THE PLOT THINS?

posted by James Reel

    The only amusing thing about yesterday’s rout of two dozen people accused of planning to blow up airliners headed for America is that newscasters refer to an “alleged plot.” OK—journalists are trained not to prejudice a case in their reporting; news reports should not refer to “perpetrators” or “robbers” or “murderers” unless and until they have been convicted. Meanwhile, they’re just “suspects.” (But please, not “alleged suspects”; arrest doesn’t prove guilt, but it does officially place someone under suspicion.) Still, there’s something odd about hearing newscasters talk about an “alleged plot.” I’m not sure why, especially since there’s a long history of officials fabricating conspiracies in order to discredit their opponents, or shift attention away from a real problem. And, of course, our own FBI has great trouble distinguishing ordinary artists from bioterrorists, so I suppose “alleged plot” is, indeed, the best way to phrase it.
    I do wonder, though, why the British roundup of all those suspects sent the U.S. Department of Homeland Security into Keystone Kops mode at American airports. According to Michael Jackson, the deputy director of Homeland Security, “the conspiracy was directed at airlines with direct nonstop flights from the United Kingdom to the United States, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Continental” (that’s not a direct quote; it’s how a news service phrased it). So if planes leaving the U.K. were being targeted, why the contrived chaos at American airports?
    I hope the system is running smoother by September, when I’ll travel to Italy and back … via London. I have no desire to be blown up in midair, so I value reasonable and effective security protocols, but much of what goes on at airports looks like bureacratic bluster and macho posturing. Why weren’t any reporters yesterday asking if these measures were truly relevant to legitimate security concerns? Proper journalistic skepticism should go beyond using careful phrases like “alleged plot.”

SCREENWRITING 101

posted by James Reel

    In today’s Tucson Weekly, I interview Blake Snyder, author of the latest book that tells you how to write a commercially successful Hollywood screenplay. He seems like an exceptionally nice guy, but I fear my inner snark emerged once or twice early in the article. Here’s the beginning:

    Fifty years ago, anybody with any intellectual ambition spent odd stolen hours writing the Great American Novel. Of course, the novels usually weren't so great, rarely got finished and almost never got published.
    Today, everybody's working on a screenplay. These supposedly fabulous movie scripts rarely get finished and almost never get turned into movies. But that doesn't stop everybody from wanting to be a screenwriter.
    "It looks easy," says screenwriter Blake Snyder. "And guess what? It is easy. My earliest inspiration was seeing movies that were not very good and thinking, I could do that."
    Write a movie that was not very good? "No, I mean I could do better."

    Read the rest here.

GLASS HOUSES

posted by James Reel

    The Big Boss here at KUAT is campaigning to beautify and professionalize the appearance of the spaces where civilians are likely to pass by, including the corridor that skirts the KUAT-FM booth and the radio newsroom. As of yesterday, beautification and professionalization have come to mean, in part, opening the vertical blinds that shield us from the gaze of passersby. This is fine with me; I started opening the blinds during my shift a few weeks ago. Since all the work spaces were shifted around during the big remodeling in the 1990s, the FM booth hasn’t had a window to the outside world. True, when we were positioned along an exterior wall, our sole window was way up just below the ceiling (our floor is half underground) and looked out upon a typical UA red brick wall, with a fringe of greenery along the bottom. But it was something. Now, with the blinds open, I can look out into the corridor in front of me, which doesn’t produce any natural light, but at least it does reduce the claustrophobia.
    Naturally, some employees are not happy with this decision. One guy used to be harrassed by a stalker, and he’d prefer not to be on display should the malefactor ever return. Another hates the way people make monkey faces as they pass by on the other side of the glass. Yes, that can be annoying, but I’ve found that over the past few weeks those people have gotten used to the open blinds during my shift, and now all I get is the occasional friendly wave. (The sole remaining offender is my immediate supervisor, a notorious prankster.) As for students and other strangers walking down the hall, they do everything they can to avoid eye contact, although many of them are legitimately curious about what a radio station looks like.
    I probably have far fewer problems being on display than most of the other people around here. Radio is a very private profession; we speak to thousands of people, but we do it in physical isolation. Me, between my two stints in the radio biz I spent several years working at the morning paper, in a big open newsroom similar to what you see in movies like All the President’s Men. There’s no privacy at all in such places, and there’s always somebody sitting six feet away from you, not even in a separate cubicle, who can see and hear everything you’re up to. You get used to it, and start to ignore each other’s activities, or stop caring that you’re surrounded by potential eavesdroppers. Here at the radio station, we continue to have a measure of privacy insofar as a double-pane window still separates us from co-workers and gawkers. I predict that most of my colleagues will get used to the new open-blinds policy in a couple of weeks. The toughest thing will be remembering not to scratch themselves in an unseemly way.

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.