Context & Continuity

Recovery.

I've been thinking about this word lately for two reasons:  first, reality TV is chock-a-block with shows about people going into 'recovery' for numerous reasons and this has led to a society with recovery on the mind.  In fact on one of the recent network morning shows, a woman advocating pre-emptive recovery was interviewed. 

Of course the second reason, the word 'recovery' is being bandied about regarding our economy.  And, just the other day, Mr. Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup and probably one of the smartest people in any room, told a Congregational committee that he believed his industry needed more regulation -- eventhough he believed that his own company was well in hand.  

And suddenly these two definitions of Recovery collapsed in my mind.  Now, I don't know that much about twelve-step programs, but as I re-call one of the first steps in recovery is admitting one is out of control.  --So now I'm wondering if we will be able to move beyond this addmition of lack of control and move on the the second, third and subsequent steps in our twelve step program.

Which brings me to another point, one that literally caused me to tear up over my morning coffee and newspapers.  Specifically, it was a report about education in the U.S. and where various states and the Distric of Columbia rank.  And that made me think of values.  And that made me think about the people in this country who can't get healthcare.  And then that made me think about the fearless sons and daughters we're sending to rick their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.  --And that made me think about Values again.  

And I found myself wondering, out loud, where are our values?  What have we done to walk so far away from values that so many of us believe in personally but collectively,  They vanish like the fog in my neck of the words as the sun climbs towards its zenith. 

In my tradition, we would say it is a shandra that our government, the institution that's supposed to be in our service is such a disservice to so many and a stumbling block. 

The Agency of the Future: Be Still My Heart

I refuse to go into much detail on this as I having a paying client to serve, but I must bring this article to your attention, if for nothing else to cause you distress or amusement.  Your choice.

Ms. Jodi Harris, who we can tell from her picture, is not some wizened much less long time experienced observer of the Public Relation scene, reports on a speech by Bryan Weiner, CEO of 360i made at something called the IAB Ecosystem conference held last week in Carlsbad, Calif.  Her reporting includes the following:

"It's time to leave the pessimism behind. This represents an unprecedented opportunity for agencies to become indispensable marketing partners," said Weiner...

Not to be too catty, but I've always believed deeply in my heart that pessimism was Very Counter Productive for agency life.  

If marketers want to radically impact change in the marketing ecosystem, it starts with how you allocate dollars.

Well, that's Painfully Obvious for some of us who have toiled in the Public Relations fields for almost any length of time. 

Think about how your property can serve as a conduit for deeper interactions between brands and consumers.

I'm just going to leave this nugget from Ms. Harris in the file marked "cryptic."

Here's a real good one:

Yet the fact remains: Advertising is about getting consumers to be product and service advocates. To be able to do that today, agencies need to find innovative solutions, and do so at reasonable prices.

I double dare you to walk into the cube of anyone responsible for spending precious corporate dollars on advertising to support this idea.  I have met and worked with the folks, some from our most highly esteemed companies and can honest report to you that advertising is about selling more stuff to more people.  Nevertheless, as a Public Relations guy, I'm happy for anyone to take a shot at Advertising.

As Weiner sees it, the model for the agency of the future doesn't exist yet, but marketers can help create it in their own environments by focusing all their efforts toward meeting client needs.

Well, that's probably why the speech is about the Agency of the (wait for it) ...Future.

Again, I apologize in advance for taking such a cheap shot at this reporter and the story.  I'm an almost old and certainly crusty PR guy who has seen how the business works (and doesn't work) and I become annoyed when people who obviously have know idea what they're talking about blow some of their bloviation in my direction. 

[link to story]

That's all for now except to wish you a great weekend. 

What you should have read this weekend in the NYTimes / WSJ....

