Throw down your thesis

In my beginning writing classes, the one idea I spend the most time on is something that’s often called the thesis statement. It isn’t enough that a college essay—or any essay, or any piece of writing, or film, or play, for that matter—have a topic. It has to have a specific thesis within that topic. The thesis statement is like chess or go—it takes a few minutes to learn, and a lifetime to master.

It doesn’t have to be long or complicated, but it does have to be a specific assertion. “My summer vacation” is a topic. “My trip to Disneyworld last summer was the best vacation of my life” is a thesis. (“My summer vacation, the first my husband and I took in our twelve-year marriage, saved our relationship” is an even better one, but we don’t always have as much drama in our lives as a writing class would like!) One sign of a bad thesis, or no thesis, is boredom in the face of crisp prose and strong action—when readers don’t know where the story is going, it’s impossible to keep their interest.

Once you have a thesis, you know just what to write—what to include, and, equally importantly, what to exclude. Unfortunately, a thesis doesn’t always come to us tightly wound, whole, and perfect, like a new ball of soft colorful yarn. And so sometimes we start in, thinking we’re writing about one thing, and it turns out we’re really writing about another. I once heard the writer Liz Braverman say, writing is a product of the struggle “between the words in your head and the words that come off the page.” The path to a thesis sometimes looks like the ball of yarn after the cats have played with it all afternoon.

I tell my students that often you don’t know what an essay is about until the first draft is done. When you read the draft over, think about what the thesis of the actual essay—the essay as it exists on the page—is. Then reread the essay with an eye to what comports with the new thesis and what does not. Every section, every paragraph—and eventually, after the final polishing, every sentence and every word—ought to advance the thesis in some way, so add and subtract accordingly.

Which brings us to Throw Down Your Heart, a documentary film about a trip the musician Béla Fleck made to Africa. It opens today, but I saw it back in November at the American Museum of Natural History’s 2008 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival.

First, let me say that it was a wonderful evening and a wonderful show to watch. And the film is destined to be popular, and well-liked by anyone who likes Fleck’s kind of music, or just the wonderful sounds that can result when one culture’s symbols are made to clash with another’s. The movie gets an astonishing 8.1 out of 10 on IMDb, though only 15 people have voted, and I notice it won an audience award last month at SXSW, among others listed on the film’s website.

How could one not love a film named for a story that when men from Africa’s interior were brought to a certain coastal port in Tanzania, from which they would be shipped overseas, never to see their families again, they were advised to “throw down their hearts.”

That said, Throw Down Your Heart fails as a film. It fails for the same reason many of my students’ essays fail—the failure to rethink and rewrite the work, after the true thesis emerges from the first draft.

The film’s original idea was apparently to take the instrument Fleck is most closely associated with, the banjo, back to Africa. It was described that way in the promotional material that drew me to the AMNH. It’s described that way in the IMDb blurb: “A film crew follows the well-known banjo player Béla Fleck on his travels to Africa, where he learns about the instrument’s origins.” This thesis is still expressed in the movie’s trailer: “Where the banjo has come from” “A lot of people associate it with white southern music,” “There’s an instrument [in Africa] that may be the original banjo,” etc., and it’s expressed in the first few minutes of the film.

And indeed, throughout, the movie contains vestiges of that thesis, including the intinerary that forms the backbone of the narrative, taking Fleck and the crew through four candidate countries for the origins of the banjo (Uganda, Tanzania, The Gambia, and Mali).

In looking for the precursors to today’s banjo, some of which are instruments that are still played in Africa, Fleck encountered extraordinary musicians, some famous, some known only within a single village but of world-class caliber. It was, perhaps, inevitable, that the movie would devolve into a celebration of those musicians, and Fleck’s interactions with them, including a couple of terrific duets and other performances in which Fleck not only plays the banjo with them, but some of the precursor instruments as well. And that’s fine. But that’s a very different movie.

Worse still, there was a third thesis available to director Sascha Paladino, hinted at in the movie, and it is in fact the movie he should have made. The AMNH viewing ended with a Q & A with some of the film’s crew. In the course of describing how hard Fleck worked, we were told that he stayed up far into the night trying to learn new forms of music and getting the hang of those African instruments. Fleck didn’t allow those late-night moments to be shown.

It’s understandable that an eight-time Grammy winner wouldn’t want to be seen making bad music late at night with unfamiliar instruments he had only just been given. But the story of one of the world’s great musicians struggling to master new instruments and new musical forms would have turned a enjoyable music travelogue into an unforgettable musical odyssey.

The New York Post put up a short review of the movie yesterday that unwittingly gets it exactly right. “The movie is at least 20 minutes too long,” the Post wrote—an extraordinary thing for a review of a 97-minute musical film in which the music is called “infectious.” (Karina Longworth, in a generally very favorable review at Spout.com, agreed, calling it “somewhat overlong.”) Boredom is the inevitable consequence of a defective thesis.

The anonymous NY Post reviewer also wrote, “Fleck fails to provide any personal charisma.” Exactly. By withholding Fleck’s failings, the movie withholds its central character. Béla, if only you had thrown down your heart.

Too Clever By Half

THE BRANDING
OF A RESTAURANT
POWERHOUSE

When Triarc Companies Inc., the parent company of sandwich chain Arby’s Restaurant Group, Inc. acquired Wendy’s International, the move created the third largest fast-food company. The company was renamed as Wendy’s/Arby’s Group and required a new brand identity to embody the innovative spirit of both restaurant brands. The new brand identity also needed to illustrate the collective strength of the organization to its employees, franchisees and shareholders.

Wendy’s and Arby’s merged?

KCSA Strategic Communications worked closely with Wendy’s/Arby’s Group management to define the shared, core brand values of both Wendy’s and Arby’s, and articulate the company’s unique value proposition and intangible qualities that surround the Wendy’s/Arby’s name.

“Value proposition” – heh.

“Intangible qualities” – heh-heh.

“Each company’s brand is a valuable strategic asset,” said Joshua Altman, Managing Director at KCSA. “The challenge in this type of situation is to develop a symbolic, clear new brand language that creates new meaning to audiences without losing the tradition, legacy, and the already important values established by the previously separate entities.”

Tradition? Legacy? This is fast food we’re talking about, right?

The Wendy’s/Arby’s Group brand identity references identifiable visual characteristics from both Wendy’s and Arby’s, structured as a form reflective of the “W” and “A” in Wendy’s/Arby’s Group. The icon and the tagline, “Serving Fresh Ideas Daily”, support Wendy’s/Arby’s Group’s commitment to innovation and high level of quality.

Wendy’s has a new logo?

