Is blogging together being like Iceland?

[... before I get to the topic, ... a note for this blog's Annals of Outrageous Hypocrisy. It’s the usual suspect, I’m afraid, Guardian News and Media (GNM). Any number of us who have commented on blogs on The Guardian’s website in recent years have seen our posts deleted when they support -- or simply mention -- bloggers disagreeing with the paper’s moderation decisions or policies. I last saw this happen only weeks ago. . . But hark! comrades, here is The Guardian – as quoted by Noam Cohen in The New York Times – once again posing as the great liberator and friend of free speech:

… Last month, a British judge ruled that material obtained by Guardian journalists about a multinational corporation had to be kept secret. […] That is, The Guardian was forbidden to report that it had been gagged.

… When, thanks to his Twitter-ing, The Guardian’s editor got the gag order untied, he exulted:

But last week’s events show that a variety of Internet projects, including Twitter, are making it harder for the traditional gatekeepers to control of the flow of information.
Certainly, The Guardian was in full celebratory mode last week. “Twitter’s detractors are used to sneering that nothing of value can be said in 140 characters,” Mr. Rusbridger wrote about his initial tweet. “My 104 characters did just fine.”

Hmm …and now that you know what, er…. heavy-handed moderation …. feels like yourself, Alan Rusbridger, how about telling us that you understand how we feel about your minions’ restraints on our free speech? How about apologising for routinely dishing out through your moderators the kind of censorship and silencing you apparently can’t take yourself?]

de•lin•quent (dĭ-lĭng’kwənt, -lĭn’-)

adj. 1. Failing to do what law or duty requires.
2. Overdue in payment: a delinquent account.

[Latin dēlinquēns, dēlinquent-, present participle of dēlinquere, to offend : dē-, de- + linquere, to leave, abandon; see leikw- in Indo-European roots.]

… Yes, I know. . . I know. The long gap between posts – if nothing else – proves that nearly all shades of that word apply to the writer of this blog. But whereas most people wander from their accustomed haunts when the days are long and the weather balmy, some of us put off going away until the wind picks up, the thermostat plummets, and we can maximise our chances of surreal experiences. I’ve been busy haggling over steamer trunks, mules and camels, and calculating how many tents I’ll need.

I’ve been recalled to duty at this site by @ISA, also known as Philip Hall, who has just launched an experiment in collaborative blogging. If Phil had consulted me beforehand about timing – never mind that there’s no reason why he should have done — I’d have explained that I couldn’t accept either his invitation or his ‘all hands on deck’ summons over at Ars Notoria, or certainly not in the immediate future.

I wish the new site every success. Its launch has dovetailed tidily with reflections over the last few days on what I’ve learnt from running acciaccature — one year old next month, when I might not have access to a computer or even a net-capable mobile telephone. Moments before I had Phil’s birth announcement, and looking for attractive trunk-lining, I came across this paragraph in an excellent travelogue by Rebecca Solnit in last October’s issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Iceland is the only part of Europe that never begat monarchs or a hereditary aristocracy […] Iceland’s national parliament, or Althing—the word for “assembly” being, in Icelandic, thing—was formed in 930 a.d., about sixty years after the first settlers came over from Norway. They met at a site whose name, Thingvellir, “the plain of the thing,” still commemorates this ancient annual gathering, which was a combined parliamentary session, court review, and country fair.

Aha, I thought, re-reading that – a nation founded in the spirit of collaborative blogging, which Phil’s charter demonstrates to perfection. I dearly hope that Ars Notoria can avoid the obvious pitfalls of all such idealistic enterprises, never depicted more splendidly than by Orwell’s hypocritical, self-righteous oinks ‘more equal’ than the other beasts in Animal Farm.

About Icelandic government, though, what Solnit mentions as its most glaring flaw puzzled me at first. That, it seems, is cowardice – lily-livered citizen-governors – on which she quotes Svanur Kristjánsson, an Icelandic professor of political science:

“You can run into your prime minister at the store,” he said. “You know the minister, the president—you can make an appointment with the president.” But at the same time, there is “an incredible lack of civic courage” within the governing class, “a lack of people standing up and telling the truth,”

The idea seemed less surprising after I remembered the striking ratio in this very spot between the swarms of clicks, indicating reader interest, and the low comment count, for posts critical of The Guardian — taking it to task not just for silencing dissenting voices but far, far worse.

Whether or not Icelandic cowardice has any application at Ars Notoria – I’d guess none, if it turns out to be just a friendly chat forum, or one where bloggers with strange hobbies embrace fellow-hobbyists — countries could supply the best fast metaphors for what collaborative blogs should and shouldn’t aim at being.

Since most of the bloggers I know and love best are almost militantly independent, I suspect that we’re most like nations made up of hardy and idiosyncratic mountain peoples when we attempt to blog together. Think of Switzerland, a country of only seven and a half million inhabitants splintered into twenty-six cantons speaking either wholly different languages or different dialects of the same language, and operating something like fractal micro-Switzerlands with their own laws.

Well, … perhaps not Switzerland, as after the 19th century its tribes, acting collectively, seem to have acquired a mysterious gift for attracting peace to themselves – or certainly for keeping out of international disputes.

Afghanistan would be its opposite, since that’s a mountainous nation that you might suppose to have a magical knack for magnetising conflict.

Collaborative blogging – in my experiences to date, starting with Desmond Swords’ heroic blogger-nation, Lit-Lovers’ Forum, in 2007 – is rather more like Afghanistan.

When I can help with Ars Notoria (and if Phil’s invitation still stands) I almost certainly will – though that won’t be for several weeks. Why the note of hesitation? Since Phil has some connection never quite spelt out with administrators at The Guardian, I confess that I’ve been wondering whether we aren’t being invited to act, unpaid, as laboratory mice for an experiment in moderation-free blogging whose most constructive and productive features will simply be copied by that newspaper.

I have trouble completely believing my suggestion myself – since Phil, unlike GNM, is as far as possible from a hypocrite or, as the subject has been mentioned, coward. I’m more deeply in his debt than anyone else’s for posting notices of this site’s existence in other places, and he has been unstinting with every form of encouragement. But for family-related reasons he has openly explained, he feels bound by respect and affection to certain editors at that newspaper.

I don’t envy him his complicated tight rope act, supporting both us and them. If I’m right in my guess … and I could be wholly mistaken … and if the policy-makers and online publishing strategists at The Guardian make the apology they owe a few of us for outrageous mistreatment; if they can be modest enough to ask for our help in trying out new kinds of blogging platforms; if they compensate us in some way for our effort, I’ll sign on. Who would doubt that that’s the right way forward for any newspaper serious about thriving in the ethersphere?

A prize-winning journalist becomes the latest casualty of free-speech suppression at Guardian News & Media

GNM's expansion and redesign explained to NetMag

To many if not most readers of this blog, big business is boring. Small business is boring. Management is boring. Journalism is rather boring. . . And I have, by now, written so many posts on the subject of irrational and self-destructive censorship by editors and moderators at Guardian News & Media that that’s almost certainly boring, too.

So why am I posting in this spot about a widely admired Observer columnist on management whose job was axed in a recent round of economy measures at GNM?

