August 13, 2025
Leaving a Mark: Historical Graffiti
Leaving a Mark: Historical Graffiti: Explore what has made graffiti an enduring medium of expression throughout history using Gale Primary Sources.
May 12, 2010
The Art of the Matter
"Art" by Yasmina Reza first appeared in Paris in 1995. Shortly afterwards it was translated into English for the British stage and turned up at the Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre) on Broadway on March 1, 1998. The cast was stellar for this three-person play, performed without intermission. The six-month Broadway run included Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina, all well known film and theatre performers.
The recent weekend performances of the play at the Kehler-Liddell Gallery in Westville this April were perhaps a little less glamorous but were easily just as powerful as its Broadway version—in some ways even more so. Where the Royale Theatre seats 1,100, Kehler-Liddell's impromptu bleachers and 60 some chairs transformed what on Broadway can only have been an all-too-impersonal experience into an intimate tete-a-tete between audience and performers. Placing the play within a gallery reflected, if anything, the mutual trust exhibited by gallery staff and the Elm Shakespeare Company, which was responsible for this production.
This element of trust is no small matter in a play as powerful as Reza's. The setting is simple enough: the living rooms of the three characters—Marc (James Andreassi), Serge (Tom Zingarelli), and Yvan (Raphael Massie)—which remains unchanged throughout the hour and twenty minute performance. The key conflict is unsettling, one that should worry any gallery owner in the business of selling art. In brief, Serge, a dermatologist and divorcee, has purchased for 200,000 francs a five-by-four-foot painting of white lines on a white background. This decision immediately upsets Marc, an engineer who condemns the work as trash, to the dismay and disdain of Serge. Their seeming arbiter is the hapless and "chaotic," soon-to-be-married Yvan.
While hardly a tale of war or woe, Reza's play disturbs the universe of art and, as becomes shortly evident, human relations. The opening gambit in Reza's backhanded criticism of postmodern art—and possibly of poststructuralism, a distinctly French phenomenon that Reza undoubtedly had to live through—is the all-white painting that is the object of Serge's veneration, Marc's rage, and Yvan's confusion. But "Art" goes beyond the obvious conundrums formerly presented by Marcel Duchamp's institutionalized snow shovels and urinals. (Does something become 'art' by virtue of hanging in a museum? What if you pay 200,000 francs for it?) It goes after the relationships among the characters, since it's on the blank whiteness of the canvas that their relationships are ultimately inscribed, evoking a range of emotion that drives them through the convolutions of feeling that by play's end leaves the audience near breathless with the verbal pyrotechnics of it all.
This is where mastery of the material makes all the difference, and the ensemble put together for this production really does have firm control of that material. The snugness of the venue and the simplicity of the set demand a conciseness of body language that is belied by the explosiveness of the characters' pent-up feeling. The contrast of so much energy to be conveyed in so contained a setting ultimately creates a bond between players and spectators that only a great performance in the right environment can convey.
This simpatico between audience and ensemble seems exactly the intended goal of this experiment by Elm Shakespeare Company and Kehler Liddell Gallery to bring high art of high quality to New Haven's neighborhoods. "Westville is something of an arts district already strong in the visual arts with its many galleries," noted Elm Shakespeare founder and director James Andreassi. "Elm Shakespeare's goal was not only to find an indoor space for performing smaller plays but also to take advantage of the artistic energy in Westville and deepen it by bringing the theatrical arts to the neighborhood." In that regard, Elm Shakespeare both follows in the wake and leads along with works that have been aired by New Haven Theater Company, Broken Umbrella Theatre, and Theatre 4.
October 13, 2009
LIbraries of the Future No More?
I attended the conference described in this article at Inside Higher Ed. It is absolutely worth reading the comments for those interested in the hard choices confronting academic libraries in today's Google era. I couldn't help but offer some thoughts in a lengthy comment that I reproduce here for those who care about the future of libraries to consider.
I attended the Ithaka conference and witnessed Vice Provost Greenstein's presentation firsthand. A few thoughts...
His presentation was provocative and frankly, I enjoy bomb throwers. It was perhaps more disturbing for that bomb throwing to come from an individual with the power to actually detonate what he throws.
With that said, libraries are changing and there are legitimate issues raised regarding the preservation of books (or other library "artifacts"), ownership of digital content, outsourcing of library-based tasks, etc. The biggest change quite simply is that unitized objects--books, CDs, etc.--have become free-floating disseminable objects that not only can float at far lower cost within the digital ether, but can potentially carry all of its metadata with it. That fundamentally changes the kinds of work librarians used to do, from cataloging and shelving to binding and ordering.
The result has been, naturally enough, a shift in what librarian staffs (from shelvers to university librarians) actually now do for a living.
The more disturbing point Greenstein raises is that of depriving libraries of dollars rather than focusing on their reallocation within library systems. This goes to the heart of the metrics universities use for measuring success and meeting the demands of both students (whose tuitions and per-head subsidizations pay many of the bills) and accreditation agencies. (Greenstein raised this point about accreditation quite explicitly.)
And this goes to the heart of what librarians would have to do to combat the trends and pressures Greenstein outlined on university budgets. In brief, librarians need to organize their efforts around the measurable value they supply to library users--specifically students and faculty--as well as the significance of that value to accreditors.
Imagine accreditors who looked not only at university department course listing and faculty CVs, but available institutional resources--both intellectual and human--within the library as part of their accreditation process. (Perhaps they already do!) Rest assured a different tune would be sung by administrators.
Greenstein was emphatic about that, implying that libraries need to do more than lobby adminstrators to maintain funding, they must lobby (yes, lobby!) students, faculty, alumni, and accreditors. What libraries will look like a decade from now is irrelevant: library jobs, resources, modes of delivery, etc., are always changing. hat matters is your ability to demonstrate your value to the funding sources of your university, no small measure for libraries that have not paid sufficient attention to this beyond usage statistics and circulation numbers.
July 1, 2009
Literary Impressions: Puzzle Me This...
This is cross-posted at New Haven Review here.
When I was a child, I was absolutely stupefied by my father’s ability to complete the New York Times Sunday crossword. Mind you, he was not a competitive puzzler, one of those types today who now bundle themselves off every end of February to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which, after 30 years at the Marriott Stamford in Connecticut, was held for the first time ever at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott.
Puzzling as a sport was not a feature of my father’s love of the crossword. He enjoyed them thoroughly, but there was no fanaticism in his play, and thus neither stopwatches nor blasts of indignation at seemingly disingenuous clues or specious puns. He was a cruciverbalist—the technical moniker for the habitual crossword solver—in the most traditional of senses, at his leisure or on a lunch break. Moreover, he liked doing them in ink and all caps—both no-no’s according to Stanley Newman in his Cruciverbalism: A Crossword Fanatic’s Guide to Life in the Grid, a lovely little hardcover I picked up while combing the shelves of the Goodwill on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden.
Stanley Newman is the puzzle editor for New York Newsday and this short paean to the crossword, co-authored with Mark Lasswell, is a fascinating little contribution to puzzle lore that at an easily perused 160 pages is entirely worth reading by anyone who enjoys crosswords. Take me, for example. I like crossword puzzles, and even though I’m not nearly as capable as my father, I relish the qualities of its particular type of challenge: the puns and the trivia, the small victories and epiphanies in lateral thinking that spring from that part of your unconscious where facts you thought lost still roost .
Newman covers several topics in his little tome: how he went from bond businessman to crossword puzzle guru; the history of the crossword (which is how publishing giant Simon & Schuster made its first real money); the ways in which puzzle editors and constructors go about the daily grind of producing their wares; some general principles for solving puzzles; and sundry other matters. But what caught my interest were the very first pages, where he holds forth on his outright distaste for New York Times puzzle editor Eugene T. Maleska and reviews the war he started with him and the New York Times over the state of the crossword.
This is no doubt where his co-author came in, suggesting, “Look, if we’re going to hook general readers first and fans second, let’s begin with a pie fight, because everyone loves a pie fight.” And I must admit, I do like pie fights, especially when they take on bathetic proportions, making mountains of molehills, the truest sign of passion.
When Newman was a bond trader, he started a newsletter about the crossword business in which, among other things, he regularly took to task Maleska’s penchant for publishing puzzles that depended on overly obscure geographical locations, an unhealthy interest in opera, an utter distaste for popular culture, and a schoolmarmish predilection for Latin phrases (Maleska had been a Latin teacher before replacing the much-beloved Will Weng as the crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times). Newman was convinced that Maleska’s role doubly damaged the state of the crossword: for puzzle solvers, his stiffness dampened the interest of the next generation, while for constructors his perch at the Gray Lady overshadowed the innovativeness of their work at other papers. In brief, Maleska was giving cruciverbalism a bad name.
And yet whatever pleasures pie fights may present, what most endeared this reader to Newman’s tale is his belief—and demonstration by personal example—that old dogs can learn new tricks. Unlike many crossword enthusiasts, who tend to start young, either around high school or college, Newman himself became a crossword champion in his 30s! Before then he was not much better than your occasional cruciverbalist. But, as he suggests, with a little dedication and some zeal, it is possible for anyone—and he is emphatic about that anyone!—to become good at doing crosswords, regardless of age. And, that, in itself, sheds some light on the beauty of a book that illustrates how the ability to excel at some cerebral or artistic passion does not necessarily diminish with time. Think Grandma Moses with a paintbrush or Immanuel Kant publishing his first book at the age of 50!
Homeward Stay: Why I Love Westville, New Haven
Donald Brown, writing at New Haven Review, asked the following at the end of his post here:
How could I not answer about the neighborhood I've come to love as follows...
I grew up in Brooklyn. There I attended all my life public schools to which I walked nearly every day of the thirteen years I had to go. At the age of 17, I left my family home and never came back, which is not the same as saying that I didn’t return to New York or even Brooklyn. I did. But I didn’t return “home” in that most traditional of senses: taking up residence, as my brother did till age 35, in my parents’ five-bedroom home on Glenwood Road.
When I left New York for the last time, after a two-year stint as an editor, to return to New Haven (yes, I lived here twice), my wife and I were not only overjoyed, we even returned to the neighborhood in which we had rented the first time around: that part of Westville between Whalley & Derby on the north and south respectively; and Yale Avenue and Forest Road as far as east and west go. We have had no regrets since in the last 10 years that we have resided here, and we both chalk that up not to New Haven itself, but the neighborhood in which we reside.
I could write electronic ream after ream on the wonderfulness of this neighborhood. My children walk two blocks to school (Edgewood School); my wife walks two blocks to work (Mitchell Library); we walk two blocks to synagogue (Beth-El Keser Israel); we have farmer’s market directly across the street in the summers; access to tennis courts in Edgewood Park (across the street) and Yale fields (three blocks) respectively; sledding at the Yale golf course in the winter five blocks away we can walk less than a block to five art galleries, four bars, five restaurants.
It’s the neighborhood thus that has made New Haven home for us (and our children) and not “New Haven” itself. The spatial proximity of creature comforts, leisure activities, the necessities of food and culture have created a latitude and lassitude in time: it moves more slowly, more relaxedly, more satisfactorily, with fewer alienating effects as I wave hello to friends going north along my block to synagogue or walking their children south along it to school or heading in either direction with dogs in tow or on bikes or in jogging suits.
Were I to leave New Haven, what I would miss is not its individual places or events--this restaurant or its much celebrated Festival of Arts and Ideas or remarkably Long Wharf Theatre--but the entire gestalt of the community that occupies its small corner of this small city.
So, a question to any long-standing or native New Haveners reading this: what do
you consider to be definitive aspects of New Haven … the kinds of things one
shouldn’t miss while living here? Or: what’s a change you’ve seen in your time
here that had some effect on you?
How could I not answer about the neighborhood I've come to love as follows...
I grew up in Brooklyn. There I attended all my life public schools to which I walked nearly every day of the thirteen years I had to go. At the age of 17, I left my family home and never came back, which is not the same as saying that I didn’t return to New York or even Brooklyn. I did. But I didn’t return “home” in that most traditional of senses: taking up residence, as my brother did till age 35, in my parents’ five-bedroom home on Glenwood Road.
When I left New York for the last time, after a two-year stint as an editor, to return to New Haven (yes, I lived here twice), my wife and I were not only overjoyed, we even returned to the neighborhood in which we had rented the first time around: that part of Westville between Whalley & Derby on the north and south respectively; and Yale Avenue and Forest Road as far as east and west go. We have had no regrets since in the last 10 years that we have resided here, and we both chalk that up not to New Haven itself, but the neighborhood in which we reside.
I could write electronic ream after ream on the wonderfulness of this neighborhood. My children walk two blocks to school (Edgewood School); my wife walks two blocks to work (Mitchell Library); we walk two blocks to synagogue (Beth-El Keser Israel); we have farmer’s market directly across the street in the summers; access to tennis courts in Edgewood Park (across the street) and Yale fields (three blocks) respectively; sledding at the Yale golf course in the winter five blocks away we can walk less than a block to five art galleries, four bars, five restaurants.
It’s the neighborhood thus that has made New Haven home for us (and our children) and not “New Haven” itself. The spatial proximity of creature comforts, leisure activities, the necessities of food and culture have created a latitude and lassitude in time: it moves more slowly, more relaxedly, more satisfactorily, with fewer alienating effects as I wave hello to friends going north along my block to synagogue or walking their children south along it to school or heading in either direction with dogs in tow or on bikes or in jogging suits.
Were I to leave New Haven, what I would miss is not its individual places or events--this restaurant or its much celebrated Festival of Arts and Ideas or remarkably Long Wharf Theatre--but the entire gestalt of the community that occupies its small corner of this small city.
June 7, 2009
Literary Impressions: MFA Programming
One of my co-group bloggers, poet and teacher, Alison Moncrief has offered a very thoughtful response to Louis Menand's New Yorker review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era, in which Menand offers, among other things, his understanding--apparently limited--of what students who enter writing MFA programs are expected to have accomplished.
