismissing her as a “virus that swept the world”. Perhaps if Miss Boyle had enjoyed the benefit of musical, ambitious, middle-class parents, been a natural beauty and had an eight-year affair with Tim Rice, one of the most powerful men in musical theatre, the Britain’s Got Talent singer might have got to the top as quickly as Ms Paige.

Here’s their duet, and please note how much fresher and more exciting a performer Susan Boyle is than that dried-up skank. And, by the way, here’s the latest photo of Susan.

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A Few Words on Hollywood from F. Scott Fitzgerald

2010-01-26T14:27:00.023-05:00

A negro man came along the shore toward them, collecting the grunion quickly, like twigs, into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful, around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore.

“I wish for another pail,” the negro man said, resting a moment.

“You’ve come a long way out,” said Stahr.

“I used to go to Malibu, but they don’t like it, those moving picture people.”

A wave came in and forced them back, receded swiftly, leaving the sand alive again.

“Is it worth the trip?” Stahr asked.

“I don’t figure it that way. I really come out to read some Emerson. Have you ever read him?”

“I have,” said Kathleen. “Some.”

“I’ve got him inside my shirt. I got some Rosicrucian literature with me, too, but I’m fed up with them.”

The wind had changed a little, the waves were stronger further down, and they walked along the foaming edge of the water.

“What’s your work?” the negro asked Stahr.

“I work for the pictures.”

“Oh.” After a moment he added, “I never go to movies.”

“Why not?” asked Stahr sharply.

“There’s no profit. I never let my children go.”

Stahr watched him, and Kathleen watched Stahr protectively.

“Some of them are good,” she said, against a wave of spray; but he did not hear her. She felt she could contradict him and said it again, and this time he looked at her indifferently.

“Are the Rosicrucian brotherhood against pictures?” asked Stahr.

“Seems as if they don’t know what they are for. One week they for one thing and next week for another.”

Only the little fish were certain. Half an hour had gone, and still they came. The negro’s two pails were full, and finally he went off over the beach toward the road, unaware that he had rocked an industry.

From Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western

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Conan’s Farewell Speech

2010-01-23T05:40:00.011-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, before we bring this rodeo to a close, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can’t say about NBC. This isn’t a joke, and to set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, The Late Night Show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I’ve worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we’re going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we’ve done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible. I really do.

A lot of people have been asking me about my state of mind. I’ll be honest with you: Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the history of the medium. I will fight anyone who says I don’t (but no one would). But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian, every comedian, dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and for seven months I got to do it. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret one second of anything that we’ve done here. I encounter people now when I walk on the street who give me a sort of sad look. I have had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-11 parking lot, we would find a way to make it fun. We really would. (But I don’t want to do it in a 7-11 parking lot!)

Finally, I have to say something to our fans. This massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming for me. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the internet. The fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain... It’s pouring! It’s been pouring for days! And they’re camping out to be in our audience! Here’s what all of you have done. You have made a sad situation joyous and inspirational.

So to all the people watching, I can never ever thank you enough for the kindness to me [here his voice starts to break] and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. And all I ask of you is one thing, and I’m asking this in particular from the young people that watch: please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism—for the record it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen. It's just true. As proof, ladies and gentlemen, let’s make something amazing happen right now. Here to close out our show are a few good friends, led by Mr. Will Ferrell...

[Surrender]

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Conan Flings Down the Gauntlet

2010-01-13T18:02:00.024-05:00

People of Earth:

In the last few days I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move The Tonight Show to 12:05 to accommodate the Jay Leno Show at 11:35. For 60 years The Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t The Tonight Show. Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the internet a time slot doesn’t matter. But with The Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.

Yours, Conan

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Happy 100th Birthday, Oscar Winner Luise Rainer! (And I Forgive You for Playing O-Lan)

2010-01-12T17:45:00.086-05:00

Luise Rainer...who made her screen debut as a teenager and appeared in three other German-language films in the early ‘30s, terminated her European career when the Austrian Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Germany. With his vicious anti-Semitism, his imposition of a police state in Germany, and his desire for an anschluss between Austria and Der Vaterland, Hitler was a threat to European Jewry. Rainer had been spotted by a talent scout, who offered her a seven-year contract with the American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The 25-year-old Rainer took the deal and emigrated to the United States.

...During the making of Escapade, Rainer met and fell in love with the left-wing playwright Clifford Odets, then at the height of his fame. They were married in 1937. It was not a happy union...

