Writing: November 2007 Archive Page

Here is the beginning of a poem that recent SHU graduate Moira Richardson read at her father's funeral this morning.

I am the twinkle in your eyes,
Eternal laughter sparkling,
Strong and silent,
My father.

Douglas McLennan (Arts Journal):

Newspapers have not traditionally been mass market. In fact they were the classic niche subsidy model. The genius of newspapers was that they aggregated lots of mini-content - comics, bridge columns, stock tables, crossword puzzles, the arts, business, sports - and built enough of a combined audience to subsidize the content that otherwise would not have paid for itself.

I don't know a single journalist who got in the business because they wanted to make sure Garfield or Dear Abby got delivered every day, but the fact is that the content that journalists think counts most - coverage of city hall, foreign reporting, investigations - does not have a big enough audience to pay for itself on its own.

Yet somewhere along the way, this idea of niche aggregation slipped away from the local paper and was replaced by the sense that every story ought to be comprehensible by every reader. The problem: in a culture that increasingly offers more and more choice and allows people to get more precisely what they want, when they want, and how they want it, a generalized product that doesn't specifically satisfy anyone finds its audience erode away. The more general, the more broad, the more "mass culture" a newspaper tries to become, the faster its readers look elsewhere.

Inside Higher Ed has an interview with Christine L. Borgman

The scholarly communication system has evolved over a period of centuries -- it doesn't shift quickly. Scholarly journals still look a lot like they did in the 17th century, for example. The tenure system is a much stronger driver of scholarly infrastructure than is technology. Scholars are rewarded for publishing journal articles and books, in the right places. They are not rewarded for good data management, except in a very few fields. Rewards for open access publishing are indirect, such as more citations, and recognition of these benefits has been slow to emerge.

Mike Edwards, a civilian instructor at West Point, reflects on the academic reaction to a new army field manual that plagiarizes large swaths of complex material, sometimes verbatim, from published sources. Part 1, Part 2.

The scandal, though, is this: according to anthropologist David Price, the published version of the Army's FM 3-24 on Counterinsurgency is deeply and thoroughly plagiarized, particularly in its Chapter 3, which patches together a wide range of verbatim or minimally edited passages from prominent sociological and anthropological texts without any sort of sufficient documentation in order to establish a series of definitional terms for use by officers, NCOs, and soldiers seeking to implement counterinsurgency tactics in the field.

Now, initially, when I saw this, I immediately got out all my old FMs: not a single works cited among them. David Price writes that "The cumulative effect of such non-attributions is devastating to the Manual's academic integrity," but apparently fails to grasp that this is in some ways a matter of genre: FMs are manuals for use in the field rather than the library, and the sergeants and lieutenants and captains who will put them to use are far less interested in where ideas come from than in matters of implementation. Some officers I've spoken to have echoed the observation that Army writing is community property and definitionally in the public domain, which likely contributed to the habits of mind that led to the failures of documentation. I don't believe that excuses the plagiarism -- particularly given Price's point that "The most damning element of the Manual's reliance on unattributed sources is that the Manual includes a bibliography listing of over 100 sources, yet not a single source I have identified is included" -- but it does help to explain it.

In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd reflects on the show biz writers' strike.

Hillary Clinton had the bad luck to fumble a debate before the writers' strike knocked late-night comics off the air.

"I shudder to think what's happening to all the kids who keep in touch with world news by listening to reports of late-night comedians," said David Thomson, the film historian.

I watch so little TV that this strike will little impact on the way I spend my leisure time... but I am following the story because one of the issues is how writers will be compensated for online remediations of their work.

According to Rebecca Blood, in early 1999, Jesse James Garrett posted a list of 23 web sites that posted links and brief commentary. The Wayback machine's archive of Garrett's site returns this list from early 2000.

bradlands
bump
camworld
flutterby
genehack
gulker
hack the planet
honeyguide
jjg.net infosift
linkwatcher metalog
ltseek
macronin
nowthis
obscure store
peterme
psyberspace
rasterweb
rc3.org
researchbuzz news
robot wisdom
scripting news
windowseat
whump.com more like this

It might be interesting to see what happened to each of these sites.  When I started blogging later in 1999, I hadn't heard of a single one of these, though I was very familiar with the genre of what was then called the "list of links."  In February of 1998, while working at the University of Toronto' s Engineering Writing Centre, I urged web authors to "Annotate Your Lists of Links."   Later that same year, one of the e-school staff members e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, which was precisely that -- an annotated list of links, carefully selected and always worth visiting. 

When I first started blogging in the spring of 1999, I closely copied the format of A&L Daily, which used multiple columns, did not date its entries, and used "[more]" as the link. (I first dated an entry on July 20, 1999, because I was writing about the 1969 moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that the event took place exactly 30 years earlier, and I've dated every entry since then -- about 5500 separate entries.)

Arts & Letters Daily, which did not focus on technology issues, was not on the early 1999 list of 23 sites that have become accepted as the canonical list of early blogs. There must have been many, many other sites that were not part of this particular subnetwork; I seem to remember Blood's claims that

Before the weblog genre had a name (the term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger, 10 years ago next month... his site, "robotwisdom," is one of the canonical 23), home pages had guest books, web-based discussion boards had postings and threads, and in the pre-Google days when new content was hard to find on the web, a "What's New?" page (with a collection of short links) was an important part of large, active websites.  Many sites featured a "link of the day" or a "link of the week," though you often had to click the link to find out what was on the other end.  Dating from about 1995 was the concept of the "Web Ring," which was a standard interface that webmasters put on their home pages, with "next" and "previous" links that went offsite, to other pages in the "ring" (populated by a centrally-hosted database). 