Not just because, writing at the top of his form, this writer — Simon Caulkin — is a fine literary essayist whose work has been garlanded with the most coveted awards in his sphere. Anyone who cares about literature should also be outraged because he frequently used that column for incisive criticism of the disregard by large corporations, government departments and other powerful institutions of basic human and cultural values – and frequently, of common sense as well.

For an idea of what I mean there, look at the brief extracts I’m pasting in at the bottom of this blog entry, chosen at random from the dozens of columns by him that I’ve admired over the years. The first is about the vogue for mercantilist window-dressing that includes the pious phrase ‘corporate social responsibility’. The second is about fakery in general becoming business-as-usual for business.

A petition drawn up by one distressed fan of the column was signed by an impressive list of ninety authorities on management from both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere, as you’ll see by clicking on the link to this headline: ‘Academics threaten Observer boycott over ousted columnist, as newspaper faces uncertain future with GNM’.

The Observer refused to print the petition – or, as I’ve now given up hoping, reconsider its decision to drop the Caulkin column. Since that newspaper is effectively run by its owner, GNM, that hardly comes as a shock to some of us vanishingly trivial figures, bloggers recently victimised most bizarrely by the group’s managers. It felt like par for the course to read Philip Whiteley, chairman of the Human Capital Forum and the leader of the protest, saying to a journalists’ web site tipped off by Private Eye about this fight:

“I find it shocking that The Observer did not print our letter, given that as a ‘liberal’ paper it would presumably oppose the suppression of dissent and debate in public authorities or major corporations.”

The Observer’s continuation of columns by comedians David Mitchell and Dara O’Briain futher angered him: “Many of the letter’s signatories complain that The Observer is more interested in celebrities than the weighty issues of the day; and in breaking up the content into bite-sized pieces.

“Many formerly loyal readers feel patronised or ignored. It’s interesting to note that titles that have not gone down-market, such as the Financial Times, Economist and Wall Street Journal, and have not been so badly affected by the downturn in advertising,” he said.

“The editors of the Guardian/Observer seem to be insistent upon cheapening content, then wondering why they can’t charge for it any more. They have responded to decline by guaranteeing further decline.“

Does the organisation have no imagination whatsoever? Doesn’t it understand that flexibility practically defines the new online media with which it has been grappling? That one option it should surely have tried was an online version of the column – perhaps dedicating a specialised segment of its site to discussions of it? Search engines bring up so many complaints about GNM’s decision to wield the guillotine, in this case, that it’s hard to imagine such an experiment having anything but encouraging results.

At the very least, shouldn’t GNM have run the petition and let readers debate the termination of the column? Not just because we see opportunities for such discussion as a basic right in this age of blogging, of which GNM’s Comment-is-Free site is part, … supposedly a free speech forum — about which it boasts so often and proudly?

What GNM has been emphasising to the world repeatedly about its push into online publishing is that the scale of this drive is massive. Would finding a way to fit a management column into the grand enterprise have been so far beyond the wit of its management?

The shaky marriage of capitalism and virtue
Simon Caulkin, management editor,
The Observer,
Sunday 29 October 2006

… It’s true that the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) has never been more forcibly put, or more widely believed, including, genuinely, by company executives.

[…]

‘There is a business case for CSR, but it is much less important or influential than many proponents of civil regulation believe.’ Thus, despite the new conventional wisdom, and earnest endeavours by researchers to prove it, there is no evidence to show that ‘responsible’ companies are more profitable than irresponsible ones, let alone a causal link between the two. Neither, alas, does socially responsible investing produce higher returns than the ordinary variety.

[…]

CSR is shareholder capitalism’s guilty conscience, but it leaves the justification of shareholder primacy intact. And some guilt it can’t assuage: in the late 1990s, one company was highly rated by ethical investment funds and garlanded with environmental awards. Its name was Enron.

Why honesty is the most profitable policy
Simon Caulkin, management editor
Sunday August 5, 2007
The Observer

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, you may remember, declared that the Gulf War (the first one) took place only on television. […] Far from being just an aberration at the BBC, faking is now revealed to be endemic: it’s the way TV works.

We should hardly be surprised. Faking it – hiding one version of reality with another – is increasingly what management is about; profit is the product of an arbitrage between the company’s image of reality and yours. Consider Penelope Cruz’s eyelashes, or any number of airbrushed model images. Almost all advertising and much media production is faked in some sense.

[…]

Of course, some companies, pleading the pressure of the capital markets, will claim they have no choice but to fake it. Investors don’t care how the numbers are made, only that they are. This is not so much the Jean Baudrillard as the Groucho Marx school of management. As he put it: ‘The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you’ve got it made.’

Neurons making love and art

'Dragon Boat Festival,' Fang Zhaoling, 1985

It’s rutting season where I am.

Perfect, as it happens, for the question preoccupying me lately — about what conclusions neuroscience will reach on the neurological basis for the romantic temperament, its joys and vexations. In place of the asthmatic buses and jackhammers punctuating thought on my last working visit to London, I have galumphing deer clattering on the wooden planks hugging the perimeter of this house. This is something like listening to badly trained, drunken clog-dancers who lack any sense of rhythm.

‘Shhhh,’ I said, raising a cautioning hand at the kitchen table the night before last. I left my seat silently, snapping on outdoor lights as I went, and soon was looking down two sets of long doe ears lined in off-white fur — eighteen inches away and behind a glass door — as their owners tucked lustily into bird seed. That’s right, bird seed — where there’s no shortage of lush gardens for randy ruminants to plunder … — fallen from the bird feeder into a re-potting project.

In the morning, proof that the marauders returned …

A few days ago, I was about to post Fang Zhaoling’s painting with a line saying ‘Happy Bank Holiday’ – since the scene it depicts looked like fun unbound — until I read its caption. I remembered discussing on someone else’s blog last year the annual Dragon Boat Festival, which commemorates the death of one of the most famous poets in Chinese history. Qu Yuan (332-296 BC) was an aristocrat and great patriot with an ‘air of suffering nobility’ whose despairing love for his country led him to criticise its rulers, endure the ostracisation that followed, and eventually die by suicide. During the festival, the outstandingly practical Chinese try symbolically to ‘fish his corpse out of the water in which he drowned himself’, according to the sinologist Hellmut Wilhelm. A Chinese government site says about his most celebrated work:

Lament on Encountering Sorrow is a romantic lyric poem with a measured realism. The poet utilizes a great deal of exaggeration in portraying characters and describing objects. The assemblage of fairy tales further enhances the poem’s romantic flavour.

It was intended as a political protest. Though the poet who is its hero harnesses jade dragons to his phoenix carriage and is borne away on the wind to battle obstacles to winning the hand of a fairy, goddess or princess, Wilhelm says that the amorous quest is an ‘allegory of sensual union’ whose actual significance is political. In the ancient Chinese tradition, that union ‘was often used … to allude to the relationship between ruler and advisor.’

