Archives for 2003

Dear Household Opera: OGIC, who introduced me to the pleasures of Edward Gorey once upon a time (and is a fanatical Gorey collector herself), will be pleased by this paragraph in your latest posting:

See Edward Gorey’s L’Heure Bleue, possibly his most beautiful book, which includes dialogue such as “I should like a parsley sandwich,” “To the best of my knowledge they are no longer in season,” and “More is happening out there than we are aware of.” “It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.”

(Incidentally, why in hell won’t somebody reprint The Lavender Leotard, or, Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet?)

Dear Cup of Chicha: OGIC and I really want to see that “little karate-victory-dance” you do when your site turns up on another blogroll. Could you please post a photograph? Or–better yet–a drawing?

Dear God of the Machine: You’d be surprised (or maybe not) at the high number of older-than-40 people who’ve told me that they hate the word “blog” and wish somebody would come up with a better one. After much prayer and reflection, though, I’ve decided that you’re right:

Neologisms for old things come and go, but a blog is a new thing, and with new things first out of the gate nearly always wins. In diction wars you have to pick your battles carefully. If you must complain, complain about something that drains meaning from the language. For years I objected to the coalescence of “amazing,” “awesome,” “remarkable,” and “phenomenal,” as if English were short on synonyms for “good.” This battle was worth fighting because it was over shades of meaning; there is no English word with the precise meaning of “amazing” except “amazing.” But popular usage has bulldozed me…

What’s wrong with “blog” anyway? It is short. It is more or less Anglo-Saxon. It lends itself easily to back-formations for writing a blog (no ugly “-ize” required) and for the author of one, not to mention felicitious derivatives like “blogrolling” and less felicitious but still useful ones like “blogosphere.” The dispute over whether the verb is transitive will sort itself out in time. “Blog” reminds me a great deal of one of the best neologisms of the 20th century, “blurb,” coined by Gelett “I never saw a purple cow” Burgess. It rolls off the tongue less easily, and lacks its onomatopoeic qualities, but has all of its other virtues.

Blog it is. Here endeth the lesson.

Dear Reflections in D Minor: Speaking of neologisms, I know just what you mean:

It’s funny how sometimes this whole Internet thing seems more like real life than real “real life.” And there’s another possible topic for a future post. Why do we talk of “real life” as if life online is not just as real? I sometimes use the term “realspace” to refer to that which is not cyberspace and I’ve seen the word “meatspace” which is more accurate but sort of icky. We need some new words.

OGIC and I are very old friends, but we haven’t seen each other in the flesh for a year–yet we “meet” each day in cyberspace. It isn’t quite as good as dinner and a movie, but it beats nothing all to hell.

Dear Lileks: We may be semi-highbrows around this shop, but I quite liked what you wrote about Norman Rockwell this morning:

I love Klee, but it’s just Klee. I’m not inclined to hang on the wall that SatEvePost cover of the grinning tomboy with the black eye, but if I was asked to write a story about it, I could give you 9000 words. Somehow this makes it bad art.

Go figure.

Dear Eve Tushnet: You must be the first blogger in the known universe to have worked Cat Power and Christ into the same posting. I’m agog.

Dear Asymmetrical Information: Welcome back. About time.

And, finally:

Dear Minor Fall, Major Lift: From now on, we’re spelling it “underwhlemed,” too. It’s better that way.

Web-based reasons to put off till tomorrow what you could have done today:

As noted by Terry earlier, Amanda at Household Opera is quoting Edward Gorey, which should always be encouraged. Now I know where my next fortune cookie is coming from.

Cinetrix, whom we can’t seem to stop linking to, is brave. She’s also sick, which will not do. Get on the case, ‘Fesser.

Jessica Harbour is full of good advice for participants in National Novel Writing Month, which I kind of wish I were doing, now that it is safely too late to start. NaNoWriMo’s FAQs include the following:

Did you know there is a group in Vancouver that writes novels in a weekend?

Yes, and they are fools. Everyone knows that any deep and lasting work of art takes an entire month to make.

How do you pronounce NaNoWriMo?

NAN-no WRY-Mo.

Oh. I’ve been saying it NAN-no WREE-Mo.

That’s ok too.

Can I write one word 50,000 times?

No. Well… No.

Can anyone participate in NaNoWriMo?

No. People who take their writing very seriously should go elsewhere. Everyone else, though, is warmly welcomed.

Oh well, maybe next year.

Dear OGIC:

Ever since this site began, our traffic has been significantly lower in the Mountain Time Zone than anywhere else in the continental U.S.

Discuss.