I won't rehash Alison's response, except to note that she focuses rightly on the fact that criticism of MFA writing programs ought be leavened by the recognition that they are essentially apprenticeship programs. There is no more reason to disparage these than those that instruct painters how to paint, cooks to cook, lawyers to lawyer, and doctors to doctor.
Interestingly, McGurl's book itself bypasses jaundiced criticisms about the poverty of what is produced from these programs, as noted here:
According to Alison, however, Menand still manages to slip one of those sly questionings of the MFA program's purpose. As I pointed out in my comment on her piece, which I reproduce here, what often irks about this species of criticism is not its rightness--I'm agnostic on the matter actually--but the motivations that underlie it. Here is an abridged version of that comment:
I could go on and on in this vein, noting, among other things, that there really are many fine writers today, any number of whom graduated from an MFA program; that during any "great" period in American writing--the American Renaissance, the American naturalist period--there were swarms of utterly crappy writers who would have benefited from the training an MFA program would have delivered, even a bad one.
In fact, the problems afflicting most MFA programs stem not from the programs themselves, but the publishing industry, where works of literary merit have enormous difficulty finding a purchase outside the world of the small press, a world I have come to respect more as I dive further into it. Thus the biggest problem affecting MFA graduates is not the quality of their work but how much they must modify it for the purpose of commercialization, something some of their professors, with their professor salaries, do not have to sweat as hard. The best example of this are the well-known challenges facing poets, who must depend on the constellation of university-subsidized literary journals as well as chapbook and self-publishing operations for their works to see light of day. Any publisher in the business for the money is not their best friend. With brute realities of this nature confronting would-be writers, is it any surprise that the "best" work of MFA graduates must often be buried or abandoned altogether? It's enough to suggest that if not for the MFA program--and the support it indirectly provides to literary journals and small presses, our literary culture might actually be in worse shape.
I won't rehash Alison's response, except to note that she focuses rightly on the fact that criticism of MFA writing programs ought be leavened by the recognition that they are essentially apprenticeship programs. There is no more reason to disparage these than those that instruct painters how to paint, cooks to cook, lawyers to lawyer, and doctors to doctor.
Interestingly, McGurl's book itself bypasses jaundiced criticisms about the poverty of what is produced from these programs, as noted here:
However, McGurl doesn’t back away from the question of the aesthetic consequences of the rise of the program; in fact, he uses the two main charges against creative writing, “that it is self-involved, that it is unoriginal,” as his main analytical categories—in what ways, he asks, are the works produced by writers associated with programs not so much self-involved as reflexive—interested in expressing ideas about the nature and grounds of their creation—and in what ways are they systematic—that is, how do they bear the traces of a common (but changing) set of ideas about what counts as good writing?
According to Alison, however, Menand still manages to slip one of those sly questionings of the MFA program's purpose. As I pointed out in my comment on her piece, which I reproduce here, what often irks about this species of criticism is not its rightness--I'm agnostic on the matter actually--but the motivations that underlie it. Here is an abridged version of that comment:
The problem with most criticisms of MFA programs is the insistence on mystifying the writing process and a general beholden-ness to "great" writers--Melville, Dickinson, et. al.--who did not reap the benefits of any such organized program of instruction. The irony, of course, is that there are today many, many more writers of quality today than there were then. This is in part the result of sheer numbers--more people, greater literacy, more time to write, more venues to have one's writing distributed (publishers, websites, etc.), and, yes, more instructional programs focused on the art of writing.
Images of MFA degree programs as group therapy sessions or a mistaken byway for those seeking to be the next Philip Roth or Margaret Atwood completely misapprehend them for what they are: structured attempts to refine the practice of a craft, which may or may not become one's vocation. Too often criticism of MFA programs feels like academics looking from the outside in with little respect (and a touch of envy) for the motivating force of the participants, who simply want to write finer essays, better stories, stronger poems--and not more literary criticism!
I could go on and on in this vein, noting, among other things, that there really are many fine writers today, any number of whom graduated from an MFA program; that during any "great" period in American writing--the American Renaissance, the American naturalist period--there were swarms of utterly crappy writers who would have benefited from the training an MFA program would have delivered, even a bad one.
In fact, the problems afflicting most MFA programs stem not from the programs themselves, but the publishing industry, where works of literary merit have enormous difficulty finding a purchase outside the world of the small press, a world I have come to respect more as I dive further into it. Thus the biggest problem affecting MFA graduates is not the quality of their work but how much they must modify it for the purpose of commercialization, something some of their professors, with their professor salaries, do not have to sweat as hard. The best example of this are the well-known challenges facing poets, who must depend on the constellation of university-subsidized literary journals as well as chapbook and self-publishing operations for their works to see light of day. Any publisher in the business for the money is not their best friend. With brute realities of this nature confronting would-be writers, is it any surprise that the "best" work of MFA graduates must often be buried or abandoned altogether? It's enough to suggest that if not for the MFA program--and the support it indirectly provides to literary journals and small presses, our literary culture might actually be in worse shape.
June 3, 2009
Digital Libraries: Googles and Our Discontents
Readers here will find a very nice summary of an April 4, 2009, "Library 2.0" conference at Yale University. There my New Haven Review colleague and Yale instructor, Donald Brown nicely summarizes points made by the conference attendees. However, it is not surprising to see some of the issues glossed over by those who spoke (or perhaps simply not recorded by Don).
Don also offers his own points regarding the threats posed by Google and its ilk to libraries, per se, all worth the reading. However, I thought a few points ought also be made regarding the seemingly onerous burden placed upon us by Library 2.0.
Let me take on some of the issues Don mentions in the spirit of Plato...
Don: "Michael Zimmer of Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee…offered a few caveats to the collective zeitgeist of online über alles with the notion, picked up from Neil Postman, of technology as always offering a Faustian bargain….Zimmer had reason to wonder if ‘Library 2.0’—the library as modeled on Google, essentially—will continue to provide a ‘safe harbor for anonymous inquiry.’ Not simply ‘who owns the content’ of what we post—but who owns the documentation, who gets to data-mine, and so forth."
Bennett: "Agreed, this problem of privacy of our inquiries is a serious problem. On the other hand, "datamining" is, in a very real sense, what every scholar already does. The question is not the activity but the nature of the data and the purposes of the mining. I’m actually grateful when Amazon recommends books to me of related interest based on the buying habits of previous customers. In a pre-Internet world, there was no way to have gotten that type of information."
Don: "Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, spoke of the possible consequences of putting all our searches for information in the hands of ‘proprietary black box algorithms subject to manipulation.’ Wikipedia is always the first or second entry in any Google search. The first ten are apparently all anyone looks at. Everything that gets buried by the algorithm is as good as not there. This is not how research is conducted."
Bennett: "Actually, in some ways, this is how research is conducted. Before there was Google, there were—and still are—all sorts of 'shortcuts' in the research process: encyclopedias, reference guides, anthologies, textbooks, library catalogs (once card, now digital). I'm not certain what 'subject to manipulation' refers to here since there is always some form of sorting and re-sorting of data that occurs in secondary tools. Google—indeed, any search engine, is just one of these. The fault lies less in Google than in ourselves and our research habits."
Don: "[T]he notion of open access to all information, via the internet, of complete ‘transparency’ of provider and user, was more or less the mantra of the day. But what the Faustian bargain came to seem finally was not with the technology itself, but with giants such as Google and Amazon as the Big Brothers playing Mephistopheles, offering us the interconnected, easy access world of our dreams, but a world where we sacrifice something of our own intellectual curiosity, restlessness, and desire to see outside or beyond that black box algorithm that makes things so easily manageable for us."
Bennett: "Kind of covered that already, Brutus."
Don: " Wolpert pointed out that what made the MIT professors move for Open Access was their realization that, in the world of electronic text, libraries only ‘lease’ access to online work, rather than owning it like all those printed copies they store in perpetuity. If something happens to the provider or to the lease, all that material is no longer available. And now the publishing world seems poised to turn over all electronic control of out-of-print materials to Google to broker for us, and to disseminate to us according to its lights."
Bennett: "Wolpert has probably overstated the case. Libraries don’t lease all of their online content. Some of it is in fact purchased through “digital archive” arrangements, where libraries own digital copies of their books in perpetuity. These typically affect collections of historical books (not from Google but other major library vendors) and certain journal collections. The fundamental problem is not lack of ownership; it’s the ability of libraries to host the data on their own. And while I'm not one defend Google, on this front, again, I think the case is overstated since I believe Google turns over digital copies of books from any library to that library. (E.g., Harvard gets digital copies of its books alone; Stanford gets theirs, etc.) The problem is not ownership of that data: it's what happens when the current distributor of it goes bust or ceases offering that service. Now all the libraries, whom hopefully did get digital copies of their books, have to figure out a new way to get all that content up on the Web and strung together."
Don also offers his own points regarding the threats posed by Google and its ilk to libraries, per se, all worth the reading. However, I thought a few points ought also be made regarding the seemingly onerous burden placed upon us by Library 2.0.
Let me take on some of the issues Don mentions in the spirit of Plato...
Don: "Michael Zimmer of Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee…offered a few caveats to the collective zeitgeist of online über alles with the notion, picked up from Neil Postman, of technology as always offering a Faustian bargain….Zimmer had reason to wonder if ‘Library 2.0’—the library as modeled on Google, essentially—will continue to provide a ‘safe harbor for anonymous inquiry.’ Not simply ‘who owns the content’ of what we post—but who owns the documentation, who gets to data-mine, and so forth."
Bennett: "Agreed, this problem of privacy of our inquiries is a serious problem. On the other hand, "datamining" is, in a very real sense, what every scholar already does. The question is not the activity but the nature of the data and the purposes of the mining. I’m actually grateful when Amazon recommends books to me of related interest based on the buying habits of previous customers. In a pre-Internet world, there was no way to have gotten that type of information."
Don: "Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, spoke of the possible consequences of putting all our searches for information in the hands of ‘proprietary black box algorithms subject to manipulation.’ Wikipedia is always the first or second entry in any Google search. The first ten are apparently all anyone looks at. Everything that gets buried by the algorithm is as good as not there. This is not how research is conducted."
Bennett: "Actually, in some ways, this is how research is conducted. Before there was Google, there were—and still are—all sorts of 'shortcuts' in the research process: encyclopedias, reference guides, anthologies, textbooks, library catalogs (once card, now digital). I'm not certain what 'subject to manipulation' refers to here since there is always some form of sorting and re-sorting of data that occurs in secondary tools. Google—indeed, any search engine, is just one of these. The fault lies less in Google than in ourselves and our research habits."
Don: "[T]he notion of open access to all information, via the internet, of complete ‘transparency’ of provider and user, was more or less the mantra of the day. But what the Faustian bargain came to seem finally was not with the technology itself, but with giants such as Google and Amazon as the Big Brothers playing Mephistopheles, offering us the interconnected, easy access world of our dreams, but a world where we sacrifice something of our own intellectual curiosity, restlessness, and desire to see outside or beyond that black box algorithm that makes things so easily manageable for us."
Bennett: "Kind of covered that already, Brutus."
Don: " Wolpert pointed out that what made the MIT professors move for Open Access was their realization that, in the world of electronic text, libraries only ‘lease’ access to online work, rather than owning it like all those printed copies they store in perpetuity. If something happens to the provider or to the lease, all that material is no longer available. And now the publishing world seems poised to turn over all electronic control of out-of-print materials to Google to broker for us, and to disseminate to us according to its lights."
Bennett: "Wolpert has probably overstated the case. Libraries don’t lease all of their online content. Some of it is in fact purchased through “digital archive” arrangements, where libraries own digital copies of their books in perpetuity. These typically affect collections of historical books (not from Google but other major library vendors) and certain journal collections. The fundamental problem is not lack of ownership; it’s the ability of libraries to host the data on their own. And while I'm not one defend Google, on this front, again, I think the case is overstated since I believe Google turns over digital copies of books from any library to that library. (E.g., Harvard gets digital copies of its books alone; Stanford gets theirs, etc.) The problem is not ownership of that data: it's what happens when the current distributor of it goes bust or ceases offering that service. Now all the libraries, whom hopefully did get digital copies of their books, have to figure out a new way to get all that content up on the Web and strung together."
Review: Fledgling by Octavia Butler
For years I’ve known of the achievements of Octavia Butler who carries the distinction of being one of the few, if not only, African-American, female writers in the otherwise all-too-white and once upon a time all-too-male genre of science fiction. Butler’s reputation, moreover, is stellar. She cleaned up in science fiction awards for her novella BloodChild landed a Nebula for Parable of the Talents and even had the rare distinction for a science fiction writer of receiving a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. She died from a stroke at the relatively young age of 58 after authoring some thirteen books in a writing career that spanned nearly 30 years.
Her last work before she died was a science fiction vampire novel, Fledgling described by her as a “lark.” At a minimum, let us say that it is any number of cuts above such fare as Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series, which I only know from DVD since I refuse to plow through the many thousands of pages of teen vampire angst run amok in the halls of our nation’s high schools. Indeed, one wonders if Butler was not responding in part to this one of many in a genre that I have lovingly dubbed for my teenage daughter as the “hickeys with holes” brand of fiction.
Fledgling is compelling. A child awakens in a cave, badly injured, in terrible pain, with no memory of her past and struggling to survive. Ravenously hungry, operating only on instinct, Shori discovers that she is a 53-year-old vampire in the body of an 11-year-old child, a member of an ancient, anthropogenetic race known as the “Ina,” who live alongside human beings. Shori’s amnesia is a literary device that just borders on the trite for pumping up readers’ feelings of suspense. But it’s also an opportunity, in Butler’s deft hands, to reimagine the human-vampire relationship as one of mutual symbiosis instead of formal parasitism. What we get is Butler’s latent utopianism in which the idea of the family is reconfigured into a mixture of physical addiction and mutual dependence, open sexual relations and Western ideations of the village family unit.
