The winter had been long, harsh and cold beyond memory. Snow was deep; the wind did not blow to clear the ridges so horses could get at the grass. Instead there were occasional hard bright days that made an ice crust on top so the horses’ fetlocks left red on the snow. The man pulled off the thick cottonwood bark higher than his horse could reach, throwing it down for fodder. There was no meat in the lodge. The cached dry meat was exhausted early -- a rawhide bundle of it had accidentally fallen off the horse when crossing water so that it was spoiled, turned moldy instead of drying again.
He had to go hunting, knowing he might not come back, might not even find prey. Now, having gone as far as he dared -- maybe too far -- he was hoping to return to camp empty-handed. Not hoping. Everything in him pointed, yearned, strove towards the lodge where his family was rolled up in buffalo robes, trying to sleep the winter away. Heavy overcast had prevented him from seeing the sun and now it was darkening, but he knew the way. A new skiff of snow powdered the top of the most recent crust and, looking back, he saw he was traveling straight.
Following the ridges as was the usual winter strategy didn’t help much this time. The wind hadn’t blown snow off the grass before the sun hardened a shell on top, so that the horse had to stab every step down into the snow. The rider had walked some, light enough to stay on top, but even then the horse had to work hard and he knew he only had a limited amount of strength himself. He had barely the strength to beat the horse sharply so it wouldn't just stop when it floundered in a drift.
He had felt the horse stagger and sway for a while. He was riding when it fell -- not tipping over so much as sinking straight down because the deep layers of snow propped it. For a while he didn’t realize the horse was dead and kept flailing at it. Then it filtered through his gelid consciousness that there was neither breath nor heartbeat. He lay on top of it for a while, trying to soak up its last warmth. He’d known how exhausted it was but it had been the only way to get far enough from the camp to find prey.
His whole life from his vision ordeal on had been training for survival in edge-of-life situations. At the feet of the oldsters, at the shoulders of grown men, he had listened carefully to their advice, their strategies. One was to always keep one’s steel knife secured and he knew now that if he hadn’t had a knife, he would not be able to skin this horse and cut it up. He would not have killed it -- a horse was an important survival force, as important as the knife -- but now it was only meat.
He would have to hurry or the cold would make the horse impossible to skin or cut up. As though he were skinning a buffalo, he made a cut down the spine and began to peel the hide off on one side, digging snow out of the way. When he got down far enough to access the steaming viscera, he reached in for the soft purple liver and tore off mouthfuls to restore his strength a bit. It worked. It was a temptation to just crawl inside the horse, to soak up its heat, but it would soon become a prison, freezing to iron with ribs for bars.
His plan was to make a sled or skid from the hide, cut up as much meat as he thought he could tow, and try to pull it on to the camp. The distance was not impossible -- just at the outer limits of what a human could do. But he’d had a little hot bloody meat now. Anyway there was no other option.
The movement had attracted attention and the smells of hot horsemeat had gripped the minds of three wolves who were light enough to run on the snow, regardless of the weight they had gained from eating bogged-down elk and moose along the riverbeds. For them it was a good winter, even though digging out a place in the snow for them to sleep in a pile with their tails over their noses could cut their paws. They sat down to wait and watch.
At first the man’s efforts went well and he traveled forward in an encouraging way. The sun had gone down; northern lights sheeted and billowed across the sky. When he was far enough away that the wolves felt safe, not far at all, they came to the remains of the horse and choked down as much as their stomachs could stretch to hold. But it was quickly freezing and even the crushing jaws of a wolf has its limits.
They thought of the man, still warm meat and leaving a clear trail in the skiff of snow. They thought they could always come back to the rest of the horse. They didn’t know they were thinking. To them it was a feeling, an inner compass they had learned to use by watching older wolves on previous kills. Without discussion, they set off, saving their energy, knowing they didn’t have to hurry.
When they tore the man apart, he still had enough focus and energy to sing his death song and lash out with his knife. He couldn’t kill any of the wolves, but managed to wound one badly enough that it died later. The other two slept a little colder after that.
In a few days a chinook wind came and took the temperature high enough that small creatures could easily strip the horse down to a skeleton, especially since the side had been skinned. A moose went through the ice in swift water not far from the man’s lodge and drowned. His family found it and ate it, enough meat that they all survived. Years later the man’s oldest son trapped two wolves who traveled together and traded their hides for new steel knife to replace the one that had disappeared with his father.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
CHANGING TIMES, CHANGING KIDS
Tim’s aunt, who had been an English teacher, has just died. She was born in 1923, which makes her approximately the same age as my younger English teachers, women who had perfect confidence in the order of the world, though they had gone through the Depression as adolescents which convinced most of them that education and hard work were what the world was about. They were admirers of geniuses, like the major male writers of the post-WWII period. Like Hemingway (1899-1961) whose books she bought for Tim. I suggested that as a Michigan boy who did a lot of fishing, for Tim it was “The Big Two-Hearted River” that might have been a good fit, but he says “The Sun Also Rises” is sublime. Though she was his mother’s older sister and his mother thought bookstores were dangerous places where bad people hung out, his aunt took him into those sacred precincts. Gradually, his mother was persuaded that bookstores were safe, but by then Tim had adopted the idea that dangerous places and “bad” people were irresistible.
Being an English teacher on the reservation never meant having to render an opinion on bookstores, since there weren’t any. Nor did I ever dare suggest that the students read Edith Wharton novels, as Tim had to. (Actually, some of the stories about his mother make me think of Wharton and her miserable trapped women, often Dutch.) My problem was socioeconomic at first (make their English usage conform so they’ll be respectable) and then political. But many students didn’t really know how to read because of absenteeism, changing schools, and no one being able to capture their attention. I had no training at all in how to teach reading because it was assumed that high school students would know. They were far from stupid and some read all the time, like Tim. They loved comics enough to (ahem) liberate them from the candy and photo store. No one sold magazines like the ones I had been used to reading and I couldn’t afford subscriptions.
After the post-modern revolution began, every day meant trying to convince NA students that I had any right to teach them, regardless of content. I never did come to terms with those politically motivated Indian students beyond just closing the door and trying to argue it out with them. We became close in the process, but I was always in danger of being fired and possibly punched out by a parent. All of us had the feeling in the Seventies, that the world was plunging into revolution so a lot of people tried hard to keep order, meaning the status quo.
The same problem surfaced in 2003 in a different way. The small-town Cut Bank kids just off the rez felt that no outsider had a right to teach them or any notion of how to do it right. Merely being white meant nothing in an oil town where floating roughnecks and outside franchise managers brought along their kids. You had to have grown up in the town. The fact of long history with the rez kids was just added evidence of my despicable outsiderhood. They weren’t racist so much as they were xenophobic.
There was an exception. I had been hired in the belief that if I had taught on the rez successfully, I must have been a master of adversarial teaching. The white admin thought that the kids on the rez must be defiant demons. Actually, they were pretty cooperative so long as they understood the point of what we were doing. The Cut Bank administration thought a powerful teacher was required because they had created a group of male renegades, otherwise known as “gifted athletes,” who had covert permission to do anything they wanted to do so long as they won games. The boys themselves informed me of this. Their arrogance was only tempered slightly by their suspicion that somehow they were being used.
Indeed they were. Knocked unconscious on the football field. Knees destroyed on the basketball floor. Excused from class far more than they could ever make up. Riding buses across below zero Montana all day and all night to get to adversaries, eating in fast food joints. Not just that. Beer blasts enabled by adults who wanted to control them. “Extreme” fighting in back alleys, also enabled by adults: dog fights, cock fights, boy fights -- made no difference to them so long as there was violence and gambling. Girls were hurt in the byplay of something close to trauma-syndrome-triggered abuse, pregnancy and VD -- to say nothing of the emotional debris. Parents wanted them to entrap big shot athletes. And so on. Eventually I’ll work the indignation out of my system in a YA novel. The “nice” people in the town operated on denial.
