Hammond’s Folly

This article (from the Barnes & Noble Review, which is probably in the top ten squarest publications ever) has some more depressing but probably true stuff about the book publishing industry:

“Some 150,000 books are published in the United States every year. Let’s — once again without any real foundation — be really draconian and say that only 10 percent of those books would be in any way appealing to generalist readers of some intelligence. Let’s take 50 percent of that 10 percent, for no reason at all, just to be even meaner, and we end up with 7,500 books. That means that on average one hundred and fifty more or less worthwhile books are published every week in this country. Let’s cut that number in half, just to make the floor of our metaphorical abattoir really bloody. That makes seventy-five decent books a week. (By the way, that number is about twice the rough and generous estimate I’ve made based on actual experience.) How are seventy-five at-least-half-decent books going to receive serious and discriminating reviews in the few important places remaining for serious reviews every week? To say nothing of getting attention from prominent publicity outlets, like NPR and Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart? They’re not. They’re simply not. These statistical circumstances make publishing into a kind of grand cultural roulette, in which your chances of winning any significant pot are very, very small.”

Against our vanishing

The last of the Polaroid film, which the company stopped making last year, expires next month.

The Observer Review had a few artists take a few final shots with the film. These are by Sam Taylor-Wood

In 1981, Allen Grossman wrote in The Sighted Singer, ”I am convinced that the greater function of poetry (if there can be a greater function than to bring people into discourse one with the other) is the keeping of the image of persons as precious in the world…Really, a question of great moment is the following: does poetry have a function left that is not usurped by other means of transmission of images across time? We live in a world which is flooded with images, images which flow as it were through the hands of Thomas Alva Edison toward us from sources unanticipated by the great poetic makers, who felt that they held in their hands the privilege of conferring visibility, or withdrawing it even from the great heroes. I think no discussion of the function of poetry now should get farther than we have gotten without considering this usurpation of the function of transmitting images by other media.”

Being cool in high school

From Jezebel’s Jenna Saunders. Full post is well worth the read:

“The countess and I walked over, looked at the men, looked at each other, then looked again, more awkwardly, at these laughing golden boys — and immediately I knew that all the liquid eyeliner and velvet ropes and jet planes in the world will not stop and have not stopped me from remaining the person I was in high school. There’s a certain kind of popularity that, if you should be so lucky as to experience it at 15 or 16 or 17, deposits in its wake a sense of pure social mastery that never really leaves you. And there’s a certain kind of awkwardness, bodily shame, and tongue-tied single-sex-high-school befuddledness in what I still think of as “mixed” social situations that precludes any kind of innate suavity and leaves one always at the mercy of frizzy-haired shoulder-tappers.”

Launching, every day, the same way

I’ve been told by four different people in three different mediums that they like this new photo I’m sporting at the top of the page. Which, by the power of multiplication done by someone who doesn’t understand math, means 12 of you want to know about it!

Let me tell you about this picture. I like it. I like how the light is so loud and silver and catching the water, and while the brightest point of light is often– I’m told– the focus of a good shot, here it’s the background, it’s the flow, since even my shirt is silver. And that makes my hair, the movement and toss of it, the center, and because the light is the way it is, it makes the hair look like a unique shade of auburn that it normally isn’t : there’s some transmogrification in the lens of the camera or the way the sunlight reflects or the glow of the monitor that takes my dark blond hair and makes it the color of burnt sugar.

But what I like best about it is the way it shakes out, the way my hair pulls behind me as if I’m lunging forward. Truth is, we had the camera on continuous shot, and if you can see the photos before and after it, like I can here on my computer, you see that I’m actually twirling, going in circles over and over again, because I saw some model doing that in a tv show or a movie once or something. There were, quite literally, a hundred photos of me in some kind of circular motion in this exact spot before I deleted most of them, and then this one picture where, cropped and devoid of context, I look like I’m launching, like I’m running forward, like the spray of water in front of me is a barrier about to be broken, but I tell you dear reader, that I never actually got wet, even though I like how the picture makes it look as if I will.

