Saturday, August 08, 2009
A Free Press Isn't Free
A newspaper is a vehicle for advertising.
That doesn't mean that the publisher of a newspaper or magazine can't have high moral standards or elevated goals; here at the Freep we are never told to write what an advertiser will like, and when I was with other magazines and newspapers that was also true. But only a select few journals survive on the receipts from newsstand sales and subscriptions (academic journals can cost hundreds of dollars a year for a subscription). Consider that we are not the only newspaper in Nashville that doesn't charge at all for copies. Where does the money come from?
Obviously, it comes from advertisers, or it is supposed to. (A very small amount of it comes from grants, and only for a vanishingly small number of journals.) This is the same model that works for radio and broadcast television--the content provider puts your eyes and ears within reach of the ads.
And we can see how well it's worked for commercial radio and television. They are providing cultural leadership in all areas (American Idol and Desperate Housewives are only two examples), and providing the public with the kind of in-depth journalism that we need. I, for one, am woefully ignorant about Lindsay Lohan's love life, because I get most of my news from The New York Times. (Online. For free.)
Investigative journalism is expensive. A reporter, or a team of reporters, can work on a story for months, drawing salary and running up expenses, and produce one or two lead stories. It's important, and it's prestigious, but it doesn't draw ads. As ad revenues fall and newspapers cut back expenses (did you notice the recent negotiations at the Boston Globe?), are they going to cut operations that produce revenue, or those that cost more than they produce? Fox News is the future of newspapers. Consider how Fox News would have covered Watergate.
But if people can get their news for free, why should they pay for it? And shouldn't news organizations be subject to the marketplace, just like other businesses? Not necessarily. Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Maryland) has introduced a bill under which newspapers could be considered educational institutions, similar to universities, organized similarly, as nonprofits. Their advertising revenue would be tax-free, and they could accept donations to support specific kinds of reporting, as PBS does now.
This might keep them alive for a while, but readership is still falling, and in-depth coverage of serious issues doesn't seem to be able to stem the tide. Even more news about Lindsay Lohan isn't enough.
It may be that newspapers have seen their day, and they will be curiosities in the history books of the next generation. Right now, though, I don't see blogs and web sites taking their place. Blogs often break interesting and important stories, but there is no way of knowing the truth of what you see on a blog; newspapers, or the best of them, have a tradition of fact-checking. Any bozo can start a blog. And news web sites don't generate enough income to support a real news-gathering operation.
Perhaps we will go through a period of chaos, and blog journalism will find an economic model that allows it to do real, trustworthy, investigative reporting. Perhaps this is the end of the news as we know it.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Blog of Ages Redux
But what happens when the tomato is put on the Internet? First, it becomes an infinity of tomatoes. The power of intellectual property lies in two aspects of the work—the tomato. The second aspect is in what we call, appropriately enough, secondary or subsidiary rights. Your Star Wars toys and Living Words lunch boxes fall into this area. They exploit the idea of the tomato, and I've heard no one dispute that the creator of the tomato should control that idea.
The first right of the intellectual creator, though, is copyright, which is exactly what it appears to be—the right to make (or allow others to make) copies. This is a relatively recent idea. Only a little more than two hundred years ago, an author or composer would sell a work to a publisher for a flat fee. If it was hugely successful, the composer might have some additional leverage in negotiating the next sale, but would never see another pfennig on that work. Other publishers would be likely to put out their own editions, for which the creator would get nothing.
Copyright allowed creators to lease, rather than sell, the rights to their work. An author's contract now is for an advance against royalties, and if the book continues to sell, an author can keep getting checks for a lifetime (and beyond; current copyright law in the U.S. protects the rights for 75 years after the author's death). The publisher is compensated, of course, for the costs of editing and designing and manufacturing and distributing the book; all that comes out of the price you and I pay for a physical book.
But what happens when there is no physical book? If I buy an e-book or an audio book download, no physical object is transferred to me. The farmer sells me the tomato, but he can still sell you the very same tomato.
There are some people who believe that the low manufacturing cost (for a book, basically editing and design, both of which can really be omitted if you aren't obsessed with quality) should be reflected in the price. That is, they think that we should give away the right to copy intellectual property and control only who can sell it and the secondary rights. Some authors (the most famous is probably Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer) now release their works for free on the Internet, assuming that readers will then be inspired to purchase physical copies--and Doctorow's books do have respectable sales ranks at Amazon, so people are buying them.
The other side of that is that many people believe that everything should be free if it is freely available on the Web, or if it can be made freely available. Writers' organizations spend a fair amount of time tracking down pirate sites that post scanned copies of books whose authors have not agreed to release their texts (Doctorow and others release some rights under Creative Commons licenses, which you can look up at creativecommons.org). The pirates, both those who scan and post and those who unknowingly download those texts, often claim that they have done nothing wrong, since “information wants to be free.” Well, it may want to be free; I want to be rich, but my writing is not making that happen—in part because I face competition from those who are willing to give their work away for free. If my work is better than theirs, they still have the advantage of price.