“The Wendy’s/Arby’s Group brand identity is designed not only as an acronym, but as a spiral continuum, maintaining the idea of continuous, flexible movement forward,” said Margaret Wiatrowski, Creative Director at KCSA. “The overall visual direction remains neutral by introducing entirely new elements to the combined entity, both formalistically and typographically. Symbolically, the two entities are combined through a mutual sense of innovation, authenticity and tradition.”

Innovation? Authenticity? Tradition (again!)? This is fast food we’re talking about, right?

Wendy’s/Arby’s Group unveiled its new brand to key stakeholders the first week of October, 2008.

Oh, it will have a new logo.

To learn more about this project or how we may serve you, please contact Joshua Altman at jaltman@kcsa.com.

Who wouldn’t want to learn more about this “project?

KCSA, a public-relations firms I’ve worked with, is better than this. Is there anything more inauthentic than saying that you have authenticity?

It’s time to return to the words of the master.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basis, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.

– George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

“Key stakeholders,” “valuable strategic asset,” “overall visual direction,” “formalistically,” “value proposition,” “intangible qualities,” “innovation,” “tradition,” and “legacy” are all words that are used to dress up simple statements, give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments, and, as the master would be quick to say, are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Since only “key stakeholders” have seen the changes, it’s too soon to say whether this rebranding effort will be a success or a failure. And there’s no denying that brands are important. GM is trying to sell its Hummer brand, and according to today’s N.Y. Times, hopes to get a few billion for it. Since, in a era of $4/gallon gas, no one is buying Hummers (or cars at all; GM’s and Ford’s stocks jumped out the window yesterday, and even Toyota is going the zero-percent financing route), Hummer’s entire value is that it’s a name that is universally recognized (albeit often mocked).

What KCSA needs to remember, though, is that rebranding isn’t a sexy runway show. Rebranding is a little bit of backoffice sketching, and a lot of sweatshop work – cutting, sewing, ironing, fitting, and resewing. It can’t be dressed up with meaningless words. In fact, for a PR agency to talk of value propositions and strategic assets is like the designer showing up at the runway in a bathrobe.

Come on guys, you’re better than this.

No award for old men?

In the run up to the Academy Awards, Knowledge News has a nice article, “Oscar’s Biggest Snubs” (thanks Claire, for the link), describing how some of Hollywood’s best films didn’t even win best-picture in the year they were released.

Citizen Kane, often cited as the greatest movie of all time, tops the list, and two of my favorite movies ever are there as well, Chinatown, and Double Indemnity. Singin’ in the Rain, not one of my favorite movies, but surely touched by greatness, and Some Like It Hot, round out the list. There’s also an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, surely the most underawarded director in Academy history.

Singin’ in the Rain apparently lost out to The Greatest Show on Earth. Now that’s a movie that I could watch over and over again, but it’s hard to see it as better than one of a few score movies that people will remember for the next fifty years.

Hollywood has always confused entertainment with greatness, and it’s always fun to see that tension play out as the Academy votes each year. Oddly, they struggled in reverse with Hitchcock—voters obviously thought of movies like Rear Window and Psycho as throw-away entertainment, when in fact we now see their lasting value and Hitchcock as one of the great auteurs of all time.

Which brings us to this year. Of the five nominees, there’s no obvious winner, though a couple will be memorable for a long time and none of them is really disposable entertainment. (The official list is here, but you have to like ImdB’s for its linkability.)

Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

We can cross There Will Be Blood off the list right away. It’s a mess of a movie, structurally unsound, poorly plotted, and with absolutely no likeable characters. It’s hard to even see how it even got nominated, except for Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance.

Michael Clayton is a terrific movie, but not the kind that normally emerges as Best Picture. For one thing, it has no actual point, other than revenge is sweet and, at least in Hollywood, the smartest guy sometimes wins. It puts wit and charm in an action movie, but, frankly, that was true of Sneakers and The Italian Job, and no one ever nominated them for Oscars.

No Country for Old Men is a strong contender, because it captures a lot of mind-share as possibly the best-ever for its genre, which is that of Gruesome Thoughtful-Action Movie, a specialty of the Coen brothers. Unforgiven was in that genre, and did well its year, as did Fargo. The comparisons are limited, in that each of those movies had characters more likeable than Tommy Lee Jones’s. On the other hand, there’s a growing recognition of the auteur quality to the Coen oeuvre.

Juno is the kind of small picture that can, in these post-Little-Miss-Sunshine days, easily get nominated, but perhaps never win. It does have the merits of actual themes, a plot, a point of view, and funky believable characters, the central one of which has just the sort of change that a leading lady, even one of 16, is supposed to undergo. In other words, it’s a classic movie, and those are in somewhat short supply this year.

Even more interestingly, the central character in Atonement is likewise transformed and then, as the characters who inspired it die off, reverts to her earlier self. That’s a remarkably difficult message for Hollywood to deliver, and Atonement succeeds against all odds. Combine that with the luminous development of two characters we give our hearts to in the first part of the movie, and the radically different cinematography in the front and back halves, either of which probably deserves an award in that category, and I would have to pick this as my favorite movie of the year, and the one I’d like to see win the Best Picture award.

Some other quick picks:

Best Actor – I only saw two of the nominated performances, so I don’t get a vote. If anyone beats Daniel Day-Lewis, though, I will have to run out and see that movie.

Best Actress – I only saw one performance here. Normally that wouldn’t matter, because it was Ellen Page’s, and you ask yourself, is anyone good enough to beat that? Unfortunately, when the category includes Cate Blanchett and Julie Christie, the answer is yes.

Best Supporting Actor – the three performances I saw, Javier Bardem, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Tom Wilkinson, were pretty amazing. Even more astonishing, though, is that Casey Affleck is nominated for something that’s presumably even better than he was in Gone Baby Gone. Personally, I hope Javier Bardem wins, because we’ll see Philip Seymour Hoffman get nominated a bunch more times, while this was Bardem’s role of a lifetime.

Best Supporting Actress – I saw four of the performances. Ruby Dee might get it, for sentimental reasons. I hope not, because it just wasn’t that memorable a role, certainly not compared to Saoirse Ronan’s, or Amy Ryan’s. Again, the missing performance is Cate Blanchett, so anything could happen here. I’m rooting for the kid.

Adapted Screenplay – I missed two of these films, unfortunately. I just hope and trust that There Will Be Blood doesn’t win, because most of its problems as a movie, not the least of which is an ending that’s both totally inevitable and completely unsatisfying, could have been fixed at the screenplay level.

Original Screenplay – I only saw two nominees, but I hope Juno gets it. It is, truly, original, in its story and its characters, in all the best ways. As a budding screenwriter, I am in awe of the writing in movies like Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno.

Update:

Well, most of the awards I cared most about fell where I wanted them to. In many cases, I didn’t see the winner’s work, so I can’t judge how smartly the Academy vote.