But there’s an added wrinkle: Shori, unlike all of her vampire relations, is black, purposely so, the result of experiments in skin pigmentation and Ina-human gene mixing. Presumably this should raise Fledgling to the level of social novel a genre I generally favor when done right. But the material seems to get away from Butler, and what appeared so promising at its opening simply doesn’t deliver on the possibilities suggested, an unfortunate result for a work that—as vampire novels today go—still surpasses its peers in depth and invention.
Her last work before she died was a science fiction vampire novel, Fledgling described by her as a “lark.” At a minimum, let us say that it is any number of cuts above such fare as Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series, which I only know from DVD since I refuse to plow through the many thousands of pages of teen vampire angst run amok in the halls of our nation’s high schools. Indeed, one wonders if Butler was not responding in part to this one of many in a genre that I have lovingly dubbed for my teenage daughter as the “hickeys with holes” brand of fiction.
Fledgling is compelling. A child awakens in a cave, badly injured, in terrible pain, with no memory of her past and struggling to survive. Ravenously hungry, operating only on instinct, Shori discovers that she is a 53-year-old vampire in the body of an 11-year-old child, a member of an ancient, anthropogenetic race known as the “Ina,” who live alongside human beings. Shori’s amnesia is a literary device that just borders on the trite for pumping up readers’ feelings of suspense. But it’s also an opportunity, in Butler’s deft hands, to reimagine the human-vampire relationship as one of mutual symbiosis instead of formal parasitism. What we get is Butler’s latent utopianism in which the idea of the family is reconfigured into a mixture of physical addiction and mutual dependence, open sexual relations and Western ideations of the village family unit.
But there’s an added wrinkle: Shori, unlike all of her vampire relations, is black, purposely so, the result of experiments in skin pigmentation and Ina-human gene mixing. Presumably this should raise Fledgling to the level of social novel a genre I generally favor when done right. But the material seems to get away from Butler, and what appeared so promising at its opening simply doesn’t deliver on the possibilities suggested, an unfortunate result for a work that—as vampire novels today go—still surpasses its peers in depth and invention.
January 20, 2009
Literary Impressions: D.M. Cornish's Fantastic Achievement
A Review
Monster Blood Tattoo, Volume 1: Foundling (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006)
Monster Blood Tatto, Volume 2: Lamplighter (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008)
Oh, the damage Harry Potter has done! The tale of how J.K. Rowling, struggling single mother, produced in 1997 the first in a series of seven young adult fantasy novels that shattered nearly every publishing record is a story so well worn that my fingers grow tired in just the typing of these words. Stellar sales have drawn copycat titles galore--and this despite the attempted library purges of our unique brand of American church lady.
Young adult fantasy novels are now all the rage, with Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, supplying one case study after another in the science of merchandising this genre. To attempt any full list of young adult fantasy titles published in the last decade would be utter foolishness. In addition to the many that have come back into vogue—from Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising to Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series—the number that jockeyed for position as just last year's best is enough to daunt marathon readers.
But I have a teenage daughter and a prepubescent son who are omnivorous readers of this species of literature, so it was inevitable that while I incline towards adult fantasy—from old standards to such obscure classics as Tanith Lee’s out-of-print Tales from the Flat Earth—how could I not want to know a little more about what my kids were reading? At a minimum, I thought, let me at least see my way clear of the puff pastry reviews (“…The Hobbit for the 21st-century reader…!”) to suss out the best of these.
To start, I combed my daughter's bookshelves, where I discovered and later added several surprisingly good titles. Despite a lousy movie,Jeanne DuPrau’s City of Ember served up solid post-apocalyptic fiction; Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy was distinguished by its unique anti-hero; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, which I read before my children did, shocked me with the maturity of its subject matter, putting even most adult fantasy to shame. And then there were the lesser-known works, like Chris Wooding’s Storm Thief and John Connolly’s remarkable Book of Lost Things, both of which have convinced me that this increasingly overworked and oversold genre can not only produce quality work but, oftentimes, better than that its “adult” peer.
All of this brings me to D.M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series, which currently has only two entrants for his proposed…trilogy? tetralogy? pentalogy? Honestly, one can no longer tell in an age where adult fantasy authors like Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, or J.R.R. Martin can get away with churning out volume after ever more slowly-paced volume for their pet series. Fortunately, most young adult fantasy has avoided this trap. The only exception is Harry Potter (technically a “heptalogy”), which still aesthetically outperformed its adult counterparts by maintaining its excellent pacing from start to finish and successfully tying up every loose end by its conclusion. How many volumes Cornish intends to produce remains to be seen. What he has accomplished so far is remarkable.
Despite the fancy website and the vaguely concealed threat of a movie option, the series is unique in several respects. When I recommended it to my daughter, I describe it simply as a “cut above” the other fare. Now, I won’t spoil you with the story, which is simple and, in some ways, typical enough. It’s Freud’s family romance written inside out: the story of an orphan, Rossamund Bookchild, who sets out to begin his career as a lamplighter in a land where its city- and farm-dwelling human inhabitants live sometimes in an unquiet peace, more often in open war with forest- and field-dwelling monsters. The first volume, Foundling, chronicles our teenage hero’s journey from orphanage to outpost by road and waterway so he might serve as a lamp-lighting laborer. The second, Lamplighter, recordis life at his new home. There he learns his trade, lighting the lamps that speckle the local patch of road that run through the untamed area and, when lit, keep the beasties away. A more detailed description of the plot is not necessary. Encounters with friends and foes, the accompaniment of protectors and potential love interests, confrontations with detractors and outright villains inevitably spice up the story. But it’s not the pacing or the plotting that ultimately wins you over. It’s the thickness of the telling.
What I write next I do so with trepidation. Dragging Tolkien into any review for purposes of comparison is a fool's gambit. But I am not so foolish as to draw an aesthetic comparison. Monster Blood Tattoo is not the next Tolkien for kiddies. It’s not even a question of whether it’s as good or almost as good. It’s different, and what it shares with Lord of the Rings is a distinct thickness in its textual universe, with ample borrowing in technique from Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange, on the one hand, and the devices of alternate history fiction, on the other.
The story’s events take place in an 18th-19th century, Anglo-Germanic world, the “Half-Continent” as it’s labeled. The first volume is accompanied by a 100-plus page appendix that is much more than a mere glossary when read with care. It maps a universe and a culture, with ample entries on vocational types, species of technology, alchemical concoctions (there are quite a few of these), customs and behaviors, geographic locales, and individuals of note. The fairly heavy use of neologisms throughout the novel —potives (externally acting potions, often hurled like grenades), sedorners (“monster lovers,” in essence, traitors to the Half-Continent’s human population), threwd (a feeling of being watched, a sixth sense) and so forth—wears at first. But after enough flipping to the back, the reader eventually settles in, able to appreciate, even relish, the associations—etymological and metaphorical—that link Cornish’s world with our own, such as the portmanteau word “sedorner,” which merges sedition and suborn to create a fittingly nuanced idea. (To understand how fitting it is, there is no substitute for reading the book itself, a sign of how successful this neologism is.)
To emphasize the scale of the series’ universe and sink the reader ever deeper into the hero’s world, Cornish sets the entire action of the first novel, quite literally, in a microscopic portion of the Half-Continent. The second novel takes the reader slightly further afield, but not by much, leaving vast—and I do mean vast--tracts of that world unexplored, thus enticing us onward, much in the same way my son continues to ask me about Tolkien’s ne’er-mentioned Rhun, which lies northeast of Mordor, or the southerly Haradwaith.
But there is more than mere immersion to recommend the series. Unlike so many other writers, Cornish develops in novel ways what still too few fantasy writers dare: moral ambiguity. Most fantasy novels commonly suffer from the simplicities of Manichaeism, especially in their villains. True, Tolkien manages to suggest the temptations of power among the forces of good in Saruman’s betrayal, Boromir’s weakness, and Denethor’s insanity. But Sauron and his orcs remain unremittingly bad—and so, too, the usual assortment of fantasy villains whose quest for power is always manic in nature and psychologically trite in explanation. Lord Voldemort, a.k.a. Tom Riddle, is no different in this regard.
Some works, however, do play the moral complexity card with greater nerve. In these, the noble actions of heroes precipitate less-than-noble results; the seemingly villainous means of antagonists actually do some good. It’s this moral ambiguity that has made the work of Philip Pullman or George R.R. Martin’s best work so compelling. In these, the villains don’t feel so villainous, while the heroes seem a little less than heroic. But Cornish takes matters a step further by situating the moral ambiguities of his work not in the internal drives of personality but the external realities of the marketplace of goods and ideas. And most intriguingly, he manages to do this through the glossaries.
There is war between human beings and monsters in the universe he has created. But why there is war is what stirred this reader most. There are no megalomaniacal land grabs by sadistic would-be princes, no demon kings seeking the extermination of the human species. There aren’t even the platitudinous ambiguities of heroes struggling to make things right through unseemly choices or villains seeking benevolent outcomes through inhuman means. Currently at least, Cornish is more coy about the matter. Difficult moral choices do confront our hero, but his argument is with a culture that he doesn’t much understand but that we do through the outer lens of the encyclopedic glossary. What we see around the corner that Rossamund does not is the clink of coin that precipitates all sorts of bad behavior: forest raids to capture the smaller “monsters” that will be thrown into illegal fighting pits that have popped up across the Half-Continent; a cottage industry in monster bounty hunting that has resulted in a flourishing trade of some rather creepy forms of surgery to super-energize this hunting class; political maneuverings that with a wink and a nod “ban” certain illicit trades (such as the revivification of corpses).
Ultimately, what so fascinates about Cornish’s ambitious work is the slow convergence of the back story told in the glossary--a story of greed and exploitation, irresponsible behavior, and false ideology--and Rossamund’s personal tale of heroic naivete. We stare, like drivers slowly rolling past a highway accident off to the side, as the path of Rossamund's life and the secret of who he is come to intersect, quite literally, with the economic and political rumblings of the Half Continent itself. Cornish’s work is more than a series of novels: it’s a campaign, a slow accretion of background and foreground, a thickening of the hero’s Bildungsroman within its textual universe. If Cornish can maintain the path upon which he has started, we may well see entirely new possibilities in what this genre can accomplish.
Monster Blood Tattoo, Volume 1: Foundling (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006)
Monster Blood Tatto, Volume 2: Lamplighter (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008)
Oh, the damage Harry Potter has done! The tale of how J.K. Rowling, struggling single mother, produced in 1997 the first in a series of seven young adult fantasy novels that shattered nearly every publishing record is a story so well worn that my fingers grow tired in just the typing of these words. Stellar sales have drawn copycat titles galore--and this despite the attempted library purges of our unique brand of American church lady.
Young adult fantasy novels are now all the rage, with Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, supplying one case study after another in the science of merchandising this genre. To attempt any full list of young adult fantasy titles published in the last decade would be utter foolishness. In addition to the many that have come back into vogue—from Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising to Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series—the number that jockeyed for position as just last year's best is enough to daunt marathon readers.
But I have a teenage daughter and a prepubescent son who are omnivorous readers of this species of literature, so it was inevitable that while I incline towards adult fantasy—from old standards to such obscure classics as Tanith Lee’s out-of-print Tales from the Flat Earth—how could I not want to know a little more about what my kids were reading? At a minimum, I thought, let me at least see my way clear of the puff pastry reviews (“…The Hobbit for the 21st-century reader…!”) to suss out the best of these.
To start, I combed my daughter's bookshelves, where I discovered and later added several surprisingly good titles. Despite a lousy movie,Jeanne DuPrau’s City of Ember served up solid post-apocalyptic fiction; Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy was distinguished by its unique anti-hero; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, which I read before my children did, shocked me with the maturity of its subject matter, putting even most adult fantasy to shame. And then there were the lesser-known works, like Chris Wooding’s Storm Thief and John Connolly’s remarkable Book of Lost Things, both of which have convinced me that this increasingly overworked and oversold genre can not only produce quality work but, oftentimes, better than that its “adult” peer.
All of this brings me to D.M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series, which currently has only two entrants for his proposed…trilogy? tetralogy? pentalogy? Honestly, one can no longer tell in an age where adult fantasy authors like Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, or J.R.R. Martin can get away with churning out volume after ever more slowly-paced volume for their pet series. Fortunately, most young adult fantasy has avoided this trap. The only exception is Harry Potter (technically a “heptalogy”), which still aesthetically outperformed its adult counterparts by maintaining its excellent pacing from start to finish and successfully tying up every loose end by its conclusion. How many volumes Cornish intends to produce remains to be seen. What he has accomplished so far is remarkable.
Despite the fancy website and the vaguely concealed threat of a movie option, the series is unique in several respects. When I recommended it to my daughter, I describe it simply as a “cut above” the other fare. Now, I won’t spoil you with the story, which is simple and, in some ways, typical enough. It’s Freud’s family romance written inside out: the story of an orphan, Rossamund Bookchild, who sets out to begin his career as a lamplighter in a land where its city- and farm-dwelling human inhabitants live sometimes in an unquiet peace, more often in open war with forest- and field-dwelling monsters. The first volume, Foundling, chronicles our teenage hero’s journey from orphanage to outpost by road and waterway so he might serve as a lamp-lighting laborer. The second, Lamplighter, recordis life at his new home. There he learns his trade, lighting the lamps that speckle the local patch of road that run through the untamed area and, when lit, keep the beasties away. A more detailed description of the plot is not necessary. Encounters with friends and foes, the accompaniment of protectors and potential love interests, confrontations with detractors and outright villains inevitably spice up the story. But it’s not the pacing or the plotting that ultimately wins you over. It’s the thickness of the telling.
What I write next I do so with trepidation. Dragging Tolkien into any review for purposes of comparison is a fool's gambit. But I am not so foolish as to draw an aesthetic comparison. Monster Blood Tattoo is not the next Tolkien for kiddies. It’s not even a question of whether it’s as good or almost as good. It’s different, and what it shares with Lord of the Rings is a distinct thickness in its textual universe, with ample borrowing in technique from Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange, on the one hand, and the devices of alternate history fiction, on the other.