What interests me about Qu Yuan’s story and his epic poem is that they illustrate the consistency, across cultures, of the link between art and a bonjour tristesse view of life. The mystical psychologist Helen Palmer includes as typical of this perspective an attraction to ‘what’s missing: the distant, unavailable, and hard to get ,’ as well as a ‘sense of abandonment … impatien[ce] with mediocrity and mundane life’ ; a tendency to intensify feeling through ‘loss, fantasy, artistic connection, and dramatic acts’ – and in work, a craving for distinctiveness, for ‘creativity, even genius, an eccentric edge in presentation.’

That isn’t just true of artistic creativity, as conventional thinking has it, but of original thinking in science, too. That point is made in a mention I found only this week of The Age of Wonder by the biographer Richard Holmes:

“Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity,” Holmes writes. “But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive.[...]“

A biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, Holmes’s particular genius is to parse the similar philosophical concerns of both science and poetry, showing us how the scientists of the era defined the textbook Romantic temperament as much as the poets did.

I want neuroscientists to explain what drearily reductive evolutionary biologists have so far been unable to do, which is tell me why Albert Einstein, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, Robert Oppenheimer and Ted Hughes all had enough sturm-und-drang in their relationships to justify thrillingly romantic bio-pics — even though, because they were men, no one would a priori have assumed any interest in being ‘in love with being in love’ in ways assumed to be typical of women. Why is romantic love – the most intense, pleasurable, but also difficult kind of loving – so often part of the picture of high accomplishment in creating what didn’t exist before, when that involves imagination and originality?

What other human tendencies belong in that cluster of neurological functions or tendencies? For instance, science has found that brain circuitry fully supports the old cliché about the close kinship between the emotions of love and hate. Recently, neuroscientists have been working on a fascinating puzzle – trying to work out why cursing seems to act as a natural analgesic:

According to a study published in the current issue of NeuroReport, swearing helps to alleviate pain:

“Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon,” said Richard Stephens of Keele University in England and one of the authors of the new study. “It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.”

I was thinking about all that when fragments of David McDade’s lyrics on a CD bought for a different song caught my ear (not in the overcooked rendering of the hyper-pneumatic Dolly Parton) :

Everytime the bluebird sings
My heart takes wings to the sky
With bluebird’s grace I fly
To my place in your eyes
Cause after all, I did all I could
And you did your best, just the same
Nobody won, we both lost, no one’s to blame
But I’ll find my way to you, if I’m only pretending
And we’ll be like bluebirds, live the beautiful lie
We’ll be like bluebirds, live the beautiful lie

… and when those last words seemed strangely familiar, a search engine reminded me that it was Stendhal who said that all art is a beautiful lie, or what you could see as elaboration on the romantic impulse.

What would the opposite of that be? Perhaps excessive realism – like Schopenhauer’s. He meticulously worked out how attaining our desires only leads to new desires and discontentment, and for himself, mostly rejected close human connection — preferring the companionship of a succession of poodles he owned from his student days until his death. I suspect that most of humanity would find his impeccable rationality less compelling than the grand — grandiose — delusions of romanticism. Our reach was surely always intended to exceed our grasp.

How many wouldn’t reject the chance to write impenetrably, as Schopenhauer did, …

The physical form of the principle of sufficient reason is the principle of becoming. The mathematical form of the principle of sufficient reason is the principle of being. The logical form of the principle of sufficient reason is the principle of knowing. The moral form of the principle of sufficient reason is the principle of acting.

… if offered the choice between that and being able to say, as Byron did, that

… dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures and the touch of joy:
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight off from our waking toils,
[…] they become
A portion of ourselves and of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity; …

A world-view like Schopenhauer’s leaves so much less room for believing six impossible things before breakfast – in, for instance, the existence of bird-brained, seed-chomping deer.

We few, we happy few … bloggers vs. The Guardian (which has a lesson to learn from computer geeks)

Old Media contemplating the leap into the New (Huma Mulji's 'High Rise'; Ozier Muhammad)

Dear Comrades, including those of you who once blogged with me on the books site of The Guardian – whether or not we’re still on speaking terms,

…The signs point to a victory over Goliath. . . Yes, we few, we happy band of bloggers … have won, by refusing to let that newspaper shut us up — behaving just like Tony Benn resisting the BBC’s attempt to silence him in this riveting clip @Hazlitt posted here.

The incontrovertible proof of our triumph? That the moderators on that site can no longer openly ban us.

Because they couldn’t ban for instance, me, in the last half of August, they stooped to imitating Richard Nixon’s Dirty Tricks Department – remember Watergate? — to keep me out.

Why? Because we have taught the Guardian’s managers that a banned blogger quickly becomes a cause célèbre – not least because this site, with one or two others, initiated a tradition of publishing any comments censored by the newspaper’s trigger-happy moderators. (see Salvage Operation, part 1 and part 2.)

It would have been hard for The Guardian to ban me outright. Far from attacking or abusing anyone in my only two attempts at posting there as @wordnerd7 since last winter, I wrote a comment praising a piece on the newspaper’s site.

Before I tidy all that out of sight — and to ensure that the newspaper’s editors will never be able to dismiss the incidents as paranoid and imaginary — I’m summarising the sequence of happenings in this spot. On August 22, I had an automated message informing me that a comment warmly supporting an article by Aaron Akinyemi on the books blog had been siphoned off into ‘pre-moderation’. While I waited, mystified and with misgivings, I pasted in a draft of that comment on this site. On August 26, four days after it disappeared into the bowels of the online Guardian, it reappeared heavily edited – with links to two articles on this site agreeing with Aaron’s argument lopped off. Sentences of mine were slyly inserted under the screen name ‘@wordnerd’ – and not ‘@wordnerd7’, as they should have been. At the bottom of the butchered comment, a remark addressed to ‘@nuges’ was added to my words – a remark never made by me.

When I saw that on August 27, I immediately wrote a new comment, protesting about the censoring, blatant distortion and additions to my original comment — asking the Guardian’s moderators for an explanation. This attempt at posting also vanished into pre-moderation, never to be seen again. I put an exact replica of that post here.

Another wait. Then, on August 28, a comment of which I never wrote a single line appeared in the Akinyemi thread under ‘@wordnerd’. The post attributed to me amounts to a simple-minded and crass statement about racial differences at the furthest extreme from my own beliefs (……………as anyone interested will discover in reading these threads: Will Barack Obama bring back heroism? and A bit more on heroes: Barack Obama’s odyssey, part 2)

Just to be perfectly clear about what must be obvious, The Guardian has never answered my question about why the first post was censored and doctored – and it prevented my enquiry from ever appearing on its site. (I have a copy of the second pre-moderation notice.)

So that’s what I mean by ‘dirty tricks’, and I’m creating this careful record of the incidents for anyone else who might encounter the same behaviour by the authorities responsible for that site.

Now this, mark you, is a newspaper that has a whole segment of its website labelled Liberty Central, advertising the image it likes to project – and can sometimes justify, in other spheres – as a friend of freedom and the oppressed.

As I pointed out at the time, it’s clear that The Guardian is severely rattled by bloggers questioning its authority with substantive objections. There is other – constructive and heartening — proof of our arrows finding their mark. Over the last few weeks, there have been several articles on the Guardian’s books blog objecting to the commercialisation of book publishing – for instance, this one about promotional author-videos and another about Margaret Atwood.

