Posts by Tim

3000th post! This demands a party.

Just another seven light years to go!

If you hang around with me long enough that we get a chance to go to a fancy restaurant together, you might get to hear this parable. It used to be possible to be a professional waiter – one who thought of service as a career. And the service you received was service from a career professional. But as wages declined, so did service. A rotating cast of college students and twentysomethings can sometimes surprise you with their talent or enthusiasm, but they can’t make a career of it. You come in, you do your best, and you rotate out, and what you end up with are a lot of chain restaurants where it’s good to be a college student or twenty-something, good to drink a lot and eat a lot, but comparatively few places were you can feel like a gourmand.

The New Yorker’s The Book Bench tells a similar story about wage cuts among younger workers in the publishing industry. The impetus to the post are cuts at William Morris, where entry-level workers saw their pay cut from 13.50/hour to 9.50/hour.

Tiny salaries in the low ranks of publishing are miserable for the young workers, but they’re probably worse for literature (You can insert “movies” for “literature,” if that’s the prism through which you want to read this.) It’s a truism of the industry that most of these jobs are held by people who can afford them—people with some parental support and no student loans. Often they’ve had unpaid internships, that most pernicious example of class privilege. Their superiors are the same people, ten years later. They—we!—are smart, cultured people with good intentions, but it’s easy to see how this narrow range could lead to a blinkered view of literature.

So, if you’re sick of coming-of-age novels about comfortable young men, a little solidarity with the lowly assistants might help.

Although now I’m scratching my head: the privilege thing I get, but are publishing companies and talent agencies overrun by dudes? I’ve never gotten that vibe.

Caleb Crain (from Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, The New Yorker, etc.) has self-published a collection of his blog posts, titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay:

With all the time and energy you’ve squandered on that blog, you could have written a book. So goes the self-reproach, and indeed, the book in question turns out to be 449 pages long…

All of the posts and essays included in The Wreck of the Henry Clay are available free already on this blog, so why should you buy it? I have no idea! I have given up trying to understand the internet’s economics, but maybe it’ll be like buying ringtones versus stealing MP3s? Who knows. It took a surprising amount of time to turn several hundred blog posts into a several-hundred-page book, so perhaps some of you will be willing to pay me for my PDF-creating skills? As I said, no idea. Let’s not call this “self-published,” by the way. That has a kind of disreputable sound. It’s a chapbook, all right? Why am I doing this? I saw not long ago that someone had published a book of his Twitters, and I felt I was in danger of being behindhand. I am hereby restored to the bleeding edge. Also, now, when the electromagnetic-pulse device is detonated, I will be the only blogger in America with backup. And of course I’m looking forward to kicking back while the cold, hard internet cash at last streams in.

Of course, Snarkmarket, too, has its own experiment in meatspace self-publishing on the way…

My new favorite blog is Gary Dexter’s How books got their titles. Dexter gives the biographies (nomographies?) of famous books according to the following criteria:

1) the title should not be explicable simply by reading the text of the book itself;

2) each title should be the title of a book or play that has been published as such (rather than e.g. a poem or story that appears as part of a collection);

3) no quotations as titles.

Here’s the story of Freud’s The Ego and the Id, part of the title and concept of which was adapted from George Groddeck’s The Book of the It:

In the early years of psychoanalysis, practitioners were very anxious to establish their respectability as legitimate medical men. This was still an age of sexual puritanism, in which the sexual organs and sexual functions were not generally mentioned in polite conversation, and in which sexual categories as we now know them, or think we know them — homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, transsexualism — were still at an early and controversial stage of development. In this atmosphere, George Groddeck delivered a notorious speech to the congress of psychoanalysts at The Hague in 1920, opening his address with the words: “I am a wild analyst.” This was somewhat crass. Analysts were regarded by the public as “wild” already: it was exactly the image the profession wished to avoid. In his speech Groddeck went on to develop the idea that unconscious forces were the rulers of the human organism: even bodily diseases were caused by unconscious conflicts and neuroses. Groddeck moreover insisted on bringing his mistress to conferences and was the author of a risqu

For my money, the best movie about fatherhood is Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard’s Paris, Texas:

Travis (played by Harry Dean Stanton) emerges in the deserts of West Texas without any memory or speech. A doctor contacts his brother Walt, and driving back to California, Travis slowly begins to open up. Walt likewise reveals that he and his wife Anne have been raising Travis’s young son Hunter since shortly after Travis originally disappeared. Travis and Hunter then go to find Hunter’s mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who’s likewise vanished.

