When Is a Recovery? And, Is It, Even Then?

All the talk of a ‘jobless recovery’ going on gives me the heebie-jeebies. What bothers me is that people get left out of the equation. The economy becomes nothing more than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the idea that if it goes up, things get better for everyone. A rising tide floats all boats sort of argument.

Somehow, I suspect, that’s related to ‘trickle down,’ even though the water’s going in different directions.

Some people do understand that a ‘jobless recovery’ is no recovery at all—not for most of us, certainly. Not for those burdened by student debt, over-leveraged overpriced homes, under-employment, family members in increased need of assistance, unemployment itself, credit-card debt, or the myriad of other financial problems or responsibilities threatening to drown them. Among those who do understand is (not surprisingly) Paul Krugman, who writes in today’s The New York Times:

At this point… the acute crisis has given way to a much more insidious threat. Most economic forecasters now expect gross domestic product to start growing soon, if it hasn’t already. But all the signs point to a “jobless recovery”: on average, forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal believe that the unemployment rate will keep rising into next year, and that it will be as high at the end of 2010 as it is now.

Now, it’s bad enough to be jobless for a few weeks; it’s much worse being unemployed for months or years. Yet that’s exactly what will happen to millions of Americans if the average forecast is right — which means that many of the unemployed will lose their savings, their homes and more.

If this happens, no matter how much GDP goes up, our overall economic situation will worsen, with more and more people relying on catch-as-catch can possibilities just to survive (see Barbara Ehrenreich’s piece in yesterday’s Times for more on this), putting greater and greater strain on precarious family and friendship ties. This, ultimately, must lead to further breakdown of our social fabric, for it will not be able to stand the strain, leading to a new upsurge of crime, dislocation, and retreat into a gated ‘I’ve got mine; to hell with the rest of you’ attitude on the part of those who have managed to keep their heads above water.

What will that lead to?

Disaster. GDP up and markets through the roof notwithstanding.

We need to do two things as a country, as a society, and we need to do them now:

1. We have to create jobs, and do it now. And not simply infrastructure jobs (though ‘shovel-ready’ projects may be the fastest way to getting things moving immediately), but jobs that can improve the life of the comity now and in the future: jobs addressing the problem of global warming, focusing on renewable energy, making recycling and reusing central parts of our economy. Not simply make-work jobs, but jobs that will improve all of our lives and that will, in the long run, pay for themselves.
   
   
2. We have to find ways of easing the burden of debt that too many are shouldering. Doing so will be a trip through a minefield, but we have to take it. Sure, there will be those who will benefit unfairly and others who will never change their behavior (and who will slide right back into their bankrupt ways), but there are many, many more who will make use of the opportunity and will return to positions of personal and societal responsibility. We might start by completely restructuring student loans, capping interest, forgiving penalties, and forgiving a percentage (half, say) of the loans across the board. Who pays? Ultimately, we all do. But young people burdened by loans they cannot possibly repay will cost us even more—and this is one area where, I think, we can achieve broad agreement. We will have to do something about home loans, too… not by simply propping up the banks which made the bad loans, but by assisting those who cannot, given the current housing market (and even the rosiest forecast for the future), sustain their mortgages. Here again, it will cost us all more if we do nothing than if we help out. Sure, some of the people who will be helped acted foolishly or even venally, but most did not. Sure, it does seem as though we would be rewarding bad judgment and punishing good, but the bad are being punished right not—and the good, as well—by the very state of the current economy.

There’s nothing radical or new about either of these suggestions, but they seem to have been passed by. The politicians, apparently, don’t believe there’s the ‘will’ necessary to get them implemented.

If we don’t try, however, we will never know… and the economy, GDP notwithstanding, will continue to tank for most Americans.

It’s going to be up to us, the people, to take the lead on this. Remember, the politician practices the art of the possible. That is, he or she will not act, even if believing in something passionately, unless it seems either possible or able to bring the politician some advantage. It is up to us, through our voices, to give birth to belief in that possibility.

View From the Middle

Now, I ain't no economist, and I ain't no economist's son—but I do have eyes, and ears, and I do live in the United States. And the people around me, for the most part, are those who make (probably) something under $100,000 a year. For the most part, we've lived reasonably comfortably for the past twenty years. Our homes have increased in value steadily even though our income has not. Our children graduate from college (a good sign for the future) and, though they are generally saddled with debt from student loans, jobs (until recently) have been there for them. With a little luck and careful purchase, many of them were able to buy their own homes, were able to use the increasing value of their homes to offset the burden of college debt.