They make a striking contrast with the prevailing opinion of the editors on that site two years ago, when they ran piece after piece endorsing book publishing’s increasing dominance by marketing executives (at the expense of literary quality) – starting with one titled Selling Yourself as a Writer. As recently as last November, strong – but politely worded — objections to that unbridled philistinism were deleted by Guardian moderators.

An entry in this blog spelling out those objections in detail seems to have been heeded: Since when was a newspaper strictly a mercantilist tool?

In effectively banning me in late August, though, the authorities concerned appeared to have had a fit of acute irrationality – spiced with malice.

Arbitrary and punishing authoritarianism is out of temper with the times, dear Guardian. We know how difficult it must be for Old Media to adjust to online publishing, which needs new rules for all sorts of processes and procedures, including the correction of errors, as I demonstrated last month.

Look to the technocrats who gave us these magnificent new communication tools to see how you should be making every facet of your modus operandi more egalitarian. Power structures are flattening out. You don’t seem to have noticed, but they aren’t shaped like pyramids any more. Last March, Scott Rosenberg, who has just published a history of blogging, Say Everything, received a grant of $335,000 from the American Knight Foundation to explore a system for correcting errors in the media that mimics the cheerfully collaborative spirit in which coders of open-source software have debugged each other’s work for decades.

Instead of getting huffy and defensive about the mistakes they make when these are pointed out by readers, in Rosenberg’s vision, newspapers and other media will respond with a collegial graciousness. As he has explained, about his test site:

We’re a place on the Web (independent and not-for-profit) where you can bring specific errors, issues and problems you’ve found in media coverage in your community and try to get them fixed.

[…]

Q: Why should I bother?

A: Because you know that good public information is the lifeblood of democracy. And that journalists are human beings who sometimes make mistakes. And that they work for institutions that don’t always respond to criticism. Instead of posting an angry rant on your blog or just shrugging your shoulders, MediaBugs will give you and those journalists a chance to have civil exchanges about the inevitable errors and problems that crop up in their work.

… As for my fellow-bloggers, with whom I began. Make sure that you have your own blog. I’d have been beside myself if I’d had no way to expose the behaviour of the Guardian’s moderators over the last two weeks. Get your own site, and think hard about commenting on newspaper articles there, not on the newspapers’ sites – to ensure that you will always own the words you write, and can make up your own rules about what you can and can’t say.

Withhold your clicks from their sites, if necessary, and put your weight behind the thrilling new democracy that the new communication technologies have brought us. And do not doubt for a second that our words are being read where it matters.

. . . We few, we happy few, we band of bloggers;
For we today who save our clicks for freedom
Shall e’er be comrades; be we ne’er so vile
Our band shall speed the media revolution:
And Grauniad moderators in their cups
Shall cry themselves a river they were so foul,
And took for monkeys commenters loyal and fair
Who looked for thanks and justice, all in vain.

Platform 9¾ at the media junction

[ with apologies to H. Potter and J.K. Rowling]

It’s been hot where I am, for most of the last week – blisteringly, sinfully, mind-numbingly hot. But is only weather to blame for the last thread here and its cousin on @ISA’s site seeming not merely Dali-esque but downright fantastic?

As I swelter, I’m up to no more than sharing three jottings related to those posts – what an old friend calls ‘perspective pills’:

1. The ideal of the Fourth Estate – especially as the exclusive preserve of print newspapers — is virtually dead.

I’ve discovered that that’s a forgone conclusion for the über word nerd William Safire (well, he does have an army of paid researchers doing his digging – and yes, they make me jealous). Mea culpa, for brandishing that once-noble phrase in an earlier post. Safire’s Political Dictionary says in the entry for ‘fourth estate’:

The press, a dated phrase now often used in sarcasm.
[…]
The phrase was used to put the press on an equal footing with the greatest powers in a nation; in the twentieth century it was taken up by many editors in descriptions of the importance of journalism. The phrase lost its vividness as the other ‘estates’ [clergy, nobility, commoners] faded from memory, and now has a musty connotation. In current use ‘the press’ usually carries with it the aura of ‘freedom of the press’ enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, while critics of the press usually label it with a sneer, ‘the media,’ originally popularised as an advertising term.

Safire and his researcher-moles have settled not on Burke — who usually gets the credit — but William Hazlitt (who might or mightn’t be related to our @Hazlitt on this site) as the coiner of the term. In an 1821 essay, the great contrarian and stylist described one William Cobbett — a pamphleteer with the heart and mind of a first-rate blogger — as follows:

His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he ‘fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle.’ He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; ‘lays waste’ a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.

2. No one seriously young has the faintest idea of why ‘Fourth Estate’ once made ink-stained hearts beat faster.

From a passing mention of a blogger making a splash in Manhattan – where you once went if bent on getting rich-and-famous in Old Media, and now do better even if you’re already thriving in New Media, according to the (of course wholly unbiased) New York Times:

“I would never get my company involved in a print product,” she said over a Prince song. “That is just a very expensive way of soothing your own ego and feeling important. I can’t see any value in that.”

3. Some stunning parallels – down to the precise words — between today’s shift in media power and the mid-20th-century transition from radio to TV …

… in an exemplary, clear-eyed and whinge-free column by Terry Teachout. Confirming that Mary Dejevsky was wrong to laugh at American newspapers for losing money in digital media experiments ten years ago, he writes in ‘The New Media Crisis of 1949’:

Network TV lost vast amounts of money in its early years. It was only because the existing ­radio networks were willing to subsidize TV that it survived—leaving CBS and NBC at the top of the heap in the ’50s and ’60s, just as they had been in the ’30s and ’40s. The old media of today have a similar chance to prosper tomorrow if they can survive the heavy financial losses that they’re incurring while they develop workable new-media business models.

In that watershed year:

At year’s end, a survey of 400 TV owners in Washington, D.C., told the tale: Adult attendance at movies was down 72%, while 36.7% of TV owners attended fewer baseball games. Meanwhile, the average amount of time that these Washingtonians spent listening to radio each day had plummeted from three hours and 42 minutes to less than half an hour.
[…]
“Maybe we old people can’t adapt successfully to video,” said Jim Jordan, the star of “Fibber McGee and Molly.”

His conclusion:

Established radio performers […] flourished well into the ’60s. Everyone else— […] — vanished into the dumpster of entertainment history. The same fate awaits contemporary old-media figures unwilling to grapple with the challenge of the new media, no matter how popular they may be today.

… When I was sixteen, rows of ink on newsprint smelt as sweet as fields of lavender; a lilac bush in full bloom — or my vase of freesias on a hot day, like this one. Enough with the soppy sentiment, I tell myself: out with the old; in with the new.

Bloggers can be choosers

In today’s Independent, the columnist Mary Dejevsky reveals herself as yet another print journalist who cannot understand that any newspaper postponing its reinvention from top to toe is begging to disappear down a crack of Tolkien’s Mount Doom. Icily, she mocks leading American papers like The Washington Post for losing money in early experiments in online publishing ten years ago – and seems to believe that they would have done better to ignore digital media altogether. Somehow, she has convinced herself of what was never true – that major newspapers are or were supported by readers’ subscriptions.