    

Depression’s Upside

...The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And then there are the cognitive deficits. Because rumination hijacks the stream of consciousness — we become exquisitely attentive to our pain — numerous studies have found that depressed subjects struggle to think about anything else, just like Wallace’s character. The end result is poor performance on tests for memory and executive function, especially when the task involves lots of information. (These deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise.) Such research has reinforced the view that rumination is a useless kind of pessimism, a perfect waste of mental energy.  [more]

On Language:  Webinar
Lewis Carroll famously called blends like Webinar “portmanteau” words because they’re two words packed into one. (A portmanteau was essentially a suitcase with two compartments folded together.) Carroll made up several such words for his poem “Jabberwocky” (1871), including chortle (chuckle + snort) and galumph (gallop + triumph). Chortle has stayed with us, while galumph appears to have gone the way of gyre and gimble. Why? Because chortle is so handy and so onomatopoeically evocative (think of the laugh of a portly chum). [more]    

Justice Dept. Reveals More Missing E-Mail Files

...But it discovered that many e-mail messages to and from John C. Yoo, who wrote the bulk of the legal opinions for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were missing. The office disclosed the missing messages in a footnote to its final report, which was released last week.

“We were told that most of Yoo’s e-mail records had been deleted and were not recoverable,” officials from the Office of Professional Responsibility said in the footnote.   ....  [more]  (I've mentioned this before, but I believe it bears mentioning again:  Is this how you would set up the email system for the Justice Dept.?)

Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy

So in DSM-III there was a lot of horse-trading. The biologically oriented young Turks got a depression diagnosis—major depression—that was divorced from what they considered the psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. And the waning but still substantial number of analysts got a diagnosis—dysthymia—that sounded like their beloved "neurotic depression," that had been the mainstay of psychoanalytic practice. Psychiatry ended up with two brand-new depression diagnoses with criteria so broad that huge numbers of people could qualify for them. [more]

'529' Plans: Why So Many Flunk Out

...Inherently, saving for college is challenging because we only have a fixed number of years before the bill is due. So no matter how disciplined we are, timing and luck will play a big role. But that often is ignored by investment firms and state and federal policy makers, who have pushed 529 plans as the answer to soaring tuition costs.[more] (My new college savings plan is my life insurance.)

Rogers Quits White House Post

... A senior administration official said Friday that Democratic fundraiser Julianna Smoot, a veteran campaign operative who helped Mr. Obama build a grassroots contributions juggernaut, was the leading contender to succeed Ms. Rogers.

Ms. Rogers's job was to work with First Lady Michelle Obama and the East Wing staff to organize every social event at the White House, including state dinners and birthday parties. [more]

(Frankly, I knew she was doomed from the time I saw this picture in November 09 Vanity Fair magazine and learned that Ms. Rogers has two Hermes notebooks, each one worth more than my car. That level of conspicuous consumption in the White House, or any public post won't be tolerated.)

London Sips a Different Cup

The championship made Mr. Davies something of a cult figure, and he’s using that notoriety to champion other accomplished baristas around town by offering the mischievously named Dis-loyalty Card: get coffee at eight different establishments he admires, and he’ll make the ninth drink for free at his nameless pushcart at the Whitecross Street Market (whitecrossstreet.co.uk). [more]

Hey, Waiter! Just How Much Extra Do You Really Expect?

... Yes, I know you’re all underpaid. But guess what? So am I. When I get $500 for an article that I think is worth $1,000, you won’t see me e-mail the editor, saying, “Just so you know, service isn’t included.” Do I ask you to come into my workplace and supplement my meager income? No, I don’t. [more]

The Free-Appropriation Writer

Maybe that’s one reason for the flurry of attention recently about a teenage German novelist, Helene Hegemann, whose book about Berlin’s club scene was named a finalist for a prestigious literary prize to be awarded next month in Leipzig. After a blogger and fellow novelist announced that Ms. Hegemann had blended sizeable chunks of his own writing into hers, Ms. Hegemann, instead of following the plagiarism-gotcha script of contrition and retraction so familiar in recent years, announced that appropriating the passages from that book and other sources was her plan all along. [more]

Redrawing the Route to Online Privacy

Rules would mean new regulations. And Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are looking at further rules that could limit how personal information is used. For example, the government might ban the use of recorded trails of a person’s Web-browsing behavior — so-called click streams — in employment or health insurance decisions. [more]

I'll Post This for Two Reasons...