I have not really decided on the rights and wrongs of all this, but I keep thinking about Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. With complete freedom of information, will bad information drive out good? It's one more problem to worry about.
Blog of Ages
The advantage of the blog over the old-fashioned diary, of course, is that you don't have to wait until you're famous and dead (or at least dead; the diary might make you famous) before your thoughts are available to millions of people. And most blogs are, like most diaries, the boring everyday thoughts of people who are fundamentally uninteresting.
A few blogs, perhaps several hundred out of the millions on the Internet, cover particular topics interestingly, and even fewer are the models of interesting minds at work.
This mode of journaling is not entirely new. The medium is new, but not the idea of recording for the public what you happen to think about various issues. A newspaper column is a form of blog, even when it is not (as this is) posted on the Web. Some newspaper bloggers have become famous and influential for their writings, from Walter Winchell to Grantland Rice to Walter Kerr, influencing how Americans thought about politics or sports, or what theater they saw.
Ultimately, all of us bloggers, in print or newer media, are the children of Samuel Johnson and The Rambler. It's true that Johnson himself considered himself the successor to Addison and Steele's Spectator, and he was correct in that The Rambler came out regularly (twice a week; The Spectator was a daily) and consisted of a single essay in each issue. But The Spectator was not the work of a single hand, was intended to provide material for polite conversation, and took on something of the form of a collection of short stories.
The Rambler, on the other hand, ran to more serious meditations on those issues that seized Johnson's imagination from day to day. The first few in the selection I'm currently reading include the realistic novel, marriage, stoicism, pastoral poetry, sorrow, and biography--not a bad summary of Johnson's interests and life in a few words, and he revisited some of those issues many times. (I know, it omits the dictionary, but I said “not bad,” not “perfect.”)
There are 208 essays in The Rambler, and another 104 in The Idler, written on deadline 1750-52 and 1758-60 (the Idler essays were weekly) in his spare time; he was working on the dictionary and his annotated edition of Shakespeare in those same years. Boswell describes (with some amazement) Johnson dashing off one of those essays in half an hour the day before it was to appear. This is how many blog posts are written today.
Of course, not many of us can dash off a blog post as elegant and well reasoned as most of Johnson's, and mine, at least, take considerably more than half an hour. But even though his have been collected and republished often in the last two and a half centuries, they had the same ephemeral intention as our blog posts and columns.
The difference now, really, is that anyone with an e-mail account can have a blog. Anyone with a web site can “publish” a book. The type of material isn't new (not even hypertext is new), only the medium, and the ability to spew our work out into the unfiltered universe. We've entered a new era in how we think about writing. Are all blogs created equal? How do we deal with the availability of so much information, other than by choosing to ignore whole continents of it?
But I'm out of space. I'll have to revisit this issue later.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Another column from the Freep -- Transported by Words
The landau, in fact, was a carriage (first built in Landau, Germany) with a top that could be folded down, and the landau roof we know on cars has an ornamental doodad that looks very much like the hinge on the old landau.
The landaulet was a smaller carriage, a coupé, with the same type of roof. The coupe, as we now spell it (from the French for “cut”), is supposed to be a closed two-seater (unlike my MG, which is open most of the time), although it is commonly used for anything with an uncomfortable rear seat. The coupé de ville is a larger car, enclosed, with an open section for the driver. You've seen them in movies. (This isn't at all what we can now see in the Cadillac pre-owned lot. For Cadillac, “DeVille” was just a trim designation.) The Deuce coupe is a specific model: the 1932 (the “deuce” is for the year) Ford Model B, one of the first V-8's and the original hot rod.
That coupé de ville is one type of a limousine, whose name comes from a supposed similarity of its profile to a type of hood worn in the area of Limoges, France. The similarity to the Limousin hood vanishes when the driver moves into the main cabin of the car, even if he is separated by a window from the passengers. In any case, many of what we now call airport limos are not so luxurious (see “van” in a couple of paragraphs).
The sedan is what the British call a saloon, a car with room for at least two adults each in front and rear. The name has nothing to do with the French city, but comes from the sedan chair, which in turn gets its name from the Italian sede, “chair.” The sedan chair was also once known as a “go-cart.”
Sedans are pretty popular, but in the school parking lot they seem to be outnumbered by minivans. We understand the “mini” part there, but what is a van? Again we can go to the British terminology, where it is called a caravan; we have shortened it, but it is still the sort of vehicle (again, originally drawn by horses) that one might see in a caravan of traders.
Before minivans, of course, suburban moms drove station wagons. I actually saw one of the earliest station wagons in Reno, a wooden motorized coach custom-built for a hotel, so it could meet passengers at the railroad station and carry them up the mountain to the hotel.
A “truck” started as a small wheel, but the meaning got transferred to the small-wheeled cart used to carry heavy loads, and thence to what so many people in the South drive. The “pickup” part comes from the original purpose, to make deliveries and collections (pick-ups). But the “truck” has now made its full circle, in reference to the wheel sets for skateboards. (To be fair, it never lost that meaning on the railroads.)
