Newspaper Madness

One of the arguments that people–and by people I mean print journalists–make for the inability of newspapers to move online is the claim that the level of reporting would suffer because news outlets, due to the smaller levels of revenue available online, would have to close foreign bureaus and layoff staff and just generally not be able to do as much reporting as they have traditionally done.  Fair enough.  The loss of solid reporting would be a loss to society.  However, that argument can only hold water if the two basic assumptions underpinning it–that quality reporting can’t be accomplished without a wide network of standing bureaus and that online reporting is inherently inferior to its print cousin–are actually true.  I’ve encountered a couple of things in recent weeks that lead me to believe that neither is.

The first has been the coverage of the demonstrations in Iran.  While The New York Times has mostly reported on the press releases and statements of the most hardline Ayatollahs and the dismal to the point of being pathetic Ahmadinejad, Andrew Sullivan on his blog The Daily Dish has been doing actual reporting based on Twitter tweets and emails and on information gleaned from people who have connections with family and friends inside Iran.  This is reporting.  And this is why, when a very important and respected group of Ayatollahs came out against the recent election, all the big news outlets were slack-jawed in their disbelief while Andrew and his readers were not.

The second piece of reporting has had to do with the sudden resignation last week by Governor Sarah Palin.  (For the sake of the argument I am presenting, I offer no opinions for or against Gov. Palin.  This has to do with reporting facts, not opinions.)  While the MSM took the Governor’s statement at face value and, even in interviews, tossed her softball questions, online outlets were checking her statements to see what was factual and what wasn’t.  Again, the online outlets are reporting while the MSM is passing along press releases.

None of this is new.  The MSM let us down in considering the Iraq War.  They let us down on torture allegations.  They’ve let us down over-and-over again for the longest time.  It predates Mr. Bush’s presidency and it has outlived it.  The big newspapers and the networks and the other big news outlets have routinely relied on press conferences and government contacts instead of real reporting, which is simply awful and lazy journalism.  All the actual journalism that gets done gets shunted into a special category called “investigative journalism” and is done mostly by magazines rather than newspapers and news shows.  All the MSM really does is support the status quo, which is what state-supported media are supposed to do.  If they are not asking questions about everybody in power all the time (and this is where Fox News also misses the mark:  they coddle one side and attack the other) they are not doing their jobs.  They have stopped being reporters and started being merely typists and apologists.

I think that the MSM can either adapt or die.  I think that journalism suffers from being made into a profession instead of a calling.  I think reporters should dig and question and be cynical about politicians and aloof from them.  I think that finding ways of supporting them in their current condition is bad for democracy and bad for the Republic.

When Illiterates Try to Read Between the Lines

I tried twice yesterday to get comments on a New York Times blog called “Moral of the Story” by a fellow named Randy Cohen.  The blog purports to be dedicated to looking at stories from the news through the lens of ethics. (Never mind that ethics and morals are two distinct things and that people who are ethical aren’t always perceived as moral while folks who are moral are oftentimes not ethical.) As of this writing, neither comment has made it through the censors, which, for the purposes of this post, is neither here nor there. The blog post in question concerns the recent public relations tug-of-war between David Letterman and Sarah Palin.

First, let me say that the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. I can’t really imagine a less important news story. The situation is essentially this: Letterman told a joke–in some eyes a rotten joke–poorly, and Palin reacted in an absurd manner. There is no winner in this tiff, especially not the great American public.

Sprinkled amongst the comments generated by this post were a number that berated Letterman for joking about Willow Palin being raped, a thing which he did not do. Being a lover of the English language and of reasoning as an avocation, I wrote the following as my second comment (the first comment is lost to history):

There is not only a semantic but a legal difference between rape and statutory rape. In the one case, one participant in an allegedly sexual act is unwilling. The act is forced upon that person without their consent, whether they have the legal authority to give consent or not. In the other case, a person is engaged in a sexual act at an age that the legislature has determined is below the age at which informed consent can be given. The person’s willingness to engage in the act is irrelevant. They are deemed too young to be trusted to knowingly consent to such an act.

Conflating the two does no one any good. In fact, it cheapens the harm done and the injury felt by the victims of rape, those who were unwillingly violated by another.  However, in this matter and for the sake of making a few third-rate political points, it is convenient for Governor Palin and her acolytes to muddy the two very distinct terms into one so as to misstate the intent and effect of the joke. And if anyone actually thought that Letterman was referring to Willow Palin when he made that joke, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got a dirty mind.