After Googling for a bit, I just learned that the Web Ring concept was invented by Sage Weil, apparently in May 1994. In 1995, he started a company that was eventually bought out by GeoCities, which was in turn bought by Yahoo!  I remember now that the Yahoo! Webrings was a bit controversial, since Yahoo! didn't implement all the features of the original WebRing concept, though recently a Webring 2.0 concept was spun off from Yahoo!

One final note... an undergraduate student of mine, Kirsten Schubert, wrote a term paper on weblogs in 2002, which was well before there was any published scholarship on the subject. It's a good time capsule of what was available at the time -- general articles on hypertext rhetoric and digital authorship. (When teaching that class, I hadn't yet come across Mortensen and Walker's 2002 article, Blogging Thoughts -- the first academic essay focusing on blogs.)

In The Escapist, Tom Rhodes takes a stab at W.B. Yeats/Gordon Freeman slash crit. It's more of a nice try than a slam dunk; yes, it's possible to make these connections, and the insights are, well, insightful... but what the article lacks is an argument for why this interpretation is necessary, why it offers a better solution than so many other possible comparisons.

Half-Life 2 is the antithesis to Yeats' system, swapping the beast's triumphant aristocracy for Freeman's strive for equality and freedom. The name "Freeman" gives his mission more meaning than in the first game. In the original, he was a man trapped in extreme circumstances beyond his control, forced to fight not only extraterrestrial creatures but also contend with a military force dedicated to quashing the incident. In the sequel, he is so much more: a folk hero, a political icon, a quasi-religious figure, wielding his crowbar like God's wrath. When resistance members greet him in the game, they speak to him as if he's almost unreal, helping him in his cause, regardless of personal consequences. He has awakened after a "stony sleep," bringing a nightmare to the Combine's "rocking cradle" and its all too human figurehead. Both military commander and preacher, Freeman has come from "somewhere in the sands of the desert," and he is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man." His body is decked in orange and golden colors, much like a lion, but his head is that of a man, quietly contemplating his next move, your move, through the shadowy recesses of this ruined world in which he's been dropped.

I welcome any literate analysis of a video game, so I was happy to come across this.

But how do we apply the lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"?  Freeman is the best, but he doesn't do anything unless the player directs him; is the player, who is full with "passionate intensity" for the game, really "the worst"?  The Combine hardly counts as the "Mere anarchy... loosed upon the world."  Freeman seems to be the one sowing anarchy, since the surviving humans seem so willing to follow Freeman, but the game doesn't give us any background information about Freeman that suggests he has any goal other than to survive.

The essay focuses on what the poem might possibly mean, but it quotes only selectively from the work; literary analysis is only partly about what a text might mean; it's also about how the text communicates that meaning (word choice; form; use of or rejection of or modification of or creation of convention; ), and it needs to make an argument for why the author's proposed interpretation is not merely possible, and not merely plausible, but necessary.

Someone, get his crowbar.

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jonathan D. Silver waxes poetic:

Where do all the pumpkins go, post Halloween's big costume show?
Are they left to rot and molder, as the weather trends ever colder?
Or is there some more organized scheme, to dispose of leftovers that aren't the crop's cream?
Wherefore do they, might they go? Inquiring minds want to know!

Silver is a clever writer, though his meter could be tighter.
It could use another edit, but I'm smiling 'cause I read it.

Jessica Mintz writes of University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom's Wikipedia assignment:

"I would find these things on Wikipedia," she said, and would think, "Gosh, this is awfully thin here. I wonder if my students could fill this in?"

Wikipedia has been vilified as a petri dish for misinformation, and the variable accuracy of its articles is a point Groom readily concedes. Since the advent of the Web, she said, the quality of sources students cite has deteriorated.

For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was "transformative," and students' writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.

Knowing their work was headed for the Web, not just one harried professor's eyes, helped students reach higher - as did the standards set by the volunteer "Wikipedians" who police entries for accuracy and neutral tone, Groom said.

The exercise also gave students a taste of working in the real world of peer-reviewed research.

Kate Luce Angell writes an entertaining feature on my next-door officemate and his work in Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction MA program.

Award-winning author and Seton Hill University professor Michael Arnzen demonstrates that in horror, as in life, it's often the little things that matter most.

Take his short-short piece "Nightmare Job #3," which begins "Wanted: Town Sewage Treatment is now hiring expert diver."

It's only 100 words, so brief you could almost miss the part where he adds that job benefits include "free diving suit with harpoon gun."

[...]

Part of Mr. Arnzen's success has been the result of his use of new technology to distribute his work. He came up with the mini-poems he calls "gorelets" as a literary form that could be downloaded and read easily on the screen of a computer or personal digital assistant.

"I'm interested in potent nuggets of narrative, and horror has always been a shorter genre," he said. "Look at Edgar Allen Poe's stories and poems."

The little things also loom large in the subjects of his work, in which he finds the frightening in minutely observed, everyday details, like a janitor's glove (or IS it a glove?) and a pair of too-real bunny slippers.

"I'd like to think I'm doing the same thing comedians are, exploring our hypocrisies through observational humor," he said, adding that horror is often funny as well as fear-inducing. "I crack myself up all the time when I'm writing."