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."

J. D. Salinger, ע״ה

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. 

Antonia Frasier recounts conversation between her husband, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard

From Ms. Frasier's new memoir, But Must You Go?

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.

Link to story.

Classy Behaviour?

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. 

Crying Wolf...

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.

Et in Arcadia ego

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.  

I'm in and will let you know when the CDs arrive. 

Strategy&Business: The Evolution of Technology.

   

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.

[link to entire article]

Danah Boyd: All Hat, All Cattle.*

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.

Here's a link to her entire speech. 

*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." 

Color me surprised...

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. 

Stoppard on the BBC AM

Not much I can add to this except it's one of the precious few video clips I have on him. 

[more].

...and you're backing that up to a ...

And the point is...?

I found this eye candy on LifeHacker and followed the breadcrumbs back to the source, The University of California, San Diego.  It's an interesting study that was funded by AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology.  Seagate.  Right. 

Anyway, it's a theoretical question that's a bit interesting.  I guess Avatar takes up more disk space than Citizen Kane and Citizen Kane takes up more disk space than, say, the novel Gravity's Rainbow.   And so on.  So do we need more disk?  Personally, I'm up to about a terabyte of NAS for my family and that doesn't surprise me at all.  But on the other hand, we're rapidly approaching a new paradigm whereby one copy can be cataloged and accessed at anytime by anybody.  --Assuming infinite bandwidth.

By the way, I highly recommenced LaCie's NAS.  Has performed as expected over four years.  A dream.

One of the few people who really know what they're talking about...

... is David Strom.  Mr. Strom understands information technology from the bottom up and is a valuable person to know.  Mr. Strom writes a newsletter Web Informant which (and I'm giving away one of my trade secrets here) is an important missive to read to stay current on information technology's course and speed. 

Which leads me to his latest email newsletter that springs from an article published by the NYTimes on December 9 about the intersection of television  and the internet, something I wrote about here recently.  

So, the takeaway is this:  put David Strom on your reading list and watch with interest as television melds with computing.  Here's an ethical issue I'm dealing with this afternoon:  My daughter, a junior in high school, comes home and says she will receive extra credit for watching the move Dances with Wolves.  Do I pay Blockbuster to rent the DVD or download it from the blacknet for free?  It's a pretty good movie, but....   I guess since I've written this in public, I'll rent the DVD.  Besides, I'd rather not have that movie on my NAS. 

Roger Rees On Stoppard and etc.

As I've written before here, it was one of the great blessings of my life to see the original productions of The Real Thing in both London and New York.  In New York, the lead was played by Jeremy Irons who was still floating in the rarefied air of fame blown up by Brideshead Revisited.  I think he did a terrific job but thought Roger Rees in the West End was the better of the two.  Here's a story from the Times about Roger Rees' return to the West End in a production of Waiting for Godot. 

“I should have stayed there and become a big something,” he says now. “But what I like to do is work a lot and so I came back.” Success did give him the chance to play Hamlet for the RSC. He was a big enough name to be cast as the alter ego of Tom Stoppard in the original production of The Real Thing. “I remember my mum and me taking a photograph of the Strand Theatre. It said, ‘Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees in The Real Thing’.” All these years later, it seems that he can’t quite believe that his name was once in lights in the West End.

Most of the article focuses on Rees' leaving of London and his "twenty year exile in the  in the US."  --I know i was quite pleased when he became a recurring character on The West Wing.  Anyway, here's a link to the article.

Oh, by the way, this came up during our Chanukah party yesterday.  Someone described a situation as "waiting for Godot," and I chimed up that Beckett was James Joyce's secretary.  Wowed the crowd with that one.  One of those thrilling moments for English Majors. 

T/Economist: A giant sucking sound

The Economist is a must-read for anyone successfully braille-ing the zeitgeist and here's an excellent story from its November 7th issue about the $9.4 billion on-line segment of the $55 billion video game industry growing larger and larger and larger and...