I keep wondering how I would have reacted if I’d been Tim’s English teacher. Hemingway seems right. Certainly I wouldn’t have made him read Edith Wharton. Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers -- okay, Jack Kerouac and even the Beats. But I’d have been totally overmatched by Rimbaud or Henry Miller, even if I’m smuggled them past the admin. I did know Beckett and Brecht because my undergrad work was mostly theatre.
But kids like Tim need to write more than to read. One girl forced to sit in a Cut Bank English class refused to join in. She sat by the door and kept her book closed, her jaw set. I gave her a spiral notebook and asked her to write me a letter in it. Before the next session I wrote a letter back to her -- not as though she were a student, but like a friend. She wrote me another letter and I responded again. In a couple of weeks she was participating in discussion and reading the assignments.
Tim and I are corresponding this same way except that it turned into a book: “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs,” and by now it’s developing into a Vook ("The Fallen and the Flight") with video that Tim and the Cinematheque boys do. Even in the midst of his surgeries, he continued to correspond with his students via Internet. They send assignments, reports, complaints, enthusiasms. Their trauma and xenophobia is far beyond anything I ever imagined, but then today’s world is also beyond anything any of us expected.
Being an English teacher on the reservation never meant having to render an opinion on bookstores, since there weren’t any. Nor did I ever dare suggest that the students read Edith Wharton novels, as Tim had to. (Actually, some of the stories about his mother make me think of Wharton and her miserable trapped women, often Dutch.) My problem was socioeconomic at first (make their English usage conform so they’ll be respectable) and then political. But many students didn’t really know how to read because of absenteeism, changing schools, and no one being able to capture their attention. I had no training at all in how to teach reading because it was assumed that high school students would know. They were far from stupid and some read all the time, like Tim. They loved comics enough to (ahem) liberate them from the candy and photo store. No one sold magazines like the ones I had been used to reading and I couldn’t afford subscriptions.
After the post-modern revolution began, every day meant trying to convince NA students that I had any right to teach them, regardless of content. I never did come to terms with those politically motivated Indian students beyond just closing the door and trying to argue it out with them. We became close in the process, but I was always in danger of being fired and possibly punched out by a parent. All of us had the feeling in the Seventies, that the world was plunging into revolution so a lot of people tried hard to keep order, meaning the status quo.
The same problem surfaced in 2003 in a different way. The small-town Cut Bank kids just off the rez felt that no outsider had a right to teach them or any notion of how to do it right. Merely being white meant nothing in an oil town where floating roughnecks and outside franchise managers brought along their kids. You had to have grown up in the town. The fact of long history with the rez kids was just added evidence of my despicable outsiderhood. They weren’t racist so much as they were xenophobic.
There was an exception. I had been hired in the belief that if I had taught on the rez successfully, I must have been a master of adversarial teaching. The white admin thought that the kids on the rez must be defiant demons. Actually, they were pretty cooperative so long as they understood the point of what we were doing. The Cut Bank administration thought a powerful teacher was required because they had created a group of male renegades, otherwise known as “gifted athletes,” who had covert permission to do anything they wanted to do so long as they won games. The boys themselves informed me of this. Their arrogance was only tempered slightly by their suspicion that somehow they were being used.
Indeed they were. Knocked unconscious on the football field. Knees destroyed on the basketball floor. Excused from class far more than they could ever make up. Riding buses across below zero Montana all day and all night to get to adversaries, eating in fast food joints. Not just that. Beer blasts enabled by adults who wanted to control them. “Extreme” fighting in back alleys, also enabled by adults: dog fights, cock fights, boy fights -- made no difference to them so long as there was violence and gambling. Girls were hurt in the byplay of something close to trauma-syndrome-triggered abuse, pregnancy and VD -- to say nothing of the emotional debris. Parents wanted them to entrap big shot athletes. And so on. Eventually I’ll work the indignation out of my system in a YA novel. The “nice” people in the town operated on denial.
I keep wondering how I would have reacted if I’d been Tim’s English teacher. Hemingway seems right. Certainly I wouldn’t have made him read Edith Wharton. Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers -- okay, Jack Kerouac and even the Beats. But I’d have been totally overmatched by Rimbaud or Henry Miller, even if I’m smuggled them past the admin. I did know Beckett and Brecht because my undergrad work was mostly theatre.
But kids like Tim need to write more than to read. One girl forced to sit in a Cut Bank English class refused to join in. She sat by the door and kept her book closed, her jaw set. I gave her a spiral notebook and asked her to write me a letter in it. Before the next session I wrote a letter back to her -- not as though she were a student, but like a friend. She wrote me another letter and I responded again. In a couple of weeks she was participating in discussion and reading the assignments.
Tim and I are corresponding this same way except that it turned into a book: “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs,” and by now it’s developing into a Vook ("The Fallen and the Flight") with video that Tim and the Cinematheque boys do. Even in the midst of his surgeries, he continued to correspond with his students via Internet. They send assignments, reports, complaints, enthusiasms. Their trauma and xenophobia is far beyond anything I ever imagined, but then today’s world is also beyond anything any of us expected.
Monday, January 04, 2010
RECLAIMING THE COUNTER CULTURE
"I want to notice the way in which each of the movements he seemed to involve a religious reaction against a certain 1960s-style form of the counterculture.
"The Protestant case in the United States is especially instructive here. Whereas self-styled “fundamentalists” in 1920 identified themselves as opposed to Darwinian science and Liberal Protestant theology, in the 1970s their target had shifted decisively: feminism, sexual liberation, and secular politics were the new theological and cultural targets du jour. John Paul II’s resolve in undoing a great deal of the Second Vatican Council’s “new openness to the modern world” (another product of the mid-1960s) may be read in similar terms, as may Khomeini’s reaction against many Iranian clerics’ proximity to, and collusion with, the secular reforms of Western-leaning and Western-style political leaders. . ."
--“Religion at Decade’s End” by Louis A. Ruprecht in the “Religion Dispatches” online aggregator.
“The study, “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer — the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters — had become more politically active."
NYTimes 1/4/10
__________
Tim points out that these schemes for Youth Service teachers, like the system of using adjunct faculty, is really just a source of cheap and obedient labor for school administrators. My on-going dialogue with Tim Barrus pivots around our treatment of young people -- not just children -- in schools, law enforcement, families, and at large. We also share a yearning for the watershed counterculture movement of the Sixties and Seventies, which immediately evoked an unequal and opposite opposition from the established cultures. WWII is the earliest point in the sequence that I can remember, demanding the utmost effort, creating mortal drama, and leaving everyone exhausted. Some felt it was a hell that should be avoided at any cost and others rather longed for all that drama, esp. those who (like Cheney or Reagan) weren’t really involved.
The advantage of my ten years as a teacher on the Blackfeet Reservation was that it was essentially in the 19th century, so my eleven year age difference with Tim is lessened. We both entered the Age of Aquarius with naive eyes and a joyful welcoming of a potentially less confining and judgmental world. We have resented and resisted being forced back into the box. I’ve seemed to have been going along with the conventional, but only enough to keep from being stamped out, which takes a little more energy all the time.
The suggestion by Ruprecht is that we’re all going to be forced to give up some of this culture war in the face of global weather change. I accept this, but my question in this little 1,000 word blog post is what sorts of organizations will protect youngsters while allowing them to keep growing. Church and school badly need transformation.
Both institutions, for roughly the same reasons, have become petrified and self-eating for the ironic reason that they are trying to preserve themselves without having to change, which is impossible. The result is that most of the effective changes are coming from outside the systems in order to escape the corporate cement over all the best fertile soil. The new element that might allow the counter-culture to flourish this time is indubitably the Internet, a young people’s tool. We’re in the interstices and they are us, insuppressible.
The cultural break this time is music based, though more roots than rock n'roll. What could be more poetic? Joining math with emotion, it travels virally around the planet. Not only do we watch movies, we create our avatars (well, the youngsters do) and move into them.
Schools are both too boring and too ineffective. Faculties have become catch-basins for the local common-denominator culture, cash-cows for the enterprising principals and superintendents, and political machines for power mongers. They are beginning to age out.