She could, like Elfrida Beetle, be suffering from a premature rusting of the synapses she uses to think about her profession.

But who, you ask, is this Elfrida?

I’ve been borrowing the name of one of my favourite fictional characters** for the editor in charge of the online edition of a well-known newspaper, in private woolgathering. Why? They happen to have the same set of initials. It was through an unhappy – but happily brief – encounter with this senior journalist in 2006 that I first realised quite how oblivious Old Print’s leaders were about the end of the Gutenberg era in publishing.

Their misplaced sense of superiority shows in more than the dirty eye most of these leaders cast over bloggers. Only a few – for instance, the people directing the online version of The San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com) – appreciate that nurturing a loyal community of bloggers could add up to owning both the crown jewels of and key to online publishing in the future. In replying to @ISA’s comment about the fight between The Guardian and The Observer at the weekend, I was thinking of a front page story in the Chronicle last May about how vital blogger-commenters have become to the survival of newspapers:

[C]omments keep readers on the Web sites longer and create engaged communities, which can turn into more money-making opportunities through increased advertising, said Steve Semelsberger, senior vice president and general manager of Pluck, the company that provides social-media tools to 250 newspapers, including USA Today, the Washington Post and The Chronicle.

He said comments can boost page views by 5 to 15 percent and can serve as a starting point for social-media interaction on a news site.

“Comments are both an offensive and defense move,” he said. “You have to do it to be a relevant conversational Web property, and you can also make money off it.”

SFGate averages almost 4 million page views a month for comments. Prior to turning on comments for news stories in the summer of 2007, there were only about 30,000 page views a month for comments, mostly on staff blogs.

Pluck supplies the software on which Elfrida Beetle’s site runs, but I’m inclined to doubt that she knows what this means. In 2006 – before my reincarnation as a blogger – I appealed to her to correct two mistakes in the digital version of a freelance article of mine published on her site – which had been edited for a publication linked to it. Unlike US papers, most British newspapers only allow staff writers to check the final versions of articles before they go to press, for errors introduced or missed in their editing. A freelance writer who has no friend or relation among the editors is typically denied any such chance.

This can make a poor bargain rather worse. A freelance writer might contribute a gem of a story from a location where a newspaper has no correspondents. Even then, the writer has in recent years had to be content with a fee too small to feed a family of gerbils for very long. These terms are accepted not just to get a particular story out to the world, but in the faute-de-mieux way a taxidermist looking for customers might be obliged to accept a display case in one spot rather than another — depending on the kind of stuffed animal involved.

One of the mistakes in my article was a grammatical error that crept in with a minor editorial trimming of the first paragraph. The other stemmed from the omission of a factual correction I had sent in. Neither was particularly dire. But it seemed to me that if writers weren’t allowed to check copy before it got into print, we should at least be permitted to correct the electronic version of a piece.

It was the reason Elfrida gave for refusing to allow this – without apology or any other softening words — that I found stunningly anachronistic:

We do not change archived articles, unless it is a [?] processed through the complaints procedure or under legal duress. We have to respect the sanctity of the print archive and therefore we will not be changing or removing the article unless directed to by the reader’s editor or the lawyers.
[ my emphasis ]

Remember that this happened only three years ago. As I pointed out to both Elfrida and her über-editor:

Computers make it easy to correct errors in articles in instants. Yet a freelance writer asking for corrections of mistakes introduced in subbing is told that this cannot be done because “we have to preserve
the sanctity of our print edition.” The policy could not be more ironic. Whereas the print version of a story is only good for wrapping fish the next day, the electronic version is posted permanently on the web,
accessible all over the world at no cost – and, as I’ve discovered to my dismay, impossible to eradicate. Such rigidity is particularly hard on freelance writers, since our pieces are frequently read on search engines by commissioning editors at other papers, and by book editors doing research on our work. We only have our work, without mpressive job titles, as measures of our worth.

If British journalists were allowed to see final, edited versions of stories – as freelance contributors to good US papers usually are – we could help harried sub-editors to spot mistakes and would share in the
responsibility for them.

Instead, we are powerless to do anything about errors before or after the fact.

To all these arguments I received the same answer: silence.

Since Elfrida and her superior were blind to the irrelevance of print archives in 2006, I’m hardly surprised that in 2009, they have yet to show any sign of giving bloggers the degree of respect that the Chronicle does – or for that matter, The New York Times, which now routinely quotes blogs and bloggers (for instance, in the wonderful conclusion of this column).

The writer-editor Scott Rosenberg has just published Say Everything, a crisp and carefully researched history of blogging — a medium he says is now ten years old. In 1995, he was a co-founder of Salon.com, one of the sharpest and most stylish e-zines of the era. A few days ago, he smilingly admitted that he was mistaken in predicting, in that year, that print publishing would be obsolete by 2000. I’m not sure he isn’t equally wrong in predicting that blogging in ten years will be much like blogging today – except for a widening of the split between Twitter-ish micro-blogging and more serious and thoughtful entries on long blogs. Ten years ahead — at today’s rate of change, and with multi-media mutations poised to take off in directions unknown, involving more new media than there have been at any one time — strikes me as too risky for any prediction at all

In a curious paradox I’m not sure he has noticed, Scott defines a blog as ‘a personal website where the newest information goes on top’ – but also says that blogging is ‘the new public sphere in society.’ On absolutely any subject, to understand ‘the substantive issues’ and the state of the debate, he says that you now have to start by surveying the blogs addressing it.

I am sure that he is right about that. Mary Dejevsky, holding fast to the idea of an old-fashioned newspaper as the only way to give readers facts worth reading, has found a curious new scapegoat, the BBC website, to blame for the suffering of British newspapers.

More remarkable is that neither the word ‘blog’ nor ‘blogger’ makes a single appearance in her argument. A funny way to treat the most important category of actor in her industry’s present and future, is all I can say. I predict that bloggers will choose to support those newspaper sites that treat them and their own blogs with the greatest respect, and that these are the only Old Media sites that will thrive.

** ‘She used to be called Alfred and then when she turned into a female she was going to be called Alfreda but Nanny said it wasn’t Alfreda but Elfrida and then she’d just swallowed a beetle and elle is French for she.’
‘I see,’ said Minnie, prepared to let it go at that.
‘She freed the beetle,’ explained Violet. ‘By swallowing it. She freed it from the miseries of life. Elle freed a beetle. Elfrida Beetle.’
‘Ah,’ said Minnie.

from The Shooting Party. Isabel Colegate. 1980.

Old print media and their trained, fact-sniffing noses

There are now an amazing number of journalists, about 850, serving the Guardian’s online industry, with little or nothing to show for it.

It’s been years since reading a tally took me so close to needing emergency resuscitation. If Donald Trelford, a former editor of The Observer, had mentioned a number one-tenth the size in writing about the paper’s uncertain future as The Guardian’s stepchild in yesterday’s Independent, I’d have been speechless for hours.