Finally, it is hypocritical to worry about protecting the children when both Willow and Bristol Palin have been repeatedly used as props and weapons by their parents. If the folks who are so worried about them are true to their word, they would find these kids a foster home.

(I have slightly revised this comment to remove spelling and other such errors and to amplify the argument in a couple of places.)

As I’ve trudged through life, I’ve been subjected to a long stream of numbskulls and dimwits who disparaged “book learning” in favor of “street smarts” and who decried the need for a large vocabulary (originally called the use of “twenty-five cent words,” inflation has them valued at somewhere around five dollars these days) and the subtle use of language. And yet the entire line of thinking that goes into jumping to the conclusion that Letterman was joking about anyone being raped shows exactly why book learning and a varied vocabulary and a subtle sense of language are virtues, not vices. For without understanding how words work, without understanding the difference between reasoning and believing, a demagogue can mislead and citizens are reduced to the status of cattle. (I made a similar point in an earlier post.)

Despite what is believed in some quarters, this nation was not founded by men who had faith in religious belief.  They had faith in the ability of humans to reason their way through problems.  They understood that reason elevated the member of a mob to be a functioning citizen.  Reason allowed them to be governed rather than ruled.

The Elements of Style, Not Steel

In reading an article in The Times this morning concerning the 50th anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, I reflected on a blog post I wrote a little over a year ago in which I discussed the effect the so-called “little book” had on me as a writer.  It was a small stroll down memory lane inspired, at the time, by a slight detour.  I had read a blog post by Paul Krugman in which he danced a piroette on the wonders of George Orwell’s essay about clarity in writing, “Politics and the English Language,” and I ventured the opinion that not only might Orwell’s essay perhaps not have been “the best essay on writing ever written,” but was, at least in my case, one of the best sleep aids I had ever encountered.  Some days later, I noticed on the dashboard for this blog that there was a link incoming to that post.  It connected to some website devoted to Orwell, and the author of the link added one of the “rules” from The Elements of Style in which E.B. White enjoined the nascent writer to not “affect a breezy manner.”  Apparently my lack of enthusiasm had struck a nerve, and someone who lacked the courage to identify himself had constructed what he thought was a witty rejoinder to my slander against his hero.  That’s how things are done in the digital world.

Unfortunately for our Orwell-loving sniper, my piece, while playful in spots, was not written in a breezy manner, and he (or she; idiocy is not gender-specific) missed the point of a section that White referred to in the book as a selection of reminders.  This point was also missed in a recent article published in The Chronicle of Higher Learning by a professor from the University of Edinburgh called Geoffery Pullum, although, in fairness, Professor Pullum has more reasonable, compelling, and useful ideas to put forth.  Both seem (although I might be misinterpreting Professor Pullum) to be under the misapprehension that The Elements of Style is anything other than a collection of guidelines for the beginner and is not–especially after E.B. White got through with it–a polemic or manifesto.  Of course, they are not alone.  Too many thousands, including the folks who created the grammar wizard in Microsoft Word, have taken the Little Book too seriously.  They treat it as if it were holy writ, not merely some quick ideas that put forth the notion–the same one as put forth by Orwell, by the way–that clarity in the writing of English prose is a virtue.

Because Professor Strunk followed his own advice concerning the making of definite assertions, the early sections of the book do read like an extension of the Ten Commandments, but this can be overcome.  And the second section, the one dominated by White, is far less proscriptive, although, I guess, by the time that people get that far, they have been conditioned enough to jump when commanded that they unconsciously omit White’s advice to season one’s taste of his reminders with a pinch or two of salt.  It is long past time for everyone to relax a little and to remember that The Elements of Style is not a sacred text.  It began its life as a guidebook for college freshmen and not as a learned disquisition on the English language in all its complexity.  It is a style guide, and a decent one, I think, and entertaining to boot.

Now, two more things before I go.

First, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-Orwell.  1984 and Animal Farm are two of the best novels I’ve ever read, extraordinary in every way.  What I failed to make clear previously was that it was that one essay that put me to sleep.  If it is truly as great as Professor Krugman had it, then the fault is mine.

