Archives for 2003

Felix Salmon has posted some provocative thoughts about blog timeliness, custom-tailored for “About Last Night”:

One of the greatest things about blogs in general is that they’re much more personal than, say, the Wall Street Journal. Updating a website shortly after midnight every day is not personal: it’s mechanical. It also mitigates against the kind of impulsive postings which might not go down in internet history but which help to build community: the things which give your audience an idea of who you are and what makes you tick. “Ohmigod I just heard George Plimpton died,” maybe followed by a personal anecdote, is not exactly newspaper material, but it’s perfect for a weblog….

So the upsides to publishing on an as-and-when basis are many: your site stats increase, your readers become more loyal (if only because they visit you more often), your blog becomes more blog-like and less like a daily newspaper column, and it also, when it wants or needs to, becomes more timely. What are the downsides? For you, I’d say the main one would be that blogging would become more of a full-time occupation. At the moment, you might be doing your regular job during the day and then settling down in the evenings to do the blog, maybe after having mulled a number of different possible topics in the back of your head over the course of the day. If you change posting habits then you might find yourself blogging during hours of the day in which you had intended to do something else.

That said, no-one’s going to mind if you don’t update between the hours of nine and five, or if you do so only very occasionally. Do what works best for you, because that, I can guarantee you, is going to be what works best for your readers. I would only urge you not to sit on blog postings for hours after you’ve written them, just because you want to wait until a certain hour before you post. I simply cannot see why that does either your or your readers any favours at all.

This hit me where I live. I spent a lot of time (three years, off and on) thinking about the nature of blogging before I decided to launch “About Last Night,” and I worked out a lot of things in my head in advance of the first day’s postings. But blogging really is a new medium, with its own indigenous properties and natural laws, and after actually doing it for two months I’m only just beginning to grasp some of them. What Felix Salmon is saying may well be obvious to people who came to blogging first, as opposed to people with a long history of print-media journalism, with its deadline-driven timetables (to which I am a slave, as all of you who’ve been reading my recent postings will be all too aware). But it wasn’t obvious to me–at least not until my hard drive crashed and I found it impossible to keep to the kind of clockwork schedule I simply took for granted was as necessary on line as off.

I think I may already have been starting to realize some of this on my own. I’d noticed, for example, that the traffic for this site is lowest in the mornings–the very time I took for granted that most people would read it, the way they do a newspaper. Instead, the numbers start to spike upward around one p.m. on the East Coast, and you can see them continue to climb as the lunch hour moves across the continent. Had I expected that? No. Did it change my posting habits? No. It took a computer-related disaster to jolt me out of my print-based routine, and even then I felt odd, almost guilty, because I wasn’t hitting at the same time every day.

Old habits die hard, even when they’re ill-suited to new circumstances. I suspect this is especially true for middle-aged people who are stumbling into a brand-new conceptual world pioneered by younger folk. (As I remarked in this space a couple of weeks ago, advancing age brings wisdom and inflexibility in equal measure.) The trick is to see what’s under your nose, and what I seem to be seeing, thanks in part to Felix Salmon, is that the whole point of blogging is to do things your way, at your own pace, secure in the knowledge that the 24/7 nature of the medium will allow other people to do exactly the same thing.

As it happens, I was talking about all this yesterday with Our Girl in Chicago, who is considerably younger than I am and thus has found it easier to adapt to the intrinsic nature of the medium. In addition, we’re both enjoying joint blogging very much (an idea I got from 2 Blowhards, by the way), and it occurred to us at roughly the same time that this is no coincidence. Two-headed blogs are not only easier to keep in motion, but the unpredictable alternation of the two voices makes for a serendipitous variety of tone and topic that I find appealing. Yet that, too, is something you won’t find in newspapers and magazines, whose fixed periods of publication are antithetical to free conversational interplay.

As I announced on Monday, “About Last Night” will be updated on what Felix Salmon calls an “as-and-when” basis for the duration of the current computer crisis. But I now suspect that is likely to become a permanent arrangement once my iBook is up and running. Once again–and not for the first time–what initially seemed like a major disaster has actually had the effect of dynamiting an arbitrary routine and making me rethink the way I do things.

So here’s to the unforeseen…up to a point.

This is the inaugural installment of a recurring feature by OGIC that, like Terry’s “Almanac,” will provide profound or funny or otherwise arresting words–something I’d like to find in my next fortune cookie. Or, who knows, maybe something I have found in a fortune cookie. It will appear not daily, but as frequently or infrequently as fortune sees fit.

“On the way back to Tourves we drive past it again, Mont Sainte-Victoire. It looks bald, formidable, remote. It looks like it would kill you if you tried to paint it.”

Robert Cohen, Slate “Diary”

(1) It’s been an open secret for several months now, but I’m one of the judges for this year’s National Book Awards (I’m on the nonfiction panel). Our short list of nominees will be announced on October 7. We think we picked a very nice bunch of books.

(2) No, I didn’t have anything to do with Stephen King’s lifetime achievement award. I found out about it the same way you did.

(3) No, I don’t have an opinion about the award, because I’ve never read anything by Stephen King (I don’t much care for tales of horror). OGIC thinks you ought to have read at least some of his stuff before making up your mind about its quality (see below). I agree.

Fair enough?

“If one plays good music people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.”

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

I was mistaken when I said last week that you could email me at “ourgirlinchicago….” That email address is a mere flimsy fiction.

However, I don’t think Terry will mind if you write to me via his Arts Journal address–just make it easy on the poor guy and put “OGIC” in the subject line, would you?