The story’s events take place in an 18th-19th century, Anglo-Germanic world, the “Half-Continent” as it’s labeled. The first volume is accompanied by a 100-plus page appendix that is much more than a mere glossary when read with care. It maps a universe and a culture, with ample entries on vocational types, species of technology, alchemical concoctions (there are quite a few of these), customs and behaviors, geographic locales, and individuals of note. The fairly heavy use of neologisms throughout the novel —potives (externally acting potions, often hurled like grenades), sedorners (“monster lovers,” in essence, traitors to the Half-Continent’s human population), threwd (a feeling of being watched, a sixth sense) and so forth—wears at first. But after enough flipping to the back, the reader eventually settles in, able to appreciate, even relish, the associations—etymological and metaphorical—that link Cornish’s world with our own, such as the portmanteau word “sedorner,” which merges sedition and suborn to create a fittingly nuanced idea. (To understand how fitting it is, there is no substitute for reading the book itself, a sign of how successful this neologism is.)
To emphasize the scale of the series’ universe and sink the reader ever deeper into the hero’s world, Cornish sets the entire action of the first novel, quite literally, in a microscopic portion of the Half-Continent. The second novel takes the reader slightly further afield, but not by much, leaving vast—and I do mean vast--tracts of that world unexplored, thus enticing us onward, much in the same way my son continues to ask me about Tolkien’s ne’er-mentioned Rhun, which lies northeast of Mordor, or the southerly Haradwaith.
But there is more than mere immersion to recommend the series. Unlike so many other writers, Cornish develops in novel ways what still too few fantasy writers dare: moral ambiguity. Most fantasy novels commonly suffer from the simplicities of Manichaeism, especially in their villains. True, Tolkien manages to suggest the temptations of power among the forces of good in Saruman’s betrayal, Boromir’s weakness, and Denethor’s insanity. But Sauron and his orcs remain unremittingly bad—and so, too, the usual assortment of fantasy villains whose quest for power is always manic in nature and psychologically trite in explanation. Lord Voldemort, a.k.a. Tom Riddle, is no different in this regard.
Some works, however, do play the moral complexity card with greater nerve. In these, the noble actions of heroes precipitate less-than-noble results; the seemingly villainous means of antagonists actually do some good. It’s this moral ambiguity that has made the work of Philip Pullman or George R.R. Martin’s best work so compelling. In these, the villains don’t feel so villainous, while the heroes seem a little less than heroic. But Cornish takes matters a step further by situating the moral ambiguities of his work not in the internal drives of personality but the external realities of the marketplace of goods and ideas. And most intriguingly, he manages to do this through the glossaries.
There is war between human beings and monsters in the universe he has created. But why there is war is what stirred this reader most. There are no megalomaniacal land grabs by sadistic would-be princes, no demon kings seeking the extermination of the human species. There aren’t even the platitudinous ambiguities of heroes struggling to make things right through unseemly choices or villains seeking benevolent outcomes through inhuman means. Currently at least, Cornish is more coy about the matter. Difficult moral choices do confront our hero, but his argument is with a culture that he doesn’t much understand but that we do through the outer lens of the encyclopedic glossary. What we see around the corner that Rossamund does not is the clink of coin that precipitates all sorts of bad behavior: forest raids to capture the smaller “monsters” that will be thrown into illegal fighting pits that have popped up across the Half-Continent; a cottage industry in monster bounty hunting that has resulted in a flourishing trade of some rather creepy forms of surgery to super-energize this hunting class; political maneuverings that with a wink and a nod “ban” certain illicit trades (such as the revivification of corpses).
Ultimately, what so fascinates about Cornish’s ambitious work is the slow convergence of the back story told in the glossary--a story of greed and exploitation, irresponsible behavior, and false ideology--and Rossamund’s personal tale of heroic naivete. We stare, like drivers slowly rolling past a highway accident off to the side, as the path of Rossamund's life and the secret of who he is come to intersect, quite literally, with the economic and political rumblings of the Half Continent itself. Cornish’s work is more than a series of novels: it’s a campaign, a slow accretion of background and foreground, a thickening of the hero’s Bildungsroman within its textual universe. If Cornish can maintain the path upon which he has started, we may well see entirely new possibilities in what this genre can accomplish.
May 21, 2008
Literary Impressions: Reading Well
About a week ago, I joined friends in New Haven for a Friday night meal. Their daughter was in town, back from college, and over the course of dinner conversation, I asked if she had any professors who were distinctive, who stood out from the others. She immediately described two faculty who were notable for the passion of their presentations and the degree to which they immersed themselves in their subjects. An English major now, just as I had been when I attended the University of Chicago twenty years earlier, she asked after 30 minutes into her own fairly passionate disquisition why I inquired. I admitted that I wanted compare her experience with my own and find the link between what these special professors had accomplished for her and what mine had done for me.
Actually, I will admit that I had one particular professor in mind, a professor whose own presentations liberated me as a reader. That professor was William Veeder, who has apparently produced enough of an impact as a teacher (and secondarily, in my humble opinion, as a scholar) to receive a Wikipedia article. The article, which outlines his theories of literary study, is largely a tribute. I'm especially tickled by the quotes, or "Veederisms," as they're lovingly described.
While some of what appears in that article on Veeder's approach to literature remains familiar from my classes with him, what I recall most is what fails to show up. It centers around the idea he espoused that a literary work's meaning (or more broadly any text's meaning) is the result of the intersection of the words produced by an author and the response of the reader to that concatenation of words. This intersubjective view of literary study is not uncommon and is an eminently practical understanding of how writers, texts, and readers relate to one another in the reading experience. The Wikipedia article certainly captures that idea by underscoring Veeder's pragmatic approach--in the William Jamesian sense--to how we respond to literature. The liberating aspect of that approach, much underplayed by the article and pretty important when you're a mere whipper-snapper of a college student seriously considering a major in English, was his de-emphasis of the authority of the author.
Mind you, in his class, he did not take much stock in some Barthesian "death-of-the-author" view of the matter. Veeder believed in authors and their authority, but it was an authority much limited. To make this point he told a wonderful story that, even if apocryphal, rings true in the only way these things matter. At some point in his education, Veeder had taken a course with mid-twentieth century literary scholar Leo Spitzer. (This is where the apocryphal part comes in--Veeder attended the University of Notre Dame; Spitzer taught nearly all of his life in the United States at Johns Hopkins University. Where they crossed paths remains a mystery to me.) Apparently Spitzer had been teaching Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, and the classroom conversation had become both incisive and lively. He then distributed criticism by an apparent contemporary of Lawrence's and asked for the students' feedback. They all agreed that the critic had badly misfired in his interpretation of the novel. Spitzer then revealed that the critic was...Lawrence himself. Not a single mind was changed: the class responded--rightly in Veeder's view--that Lawrence had simply failed to understand what he had achieved. As slippery as this slope seemed, Veeder held firmly to the view that literature remains first and foremost a literary experience, and that experience takes at least two to tango--a reader and a text.
It was the follow-up question to this tale and his answer that sealed the deal for me. One of my classmates asked if an author's interpretation has authority in our interpretation of a text. Veeder's response was artful: authors do not have the kind of authority that we (and sometimes authors) imagine. Once the text is born, it is, like a child, sent out into the world to fend for itself; the author may have brought the work to term but her relationship to it thereafter changes forever as she becomes just another reader.
OK, well maybe not just any other reader. Veeder's term of choice was a "privileged" reader, but a reader nonetheless. Privileged here means the author has a special relationship to the text--in the D.H. Lawrence case, as its progenitor. But need I add that if the author's work were about, say, his mother, such as Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors, the author's mother would also be something of a privileged reader, one with her own rather unique relationship to the text. But even this "privileged" relationship is problematized by the fact that we all have unique relationships to texts, not only because we are unique in relation to one another but because we are unique even to ourselves over time--at 43, I'm just not the same person reading Heart of Darkness as I was when I struggled with it at 18.
The net effect of Veeder's insight was to empower me as a reader by depriving the author of a kind of mystical authority that he or she simply did not have. True, the author is bound to be frustrated by perceived misreadings of his or her work--think Salman Rushdie, certain Muslim readers, and his Satanic Verses--but there is no getting around the reality of the situation. Readers will make what they will of what they read, which is why though it be a classic I find the Scarlet Letter a dreadful bore while some neighbor of mine no doubt considers it a thrillingly tragic romance. Let me hastily add that this does not make all readings equal in value or cogency. But that is an entirely different issue. The first step in reading well that Veeder taught was not about being right but about being bold. And in order to be bold, a painfully obsequious deference to the author is the first thing to go out the window. It's a mantra by which I still read.
Actually, I will admit that I had one particular professor in mind, a professor whose own presentations liberated me as a reader. That professor was William Veeder, who has apparently produced enough of an impact as a teacher (and secondarily, in my humble opinion, as a scholar) to receive a Wikipedia article. The article, which outlines his theories of literary study, is largely a tribute. I'm especially tickled by the quotes, or "Veederisms," as they're lovingly described.
While some of what appears in that article on Veeder's approach to literature remains familiar from my classes with him, what I recall most is what fails to show up. It centers around the idea he espoused that a literary work's meaning (or more broadly any text's meaning) is the result of the intersection of the words produced by an author and the response of the reader to that concatenation of words. This intersubjective view of literary study is not uncommon and is an eminently practical understanding of how writers, texts, and readers relate to one another in the reading experience. The Wikipedia article certainly captures that idea by underscoring Veeder's pragmatic approach--in the William Jamesian sense--to how we respond to literature. The liberating aspect of that approach, much underplayed by the article and pretty important when you're a mere whipper-snapper of a college student seriously considering a major in English, was his de-emphasis of the authority of the author.
Mind you, in his class, he did not take much stock in some Barthesian "death-of-the-author" view of the matter. Veeder believed in authors and their authority, but it was an authority much limited. To make this point he told a wonderful story that, even if apocryphal, rings true in the only way these things matter. At some point in his education, Veeder had taken a course with mid-twentieth century literary scholar Leo Spitzer. (This is where the apocryphal part comes in--Veeder attended the University of Notre Dame; Spitzer taught nearly all of his life in the United States at Johns Hopkins University. Where they crossed paths remains a mystery to me.) Apparently Spitzer had been teaching Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, and the classroom conversation had become both incisive and lively. He then distributed criticism by an apparent contemporary of Lawrence's and asked for the students' feedback. They all agreed that the critic had badly misfired in his interpretation of the novel. Spitzer then revealed that the critic was...Lawrence himself. Not a single mind was changed: the class responded--rightly in Veeder's view--that Lawrence had simply failed to understand what he had achieved. As slippery as this slope seemed, Veeder held firmly to the view that literature remains first and foremost a literary experience, and that experience takes at least two to tango--a reader and a text.
It was the follow-up question to this tale and his answer that sealed the deal for me. One of my classmates asked if an author's interpretation has authority in our interpretation of a text. Veeder's response was artful: authors do not have the kind of authority that we (and sometimes authors) imagine. Once the text is born, it is, like a child, sent out into the world to fend for itself; the author may have brought the work to term but her relationship to it thereafter changes forever as she becomes just another reader.
OK, well maybe not just any other reader. Veeder's term of choice was a "privileged" reader, but a reader nonetheless. Privileged here means the author has a special relationship to the text--in the D.H. Lawrence case, as its progenitor. But need I add that if the author's work were about, say, his mother, such as Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors, the author's mother would also be something of a privileged reader, one with her own rather unique relationship to the text. But even this "privileged" relationship is problematized by the fact that we all have unique relationships to texts, not only because we are unique in relation to one another but because we are unique even to ourselves over time--at 43, I'm just not the same person reading Heart of Darkness as I was when I struggled with it at 18.
The net effect of Veeder's insight was to empower me as a reader by depriving the author of a kind of mystical authority that he or she simply did not have. True, the author is bound to be frustrated by perceived misreadings of his or her work--think Salman Rushdie, certain Muslim readers, and his Satanic Verses--but there is no getting around the reality of the situation. Readers will make what they will of what they read, which is why though it be a classic I find the Scarlet Letter a dreadful bore while some neighbor of mine no doubt considers it a thrillingly tragic romance. Let me hastily add that this does not make all readings equal in value or cogency. But that is an entirely different issue. The first step in reading well that Veeder taught was not about being right but about being bold. And in order to be bold, a painfully obsequious deference to the author is the first thing to go out the window. It's a mantra by which I still read.
May 2, 2008
Literary Impressions: Why We Should Teach Literary Criticism
Earlier, I had written about the fruitlessness of teaching students how to write literary criticism. And in the two weeks since writing that post, I haven't changed my mind. But not teaching students how to write literary criticism is not the same as refusing to teach them how to do literary criticism.
In fact, when it comes to the art of unraveling a literary work--of dissecting it, if you will--I do believe we should instruct students in this activity. I'm just not convinced this is the most effective way of teaching students how to write better, and too often beginning literature courses are treated as an extension of one's training in academic writing. But, in my view, the experience of writing literary criticism comes too early in the trajectory of a student's college career. Unless the inability to write has burdened them with freshmen remedial composition courses--something of a norm among American college students--writing literary criticism within the first two years of study is too soon to engage in the art of analyzing one of our most complex human artefacts.
If you'll indulge a small digression for context, I've always been amused by the distinction in our culture between the "hard" and "soft" sciences. In academia, hard sciences like physics and chemistry have long been seen as more difficult, more challenging than the "soft" sciences of psychology and sociology. Just look at the adjectives! But this bias is built on a strange insecurity that belies the reality of the situation. The soft sciences are soft not because they're easier but because they're the more complex of the two. And why? Because they have humanity as the object of their analysis, and human beings by nature lie--if not to the scientists who observe them then to themselves. Our capacity for deception and delusion inevitably muddy the stream of reproducible results and controllable variables upon which "good" science depends. Pity the poor psychologist rather than the physicist, for grasping human behavior is enough to give even the keenest of minds a migraine. And narrative is, if anything, a demonstration of this ontological aspect of human nature. It is the instability and unknowability of intentions and responses, causes and effects, writ large. If human beings instantiate in every living moment the Heisenberg principle, stories are little more than extensions of that instantiation. And yet we're sending in students to write coherently about that?