Here's a link to the story. And you have to love the headline.

NYTimes: Slave to the internet.

And so, the New York Times observes, again, that living off-line can be uncomfortable.  It's a wonderful little story by Wyatt Mason that delves into what makes a relationship and a community. 

I did, I confess, begin to trespass variously against our new neighbors, in search of e-mail. I did drive with suspicious slowness down leafy lanes, laptop flagrantly agape in the passenger seat, pulling into driveways where I had no honest business. Idling in front of a house from which an unprotected network might be pulsing, I did master the art of holding a map in my left hand and squinting confusedly at its surface while pointing and clicking and connecting discreetly with my hidden right. Nor were my hunting expeditions always automotive. By the time July rolled in and I was gardening (with clothes on) and taking photos with my laptop camera of my proud crop of organic kale, I noticed the plucky, single WiFi-signal bar I’d not seen before, faint, but promising. Bearing the machine before me like some dowser of yore by modernity deranged, I let the machine lead me from the garden and deep into the woods, where I found, broadcast by what knotty pine I couldn’t say, the signal strength I sought. Did I get my e-mail? Yes. I also got stung by a hornet in the process. At the time it seemed like an even-enough trade.

Here's a link to the article.  

Nicolas Carr: The Price of Free.

Just in case you missed it in the November 15 issue of The New York Times Magazine, here's a fascinating article by Nicolas Carr, one of the prescient observers of the digital scene. 

A few months ago, while stalking the aisles of my local Best Buy, I gave in to techno-temptation. I bought a Blu-ray player. What I didn’t realize until I unpacked the gadget was that it does a lot more than just spin high-definition discs. It is, as they say, Web-enabled. As soon as I plugged it into an outlet in my living room, its built-in WiFi antenna sniffed out my home network and logged on. The Blu-ray player became a gateway between the Internet and my television set.

Ever since, and much to my surprise, I’ve been using the device more to transmit Internet content than to play discs. I stream TV shows and movies from Netflix, music from Pandora and videos from YouTube. Beyond my existing $11-a-month Netflix subscription, I haven’t forked out a penny for any of this programming. It comes flowing out of the Web, whenever I summon it, free.

For a long time, it has amazed me how much content is available for free, And I know that I haven't made up my mind about fair use and sharing and stealing and so forth.  But I do know that we're at the edge of an amazing new era and I'm sure we'll work out these issues as best as we can.  And creative destruction will be part of the price we'll pay.   Here's a link to the article. 

...and lock the door behind you, please.

Editor & Publisher has ceased publication. Megan McArdle at the Atlantic's website chalks it up as another moment in the the media death race.  If Editor & Publisher can go under, could Publisher's Weekly be far behind?

NYTimes, 11.10.9: Bible That Vanished on Kristallnacht Is Heading Home

I can't say I agree with the writer or editors of the the New York Times when they decide to describe the recovered book a Hebrew Bible, especially as the erudite readers of the NYTimes will be able to understand the meaning of Torah or even Tanach.  Nevertheless this is a fascinating story, especially as it concerns how this is the first Hebrew Bible that contains chapter numbers. 

“It doesn’t mean money to us,” Dr. Ariel Muzicant, the president of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, Vienna’s Jewish community, said at the ceremony. “It’s about spiritual value.”

The atlas-size Bible, which was printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1516, several generations after the Gutenberg Bible, according to scholars, bears faded gold Hebrew characters on its three-inch-thick spines. And, “for the first time in a Hebrew Bible, the chapter numbers appear in the margin,” according to the catalog issued by Kestenbaum & Company, the auctioneer, which estimated its value at $20,000 to $30,000.

[more]

T/ Best newsstand in San Francisco.

On Friday, November 6, 2009, Fog City News will celebrate its Tenth Anniversary.  On the one hand, Fog City News is a big too fancy and a bit too small to be a truly great newsstand, like Dina news or Universal New in NYC or the Harvard Square Newsstand in Cambridge.  When I was a very young man laboring in the caverns of Manhattan, making and spinnig news, I would run off to Universal News to get the out-of-town newspapers that had printed my stories. 