Youth is criminalized. As Tim points out, running away from family will get you a jail term, even though “family” is hardly the right term for a poverty-stricken, drug-riddled, abusive household where people might or might not be genetically related. Men with second-hand families are not so likely to value their “possessions” which is still how many laws define children and wives. On the other hand, for women, freedom is just another word for “abandonment” and “the right to work” has meant a new slavery.
Okay. Enough negatives. Let’s envision something different.
I’ve always liked the old counter-culture idea of communes, which goes way back into history to the original bands of hunter-gatherers. Survivors since the Sixties have quietly existed for half a century, doing their thing. They are affinity groups who welcomed all the technology of organizational development that corporations pretend to adopt but then stamp out, including churches and schools. Any organization that values its own continued existence over the welfare of the individual human members has taken its metaphor of being a “body” far too seriously and has become a monster.
Now self-education is possible in a way never existent before, though books have helped. I’m thinking of Salman Kahn, whose gift for simple explanations was so helpful to his niece that it proved contagious and developed into a website http://www.khanacademy.org/ Even I can understand his explanations, which now include such arcane topics as the economy. I think it IS relevant that he’s not the usual Euro white male but rather from the region that invented math in the first place.
Education in schools, esp. higher education, has always been as much about horizontal peer exchange of information and worldviews as about mastery of a canon of some kind. The vertical dimension of professor/student=lecture has been weakening even as the “silo” forces of assigned disciplines have been dissolving. Now we can collaborate or witness others collaborating and investigate relevant information that was previously sequestered as someone else’s property. My own thinking about religion ranges from fMRI research through Blackfeet ceremonies through novels and geology, without excluding traditional religious studies in a university.
My high school class of 1957 chose the motto: “Now we have the timber; let us build.” It sounded kinda, well, “wooden,” at the time. But maybe there was something to it.
"The Protestant case in the United States is especially instructive here. Whereas self-styled “fundamentalists” in 1920 identified themselves as opposed to Darwinian science and Liberal Protestant theology, in the 1970s their target had shifted decisively: feminism, sexual liberation, and secular politics were the new theological and cultural targets du jour. John Paul II’s resolve in undoing a great deal of the Second Vatican Council’s “new openness to the modern world” (another product of the mid-1960s) may be read in similar terms, as may Khomeini’s reaction against many Iranian clerics’ proximity to, and collusion with, the secular reforms of Western-leaning and Western-style political leaders. . ."
--“Religion at Decade’s End” by Louis A. Ruprecht in the “Religion Dispatches” online aggregator.
“The study, “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer — the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters — had become more politically active."
NYTimes 1/4/10
__________
Tim points out that these schemes for Youth Service teachers, like the system of using adjunct faculty, is really just a source of cheap and obedient labor for school administrators. My on-going dialogue with Tim Barrus pivots around our treatment of young people -- not just children -- in schools, law enforcement, families, and at large. We also share a yearning for the watershed counterculture movement of the Sixties and Seventies, which immediately evoked an unequal and opposite opposition from the established cultures. WWII is the earliest point in the sequence that I can remember, demanding the utmost effort, creating mortal drama, and leaving everyone exhausted. Some felt it was a hell that should be avoided at any cost and others rather longed for all that drama, esp. those who (like Cheney or Reagan) weren’t really involved.
The advantage of my ten years as a teacher on the Blackfeet Reservation was that it was essentially in the 19th century, so my eleven year age difference with Tim is lessened. We both entered the Age of Aquarius with naive eyes and a joyful welcoming of a potentially less confining and judgmental world. We have resented and resisted being forced back into the box. I’ve seemed to have been going along with the conventional, but only enough to keep from being stamped out, which takes a little more energy all the time.
The suggestion by Ruprecht is that we’re all going to be forced to give up some of this culture war in the face of global weather change. I accept this, but my question in this little 1,000 word blog post is what sorts of organizations will protect youngsters while allowing them to keep growing. Church and school badly need transformation.
Both institutions, for roughly the same reasons, have become petrified and self-eating for the ironic reason that they are trying to preserve themselves without having to change, which is impossible. The result is that most of the effective changes are coming from outside the systems in order to escape the corporate cement over all the best fertile soil. The new element that might allow the counter-culture to flourish this time is indubitably the Internet, a young people’s tool. We’re in the interstices and they are us, insuppressible.
The cultural break this time is music based, though more roots than rock n'roll. What could be more poetic? Joining math with emotion, it travels virally around the planet. Not only do we watch movies, we create our avatars (well, the youngsters do) and move into them.
Schools are both too boring and too ineffective. Faculties have become catch-basins for the local common-denominator culture, cash-cows for the enterprising principals and superintendents, and political machines for power mongers. They are beginning to age out.
Youth is criminalized. As Tim points out, running away from family will get you a jail term, even though “family” is hardly the right term for a poverty-stricken, drug-riddled, abusive household where people might or might not be genetically related. Men with second-hand families are not so likely to value their “possessions” which is still how many laws define children and wives. On the other hand, for women, freedom is just another word for “abandonment” and “the right to work” has meant a new slavery.
Okay. Enough negatives. Let’s envision something different.
I’ve always liked the old counter-culture idea of communes, which goes way back into history to the original bands of hunter-gatherers. Survivors since the Sixties have quietly existed for half a century, doing their thing. They are affinity groups who welcomed all the technology of organizational development that corporations pretend to adopt but then stamp out, including churches and schools. Any organization that values its own continued existence over the welfare of the individual human members has taken its metaphor of being a “body” far too seriously and has become a monster.
Now self-education is possible in a way never existent before, though books have helped. I’m thinking of Salman Kahn, whose gift for simple explanations was so helpful to his niece that it proved contagious and developed into a website http://www.khanacademy.org/ Even I can understand his explanations, which now include such arcane topics as the economy. I think it IS relevant that he’s not the usual Euro white male but rather from the region that invented math in the first place.
Education in schools, esp. higher education, has always been as much about horizontal peer exchange of information and worldviews as about mastery of a canon of some kind. The vertical dimension of professor/student=lecture has been weakening even as the “silo” forces of assigned disciplines have been dissolving. Now we can collaborate or witness others collaborating and investigate relevant information that was previously sequestered as someone else’s property. My own thinking about religion ranges from fMRI research through Blackfeet ceremonies through novels and geology, without excluding traditional religious studies in a university.
My high school class of 1957 chose the motto: “Now we have the timber; let us build.” It sounded kinda, well, “wooden,” at the time. But maybe there was something to it.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
AESTHETICS IN THE NEW MEDIA
In view of all these new media, what stays the same? Aesthetics. The principles of perception. Because the media can pack together all sorts of sensory events from print to 3-D film, but the human brain still takes it in according to the way the human brain works. So how does it work?
Good question.
But there are some principles that remain the same, points of attention that are relevant whether you are composing music or transmitting print or painting a mural. They are mostly about organization, which amounts to the order in which the material is presented to the consumer. There needs to be a beginning and end. Attention must be paid to the transitions in any sequence, either between different “beats” of content (this is acting and directing talk) or between shifts in media. Many people expect a rising action, a turn of events, and some kind of resolution before the end.
In the New Media, some things are different. More is expected of the consumer. One is the idea of the continuous loop: sequences of equal value just keep happening, one after the other, and the consumer is expected to supply the beginning or ending by signing on or off. But the events are in segments so the consumer can presumably see the intervals between segments as beginnings. This is like the old-fashioned newsreels where the stories ran all day and people came and went as their schedules and tolerance allowed. Or like song anthology sequences, which can be made deliberately random on an iPod or be planned out according to some scheme.
In addition, a suspension of interpretation is needed until one catches on to what is happening (or not). For instance, the first time I saw “Wild Strawberries,” I arrived late, during the dream sequence, without knowing what it was. I just had to tolerate confusion and questions for a few minutes until I understood that this was psychological sequence and imagery rather than realistic imagery. When I was little and saw the impressionistic movie, “The Red Shoes,” I had a hard time separating what was in the characters’ heads from what was “real.” Many contemporary movies (maybe TOO many) are pretty confusing that way, in particular if the viewer has no background in that context and therefore no reference in reality.