Perhaps I make mountains of molehills here, but sometime I must wonder if compelling nineteen-year-olds to intelligibly and (one hopes) intelligently interrogate literature exemplifies the very irrationality they're asked to expound on. It difficult enough to discern, say, a character's ostensible motivation in a work of fiction; to ask students to peer further over the literary horizon and comment on the unstable source of that representation, which may range from the author's unconscious predilections to the ultimately unknowable historical milieu of the work, seems sheer madness. Here we blithely walk students into literature's hall of mirrors and ask them to look from reflection to reflection in a cascade of narrative instability, uncertainty and ambiguity--which, if you can believe it, is a good thing in a literary work--and expect them to walk out presumably loving the work and the craft of writing literary criticism.
Inevitably we are disappointed. They leave frustrated, and the work is more pedestrian than not. At best, we hope for diamonds of insight in the rough. Some, of course, stick it out, having enjoyed the ride despite the results. In these are our first English majors presumaby born. But was the ride worth it?
In the end, frustrations aside, I believe it was. Uncertainty and ambiguity in a work of literature is a good thing. I'm with the New Critics on that point. But try getting your typical first-year college student to accept that. Not so easy.
Not so easy because eventually they will have to accept the fact that life as lived is rife with uncertainty, and making it through depends on learning how to navigate its shoals. Literature of any real quality demands the abeyance of the Manichaean reality we'd all otherwise prefer. And engaging students in the act (and if they're further interested, the art) of literary criticism is among their first steps in exploring and accommodating the not-so-black-and-white reality in which we live. Literary criticism is essentially a safe space to pick apart reality through the vehicle of narrative. The more robust and thoughtful the picking apart, the better the training the student receives for handling the blows life will inevitably deal. Better to explore earlier in a textual work why a crime was committed than later in a courtroom as a witness, plaintiff or defendant. Literary criticism for this reason, among others, is a species--maybe a subspecies--of ethical behavior. It is the unexamined life being examined, through the lens of someone else's narrative existence.
But, mind you, this is only the act of engaging in literary criticism. It is not necessarily the act of writing it. For when you write literary criticism--not a bad thing in itself, of course--you have now more heavy-handedly codified the flux of possibilities that circulated prior to committing ideas and arguments to paper. Granted, codification will sometimes have the ameliorative effect of pushing you to think through and state more clearly your views of the work at hand. For while uncertainty may characterize the nature of reality, so does certainty, if only temporally. Uncertainty, after all, is not the same as chaos. And the writing of literary criticism, while difficult in the extreme at times, is not impossible. Indeed with time, maturity and the ability to walk the high wire of our quotidian reality, it is even something we may want to teach. But only when it really is worth teaching and not before. A softening up period that concentrates more on discussion and more imaginative forms of engagement would do far more till then.
In fact, when it comes to the art of unraveling a literary work--of dissecting it, if you will--I do believe we should instruct students in this activity. I'm just not convinced this is the most effective way of teaching students how to write better, and too often beginning literature courses are treated as an extension of one's training in academic writing. But, in my view, the experience of writing literary criticism comes too early in the trajectory of a student's college career. Unless the inability to write has burdened them with freshmen remedial composition courses--something of a norm among American college students--writing literary criticism within the first two years of study is too soon to engage in the art of analyzing one of our most complex human artefacts.
If you'll indulge a small digression for context, I've always been amused by the distinction in our culture between the "hard" and "soft" sciences. In academia, hard sciences like physics and chemistry have long been seen as more difficult, more challenging than the "soft" sciences of psychology and sociology. Just look at the adjectives! But this bias is built on a strange insecurity that belies the reality of the situation. The soft sciences are soft not because they're easier but because they're the more complex of the two. And why? Because they have humanity as the object of their analysis, and human beings by nature lie--if not to the scientists who observe them then to themselves. Our capacity for deception and delusion inevitably muddy the stream of reproducible results and controllable variables upon which "good" science depends. Pity the poor psychologist rather than the physicist, for grasping human behavior is enough to give even the keenest of minds a migraine. And narrative is, if anything, a demonstration of this ontological aspect of human nature. It is the instability and unknowability of intentions and responses, causes and effects, writ large. If human beings instantiate in every living moment the Heisenberg principle, stories are little more than extensions of that instantiation. And yet we're sending in students to write coherently about that?
Perhaps I make mountains of molehills here, but sometime I must wonder if compelling nineteen-year-olds to intelligibly and (one hopes) intelligently interrogate literature exemplifies the very irrationality they're asked to expound on. It difficult enough to discern, say, a character's ostensible motivation in a work of fiction; to ask students to peer further over the literary horizon and comment on the unstable source of that representation, which may range from the author's unconscious predilections to the ultimately unknowable historical milieu of the work, seems sheer madness. Here we blithely walk students into literature's hall of mirrors and ask them to look from reflection to reflection in a cascade of narrative instability, uncertainty and ambiguity--which, if you can believe it, is a good thing in a literary work--and expect them to walk out presumably loving the work and the craft of writing literary criticism.
Inevitably we are disappointed. They leave frustrated, and the work is more pedestrian than not. At best, we hope for diamonds of insight in the rough. Some, of course, stick it out, having enjoyed the ride despite the results. In these are our first English majors presumaby born. But was the ride worth it?
In the end, frustrations aside, I believe it was. Uncertainty and ambiguity in a work of literature is a good thing. I'm with the New Critics on that point. But try getting your typical first-year college student to accept that. Not so easy.
Not so easy because eventually they will have to accept the fact that life as lived is rife with uncertainty, and making it through depends on learning how to navigate its shoals. Literature of any real quality demands the abeyance of the Manichaean reality we'd all otherwise prefer. And engaging students in the act (and if they're further interested, the art) of literary criticism is among their first steps in exploring and accommodating the not-so-black-and-white reality in which we live. Literary criticism is essentially a safe space to pick apart reality through the vehicle of narrative. The more robust and thoughtful the picking apart, the better the training the student receives for handling the blows life will inevitably deal. Better to explore earlier in a textual work why a crime was committed than later in a courtroom as a witness, plaintiff or defendant. Literary criticism for this reason, among others, is a species--maybe a subspecies--of ethical behavior. It is the unexamined life being examined, through the lens of someone else's narrative existence.
But, mind you, this is only the act of engaging in literary criticism. It is not necessarily the act of writing it. For when you write literary criticism--not a bad thing in itself, of course--you have now more heavy-handedly codified the flux of possibilities that circulated prior to committing ideas and arguments to paper. Granted, codification will sometimes have the ameliorative effect of pushing you to think through and state more clearly your views of the work at hand. For while uncertainty may characterize the nature of reality, so does certainty, if only temporally. Uncertainty, after all, is not the same as chaos. And the writing of literary criticism, while difficult in the extreme at times, is not impossible. Indeed with time, maturity and the ability to walk the high wire of our quotidian reality, it is even something we may want to teach. But only when it really is worth teaching and not before. A softening up period that concentrates more on discussion and more imaginative forms of engagement would do far more till then.
April 23, 2008
Literary Impressions: Uphill Battles
When I started my doctoral studies in literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center, the English department nestled in the top floors of the gently sloping and thus aptly named Grace Building, which looked benignly down upon Bradley Park behind the New York Public Library. In my first years as a graduate student, I received free tuition and had a stipend that paid some living expenses.
Two years later both tuition grant and stipend were gone, and I had to support myself as an adjunct instructor in the CUNY system. Luckily, the English department offered a course on how to teach college-level composition and literature. I never again--with one exception--had so practical a class during my doctoral years.
Despite how noble the effort, one is never truly ready for the challenges of the first college class you teach. I taught at Baruch College, the "business" college of the CUNY system. Baruch tended to draw greater numbers of foreign nationals than its city university peers, largely because its emphasis on business played to their immigrant ambitions and desire to enter society through that most American act of citizenship--the making of money. As a result, Baruch generally drew a sprinkling of second-language students in all of its beginning courses.
Unfortunately for me, my first class--an introduction to writing course--was less sprinkle than flood. I had several Chineses nationals, a Lebanese Muslim and Christian respectively, an Israeli, an Ivory Coast native, another from Indonesia, a few Spanish speakers, and two Jamaicans, who though English was their first language, offered accents so thick that they proved the most difficult to understand clearly. Roughly two-thirds of my class comprised second-language English speakers. And, mind you, this was not an ESL (English-as-Second-Language) course, nor had any training in that specialized field.
This was a baptism by fire since I never had that many second-language students again. But it was a wake-up call to the difficulties that can confront the unwashed, adjuncting masses. How unusual fifteen years later to read the ruminations of one Professor X on the adjunct teaching of English in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I read this article in Maine at the end of August and found myself neither bemused nor nostalgic but frightened by the very sameness of our experience: the same corporate motivations that serve as the raison d'etre for the adjunct instructor and the neverending "prerequisite" composition 101 courses that have students paying again and again, no matter how often they fail, just to get a foot in the door to the rest of their academic training.
As the article burbled along, documenting that which I already knew, it pitched back to an Arnoldian sentiment that I have touched upon elsewhere. I quote in full:
There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.
The phenomena Professor X discovers--shortened attention spans leading to truncated reading experiences--is not new. When "reading biographies" were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s, those I received were rife with my students general dislike for anything longer than a Sports Illustrated feature. In a pre-Web age, magazine and newspaper articles were their preferred, if not sole, reading. To them, reading a Dickens novel was just waterboarding by another name. This failure in the ability to read well became especially apparent when I had made the foolish mistake of assigning Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Obviously I had not thought through the matter clearly, as I mistook its brevity and reputation as an adventure yarn for a reading pleasure. Heart of Darkness is a pleasure to read...for me. For my students, it was dull, dull, dull. Too much atmosphere, too many conversational ellipses, too much unsaid historical background. Even now, as I reread it, its plodding sensibility weighs the reading experience down, just as Conrad intended, obligating you to wade into a darkness that is more than semifictional Africa but linguistic and moral.
For my students, its vagueness was a bore, and no amount of exegetical cheerleading that transformed the novel's vagueness into its point was going to make a difference to their reading experience. It was a painful lesson in teaching literature to today's American college students, one that continues to trouble me...and no doubt the good Professor X. For it does little more than raise the specter, over and over again, of whether teaching literary criticism to students is a worthwhile endeavor.
Two years later both tuition grant and stipend were gone, and I had to support myself as an adjunct instructor in the CUNY system. Luckily, the English department offered a course on how to teach college-level composition and literature. I never again--with one exception--had so practical a class during my doctoral years.
Despite how noble the effort, one is never truly ready for the challenges of the first college class you teach. I taught at Baruch College, the "business" college of the CUNY system. Baruch tended to draw greater numbers of foreign nationals than its city university peers, largely because its emphasis on business played to their immigrant ambitions and desire to enter society through that most American act of citizenship--the making of money. As a result, Baruch generally drew a sprinkling of second-language students in all of its beginning courses.
Unfortunately for me, my first class--an introduction to writing course--was less sprinkle than flood. I had several Chineses nationals, a Lebanese Muslim and Christian respectively, an Israeli, an Ivory Coast native, another from Indonesia, a few Spanish speakers, and two Jamaicans, who though English was their first language, offered accents so thick that they proved the most difficult to understand clearly. Roughly two-thirds of my class comprised second-language English speakers. And, mind you, this was not an ESL (English-as-Second-Language) course, nor had any training in that specialized field.
This was a baptism by fire since I never had that many second-language students again. But it was a wake-up call to the difficulties that can confront the unwashed, adjuncting masses. How unusual fifteen years later to read the ruminations of one Professor X on the adjunct teaching of English in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I read this article in Maine at the end of August and found myself neither bemused nor nostalgic but frightened by the very sameness of our experience: the same corporate motivations that serve as the raison d'etre for the adjunct instructor and the neverending "prerequisite" composition 101 courses that have students paying again and again, no matter how often they fail, just to get a foot in the door to the rest of their academic training.
As the article burbled along, documenting that which I already knew, it pitched back to an Arnoldian sentiment that I have touched upon elsewhere. I quote in full:
There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.
The phenomena Professor X discovers--shortened attention spans leading to truncated reading experiences--is not new. When "reading biographies" were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s, those I received were rife with my students general dislike for anything longer than a Sports Illustrated feature. In a pre-Web age, magazine and newspaper articles were their preferred, if not sole, reading. To them, reading a Dickens novel was just waterboarding by another name. This failure in the ability to read well became especially apparent when I had made the foolish mistake of assigning Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Obviously I had not thought through the matter clearly, as I mistook its brevity and reputation as an adventure yarn for a reading pleasure. Heart of Darkness is a pleasure to read...for me. For my students, it was dull, dull, dull. Too much atmosphere, too many conversational ellipses, too much unsaid historical background. Even now, as I reread it, its plodding sensibility weighs the reading experience down, just as Conrad intended, obligating you to wade into a darkness that is more than semifictional Africa but linguistic and moral.
For my students, its vagueness was a bore, and no amount of exegetical cheerleading that transformed the novel's vagueness into its point was going to make a difference to their reading experience. It was a painful lesson in teaching literature to today's American college students, one that continues to trouble me...and no doubt the good Professor X. For it does little more than raise the specter, over and over again, of whether teaching literary criticism to students is a worthwhile endeavor.
April 22, 2008
Literary Impressions: Why Bother Teaching Literary Criticism?