But we've come here today to commemorate Fog City News.  If you like newsstands.  And if you like chocolate.  And if you're in San Francisco.  Then you need to visit Fog City News.  Fog City News is where I was able to acquire the issue of French Vogue edited by Sofia Copolla.  It is a long narrow room and you can't reach the magazines on the top rack because it is so high.  And as if that wasn't enough, it does have the most exquisite chocolate one can buy. 

Go.  See.  Buy.  Repeat. 

     

WSJ, 11.4.9: The Greatest Generation (of Networkers)

"The unspoken attitude is, 'I don't need you. I have the Internet,'" says P.M. Forni, the 58-year-old director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which studies politeness and manners. "The Net provides an opportunity to play hide-and-seek, to say and not say, to be truthful and to pretend. There is a lot of communication going on that is futile and trivial."  [more]

William Gibson, one of my favorite authors wrote, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”  And we can see it with our kids.  And, just because it's the future, doesn't mean that it's all ok. 

NYTimes, 11.3.9: Lament on the Fading Culture of the Printed Word

Goodbye to All That

Over the years, how many people have read Joan Didion’s pointed, moody, celebrated essays and come to New York in the hope of writing some of their own? The path of those would-be writers is patently stubborn, given the tone Ms. Didion strikes in the essay so many name as their favorite, “Goodbye to All That.” It is a famous elegy for the passing of youth, but also a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited.

[more]

I arrived in NYC in 1981 along with most of the rest of the herd from the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course.  Most of us found work.  I think I held the record for one of the first to find a job:  three weeks.  Bad then, everyone was incessantly talking about how bad things were, but, in reflection, they were so bad afterall, not compared to today. 

Overall, I feel the same way I did then:  If one is very smart and is willing to work very hard, one can find work.  For everyone else, not so much. 

What You Should Have Read in Today's NY Times.

The Obamas’ Marriage

Another Washington dusk, another motorcade, another intimate evening played out in public view. On Oct. 3, just a day after their failed Olympics bid in Copenhagen, Barack and Michelle Obama slipped into a Georgetown restaurant for one of their now-familiar date nights: this time, to toast their 17th wedding anniversary. As with their previous outings, even the dark photographs taken by passers-by and posted on the Web looked glamorous: the president tieless, in a suit; the first lady in a backless sheath.

[more]

Going Along for the Rides

Curtis Sliwa, 55, has spent the last 30 years riding the New York City subways as the founding member of the Guardian Angels crime-patrolling group. He has a second career as a radio talk show host on WABC-AM (770). He spends each Sunday touring the subway system with his 5-year-old son, Anthony, while his long-suffering wife, Mary, also 55, waits at their home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

[more]

Block-a-Thon

On Sunday morning, 40,000 people will run, walk and wheel their way 26.2 miles through New York’s five boroughs in a whirlwind tour of the city at its most festive. My personal marathon, restricted to the long rectangle created by Baltic and Warren Streets and Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn, offered something more subtle: a glimpse at a day in the life of my neighborhood.

The idea came to me on my umpteenth walk with Barnaby, a basset hound with a trace of beagle that we adopted from a shelter in June. Somehow, the thought “This is pathetic — I’m walking miles every day without getting anywhere” morphed into “What if we kept walking — without going anywhere? Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?”

[more]

Keep Those Eyes on the Skies

Were they asleep? No, just glued to their personal laptops — a violation of airline policy — to figure out together a complicated new pilot scheduling system while their Airbus A-320 flew on autopilot with 144 passengers on board. “The ultimate example of distracted driving,” one Washington lawmaker called it last week.

Air traffic controllers tried to make radio contact for 91 minutes. The military put four fighter jets at the ready, fearing a hijacking. The White House situation room was alerted. A flight attendant finally roused the pilots’ attention by telephoning the locked cockpit to ask why they weren’t descending.