Rainer would allay any backbiting from Hollywood's bovines over her first Oscar with her performance as O-Lan in MGM producer Irving Thalberg’s spectacular adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, the former Boy Wonder's final picture before his untimely death. The role won Rainer her second Best Actress Award. The success of The Good Earth (1937) was rooted in its realism, and its realism was enhanced by Rainer’s acting opposite the legendary Paul Muni as her husband. When Thalberg cast Muni in the role of Wang Lung, he had to abandon any thought of casting the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as O-Lan as the Hays Office would not allow the hint of miscegenation, even between an actual Chinese woman and a Caucasian actor in yellow-face drag... [More]

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On Reading and Writing the Novella

2010-01-06T21:50:00.000-05:00

The novella has become the Rosalind Russell of American literature, liked by all the guys but never taken out on a date. Universally acknowledged as an important and respected literary genre—everyone can cite a few examples from college literature courses, from Daisy Miller to Heart of Darkness—the novella is thriving in theory but not in practice, which has polarized around the Big Novel and (to a lesser degree) the short story. Unable to make it in the commercial markets, the novella has been driven into various niches of American publishing, like tiny creatures escaping predators. Lamenting this can induce readers to nod sympathetically, but I’m not sure how many truly care. When was the last time—be honest—that you actually read one?

For me, it’s a personal question. I love the novella; its flexibility, amenability to innovation, and ability to accommodate dramatic development with compactness make it irresistible, and despite the fact that I’ve published a few novels and lots of stories, the novella remains my favorite form. God knows it isn’t remunerative: after spending four months writing something that earns you $1,300, a safe civil-service job starts to look good. With nice reviews, some award nominations, and a few appearances in year’s best anthologies, my career has been more successful than most. But the truth is that the novella has fallen between the two stools of American literature: too brief (usually) to appear as a separate volume, too long for the layout-driven format of today’s magazines, and widely regarded as fatally lite in a culture that wants everything super-sized.

The short story, written off a generation ago, has enjoyed a modest revival since the eighties, when writers like Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel made the form seem smart and contemporary to young readers uninterested in following The New Yorker. Collections (especially in trade paperback format) made stories available to these readers, and two year’s-best volumes—the venerable O. Henry Prize Stories and the Best American Short Stories—got long-overdue makeovers. There is still precious little money to be made in short stories, and it remains (like poetry) a genre in which a small number of successful practitioners gets all the attention, with a precipitous drop-off for the rest. But its position as a niche market seems to offer some protection from the juggernaut of big fat novels.

Such is the allure of the big novel today that short novels are often labeled as novellas, presumably because a real novel should weigh in at something longer. John Updike’s Rabbit Remembered and Mona Simpson’s Off Keck Road, each about 170 pages long, are both called novellas by Knopf, creating the interesting situation of Updike publishing a novella that is longer than several of his early novels. It’s as though McDonald’s had so accustomed its patrons to outsized fare that it had to begin calling its regular hamburgers “miniburgers.”

The true novella is a still slimmer creature, not just a smaller species but a different genus. Its upper range just fails to touch the minimum length at which publishers feel comfortable producing a volume—somewhere between Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Red Badge of Courage—while its lower limit slightly exceeds the length of Alice Munro’s stories, those canny works that feel distinctly longer than a short story but still fit into the pages of The New Yorker and the annual Best American Short Stories volume. Between 15,000 and 35,000 words lies an intermediate zone, a green expanse too deep to wade across but navigable without a fully rigged ship.

Novellas are the traditional discovery of high school students, who encounter them in volumes with titles like Six Great Modern Short Novels or the fatter Norton anthologies. It’s where they make their acquaintance with The Turn of the Screw, Notes from Underground, The Metamorphosis, and Death in Venice—works that can be read in an evening or two, that seem to take readers as far away as a novel but return them sooner. The above are fine stories, but also, readers may notice, rather old; those “modern” short novels include entries by Melville and Gogol. The novella has a splendid American history, but try to find students reading anything much more recent than, say, The Old Man and the Sea or Breakfast at Tiffany’s and you are probably out of luck.

The historical reasons for this are interesting, having largely to do with the changes in the role of magazines (which took an enormous hit in the early nineteen-fi fties with the advent of television) and the rise of the mass market paperback. When all books were hardcovers and all broadcasts were radio, readers looked to magazines for long as well as short fiction, and novellas (often called a “Complete Novel in This Issue!”) were a staple. After such magazines as Collier's, Blue Book, and The American Mercury failed, the short story went into a decades-long decline, and the novella seemed to disappear.

But for a writer who loves the novella, evidence that the form is still alive and vibrant seems everywhere, if only, perversely, for writers famous for other things. Stephen King’s collections of novellas have all been bestsellers, while other commercially successful authors, such as Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates, have published novellas as stand-alone volumes. (Saul Bellow, who also developed an interest in novellas late in his career, managed both.) A sufficiently popular writer can probably publish anything, but in fact critically acclaimed yet only modestly popular writers such as William H. Gass, Jane Smiley, John Barth, Jim Harrison, and Steven Millhauser have also published collections of novellas.

So while the days when William Faulkner could publish “The Bear” in The Saturday Evening Post may be long gone, writers with sufficient chops in critical repute can join the best-selling novelists in bringing out novellas in book form. How crucial are those chops, however? Is book publication of so uncommercial a genre as the novella truly open only to authors already celebrated for other works? Sad to say, this seems to be true: search for “novella” in Amazon.com, and what you will get—aside from some tiny publishers specializing in gay, Christian, and romance fiction—are books by well-known novelists.