Ever since the National Book Foundation announced that they would bestow their annual achievement award on Stephen King–and especially since Harold Bloom announced his ire about this–I’ve been plotting a response. Defenses of King have popped up in the meantime, for instance here and here. I couldn’t tell whether this was a defense or not (the author plays both sides of the fence). None of them quite captured what is for me the essence of the case against Bloom.

Tonight, however, I found the response that entirely discharges me of the need to write what I think, because it perfectly reflects what I think. Needless to say, it’s excellent! At his blog Easily Distracted, Timothy Burke notes the obvious but under-remarked fact that Harold Bloom has read little of King’s work, if any:

The most important point is that…qualitative judgements are hard to make, not easy. They’re the meat-and-potatoes business of literary criticism. They require a lot of laying of philosophical and intellectual foundations to make in general (which Bloom has done, though in ways I profoundly disagree with) but also a lot of labor in each and every specific case, which Bloom has not done.

And he proceeds to the gist of the matter:

The culture which matters most is not merely the culture that aesthetes praise as worthy, but the culture which indures, inspires, circulates, and is meaningful and memorable for many people, to the widest audiences. Sometimes that involves the adroit manipulation of archetypical themes and deep tropes of the popular culture of a particular time and place, and King does both of those things. I don’t know how he’ll be read a century from now, but I do know that in this time and place he not only tells a damn fine story (most of the time: even I would regard some of his work as hackwork) but manages to say some important things about consumerism, family, childhood, apocalyptic dread, obsession and many other resonant, powerful themes of his day and age.

This is a vastly greater level of articulation than I had approached in my thinking about this, which had gotten only about as far as invoking two nineteenth-century giants, Scott and Dickens. I once contemplated writing a dissertation about the careers of Sir Walter Scott and Henry James, which pretty quickly proved impracticable though the contemplating was great fun (a sad truism about dissertations). I remember musing that if such a comparative study were to extend into the twentieth century, the most logical place for it to lead would be, full-circle-wise, to King, a hugely popular and prolific storyteller like the Author of Waverley, with frequent recourse to the supernatural and a bead on, as Burke notes above, the “resonant, powerful themes of his day and age.”

Scott was not consistently good and certainly is not regarded today with anything like the respect accorded the likes of James or George Eliot. But he thought up, and vividly put down, the stories that most captured the collective nineteenth-century imagination (and not just in England, either). He may be just the figure to shed some literary-historical light on King’s achievement, whether you’re inclined to understand it as artistic, commercial, or something in between.

“Nothing is so poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Apropos of my most recent posting on Zankel Hall and its critics, I got this e-mail last week from Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker. I couldn’t post it until now because of the black smoke coming out of the hard drive of my iBook:

A friendly riposte re: Zankel. Is it fair to judge the acoustics on the basis of the preview concert alone? I’d be especially wary of measuring the hall’s suitability for amplified music solely on the basis of the Kenny Barron Quintet’s brief performance. Yes, their full show that weekend was noisy and unfocused. But Omar Sosa was another matter–cool, crisp sound. Perhaps Mr. Barron simply didn’t have an adequate setup.

I’ve Zankled nine times so far, and my perceptions keep changing. The subway noise, which annoyed me last week, is bothering me less. The acoustics are still weird, but I’m discovering that the aisle seats in the orchestra, where the critics are clumped, are among the worst. Best are the middle
seats of the orchestra and the side seats in the balcony. The problem is that the stage lacks a good reflective shell behind it–“revenge of Merkin Hall,” I heard one composer say–so the sound seems to gel only in certain places. A couple of butt-ugly buffers on the side might help. However, to judge from comments overheard, casual listeners are totally unperturbed by
all these issues. They like the place. So do I.

As for the multi-culti programming, I think you’re overlooking the hall’s usefulness as a filter for those who are baffled by the sheer superfluity of choices out there. BAM has long functioned in the same way–as a taste agent that people have grown to trust. The opening weekend worked because we trusted John Adams, the man responsible for the programming, and he put on a briliant tour of the musical horizon. The reliance on Nonesuch in the opening season is another canny use of the filter function. The crucial question is whether Zankel can maintain this level of interest, or whether it will devolve toward classical Dullsville.

Looking back over my original postings, I don’t think I was quite so categorical in my comments on the acoustics as Alex implies, but beyond that I think he is talking a good deal of sense. I have no doubt that everybody’s perceptions of Zankel Hall will change over time and with further exposure–or, to put it another way, we’ll all get used to the place, and come to see at least some of its characteristic features not as unpleasant surprises but as…well, characteristic features. This is even true of a phenomenon so seemingly “objective” as acoustics, and it’ll be even truer as more artists perform with amplification, thereby creating a sonic track record for the managers to draw on.

For what it’s worth (though I can’t name names), I recently had a chat with a jazz musician slated to perform in the hall later this season who came away from Brad Mehldau’s concert feeling considerable anxiety about the acoustics–especially as they affect drummers. Time will tell, and it will also tell whether Zankel is able to establish itself as a center for consistently imaginative programming or will deteriorate into “classical Dullsville.” I like Alex’s point about halls serving as filters and trustworthy “taste agents” for the public–though of course that doesn’t happen very often.

In retrospect, I fear that I was writing too much as the jaded insider who’s Heard It All. It’s true that the people who book concert-hall performances in New York rarely surprise me anymore, but then it’s my business to know what’s going on. In any case, I’m obliged to Alex for reminding me of some things that seem to have slipped my mind in the usual rush to judgment. Blogging has a way of doing that to you, but it also makes it possible for you to think twice, and three and four times, in public. I hope I’ll have thought a lot more times than that about Zankel Hall before I’m finally done.