At the home of Mark Oppenheimer, one of the editors of New Haven Review, for which I serve as publisher, we had a conversation about writing literary criticism. Context for the conversation was the course in journalism that he will teach next semester at Yale, which makes sense given his credentials as a journalist. He noted that he much preferred teaching nonfiction writing courses of this sort to literature classes because he neither wrote nor knew all that much about literary criticism. This, too, made sense to me, which explains why I chimed in: "I don't really understand why we teach students how to write literary criticism at all."
So why do we teach students how to write literary criticism? Make no mistake, it is a form of writing that can approach art in the right hands. But even for beginners it is a far more difficult mode of nonfiction writing--in my humble view--than the standard nonfiction forms of narration, description, and argumentation. Technically, literary criticism is a subdivision of the last, but it remains one of the hardest to do well. I attribute this difficulty not only to the inability of students to read well but also to the inherent complications of trying to formulate an argument about something as slippery as a finely crafted story or poem.
In my own experience, the slipperiness of literary fiction derives directly from the story-like nature of this species of discourse. When I taught, my students continuously wrestled with the Herculean (or perhaps Sisyphean) task of unwinding the author from the characters, the storyteller from the story, the telling from the showing. Even I still have difficulty with the boxes-within-boxes, or better yet wall-of-mirrors, nature of this discursive mode--and I have a doctorate in literature, mind you.
I'm currently convinced that high school teachers and professors teach students how to write literary criticism not because it instructs them in how to "think critically" or "formulate an argument" better. These can be done just as easily using another topic. Instead, I believe many teachers in their heart of hearts would rather not teach students how to write literary criticism at all. What they probably do like is reading works of high literary quality and talking about them intelligently--like a book club but with the teacher's authority intact. That certainly was my experience as a college instructor. I loved selecting, teaching, and discussing (or more appropriately discoursing on) the work at hand. What I despised to no end was marking my students' papers, which were poorly written, generally incoherent, and pedestrian in their interpretations. And most literary instructors I speak with echo this same sentiment. It probably explains why I became an editor: I grew tired of marking people's dry runs. If someone is going to write poorly, and I'm going to have to redline it into readable prose, I might as well make sure that the fruits of my labor see light of day in published form.
In some ways, I miss the halcyon days of teaching literature. I even sometimes miss the stress and strain of writing literary criticism myself--no easy task, even for me. But the idea of teaching students to write literary criticism, as if that would constitute training for a profession other than, well, writing literary criticism (which is not even a solid basis for the art of book reviewing) is a misbegotten notion that serves no one other than the instructors who recognize this chore as the price that must be paid for the pleasure of teaching literature.
So why do we teach students how to write literary criticism? Make no mistake, it is a form of writing that can approach art in the right hands. But even for beginners it is a far more difficult mode of nonfiction writing--in my humble view--than the standard nonfiction forms of narration, description, and argumentation. Technically, literary criticism is a subdivision of the last, but it remains one of the hardest to do well. I attribute this difficulty not only to the inability of students to read well but also to the inherent complications of trying to formulate an argument about something as slippery as a finely crafted story or poem.
In my own experience, the slipperiness of literary fiction derives directly from the story-like nature of this species of discourse. When I taught, my students continuously wrestled with the Herculean (or perhaps Sisyphean) task of unwinding the author from the characters, the storyteller from the story, the telling from the showing. Even I still have difficulty with the boxes-within-boxes, or better yet wall-of-mirrors, nature of this discursive mode--and I have a doctorate in literature, mind you.
I'm currently convinced that high school teachers and professors teach students how to write literary criticism not because it instructs them in how to "think critically" or "formulate an argument" better. These can be done just as easily using another topic. Instead, I believe many teachers in their heart of hearts would rather not teach students how to write literary criticism at all. What they probably do like is reading works of high literary quality and talking about them intelligently--like a book club but with the teacher's authority intact. That certainly was my experience as a college instructor. I loved selecting, teaching, and discussing (or more appropriately discoursing on) the work at hand. What I despised to no end was marking my students' papers, which were poorly written, generally incoherent, and pedestrian in their interpretations. And most literary instructors I speak with echo this same sentiment. It probably explains why I became an editor: I grew tired of marking people's dry runs. If someone is going to write poorly, and I'm going to have to redline it into readable prose, I might as well make sure that the fruits of my labor see light of day in published form.
In some ways, I miss the halcyon days of teaching literature. I even sometimes miss the stress and strain of writing literary criticism myself--no easy task, even for me. But the idea of teaching students to write literary criticism, as if that would constitute training for a profession other than, well, writing literary criticism (which is not even a solid basis for the art of book reviewing) is a misbegotten notion that serves no one other than the instructors who recognize this chore as the price that must be paid for the pleasure of teaching literature.
March 4, 2008
Going Back to Schools and Their Archives
During my tenure as a director business development for a digital conversion vendor specializing in libraries, I was surprised to learn how great the need and interest was among academic institutions to convert selected parts of their school archives. Of particular interest were yearbooks and student newspapers. There was a strong interest as well in school publications, commencement and sports programmes, course catalogs, department newsletters and journals, and trustee and departmental minutes and reports.
The main difficulty for many of the smaller institutions that I approached was digitization ability or capacity. That is where I came into the picture, surveying the various constraints that they operated under and trying to work out solutions. To that end, I often advised on proper shipping and handling of materials (to ensure that nothing untoward happened to them), recommended specifications for the creation of “archival masters” and display files, advised on file naming requirements, and surveyed project size and scheduling. I became, in some ways, an ad hoc project manager on their behalf.
So what did I learn during this time? Well, consider yearbooks. These are important documents to academic institutions. They are a source of information about alumni that are critical to any school’s institutional history as well as its fundraising efforts. But yearbooks are complicated. Their interior layouts are highly variable, making them visually rich but challenging to search textually. As a result, because of the preponderance of photos, imaging must inevitably be done in grayscale or color, creating large image files. Text capture, however, is a bit more difficult since it will comprise names and all sorts of data that require a high degree of accuracy, raising the price of keying the text. (The trade-off is that yearbooks tend to have relatively little text because they are so graphically rich.)
Or take student newspapers. These are affected by problems of irregular issuance, variable trim sizes over time, and fragility (when not properly cared for). Because of their visual richness, they, too, pose imaging challenges with respect to image quality and file size. On the other hand—again depending on your approach—they tend to be short. So a 12-page PDF of an issue of a student newspaper is likely to be a far smaller file than a 150-page PDF of that same school’s yearbook--making it easier to read online or download.
Course catalogs, minutes and even journals, on the other hand, can be some of the easiest material to digitize because their lack of photographs and color more than likely means that they can be imaged “bitonally” (just black and white, like what you got from older copying machines). This reduces the file size tremendously and allows for far easier display of the content in an online environment. It’s cheaper, too, of course.
The trick to addressing these many variables, as I’ve learned, is having access to a variety of quality digital equipment, a staff who know how to handle library materials as well as image them, and a strong “post-production” process (post-production refers to cleaning up the files—straightening and cropping the images, correcting color, capturing the text by OCR or keying, and, of course, QCing the results afterwards to guarantee the quality). My own experience suggests that libraries that have tried to do the work on the cheap (buy equipment and use their own students or hire vendors who generally neither handle library materials nor understand how they work) pay for it in the long term.
The main difficulty for many of the smaller institutions that I approached was digitization ability or capacity. That is where I came into the picture, surveying the various constraints that they operated under and trying to work out solutions. To that end, I often advised on proper shipping and handling of materials (to ensure that nothing untoward happened to them), recommended specifications for the creation of “archival masters” and display files, advised on file naming requirements, and surveyed project size and scheduling. I became, in some ways, an ad hoc project manager on their behalf.
So what did I learn during this time? Well, consider yearbooks. These are important documents to academic institutions. They are a source of information about alumni that are critical to any school’s institutional history as well as its fundraising efforts. But yearbooks are complicated. Their interior layouts are highly variable, making them visually rich but challenging to search textually. As a result, because of the preponderance of photos, imaging must inevitably be done in grayscale or color, creating large image files. Text capture, however, is a bit more difficult since it will comprise names and all sorts of data that require a high degree of accuracy, raising the price of keying the text. (The trade-off is that yearbooks tend to have relatively little text because they are so graphically rich.)
Or take student newspapers. These are affected by problems of irregular issuance, variable trim sizes over time, and fragility (when not properly cared for). Because of their visual richness, they, too, pose imaging challenges with respect to image quality and file size. On the other hand—again depending on your approach—they tend to be short. So a 12-page PDF of an issue of a student newspaper is likely to be a far smaller file than a 150-page PDF of that same school’s yearbook--making it easier to read online or download.
Course catalogs, minutes and even journals, on the other hand, can be some of the easiest material to digitize because their lack of photographs and color more than likely means that they can be imaged “bitonally” (just black and white, like what you got from older copying machines). This reduces the file size tremendously and allows for far easier display of the content in an online environment. It’s cheaper, too, of course.
The trick to addressing these many variables, as I’ve learned, is having access to a variety of quality digital equipment, a staff who know how to handle library materials as well as image them, and a strong “post-production” process (post-production refers to cleaning up the files—straightening and cropping the images, correcting color, capturing the text by OCR or keying, and, of course, QCing the results afterwards to guarantee the quality). My own experience suggests that libraries that have tried to do the work on the cheap (buy equipment and use their own students or hire vendors who generally neither handle library materials nor understand how they work) pay for it in the long term.
February 11, 2008
Doing Public Relations Work
I've also begun to take on some public relations work, assisting another professional in the writing of press releases and, I hope sometime in the future, engaging in "story pitching," which is simply the process of getting journalists to take a closer look at a story for eventual publication. In the course of doing this work, I've been learning quite a bit.
One interesting point that came up during negotiations with a prospect that has never paid for PR work is the return on the investment. PR work is not inexpensive, so how does one contrast it with the value of just paying for advertising (commonly known as "making media buys"). A friend and I did a little preliminary research on the matter and found justification for what our gut instinct was telling us. In brief, there is a very real ROI on good PR, but measuring it it is no easy matter, especially if it is not of the "sales campaign"sort with well-defined tracking methods--such as coupon codes. Professionals tell me that the best way, of course, is for the PR client to also fund an outcomes analysis using the traditional market research methods of survey, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. Unfortunately, too many clients are simply not willing to pay the money, preferring instead to pour the cash into the PR itself.
Alas, because marketing budgets tend to be among the softest during recessionary times--like that which we appear to be entering--the pressure to know the ROI on PR efforts without presumably having to pay as much for that research is likely to grow. Don Bartholomew's blog on the matter is actually not a bad place to start to get a sense of where the future may lie.
On the other hand, as my friend and I thought about how to respond to this prospective client, we decided to see if there were any established metrics on the issue. In this case, we settled on an ad equivalency model: how much would it cost to place an ad in a media outlet that would consume roughly the same space as a placed article (a traditional PR outcome)? Here's what my friend wrote--with all names removed, of course:
I should add, however, that the debate about ROI on PR is lively. I picked up a few interesting exchanges from or by professionals here, here, and here.
Of course, need I add that all of this has been problematized most recently by a student of the Institute for Public Relations in a study posted here?
One interesting point that came up during negotiations with a prospect that has never paid for PR work is the return on the investment. PR work is not inexpensive, so how does one contrast it with the value of just paying for advertising (commonly known as "making media buys"). A friend and I did a little preliminary research on the matter and found justification for what our gut instinct was telling us. In brief, there is a very real ROI on good PR, but measuring it it is no easy matter, especially if it is not of the "sales campaign"sort with well-defined tracking methods--such as coupon codes. Professionals tell me that the best way, of course, is for the PR client to also fund an outcomes analysis using the traditional market research methods of survey, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. Unfortunately, too many clients are simply not willing to pay the money, preferring instead to pour the cash into the PR itself.
Alas, because marketing budgets tend to be among the softest during recessionary times--like that which we appear to be entering--the pressure to know the ROI on PR efforts without presumably having to pay as much for that research is likely to grow. Don Bartholomew's blog on the matter is actually not a bad place to start to get a sense of where the future may lie.
On the other hand, as my friend and I thought about how to respond to this prospective client, we decided to see if there were any established metrics on the issue. In this case, we settled on an ad equivalency model: how much would it cost to place an ad in a media outlet that would consume roughly the same space as a placed article (a traditional PR outcome)? Here's what my friend wrote--with all names removed, of course:
In answer to _____'s question about the value of a feature in the [newspaper name]'s, please consider this example. The [newspaper name] has a Sunday circulation of over 300,000 homes and reaches 1.1 million adults on a weekly basis. A half-page color ad in the home and garden section or city & shore magazine costs somewhere between $2,000 and $6,000 per placement. Though it is a rough metric, generally speaking the Media Equivalent for a feature story or editorial is 1.5 to 6 times the advertising value, meaning being featured could be worth as much as $36,000. Companies often reinforce PR efforts with advertising and product placement to build on the name recognition they receive from PR. Another particular advantage to getting stories placed is that people clip and email stories to friends and colleagues.Not a bad analysis, I thought. Of course, 1.5 to 6 times the advertising costs is an enormous range, and, as mentioned already, PR campaigns are not necessarily cheap. On the other hand, what my friend failed to mention is that this was the equivalence of one placement. Since our proposal envisioned several placements, we figured the value for money would be well worth it, depending on the degree of success in placing stories--and that in itself would depend on the quality (and track record) of the write-up and story pitches.
I should add, however, that the debate about ROI on PR is lively. I picked up a few interesting exchanges from or by professionals here, here, and here.
Of course, need I add that all of this has been problematized most recently by a student of the Institute for Public Relations in a study posted here?
January 29, 2008
Doing a Brochure
I'm in the middle of dealing with a project to develop a brochure on behalf of a summer camp. In preparation for this task, I decided to do a little research. After, all, why reinvent this wheel? I decided to comb the Internet to see samples, using the terms "summer," "camp," and "brochure" on Google and restricting my search to PDF files only.