Second, Professor Pullum’s essay should be read by anyone who is infatuated with The Elements of Style and his words heeded.  I think he is right in just about everything he says except in his insistence on taking the book sooooo seriously.  It also seems to me that some of his notions, such as that “[t]he students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction,” are logically flawed and detract from his overall argument.   (Not that he’s arguing with overalls.  Whoops!  There’s that breezy side of me rearing its ugly head again.  For shame!  For shame!)  I think it would be great to see his essay published with the standard text as an afterword or something.  Everyone would benefit from a bit of scoffing, for there is no animal duller than a sacred cow.

I Get the Picture

Despite checking it relentlessly throughout the day, I don’t always get a lot of value out of Facebook.  I look at my homepage, shrug, and move on.  There’s something about both it and Twitter that I have trouble with.  As egocentric as I am, I still can’t be persuaded that anybody needs to know the excruciating minutiae of my daily life.  Does it really matter what I’m doing at any given moment, as long as it’s reasonably legal and only involves consenting adults?

However, I have just had an interesting experience on Facebook.  The niece of one of my “friends” (he and I were true friends during high school, but are, in reality, something less than  acquaintances now) posted a series of pictures taken at some family event.  Now, of course, there’s a very human tendency to remember people as they were rather than as how they are.  This was brought into sharp focus for me when I came across, among these photos, a shot of my friend’s parents.  I remember them as they were 30 or more years ago, probably about the age I am now.  And here I saw them, aged appropriately, still easily recognizable for who they were, who they had been.  And yet it was still a shock.

The smiles were still the same, hers open and friendly, his more wry and knowing.  He looks at her with love, as he always did, and I am transported.  I am young and callow, thin as a straw and riddled with acne and insecurity.  We are in their kitchen in the sturdy yellow house on a quiet small street.  My friend’s mother is cooking or cleaning or waiting on someone.  His father sits at the table at the wall by the door, reading the paper which is spread flat before him.  He sips a beer in tall, slender beer glass at patient intervals, spicing it with a taste of salt taken from a supply he keeps in the crook at the base of his thumb.

This is a happy memory for me.  More than that, it is a memory content.  This is a home for me, a second home, not in opposition to my real home as is so often the case, but an extension of it.  Another haven of acceptance and accord.

To see these people again, the mother, the father, the brother, the sisters, to see the person who was once the friend of the person who was once me is a pleasure, a welcome wave of sentiment and remembrance.  Many years have passed and all of these lives, mine and theirs, have gone in ways discrete and different.  I am, such as I am now, mostly unknown to them and they to me.  And yet in  my memory, so many years ago, I feel their presence and their being.  And amongst the strains and trials of life, amongst the difficult people and the slights and troubles that refuse to be forgotten, I still have that haven.

The Joke’s on You

As I’ve noted before, I keep tabs on the A Prairie Home Companion website the way that a boy keep tabs on the girl who broke his heart, and a Post to the Host there has gotten me thinking about practical jokes.  Apparently, on a recent show, Garrison Keillor revealed that Buddy Holly hadn’t died in that plane crash on the winter of 1959 and that he was now a minister with the Church of Christ working the lower westside of Manhattan.  One listener, confused, posted to the host and asked for clarification.  Mr Keillor thereupon took the opportunity to expand on his story, and even threw in that Holly now went by the name of the Reverend Charles Holley, with an “e,” which is the way his family spelled his true, nonstage name.  Now, a cursory Google search revealed that the named church, the Manhattan Church of Christ,  was not on W. 12th Street, but rather on on E. 80th Street, and that there was no Charles Holley ministering there.  So, the whole thing is a spoof.

And that’s fine, except that it makes me uncomfortable in the way that almost all practical jokes make me uncomfortable.  There is something fundamentally cruel and heartless about practical jokes.  The basic premise of these attempts at humor is to make one person look like a jerk for the amusement of others.  And while such an activity is certainly legal and Constitutional in the most trivial possible sense of the word, is it, in fact, civil?  Is this a way for a well known radio performer, humorist, and novelist to be acting?  And does this suckering of a listener–and most of his loyal listeners are nothing short of adoring–betray a well hidden contempt for the very people who make him a success?  Doesn’t Mr Keillor make a very nice living from the attentions of people like our unfortunate Thad and other hapless listeners like Carla, who posted a comment begging for clarification?