Our understanding of narrative is far more flat or maybe wave-shaped than the traditional Greek drama pattern. We are much more likely to see events as a treadmill than a ski jump. We are a bit suspicious of ski jumps. They seem over-dramatic. But we love risk and violence: crashes, pile-ups, even bodies, one after another. Banal and repetitious as suicide bombers can be, journalists try to keep our emotions engaged (rage, indignation, catharsis, determination) by supplying ever more unexpected detail: the hand still holding a coffee mug though detached from the coffee drinker. But then what in the next one?
Likewise, there are so many absurd situations in a society full of mixed cultures that it’s hard to capture simple humor. The cat who plays the piano, putting her little head down on the keys as if to savor the sound, strikes people as a stunt instead of a gentle and unexpected merging of human and feline behavior. Some people have been so calloused by politics that they can’t perceive anything short of slapstick. Irony hasn’t ended, but ironists are maybe a little worn out.
A good artist plays expectation against surprise, whether the latter is amusing or horrible. Judging just how to do that is a skill but also means knowing the audience and that might be the hardest part of contemporary art forms, especially in the more portable modes like videos, except that people DO self-select and demographics can sort themselves out. Personally, I like to stumble upon some new cultural circle, but my tolerance for bafflement and ambiguity is pretty high. On the other hand, I don’t see or hear as well as I once did. Even more of a problem is that I have such a library of precedents in my head that I’m likely to activate one of them as relevant when it really isn’t.
Channel-surfing and radio scanning are one consumer-controlled sort of segmenting, but moving deliberately from one strand of a story to a sub-plot or from print to visual is a different sort of thing. In the case of Tim and myself alternating voices, moving between them is a significant transition in tone, even if we keep the subject the same, and some people will simply leave one of us out, the way I used to read Zane Grey westerns by skipping all the sunsets. There have always been and will always be people who cherry-pick scenes and make their own loop, repeating them again and again. But until now, no one could take film or music and “mash” it into something new, maybe critical and maybe a tremendous expansion and enhancement.
At a time when we need a “library” of shared references, the old canon is pretty threadbare until its very threadbareness becomes a subject, like the Romeo & Juliet currently on Broadway -- acted out versions of people’s faulty memories. And this adds to our sense of “reflexivity” -- watching ourselves watching, critiquing ourselves even as we critique. Though time has not reversed its direction, we have left far behind the Greek or Christian or whatever culture it was that invented a continuum with a neat beginning, extent and end. In an ontological sense, our beginning and end have become so infinite, so cosmic, so present but imperceptible, that they’re largely irrelevant -- which may give us a craving for an environment where a seed DOES get planted, sprout, mature, scatter more seeds, and die into compost. But when we can see powerful and beloved people’s images so clearly as they are born, grow up, enjoy a mature life, decline and die, maybe we value much more the images of infinity and eternity and yearn to know what cannot ever be destroyed. Can time be destroyed? The Queen of England can be destroyed. Can the British Isles sink beneath the sea? Clearly humans can be destroyed. This story seems to be significant to us, whether schlock poorly done or not. In the end, content rules.
Good question.
But there are some principles that remain the same, points of attention that are relevant whether you are composing music or transmitting print or painting a mural. They are mostly about organization, which amounts to the order in which the material is presented to the consumer. There needs to be a beginning and end. Attention must be paid to the transitions in any sequence, either between different “beats” of content (this is acting and directing talk) or between shifts in media. Many people expect a rising action, a turn of events, and some kind of resolution before the end.
In the New Media, some things are different. More is expected of the consumer. One is the idea of the continuous loop: sequences of equal value just keep happening, one after the other, and the consumer is expected to supply the beginning or ending by signing on or off. But the events are in segments so the consumer can presumably see the intervals between segments as beginnings. This is like the old-fashioned newsreels where the stories ran all day and people came and went as their schedules and tolerance allowed. Or like song anthology sequences, which can be made deliberately random on an iPod or be planned out according to some scheme.
In addition, a suspension of interpretation is needed until one catches on to what is happening (or not). For instance, the first time I saw “Wild Strawberries,” I arrived late, during the dream sequence, without knowing what it was. I just had to tolerate confusion and questions for a few minutes until I understood that this was psychological sequence and imagery rather than realistic imagery. When I was little and saw the impressionistic movie, “The Red Shoes,” I had a hard time separating what was in the characters’ heads from what was “real.” Many contemporary movies (maybe TOO many) are pretty confusing that way, in particular if the viewer has no background in that context and therefore no reference in reality.
Our understanding of narrative is far more flat or maybe wave-shaped than the traditional Greek drama pattern. We are much more likely to see events as a treadmill than a ski jump. We are a bit suspicious of ski jumps. They seem over-dramatic. But we love risk and violence: crashes, pile-ups, even bodies, one after another. Banal and repetitious as suicide bombers can be, journalists try to keep our emotions engaged (rage, indignation, catharsis, determination) by supplying ever more unexpected detail: the hand still holding a coffee mug though detached from the coffee drinker. But then what in the next one?
Likewise, there are so many absurd situations in a society full of mixed cultures that it’s hard to capture simple humor. The cat who plays the piano, putting her little head down on the keys as if to savor the sound, strikes people as a stunt instead of a gentle and unexpected merging of human and feline behavior. Some people have been so calloused by politics that they can’t perceive anything short of slapstick. Irony hasn’t ended, but ironists are maybe a little worn out.
A good artist plays expectation against surprise, whether the latter is amusing or horrible. Judging just how to do that is a skill but also means knowing the audience and that might be the hardest part of contemporary art forms, especially in the more portable modes like videos, except that people DO self-select and demographics can sort themselves out. Personally, I like to stumble upon some new cultural circle, but my tolerance for bafflement and ambiguity is pretty high. On the other hand, I don’t see or hear as well as I once did. Even more of a problem is that I have such a library of precedents in my head that I’m likely to activate one of them as relevant when it really isn’t.
Channel-surfing and radio scanning are one consumer-controlled sort of segmenting, but moving deliberately from one strand of a story to a sub-plot or from print to visual is a different sort of thing. In the case of Tim and myself alternating voices, moving between them is a significant transition in tone, even if we keep the subject the same, and some people will simply leave one of us out, the way I used to read Zane Grey westerns by skipping all the sunsets. There have always been and will always be people who cherry-pick scenes and make their own loop, repeating them again and again. But until now, no one could take film or music and “mash” it into something new, maybe critical and maybe a tremendous expansion and enhancement.
At a time when we need a “library” of shared references, the old canon is pretty threadbare until its very threadbareness becomes a subject, like the Romeo & Juliet currently on Broadway -- acted out versions of people’s faulty memories. And this adds to our sense of “reflexivity” -- watching ourselves watching, critiquing ourselves even as we critique. Though time has not reversed its direction, we have left far behind the Greek or Christian or whatever culture it was that invented a continuum with a neat beginning, extent and end. In an ontological sense, our beginning and end have become so infinite, so cosmic, so present but imperceptible, that they’re largely irrelevant -- which may give us a craving for an environment where a seed DOES get planted, sprout, mature, scatter more seeds, and die into compost. But when we can see powerful and beloved people’s images so clearly as they are born, grow up, enjoy a mature life, decline and die, maybe we value much more the images of infinity and eternity and yearn to know what cannot ever be destroyed. Can time be destroyed? The Queen of England can be destroyed. Can the British Isles sink beneath the sea? Clearly humans can be destroyed. This story seems to be significant to us, whether schlock poorly done or not. In the end, content rules.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
"GLITTERING PRIZES" vs. "LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE"
The first paragraph of a review of Lucinella by Kati Nolfi for the “Book Slut” blog.