Oy vey! What a disaster. The majority were homemade affairs with little design quality. Clearly a lot of folks were building these in-house using either Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher or some other all-purpose program for amateurs. Typical examples can be seen here, here, and here. There were a few better ones, but none that were especially adventurous in design or layout. That is why I am looking forward to working with a professional designer on this current endeavor.
Still, because the summer camp decided to begin from scratch, the volunteer team devoted to this project needed to make some basic decisions. First was what kind of fold arrangement did we want. We looked a several choices, some of which were nicely illustrated at such sites as, of all places, the Library of Congress and Purdue University. As the discussion proceeded, the course of discussion turned to how brochures are handled by recipients. "Right-Angle Folds," for example, are ideal for creating handout posters, which at 5.5" x 8.5", will unfold into 11" x 17" posters; trifold and quarter-fold brochures, on the other hand, are better suited for personal use by individuals. Quarter folds from 8.5" x 14" (legal size), with their eight panels, will support more information than six-panel trifolds from 8.5" x 11" stocks.
Then there are questions of paper stocks and glosses in order to support the photographs that will need to go into the brochure. One interesting point that came up right away was the fact that most of the photographs taken at the camp during the summer with digital cameras are probably JPG files, and therefore use the RGB (red-green-blue) color space, ideally suited for computer terminal displays of data. Professional rinters, however, require CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-black)-based formats, such as TIFF. Conversion, however, does not seem to be a major issue with the right software in hand, although there may be some shifting around in color tones, nicely illustrated here.
Oy vey! What a disaster. The majority were homemade affairs with little design quality. Clearly a lot of folks were building these in-house using either Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher or some other all-purpose program for amateurs. Typical examples can be seen here, here, and here. There were a few better ones, but none that were especially adventurous in design or layout. That is why I am looking forward to working with a professional designer on this current endeavor.
Still, because the summer camp decided to begin from scratch, the volunteer team devoted to this project needed to make some basic decisions. First was what kind of fold arrangement did we want. We looked a several choices, some of which were nicely illustrated at such sites as, of all places, the Library of Congress and Purdue University. As the discussion proceeded, the course of discussion turned to how brochures are handled by recipients. "Right-Angle Folds," for example, are ideal for creating handout posters, which at 5.5" x 8.5", will unfold into 11" x 17" posters; trifold and quarter-fold brochures, on the other hand, are better suited for personal use by individuals. Quarter folds from 8.5" x 14" (legal size), with their eight panels, will support more information than six-panel trifolds from 8.5" x 11" stocks.
Then there are questions of paper stocks and glosses in order to support the photographs that will need to go into the brochure. One interesting point that came up right away was the fact that most of the photographs taken at the camp during the summer with digital cameras are probably JPG files, and therefore use the RGB (red-green-blue) color space, ideally suited for computer terminal displays of data. Professional rinters, however, require CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-black)-based formats, such as TIFF. Conversion, however, does not seem to be a major issue with the right software in hand, although there may be some shifting around in color tones, nicely illustrated here.
December 25, 2007
Booking Images
So last night I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance. He had a small problem. To wit, he used images from another published work for a book that he had just published. The images in this case were all famous works of art, all public domain. His question was how much ought he worry about using the images from this previously published work, which was still in print and therefore in copyright.
My initial response was a simple one. "Did you use a large enough number of images from this work to infringe its "anthology" copyright" (the copyright implicit in just selecting and arranging already created content)? Since his batting average was roughly 20% of the total from the previous publication, he appeared to straddle the line.
Next I asked, "Are images of these masterworks commonly available from other publications--musuem catalogs, coffee-table books, and so forth?" Most were, which offered the additional protection of plausible deniability. In brief, it would be difficult for the publisher of the source work to detect reuse of the images without a smoking gun in hand (i.e., a memo from the author stating where she got the works).
His concern was not a surprising one for someone new to publishing. He wanted to be open about the sources of his information. Yet he also wanted to know that he would be protected from infringement claims, something that publishing contracts do not always offer outright to authors. (After all, publishers trust their authors not to plagiarize and do not want to be in the position of having to police this basic expectation.) Was he being dishonest by failing to provide credit where credit was ostensibly due?
Full disclosure seems the ethical thing to do. And yet, crediting sources that offered little more than exact reproductions of already public domain images may be granting unearned credit. Years ago, I built American history CD-ROM products rich in textual and pictorial primary sources that I commonly, dare I say, pilfered liberally from documentary readers and anthologies. As beholden as I was to these readers, their contribution was primarily reproduction. They had no legal claim to the intellectual copyright of the work. Mere reproduction of an image or transcription of a textual document does not meet the minimum requirement for infringement. So crediting the "reprint" would have been, for all intents and purposes, a courtesy, one that I did not refrain from extending in most instances.
However, let's say for the sake of argument that I were producing a digital product on the formation of the Constitution. It is possible that I might use twenty critical documents--many short and self-contained, such as Federalist essay no. 19--from a source that had assembled some roughly 100 documents. Here the question of crediting the source becomes more complicated. On the one hand, I have used a seemingly substantial portion of the work, and presumably I should clear rights to use this combination of otherwise public domain documents. On the other hand, my digital product will encompass some 500 documents on the formation of the American constitution, and twenty included are not all that rare. Would I be inviting trouble from a publisher if I were to request permission that the publisher does not necessarily have the right to grant? (Oh, yes, publishers will sometimes try to assume rights that they may not possess.) Should I even bother crediting the publisher, which has done no more than reprint works that themselves might have been gathered without credit from earlier reprint anthologies?
If I seem to be crossing a line, think of it this way. Let's say I include the Declaration of Independence, several essays from the Federalist Papers, and several anti-Federalist essays from this work. It seems I ought credit the source anthology. But nearly all of these items have been reproduced elsewhere by other publishers. Not only who is to know where I sourced the documents under question, but the anthology publisher is more than likely to be guilty of having pilfered them in turn. For these reproduced transcriptions of public domain works--in the case of the Federalist Papers, reproduced from the newspapers in which they first appeared--the more logical and useful citation would be the work's original source. In fact, in citing unmodified primary sources, I commonly credit not the reprint anthology, but the original source referenced in that anthology. Even when one reprint credits another reprint (it does happen), I traditionally skipped over both reprints and cite the original source. It is, after all, the more useful bit of bibliographic information for the scholar seeking to undertand better the provenance of the primary source.
Note, of course, the critical term italicized above: unmodified. If the anthology I use has signficantly edited the original texts (often through ellipses), then I must both clear permission and provide credit. In those instances, the publisher can rightly claim copyright on the modified version of the original work by virtue of those editorial elisions, which then constitute the creative input component for a copyright claim. For still images, modification of these, too, would place a copyright stamp on the use of that image that would require both permission and credit. (Think Andy Warhol silkscreening a Velazquez painting.) In the case of my interlocutor whose concerns precipitated this entry, there was no modification by the publisher of the works. And so, in my view, there was no necessary obligation to cite the reprinter as the source for his own work.
My initial response was a simple one. "Did you use a large enough number of images from this work to infringe its "anthology" copyright" (the copyright implicit in just selecting and arranging already created content)? Since his batting average was roughly 20% of the total from the previous publication, he appeared to straddle the line.
Next I asked, "Are images of these masterworks commonly available from other publications--musuem catalogs, coffee-table books, and so forth?" Most were, which offered the additional protection of plausible deniability. In brief, it would be difficult for the publisher of the source work to detect reuse of the images without a smoking gun in hand (i.e., a memo from the author stating where she got the works).
His concern was not a surprising one for someone new to publishing. He wanted to be open about the sources of his information. Yet he also wanted to know that he would be protected from infringement claims, something that publishing contracts do not always offer outright to authors. (After all, publishers trust their authors not to plagiarize and do not want to be in the position of having to police this basic expectation.) Was he being dishonest by failing to provide credit where credit was ostensibly due?
Full disclosure seems the ethical thing to do. And yet, crediting sources that offered little more than exact reproductions of already public domain images may be granting unearned credit. Years ago, I built American history CD-ROM products rich in textual and pictorial primary sources that I commonly, dare I say, pilfered liberally from documentary readers and anthologies. As beholden as I was to these readers, their contribution was primarily reproduction. They had no legal claim to the intellectual copyright of the work. Mere reproduction of an image or transcription of a textual document does not meet the minimum requirement for infringement. So crediting the "reprint" would have been, for all intents and purposes, a courtesy, one that I did not refrain from extending in most instances.
However, let's say for the sake of argument that I were producing a digital product on the formation of the Constitution. It is possible that I might use twenty critical documents--many short and self-contained, such as Federalist essay no. 19--from a source that had assembled some roughly 100 documents. Here the question of crediting the source becomes more complicated. On the one hand, I have used a seemingly substantial portion of the work, and presumably I should clear rights to use this combination of otherwise public domain documents. On the other hand, my digital product will encompass some 500 documents on the formation of the American constitution, and twenty included are not all that rare. Would I be inviting trouble from a publisher if I were to request permission that the publisher does not necessarily have the right to grant? (Oh, yes, publishers will sometimes try to assume rights that they may not possess.) Should I even bother crediting the publisher, which has done no more than reprint works that themselves might have been gathered without credit from earlier reprint anthologies?
If I seem to be crossing a line, think of it this way. Let's say I include the Declaration of Independence, several essays from the Federalist Papers, and several anti-Federalist essays from this work. It seems I ought credit the source anthology. But nearly all of these items have been reproduced elsewhere by other publishers. Not only who is to know where I sourced the documents under question, but the anthology publisher is more than likely to be guilty of having pilfered them in turn. For these reproduced transcriptions of public domain works--in the case of the Federalist Papers, reproduced from the newspapers in which they first appeared--the more logical and useful citation would be the work's original source. In fact, in citing unmodified primary sources, I commonly credit not the reprint anthology, but the original source referenced in that anthology. Even when one reprint credits another reprint (it does happen), I traditionally skipped over both reprints and cite the original source. It is, after all, the more useful bit of bibliographic information for the scholar seeking to undertand better the provenance of the primary source.
Note, of course, the critical term italicized above: unmodified. If the anthology I use has signficantly edited the original texts (often through ellipses), then I must both clear permission and provide credit. In those instances, the publisher can rightly claim copyright on the modified version of the original work by virtue of those editorial elisions, which then constitute the creative input component for a copyright claim. For still images, modification of these, too, would place a copyright stamp on the use of that image that would require both permission and credit. (Think Andy Warhol silkscreening a Velazquez painting.) In the case of my interlocutor whose concerns precipitated this entry, there was no modification by the publisher of the works. And so, in my view, there was no necessary obligation to cite the reprinter as the source for his own work.
November 15, 2007
New Venture in Literary Publishing
About two months ago, a friend with whom I play tennis mentioned an article that had appeared in the local business paper. It recorded the advent of a new literary journal in my hometown of New Haven. It was tentatively named the New Haven Review of Books, and she thought it appropriate to share because two years earlier I had tried the idea of just such a publication out on her. My reasoning then had been that New Haven, lying midway between New York and Boston, with Yale serving as its local fount of culture, could easily support a quality book review publication. New Haven is rife with intellectuals and artists, and perhaps its greatest problem is retaining them before they head off to, well, New York and Boston.
The magazine was intended as a bit of a lark. I thought it might be fun to do, as a way of reinvigorating my interest in things intellectual. The major drawback for me was quite simply lack of time—I was then a full-time editorial director at Thomson Gale (now Gale Cengage Learning), and my range of contacts among writers was limited. Moreover, my background was stronger as a publisher than as an editor. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I had served as an editor for the student-run Chicago Review. During my doctoral studies, I then worked as editor and publisher for Response: A Jewish Contemporary Review, a nationally published quarterly journal of Jewish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that had some rather impressive contributors over its forty years of existence. Because of the journal’s small size, I handled pretty much everything, from working with the printer to cashing the checks. It was an interesting experience and my introduction to the business of publishing.
Fast forwarding back to the present, as I was reading through the article in Business New Haven about this new publication, I learned that its founder was a fellow synagogue member (and a fine writer, to boot). When I caught up with him during Saturday services, I mentioned the article and expressed my interest in helping out.
“Do you write?” he asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “In fact, that’s not how I want to help. I’m really more interested in the business of publishing, so I’d like to assist on that front.”
“Really? That’s great. Publishing is the part I know little about, and that’s exactly the type of help we can use now. We published our first issue, and we want to become more established. We’re just not sure how to go about doing that.”
“That’s not too hard,” I responded. “In fact, that’s pretty much what I did years ago when I started working with literary journals.”
And this is how I come to write about the New Haven Review (no longer the New Haven Review of Books). So, over the next few months, I will record some of the work I am doing with respect to this endeavor, hoping what I write can serve as a bit of a primer for others thinking of starting their own literary publications. Let me point out that I will be concentrating on the dynamics of setting up shop and publishing a journal—not on editorial policy. That is left to the wiser heads in the volunteer group of individuals who have gathered around this effort. If you’d like to see what I’m talking about specifically, go ahead and check out the online edition of the New Haven Review of Books. The print version exists as a privately published and distributed, side stapled, edition for now.
The magazine was intended as a bit of a lark. I thought it might be fun to do, as a way of reinvigorating my interest in things intellectual. The major drawback for me was quite simply lack of time—I was then a full-time editorial director at Thomson Gale (now Gale Cengage Learning), and my range of contacts among writers was limited. Moreover, my background was stronger as a publisher than as an editor. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I had served as an editor for the student-run Chicago Review. During my doctoral studies, I then worked as editor and publisher for Response: A Jewish Contemporary Review, a nationally published quarterly journal of Jewish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that had some rather impressive contributors over its forty years of existence. Because of the journal’s small size, I handled pretty much everything, from working with the printer to cashing the checks. It was an interesting experience and my introduction to the business of publishing.
Fast forwarding back to the present, as I was reading through the article in Business New Haven about this new publication, I learned that its founder was a fellow synagogue member (and a fine writer, to boot). When I caught up with him during Saturday services, I mentioned the article and expressed my interest in helping out.