One exception to that was Tilda Swinton, who won best supporting actress; it was a great little part, played with greatness, sure, but it was a little part, and surely any number of actresses would have done just as well. I thought none of that was true of Saoirse Ronan’s performance.

We actually have the DVD of “La Vie en Rose” in the house, I’m eager to see Marion Cotillard’s performance. She looked and sounded pretty damned good.

I’m disappointed that Atonement didn’t win Best Picture, but I’m happy that the Coen brothers won for directing. Similarly that There Will Be Blood won for cinematography; whatever that’s pictures flaws were, there were none at the level of images on the screen.

On the plus side, Javier Bardem won his gold, and gave a great speech.

Best of all, Juno won for original screenplay.

How low can high schools go?

Have you seen “Dumbing Us Down, The American Tragedy”? It’s a YouTube video that seems to be just going around now, even though it goes back to at least November 2006, when it was posted. It seems to have hit Digg just a couple of days ago.

There are a lot of links to it, but not much information. It was made by Brandon Telg, Jarred McKinney, Austin Woodall, three Gainesville (Fla.) high school students, at least at the time.

Their film takes a quick look at the declining state of education in the U.S. They call it a documentary, but at 13 minutes, its more of an outline of one. Still, they have a very nice mix of anecdote and statistic, and the video is pretty well made, a few easily excused typos and other glitches aside.

Their impetus seems to be a conversation with a history teacher who noticed, by accident at first, that almost none of his students — two of 32, in fact — knew who Gerald Ford was. The teacher later learned that only two of his students knew the name Mahatma Gandhi.

That led Telg, et al., to wonder how extensive the ignorance of their fellow students was. So they asked around to see what people knew of Gandhi. The depressing but predictable answer was, not much. Many didn’t know the name at all, while others misplaced it, such as the kid who thought Gandhi was a Mongol conqueror.

So the three videographers drew up two lists, one of famous names from history — Thomas Edison, Calvin Coolidge, Dick Cheney — the other pop culture stars — Eminem, Paris Hilton, Jack Black, and so on.

It’s hard to fathom the depths of student ignorance on display in the video. Edison was variously thought to be a former president and located in the 18th century by one student who mumbled, “kite, electricity, light bulb” — as if the light bulb were invented in the 18th century. Even Cheney was not universally known, though Eminem was.

They descry standardized testing mandated by No Child Left Behind. They invoke John Dewey, Horace Mann, and Cotton Mathers, and find, in their words, “This generation is witnessing first-hand the disintegration of the original intent of the American public education system.”

As I said, there’s not much information about the video and it’s more cited than discussed in the blogverse. But 24-year-old Daniel H. had some comments I found interesting.

For example, all I knew about Calvin Coolidge was that he was a president… that was pretty much it. I did know about Gandhi and Edison, but only a couple sentences’ worth. Now, I consider myself an intelligent person, but that doesn’t really help much for what would be considered “book learning”. You see, with the current state of our education system, students are learning less and less. I think it started around the time I was coming up through elementary school, and I’m only 24 years old.

 

In elementary school, I was given a calculator from day 1 and was told to use it when multiplying and dividing. Did we learn our “times tables” ? Yeah.. but we only went over it for a few days before we had a calculator stuffed in our hand. Talking to people even just a few years older than me makes me realize what all I never had in school.

 

Previous generations had to memory their multiplication table backwards and forwards- I never really did. They learned the presidents in order with facts about each- we barely went over the list once, and certainly didn’t have to memorize it. We never had to learn where all 50 states are in the US and the capital of each (I had friends in high school who thought Alaska was down by Mexico because of concatenated maps)… there are plenty more instances like that.

Daniel certainly overestimates the older generation. I went to some pretty good schools growing up, including the top high school in New York and maybe the country. While we were required to know our times tables up to 12, we never memorized state capitals or presidents. I have a self-selected group of very smart friends online, but of the people I know day-to-day in ordinary life, I might be the only one who can locate all 50 states geographically, another thing I wasn’t required to know growing up.

Anyway, it’s hard for me not to connect the video up with another youth-culture documentarian who this week floated through one of the mailing lists I’m on: Virgil, creator of Booksthatmakeyoudumb.

Basically, this guy looked at college students’ favorite-book lists on Facebook, then correlated them with the average SATs of the schools’ student bodies, to rank the most popular books in terms of the scores. Hence, Books That Make You Dumb. (“Yes, I’m aware correlation ≠ causation. The results are hilarity incarnate regardless of causality. You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.”)

Here’s the methodology in a little more detail.

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?

 

Well, here’s one idea.

 

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most frequent “favorite books” at every college (manually — as not to violate Facebook’s ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.

2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.

3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

 

    Books ~ Colleges ~ Average SAT Scores

 

4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.

5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

He takes at face value Facebook’s book names (“The Bible” and “The Holy Bible” are different, for example), and he categorizes the books by simply taking what shows up most for them on LibraryThing. And the methodology itself is probably specious, but the list is pretty interesting. The data itself is fascinating. While I think it’s mostly in accord with expectations, it’s good to see in living color.

It’s pleasing to see how popular 1984, To Kill A Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, and The Great Gatsby are, and that East of Eden, Lolita, Running With Scissors, and 100 Years of Solitude show up at all — heck, I’m even glad that Atlas Shrugged and Anthem show up; as bad as Rand is, you can’t read them mindlessly. (It’s disappointing that The Republic isn’t at least as popular, though.)

As crazy as this project is, it’s worth a look. And given that the Facebook crowd is probably just a few years older than that of Gainesville High School, maybe there’s some cause for hope. At least a few college students have favorite books, and some pretty damned good ones at that.

What a difference a comma makes

My favorite example of punctuation placement is a sentence that, as far as I know, was invented by Mitch Wagner to prove the need for the serial comma: “This novel is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”

Another favorite example is a sign I used to see in Iowa City when I was a grad student there.

NO PARKING VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

“Look,” I used to tell my Intro to Logic students. “Not only will parking violators not be prosecuted, but they’re nice enough to post a sign saying so.”

I thought of each of these yesterday when I read “Interest Fades in the Once-Mighty V-8,” by Bill Vlasic, in the NY Times.

Ford executives said they had at times wrestled with the decision to give up V-8s in some models, including a new sedan from the Lincoln luxury division, because they worried about customer reaction.

 

“I worked on the Lincoln Continental program 20 years ago, and people were vehement that it had to have a V-8,” said Mark Fields, Ford’s president for the Americas. “But now people don’t really care if the performance is there.”

Whoa, that’s a full 180 degree u-turn of ambiguity.

Which is it, Bill? People don’t care about the performance anymore? Or that’s all they care about?

Multicar Pileup As Snowstorm Hits Plains

DATELINE | CITY, PLAINS_STATE. — A strong snowstorm that cut visibility nearly to zero in some places as it rolled across the Plains on Saturday caused numerous vehicle pileups and forced authorities to close portions of several major highways.