Just what do so many reporters dedicated to digital publishing have to show for their trouble, I wondered. I’d been sure that the joint Guardian and Observer web site was still mainly being fed by old-fashioned journalists occasionally lending part of their brains to the online edition of their papers.

I looked at the passage containing the sentence again:

One senior Observer figure told me: “It’s surreal. There are now an amazing number of journalists, about 850, serving the Guardian’s online industry, with little or nothing to show for it. This is not what we signed up for, or what The Guardian promised, back in 1993. They are engaged in a wild gamble on the future and it looks as though they are ready to sacrifice The Observer to pay for it, even though it may never work.”

Journalists, unlike bloggers – understand facts – or so say … well, proper Old Media journalists and editors. So I typed that number into a search engine box with a key word or two to see if anyone else was as astonished as I was. No one, apparently, but there was this mention of the magic 850 in a January entry in the Editors Weblog of the World Editors Forum.

Guardian News & Media recently integrated its print and online operations, The Guardian, The Observer and the website Guardian.co.uk, having moved to new premises last month. […] Previously, five different buildings housed the Guardian’s 1400 staff, including around 850 journalists. Guardian News & Media has now taken three and a half floors of the new King’s Place development …

Hmmm … so the 850 journos were just ordinary Guardian print journalists – no Observer employees, naturally. And not specialists in e-publishing at all. But how could Donald Trelford, presumably filtered through vigilant Indy sub-editors, have been so misleading?

Curiouser and curiouser. . . Keep looking, I told myself — and found that even The Daily Torygraph is no stranger to the mysterious number’s magnetism — which I shall quote in its richest context:

The figures showed that Guardian News & Media (GNM), the division that includes both the Guardian and the Observer, lost £36.8 million, considerably worse than the £26.4 million loss in the previous year.
[…]
Those are noble ambitions but most of the 850-strong joint editorial team would prefer management to devote more time to making the newspapers financially viable rather than fretting about global warming. The Observer is thought to have lost as much as £20 million last year. In the same year, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger received an 11 per cent salary rise to £445,000.

Ah, so! A joint Guardian-Observer editorial team of 850.

But then why would someone of the standing of Donald Trelford — just because he was understandably upset on the Observer’s behalf — wield the statistic like a souped-up machete?

I reminded myself that the Torygraph, no friend of either paper, just might be indulging in a bit of sly disinformation.

… Now I could solve the riddle of the 850 myself. I might, for instance, email someone important and official at Guardian News & Media and get the straight scoop about that number.

But then I’d lose caste as a blogger. We leave all that fact-checking faffing-about to real journos in this ‘ere Blogosphere, I’m afraid.

And if I started behaving like a journalist, I could hardly end like this, could I? ……….;) …………………

A serendipitous postscript to: Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

A good reporter thinking in what couldn’t be deemed his finest hour was complaining the other day that the net has killed serendipity. To that I say, stuff and nonsense. The fact is, it’s alive and well and has only done a bit of shape-shifting — just as Serendip, the inspiration for that gorgeous word, turned into Ceylon and then Sri Lanka.

After I’d posted my last entry here, I got curious about how posterity is treating Bruce Chatwin. Near the top of search engine offerings for my query, I found a surprising and highly original assessment of his work by a friend of his, the composer Kevin Volans.

No, that doesn’t count as an example of serendipity, but only the equivalent of a waiter appearing with poached eggs and a double espresso because I’d ordered — gosh! — poached eggs and a double espresso. I was looking for other people’s opinions of the Chatwin oeuvre: that was what I got. What did signal serendipity was that the title of the Volans paper, written for last spring’s Oxford Literary Festival, was Some Japanese Influences on Style and Structure in Bruce Chatwin’s Writing. And as if that wasn’t sufficiently delectable on its own, he explains en passant that it was ‘the compositional structure of the books that first attracted me to Bruce’s work.’

Volans’ analysis justifies an obsession of mine — that we need much more of both cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary criticism in the arts, because it’s in the perspectives of outsiders that the most illuminating insight is found disproportionately. That’s not something I can prove statistically or in any objective way, of course. But though I have no formal training in either classical music or poetry appreciation, this segment of the — rather disorganised, only it doesn’t matter — paper immediately leapt out as fresh and true:

In place of metaphor Chatwin tends to use a structure also found in haiku or its older form waka – an AB form in which the first part sets up an expectation, and the second part provides a resolution (which is often unexpected). The resonance created between the first and the second parts substitutes for metaphor. [...] This is the basis of the structure of Japanese linked poetry which was developed from the 8th century onwards. According to Yuasa, ‘…each poem takes up the suggestion of the last poem and yet opens up a new world of its own, so that the reader is carried though the whole series as through the exquisitely arranged rooms of a building.’ I think this is what Bruce aspired to in his more ambitious moments.

An AB structure runs throughout Bruce’s late work in particular – the
form is so common as to almost be a personal cliché – and is used both on a small and a large scale. […]

A: “Mrs. Gandhi wore a green and white striped sari. And sat down to a breakfast
B: that never came.” [ What Am I Doing Here ]

A: “They set down the coffin with a show of reverence.
B: Then, attracted by the smell of hot bread from a bakery along the street, they strolled off to get breakfast…” [ Utz ]

A: “Olwen had kicked. The hoof caught him under the chin,
B: and the sparrows went on chattering.” [ On the Black Hill ]

I wondered what Volans would make of the Shawn Yu portrait of Chatwin that I was attracted to because it gets behind the shimmering, beguilingly fey persona that the writer created. This passage in the Volans critique led me to suspect that he just might understand my choice of image:

[Artistry] transcends ‘personality’. Personality is formed and assessed socially and is habitual […] Beethoven the personality may have driven Beethoven the artist, but it was the intellect, the intelligence and the imagination of the artist that created the realms of his music. […] I say all of this because with Bruce Chatwin it is easy to be sideswiped by the glamour of the personality and the life of the author. Indeed, I think that at times the artist and the persona in Bruce were at odds with each other.

Volans believes that Chatwin was deeply influenced by the 17th century Japanese poet Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North — particularly in the writing of his impressionistic, idiosyncratic, collage- and blog-like account of his Australian odyssey:

For me Bruce’s novel with the most interesting structure is The Songlines. In form it’s almost an exact parallel of Basho’s A Visit to Sarashina Village: first a prose narrative which gives way to a set of linked verse. Basho, in the company of a pupil, sets off to see Mount Obasute under a full moon. The piece becomes a meditation on the meaning of travel, and journeying as a metaphor for transience of life itself. The linked poems at the end are by Basho and his disciple Etsujin.

[…]

[The Songlines ] is, of course, primarily a meditation on walking, travelling and its meaning. And the notebooks at the end have links: Petrarch talks of sleeping in a different bed each night. This links to Rimbaud (asking what am I doing here) – to a sleepless night in an hotel in Brazil – to the names of 2 hotels in Cameroon, the Windsor and the anti-Windsor – which provide a link a the British ambassador in Kabul, whose contradictory initiative and insensitivity to local culture leads to a Moorish proverb on the value of men – which prompts a story of a little man who prospects for jewellery in sewers in Miami: “’It is not, I can assure you, sir’ he said, ‘ an unrewarding occupation.’” And so on. And of course, many of the notes are quotations from other people’s writings.