“Do you write?” he asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “In fact, that’s not how I want to help. I’m really more interested in the business of publishing, so I’d like to assist on that front.”
“Really? That’s great. Publishing is the part I know little about, and that’s exactly the type of help we can use now. We published our first issue, and we want to become more established. We’re just not sure how to go about doing that.”
“That’s not too hard,” I responded. “In fact, that’s pretty much what I did years ago when I started working with literary journals.”
And this is how I come to write about the New Haven Review (no longer the New Haven Review of Books). So, over the next few months, I will record some of the work I am doing with respect to this endeavor, hoping what I write can serve as a bit of a primer for others thinking of starting their own literary publications. Let me point out that I will be concentrating on the dynamics of setting up shop and publishing a journal—not on editorial policy. That is left to the wiser heads in the volunteer group of individuals who have gathered around this effort. If you’d like to see what I’m talking about specifically, go ahead and check out the online edition of the New Haven Review of Books. The print version exists as a privately published and distributed, side stapled, edition for now.
November 14, 2007
Options, Embargoes, and Exemptions in Commercial Microfilm Publishing
As I’ve described elsewhere, commercial microfilm products largely comprise content from libraries or print publishers (such as newspapers or periodicals). Just a day ago, I had a phone call with an institutional contact about a proposed microfilm venture. In the course of our conversation, I reviewed several key issues affecting products of this nature. A summary of some of these should illuminate the available options and trade-offs for institutions and publishers about to engage with one another in a microfilm publishing arrangement.
ROFOs and ROFRs
Prior to the mid-1980s, and sometimes even later, micropublishers rarely included digital rights in their microfilm contracts. In the last decade, they no longer overlook this opportunity, especially those with the financial wherewithal to go digital or hopeful of eventually getting there. As a consequence, commercial microfilm publishing contracts commonly include provisions concerning the possibility of a digital edition. The simplest approach to addressing a digital version of a microfilm product is to include a “digital option.” Options come in various forms and follow standard legal practice. My contracts often included a right of first offer (ROFO), which grants the publisher the right to bid first in good faith on a digital project in the event that the content owner opts or a third party offers to digitize the content, whether for free or for fee. A variant is the right of first refusal (ROFR). This tends to be more restrictive because in this arrangement the content owner must give the publisher the right to match or meet any possible offer, especially from a third party. In the current climate, library sources find ROFOs more acceptable because they want the latitude to publish their content for free and not be subject to the restrictions (and obligations) implied in an ROFR.
Cannibalization
In my own experience, library sources have rarely posted serious objections to granting a digital option. After all, the provision is just an option and not a binding agreement. More important to content owners, especially libraries, are restrictions on the digitization of the data. For the publisher, these restrictions have a simple purpose: to prevent the “cannibalization” of the microfilm product by the availability of a digital version. (Cannibalization is the common term for lost sales by dissemination of an alternate edition or version of the same content.) However, many libraries—especially research libraries, which are often the main sources for scholarly microfilm sets—have public and scholarly missions that emphasize expanded access to knowledge and, therefore, their holdings. (I am perhaps too bold here, but this argument, which I have heard frequently seems disingenuous in the extreme. Many of the institutions claiming this free knowledge mandate are private and do not grant on-site free access to their holdings to unaffiliated individuals, so why the rush to give it all away free to the teeming masses?)
The expanded access mission of these institutions generally translates into “open access” (read “free”) digital versions of their collections. Where once upon a time funding agencies favored microfilm preservation, providing grant money for either equipping micrographics departments within libraries or paying vendors under the direction of the grantee, today those same funds have been aggressively financing the provision of digital equipment and services. So here we have a fundamental conflict of interests. The microfilm publisher would, of course, see any open source digital version of the content from the prospective product as anathema. On the other hand, libraries see opportunities to upload digital versions of their holdings —much simplified by provision of a microfilm version of their content from which to work—as critical to their mission to augment access and, equally important, raise the visibility of the collection and its host library.
Embargoes & Exemptions
The result for most microfilm contracts is the arrangement of a limited “embargo” on the digitization of content from the microfilm, especially by the source institution and for free. Few institutions, however, will tolerate a complete embargo. As a consequence, it is not uncommon to include an exemption of up to ten percent of the content for any form of dissemination by the source institution. (Indeed, for publishers, this allowance may favor the collection’s distribution in microfilm by serving up a digital teaser for the more complete collection.) Outside of that exemption, embargoes vary. With the Library of Congress, I negotiated a 36-month embargo on digital conversion and dissemination from the date of publication of the microfilm edition of the content. Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, on the other hand, opted for a yearly addition of ten percent to the first-year exemption, so that by year ten, the entire collection would be available for digitization and dissemination without restriction. Note that embargoes are especially important to the publisher if it decides—as some do today—to create the microfilm collection from a digital imaging process. (Yes, as backwards as this seems, there are a number of good reasons for creating microfilm collections in just this manner.) Since digital images, along with gratis copies of the microfilm, will be supplied to the source institution, the embargo is critical to the publisher. On the other hand, the gratis provision of a complete set of digital images represents a strong temptation to the library.
For the publisher, of course, provision of an exemption does not necessarily result in digitization and dissemination of the content by the content. First it is possible that the publisher may “go digital” with the product before the embargo period finishes. Second, and more likely, the content owner will not have digitized the content by the time the selling arc of the product has ended (usually 3 to 5 years) owing to a lack of funds, interest, staff, or what have you.
Nonetheless, content owners often do not want to abdicate the ability to digitize, should a grant funder or a more generous library director come waltzing through the door. Libraries want these exemptions and, in an ideal world, to limit the embargo as much as is reasonable. In the course of negotiation, content owners can always just stand firm on promoting its open access interests—seeking large exemptions or miniscule embargoes. But I recommend the trading on negotiable portions of the contract. For example, the source institutions might trade a greater exemption or shortened embargo for reduced royalty payments or some other cost-savings concession that sweetens the bottom line for the publisher. This give-and-take will at least provide some form of compensation for potential sacrificed revenues as a result of cannibalization. On the other hand, for content owners that may care little about exemptions or embargoes—they really have no internal plans to digitize the content—they may adopt the opposite tactic. In exchange for a reduced exemption or longer embargo, they prefer a higher royalty, larger advance, or a guaranteed yearly minimum.
As I’ve recommended to content owners with whom I’ve negotiated, publishing contracts are not written in stone. They actually comprise a set of moveable parts that may be added, revised, or discarded, and since each of these parts represent a set of obligations—if you will—they each have opportunity costs that can be traded. In brief, contracts are “barterable,” and should be treated accordingly in that way, especially for commercial microfilm products, which are technically “print-on-demand” products with notoriously long lifespans.
October 12, 2007
Microfilm Primer: Close Calls and Tragedies in Microfilm Publishing
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In the course of sniffing out new collections for publication at Primary Source Microfilm, I stumbled across a record in Columbia University’s online public access catalog describing its Federated Press collection. I had no idea what this collection represented, although its size at roughly 250 rolls made it an attractive prospect. A little research revealed that the Federated Press had been a relatively short-lived wire service for labor-friendly publications during the heyday of the 20th-century labor movement. (It boasted Betty Friedan as one of its early journalists.) The collection comprised news releases organized by chronology and subject and biographies. When I asked Columbia staff about the collection, imagine my dismay when I learned that they had no real idea where the master negative was located . Since the master negative is critical to any high-quality reproduction of the set for prospective customers, I faced the grim prospect of working from the heavily scratched microfilm positive that sat in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Not good. Only after several weeks of searching did Columbia’s library staff discover the presence of the master negative at Preservation Resources, which had stored it, in turn, at one of Iron Mountain’s many facilities. In the end this little known and not much used collection was successfully published, resulting in a revamped catalog, a new print negative placed in Primary Source Microfilm’s cold vault, another negative and positive delivered for safekeeping this time to Columbia University for local storage, and, of course, the distribution of a number of positive copies among major research libraries with strong programs in labor history throughout the United States. Close call that one!
Sadly, not all stories turn out so well. Roughly around that same period I discovered another collection, this time a gathering of manuscripts, serial publications, and monographs—many quite rare—from and about the Yucatan region of Mexico. Based on a bibliography I discovered, I began to root around for its location. I started at the University of Alabama, which owned an old and heavily worn positive set of the over 140 rolls that comprised this 35-millimeter microfilm collection. With the assistance of the bibliography’s editor, Edward Terry, who still taught at the university, I learned that a master negative resided in the Yucatan, little attended to by its owners. There was much to concern me. The Yucatan is notorious for its humidity, and during my visit, the region had just weathered a devastating hurricane that tore up much of the countryside and damaged parts of Merida where the film set resided. The microfilm itself was stored in a dilapidated building with no means of controlling the temperature or the humidity. And need I add that the microfilm itself was acetate stock?
After laborious negotiation, we brought the negative to the United States and began the difficult process of creating second-generation print negative on silver halide polyester microfilm in order to give the this collection of some very rare material a fighting chance of survival. Fortunately, the microfilm had somehow managed to survive without suffering the baleful effects of vinegar syndrome. This was good. But, lo and behold, as we worked our way frame-by-frame through the film, we were shocked to discover a host of imaging problems that, despite our best efforts, we could not salvage. The microfilm, which had been shot in the Yucatan, featured among other things the thumbs of the operator holding down book pages, indicating the absence of a glass plate. Moreover, there had been no effort to control the lighting. As a consequence density readings varied widely—sometimes from one photographic frame to the next—with dark images sidling up next to overexposed shots. Finally, pages started showing up on a regular basis that were out of focus. This final blemish was the straw that broke the back of this product. Primary Source Microfilm, in good faith, could not distribute the product. And even worse, the original library of materials has been dismantled some years after the creation of the microfilm, making any prospect of reshooting the collection impossible. The money that the University of Alabama had spent so many years ago to create this microfilm set was all for nought.
Although there is no guarantee of the fact, had the microfilming been performed under the auspices of a publisher, which must always look over its shoulder at the customer’s reception, many of these problems might never have happened. In the end, despite the painful decision not to redistribute the collection because of its many flaws, Primary Source Microfilm nobly--and at my urging--created gratis negative and positive copies on polyester stock of the entire microfilm set for both the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura de Yucatán and the University of Alabama respectively, to prevent further deterioration of the acetate originals.
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In the course of sniffing out new collections for publication at Primary Source Microfilm, I stumbled across a record in Columbia University’s online public access catalog describing its Federated Press collection. I had no idea what this collection represented, although its size at roughly 250 rolls made it an attractive prospect. A little research revealed that the Federated Press had been a relatively short-lived wire service for labor-friendly publications during the heyday of the 20th-century labor movement. (It boasted Betty Friedan as one of its early journalists.) The collection comprised news releases organized by chronology and subject and biographies. When I asked Columbia staff about the collection, imagine my dismay when I learned that they had no real idea where the master negative was located . Since the master negative is critical to any high-quality reproduction of the set for prospective customers, I faced the grim prospect of working from the heavily scratched microfilm positive that sat in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Not good. Only after several weeks of searching did Columbia’s library staff discover the presence of the master negative at Preservation Resources, which had stored it, in turn, at one of Iron Mountain’s many facilities. In the end this little known and not much used collection was successfully published, resulting in a revamped catalog, a new print negative placed in Primary Source Microfilm’s cold vault, another negative and positive delivered for safekeeping this time to Columbia University for local storage, and, of course, the distribution of a number of positive copies among major research libraries with strong programs in labor history throughout the United States. Close call that one!
Sadly, not all stories turn out so well. Roughly around that same period I discovered another collection, this time a gathering of manuscripts, serial publications, and monographs—many quite rare—from and about the Yucatan region of Mexico. Based on a bibliography I discovered, I began to root around for its location. I started at the University of Alabama, which owned an old and heavily worn positive set of the over 140 rolls that comprised this 35-millimeter microfilm collection. With the assistance of the bibliography’s editor, Edward Terry, who still taught at the university, I learned that a master negative resided in the Yucatan, little attended to by its owners. There was much to concern me. The Yucatan is notorious for its humidity, and during my visit, the region had just weathered a devastating hurricane that tore up much of the countryside and damaged parts of Merida where the film set resided. The microfilm itself was stored in a dilapidated building with no means of controlling the temperature or the humidity. And need I add that the microfilm itself was acetate stock?
After laborious negotiation, we brought the negative to the United States and began the difficult process of creating second-generation print negative on silver halide polyester microfilm in order to give the this collection of some very rare material a fighting chance of survival. Fortunately, the microfilm had somehow managed to survive without suffering the baleful effects of vinegar syndrome. This was good. But, lo and behold, as we worked our way frame-by-frame through the film, we were shocked to discover a host of imaging problems that, despite our best efforts, we could not salvage. The microfilm, which had been shot in the Yucatan, featured among other things the thumbs of the operator holding down book pages, indicating the absence of a glass plate. Moreover, there had been no effort to control the lighting. As a consequence density readings varied widely—sometimes from one photographic frame to the next—with dark images sidling up next to overexposed shots. Finally, pages started showing up on a regular basis that were out of focus. This final blemish was the straw that broke the back of this product. Primary Source Microfilm, in good faith, could not distribute the product. And even worse, the original library of materials has been dismantled some years after the creation of the microfilm, making any prospect of reshooting the collection impossible. The money that the University of Alabama had spent so many years ago to create this microfilm set was all for nought.
Although there is no guarantee of the fact, had the microfilming been performed under the auspices of a publisher, which must always look over its shoulder at the customer’s reception, many of these problems might never have happened. In the end, despite the painful decision not to redistribute the collection because of its many flaws, Primary Source Microfilm nobly--and at my urging--created gratis negative and positive copies on polyester stock of the entire microfilm set for both the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura de Yucatán and the University of Alabama respectively, to prevent further deterioration of the acetate originals.
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