Dozens of vehicles were involved in a pileup on Interstate NN in [western|eastern] PLAINS_STATE, authorities said. Sections of some NEIGHBORING_STATE_1 highways were closed because of whiteout conditions. Local authorities said it was the worst snowstorm in X years.

The PLAINS_STATE State Highway Patrol said preliminary reports indicated NUMBER to 2x_NUMBER vehicles, including NUMBER tractor-trailer rigs, were involved in the early afternoon chain-reaction wreck on Interstate NN [at|near] CITY.

Multiple ambulances were sent to the scene but there was no immediate indication how many people were injured or if there were any fatalities. HOSPITAL_NAME in CITY said it was treating several people from the accident though none of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening.

The Patrol closed about 100 miles of I-NN from CITY2 to the NEIGHBORING_STATE_1 state line. The storm blew locally heavy snow across NEIGHBORING_STATE_2, [eastern|western] NEIGHBORING_STATE_3 and parts of NEIGHBORING_STATE_4 and NEIGHBORING_STATE_5.

In NEIGHBORING_STATE_1, Highway NN near TOWN was closed because NN to NN+10 cars had slid off the road or had been involved in collisions, authorities said.

By early afternoon, the storm had dropped N inches of snow in the CITY area, said National Weather Service meteorologist NWS_SPOKESPERSON_NAME. Accumulations of up to N+M inches were possible.

[ADDITIONAL FORECAST MATERIAL GOES HERE]

In [CURRENT_YEAR - X] a severe snowstorm claimed Y lives. Mayor MAYOR_NAME noted that OPTIMISTIC_COMPARISON_GOES HERE.

[Inspired by a recent AP report here .]

Books not dead yet

Webster University and Lee University have each “announced the creation of their own university presses,” Inside Higher Ed reported today.

The article calls this “a challenging time for the economics of scholarly publishing” and notes that they “will both publish in cooperation with other entities.”

I can guess what that means. Both the organization I work for and the one I worked for before that—professional societies each—had a Press unit that, during my tenure, developed “cooperation” agreements with large academic publishers. The book operation where I am now, for example, publishes them in cooperation with Wiley Press.

In such a situation, the Press isn’t exactly an imprint of the bigger publisher. My organization does all the up-front work of acquiring and editing manuscripts. Wiley handles production and distribution. The two do their own marketing in, um, cooperation. Each, in other words, does what it’s good at.

With the development of digital technologies, I wonder if music won’t eventually go a similar route. Why aren’t there small imprint labels that develop acts and produce them? Let the big record companies handle manufacturing and distribution. Well, in a sense, we may see a little of that—except that in the iPod/iTunes era, manufacturing and distribution are somewhat trivial. [ADDED: Music distribution was the subject of a forward blog entry, here.]

Well, let’s turn it around then. When will manufacturing and distribution become trivial for books?

As a partial answer to that, I saw my first Sony Digital Reader in the wild yesterday on the subway. The guy next to its owner was quizzing her as if it were an iPhone on June 30th. I heard her to say she’d had it since September and loves it. Maybe when ebooks are are common as iPods, the small universities and and the professional societies won’t need the “cooperation” of “other entities.”

And how would the candidates know what to say, anyway?

Here’s an interesting development in the Hollywood writer’s strike: it may affect the next Democratic presidential debate.

New York, NY (AHN) – The ongoing writer’s strike in Hollywood has started to have an effect on the political arena, as the upcoming CBS presidential debate is being threatened as candidates refuse to cross the picket lines should the station writers decide to join the strike.

Although CBS news writers have yet to talk of joining the strike, guild leaders are allowed to call one at any time, should they see it necessary. Candidates have been publicly announcing their respect for the strikers, as many of them have canceled television appearances for the sake of not crossing picket lines.

And not just the debates:

United Press International reported that Sen. John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth have canceled a scheduled appearance on “The View” so as not to cross the picket lines of the Writes Guild of America.

We’ve seen this before, of course. Newspaper and magazine writers had to get their digital due from the Supreme Court (Tasini vs NY Times).

What is it about digital that makes media companies think it’s any different from any other form that a work can take? Does it really matter, when it comes to paying a writer, whether you watch an episode of CSI on your television screen or your iPod?

Here’s the best statement of the writer’s point of view I’ve seen. It’s less than 2 minutes long and managest to say everything that needs to be said.

Studios, just pay the people with the talent. All of them. Just pay them and stop whining.

Writing considered harmful to the soul

I had another run-in with Judaism tonight. The kid was in town with a couple of her friends for a terrific afternoon at the Cloisters. We took them out to an early dinner at a nearby Indian vegetarian Kosher restaurant. It’s pretty new and I hadn’t been there before. I didn’t know what their wine situation was, so I grabbed a bottle from the rack on my way out the door.

I was hopeful when I saw the menu not listing any beer or wines, but no dice, they have a license. They were willing to open our bottle anyway, but first, a question. “Is the wine Kosher?”

No, and guess they would have had to throw out any glasses into which it was poured, but I suspect that even if we’d also brought glasses, it would have been a no-go. What kind of religion gives a darn not only what goes on in the kitchen but what the customers do out front?

The same kind, I guess, that won’t let you write a note to yourself in the notepad you always carry around, if the writing is done in a synagogue.

It was earlier this year at a friend’s daughter’s bas mitzvah. It was one of those orthodox ceremonies where people kiss each other hello right in the aisles and then launch into long, full-voice conversations, right in the middle of yet another prayer in a three-hour service. That’s okay, but writing down something so that you won’t forget it is verboten.

“Writing is work,” I was explained. Well, often it is, and often it isn’t. And you know what? Talking is work if you’re a radio DJ. Kissing is work if you’re, well, a person for whom kissing is work.

What kind of religion thinks it can identify an entire activity like writing or talking or walking and say whether it’s work or not, independently of any context? Pulling a lever 4 times a minute, 240 times per hour, is a lot of work if you’re on an assembly line, but it’s apparently vastly entertaining if you’re in a Las Vegas casino.

Unfortunately, there’s no context in which I can find Judaism entertaining these days. It’s just annoying and simple-minded, for the simple-minded.

Newspaper allegedly gets it wrong

The Daily News is far from the only paper to get this wrong, but it gets it more starkly wrong than most — right in the headline:

Barry Bonds indicted for allegedly lying under oath

You can look at the indictment, and as you might expect, the grand jury doesn’t charge Bonds with allegedly lying under oath, it charges him with lying under oath.

Take Count Five:

Barry Lamar Bonds, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly, did corruptly endeavor to influence, obstruct, and impede the due administration of justice, by knowingly giving Grand Jury testimony that was intentionally evasive, false, and misleading….

