THE HAUTE 100 & THE HOTBOT 25

posted by James Reel

    The current to-do over AOL’s release of search terms to researchers, seen as a privacy breach, reminds me that I wrote about a much more harmless and fun release of search data several years ago. Way back in the summer of 1999, the search site HotBot compared its queries to a list of top authors that had just been issued by the Modern Library. This is what I had to say about that publicity stunt …

    Alone, cold and adrift in cyberspace, poor Lawrence Durell seems to have no home page on the Web. And that's just as well; if he did, no one would visit. How pathetic it would be for an author on the Modern Library's Top 100 English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century list to wrap himself in a few tattered HTML tagwords and cling to some dismal sand-colored electronic wallpaper, waiting in vain for the Internet's impersonal search engines to point someone his way.
    Durell, the author of the Alexandria Quartet, was one of six authors on the Modern Library's Haute Hundred list ignored by users of the search site HotBot during June, 1999. Also snubbed were James M. Cain, James T. Farrell, John O'Hara, Muriel Spark, and Booth Tarkington.
    Once the initial hubbub over the Modern Library's rankings died down, HotBot looked into how those vaunted authors rated in terms of actual public interest. It checked the Modern Library list against queries logged at its site during one four-week period. The results weren't too surprising; after all, who but Orson Welles fans would care about Booth Tarkington anymore? Still, HotBot's rankings suggest which Great Twentieth-Century English-Language Authors attract the interest of real people, rather than the interest of a publisher trying to hawk its backlist.
    Some caveats are in order. First, HotBot declined to tell me how many total hits it counted for each author. HotBot, a member of the Lycos Network, currently attracts "more than 7.1 million users monthly, according to Media Metrix." Several million of those searches probably seek Traci Lords sites or stills from the Pamela Anderson Lee sex video or any number of non-literary topics. So the first-place writer may have spurred thousands of inquiries, or only a couple of dozen.
    Also, because the statistics were gathered over the course of only one month, we can't generalize from them with any confidence. But because the figures were gleaned during June, too late for most term-paper research, they probably do reflect the interests of the general public rather than desperate students.
    Here are the 20th-century literary authors who scored the highest among HotBot searches during June, 1999, along with my own intrusive commentary:
    1. James Joyce
    Many anti-elitists howled at One-Eyed Jim's perch atop the Modern Library rankings, but he also takes pride of place on the search-frequency list. Perhaps readers just need more help figuring Joyce out, but the fact remains that people are making the effort to learn something about him and his work. A HotBot publicist told me that Joyce had almost three times as many searches as the tenth-place finisher, Graham Greene, and seven times as many as the twenty-fifth-place finisher, John Dos Passos. Maybe you math fans could turn this into a story problem.
    2. George Orwell
    3. John Steinbeck
    Acccording to my HotBot source, Joyce, Orwell and Steinbeck were way out ahead of the fourth-place finisher:
    4. Ernest Hemingway
    Here's the one instance in which current events may have influenced the figures. Hemingway's True at First Light had just been published, surely spurring renewed interest in the author. Maybe the winners of the bad-Hemingway-writing contest had recently been announced, too. At any rate, you can't hold being in the news against an author who's been dead nearly 40 years.
    5. Virginia Woolf
    Woolf's placement this high really shouldn't be surprising. Her works remain intensely interesting to feminists, Bloomsbury cultists (who are legion) and, for that matter, me. (Minutes before I started writing this column, I finished reading Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway—as a prelude to Michael Cunningham's The Hours—and I find myself inexplicably devastated.)
    6. Jack London
    7. Rudyard Kipling
    Now, there's an interesting pair of authors adventuring through worlds quite unlike ours. You'd think they would have fallen from fashion by now, but obviously good yarns enjoy longevity.
    8. James Baldwin
    As a writer, Baldwin was the quintessential Angry Young Black Man, even when he was an old man, and his works have enjoyed a renaissance in the 1990s, now that he's safely dead. Still, it's a bit surprising for him to outdistance Ralph Ellison just now (see the remark after No. 20).
    9. Joseph Conrad
    10. Jack Kerouac
    11. Graham Greene
    12. Henry James
    13. Aldous Huxley
    14. Edith Wharton
    15. J.D. Salinger
    Who could question that cluster of seven authors, no matter the ranking? Kerouac and Huxley may, unjustifiably, be remembered in the 21st century as one-book authors, but somehow those single novels—On the Road and Brave New World—will probably never fall from the A list, even though in different ways they ought to seem terribly dated by now.
    16. Willa Cather
    17. Nathanael West
    Those two are a surprise. It would be heartening to know that readers were checking up on Cather's historical inaccuracies in Death Comes for the Archbishop, an overrated book that makes heroes of some particularly unpleasant figures in New Mexico history. West is a more interesting writer and figure; I wonder if the HotBot searchers were trying to determine why his Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust, over-the-top black comedies both, are so damned depressing.
    18. Henry Miller
    19. Evelyn Waugh
    20. Ralph Ellison
    Miller and Waugh can rest in peace, as far as I'm concerned. But I am astonished that Ellison falls so low on this list. Juneteenth, his long-awaited (and posthumous) second novel, was published during the month of the HotBot survey. Given that accident of chronology if nothing else, I'd expect Ellison to be lurking up in Hemingway's neighborhood, certainly somewhere above Baldwin. Pehaps Juneteenth is just too difficult; after all, those Hemingway inquiries might have concerned the high school favorite The Old Man and the Sea rather than True at First Light. At least it's fitting that Ellison keep company with the next author on the list, whose style overspreads Juneteenth like batter on a drumstick.
    21. William Faulkner
    22. F. Scott Fitzgerald
    23. Joseph Heller
    24. Robert Penn Warren
    25. John Dos Passos
    Rather odd to find this last pair of three-named authors lurking in the Top 25, when so popular a writer as Kurt Vonnegut came in at 61. Still, I find among my friends that there has been a surge of interest in Dos Passos since the Library of America reissued his U.S.A. in 1996. I'd prefer that reason, anyway, to the possibility that fans of Mexican beer are confusing Dos Passos with Dos Equis.