“Artists are cherished and reviled for their bad behavior. They transgress where normal people cannot. In Lore Segal's Lucinella, a thrilling experimental novella first published in 1976 and now reissued by Melville House's Contemporary Art of the Novella series, New York poets are a competitive and shallow bunch. The bad behavior in Lucinella is the social kind; while there's some indiscriminate fucking, there's no homicide or drug addiction. The poets are preoccupied with who's who, who's where, what they're writing, who they're doing. They are writers, but they are not self-sacrificing ascetics as some assume artists must be. They would sacrifice each other for a speaking engagement or publication; an editor's career is described as "standing on your writers' shoulders, alternatively with your foot on one or another of their necks." You could call the relationships symbiotic or more accurately, opportunistic. They search for meaning, order, fame, and transcendence in dowdyish party scenes of empty fabulousness and joyless desperation. But then each success proves insignificant and fuels the search for the next one.“
This is a pretty apt summary of “The Glittering Prizes.” Now I’ve watched Nancy Mitford’s “Love in a Cold Climate” or rather the BBC version by Debora Moggash. The two series make an interesting comparison because both are fictionalized autobiography, they are about post-war periods after WWI (“Love in. . .” filmed in 2002) and after WWII (“Glittering Prize” filmed in 1975) but the actual films were made in reverse order. “Love in” follows the progress of related women (the famous Mitford sisters) and “Glittering Prize” follows a small group of Cambridge students (Raphael’s cohort), who are at first considered the very epitome of the best and by the end mocked as stuck and old-fashioned. (I’d say the end was a lot more convincing than the beginning.) Both are about ways of life that are pretty much gone now: the over-educated brilliant young genius (most of the plot rests on the shoulders of Tom Conti who plays a Jewish semi-intruder -- more Dustin Hoffman than Al Pacino) in an abrasive and competitive world. "Love in .." is about the uneducated but high-spirited young women of the landed gentry gone goofy by inbreeding or something, who somehow seem destined to shine without awards.
I cannot conceal that I enjoyed “Love in a Cold Climate” far more than “Glittering Prizes.” There are some obvious reasons, like the fact that “Love in. . .” is about women. Some people would mind that the young ones are slender and bright with bouncing pointy breasts (Didn’t people wear bras in those days?) but I don’t. It was easy to identify with their energy. The eccentrics in “Love in. . .” are played masterfully by terrifically talented and experienced English actors. The “Glittering” actors are very young, though they would later become stalwarts.
Maybe some of my dislike of “Glittering” comes from knowing the types all too well. Didn’t the NU geniuses start out very much this way? The U of C geniuses were like this, at least the ones I knew, which were the least brilliant since the truly brilliant ones were hard at work somewhere, the source of their genius. But the daughters of the landed gentry are far enough in the past to romanticize, even if these girls are not quite far enough back to be Jane Austen heroines or even the cynical women of Edith Wharton. Think “The House of Eliot.” It does help to introduce the Paris factor, where men escape the deadly English love of drafty castles and bird hunting. The impossible and goofy father in this version (Alan Bates) is more lovable than most, since his violence after WWI is mostly a matter of writing an enemy’s name on a piece of paper and putting it in a deadly drawer, which he believes will kill them within the year.
The biggest difficulty with “Glittering” took me a while to figure out. Even though Frederic Raphael had considerable experience with movies, this series is done with stage technique. Raphael writes quips suitable for throwing to the far reaches of the auditorium. The actors are stage actors who react broadly, hold for laughs, and even mug as though they were dozens of feet away. And most of all, the camera works like a Fifties television camera with very little editing, none of it particularly artful though there are clever angles over the tops of furniture or around corners. Everything moves way too slowly. And the furniture, etc., is not from a particularly fortunate period IMHO. The women are simply inexplicable: they don’t seem capable of transparency or even manageability, simply taking abrupt turns without much warning except that the patterns are predictable. (“Wife becomes bored and turns to a career.” “Career woman abandons all for family.”) The whole thing seems to be mapped more than motivated.
So my premise is that this movie series, even though it was written by an Oscar winner (which sits glittering in the background of one episode) is actually clinging to a past medium and that makes it deadly. It is an auto that acts like a buggy. When I went to imdb.com to see if others remarked on it, I found something quite funnily transparent. There were comments, very similar, all saying how wonderful and topnotch everything was, and begging/commanding that such a treasure be released on DVD at once. Clearly, the troupe had united their fans, friends and probably family in a successful effort to get this series “out there.” But it was a case of “be awful careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” It might have been better to have just remembered how brilliant it was.
Since the Mitford story is easier to grasp and, to be honest, much funnier since the fun doesn’t depend on smart talk but rather on essentially impossible situations, it survives the passage of time. But also, the editing is brisk, the sets cannot be topped (the great houses of England and a few excellent places in Paris) and the characters look out at the world as much as they look inward.
“Artists are cherished and reviled for their bad behavior. They transgress where normal people cannot. In Lore Segal's Lucinella, a thrilling experimental novella first published in 1976 and now reissued by Melville House's Contemporary Art of the Novella series, New York poets are a competitive and shallow bunch. The bad behavior in Lucinella is the social kind; while there's some indiscriminate fucking, there's no homicide or drug addiction. The poets are preoccupied with who's who, who's where, what they're writing, who they're doing. They are writers, but they are not self-sacrificing ascetics as some assume artists must be. They would sacrifice each other for a speaking engagement or publication; an editor's career is described as "standing on your writers' shoulders, alternatively with your foot on one or another of their necks." You could call the relationships symbiotic or more accurately, opportunistic. They search for meaning, order, fame, and transcendence in dowdyish party scenes of empty fabulousness and joyless desperation. But then each success proves insignificant and fuels the search for the next one.“
This is a pretty apt summary of “The Glittering Prizes.” Now I’ve watched Nancy Mitford’s “Love in a Cold Climate” or rather the BBC version by Debora Moggash. The two series make an interesting comparison because both are fictionalized autobiography, they are about post-war periods after WWI (“Love in. . .” filmed in 2002) and after WWII (“Glittering Prize” filmed in 1975) but the actual films were made in reverse order. “Love in” follows the progress of related women (the famous Mitford sisters) and “Glittering Prize” follows a small group of Cambridge students (Raphael’s cohort), who are at first considered the very epitome of the best and by the end mocked as stuck and old-fashioned. (I’d say the end was a lot more convincing than the beginning.) Both are about ways of life that are pretty much gone now: the over-educated brilliant young genius (most of the plot rests on the shoulders of Tom Conti who plays a Jewish semi-intruder -- more Dustin Hoffman than Al Pacino) in an abrasive and competitive world. "Love in .." is about the uneducated but high-spirited young women of the landed gentry gone goofy by inbreeding or something, who somehow seem destined to shine without awards.
I cannot conceal that I enjoyed “Love in a Cold Climate” far more than “Glittering Prizes.” There are some obvious reasons, like the fact that “Love in. . .” is about women. Some people would mind that the young ones are slender and bright with bouncing pointy breasts (Didn’t people wear bras in those days?) but I don’t. It was easy to identify with their energy. The eccentrics in “Love in. . .” are played masterfully by terrifically talented and experienced English actors. The “Glittering” actors are very young, though they would later become stalwarts.
Maybe some of my dislike of “Glittering” comes from knowing the types all too well. Didn’t the NU geniuses start out very much this way? The U of C geniuses were like this, at least the ones I knew, which were the least brilliant since the truly brilliant ones were hard at work somewhere, the source of their genius. But the daughters of the landed gentry are far enough in the past to romanticize, even if these girls are not quite far enough back to be Jane Austen heroines or even the cynical women of Edith Wharton. Think “The House of Eliot.” It does help to introduce the Paris factor, where men escape the deadly English love of drafty castles and bird hunting. The impossible and goofy father in this version (Alan Bates) is more lovable than most, since his violence after WWI is mostly a matter of writing an enemy’s name on a piece of paper and putting it in a deadly drawer, which he believes will kill them within the year.