And finally, when we all get on at once, the omnibus (Latin, “for all”) has shortened itself to bus, sharing a root, if not a route, with the busboy.
Friday, May 29, 2009
The Curse (?) of Cursive
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Assessing the Installation
This is aside from the headline in The Onion, “Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job,” although I certainly agree with that. But what does it mean to be “installed?”
Originally (the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation is from 1548), this was used strictly for bishops and other churchmen. One of the many advantages of being a bishop is that you don't have to sit in a regular pew with the peasants. You get a special seat, in a row of seats, slightly recessed so that you have walls and armrests at your sides. When you are officially invested with your authority as bishop, you get the right to the bishop's stall. You are placed in the stall (much as at an investment into office you are put in the specific clothing--vestments--of that position, robes and sashes and whatnot).
Although we (sadly, perhaps) lack an official costume of the presidency (some countries do still have sashes), we do have an official seat. It is not the chair itself--presidents get to pick from an assortment of chairs--but its location in the Oval Office that makes it the boss's chair. The tradition of departing presidents leaving notes for their successors, even if they switch desks, lends this weight. So the new president, after taking the oath, is entitled to do business from the presidential chair in the presidential office.
Of course, most of what we watched on January 20 was not part of the installation. There were only two elements of all the presentations that had binding value, and they were the administration of the two oaths, for vice president and president. (“Administer,” as you may have guessed, comes from an Anglo-Norman root meaning to officiate at a religious ceremony.) Those oaths constitute the actual inauguration.
So what does that mean, “inaugurate?” Does it have anything to do with drilling a hole in the ground? No. (That's “auger.”) The Latin root is inaugurare, to read omens from the flight of birds. Before making any change in government, it would only make sense (to a pious Roman) to see what could be divined about the consequences of the change. We may have lost our faith in omens, but 68% of us (according to last year's Pew poll) believe we have guardian angels. Consulting or relying on the supernatural is second nature to us.
Bringing a new president in office is cloaked with words that tie it to a religious rite, a solemn obligation. The words try to remind us of the importance of the moment, of the words of the oath--words so important that they had to be administered twice, you will recall.
This is all fitting for a man who chooses his words as well and as carefully as our new president. I expect the next four years to give us a lot of language worth thinking about.
Friday, May 22, 2009
How do you like your eggcorns?
Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Marina Pessl
As it happens, I was in Borders Books the other day (it's right next door to the Vanderbilt benefits office, and I'm a new Vanderbilt employee), and saw a copy on the rack, and took a look at the flap copy. It says the book is a satire. I like satire, so I went ahead and listened to it.
(All right, that's not exactly true. I had already started listening, and was wondering when the story was going to start developing. But I decided to think of it as a satire and give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, satire doesn't operate by the same rules as, say, Robertson Davies. We don't necessarily expect complexities of story and characterization from satire.)
So I kept on listening, while feeding the dogs and driving around in the MG (and it isn't so easy to listen to a book in the MG) and so on, and I tried to get involved in this young woman, Blue, and her tribulations. And it was all tribulations. Aside from possibly developing a crush on one of the teachers at her new school, everything was unpleasant for her. She had no friends, and the group at school into which she was drawn didn't seem to like her very much; well, she wasn't very likable, so who can blame them?
Blue is pretty sure she is smarter than everyone else she knows, except possibly her father, who is just as obnoxious and has raised her to be just what she is. She doesn't seem to hide this attitude, except amid the aforementioned group, when she is almost totally silent. So what's to like?
And of what is it supposed to be a satire? Wealthy, over-achieving high school students? They aren't important enough to me for me to be interested in a satire of them. Besides, I didn't get a laugh out of the first half of the book.
Which is about as far as I got.
But it did get me interested in the nature of satire. After all, one of the qualities of Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey I will be teaching this semester, is her satire on her own (small, defunct) society and its attitudes toward fiction. Those are hardly current concerns for me. But Austen makes them imminent for me, in large part because she makes me care about her people. (You can't worry too much about her plots; usually the resolutions have no surprises.)
Similarly, Wodehouse can be read as a satire of upper-class life (or a certain strain of it) in an England that was dead long before he stopped writing about it. (I'm currently listening to Jeeves and the Mating Season.) But Wodehouse is a hoot, and Bertie is so naive that we can't help a certain fondness for him. (This can be dangerous; I had to stifle a laugh in the dentist's chair today.)
Pessl, although her writing is lively (she's very good at verbing), never got me to care about anyone in the story. Now, I know people of about that age, if not of the same social class (I may meet some this semester at Vandy, but they don't come my way outside the classroom, and I didn't run into any at TSU). They don't seem to have the same problems as Pessl's characters, and they surely don't have the same flat personalities.
I think you can get away with flat characters if the satire is broad enough or funny enough or topical enough. But while "no one appreciates just how wonderful I am" is a pretty universal adolescent problem, and one that is fairly easy to make fun of, but it doesn't sustain a novel very well.
I get the feeling that I'm missing something, but it may just be that, like most television today, I'm just not supposed to get it. It's for younger people, and I can go suck eggs.