Another point on which Volans and I might be singing in perfect harmony is about the commercialisation of the arts — an affliction I’ve bewailed before in writing about the fate today of journalism and book publishing.

By starting his career with In Patagonia Chatwin ran into a problem: all the arts are now run by their arch enemy: Business – in this case the Book Industry. And industries love labels. Work must be classified into genres. Is it fact or fiction? Is it a novel or is it a travel book? I recall one of the judges of the Booker prize being almost more annoyed at the brevity of Utz than anything else. The book didn’t fit into his classification of a novel, and therefore he felt it didn’t belong in the competition! (Imagine Capability Brown’s apoplexy at the sight of a stone garden).

I see hyper-serendipity as one of the greatest treats the net serves up. I’d have rated my chances of stumbling on Volans’ thoughts about Chatwin before I came online at close to zero. I am unlikely to have thought of asking a reference librarian about parallels in exotic cultural traditions for Chatwin’s literary style, and as for what rhythms a composer might discern in it — no, again, not even in a dream.

Yes, I do have an extraordinary friend or two who might, out of the blue, volunteer observations from a Volans-like perspective — or opinions as penetrating from some other viewpoint entirely. But that would be serendipity, too — the old-fashioned, ante-net kind.

As goes blogging, so goes literature … or, … Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

Bruce Chatwin by Shawn Yu: http://gumkid.blogspot.com/

Mary Roach on Bill Streever’s Cold in last Sunday’s lead review in The New York Times:

Streever himself is a scientist, both by degree and paycheck, but writing for journals hasn’t muddied his style. Phalaropes, he writes, “swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to their feet.” […] He sculptures lucid explanations and fires them with fine writing.

A warning: This is a book only in that it has a cover. It’s structured more like a blog. There are chapters, but they aren’t united by easily discerned themes. One begins with a few pages about El Niño, followed by a section break and then “The moose is so well insulated that. . . .” I fought it for a chapter or two, and then I gave in. The book is so interesting it doesn’t matter.

Portraiture in the form of cheap snapshots became as blah-unremarkable as sneezing in the second half of the 20th century — at least for westerners –- and must have struck many an old-fashioned portrait painter in exactly the way blogs do serious writers today.

Old ideas about both the purpose of — and frame for — art have been smashed beyond repair. It isn’t just that artists are free to make art entirely on their own terms. Our uses for it are getting steadily more idiosyncratic.

Consider this:

We say that we take pictures of each other to make records of passages in our insignificant lives. But when I want to reconstitute the feelings, sensations and state of mind I link to living in a particular place – say, wordnerd7 in wc1e-7au — photographs of me outlined against Bloomsbury’s Georgian façades are next to useless. After all, I hardly ever saw myself like that – or indeed see myself anywhere I come and go at all. Nor does looking at anyone I was close to in those years against once-familiar backdrops work anything like the time machine I long for: instead, I instantly begin to think of all those people as they are today. Stupidly, it never occurred to me to create a pictorial archive of what I saw walking to work or the food shops or the newsagent’s or the Goodge Street or Russell Square tube stations.

But my lust for time travel means I’ve discovered a use for the sculptor Anthony Gormley’s prosaically wacky One & Other public art project being staged round the clock in Trafalgar Square.

In spite of my slightly slighting mention of it in my last post, I’ve found myself returning to its web site – an obsessiveness that puzzled me until I registered that my heart was skipping beats with every panning shot of the sky, or seeing the sheen of moisture on streets surrounding the plinth, or observing figures wreathed in silvery mist scurrying under umbrellas to get somewhere dry – or sunlight glinting off plane tree leaves. I remembered how intently and with what keen yearning to be out at sea or in the country I used to gaze beyond London rooftops. The webcam pointed skywards restores my own inimate, personal London to me more munificently than any device, including a passage in an A. S. Byatt novel set in the building where I, too, once occupied a rent-controlled flat.

In other words, for me, One & Other has simply been enabling a superior form of London-watching. Unlike the single fixed webcam trained on Trafalgar Square that I bookmarked in my browser two years ago, the ever-mutating Gormley installation has given me a focal point – if only rarely a wow! experience with a participant like LilacBonzai, the People’s Plinthess, a marvel of protean playfulness.

Gormley understands. Art is about audience participation, now. It’s about expertise going to bed with amateurism and staying there, not bothering to wash the sheets. Experts, whether they make a bow to classical conventions and standards or ignore them altogether, are inspired by what used to be called outsider-art, or merge their own ideas with those of outsider-artists who once had no audience not made up exclusively of family and friends. We, the audience, make what we choose to of the results — which can bear no resemblance to the artist’s stated intentions.

Digital media and digital networking on the internet have been hogging most of the credit for these changes but in fact, have only sped up the pace of the democratisation of the arts. In every branch, the direct pre-figuring of what we see and read today began more than a hundred years ago.

Henry Moore, who made Britain a power if not the ranking world power in modernist sculpture, was originally inspired in his choice of profession by Michelangelo. Later, as a quick Wikipedia check confirmed for me, it was primitive art like Mayan-Toltec carvings that helped him find his distinctive style – after he ‘became uncomfortable with classically derived ideals,’ and was also influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) and Frank Dobson (1888-1963).

In fiction, experimentation began early in the 20th century – unless you agree with those who think that Cervantes, who wrote the first novel, was also the first modernist. In non-fiction, I myself first admired Bruce Chatwin’s subversion of conventional structures for the contrast that this made with the elegant, sentence-by-sentence classicism of his prose.

Others will have their own candidates, but I was ready to nominate him the First Haut-Literary Blogger after I read the original memo on the manuscript of his first book, In Patagonia, by Susannah Clapp — the exemplary editor at Jonathan Cape whose help became indispensable to his work. She has described In Patagonia as ‘an attempt to give a “cubist” picture of that country.’ Her 1976 report on the manuscript said in part:

This is very extraordinary – and a possible problem. Basically, it’s a collage-like collection of impressions, memories, histories and stories about Patagonia loosely bound together by an intermittent first-person narrative, but mostly functioning more or less autonomously … I was impressed by each bit as I read, but didn’t feel impelled forward throughout the whole 350-odd pages. . . [I]f I weren’t so impressed by the matching of informativeness with intelligent description, I would say a sad no.

Her rare literary perspicacity can be deduced from her having discerned this author’s intentions so perfectly that his scribbling equivalent of cubism became even more so in the editing of his pages. She describes the book’s

angularity, its many small scenes and surfaces – one tilting away from another. The earliest manuscript was organised in this way; and in the process of editing – during which some sections went through as many as four versions – the book became still more angular.

I’ll know more when I have actually read it, but judging from the quotation with which I began this entry, I’m guessing that the reviewer, Mary Roach, is referring to a book written in the Chatwin mould.

In arts audiences everywhere, Chatwinesque fragmentariness and the Gormley style — which I nearly described as gormless, wondering whether One & Other is more an example of creative passivity or inclusiveness — have formalists and classicists tearing their hair out in disgust and despair. Against their insistence that ‘the rot’s set in well and truly, now’ – as one friend of mine put it grimly only last week, I’d suggest that it’s too soon to be pessimistic about artistic evolution in our time.