The biggest difficulty with “Glittering” took me a while to figure out. Even though Frederic Raphael had considerable experience with movies, this series is done with stage technique. Raphael writes quips suitable for throwing to the far reaches of the auditorium. The actors are stage actors who react broadly, hold for laughs, and even mug as though they were dozens of feet away. And most of all, the camera works like a Fifties television camera with very little editing, none of it particularly artful though there are clever angles over the tops of furniture or around corners. Everything moves way too slowly. And the furniture, etc., is not from a particularly fortunate period IMHO. The women are simply inexplicable: they don’t seem capable of transparency or even manageability, simply taking abrupt turns without much warning except that the patterns are predictable. (“Wife becomes bored and turns to a career.” “Career woman abandons all for family.”) The whole thing seems to be mapped more than motivated.
So my premise is that this movie series, even though it was written by an Oscar winner (which sits glittering in the background of one episode) is actually clinging to a past medium and that makes it deadly. It is an auto that acts like a buggy. When I went to imdb.com to see if others remarked on it, I found something quite funnily transparent. There were comments, very similar, all saying how wonderful and topnotch everything was, and begging/commanding that such a treasure be released on DVD at once. Clearly, the troupe had united their fans, friends and probably family in a successful effort to get this series “out there.” But it was a case of “be awful careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” It might have been better to have just remembered how brilliant it was.
Since the Mitford story is easier to grasp and, to be honest, much funnier since the fun doesn’t depend on smart talk but rather on essentially impossible situations, it survives the passage of time. But also, the editing is brisk, the sets cannot be topped (the great houses of England and a few excellent places in Paris) and the characters look out at the world as much as they look inward.
Friday, January 01, 2010
THE ADVANTAGES OF DISPLACEMENT
As any homesteader knows, it’s important to stick -- to plant yourself the a Dog Soldier intending to fight to the death plunges his spear into the ground. But then, how did the homesteader arrive at all except by being displaced one way or another from the previous location? The Indians who had previously lived on the lands now being homesteaded might ask that question if they could stop grieving over their own displacement.
Displacement from a job is as shocking as displacement from a “place,” maybe a house that is underwater either literally or symbolically. But there ARE advantages. Those of us who have been bumped out of our routines and achievements over and over again, are not always appreciative at the time. Some are better adapted for such catastrophes than others are. There is always talk about the importance of community, but what about the individual who has lost community?
My vocational displacements are tied to geographical relocations. Undergrad college, employment on the Blackfeet Reservation, marriage/divorce, animal control, grad school, circuit-riding, congregations, Blackfeet reservation, City of Portland, Valier. (I’ve been in Valier longer than I was in Portland last time.) Each move turned me over inside, rather traumatically, like being spaded up -- “harrowed” is the term. And each move brought up new parts of myself. It helped that I was one of those people who always resists closure, completion. Some would say I was child-like.
Never at any point in my education did I think about being an animal control officer, but when I was more or less forced into the role, I found that I brought a lot to it. Sometimes it’s a big advantage not to have any mental picture of what a thing will be. Seeing it free of stereotyped assumptions meant asking a new set of questions, finding new options, having an entirely different understanding of where it could go. It also means threatening the people who have been perpetuating the assumptions and forcing outcomes that they thought were good for them personally. Coming into Multnomah County Animal Control when I did fortunately happened at the same time that Mike Burgwin came to the supervisor job with a totally new set of assumptions. One of the most basic ways we agreed was that we saw the job as a “street job,” not a shelter maintenance job. Therefore, we concentrated on what would make the street safer. We were “hot,” experimental, high-energy.
For contrast consider teaching in Cut Bank. My assumptions were from the Sixties: idealistic, creative, not pre-determined. The leadership had one goal only: keeping their high paying jobs, which meant preventing any sort of controversy. It was not about the kids. In fact, one of we three English teachers was really a science teacher and the other one, who had a college degree in English, could not correct her students’ grammar quizzes. The previous heavyweight (literally) English teacher had taught despairing Russian novelists, which the kids accepted as truth, but he had promised to flunk the main hell-raiser among the athletic stars -- so was banished to teaching typing (keyboarding) which he only minimally understood. The hell-raisers had run off teachers and boasted about it. I became very attached to them and let the prairie princesses languish with little or no attention. They decided to bring me down and did. I gave them the ammunition. The place nauseated me. I was too old to do what I ought to have or even to figure out what it ought to be. But it will make a good novel: “Prairie Gladiators.”
The good thing about being a writer is that everything is grist for the mill. And I learned about my limits. Bob Scriver had said to me decades earlier: “You know what you CAN do, but you don’t know what you CAN’T do!” (It applied to him as well.) This was an important lesson that some people learn in death. In fact, it has to be relearned in old age.
But I knew enough to buy this house, set it up so it works for a reader/writer, and begin my final job which turns out not to be only writing but interfacing between myself and a highly unlikely co-writer, his cadre of young men full of angst and gifts, and whatever parts of the world are interested. When Montana shut the door in my face to protect the generation ahead of me, which refuses to give up control, it was too late. I had gone another way. They had no power.
Everything back as far as my grade school teachers is relevant now: the Vernon library teacher, the high school drama teacher, the undergrad world of amazing dimensions, the deep experience on the reservation with Bob Scriver, the final acceptance of personal authority and power at Animal Control, the great dreams and aspirations of seminary, and then the amusement (and bitterness) of all that turning out to be something quite different. The nineties were miserable emotional debt-paying years, but meant that the last family deaths arrived paid-in-full, and freed me to go back to my key place, where I am.
Many more forty-below zero patches of weather and I may be asking whether I can stay here. The nation and the world are changing the economic, political, infrastructure systems and that may throw me out of here as well -- maybe tip me over into the final displacement. One of the people on my list of contacts whom I had meant to visit to form a friendship was David Baker, an earth scientist who knew Montana in a way I wanted to explore. He was almost exactly my age, born Nov. 9, 1939. I talked to him via email and once by mistake he sent me an email meant for his mother which disconcerted all three of us. His funeral is tomorrow in Great Falls. He was born there.
My most important relationship at present is “placeless,” in a “virtual” place because it’s mostly an Internet-based location. Not time-bound either, since Tim moves through so many time-zones. I do here-and-now as Stays-Put-Woman. He does the Joe Campbell hero (or anti-hero) always moving anytime. And yet, when Tim is at his most desperate, his best time and place is his wife, the True Hero. We honor the complexity of life, the power of paradox.
Displacement from a job is as shocking as displacement from a “place,” maybe a house that is underwater either literally or symbolically. But there ARE advantages. Those of us who have been bumped out of our routines and achievements over and over again, are not always appreciative at the time. Some are better adapted for such catastrophes than others are. There is always talk about the importance of community, but what about the individual who has lost community?
My vocational displacements are tied to geographical relocations. Undergrad college, employment on the Blackfeet Reservation, marriage/divorce, animal control, grad school, circuit-riding, congregations, Blackfeet reservation, City of Portland, Valier. (I’ve been in Valier longer than I was in Portland last time.) Each move turned me over inside, rather traumatically, like being spaded up -- “harrowed” is the term. And each move brought up new parts of myself. It helped that I was one of those people who always resists closure, completion. Some would say I was child-like.
Never at any point in my education did I think about being an animal control officer, but when I was more or less forced into the role, I found that I brought a lot to it. Sometimes it’s a big advantage not to have any mental picture of what a thing will be. Seeing it free of stereotyped assumptions meant asking a new set of questions, finding new options, having an entirely different understanding of where it could go. It also means threatening the people who have been perpetuating the assumptions and forcing outcomes that they thought were good for them personally. Coming into Multnomah County Animal Control when I did fortunately happened at the same time that Mike Burgwin came to the supervisor job with a totally new set of assumptions. One of the most basic ways we agreed was that we saw the job as a “street job,” not a shelter maintenance job. Therefore, we concentrated on what would make the street safer. We were “hot,” experimental, high-energy.
