http://blog.oup.com/2008/04/dictionary-2/
Campaign Fonts
April 3, 2008 Leave a Comment
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/to-the-letter-born/index.html
What is Narrative Nonfiction?
March 28, 2008 2 Comments
Technically, it’s nonfiction that reads like fiction: there are stories, or one overall story. There’s tension, release, and a narrative arc. Also, what is tension in literature? Learn more about it.
We’re thinking of trying to publish more of it at the Press. But how do you move from academic, professional, and practical nonfiction to this higher art form? Do you just hire a writer and have them work with your author and hope it comes out pretty? My guess is that it’s not that easy.
What books should we use as models? Andrew Chaikin’s “A Man on the Moon” and Jim Lovell/Jeffrey Kluger’s “Lost Moon” are two of my favorites in this category. Chaikin’s injects the human into the scientific, military rigor of the space program, but manages to actually maintain and honor that rigor all the while–a remarkable feat. “Lost Moon” is a little more pop and a little less scientific, but an even smoother read and, by the end, a page-turner. There aren’t many other non-fiction books that I’ve picked up again and again.
What elements other than those listed above make up good narrative nonfiction? Have you read any nonfiction lately that you couldn’t put down? Why not? What was so riveting?
Crossing the (Foul) Line
March 28, 2008 Leave a Comment
Furman Bisher’s recent rant about Opening Day in Japan is all over the blogosphere. Everyone seems to be poking fun at it, or at Bisher himself, for being too old-school (or just too old), as he complains that baseball’s being played in Tokyo and being played by Japanese people. Ha, ha, isn’t it funny.
NO! It’s not! It’s horribly racist and nationalist. Bisher’s comments aren’t just backwards; they’re appalling. He is upset because Opening Day is being held in a country that once upon a time fought our country (let’s not forget that we fought back), and being played by one of its countrymen. He’s lumping everyone who shares attributes with the decision-makers of WWII-era Japan together with those decision-makers themselves.
How can we ever envision an end to the national and religious strife we see around the world if we use this kind of logic to defend even our kinder nostalgic musings?
Response to John
March 22, 2008 Leave a Comment
OK, so taking your comment para by para.
1. POD. Yes, you are wrong to assume that POD would produce a less-than-desired bound format. BUT, seen this way, his POD model is even more of a waste than 8.5 x 11 papers would be. So you’d get a book printed to read it, and then throw it away? You’d always have the online version, I assume, to look little things up, but then you’d have another full copy printed if you wanted to read the whole thing again?
The problem with this is Seth Godin’s idea that books still have value as a souvenir. In other words, people will still buy books to remind them of what they read, to own a physical object that associates them with those thoughts, and to show off on their bookshelves. As the linked article points out, “only a souvenir” scares the heck out of publishers. But this Penguin article’s even bleaker, suggesting that the book doesn’t even have souvenir value. And I think it very much does, and we shouldn’t underestimate the power of that.
It also has artifact value. Late in the Apollo program, NASA fought to keep sending men to the moon because they wanted real people to see the real thing to be able to record man’s full impressions and observations. Sending a robot wouldn’t do the trick. This is kind of the inverse of that: if we digitize all of our books, and toss the hard copies (can you imagine tossing a first folio??), you keep only a fraction of the experienceable object that is that book. You throw away the rest of the metonymy. And that isn’t good for research, or for our human experience of the world.
2) Libraries. This is kind of more like the “Everything is Miscellaneous” question. Digital formats will enable different kinds of random browsing and new finds. I’m not so concerned about this.
Obama’s Speech
March 21, 2008 1 Comment
If you haven’t watched Obama’s race speech yet, please do so.
It’s noteworthy, I think, that this speech prompted Jon Stewart to a moment of seriousness reminiscent of his brilliant (I mean it) Crossfire diatribe. There was no joking in his eyes (though the serious irony was pointed) when he summed up the speech as “an American politician speaking to Americans about race as though they were adults.” In this speech Obama has done what Stewart pleaded with Crossfire to do: he moved beyond easy partisanship, told some uneasy truths, and has therefore gotten us somewhere* new. In Obama we’d have a president who not only understands and acknowledges the anger on both sides of a major issue, but makes bold to explain each side to the other, and proposes a solution.
But please, whoever your candidate of choice may be, just watch this–for its historical value, if for nothing else.