[more]

The Difference a Year Makes

BABY boomers are counted as lucky for having lived through a time of unprecedented prosperity. But Harry MacAvoy, 52, believes that within his generation, there was one year to be born that was luckier than the rest, 1957.

“We completely missed the upheaval of the 60s, the Vietnam protests on campus, the draft,” said Mr. MacAvoy, who is research director for Republican legislators in the New York State Assembly and happens to have been born in, yes, 1957. “But we were old enough to remember the moon landing, the opening of Disney World and we got to college at the height of anything goes.”

[more ]

Why Google Doesn’t Like Its Phone Bill

In a company blog post last month, Google said some rural phone companies partner with “sex chat lines and ‘free’ conference calling centers to drive high volumes of traffic” in what is called “traffic pumping” in the telecom industry.

“People are on the phone for hours — Grandma wouldn’t be on all day,” said Richard Whitt, the Washington telecom and media counsel for Google, in a recent interview.

[more]

Escalations

This problematic legacy explains, in part, why another young Democratic president now finds himself at a crossroads similar to the one Kennedy was preparing to negotiate in 1963. Barack Obama’s dilemma in Afghanistan has its roots in the conundrum that Democrats faced during the last two presidential campaigns: how to oppose the war in Iraq without being fatally caricatured, yet again, as feckless heirs to the McGovernite left. Their solution was to stress their fervor for a different war. Sure, they wanted to withdraw from Iraq, but they wanted to shift more troops and treasure to Afghanistan, where the true aggressors of Sept. 11 were still evading capture. Who could call that weak? It was a sensible policy that also made for irresistible politics.

[more]

Keats Speaks

Lost though I was in admiration of the elfin good looks of Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, and the poise of Abbie Cornish, who plays Brawne, I managed to retain enough presence of mind during this scene to admire their dialogue too, which sounded like authentic Georgian English. This is how they might actually have talked, I thought: playful, delicate, precise. How did Campion, who wrote the deft and artful screenplay herself, come up with it?

[more]

 

Bookstores and Beyond

EVEN really careful planners, the ones who started saving and budgeting for college before they got to high school, are likely to gnash their teeth each semester when they head to the bookstore to buy their textbooks, only to discover that “Molecular Biology of the Cell” costs $215; “Calculus: Early Transcendental Functions,” $218; and “Business Driven Technology,” $202.

[more]

The Real Thing, T/Audio Edition.

The Real Thing is one of my many favorite Tom Stoppard plays.  It won a special spot in my heart because I was able to see the original production in London and the original production on Broadway.  Jeremy Irons and Glen Close lead the cast on Broadway and Roger Rees and Felicity Kendall starred in the West End.  Both productions were life-changing experiences for me but the West End production seemed to me to be the a bit better because it just seemed to be the right place to see the play.  

The Real Thing was staged in Los Angeles about a year ago, and from that production, this audio disk has been created and published.  According to a review I read in Publishers Weekly, the only downfall of the production is that it's sometimes hard to tell who's who in the swirl of the dialog.  --I can see that.  I've ordered a copy and will let you know what I think of it. 

The Guardian, 10.25.9: The final twist in Nabokov's untold story

The teasing went both ways. In 1991, an American librarian published a literary critical essay, apparently by a Swiss professor, entitled "A first look at Nabokov's last novel", which was quickly exposed as a brilliant spoof. Others became entangled in the debate. "It's perfectly straightforward," said Tom Stoppard. "Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it." Novelist Edmund White, whose early work had been championed by Nabokov, was equally blunt. "If a writer really wants something destroyed," he told the Times, "he burns it." John Banville said that this situation was "a difficult and painful one". Conceding that The Original of Laura may turn out to be inferior, Banville decided that it should be saved from the flames. "A great writer is always worth reading," he said, "even at his worst."

[more]

What You Should Have Read in Today's NYTimes.

The Way We Live Now:  Stop Your Search Engines

Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom.