Another sanctuary is the field of science fiction, where shortand medium-length fiction still manages a precarious existence. Most of my own published novella-length work has been in this genre, even though much of it does not technically qualify as either science fiction or fantasy. Generous definitions of those genres have gotten me through: one story, set in the seventeenth-century heyday of microscope and telescope pioneers, deals with technical innovation and intellectual revolution in a way that won it courtesy credentials as a kind of science fiction; another, a meditation on 9/11 and the “end of history,” cast around a computer-game version of the Gilgamesh legend, was published in an anthology of fantasy stories about the Bronze Age. And the science fi ction and fantasy community has year’s-best anthologies of its own, which have made room for the occasional novella, including some of mine.

So I have been treated well enough. But aside from the science fiction field, magazines—from the few high-circulation slicks that still publish fi ction to the literary quarterlies—are so penurious with their page space that only short stories can squeeze through. With our culture’s continuing fascination with first novels (even an obsession with celebrity requires new product), a talented young writer stands a better chance of publishing something good at 5,000 or 90,000 words than at 20,000.

If that’s the way folks want it, of course, who am I to complain? Readers vote with their wallets, and as busy as people are these days, they still seem to prefer enormous novels, many of them longer than they should be, to a compact tale that still possesses the depth and dimensions to involve them. The novella may be the most cinematic of lengths—it’s when short stories and novels are adapted into screenplays that scenes must be added or cut. But audiences don’t even like their movies at cinematic lengths any more. If I really wanted my next novella to reach a wide audience, I should make it 600 pages long.

Ursula K. Le Guin and Jonathan Lethem are sufficiently well-known that their novellas The Word for World is Forest and This Shape We’re In are available in book form, and the success of the film version of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain allowed the original story—twenty-seven pages long in its year’s best anthology, a bit short for a true novella—to enjoy life as a sixty-four-page slim paperback. But these are the exceptions. You will have to dig into the library stacks to find Damon Galgut’s “The Follower” or Wolfgang Hilbig’s “Knacker’s Yard,” available only in old issues of Paris Review and Grand Street.

Defiantly its own size, a good novella may simply not fit into today’s readily available formats. Nobody’s asking you not to buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this summer, but if you’re going to be venturesome and read something shorter, why not try for something less tidy than what accommodates the well-established magazines and anthologies? A work that refuses to adhere to portion size may be interesting in other ways as well.

—Gregory Feeley

[Source: The New Haven Review, March 2008]

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John Barrowman-Susan Boyle Duet

2009-12-31T08:29:00.011-05:00

Now that I’ve got your attention, you Susan Boyle fans, it’s just a fantasy. But wouldn’t you love to hear Captain Jack and our beautiful Sue do this number from the Great American Songbook, “Baby It’s Cold Outside”?

Liner notes: Frank Loesser wrote the music and lyrics; it won the Oscar for Best Song in 1949; it was from the movie Neptune’s Daughter in which Ricardo Montalban sang it to Esther Williams (on dry land, I think). There is some controversy as to whether this is a song about date rape—“Hey, what’s in this drink?”—to which I say: screw you. Gals have got no sense of playfulness anymore. There's a juiceless version of this song at YouTube with Michael Buble and Jane Monheit and a creamy one with Dean Martin that makes you want to crawl into bed with him. But the best one overall, where the arrangement and the voices really shine together, is the one sung by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer.

Enjoy—and Happy New Year!

[Baby It’s Cold Outside]

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“An LSD Christmas” Revisited

2009-12-25T09:57:00.060-05:00

My lit quarterly Cantaraville was lucky enough to get acquaintance Stephen Tobolowsky to contribute a written version of his soon-to-be periennial classic “An LSD Christmas” to the special free Winter issue, which can be read and downloaded here.

Tobolowsky’s story can be heard in different versions, in the film Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party (directed by Robert Brinkmann) and now—thanks to Slashfilmcast producer David Chen—in audio podcast at the two-month old Tobolowsky Files.

So gather the family around the old laptop, and remember, when the dog talks, you listen.
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Auditioning to be the Next Danny Kaye

2009-12-08T00:00:00.032-05:00

Besides being able to act, sing tenderly, sing patter, dance, move like and elf, and make people laugh without uttering a word, the next Danny Kaye also has to demonstrate a genuine desire to put a smile on a child’s face and a genuine interest in other people.

You hear that, Naomi? Au suivant!

A Boy and His Bride

2009-11-04T13:00:00.004-05:00

Just want to share a particularly adorable pic of a San Francisco couple on Halloween.

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A Happy Edgar Allan Poe to Round Out October

2009-10-31T03:00:00.007-04:00

This October (on the seventh, to be exact) marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of America’s greatest imaginists. Here for your delectation is not one of his usual shivery slimy nightmares but a very satisfying tale indeed of love, revenge and menchhood...