PRONOUNCEMENTS ON HEZBOLLAH

posted by James Reel

    Burning issue of the day for radio people: How, exactly, do you pronounce “Hezbollah”? On NPR and PRI programs I’ve heard HEZ-bo-lah, hez-BOH-lah (from a Lebanese-American) and hez-bo-LAH, which covers all the bases. Here’s the official position of the BBC: hez-buul-AA. (Note not just the final-syllable stress, but also the vowel quality in the middle syllable.)
    One observer, though, insists that’s wrong: “It is certainly not the anglicized Hez-buul-AA but hezb-ULLL-ah with the stress on the double consonant L. Lebanese dont speak Farsi, and they pronounce Arabic words pretty much like modern standard Arabic.” So much for appealing to authority. In any case, remember that the Brits are responsible for such pronunciation abominations as the five-syllable “aluminium” and the Cervantes title “don quicks-oat.”

SCHWARZKOPF

posted by James Reel

    Soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died Thursday; news services assiduously tell us that “no cause of death was reported,” but she was 90, for crying out loud. What’s more important than the cause of death was the career, which was thoroughly documented via recordings, which you should hear without delay, particularly her performances of Strauss and Mahler.
    Not everyone appreciates her art; here’s Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times setting out the matter even-handedly:

    For a singer of such unquestionable stature, Miss Schwarzkopf’s work was controversial. In her prime, she possessed a radiant lyric soprano voice, impressive technical agility and exceptional understanding of style. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s, she was for many listeners the high priestess of the lieder recital, a sublime artist who brought textual nuance, interpretive subtlety and elegant musicianship to her work.
    But others found her interpretations calculated, mannered and arch (the “Prussian perfectionist,” one critic called her), and complained that in trying to add textual vitality, Miss Schwarzkopf resorted to crooning and half-spoken dramatic effects.

    Such arguments are fair enough, but Terry Teachout dislikes her work for the wrong reasons:

As for her private life, suffice it for now to say that she was a Nazi, that she lied about it for as long as she could get away with it, and that she admitted her youthful affiliation with the Nazi Party grudgingly, evasively, and only when confronted with incontrovertible documentary evidence. … Such things may not matter to you, but they do to me, all the more so in light of the fact that Schwarzkopf was so gifted and admired an artist.