Personally, I’m not big on playing people for suckers, especially people who (and they are few in number) would look up to me and who would support my projects and celebrate my creativity.  As I was rereading Of Mice and Men over the weekend, I was struck by a passage in which George tells Slim why he stopped playing practical jokes on Lennie.  He says,

Tell you what made me stop that.  One day a bunch of guys was standin’ around up on the Sacramento River.  I was feelin’ pretty smart.  I turns to Lennie and says, “Jump in.”  An’ he jumps.  Couldn’t swim a stroke.  He damn near drowned before we could get him.  An’ he was so damn nice to me for pullin’ him out.  Clean forgot I told him to jump in.  Well, I ain’t done nothin’ like that no more.

That, of course, is a small parable on compassion.  When we see people as suckers, we see them as objects.  We shield ourselves from their humanity so that we can feel a tiny bit superior and so that we can “have a little fun.”  And yet, you can never tell where your “little bit of fun” ends and someone else drowning begins.  It doesn’t hurt to err on the side of compassion, especially when a person occupies a higher, more powerful social position.  And perhaps it is a good trait in an artist to see in his readers and listeners fully formed human beings rather mere suckers.

Say What?

Let me start off by saying that no one holds Stephen Fry in higher esteem than I do.  In fact, even though he’s only a year-and-a-half older than I am, I still want to be him when I grow up.  And yet, despite my admiration and abstract sort of affection, I do not think him a deity and feel completely comfortable in disagreeing with him when the occasion calls for it.  And, unfortunately, this is one of those times.

In the most recent installment of Stephen’s podcast, entitled “Language,” he makes some statements concerning language and correct usage and such subjects that, while well-intentioned and well-argued, are wrong. This is not to say that he is completely wrong or that he doesn’t make reasonable points, however, the conclusions he draws are, I believe, mistaken.

Stephen’s main point is that language is changeable and malleable and that some are often too strict in approaching language.  It is not a compilation of rights and wrongs, and those who would nitpick every perceived error need to take up ballroom dancing or Parcheesi or perhaps even sex.  And I agree with this.  I, too, used to be an absolutist, but found over time that my absolutes didn’t always apply and weren’t always as solid as I had supposed.  However, Stephen goes on to assert a kind of feel-good doctrine in which all words and usages are equal and are merely an expression of the exuberance of language itself.  In truth, as in most facets of life, ignorance often trumps exuberance and many usages that gain currency are, to use the horse racing terms, by stupidity and out of laziness.

We’ve all heard a person, usually young, say something on the order of “he like said, you know, whatever,” and I would argue that this is not truly speaking.  It’s semi-organized grunting.  Just this morning, I read a blog post on The New Yorker’s website in which a young woman who works for The New Republic was quoted as saying,

“It was, like, ‘Do you want to take Monday off work to drive in Obama’s motorcade?’ ” Lear recalled. “I went, ‘Yes, absolutely. But who is this?’ ”

This was a presumably college-educated person talking to a reporter.  Is saying “went” instead of “said”  any more efficient a way of expressing the idea of communicating?  No.  The same number of letters and syllables.  Is “went” somehow clearer or even as clear?  No, because that leaves us with this as a possible sentence:  “She went, ‘She went.’”  No, it is mere dribbling, a childish lingo forged in the furnace of laziness.  When we consider the elegance and subtlety available to human expression, should we accept such palaver as being as good as anything else?  Nonsense.

Now, Stephen relies heavily on the ideas that language is innate in humans and on the Chomskian idea that thought and language are separate.  Now, both these notions are true.  As he points out, where no language is provided, new languages evolve.  And anyone who has ever observed a cat or a dog has seen clear evidence of thought.  Animals consider and anticipate, both of which must constitute a thought process of some sort.  In this he is correct.  However, Stephen does not take the process far enough.  For while thought can exist without language, reasoning cannot.  And reasoning is shaped by words and one’s use of them.  Let us consider, in the shadow of his brutal tenure, the administration of George W. Bush.  Has there ever been a better example of a person who spoke poorly and reasoned as well as he spoke?