When my parents moved here to Brooklyn in 1970, they bought a house, an elegant townhouse, for $35,500. My brothers and I, in settling their estate, have sold the house for over 25 times that (20% less than it would have gone for two years ago, but a fine return by any standard). Seeing that type of return, others of the middle class have tried to gain the same way, by becoming gentrifiers (as my parents were called), buying some of New York's superb housing stock in not-so-stellar neighborhoods, renovating, and waiting for the housing boom to continue. They bought magnificent brownstones in Bed-Sty and Crown Heights that were in horrible condition and worked hard on their houses, generally renting the upper floor apartment to manage mortgages that could not be handled on salary alone.

Like the college graduates joining the workforce already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, these homeowners had faith in themselves and America. Few had ever seen a sustained economic downturn (the worst most of us have lived through is the hyper-inflation of the 1970s and the economic chaos of that time—chaos that seemed to have ended for good by the mid-1980s) and fewer believed it could happen.

The advice was simple: spend now, for everything is going up, up, up. Get that education, no matter the cost—it will be worth it, in the end. And get the best: that will be worth even more. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Want to buy a house? Buy the most house you possibly can, even if the mortgage seems beyond your capacity. In a few years, after all, you'll be earning more—and the house will be worth a lot more.

Yeah, yeah... we all know what happened to that.

But (whew!) the economists are telling us that the worst is over. The economy has bottomed out and things will get back to “normal” (that “normal” was a chimera—but nevermind) quite soon. Unemployment may continue to climb, but we have weathered the storm.

Say what? Have any of these economists talked to anyone living in the middle economic zone of America? Do they have any clear idea of how close to the edge millions of Americans are right now? If they do, don't they see that there is no way to back away from the edge and that the rocks beneath their feet are crumbling?

None of what I am saying is new to anyone in America's middle class. When I take my dog to the park for a run, I mingle with small landlords, sanitation workers, postmen, cooks, teachers... the run-of-the-mill of New York or anyplace else. What are they saying? It's going to get worse. Why are they saying that? Because they know too many people who are trapped with no way out, people who can't pay their debts. We all do.

Those people who bought the brownstones have them on the market right now for enough to cover their debts, but no more. Building materials lie piled in the living rooms and back yards. Though the apartments, which they finished first, may be rented, rents are no longer going up like they were. In fact, they've been coming down. They won't get as much for the places next year—and don't have the money to cover the difference that will make towards the mortgage. Not to mention that prices continue to slide. Not as fast as they were, but they are still going down—and people are getting desperate.

I know someone who just consolidated his college loans. He has graduate degrees and a secure job, but the loans (he has discovered) eat up over half of his take-home pay—and the extra income he was expecting to make through moonlighting just isn't there. As rent takes up another half, he's losing money each pay period—even before eating a bite. He's going to have to move to a much, much cheaper place. Oh, and guess what? His landlord isn't going to get as much money from the next tenant (though he may not know that yet).

Our economy cannot get better as long as too many people owe more money than they can ever reasonably pay back. And there are millions who do. Most of these aren't bad people, or foolish. They merely believed that what they had seen happening would continue to happen.

What to do? I don't know, not really. But rash forecasts of recovery won't help. They will only further depress those who see themselves falling over the edge yet who, so far, are holding on for dear life. Talk won't help them.

We need to do something before they fall. Sure, they are partly to blame, but that's irrelevant right now.

Cutting spending and cutting taxes won't help. The impact on individual lives is puny, and it is individuals we are talking about here.

Massive programs showing faith in our cities, our industries, and our educational structures would help, but we don't seem to have the willpower. Developing a rational health-care system certainly would help (for that's another area pushing people closer and closer to the edge), but too many people are unwilling to look at a broad enough picture for that to happen.

A complete restructuring of our banking system, along with a massive re-evaluation of debt as it exists now in America, however, may be the only way out. The loans need to be taken out of the profit cycle, at least for now, interests rates capped, past payments applied to principle alone and past accrued interest above a certain low percentage forgiven (reducing the debt substantially).

As I said before, I don't know if even this can be the answer.

All I know is that rosy forecasts can't solve the problem of debt that threatens to push way too many of us over the edge—dragging the rest of us (ultimately) with them.

‘Stuck in the Middle’: Dance, Movement, and Reservoir Dogs

What follows is a presentation I will give at the Popular Culture Association annual meeting in New Orleans, LA this coming Wednesday:

"I don't see what the big deal is. Everybody steals from everybody; that's movies.” From Swingers (Doug Liman, 1996), that line comes just as homage to Reservoir Dogs commences. And it’s true, though the ‘if everybody does it, it must be OK’ logic is a little strained. It’s not the purpose of movies to be original, but to be entertaining. And to be entertaining, one must work with audience expectations, which means working with the successes of the past. Instead of creating something new, one must make the old new—itself an old piece of advice. ‘Make it new,’ ordered Ezra Pound, revitalize. That’s where art lies.