The Daily News, in short, is commiting the sin of the double-qualifier. Either is correct:

. The grand jury indicted Bonds for x

. Bonds allegedly did x

but to put them together is to end up with something false, if not simply absurd.

Similarly, there’s a 20% chance of showers, and it might rain, but not, “there might be a 20% chance of rain.”

It is, in fact, a dead certainty that it might rain. And Bonds was absolutely indicted, not allegedly, for absolutely lying under oath, which he allegedly did.

Romancing the stone

Does the public really like romance movies? Especially ones that aren’t romantic comedies?

The answer seems to, “not so much.” A friend of mine recently asked me to name my two favorite romance movies, generously allowing, when asked, that romantic comedies were indeed romance movies. I came up with my first choice very quickly: The Lady Eve.

The second one didn’t come so quickly, so I went to the IMDB list of top 250 movies ever, as determined by the ratings given by the hundreds of thousands of people registered at the site. (Note that people simply rate movies; they’re not voting specifically for either their favorites nor what they think are best-ever.)

Is It’s a Wonderful Life (#31) a romance movie? Not really. Forrest Gump (#68)? Both are feel-good movies, but not romances. Singin’ in the Rain (#71)? No, it’s about something else. Back to the Future (#115)? Too much adventure and male bonding. Manhattan (#231)? One user comment at IMDB was, “A love song to Manhattan disguised as romantic comedy,” which I think is pretty accurate.

So here’s what we’re left with. I’ve italicized the romantic comedies.

• 9. Casablanca (1942)
  46. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
  78. Some Like It Hot (1959)
  94. The Apartment (1960)
  123. Annie Hall (1977)
  138. It Happened One Night (1934)
  147. The Graduate (1967)
  148. The Princess Bride (1987)
  162. The African Queen (1951)
  173. Gone with the Wind (1939)
  179. Groundhog Day (1993)
  207. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
  244. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
  245. To Have and Have Not (1944)

Without the comedies, here’s what remains, a single movie in the top 10 (barely), two in the top 100, and another three making it into the top 200. With eight in the top 250, pure romance makes for a mere 3.2% of the list.

• 9. Casablanca (1942)

  46. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
  147. The Graduate (1967)
  162. The African Queen (1951)
  173. Gone with the Wind (1939)
  207. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
  244. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
  245. To Have and Have Not (1944)

Even with the six comedies, the broad category of romance-movie accounts for less than 6% of people’s best-liked movies. To me, that seems odd. While I’ve never worked out my own personal top-250, it might well include three movies from the highly specialized category John-Cusack-romantic-comedies, none of which makes the IMDB list, or even comes very close (#250 of the top-250 gets a 7.9):

• High Fidelity (7.6)
  Grosse Pointe Blank (7.4)
  The Sure Thing (6.7)

Oddly, When Harry Met Sally, which I would guess is one of the most cited movies of all time, also get a mere 7.6. Soapdish, one of the few totally successful screwball comedies to be made after the 1940s, and one of the funniest movies of all time, in my opinion, gets an embarrassing 6.0. But this just confirms that romance movies, even romantic comedies, maybe be a staple of movie life, but it’s rarely what we feast upon.

Either the romance movie just isn’t most people’s cup of tea, or, perhaps, if the fault lies in the stars, and not ourselves, it just rarely rises to greatness. (Here’s a clue: The Lady Eve gets an 8.1 rating, but apparently not from enough voters, or enough of the right voters.)

This year’s dark and stormy night

This year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner was announced, and it’s a lulu.

“Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ‘permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash — to pee.”

Congrats to Jim Gleeson, 47, of Madison, Wisc.. As the AP story, notes, he “beat out thousands of other prose manglers.” Deservedly so.

How much public information is too much?

How much public information is too much? Or, to put it another way, can the Interweb make some information too public? In the past, we’ve had matters that were of public record, but not widely known and not widely accessible. That middle ground has lately been lost.

Earlier this week, many of the 53,000 state employees whose salaries are a matter of public record freaked out when the Lansing State Journal put a database of them up on the Web. It’s just the latest example of something that’s been going on for a long time.

As the Poynter Institute’s blog said on Friday (thanks, sjvn for the heads-up):

Although this information has always been a matter of public record, never before has it been so widely accessible. Thus, many state employees, LSJ readers, and other community members are in an uproar over this, citing privacy concerns.

We see this everywhere these days. Here are just three instances.

1. Sex offender databases existed in police stations and city halls for years, often as a matter of public record, but putting them on the Internet lets everyone view them with a mouse click.

So, for example, in Wayne N.J., where I used to live, there were three sex offenders registered in accord with Megan’s Law in early 2007. Not just their names but their address, gender, date of birth, eye color, hair color, height, weight, race, and crime are listed here.

2. Campaign contributions are a matter of public record, but a few years ago, they started showing up online. (C-SPAN, for example, has a search by donor name or zip code, or candidate, going back to 1994. The Federal Election Commission database is here.)

3. College students and job applicants still put their resumes on-line, not knowing their Social Security numbers, which millions of them include, can be harvested, a matter I wrote about back in March 2005.

Besides the Michigan state database, two things put me in mind of this. The first was the poorly done “study” by MSNBC that I wrote about yesterday, that relied on public databases of campaign contributions as mandated and collected by the Federal Election Commission and other agencies.

The second is from last weekend’s New York Times Book Review (yes, I still read the book review in one of the few newspapers that has one, as discussed here last month).

Tina Brown (yes, that Tina Brown) reviewed Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939 by Katie Riophe.

Why these couples? Why H. G. Wells and Rebecca West; Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim and John Francis (Earl) Russell; Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell; Lady Ottoline Morrell and Philip Morrell; Radclyffe Hall and Lady Una Troubridge; Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin? All were literary or artistic figures, famous in their time (some still are in ours). All had the useful (to the rest of us) habit of writing everything down. They did their thinking aloud on paper – in urgent, dashed-off notes, carefully hoarded correspondence, diary entries, hand-delivered notes and unsent emotional manifestos. All of it was “eyes only,” so to speak, but time has declassified it. The result is YouTube in a time capsule.

I’m not sure about the YouTube comparison. The diaries and letters presumably had a paucity of video, and today, blogs serve many of the purposes of these literary records. In fact, maybe a comparison to MySpace or rather Facebook is more apt (the differences between them is something Digglahhh is hopefully going to write about soon).

But that’s incidental to Brown’s main point, which comes in a paragraph so lengthy that I’m going to break it up so that readers of this blog don’t bill me for new eyeglasses.