(It’s just under 40 minutes, in 10-minute segments here)
——
* Yes, I am aware that the term “somewhere” is vague. I am aware that in general Obama gives us hope and visions and inspiration…about something vague. But I think in this race he has to. First, because Hillary so clearly has him beat on being able to talk all wonky-like. He can’t hope to compete. Second, because when it comes down to specifics, their platforms are nearly identical. The value-added of Obama, the thing that makes him distinctive, is his ability to inspire and the way in which he does it–through truly thoughtful analysis and the courage to not just “tell truth to power” but to tell truth about power while in a powerful position himself.
The Roundup
March 21, 2008 3 Comments
– This post over at Publishing 2.0 touches on the whole digital newspaper thing again, but most interesting is its last paragraph and the conclusion that sites need not fear directing traffic away from themselves straight into the arms of their competitors. Karp calls it “the Google rule”: “the better job you do sending people away, the more they will come back.”
– A really nice discussion of the leviathan topic “the future of the book” that points out that print is good for some stuff, digital is good for some other stuff, and that there exists a possibility of a happy medium. I’m not sure the medium is so happy (can you say wasted paper?) but it’s interesting. (John, you’ll like this one.)
More On Newspapers
March 14, 2008 Leave a Comment
This post at Publishing 2.0 echoes my earlier diatribe about newspapers, particularly the New York Times, and web publishing.
The post talks about the different ways in which primarily web-native news aggregators’ home pages appear: TechCrunch displays the day’s constantly updating stories in reverse chronological order, like a blog, and Digg displays them either in chronological order or in order of popularity. The post hails these as digitally integrated and useful formats. The Times*, on the other hand, echoes its print format in many ways. Indeed, much of the page stays static through the course of a day, unless something huge happens. The article links the page’s static-ness with its way of arranging articles: by “importance.” Because somebody decides once a day that this article or headline is important, it lives on the homepage until tomorrow.
I’m right with this post’s call for traditional journalism to really get more web-integrated.
But I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Out goes static boredom (I too have stopped checking the NYT site more than once a day, while I check others frequently–bad news for the Times**). But why must we throw editorially-deemed importance out with it?
I use NYT’s “most emailed” list heavily, but I like the homepage too, because there people I trust (“editors”) tell me what to read. I don’t have time to read the whole paper; I like that they pick stories for me *in addition to* the most-emailed ones. I think editors add value to my content consumption, and I don’t want to lose that value.
In other words, I feel like the Times might actually be doing it right in trying to find a combination of these models–including both their printish front page and what Publishing 2.0 calls their “blog ghetto” at the lower-right corner of the page. It’s just a matter, now, of finding the right amount of each.
———–
*Yes, I know I italicize the NYT and leave the others in Roman. It’s deliberate. I don’t know what it means yet, but it does signal the changing ways in which we think about citing different kinds of material, no?
**Sorry.
A New Model for Digital Content?
March 14, 2008 Leave a Comment
So you really want your content to be available digitally, your audience refuses to pay for it online, but you still want to make money?
The music industry is starting to get interested in a new idea explained on Wired.com yesterday:
In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by Jim Griffin, one of the idea’s chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that’s shared online. Griffin, who consults on digital strategy for three of the four majors, will argue his case at what promises to be a heated discussion Friday at South by Southwest.
Why is this just about music? Why aren’t the newspapers in on this, and other content publishers?
And, at the end of the day, does this model make sense? Consumers would still be paying for content, but not directly based on how much they consumed. Does it still make sense to pay for this stuff at all? Certainly artists, producers, publishers deserve to get paid for work that they do. But if the market is telling them that their work isn’t valued enough to be worth payment, then is a monthly fee really going to work? Should they instead be trying to find other lines of work, or other ways to productize/monetize that work?
I’m Not With Stupid
March 11, 2008 3 Comments
When you’re a fan of something, you run the risk of people assuming you believe all the same things as every other fan out there. Fan stereotyping if you will.
To that point, as an Obama fan, I want to make clear that I do NOT believe, support, or even fathom this article in the Times. It argues, of all things, that Hillary’s ubiquitous red-phone ad is racist.
I just don’t get it at all. How do you get from “innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger” (which I grant you is super hypey but whatever) to “The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man”?
The only concrete piece of supporting evidence in the piece is that there are no black people in the ad and that the mother is a blonde. And then the author makes the leap that OBVIOUSLY the undefined terror outside the house is therefore BLACK PEOPLE = OBAMA.
It’s people like this that give the Obama campaign a bad name.