For contrast consider teaching in Cut Bank. My assumptions were from the Sixties: idealistic, creative, not pre-determined. The leadership had one goal only: keeping their high paying jobs, which meant preventing any sort of controversy. It was not about the kids. In fact, one of we three English teachers was really a science teacher and the other one, who had a college degree in English, could not correct her students’ grammar quizzes. The previous heavyweight (literally) English teacher had taught despairing Russian novelists, which the kids accepted as truth, but he had promised to flunk the main hell-raiser among the athletic stars -- so was banished to teaching typing (keyboarding) which he only minimally understood. The hell-raisers had run off teachers and boasted about it. I became very attached to them and let the prairie princesses languish with little or no attention. They decided to bring me down and did. I gave them the ammunition. The place nauseated me. I was too old to do what I ought to have or even to figure out what it ought to be. But it will make a good novel: “Prairie Gladiators.”
The good thing about being a writer is that everything is grist for the mill. And I learned about my limits. Bob Scriver had said to me decades earlier: “You know what you CAN do, but you don’t know what you CAN’T do!” (It applied to him as well.) This was an important lesson that some people learn in death. In fact, it has to be relearned in old age.
But I knew enough to buy this house, set it up so it works for a reader/writer, and begin my final job which turns out not to be only writing but interfacing between myself and a highly unlikely co-writer, his cadre of young men full of angst and gifts, and whatever parts of the world are interested. When Montana shut the door in my face to protect the generation ahead of me, which refuses to give up control, it was too late. I had gone another way. They had no power.
Everything back as far as my grade school teachers is relevant now: the Vernon library teacher, the high school drama teacher, the undergrad world of amazing dimensions, the deep experience on the reservation with Bob Scriver, the final acceptance of personal authority and power at Animal Control, the great dreams and aspirations of seminary, and then the amusement (and bitterness) of all that turning out to be something quite different. The nineties were miserable emotional debt-paying years, but meant that the last family deaths arrived paid-in-full, and freed me to go back to my key place, where I am.
Many more forty-below zero patches of weather and I may be asking whether I can stay here. The nation and the world are changing the economic, political, infrastructure systems and that may throw me out of here as well -- maybe tip me over into the final displacement. One of the people on my list of contacts whom I had meant to visit to form a friendship was David Baker, an earth scientist who knew Montana in a way I wanted to explore. He was almost exactly my age, born Nov. 9, 1939. I talked to him via email and once by mistake he sent me an email meant for his mother which disconcerted all three of us. His funeral is tomorrow in Great Falls. He was born there.
My most important relationship at present is “placeless,” in a “virtual” place because it’s mostly an Internet-based location. Not time-bound either, since Tim moves through so many time-zones. I do here-and-now as Stays-Put-Woman. He does the Joe Campbell hero (or anti-hero) always moving anytime. And yet, when Tim is at his most desperate, his best time and place is his wife, the True Hero. We honor the complexity of life, the power of paradox.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
PUBLISHING IN PIECES
“Publishing” is not and never was what people think it is or was. In truth and actuality, it is simply the conversion of print into a saleable object -- in the case of ebooks, a “virtual” object. That is, it looks like ink on paper, but it isn’t and will disappear if not constantly fed by a machine somewhere, maybe one in your hand and maybe one mysteriously linked across continents and oceans. Let’s put that aside.
Take it to the level of paper and ink, pages numbered and held in order by a glued and sewn binding, which sophisticated people are calling a “codex” in contrast to a “scroll” though Jack Kerouac tried returning to scroll mode by taping pages into a long roll to be fed through the typewriter. Commentors are constantly returning to the evolutionary sequence of marks on a surface: clay tablets, hides, then hides cut into scrolls, then pages, then moveable type, then linotype machines. Remember them? When I came to Browning in 1961 the Glacier Reporter was composed on a linotype: it was a very noisy machine with a “typewriter” on one end that spat out lines of type cast in lead at the other end. The founder of the Prairie Star in Valier has burn scars on his arms from molten lead spattering from cold molds when the metal type was recast into pigs to put back through the process. He was a kid, assigned the task by his dad.
Newspapers were useful but expendable objects: low grade paper, smeary ink, stories of fleeting interest. These days the historic content is being put on the Internet. High end codexes are very valuable indeed: consider the huge Audubon books of bird prints, kept in cases where a page is occasionally turned by curators. But a precious codex can also be valuable, like the small letter-press poetry chapbooks that someone had to compose using an old-fashioned typestick, sort of like a hand-held Scrabble tray, to compose, and then a big wheel to force the ink onto the paper, one page at a time.
At both ends of the value scale, these are objects, inventory, merchandise, saleable as individual units with a relatively standardized value. To most people the “publisher” is the guy that made the book, though printing is only the beginning, not even really the beginning.
The book entrepreneur, which is what a “publisher” is, looks for books that will sell or that OUGHT to from his point of view. If you can get a franchise for a context that requires everyone to buy this book, you’ve got a gold mine! Bibles, textbooks, operating manuals. But let’s stick to our modern idea of novels (which are supposed to be fiction), political comment (which are supposed to be true), and memoirs (which go back and forth between fiction and nonfiction which seems to be our preoccupying category division, more than the the “prose versus poetry” of “le bourgeois gentilhomme.” The apex marker seems to be “the Great American Novel,” without ever questioning whether such a thing is possible.
Publishers early in the 20th century offered excitement, life-guides, and so on -- all chosen by the head of the publishing company according to his taste and evaluation of the times. So, CHOOSING THE MANUSCRIPT was in the hands of one or a few men. It was a mark of value because the publisher was assumed to have good taste. It was being “chosen.” Today this step is dominated by surveys and the principle that what just sold well will sell well again. (Not.) The salesmen see their task as telling the publisher what to publish, so they can sell it. No longer is the salesman expected to find a way to sell what the publisher says is valuable. They don’t CARE what’s culturally valuable. They want to sell, so they’ll get a commission.
PRINTING is something most people could understand until it went to electronic screens. In fact, the government understood it well enough to tax books piled up in warehouses before they’d even gotten to the stores because they are inventory. This meant estimating the number of books to make had to include whether it were possible to pay taxes on them sitting in warehouses. The bookstores were also taxed for what was sitting around on their shelves as inventory. In the Thirties publishers allowed bookstores to return books that wouldn’t sell. Today many bookstores return as much of the inventory as possible right about now, so that the publisher will have to pay the inventory tax. Maliciously, they return shopworn books, books with dayglo sale stickers, and books they will re-order after tax time is over because they DO sell. To keep from paying the warehouse tax on unsold books (remainders) the publishers just pulp them up.
That was yesterday. Nowadays with online used and remainder book sellers able (barely) to make money, the extra books are more likely to be sold at an enormous discount and go out into the public where they compete at low prices. This is certainly the way I buy books! Not just because they are cheap, but because they are often much higher quality content than the shiny bright schlock that salesmen push to bookstores.
There are ways for publishers to cut corners. Never let a book exceed 200 pages. Don’t hire a layout specialist. Use a standard template for the font and so on. Don’t add an index or footnotes. Limit the number of illustrations or graphics. All these things cost money.
But the major way to save money is simply not to advertise. Advertising is in the end what makes a book sell. I don’t mean sleazy salesman tactics, I mean just letting people know that the book exists at all. People are often passive when it comes to book buying -- books “happen” rather than being sought out. The potential reader catches a scrap on the radio or sees an excerpt somewhere.
All these steps can be contracted out to specialists: finding manuscripts (agents do this); market research; editing; layout; illustration; actual printing; advertising; promoting; distributing; reviews; and I suppose eventually some enterprising soul will offer to house your actual codex physical library for you: organize it, inventory, recover copies, suggest the next book, keep a list of intended reading. Personal librarians. I love it. No more dusting, no more interior decoration dilemmas. No more wandering around in your nightgown in the wee smalls to browse your holdings. . . Well, maybe this needs reconsideration.
Especially in view of this insight:
13. Book publishers will have to admit to real confusion about what the product is that they produce. The big meme coming out of 2010 will be “what is a book?” Publishers will increasingly be releasing productions that contain video, audio, animation, slide shows, and interactive game elements. Movie, TV, and game producers will see an alternate marketing and revenue channel available through “ebookifying” content they have and moving it through book channels like a “tie-in.” Where one stops and the other begins will become increasingly difficult to see (and increasingly irrelevant). (From the Shatzkin Files)
Tim Barrus adds this next part. The interview with Auletta is dynamite.