In a sense the book’s title is a misnomer. These unions were not arrangements in any static sense; they were vibrant works in progress, exercises in passionate experimentalism. The encrusted inhibitions of the Victorian era had at last fallen away, allowing the intellectual elite to regard matrimony as a lifelong seminar in ways of loving. It’s hard to imagine now the successful management of so many creative permutations in marital compromises. The ménage of Clive and Vanessa Bell encompassed the presence of a live-in lover, the bisexual painter Duncan Grant; Grant fathered Vanessa’s child Angelica, whom Clive was happy to pretend was his. It was unconventional enough for the writer Radclyffe Hall and the monocle-wearing Lady Una Troubridge to live together in Paris openly as lesbians, but Troubridge also accommodated Hall’s obsessive pursuit of a nubile Russian nurse.

 

Today, when the invasiveness of media has largely put an end to such uninhibited pursuit of definitive emotion, it all seems not just interestingly adventurous but refreshingly tolerant. One can’t help feeling the sanctimony bred by publicity has made grown-up romantic life, marital and extramarital alike, at once more boring and more hazardous. Even royalty and the once inventive British aristocracy have to be as bourgeois as small-town librarians lest they fall victim to gossip columns, kiss-and-tells and tabloid newspaper exposés.

This then is the middle ground that has been lost. It’s not just that JFK got away with his affairs in and before his White House tenure, while Gary Hart and Bill Clinton did not. It’s that we have erased the DMZ that used to protect unconventional choices, made by the ordinary extraordinary citizens around us, from the battlefield of the ever-judgmental straight world.

When everything is either totally secret, or totally known, with nothing in between, we need to press to our chests matters that used to be held at arms length. Yet surely we will find it impossible to breath walking around that way all day, all our lives. And so, fearing that everything will be known, we will start to restrict our choices to the acceptable few and mundane. No more nubile Russian nurses. And as a lover of nurses (or at least one nurse), I say more’s the pity.

What do you read?

A thread on a mailing list generated a good discussion (thanks, Esther, for starting it), so I thought I’d get it started here as well. It’s based on a New York Review of Magazine (which I’d never heard of) questionaire.

1. How many print magazines do you subscribe to?

home, self: The New Yorker, Communications of the ACM (I’m a member), NY Times Magazine, NY Times Book Review (as part of the newspaper subscription), Climbing, Rock + Ice, Poets & Writers, Fourth Genre

home, other: New York magazine, EW, Newsweek, Prevention, Rolling Stone

work, self: a bunch of the free ones, eWeek, CIO, Information Week, etc.

work, access to: SciAm, Tech Review, Wired, Nature, the Economist, Chronicle of Higher Ed, etc.

2. What print or online magazines do you read regularly?

see above

3. What underappreciated magazine or Website do you think deserves a wider audience?

mine (IEEE Spectrum), FindLaw, the Onion, Financial Times, South China Morning Post

4. What print or online newspapers do you read regularly?

print: NY Times

online: none. very irregularly: WashPost, WSJ, LA Times, Mercury-News

5. What Websites do you consider essential reading?

I read a bunch of blogs regularly, but they’re mostly my friends; Google News, the feeds I’ve set up for my.yahoo. I still get most of my breaking news from mailing lists and other e-mail. Bruce Schneier’s blog is pretty essential, however.

6. What book(s) are you reading now?

Panasonic; Best Words, Best Order; The Goldfish Went On Vacation

7. What was the last great book you read?

American Bloomsbury, by Susan Cheever

8. What author or writer has the best Website/blog?

besides myself?!

 

So what do you read?

Here, Bullet

There’s a great poetry thread going on over at Brookynite’s place; some very nice poems have been posted.

My favorite book of poems of the moment is a bit harrowing, so maybe not perfect for librarian’s salon. But I can’t pass up an opportunity to pimp it. (And yes, the rest of the book is this good too. More info and ordering here.)

The author, Brian Turner, is the real deal — an MFA poet who then served in Iraq. One humorous note, and then on to the harrowing. I ordered from Abebooks and the shipper did the usual lastname, firstname. When added to the comma-spliced title poem name, the e-mail confirmation said: “Turner, Brian Here, Bullet”. Which took me a few seconds to parse.

Anyway, back to Turner, whose poems do to me what poetry is supposed to — stop the world for a heartbeat, then start it again with a flow of blood behind your ears so strong you can hear it as much as feel it. Understanding unfolds like the dawn herself, and each time you re-read a poem, a new part of the sky lightens, until you can see clear out to the horizon. At least, that’s how it works for me.

Here, Bullet

 

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Our endangered biblioecology

 

“I don’t understand why newspapers, when they want to cut space, they immediately think of depriving people who like to read.”
  — Frank Wilson, book-review editor, Philadelphia Inquirer

---

Sunday marked the last standalone book review section in the Chicago Tribune. Back in April the paper announced that beginning 19 May, its book section would move to Saturday, which “will cut circulation of the section roughly in half,” according to a comprehensive round-up of the dramatic decline in book reviewing by Art Winslow in the Huffington Post last month.

Is that better or worse than running book reviews on Sunday, but not as their own section? Readers of the Los Angeles Times will be able to judge for themselves. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal back in March,

Sometime this spring, the Los Angeles Times is expected to announce that it is folding its highly esteemed Sunday book review into a new section that will combine books with opinion pieces.

The Journal reports that

the book review as a separate section is endangered not only at the Los Angeles Times but at other major newspapers like the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Philadelphia Inquirer did this some years ago (though it is flirting with the idea of reversing it). The upshot is that you can now count on exactly one hand the last review sections standing.

That would reduce to five the number of separate book-review sections in major metropolitan newspapers still published nationwide, down from an estimated 10 to 12 a decade ago. The reason: not enough ads.

The toll is taken throughout, not just in separate review sections. Winslow found book reviews hurting everywhere, it seems:

among the most recent examples is the mid-April decision by the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to eliminate its book editor position, leaving the fate of book reviews there in doubt,

Elsewhere, at the The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., book editor Peder Zane’s position was recently cut.

In the fall, book critic Jerome Weeks of The Dallas Morning News left the paper rather than face the dramatic cuts in arts coverage that were imposed.

The Village Voice as well “booted out its book editor in a reorganization.” Then there are the newspapers that have made their cuts a different way— in the length of the reviews.

At the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, book editor Bob Hoover observed that 250 words is getting to be the standard length for reviews at his paper.

Some papers have cut their local reviews in favor of wire-service ones. Winslow mentions the Cleveland Plain Dealer and five others.

The two articles chronicle a virtual plague sweeping through American newspapers, a sort of reverse Dutch elm disease that will leave more trees standing — not just with the fewer pages they will need to print, but, inevitably, the fewer books that will get sold. For make no mistake about it — even as book publishers find other ways to market books more efficiently, they are more concerned with margins than total revenue:

The shift away from traditional advertising hasn’t helped the industry sell more books. Bookstore sales in 2006 dropped 2.9% to $16.1 billion from $16.6 billion in 2005, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

What neither article talks about is the residual damage this loss of review sections will do to the industry as a whole. The book world is a complex ecosystem that includes not just publishers, bookstores; and other stores, such as drug stores, supermarkets, newsstands, and WalMarts that incidentally sell books; but also writers and readers.