Months before, sometime in the cold stretch of winter, Jana and I had worked our way through season 1 of Gossip Girl, and right after the Bad News Blair episode– the one where Serena unwittingly steals the spotlight again, I know, not very specific, and to make it up to each other, they steal Eleanor’s dresses and do their hair up and run around the city taking pictures of themselves in an impromptu photo shoot– Jana turns to me and goes, hey, that would be really fun! Not paying attention, I go, “mm-hmm, yes it would,” like you do when a 5-year-old wants to go to Disneyland in January and you can brush them off with a “but it’s winter sweetheart, let’s talk about this in the summer,” but 5-year-olds don’t forget and neither does Jana. So in the spring I get a Facebook invite, setting the date for three of us to dress up and run around and take photos. It’s an all-day affair, with two cameras, half a dozen locations, costume changes, light diffusers, flashlights, false eyelashes, the works. Even Blair might be jealous. We counted, and between the two cameras, there were more than 3000 shots.

This particular photo came at the end of the day, when I thought we were just doing headshots, and Jana’s looked way more interesting than mine at this point, because she has the most incredible flair for drama that my hippie self lacks, so even though I knew she was snapping away with the camera when I walked over to the fountain, I wasn’t thinking about posing anymore, just really glad to get into the cool air around the water. Because we were almost done and it would be fine if my make-up got bleary. And I started turning in circles.

But of all those photos of me spinning in the water, this is the one I like, the one where it looks as if I’m streaking forward. I suppose that’s a very Western, narrative-focused thing to think, that I like the progress of the shot.  Liking the arrested motion, the way it looks as if I’ve been caught in the act of running somewhere, getting to a particular point.

I suppose that’s why you see so many shots of models jumping or running in the fashion mags. It’s a way to simultaneously project movement and stop it. A very big part of the photographer’s job is to catch the model in an exact moment where the line of his or her body creates momentum but can hold it in the eternally still structure of a statue. Any other shot is dead, lacking in dynamic, and visibly so to the reader. Which is why all of our posed snapshots on Facebook, smiling in front of monuments and canyons, are only interesting to the extent to which we like or hate the people in them, or are impressed by the surroundings.

The difficult thing is that those fashion photos, and the one you see above, are just as posed as any snapshot in front of Niagara Falls. The only difference is that fashion shoots are posed by someone with skill, someone with access to models who have made it their job to make a spin look like a poem, or make a shirt look like a suit of armor. Someone who knows how to create a fantasy, not just set themselves in one. The image is always, to some extent, a lie.

And maybe that’s what I like, the fantasy of the shot: who doesn’t want to believe that they’re continually moving forward? Lately, when I see myself tripping over the same things over and over again, finding in myself only fresh new versions of the old flaws, I wonder how much of our talk of progress is equally fantastical. Which brings me to the title of the post: the feeling that I am bound to my own skin and experience and gifts and vulnerable Achille’s tendon, and will maybe spend my whole life working to become bigger than what I already am, moving forward in some vital, essential way, and still end up with nothing but a lot of pictures of me spinning. Migratory, returning every season to the same place I was in before. I guess my best hope is that when I return to an all-too-familiar place, I’ve earned a little more grace, a little more wisdom the second, or fourth, or hundredth time around. That even if I’m still going in circles, I’ve at least widened the circumference a little bit.

Will Pay to Work

It is getting so ugly out there for us media types that people are literally spending their own money just to be employed. At something. Anything. Seriously, anything. The Huffington Post!

Domino Folding

NOOOOOOOO!!!!

This is one of only three magazines that I pay to get actual paper copies of. So sad, because if any shelter mag was going to make it, I would’ve guessed this one.

Media Deathwatch

Crap, even Google’s CEO doesn’t know what to do with the newspapers.

The problem is, as he says, more people than ever are reading, but “information wants to be free.” So, the traditional news corps are hemorrhaging money, and will continue to do so, unless someone decides news outlets are so necessary to the world they are going to subsidize them, almost like the way Nature Conservancy does with green spaces. News as a nonprofit: this would put journalistic integrity in danger, depending on whose pocketbook we’re talking about, but I’m starting to wonder if that is the only sort of thing that could stop the reaper.

But hey, over here some essentially meaningless data has been construed to tell us that people are reading books again! Um, yay?

Scare quotes

Abused by editorialists, particularly those at the WSJ. Also known as a “tool” for “writers” who find “empirical evidence” to be “misleading”.