This is not to say that everyone who is well spoken is also reasonable and of a like mind.  All the swirling influences of society and temperament affect such things.  But to send someone into that maelstrom without the weapon of well-honed language is to send them defenseless to be buffeted and drowned by information they cannot process and leaders they cannot interpret. While I am not a fan of George Orwell’s essay on language–it’s soporific effects made it almost impossible for me to drive after reading it–I do agree with the main point he makes.  He says, “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  And people who do not use language with subtlety and skill have no chance of cutting through the forest of propaganda that the average citizen finds himself in every day of his life. The young lady I quoted earlier went through the experience of driving a vehicle in the Obama motorcade on Inauguration Day without a scintilla of insight.  Her main concern was the celebrity of the people she drove, and that she spends her free time texting people instead of reading The Mill on the Floss, which she brought with her, is, I think symptomatic of this entire problem.

Stephen assails the language purists–and some of them are downright Puritans–by questioning their abilities with words.  He claims to know that they have no poetry in their souls, but I do not know how this can be proved.  It is a moment of bigotry in a remarkably unbigoted person, but we all have our faults.   In fact, I would dare say that the people who, by traditional standards, misuse the language are less likely to have poetry in them and that their misuse is liable to degrade any language to a point at which poetry is no longer possible.  Members of the military and politicians and football coaches are the leaders of an assault on language.  It is they who have given us “impact” and “reference” as verbs, two examples of a myriad of lead balloons that pose as speech.

Now, Stephen defends the verbing of nouns, and he has a point.  He points to Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is an example extreme in relation to the rest of us.  And however much Shakespeare liked to verb, he still did so selectively and strategically.  This is why he was capable of tabling, but not dooring.  And this is my problem with “impact” and “reference” as verbs.  In the case of the former, it is a disingenuous attempt to sound important and manly.  It has the same meaning as “affect,” only with a thick coating of pretension.  It is a strutting Spanish Captain of a word, veneered in braggadocio but empty inside.

“Reference,” on the other hand, is just plain unnecessary.  It has come to replace the verb the noun originally derived from (for we can noun verbs as easily as we verb nouns), the humble word “refer.”  I have yet to see what advantage “reference” offers.  It takes just as many syllables to reference something as it does to refer to it, and in the past tense, it actually adds a syllable more.  And there is something clumsy and clunky about it.  Meanwhile, “refer” is lovely in its short five letters.  The reason why “reference” has gained so much currency of late is that it sounds officious and pretentious, not because it is a better or easier word to use.  The person who references must be important, or so the speaker would have us think.  Since words should lead us toward reality rather than away from it, I can’t admit the usefulness of “reference.”

This is the problem with declaring all words to be “good.”  Linguistic egalitarianism hides the fact that some words are better than others.  They are less pretentious or more precise or more apt.  They reveal rather than hide.  Some soar and others waddle.  Some illuminate while others snuff out the light.  Simply because the language evolves through usage doesn’t mean that each mutation is a good one.  Some will survive and others won’t.  Some deserve to be euthanized.  It’s really best for all.

He also criticizes those who are forever on about punctuation and grammar.  Now, in terms of grammar, he just might be right.  In spoken language, grammar is more a matter of the ear than the mind, and in written language, we are often weighed down by rules that have no basis in practice.  Two of the more notorious examples are the prohibitions on split infinitives and in ending sentences with prepositions.  Both are rules devised by people in the 18th Century who were trying to make English work like Latin.  Which it doesn’t.  In Latin, infinitives are single words.  In English, they are two-word forms, such as “to split.”  and, in English, infinitives often beg to unequivocally be  split.  It’s a matter of ear.

Ending sentences with prepositions is another such nostrum and is foolish and prissy.  Sometimes a preposition just wants to make its way to the end of a sentence and if it doesn’t get there you end up with something along the lines of Winston Churchill’s famous (and perhaps apocryphal) parody, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”  Again, the ear is the guide.

However, in his insistent railings against people who are consumed with the proper use of apostrophes, he misses the point of punctuation and why it matters whether one tiny little squiggle mark is present or missing.  Punctuation is an aid not to the writer, but to the reader.  It has evolved over an expanse of time, and the point is to make comprehension easier and not just to give a bunch of self-satisfied prisses a means for feeling superior.  Let us take, since Stephen so furiously has, the lowly apostrophe.  It exists in three states:  before the final “s,” after the final “s,” and in place of missing letters in the middle.  Let’s start with its use with possessives.  As readers, it tells us one of three things.  If it comes before the final “s,” it means that the noun is singular, which can be of some use to know.  If it comes after the final “s,” the noun is plural, which can also be of use on occasion.  If it does not appear at all, then we know that the noun is plural and precious moments are relieved of the burden of trying to parse noun/verb agreement.  Its absence or misuse may not constitute a tragedy, but it is a help, both to the reader who wishes to not be confused and the writer who wants the reader flying through his or her work instead of having to puzzle over every possessive.