Here’s a favorite exchange, taken from the screenplay [lightly formatted by me]:

Walt: Trav, I need to talk to you a little bit about Hunter.

Travis: How old is he now?

W: He’s eight in January.

T: He’s seven, then.

W: Yeah. [Pause] But see what I want to talk about is uh … Well, he’s-he’s like part of the family now. Anne and me are like his parents now.

T: Anne’s your wife?

W: Yeah. You remember her, don’t you?

T: No. [Pause.] Does he think that you are his father?

W: Well … Anne told him you were coming.

T:Well who does he think I am?

W: I-I told him you are his father. But see … Well, you’ve been gone a long time, Trav.

T: How long have I been gone, do you know?

W: Four years.

T: Is four years a long time?

W: Well, it is for a little boy. It’s half his life.

T: Half a boy’s life. [Pause.] I remember now!

W: What?

T: Why I bought that land.

W: Oh, Why?

T: Well … Mama once told me that uh … that’s where she and Daddy … first … made love.

W: Oh, in Paris, Texas?

T: Yeah.

W: She told you that?

T: Yeah. [Pause.] So … I figured that that’s where I-I have began. [Pause] I mean me, Travis Clay Henderson. They named me that. [Pause.] I started out there.

W: Paris, Texas, huh?

T: Yeah.

W: So you think maybe you were conceived there?

T: Yeah.

W: You could be right, Travis.

T: Daddy always had a joke about it.

W: What was the joke?

T: He’s uh … he would introduce Mama… as the girl he met in Paris. Then he’d waited uh … before he said “Texas” till everybody thought that … he meant … he would wait before he said “Texas” till everybody thought … after everyone thought he was talking about Paris, France. He always laughed real hard about it.

This movie can (and should) wreck you, it’s that good.

In my back-and-forth with Robin about publishers’ web sites hosting blogs by their writers, I simply assumed that everybody had read these four pieces, forgetting that I hadn’t blogged about them yet! Here’s my background.

• Macy Halford, “Blogademia“
• Chronicle of Higher Ed, Forum on Scholarly Publishing
• Peter J. Dougherty, “A Manifesto For Scholarly Publishing“
• Benjamin Kunkel, “Lingering“

The Chronicle Forum is particularly worth reading, especially the section at the end on new trends in scholarly writing. Here’s one excerpt from Alan Thomas at University of Chicago Press:

There has been a welcome trend, still continuing, for scholars to use the security of tenure to frame book projects for wider audiences within the academy, and sometimes outside it. But for first books, things haven’t changed much: The habit of writing to satisfy a dissertation committee carries over into writing to satisfy later professional gatekeepers, without enough regard for the book’s potential audience. The peer-review process is sometimes to blame for that (well-meaning readers’ reports sometimes have the effect of re-dissertationizing a first book), and we as editors need to help authors sort the good suggestions from the bad. One trend I don’t see, but would like to, is greater attention to writing skills in graduate school. When I speak to groups of grad students, I always urge them to cultivate an ability to write in several registers (through book reviews, blogs, journalism, and so on), even as they write their dissertations.

Doug Sery at MIT press also notes that “[t]here seems to be a movement afoot to change the evaluation criteria used by universities for promotion and tenure. Specifically, there is a desire among some academics to allow participation in blogs, online journals, and other new media to count toward their promotion and tenure cases,” while Doug Armato at Minnesota writes, “I see the blog form moving into scholarship through more diarylike texts. There is also a more European-influenced urge to write speculative scholarly essays or meditations with minimal footnotes and apparatus.”

To me, the most natural way to convince tenure committees to count participation in new media is to get university presses to sponsor it, and the most natural way for university presses to help use new media to get better books is to help shape how it’s done. University presses hosting and publishing blogs is Pareto-optimal.

In fact, I think this is going in my own essay on academia in 2029.

I should have read Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist a long time ago. Jeffrey J Cohen’s excerpt at In the Middle just bumped it to the top of my list. Here’s Cohen:

Whereas C. P. Snow argued in 1959 that we require a third culture, one that bridge the noncommunicating realms of art and science, those scientists who have self-appointed themselves as this culture (especially Steven Pinker) carry a fair amount of animus towards the humanities, believing it enough if they communicate their science directly to the masses. Lehrer argues that not only does such a third culture misrepresent what Snow imagined, it often gets the humanists wrong (and misapprehends their artistic sources as well) by not having listened or read attentively. Lehrer therefore calls for a fourth culture, a space of true collaboration, and it is that call I’d like to quote this morning.

