Reason #1: Because Anna Wintour is one of my obsessions, her father falls into that sphere.
Reason#2: I haven't posted anything about Tom Stoppard for about thirty minutes so I'm falling behind.
Perhaps it's all mythical, but there story goes like this. Young Mr. Stoppard was embarking on a career (short lived) in journalism and won an interview with one of the greatest publishers of the day, Charles Wintour. He was the editor of the Evening Standard and Sunday Express. --A considerable many who raised a considerable daughter.
Anyway,...
Mr. Stoppard, fresh from a tour of duty as a reporter in Bristol, takes a seat across the desk from Mr. Wintour CBE and the conversation goes something like this:
Stoppard began his career as a reporter in Bristol. On applying to
the London Evening Standard, he was interviewed by the then
editor, Charles Wintour, who says: "I gather you're interested in
politics. Who is the Home Secretary?"
"Look," Stoppard replied, "I said I was interested. Not obsessed."
It would be entirely inappropriate for me to not mention the passing of J. D. Salinger especially as he has an important influence on my own writing. But I'm an odd fan. Catcher in the Rye is my least favorite of the Salinger canon. Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeams... and Frannie and Zooey all appear on my list above Catcher in the Rye.
For me, Salinger captured the isolation and frustration of gifted people making their way through a world that didn't quite live up to their exceptions and hopes. In less capable hands, this friction between the world of the mind and the world of the real could come off as essentially elitist. But Salinger was able to present different ways people can deal with that friction, from something self-destructive as a bullet to the brain to simple mental breakdowns, to finding a way to pass in this world. Being smart, really smart wasn't necessarily an asset in Mr. Salinger's work.
My guess is that Salinger will become part of the Canon. My second daughter is taking her turn at Steinbeck's The Pearl. How that became part of the curriculum, I'll never know. I can hope that one day Steinbeck's seat will be vacated and Salinger can enjoy the view from he orchestra.
There's a fascinating account of a dinner with Tom Stoppard where Pinter
says that he doesn't plan his characters' lives and then asks his
fellow dramatist: "Don't you find they take you over sometimes?", to
which Stoppard firmly replies: "No." That says a lot. One reason that
The Homecoming is a great play is that Pinter allows the character of
Ruth, almost unconsciously, to take over and at the end achieve an
ambivalent dominance. For all Stoppard's many virtues – such as a
formidable intellect and a coruscating wit – he tends to keep his
characters on a much tighter, almost Shavian leash.
As all my dear friends know, I cast a rather wide net as I fish for notices about Tom Stoppard. I have discovered productions of Jumpers in far away provinces of Canada etc. Today the net dragged in a clipping from The London Evening Standard, not exactly in the first tier of the London press, but nevertheless, it's published in London so it published a notice about one Miss Lucy Prebble (excellent name!) who has written a musical about ... the decline and fall of Enron. I kid you not. Not only that, but it has sold out out its run in the Royal Court Theatre and it moving over to the West End's Noel Coward theatre and ... I'm breathless .... it will be opening on Broadway and is going to be made into a movie.
Bethatasitmay, our favorite, Mr. Tom Stoppard must have had a fine seat in the orchestra for one of the performances. (Perhaps he had forgotten to update his Netflicks wishlist.) Anyway, the story goes that Ms. Lucy Prebble received a note from Mr. Stoppard. Here's the relevant portion:
When I'm introduced, people say,' – adopts bored tone – “Oh, hi” and then when they know what I wrote, they turn round and say,' – adopts voice of gushing excitement – “Oh, hi!”' The other day, she received a card of congratulation from Tom Stoppard. I jumped up and down when I got it. He didn't need to do that. It was classy behaviour.'
Now, let's snick a peek at Ms. Prebbles:
Okay. It may have been "classy behaviour" on the part of Mr. Stoppard, but somehow, especially after seeing the snapshot long and tall drink of water, I'm not entirely convinced our Mr. Stoppard was solely impressed by her writing skills.
This morning, I had the pleasure of listening to one of my many favorite radio shows, Forum, on KQED-fm. The host of the show, Michael Krasny, was away and I can't recall who was sitting in for him but that's not the point. The guests today were John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation and co-author of "The Death and Life of American Journalism
" and Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is other half of the co-authoring team.
Here's to the segment.
As an engaged, professional witness to the mass slaughter of media and unsettling effects it has on some of the people I most admire, the topic interested me and during the interview, the authors repeatedly made the point that there is a four to one ratio of public relations people to journalists and the authors used this fact to leverage their point that journalism in the United States has a knife at its throat.