[more]

Book Review - 'Chronic City,' by Jonathan Lethem

By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

[more]

Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out

On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. Twenty-­five were directed to me and me alone: 14 from friends or family, nine ­business-related and the other two conveying timely information about commercial accounts of mine. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven “Google alerts” on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters. I had been getting this odd Cyrillic e-mail for some time, and 25 of my incoming messages on this particular day were responses to a query I had sent to my colleagues asking if Russians had been spamming them, too.

[more]

Are They Laughing? Are They Moved?

NEIL SIMON is nervous. For all the success of his 82 years — a Pulitzer Prize for drama, three Tony Awards, many commercial hits on Broadway — a part of him still judges his self-worth by how much audiences laugh during his plays. Now the most personal of his works, the autobiographical “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound,” are being revived in repertory on Broadway for the first time since the original productions ran for a total of five years during the 1980s. And they are being directed by David Cromer, whose minimalist Off Broadway mounting of “Our Town” makes clear that he is not in this business for the yuks.

[more]

The New World on the Two Coasts

WHEN a music director takes the helm of a major American orchestra, the inaugural concert should be not just a musical celebration but a statement of artistic mission. The recent debuts of Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic both showed how this can be done.

[more]

Man's World at White House?  No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players.

The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.

[more]

Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt

The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.

No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.

[more]

How High Will Real-Time Search Fly?

WHEN a US Airways plane landed in the Hudson River in January, the first picture appeared on Twitter. In June, Twitter users were mourning Michael Jackson before major news outlets reported his death. And, this month, as much of the nation was riveted by images of a balloon believed to be carrying a 6-year-old boy, every twist and turn was tweeted and retweeted instantaneously, drowning out just about everything else on the site.

[more]

The Wiseguy, the Spy and the Ponzi Prince

What do they have in common, these notorious jailbirds?

Something, apparently. Legal papers filed by a lawyer representing victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s vast Ponzi scheme single out two inmates of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh, N.C., whom Mr. Madoff spends quality hard time with: Carmine Persico, boss of the Colombo crime family, and Jonathan Pollard, intelligence analyst turned spy for Israel.

[more]

The Nuns’ Story

Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.

Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.

[more]

Slaughterhouse Live

TO celebrate their 30th birthdays, Christian Rusby, a sustainability consultant in Seattle, and his twin brother, Jake, a college student, decided to get blood on their hands.

[more]

My Sad, Little Profession.

I've never been proud about what I do for a living, pushing public opinion this way and that at the whim of my master.  I was amazed the first time I learned that one could earn a degree in public relations, and despite the nurturing efforts of Ketchum Public Relations, I cast a sideways glance at something like a professional association.  The work suits me because it isn't necessarily hard and people's lives rarely hang in the balance so I can go about my work in a relaxed fashion. 

Be that as it may, I do keep an eye peeled for news about this line of work in an interest to stay abreast of the art and craft.  And that leads me to a posting I came across today from the PRSA, the professional association I referred to above.  

The name of the PRSA blog is...

...which is ok. 

The headline that got my attention today is this:

What Does Ethics Have to do With Social Media Anyway?

... which is too clever for its own good.  A million years ago, in a smokey little office in midtown Manhattan, Bob Walt taught me that if you write your press release with negative constructions and language, then your press release will have negative construction and language in it and that isn't at all what a press release is supposed to be all about.  I think Mr. Walt caught me trying to write something along the lines of "We aren't satisfied with ordinary work here."  And Mr. Walt correctly pointed out that it's much more direct if we were to write it, "We only do superior work here."  --But I digress.

This is the first time I've posted anything from Physics Central...

Dr. Brad Carroll, a physics profession at Weber State University (Utah), has created an entire course in physics based on a reading of three plays by Tom Stoppard:

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
  
• Arcadia: A Play
  
• Hapgood: A Play

Bless his heart. 

Here's an extract from the story:

What kinds of students usually take the class?
It's usually not the physics students who are in there, which I'm happy about.  They're going to be showing off that they already know this stuff. We've had English majors, theater majors, philosophy, manufacturing technology, just every part of the spectrum as far as disciplines. 

Here's the link to the rest of the story.  And because you've my special friend, here's a link to the outline for the course:  Download HONSYL09