And here’s Lehrer (as quoted by JJC):

[A fourth culture] seeks to discover the relationships between the humanities and the sciences. This fourth culture, much closer in concept to Snow’s original definition (and embodied by works like [Ian McEwan’s] Saturday), will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience. It will take a pragmatic view of truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but by its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help us to understand who we are? What long-standing problem has been solved? … While science will always be our primary method of investigating the universe, it is naïve to think that science alone can solve everything itself, or that everything can even be solved … When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art … No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge.

For my part — and it’s taken me a looooong time to come around to this view — I think one of the paradigmatic approaches to this problem of disciplinary edges is to spend a lot of time thinking about media. You simply HAVE to think about the brain, the body, culture, languages and codes, history, society, politics, commerce. Guys like Pinker want to settle old scores, spend a lot of time worrying about relativism. The people who are thinking seriously about media (inside and outside of the academy) have already moved on.

Thomas Baekdal has a nice schematic history of news and information from 1800 to 2020. I like his 1900-1960 entry:

By the year 1900, the newspapers and magazine had revolutionized how we communicated. Now we could get news from places we have never been. We could communicate our ideas to people we had never seen. And we could sell our products to people far away.

You still had to go out to talk other people, but you could stay on top of things, without leaving the city. It was amazing. It was the first real revolution of information. The world was opening up to everyone.

During the next 60 years the newspapers dominated our lives. If you wanted to get the latest news, or tell people about your product, you would turn to the newspapers. It seemed like newspapers would surely be the dominant source of information for all time to come.

Except that during the 1920s a new information source started to attract people’s attention – the Radio. Suddenly you could listen to another person’s voice 100 of miles away. But most importantly, you could get the latest information LIVE. It was another tremendous evolution is the history of information. By 1960’s the two dominant sources of information was LIVE news from the Radio and the more detailed news via newspapers and magazines.

It was really great times, although some meant that “The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio is simply to get out better papers”, an argument that we would hear repeatedly for the next 50 years.

The stuff about 2020 seems very familiar.

Via Lone Gunman.

Joe Klein on Iran and the USSR:

Pete Wehner has a post at the Commentary blog comparing Iran in 2009 to the Soviet Union of the 1980’s which, of course, is completely ridiculous. I visited Russia back in the day and I’ve now visited Iran twice. There is no comparison. The Soviet Union was the most repressive place I’ve ever been; its residents lived in constant terror. I’ll never forget my first translator in Moscow telling me that his parents had trained him never to smile in public–it could easily be misinterpreted and then he’d be off to the Gulag. There was no internet in those days, no cellphones, no facebook or twitter.

Iran, by contrast, is breezy with freedom. It is certainly freer now, despite Ahmadinejad, than it was when I first visited in 2001. There are satellites dishes all over the place, which bring accurate news via BBC Persia and the Voice of America. The place is awash in western music, movies and books. The Supreme Leader has a website; ayatollahs are blogging. You can get the New York Times and CNN online. (I was interested to find, however, that most blogs except those, like this one, that are associated with a mainstream media outlet, are filtered by the government.) There is, in fact, marginally more freedom of expression in Iran than in some notable U.S. allies, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia–although the danger of imprisonment always exists if a journalist or politician takes it a step too far for the Supreme Leader’s watchdogs.

I wonder, though — to what extent can media consumption, or even production, be a proxy for (or index of) material freedom? I mean, the reformists in Iran are actually fighting FOR a loosening of some of the more oppressive restrictions. In particular, women almost certainly had more day-to-day freedoms (apart from media consumption) under the USSR then they do in present-day Iran.

I appreciate Klein’s point here, and trust me — I don’t in any way underestimate the power of the free circulation of information as constitutive of some degree of liberty. I just worry when people who deal in information – especially journalists – confuse the freedom of information with freedom as such. (Klein’s B-story about the two states, which explains the likelihood of getting imprisoned for arbitrary reasons or dissent – is way more relevant.)

A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009. (AP Photo)

And curse the men’s cowardice with the light of their courage.