Excuse me, but as someone who attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism and practices and performs the Dark Arts of public relations for far too many years, I have come to know many journalists and many public relations .... people. So I was not impressed by this cited fact. In fact, it made me giggle when I thought "I wouldn't break a sweat until the ratio is something on the order of twenty to one." And I started to think about creating a series of jokes along the lines of "How many public relations people does it take to write a press release..."
Now, at this juncture, it is important for me to point out that I am not damning the entire population of my profession because I have met many very intelligent and creative and wonderful individuals along the winding way of my career and I treasure their friendship and they know who they are. Instead, I'm just pointing out that there is no one in my profession who deserves to be celebrated and honored such as I.F. Stone, R.W. Apple, Hunter S. Thompson, Morely Safer, Amy Goodman, Bob Woodward and the thousands of unknown scribes who cover car wrecks and write the words set in agate type on the sports page.
And it would behoove you to listen to the aforementioned interview as the authors express their astonishment that is was completely SRO @ Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. One might think that the crowd suddenly appeared out of thin air instead of the work of some public relations person.
Please. Spare me.
I have a shaky confidence in the American people and their olfactory ability to sniff out bullshit even when it's served to them on the fine china of corporate.america. I have mixed opinions about this week's decision of our Supreme Court that corporate.america has the same right to speak as any individual. On the one hand, I believe that corporate.america has the right to pay me huge amounts of money to better express its point-of-view. On the other hand, my previously stated shaky confidence in the American people's ability to tease out the fact from fiction and opinion is exactly that, shaky. Afterall, this is the same public that eats up heaping helpings of entertainments that should surely insult our so-called intelligence. Perhaps the pursuit of Unobtanium in Avatar is a wake up call to us that coporate.america has pegged us as suckers. Money ≠ Speech.
Perhaps we will never get our fill of lurid and debased entertainments that do their level best to undermine our self-respect and civilization. As for me, I will remain optimistic about the uncontrollable internet as a medium so vast that is has room for perfectly positive expressions of our humanity, the Better Angels. In Elizabethan England, the choice of entertainments were bear-baiting and Shakespeare. And Jane Austen's day, the novel was still looked down and many Well-Respected people disparaged it as a waste of time and energy. From that point of view, the internet would make their minds quail, quiver and dissolve.
Perhaps Beckett puts it best: "I can't go on. I must go on." And we can also rely on the trusty, never rusty apothegm, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
In the meantime, Amazon has delivered to me The New York Review of Books edition of Edmund Wilson's history, To the Finland Station
with a foreword by Louis Menand and I will soldier on.
Honest to goodness, I'm going to have to pay much more attention to LA Theatre Works. First, they release a very nice cd of The Real Thing. Now, they are offering a stream to its production of Arcadia.
If I were forced to draw a line through Mr. Stoppard's woriks, Arcadia would be on the top two thirds (along with R&G, Shakespeare in Love, The Coast of Utopia and a few others).
I've never seen a production of Arcadia, but have read the script and am going to somehow budget some time to listen to the stream. And if there's a way I can capture the stream and offer to you as a file, be confident I will. In the meantime, here's a link to the first hour of the LA Theatreworks production.
And here's the site's description of the play and the cast:
A crash course in mathematics, landscape gardening, literature, and chaos theory, courtesy of Tom Stoppard. Arcadia merges science with human concerns and ideals, examining the universe’s influence in our everyday lives and ultimate fates through the relationship between past and present, order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. Set in an English country house in the years 1809-1812 and 1989, the play examines the lives of two modern scholars and the house's current residents with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier. The show includes an interview with Stoppard biographer Ira Nadel. Part one of a two-part broadcast.
Starring (in alphabetical order):
Kate Burton as Hannah Jarvis Mark Capri as Ezra Chater Jennifer Dundas as Thomasina Coverly Gregory Itzin as Bernard Nightingale David Manis as Captain Brice Christopher Neame as Richard Noakes and Jellaby Peter Paige as Valentine Coverly Darren Richardson as Augustus Coverly Kate Steele as Chloe Coverly Serena Scott Thomas as Lady Croom Douglas Weston as Septimus Hodge
Directed by John Rubinstein
Oh gosh, I just now found out they are also offering the play on three CDs. Amazon doesn't carry it, but it is for sale on the LA Theatreworks site. Finally, please take note that the production is directed by John Rubenstein who you probably remember from any of the bazillion shows he has appeared on.
Strategy+Business has been a little, interesting journal for the past few years. One the one hand, it's the external house organ of Booz & Company, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that unless the house organ tends to be ... explicit ... about being a cheerleader when the content should speak for itself. McKinsey makes a good journal too.