Heh.

Reason #492 Why Journalism Can Be Really Stupid

This is why I don’t admit to reading the NYT Sunday Styles section. (Although I do spend a fair bit of time on other parts of the paper!)

How to write a bogus trend story: Start with something you wish were on the rise. State that rise as a fact. Allow that there are no facts, surveys, or test results to support such a fact. Use and reuse the word seems. (As a writer, I can attest: The word seems is magical, like unicorns! -Ed.) Collect anecdotes and sprinkle liberally. Drift from your original point as far as you can to collect other data points. Add liberally. Finish with an upbeat quotation like “My cat takes priority over the new relationship. Realistically, unless there’s something absolutely amazing about [the woman I'm dating], he wins.”

Maybe Shafer shouldn’t get this indignant. It’s all just shoveling coal for Satan, right?

Editorial

A few days ago, my friend DB walked by my desk, as he always does, to say hi. Unfortunately, he happened to catch me wide-eyed and slightly maniacal, engrossed in a draft on my computer screen, holding a pair of scissors in my right hand. I was slowly opening and closing them in a weird parody of one of those foam stress balls. I had no recollection of picking up the scissors, and didn’t notice their presence until DB pointed them out. Both of us are now a little worried about my mental state.

My trance was deep enough that I can’t tell you what I was thinking exactly, but my best guess is that I was dismantling the article on my screen, slowly peeling back layers, making notes in my head about how to make the writer understand what I needed, why this paragraph was out of place, why that other word was meaningless, and HOW THE HELL did he manage to take some solid reporting and somehow turn it into drivel?! Apparently, I was having enough trouble with the piece that I subconsciously turned to violence, and the scissors were the closest sharp object I could find.

This is a large part of my job. I spend some time writing, some time reporting and blogging, and a little bit doing the various administrative tasks that somehow get dumped on me. But more and more, I’m the editor, scanning drafts with the scissors at the ready. I send my writerly minions out into the world, armed with a few links and some questions I need answered, and cross my fingers that they’ve really understood what I want from them. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t.

And when they don’t, I go in. Most people think editors just run through copy, striking out errant commas and rearranging sentences. To them I say, HA! Sometimes that is what I get to do, and golly do I love those days. A writer’s done good work when all I have to do is fuss with a few punctuation marks and insert some hyperlinks. But sometimes you get a draft that is barely organized into sentences, and sometimes not even that. Gary Kamiya put it this way:

It’s good fun now and then to tear apart a piece and put it back together on a short deadline. Your brain is humming like a Ferrari, you’ve got sections marked A and B and Z and arrows going everywhere; you’re rewriting the lede, racing through tricky transitions, doing some fast spot-reporting, getting rid of clunkers from every graf, and pulling together this whole 4,000-word piece in six hours. When you’re done, you emerge from your office with smoke pouring from your ears. You’ve earned your salary and you pour yourself a well-deserved drink. You won’t get any fame and glory but as an editor you don’t expect any.

Whether or not I ENJOY this experience really depends on my mood on a particular day, my current level of masochism, and how well-fed I am. But by and large, I think it suits me. I’m a far better editor than I am a writer (due mostly to laziness), and a better writer than I am a reporter. Like Kamiya, occasionally I even wish we could go back to the days of “legmen and rewritemen,” where it was one person’s job to tramp the streets and make the phone calls, and someone else’s to take that jumble of information and stream it into something coherent.

It’s an almost obsolete model now, of course, given Twitter and “citizen journalism” and all that. Modern reporters and bloggers are expected to be able to get to an event, do the research, take their own photo and video, collect the right quotes, put together a pithy article, and post the thing online within about 45 minutes, practically. No problem with this as long as the editorial voice remains intact, but as the sheer weight and breadth of content available in the world grows, it becomes harder and harder. There’s a lot of crap out there, and a lot of really bad writing.

So I’m trying to be a good editor: catching faults, and be as bullying as necessary to keep my writers at their best when their work goes live. Such a task is not always possible in one draft, or without a certain amount of hand-holding and/or manipulation. Sometimes I don’t know how to fix a story. But I’m desperately hoping that all the editorial I’m doing will make me a better writer, because my own stuff needs plenty of work before (if?) I decide to transition to the other side of the desk.