That people can get carried away with these rules of punctuation is undoubtedly true.  There are martinets in every field of human endeavor.  And there are those who confuse matters of style–such as in the use of serial commas–with the basic rules of punctuation, which exist only to aid us.

Here in the U.S., I’ve noticed a puzzling fashion in which people have signs made that use quotation marks quite wrongly.  For example, there is an auto repair place near us that has a sign hanging prominently that says “‘English’ spoken here.”  Now, quotation marks around a word in such a context usually denotes irony, if not downright sarcasm.  Were these folks implying that their English was not very good or a mere facsimile of English?  Or did they mean to have the word either underlined or italicized in order to indicate emphasis?  It may be pedantic to note the difference, but a difference there is.  And it doesn’t make me superior to those who made the mistake, merely more knowledgeable.  If there are, as Stephen would have it, no wrong words, is there no wrong knowledge?  Is all knowledge the same and those who would espouse a greater knowledge on a given subject pedants?  I think not.

There is a certain kind of snobbery that attaches itself to the apron strings of language.  Of course there is.  It is a human product.  And wherever humans go, there is pride and snobbery and ignorance and foolishness.  There is also knowledge and insight and reason and thoughtfulness.  We are strange creatures filled with loves and compulsions, interests and indulgences.  It is not, in my view, a burden to ask people to use language well–as well as they can.  It is a shame, however, to expect the least of them, to banish them to a land called Ignorance, to shield their eyes from the light of reason.  To write well, to speak well, to use the full vigor, power, and beauty of English is not a vice, and to ask the best of others is not a crime.

The Means of Distribution, Part I

Over the last few days, after the broadcast of “Phil’s Deli” and in reaction to a post and comments on Baby Got Books, I’ve started thinking about how works of art get distributed, particularly in regards to books, movies and TV shows, and audio plays.  Each is being affected by the Internet and the digitized life, but none, it seems to me, has caught up with technology yet.  What finally pushed me over the precipice to write this post was getting an email forwarding a link to Michael Moore’s new film, Slacker Uprising.

Moore is trying something different here.  He’s giving his movie away.  (And, just for the record, I’m not endorsing, condemning, exfoliating, or cleansing the film.  I haven’t watched it and haven’t decided whether I will or not.  If you don’t care for Michael Moore, I would suggest that you not watch it and that you don’t bother leaving angry comments on this post.  I’m concerned here with art, society, and technology, not politics.)  He’s not the first show biz figure to try giving some content away; Radiohead got some very nice news coverage doing so, and a couple of others have apparently tried it out.

What is occurring to me is that we are about to see a vast–and quite possibly useful–change in the way that works of art are distributed.  I don’t claim that this is some kind of original insight; I’m just trying to work through this, and this blog has become the medium through which I think through these things.

Let’s start with movies.  Film, as an art form, is all but dead.  Oh, sure, you can see loads of violence, trillions of dollars-worth of special effects, and computer animation out the wazoo, but precious little of it even aspires to art.  The economics of the movie business have gotten to the point where, not only would Citizen Kane not get made today, neither would Stagecoach, On the Waterfront, The Hustler, or Five Easy Pieces.  And yet, there might be hope.

The most public face of this hope is, of course, YouTube.  People are already making short films and releasing them on YouTube or its equivalents and hoping that viral marketing will get them the attention they desire.  And now we’re getting a feature film.  And some TV shows.  People are starting to figure out how you can make money–and show business is, in the end, a business–by doing things online.

This is a major change in the means of distribution.  And being the means of distribution is the whole point of being a movie studio or a TV network.  If someone takes that away from you, your goose is cooked.  Just look at the record companies.  iTunes and iPods and programs like Garage Band and Audacity have made it possible for anyone to produce music and to distribute it without a record company.  Paul Simon discusses this and the evolution of recorded music from the vinyl album to the mp3 in a discussion with Charlie Rose (starting at minute 43:00 of the video).  He indicates that he’s no longer thinking in terms of making another CD, but instead releasing new songs individually and less as groups of songs and more as lone items.