This quarter we're treated to an interview with W. Brian Arthur. Mr Arthur spent most of the 80s on the Stanford University / Santa Fe Institute nexus of the world and has now decided to spend all his time in Santa Fe.
It appears the interview was triggered by the publication of Mr. Arthur's latest book, The Nature of Technology and How it Evolves. Here are a couple of pithy extracts that I hope will encourage you to buy the book:
The economy thus isn’t something that contains a few technologies. The economy is its technologies and is an expression of its technologies — in the same way that an ecosystem emerges from its species. And if an economy consists of its technologies, then it automatically changes the moment you change any of the technologies. If a part of the legal system or venture capital financing is altered, changes reverberate throughout the entire economy, and not just in the parts of the economy most directly impacted by what has occurred. Any time a new species comes into the ecosystem, the ecosystem changes.
...
But I don’t think human beings are any faster at inventing these days than they were 100 years ago. Maybe more of us are working with technologies — there are more scientists and engineers. Maybe we’re better organized than before. But above all, what has changed is that we have much more to invent with. That creates a certain speed-up in innovation, but I’m not expecting this rate to accelerate to infinity any time.
...
But it’s not sufficient to have good scientists or good technical journals or even good universities, any more than it is sufficient to take a recipe book off the shelf to be able to cook Chicken Cordon Bleu. What’s more important is the implicit knowledge of what temperatures to use, and just how much to cook something.
The more advanced the technology, the more craft is required in innovation. Innovation is about shared knowledge: of how to deal with phenomena, of parameter values and what to do when things go wrong — knowing what new pathways to try and what things have already been tried so you don’t have to waste your time on them. And in the computer industry, much of that knowledge resides locally in Silicon Valley.
Ms. Danah Boyd is one of the rarities on the social media scene: She knows what she's talking about and she's smart. She isn't just an observer, she's a participant. And she's been a participant for Quite Some Time. And, she knows how to back up and see the big picture.
Case in point: In December, Ms. Boyd spoke at Le Web and SuperNova and her topic was all about visibility. Here are a couple of aspects that, I think, prove my point:
Your sense of what people do with social media is highly dependent on what you consume, how you consume it, and why you're there in the first place. So is mine. The world you live in online looks different than the world I live in. And it looks different than the world that an average teen lives in. And it looks different than the world Lady Gaga lives in. And it looks different than the world that people from different cultural backgrounds experience. Our worlds are different, even if the interface gives us the impression that they're the same.
What social media does is allow us to look in on these people's lives. Or, more accurately, see the traces of one aspect of their life. Public genres of social media give us the ability to access worlds that are different than ours. Regardless of where we are in the world, we can see the experiences of people who are different than us. But are we even looking?...Not everyone shares our values and, perhaps we should accept this. But I would argue that we should be informed so that we can make change that we want to see in this world. We have the power to build these systems. Rather than being shaped by our imagination of what we think will be, we can be informed about how the world is. And use that to drive the creation of systems in order to make change, in order to help create a world that we want to live in.
So we think about the digital society that we are creating, I invite you to think about visibility. What can you see that you couldn't before? How does this make you feel? And what are you going to do about it? Perhaps its time that we embrace visibility and take a moment to look. Take a moment to see. And, most importantly, take a moment to act.
*By the way, just in case you didn't "get" the headline, there's an expression I've heard in Texas countless times. When referring to someone who has the truck, jeans and the shirt with the pearl snaps and the Resistol hat, but doesn't have any cows, someone might comment that, "He's all hat and no cattle."
As I skipped through the pages of this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review, I reached the final article, an essay that's usually worth the look. And this week did not disappoint.
I can't remember when I became attached to Fowler but I suspect it has something to do with one of the many articles I've read about the inner workings of the New Yorker. But it had to be during my undergraduate days because the fly-leaf is inscribed with my name and student ID number. One of my dearest friends from those halcyon days sent me a gift of three books, one being The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and this book I've torn through and have re-read several passages already. What's fascinating about the book is the comparision and contrast is makes between English and other languages.
And what we find is that few, precious few of the wise people in positions of influence put their foot down and try to stomp out a certain type of usage. For example, I recently became obsessed with the usage of "more: and "over." Example:
The charity raised more than $3,000 for the orphans.
The charity raised over $3,000 for the orphans.
If you look it up in any book you'll probably find the same thing I do: The second construction is not correct, but if you try to change it people will think you're a prig so get over it.
" and Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is other half of the co-authoring team. 
with a foreword by Louis Menand and I will soldier on.
Honest to goodness, I'm going to have to pay much more attention to LA Theatre Works. First, they release a very nice cd of 