Some writers I know (such as Vivian Gornick and Francine Prose, whose classes I took) burnish their reputations as well as help keep the rent paid by writing reviews. Sophisticated reviews like theirs don’t just move books but ideas as well. Books are an essential part of the ongoing consideration of ideas that constitutes the essence of culture. A good book review not only describes the contribution a given book makes, the review itself moves the discussion forward.

Indeed, it seems obvious that the books that will be most greatly harmed here will be the ones whose ideas and contributions can’t be summed up in a headline news scroll. The big popular books sold on the front tables of Barnes & Noble may do as well or better than ever, but literary books, non-fiction books on unpopular topics, and first-time authors of all stripes will surely suffer.

The same populist triage of our culture is taking place in newspapers themselves (an irony made apparent in the Frank Wilson quote that starts this entry) and elsewhere. I hope to write something soon about how new postal rates new trigger another plague, this one killing small magazines and their publishers.

leap year orchid

This is another spam subject-line poem. (The last, and first, one was is here.) Once gain, the rules are as follows. The subject lines are unedited except minimally for punctuation and capitalization. This time, I tried not to even edit punctuation.

The day you feel fine comes soon

The day you feel fine comes soon
you of number
affirmation preeminence
augment
tumble within
did you know
did you see
disrespect
As shibboleth do ceremony

With quail each unbidden
dry obliging scrubland
what doeth them and the navy of gray hairs of the king even
blue vastly
be outworn
manufacturer of the tents

Even the night’s dour note
which must characterize a nation riding modern technology
you pyramid
do standard
as tonight
do writings
on discretion
do be destiny
by thin
with context
should sit down to reign lifted up their own heart, after the land

Is nocturne so castigate
leap year orchid
without even mentioning
algebraic
shall drink therein.
this kind think
as meant

Replacing parts is easy
quid pro quo evenings
cannery goose
picnic inferno
maze entrapment
grammar plated
do no noun
gnarls
godforsaken
in the cadaver
in the mills
is by reflection
is it causation

Graduation

[This is an open-letter to the person who asked.]

If you listen carefully, you can hear faint cries from Manhattan, every so often, from 2 May at 4:45 pm, when I turned in my MFA thesis, until 2:30 pm on the 18th, which is Commencement. The cries are pleasure or pain, like a baby’s, or the bouncing ones from the couple in the motel room next door getting it on. They’re pleasure and pain both, the bittersweet realization that school is over. I loved each and every class, and my classmates, and being with them, and I’m going to miss it all.

The literature seminars were terrific, though in an regular university way. A writing workshop class is something else again. There’s the ownership we have in our words, the risks we take in writing them, the way even fiction and poetry are about ourselves, one way or another, and the way the risks are all doubled and tripled when we show others work that still in progress…. It all makes for something that’s part encounter group, part martial arts.

Bittersweet as well was the thesis reading last week. For three days, Thurs/Fri/Sat, we each read 350 words from our theses; 30+ per night, almost 100 in the program in total. Two hours a night, snack food, beer, wine, an intermission, it was very pleasant. Last year apparently they had a longer time limit, and crammed it into two nights that were marathons of 5 and 4 hours.

350 words is not enough by half when you’re choosing them, but it turned out to give a real taste of what people did in their thesis and to let you know which ones you really wanted to go to the library and read (one copy of the thesis will be in the New School library forever). They were funny and fun and sad and revealing and sometimes the words soared high above and exploded like fireworks, and sometimes they hit you as if you had tried to catch a football with your ribcage.

I was put next-to-last on Friday night and couldn’t decide between two choices. My advisor wanted me to read one the end of Chapter 1, which is about a day of ice climbing. The other choice was the beginning of Chapter 3, about my climbing partner Crazy Mike.

The Crazy Mike selection would be easier for people to understand and it had a killer image in the first paragraph, the kind that blinds you like a camera-flash and lingers, making it hard to hear what’s next. It also ended with a great list, and writers love lists (because readers love them). It had a character who was a real character. Basically, it showed a lot of what I learned in the program and it was well liked in workshop.

The ice climbing passage had some drama, emotions, some nice images, and was about climbing, which was a huge plus. In addition, it went, as my advisor, the writer Susan Cheever, put it, from the particular to the general, which she said always worked. It didn’t workshop nearly as well.

Even at the intermission I, I was undecided. I asked Susan again, and again she said the ice climbing piece. I was still unsure. Finally, I said to myself that she knows what she’s talking about. She’s written book after book, she’s given hundreds of readings, she just finished a book tour where she had to decide what to read. She knows what works, and why the hell was I asking her if I didn’t think she knew best.

I brought both versions to the podium, looked up, said my name, adjusted the microphone, and decided to trust Susan. As I was reading, I knew it was going well. I was slow, I was clear, I was quietly animated, I was standing just the right distance from the microphone. I could barely look up at the 200 or so people sitting there—I hadn’t practiced the ice climbing piece, so I had to really look at it. The one time I remember raising my eyes I saw, in the front row, three faces listening intently—the head of the program; my final-semester workshop teacher; and the head of the fiction program.

I sat down to applause, shaking. (The next night I would talk to the person who I think had the absolutely best reading, a poet named Liesel, who described how much she shook after reading.) I looked over at Robert, the head of the program. He was waiting to make eye contact with me and smiled and nodded. I smiled back and looked to his right. My workshop teacher smiled and nodded. Then the head of the fiction program, who didn’t know me even by sight, did the same. The next night she would stop me as our paths crossed during the intermission, clasp my arm lightly, and tell me how much she liked my piece.

Thanks Susan. What I didn’t realize until afterwards is that it was the right choice because it was the risky choice; it was the believe-in-yourself choice.

A lot of people aren’t going to the recognition ceremony our part of the school is holding next week, nor the university-wide Commencement, the day after, so there was a strong sense on everyone’s part that this was our real graduation. In a sense, we were done last Wednesday when we turned in the thesis, or when we read from our thesis, or not until Commencement, but I know that, when Robert said, at the end of the thesis readings on Saturday night, “Congratulations,” that’s when it was really over for me.

I was graduated (sweet!) and we would never be together again (bitter), not for classes, or readings, or the bar after; we would see each other, but not in groups, not as fellow students, not with our writing raw and our selves turned inside-out, exposed to one another as if an experiment in collective open heart surgery. I miss it already.

Write on, right on

I’ve just downloaded Near the Lewis & Clark Trail, a master’s thesis “Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in The Department of English by Chad Husted” back in December 2001.

Here’s another one, God Knows What’s in These Weeds a collection of poems by Kristin Lynn Abraham, who was graduated by West Virginia University in the spring of 2006.