    This from a man who in the same post praises recordings by Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi part twice, and, like Schwarzkopf, chronically lied about it. Evaluating an artist on the basis of his or her political activities is foolish. Consider the case of Dmitri Shostakovich, who inserted passages of utter banality into even his finest works. He was roundly criticized for this in the West back when he was thought to be a Soviet lackey. But once somebody floated the theory that Shostakovich’s banality was actually satirical, intended to mock Stalin and his cronies, Westerners began hailing the claptrap passages as daring acts of secret dissidence. The music itself never changed; only its reception did, and that tells us more about the audience and critics than about the composer.
    This is aesthetic hypocrisy. Either the music is good or it isn’t, whether the composer or performer was a good person or not, and plenty of people realize that. Isn’t it time for somebody to form a club called Jews for Wagner? There’s a remarkably large potential membership.

THEATER DOLDRUMS

posted by James Reel

    This being Thursday, I don’t have to come up with something original to blog about; I need only point you to my latest opus in the Tucson Weekly, which this time is about the pesky little money troubles of local theater groups:

Some of Tucson's best-established theater companies are in financial trouble. They're striving mightily not to make this a public issue—disaster is not yet looming—but you can figure out what's going on just by looking at their 2006-2007 season schedules.

    You can find the full article here.

RESALE

posted by James Reel

    Patty Mitchell finds a “new” (not archived) article online that looks like something she read months ago, and wonders how this sort of thing happens. Here’s how it works.
    One of the best ways for a freelance writer to make money is to sell essentially the same story to more than one publication. This is not the source of unlimited bounty, of course, because publications that cover the same subject or have the same readership don’t want to print each other’s articles. If I write something for Strings, I’m not going to pitch the same idea to Strad. A feature or review I write for Fanfare will no way, nohow show up in American Record Guide. If I sold something to the New Yorker (as if), I’d be a fool to pitch it to The Atlantic, too. But if the publications cover different areas of interest, they’re fair game. You see this a lot in newspaper travel sections. Newspapers pay very little for freelance work, on the few occasions they’ll buy freelance work, but they don’t compete with one another (except in a few remaining two-paper markets, like Tucson). So a freelance travel writer is free to crank out an account of her latest vacation in Mexico and pitch it to a hundred papers around the country. Maybe a dozen will bite. That probably adds up to about $1,000 toward the writer’s bar tab.
    Sometimes a magazine will authorize reprints of articles, and some magazines even pay writers for those reprints. Strings, for example, has been doing a lot of this lately. A piece I’ve done for Strings may be condensed and re-used in the magazine’s Teen Strings spinoff, and I’ll get a whopping $25 added to the $300 to $600 I’ve already been paid for the story. Occasionally the magazine will authorize re-use in an unrelated publication. A couple of weeks ago I interviewed someone who said he’d just seen my profile of somebody or other in a Suzuki magazine. This was news to me, but apparently the fine print says “Reprinted with permission of Strings magazine.”
    Money doesn’t always change hands. In the past few months I’ve been contacted by the organizers of music festivals in England and Boston who saw something I wrote and wanted to use it in their program booklets, and I gave the go-ahead without charge. Also, once a publication buys an article, that publication rather than the author owns all rights to the work (unless there are contractural stipulations to the contrary). Strings didn’t need my permission to hand off my article to the Suzuki publication, and I’m not sure that the last contract I signed required the magazine to pay me for such extra uses. (Web rights are a completely different, contentious issue I won’t go into here.)
    But a smart writer will do the recycling himself. Different elements of interviews I conducted with border activists found their way into separately crafted articles in the Tucson Weekly, the National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners and Salon. I’ve reworked program notes I wrote 15 years ago for Arthur Weisberg’s Ensemble 21 into magazine material, and revamped stuff I did for the Arizona Daily Star in the 1990s for liner notes for a couple of CD labels and then entries for the All Music Guide. All that material, plus blurbs I wrote around 1999-2000 for Musical Heritage Society, literary essays I concocted around that time for the e-zine The Whole Wired World, and all sorts of other stuff will regularly go into the blender and come out in some new form. It sure beats original thinking.

REVIVAL

posted by James Reel

    It looks like former blogger Rich Russell broke his silence a couple of weeks ago. If he keeps posting, I’ll have to return him to the blogroll.