And here's the irony...
Agents and editors (publishers to a lesser extent) know that change is coming. In fact, it's here.
Now, it's personal.
I fathom that there's a take on publishing as a business. Clean and simple.
Publishing is a business of extraordinary ego.
I dare anyone to approach any editor employed in mainstream publishing, and bring up the subject of change, particularly digital change, and not receive a response that isn't downright hateful.
Angry.
Intransigent.
Mean.
They do not LIKE this change. Because they can't control it.
Hence, lots of Internet discussion on content quality and the need (everyone should have one on the wall) for the proverbial editor.
Change is coming and publishing has its head in the sand.
Ken Aueletta has a kick ass book out called: Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.
This is the book that has major implications for publishing.
But note: Aueletta goes to the PERSONAL: in this book. He interviews all the Internet gurus and comes away from the collection with PERSONAL observations that it is ALL personal.
Publishing, too.
They don't want to hear that change is a constant.
Anyone who comes to them with this message will be thrown out on his ear.
My own take: As the platforms change, I think more writers are simply going to become publishers. I do not know how this will work. The advertising business paradigm they have all invested in has failed.
No one knows how this is going to work.
But it will be PERSONAL.
The idea that business is simply business provides them camouflage. This is Auelleta on C-span. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV-2vCkwQ-I
Take it to the level of paper and ink, pages numbered and held in order by a glued and sewn binding, which sophisticated people are calling a “codex” in contrast to a “scroll” though Jack Kerouac tried returning to scroll mode by taping pages into a long roll to be fed through the typewriter. Commentors are constantly returning to the evolutionary sequence of marks on a surface: clay tablets, hides, then hides cut into scrolls, then pages, then moveable type, then linotype machines. Remember them? When I came to Browning in 1961 the Glacier Reporter was composed on a linotype: it was a very noisy machine with a “typewriter” on one end that spat out lines of type cast in lead at the other end. The founder of the Prairie Star in Valier has burn scars on his arms from molten lead spattering from cold molds when the metal type was recast into pigs to put back through the process. He was a kid, assigned the task by his dad.
Newspapers were useful but expendable objects: low grade paper, smeary ink, stories of fleeting interest. These days the historic content is being put on the Internet. High end codexes are very valuable indeed: consider the huge Audubon books of bird prints, kept in cases where a page is occasionally turned by curators. But a precious codex can also be valuable, like the small letter-press poetry chapbooks that someone had to compose using an old-fashioned typestick, sort of like a hand-held Scrabble tray, to compose, and then a big wheel to force the ink onto the paper, one page at a time.
At both ends of the value scale, these are objects, inventory, merchandise, saleable as individual units with a relatively standardized value. To most people the “publisher” is the guy that made the book, though printing is only the beginning, not even really the beginning.
The book entrepreneur, which is what a “publisher” is, looks for books that will sell or that OUGHT to from his point of view. If you can get a franchise for a context that requires everyone to buy this book, you’ve got a gold mine! Bibles, textbooks, operating manuals. But let’s stick to our modern idea of novels (which are supposed to be fiction), political comment (which are supposed to be true), and memoirs (which go back and forth between fiction and nonfiction which seems to be our preoccupying category division, more than the the “prose versus poetry” of “le bourgeois gentilhomme.” The apex marker seems to be “the Great American Novel,” without ever questioning whether such a thing is possible.
Publishers early in the 20th century offered excitement, life-guides, and so on -- all chosen by the head of the publishing company according to his taste and evaluation of the times. So, CHOOSING THE MANUSCRIPT was in the hands of one or a few men. It was a mark of value because the publisher was assumed to have good taste. It was being “chosen.” Today this step is dominated by surveys and the principle that what just sold well will sell well again. (Not.) The salesmen see their task as telling the publisher what to publish, so they can sell it. No longer is the salesman expected to find a way to sell what the publisher says is valuable. They don’t CARE what’s culturally valuable. They want to sell, so they’ll get a commission.
PRINTING is something most people could understand until it went to electronic screens. In fact, the government understood it well enough to tax books piled up in warehouses before they’d even gotten to the stores because they are inventory. This meant estimating the number of books to make had to include whether it were possible to pay taxes on them sitting in warehouses. The bookstores were also taxed for what was sitting around on their shelves as inventory. In the Thirties publishers allowed bookstores to return books that wouldn’t sell. Today many bookstores return as much of the inventory as possible right about now, so that the publisher will have to pay the inventory tax. Maliciously, they return shopworn books, books with dayglo sale stickers, and books they will re-order after tax time is over because they DO sell. To keep from paying the warehouse tax on unsold books (remainders) the publishers just pulp them up.
That was yesterday. Nowadays with online used and remainder book sellers able (barely) to make money, the extra books are more likely to be sold at an enormous discount and go out into the public where they compete at low prices. This is certainly the way I buy books! Not just because they are cheap, but because they are often much higher quality content than the shiny bright schlock that salesmen push to bookstores.
There are ways for publishers to cut corners. Never let a book exceed 200 pages. Don’t hire a layout specialist. Use a standard template for the font and so on. Don’t add an index or footnotes. Limit the number of illustrations or graphics. All these things cost money.
But the major way to save money is simply not to advertise. Advertising is in the end what makes a book sell. I don’t mean sleazy salesman tactics, I mean just letting people know that the book exists at all. People are often passive when it comes to book buying -- books “happen” rather than being sought out. The potential reader catches a scrap on the radio or sees an excerpt somewhere.
All these steps can be contracted out to specialists: finding manuscripts (agents do this); market research; editing; layout; illustration; actual printing; advertising; promoting; distributing; reviews; and I suppose eventually some enterprising soul will offer to house your actual codex physical library for you: organize it, inventory, recover copies, suggest the next book, keep a list of intended reading. Personal librarians. I love it. No more dusting, no more interior decoration dilemmas. No more wandering around in your nightgown in the wee smalls to browse your holdings. . . Well, maybe this needs reconsideration.
Especially in view of this insight:
13. Book publishers will have to admit to real confusion about what the product is that they produce. The big meme coming out of 2010 will be “what is a book?” Publishers will increasingly be releasing productions that contain video, audio, animation, slide shows, and interactive game elements. Movie, TV, and game producers will see an alternate marketing and revenue channel available through “ebookifying” content they have and moving it through book channels like a “tie-in.” Where one stops and the other begins will become increasingly difficult to see (and increasingly irrelevant). (From the Shatzkin Files)
Tim Barrus adds this next part. The interview with Auletta is dynamite.
And here's the irony...
Agents and editors (publishers to a lesser extent) know that change is coming. In fact, it's here.
Now, it's personal.
I fathom that there's a take on publishing as a business. Clean and simple.
Publishing is a business of extraordinary ego.
I dare anyone to approach any editor employed in mainstream publishing, and bring up the subject of change, particularly digital change, and not receive a response that isn't downright hateful.
Angry.
Intransigent.
Mean.
They do not LIKE this change. Because they can't control it.
Hence, lots of Internet discussion on content quality and the need (everyone should have one on the wall) for the proverbial editor.
Change is coming and publishing has its head in the sand.
Ken Aueletta has a kick ass book out called: Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.
This is the book that has major implications for publishing.
But note: Aueletta goes to the PERSONAL: in this book. He interviews all the Internet gurus and comes away from the collection with PERSONAL observations that it is ALL personal.
Publishing, too.
They don't want to hear that change is a constant.
Anyone who comes to them with this message will be thrown out on his ear.
My own take: As the platforms change, I think more writers are simply going to become publishers. I do not know how this will work. The advertising business paradigm they have all invested in has failed.
No one knows how this is going to work.
But it will be PERSONAL.
The idea that business is simply business provides them camouflage. This is Auelleta on C-span. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV-2vCkwQ-I
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