Raise your hand if you know what Charles Murray is talking about in this conversation with The New Yorker‘s Rebecca Mead, related in this week’s Talk of the Town:

Murray was asked what emanations of popular culture would appear on his own top-twenty list. “The movie ‘Groundhog Day,'” he immediately offered. “It is a brilliant moral fable, offering an Aristotelian view of the world.” What else? “The genre of the hardboiled detective novel,” he said. “I think people may still be reading Sherlock Holmes two hundred years from now.” How about television? “I don’t go along with the ‘I Love Lucy’ stuff,” he said, as if an “I Love Lucy” lobby were outside, picketing the Hertog home.

It’s not outside, it’s out here! To Mead, Murray’s reference to “I Love Lucy” is just a loopy non sequitur. Committed arts blog readers will have instantly recognized it as one of David Frum’s top ten cultural items produced since 1950 that will still matter in 200 years.
Cup of Chicha was just one of many such sites to link to Frum’s list last week.

By the way, you can read my illustrious cohort’s take on Murray’s Human Accomplishment over here.

And you can put your hand down now.

Old Hag is back–and writing poetry!

The moment of truth has arrived. The long-awaited paperback edition of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken is now officially on sale. To repeat myself for the umpteenth time, If each and every one of you clicks on the link and orders at least one (1) copy for gift-giving purposes (assuming you don’t already own a copy of the hardcover edition for yourself, and if not, why not?), my amazon.com sales ranking will explode and I’ll be cool enough to hang out with Maud again. Besides, I think it’s a damned good book, as did the innumerable reviewers quoted on the front and back covers and inside the book. Fifty million critics can be wrong, but not this time.

So get with it, O.K.? Don’t forget, I’m going to buy Our Girl a Really Good Dinner with the royalties…and we’ll even blog about it!

“Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize.”

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

From the Denver Post (by way of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host), this story suggesting that pay-per-song Web sites are the wave of the musical future:

Stores will no doubt sell prepackaged music CDs for years to come, but in 2003, the power has shifted….

With at least five major paid sites now offering upward of 300,000 songs, pay-per-song has reached a marketplace mass that will both generate valuable publicity for the owners and create price-cutting competition for consumers.

More big names are poised to join the competition if their marketing surveys pan out: Dell, Microsoft and Amazon have all said they’re interested in selling downloadable songs.

Read the whole thing, including a useful box comparing the various features of the five major pay-per-song sites. What it says doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been predicting the demise of the recording industry in its present form for a number of years now, most recently in an essay published in Commentary last year (it’ll be reprinted in expanded form in A Terry Teachout Reader
under the title “Life Without Records”) in which I argued that the rise of CD-ripping, file sharing, and pay-per-song would inevitably lead to the decline of the record album:

In the not-so-long run, the introduction of online delivery systems and the spread of file-sharing will certainly undermine and very likely destroy the fundamental economic basis for the recording industry, at least as we know it today. Nor can there be much doubt that within a few years, the record album will lose its once-privileged place at the heart of Western musical culture….

Prior to the invention of the LP, musicians usually recorded not albums but specific songs or pieces of music which were released on single 78s and meant to be experienced individually. Perhaps, then, there will be no more Only the Lonelys or Kind of Blues, but only “One for My Babys” and “All Blues.” Or possibly new modes of presentation will evolve…

To be sure, this prospect is understandably disturbing to many older musicians and music lovers, given the fact that the record album has played so pivotal a role in the culture of postwar music. Nor do I claim that life without records will necessarily be better–or worse. It will merely be different, just as the lives of actors were irrevocably changed by the invention of the motion-picture camera in ways that no one could possibly have foreseen in 1900. But one thing is already clear: unlike art museums and opera houses, records serve a purpose that technology has rendered obsolete. The triumph of the digit, and the demise of the record album as culture-shaping art object, is at hand.

This piece did in fact disturb quite a few older readers, some of them musicians who had not yet envisioned the possibility of life without records. I sympathized, as I always do with those who find cultural change disorienting. What I try to do, though, is remember that different and worse aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes different is better, and sometimes, maybe most of the time, it’s just different. The thing is to try to understand the nature of the difference–and, insofar as possible, to think of ways in which new culture-shaping technologies can be used in the service of old values. Yes, film has permanently usurped the place of live theater at the center of the cultural conversation. But it didn’t kill live theater–and it also gave us new ways to tell old stories, and to tell them to larger audiences than ever before, as Laurence Olivier did in Henry V and Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing.

That’s how I view life without records: as an opportunity. And I’ll feel the same way when the printed book gives way, as in time it surely must, to the hand-held electronic book-reading device. No doubt the day will come when I stop asking the Great Cultural Dealer to deal me new cards, and decide to spend the rest of my life playing with the ones already in my hand. It happens to us all sooner or later. But I’m not ready for that moment, not yet. Yes, I’m old-fashioned–but my attachment is to essences, not embodiments. And while I’m well aware of the law of unintended consequences, I also believe in the power of free men to shape and reshape those consequences.

That’s why I’m planning to buy myself an iPod for Christmas. It’s time for another card.