It’s a time of creative ferment. ‘To obtain perfection’ in growing a certain white wine in the district of Saumur, Isak Dinesen writes in one of her gem-like Seven Gothic Tales, the local inhabitants put off picking grapes until they ‘develop a peculiar condition which is called in the French pourriture noble, or in German, Edelfaule.’ That, she says, flavours the wine with what could turn out to be ‘the true odour of sanctity, or it may be the noble putrefaction, the royal corrodent rust of a strong and rare wine … or … both. . . ’.

That is what fermentation is. You cannot know which of its results are going to be bad or good – until you do.

Onward! the blogging revolution.

footnotes:

1. Only @exitbarnadine, posting until recently under the screen name @BaronCharlus, has so far come up with anything resembling a precedent for Harold Francis Bell’s sculpture of a woman in deep thought, Pauline – which looks more and more as if it might be unique in the known history of western art. I recently encountered another self-portrait by a woman painter – the 17th-century Dutchwoman, Judith Leyster. Not as striking as @eb’s find, Artimesia Gentileschi, and not a patch on Bell’s thinker. In both self-portraits, self-consciousness unfortunately gets in the way of insight.

2. I sorted through all the choices Google Images offers for a portrait of Bruce Chatwin. Nothing appealed until I found the strikingly intelligent picture I’ve pasted in today. Quick sleuthing led me to the site of Shawn Yu –- who I was surprised to discover is only twenty-four years old. He’s a freelance artist.

Unlike all the other portraits of Chatwin I’ve seen, which celebrate his blond-god looks, Shawn’s drawing stresses his keen powers of observation and analytical turn of mind. I also seem to remember being told about Chatwin’s diminutive size, something that has somehow never been clear in other images of him.

I zapped the artist a note and was thrilled to receive permission to put his drawing here:

sure man, thank you for featuring my work.

cheers,
Shawn.

Many thanks, Shawn, and best of luck with placing your work.

Is blogging ultimately the friend of war or peace?

My most disappointing conclusion from running this eight month-old experiment in blogging? It’s that we human beings appear to find fighting more enjoyable than sparkling debate and friendly disagreement.

Never mind that in answering a question about what he or she would do as a live, fully clothed substitute for a statue in the One & Other project now playing in Trafalgar Square – and proving hour after hour that Everywo/man has no imagination — one onlooker supposed doing ‘something to represent the need for world peace’. That this aspiration is usually honoured in the breach and not the observance is more drearily unsurprising than the wish itself.

The click count for acciaccature always soars when visitors notice a quarrel getting underway in the comments section. That is true even when the disagreements are only short and sharp like last week’s flare-up between an always-interesting contributor, @anytimefrances, and a tremendously welcome new drop-in commenter, @Anil Eklavya.

The least cheering job for anyone running a blog is defusing banal disputes with incomprehensible ‘bad chemistry’ behind them. These gain force and momentum from a tendency I find even more dismaying: bloggers forming themselves into packs and tribes in a medium that easily supports individuals expressing individual opinions — and proceeding, like pathetic George W. Bush clones, to act on the depressing, simple-minded principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

The extraordinary persistence of such enmity struck me last week as a miniature version of the ultimate mystery of why countries still go to war. I was reading a gigantic obituary of Robert McNamara — the mastermind and manager-in-chief of the Vietnam war, which ends with his reflection that

War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend […] Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.

He concluded that the US could not possibly win the Vietnam war near its end – and long before many of his fellow war-mongers did. The obituary contained a remarkable record of his abject mea culpa — which shows that he believed that cross-cultural incomprehension and intolerance, of which we’ve witnessed more than one instance in microcosm on this very blog, were ultimately responsible for the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands of Americans:

At a going-away luncheon given by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Mr. McNamara wept as he spoke of the futility of the air war in Vietnam. Many of his colleagues were appalled as he condemned the bombing, aghast at the weight of his guilt.

He had thought for a long time that the United States could not win the war. In retirement, he listed reasons: a failure to understand the enemy, a failure to see the limits of high-tech weapons, a failure to tell the truth to the American people and a failure to grasp the nature of the threat of communism.

“What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese,” he said in his Berkeley oral history. “It led President Eisenhower in 1954 to say that if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos and Vietnam were lost, the dominoes would fall.”

He continued, “I am certain we exaggerated the threat.”

“We didn’t know our opposition,” he said. “We didn’t understand the Chinese; we didn’t understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don’t know our potential opponents today.”

Getting to know actual or potential opponents is surely much easier now that we routinely have access to some of the most intimate thoughts, dreams and fears of foreigners – whether we read their blogs in English or rendered clumsily, but more-or-less comprehensibly, through automatic translators.

I’d have thought that our whizzy new digital tools would at least be discouraging disagreements about facts like the squabble between @anytimefrances and @Anil Eklavya – whom I’m guessing is a graduate student with a first degree from one of the famously dazzling Indian Institutes of Technology.

When we didn’t hear from @Anil after his last post here, I found the answer to the question I’d asked him about how he had word-processed documents in a mixture of English characters and Devanagari, the script used to write Hindustani. It’s a software product called ‘KickKeys’ that certainly made my eyes pop, even though I’ve worked with foreign keyboards in France and Spain:

KickKeys offers a complete language solution through Transliteration (type-as-you-pronounce). With it you can write a foreign language using the regular computer keyboard without memorizing difficult key sequences.

The optimist in me suggests that we have no way of knowing or measuring how much potential conflict our flexible futuristic tools have headed off — which, conceivably, could far exceed their promotion of hatred. Like good news, mutual understanding and harmony don’t have anything like the capacity of bad news and crises to attract attention.

I came across unexpected confirmation for this rosier view when I wandered over to another site after I’d pasted in the paragraph before last. There I found @anytimefrances – whose interest in Indian literature had seemed unserious and patronising to @Anil – saying,

i finally got something written after reading Nissam Ezekiel – i’m becoming very fond of the modern Indian poets writing in English. hope this doesn’t impugn his reputation too much but i just love his almost matter-of-fact deliveries.

She’d just announced the sudden death of her brother to other bloggers on the thread, and was explaining how a particular Indian poet had helped her find her way to writing a poem about her loss. So as hostile as her reaction to @Anil’s criticism had been, and much as I’d despaired over her failure to answer his generous concession with one of her own — if not an apology — she proved him mistaken, and in the most moving way imaginable.

@Atf, if you’re reading here, I was deeply sorry to read your announcement – since I can’t think of many shocks greater than the unexpected death of a sibling. And I’m surprised by meaning every word of that last sentence, even though I haven’t the faintest idea of who you really are or what you look like; not even after two years of blogging with you on various sites.

The succession of texting, telephoning, Twittering and key-tapping ‘plinthers’ might not, in the end, be meaninglessly engaged in their seemingly endless streams of yakyakyak after the JCB crane plants them on their Trafalgar Square perch to horrify pigeons fascinated by their dogged attempts to eat unappetising bits of buzzing plastic embedded with mysterious winking lights.