The implication is that the record company is no longer a part of the equation.  The means of distribution have changed.

Phil’s Deli

The Shoestring Radio Theatre has produced and broadcast a production of my radio play, “Phil’s Deli,” to a hungering world, first this past Wednesday on KUSF in San Francisco, and then nationally starting on Friday.  The show will be available for download via Real Player and as an mp3 through this coming Friday, September 26th.  Anyone and everyone is encouraged to download the show.  You won’t be disappointed.  It’s pretty funny.  (If you don’t come across this until after September 26th, just email me at rudyvalue at nextintheseries dot com, and I will supply an mp3.)

And now for the story behind the story.

A few years ago, I had a scheme that involved developing a radio campaign for my then employer, a mid-sized telecommunications carrier.  Well, I developed a sample radio spot with my partner-in-audio, Tom O’Neill, and submitted it to the marketing department.  They declined to use it, and, after a short negotiation, I came away with the right to use the spot as long as we did not use the name of the company.  Fair enough.

I told Tom this, and he sent me a version back almost immediately where he had dubbed himself saying “Phil’s Deli” over the name of the telecommunications company.  I thought it was hysterical.  And I started thinking about how to use it in a script.

What I came up with was a script about pipe dreams and the power of belief.  It is also, I think, a solid example of the craft of writing a sitcom.  It’s farcical and funny.  In the best of all possible worlds, I would probably direct my own version of it, most likely for podcasting.

I really wish I had better understood the future of podcasting when I was trying to develop the radio show.  I’m pretty sure that my concept would do well as podcasts, perhaps would even expand the limits of what people think of as podcasts.  The kind of layering of sound and the establishment of a sense of place would really be enhanced in a podcast.

And maybe it will still work out.  You never know.  I have a bagful of scripts and the desire to pursue it.  What I need is a competent producer.  I write well, I act well, I can do a decent job of directing.  What kills me over-and-over again in show business is my complete lack of talent for producing.  Anybody who has a knack for it, however, is welcome to drop me a line.

My News Addiction

The Internet made me a news addict.  It’s always up, always there, just lurking behind a tab or a bookmark or as a memory in the address bar.  There are newspaper websites, news-related blogs, and news magazines.  There are feeds and summaries and convenient links.  It’s everywhere, news as entertainment.

And none of it matters.  At least not to me.

Let me give you an example.  In recent days, we have seen the American financial markets implode, the stock market experience a nervous breakdown (it’s gone from depression to mania quicker than you can say “government bailout”), and a slapdash and inconsistent government response.  I’ve read reports, and I’ve read commentaries.  I’ve looked at charts and listened to experts.  And I have no more control over these events now than I did before Lehman Brothers failed.  And yet I worry over them.  How can that be healthy?

The same goes for the Presidential campaign.  I know who I’m voting for based what I’ve gleaned from the policy papers published on their websites and with no thanks to the news cycle whatsoever.  In fact, all I ever see in the news are distractions.  Stuff and nonsense.  Meaningless gloop.  It’s all been reduced to the level of a reality game show, one that could be called Survivor:  White House.  It’s an odd way to choose our leaders and ought to be beneath us.

But nothing is beneath the news game.  Although we like to think of the news as something that is presented in the public interest, it is actually just the honey that attracts the flies to the trap of advertising.  And there’s no way of getting around this.  If the government owns the news organization, you end up, most likely, with mere propaganda.  If you leave it to the whims of the market, you end up with pabulum and pap.

Of course, as is the case with so much, The Firesign Theatre summed it up beautifully, this time on their album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.  They have a newsreader say the following:  “Those are the headlines, and now for the rumors behind the news.”

I don’t know what the answer is, and I’m not trying to prescribe a cure for everyone.  I just know that I have to wean myself off.  The news eats up my attention, makes me crabby, and gives precious little in return.  It is the enemy of enlightenment and peace, and has a tendency to narrow the mind rather than to expand it.  We’ll see how it goes.  If I write a post on Monday about the Federal bailout of a Presidential campaign, you’ll know that my plan will still need work.