As I sit and write this, two copies of my master’s thesis sit on my desk at work, having been velo-bound at a local Kinko’s. One copy is destined for the school library, the other stays with the Creative Writing department. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll leave work early, drop it off at the department office, then go over to an apartment on Charles Street, where one of my fellow students is having an open house to celebrate.

Most of us there, fiction writers, non-fiction writers like myself, poets, and the handful of people in the writing-for-children program, will then start submitting chapters from our theses, or variations of them, to literary and commercial magazines. For almost all of us, the thesis represents the bulk of what we’ve produced for the past two years, and for many of us, these will be the first short stories, personal essays, poems, and books that we will get published.

That’s how it will go for those of us at New School University, but for Chad and Kristin and many other students in creative writing programs around the country, it didn’t, and won’t, go that way. Their schools have what’s called an ETD (electronic thesis and dissertation) requirement.

At schools with ETD policies, each and every dissertation and thesis goes up on the Web, rendering them unsubmittable for further publication. As Beth Kaufka and Jennifer Bryan write in “The Case Against Electronic Theses,” published in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers,

When a writer’s work is made available in electronic form to the public, it is considered published.

(Poets & Writers doesn’t put up its articles on its website; here’s a link to the abstract.)

Opponents of the ETD policy believe it renders creative writing in a thesis relatively useless for publication by forcing authors to relinquish first electronic rights, which most commercial and literary publishers demand.

Kaufka and Bryan are MFA students in fiction at Bowling Green State University, which publishes the prestigious literary journal, Mid-American Review. (The New School publishes a literary journal too, LIT. It’s less prestigious, but it did have a bit part in the recent movie, “Words & Music.”) Like me, they’ll be graduating later this month.

The two authors and their classmates dodged a bullet when the Bowling Green students, and eventually the writing department faculty, convinced the school’s Faculty Senate that the ETD policy should exclude MFA theses. A 5-year delay exists now, and it may be made 10 years.

Other schools have in-between policies. Some do ETD by default but let students opt out. Some, such as the University of Central Florida, wait one year and then put theses and dissertations on-line.

Kaufka and Bryan argue that that’s not enough. In fact, they argue that Bowling Green’s 10-year delay isn’t enough.

According to records of students who graduated from BGSU in the past thirty-eight years, 64 percent of graduates published their first book after more than five years, while 43 percent took more than ten years. If the ETD policy remained, the majority of graduates would miss out on such book contracts.

Kaufka and Bryan acknowledge the benefits of ETD, especially in the sciences, and even the existence of some benefits for creative writing students, but think the differences outweigh any similarities.

Other disciplines work toward the dissemination of knowledge and greater research possibilities, writers produce artwork.

They quote Jeanne Leiby, a professor at the University of Central Florida and editor of its Florida Review literary magazine, as saying,

The university doesn’t take the canvases of their painters upon graduation. Why would they take the “canvases” of its creative writers?

For my part, over the next month, I’ll be sending out two chapters to literary magazines. I’m glad the New School hasn’t gone the ETD route, and wish the best of luck to my fellow MFA students in their fight against a rule that seems to have been implemented with no regard for its unintended consequences.

They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Kinky Anymore

Somehow I missed Kinky Friedman’s stand-up defense of his friend Don Imus in the NY Post last week. For those who aren’t acquainted with the finer points of New York’s prowess as a world-leader in producing detritus, the Post is the city’s attempt to make visiting Londoners feel at home should they need something with which to wrap a fish.

Now, I like Kinky Friedman and have ever since I heard “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” (this
freely listenable version is actually introduced by Imus, which is a bit freaky). I liked him even more when I read The New Yorker’s quirky profile of him a couple of years ago.

But you know you’re in for an awkward piece of wordsmithing when an article starts out with a pairing of metaphors that equips a ship predating the Argos with the latest missle technologies.

COWARDS KICK AWAY ANOTHER PIECE OF AMERICA’S SOUL

 

I met Imus on the gangplank of Noah’s Ark. He was then and remains today a truth-seeking missile with the best bull-meter in the business.

Kinky starts his defense with the big but: There’s no excuse for what Imus said, BUT ….

There’s no excusing Imus’ recent ridiculous remark, but there’s something not kosher in America when one guy gets a Grammy and one gets fired for the same line.

Yes, Kinky, that is puzzling, about as puzzling as how one person’s work could win a Pulitzer Prize and another person get expelled for plagiarizing it—the words are the same, so what’s the problem?—or how James Frey was headed for trouble the moment he took the “Fiction” label off his manuscript and slapped on one that said “Memoir.”

At least we’ve left the anachronistic Biblical metaphors behind. The heart of Kinky’s defense of his friend is quite a different one:

The Matt Lauers and Al Rokers of this world live by the cue-card and die by the cue-card; Imus is a rare bird, indeed – he works without a net. When you work without a net as long as Imus has, sometimes you make mistakes.

Unfortunately, we’ve gone from bad to worse, metaphor-wise. In fact, we’ve entered the realm of what Orwell called the dying metaphor: “worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

The salient fact about actually working without a net is that you can hurt yourself. A circus high wire act takes place 20 meters or more above the ground the big top is pitched upon. People have walked wires strung across Niagra Falls. When you fall from great heights, you can die.

Karl Wallenda, the patriarch of the most famous family aerialist act in history, died when he fell from “a wind-whipped wire 123 ft (37 m) above a street in San Juan,” according to Answers.com.

Eight years ago I saw what happens when a rock climber falls from 25 meters up. Two friends of mine and I were coming back to our packs after completing a route in New York’s Shawangunks. A climber, Scott Ruit, had just fallen from the top of the first pitch of the same route. He lay on the ground, unconscious, breathing laboriously. His chest rose and fell only on one side. A small amount of blood trickled from his face, which was a ghostly white. His legs were splayed out in a jumble.

It took a quickly-assembled group of over a dozen climbers 45 minutes to carry him a few hundred yards down a rocky trail that twisted through the woods, out to the highway. From there, an ambulance took him to a waiting helicopter. He was dead before he arrived at a hospital just across the Hudson River.

Kinky, that’s what happens when you fall without a net. I’m sorry your best friend’s career plunged to a sudden death, but he was paid millions of dollars partly because what he was doing was risky. It’s not a real risk if you can just go on someone else’s radio show and say “I’m sorry.”

Real risks have consequences, and it’s not as if Imus paid the ultimate price of working without a net. You can still visit with your best friend, smoke Montecristo cigars with him, sing wacky sarcastic songs to him. Scott Ruit’s friends can’t. Karl Wallenda’s family can’t. In fact, Kinky, why don’t you put the keyboard down and give your friend a big hug right now. And when you pick it up again, think before you start typing. You’re a better writer than this.