The Great American Novel

I stopped in at the Prairie Home Companion website this morning to catch up on Garrison Keillor’s column, The Old Scout, and most of all to see if any new Posts to the Host had been made. Now, it’s funny that I should do any of these things, because I haven’t really listened to A Prairie Home Companion purposely in years. Oh, there was a time. I’m one of those people who found it in the early years, back in the very early ’80s. When I started listening, one of the fictional sponsors of the show was Bob’s Bank (“Save at the Sign of the Sock”). And time went on and the show grew in popularity. Eventually, Garrison became involved with a Danish woman he had gone to high school with and publicly humiliated the woman he had been living with–the show’s producer, Margaret Moos. It seemed to me to be ungentlemanly behavior, so I stopped listening. Besides which, every episode now featured commercials for an album fictionally called “Songs of the Cat” at Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, and while that might have been humorous the first forty or fifty times, the whole concept had begun to wear on my nerves, and every Saturday night not spent listening to the recitation of the locations of Bertha’s Kitty Boutique stores or commercials for the Fearmonger’s Shop was time well spent.

And yet, as with any early love, interest may fade, but it never completely dies. And so I check in each week to see what the good middle and upper middle class folks in the heartland have to say and to see what Garrison is on about in his syndicated column. It helps fill up the week, and you never know what you’re going to come across.

Lately the trend in the Posts to the Host section has been for people to vilify Garrison for one reason or another. One was from a guy who was upset because Garrison used the word “fruitcake” in a Guy Noir sketch, which he took to be a slur against gay men. Of course, this is absurd. The term “fruitcake” refers to crazy people, not gayboys. No, had he been insensitive enough to want to slur gay men, he would have used the term “fruit.” Or Nancy. Or nancyboy. Or swish. Or Mary. Or sissymary. Or many others far too plain spoken and ribald for the typical audience for A Prairie Home Companion.

Another came when Garrison apparently had the nerve to suggest that the Baby Boomer Generation (a group from whose upper echelons he hails) were ever anything other than a collection of Christs-on-Earth. How dare he? Doesn’t he know that we came out of the ’60s (somewhere around 1975) living in a paradise on Earth where all problems were solved? How else could we have gone into the ’80s (somewhere around 1975) without descending into a narcissistic hash of drugs, greed, and meaningless sex? Oh, wait. We did.

And now, this morning, he is being excoriated for not considering The Great Gatsby “The Great American Novel,” and instead preferring something–anything–by Faulkner. Keillor’s response is inspired. It’s in moments like those when I remember why I loved him and his show so damn much all those years ago.

Now, my first question is this: How wealthy do you have to be before this is your concern in life? I mean, I like books and all, but I’m too busy paying bills and trying to survive to be able to spend too many hours building an imaginary hierarchy out of the corpus of American literature based solely on my own prejudices and limitations.

My second question is, why can there only be one Great American Novel? Aren’t there really hundreds? Can all the vast realities of American life be summed up in a single volume? And can that vastness really be summed up in a 40,000 word book about a bootlegger and a bunch of people with too much time on their hands? I’m not trying to dis Fitzgerald, either. The Last Tycoon, his final, unfinished novel, is an extraordinary performance, a great book written by a great writer who was finally in complete control of all of his gifts.

I haven’t read much Faulkner, which is more a sad comment on me than it is on him. I read “The Bear” in my literature book in 7th grade, even though–perhaps especially because–it wasn’t on the syllabus. I’ve also read snippets over the years, and the man was clearly a master. And you really don’t get a Nobel Prize for making sausage. He was a modernist, which is always going to alienate some readers, but I have a tip for them. Read it slow. Read it word-by-word and not sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph or page-by-page. I tried this with Ulysses, and it took over my brain. And I would have sworn before that that it was nothing but pretentious drivel.

Finally, my goal is not to write The Great American Novel, but to write A Decent American Novel, which is probably about all anyone can aspire to. There is not one greatest. I’ve had this thought for years. It started back when everyone was comparing Magic to Bird. Who was greater? And I thought, “What does it matter?” If you were choosing teams on a playground, would you pass up either? It was a meaningless question. And then I thought, you know, there’s a level in any field of endeavor that only a few can perform at, and once someone reaches that level, the whole concept of hierarchy loses its meaning. Deciding which is best is a matter of picking nits and relying more on prejudices than facts. It’s possible to love them all, and much more meaningful and enriching if you do.

Not that I have an opinion on any of this.