Seventeen years may not seem a long time in the larger stream of things, but Reservoir Dogs has been a focus for film students (in particular) as well as film scholars for what amounts to a generation. It’s old. We’ve fallen into assumptions about it, and about Tarantino, perhaps making the film stale in some eyes. ‘Everything’s already been said,’ one might complain as even another presentation on the movie appears. And that may be. Certainly, as James Agee reports Mack Sennett as claiming, “Anyone who tells you he has discovered something new is a fool or a liar or both” (Agee on Film, 398). But that doesn’t mean we should shut up, that we can’t contribute to the conversation. David Bordwell, after all, following Kristin Thompson, uses the concept of revitalization to change the focus on film from the past four decades from “post-classical,” signifying a break, to “hyperclassical,” a term of embracing the old—in effect, making it new. That’s what Quentin Tarantino does in Reservoir Dogs in respect to the motions of classical Hollywood.

The movies, of course, are all about motion. And about audience. And about relationships between parts. Think of the commode scene in Reservoir Dogs. We have a story on paper, an exposition of how the story should be told, a rehearsal, the telling, and the showing—all with motion and interaction between tellers and audiences. We have story and audience: a movie. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg wrote about the viewer of film, “the motion which he sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind" (The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, 70). Good filmmakers, people like Edwin S. Porter, Mack Sennett, and D. W. Griffith, already knew this, of course. And we do, too, recognizing that the motion we see not only appears to be a true motion, but is the capture of a true motion, even while it is created in our own minds.

We can easily go back to Eisenstein, for his discussion of montage, to confirm this. Filmic motion is a creation of motion, a dance, a depiction itself in motion or an illusion that the audience helps create through its assumptions. Munsterberg wrote:

Everybody knows how difficult it is to read proofs. We overlook the misprints, that is, we replace the wrong letters which are actually in our field of vision by imaginary right letters which correspond to our expectations. Are we not also familiar with the experience of supplying by our fancy the associative image of a movement when only the starting point and the end point are given, if a skillful suggestion influences our mind. (66)

Adding the viewer to an already complex weave of filmmaking and you get, to mix a metaphor, pied type. Untangling it, or managing to return the letters to their appropriate bins, begins to feel as unlikely as solving Rubik's cube. The motion comes not just from the filmmaker or the film, but from the viewer, making even atempts at outlining it dangerous.

Complexity is just the sort of thing Quentin Tarantino loves. Raveling and unraveling, and doing both at the same time, he plays with the audience—in all senses of the term—not just the film. He plays with dance, motion and violence, and with the conventions both of film viewing and filmmaking, constructing movies that end up like ships solid enough to withstand just about any wind blown towards them and with anchors lowering deep within the traditions of filmmaking in Hollywood and France, in particular.

But let’s step back away from his work for just a moment.

The rumble at the end of the first act of West Side Story, where Riff and Bernardo die; Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from On Your Toes, with the death of a woman and the threat of further killing coming from the audience in the film; Gene Kelly’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from Words and Music, with an added death; the “Girl Hunt Ballet” from The Band Wagon, with slaughter aplenty at the end. All of these, from classical Hollywood musicals, are as violent as anything in Reservoir Dogs. Yet they don’t get the reactions that Tarantino does—and they never did. No one says they won’t go see a musical because of the violence, yet many refuse Reservoir Dogs. Yet all five of these movies use violence—and dance and music, though Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde moves in the amateur way any of us might—and do—to songs on the radio, unlike the professional, choreographed (and distancing) steps of the others where the music is non-diegetic. Of course, it is just this difference that creates, in part, the impact of the “ear” scene, making reactions to the violence greater than in any of those other movies I’ve mentioned—on the level of simple and visceral revulsion, at least. The fantasy element, represented by dance, has been removed—as has the joy of watching skilled artists—stripping away the distancing that we’ve learned to use to keep comfortable, the excuse for violence when the act is portrayed through art and explicitly as art. Here, the art comes through Madsen’s utilization of an apparent lack of dancing skill and the apparent artlessness of camera motion, yet the presentation has much in common with how dance is filmed in classical Hollywood musicals, with long shots allowing concentration on the skill of the performer.

Of course, all of the older dance numbers are sanitized in other ways, presenting the violence in the Hollywood manner de rigueur prior to Bonnie and Clyde and still influential today. Sure. There’s no sign of blood in any of them. But that’s not the point. All of these older films are stylized. Sure. Both in terms of dance and of film… but, even with its seeming artlessness, is Reservoir Dogs not stylized? We’re not talking realism here. Though the language of Tarantino’s characters may accurately reflect the way people talked at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, there’s very little else about this movie that rises to any level of realism, even as practiced in Hollywood. Look at the dress: those suits and ties. Look at the pseudonyms, Mr.’s White, Pink, Orange, Blue, Brown, and Blonde. Look at the plot: the whole heist is preposterous, as is the father/son team behind it. Look again at the plot: it’s so well woven that it screams (intentionally screams), ‘look at me; look at how well crafted I am! No loose ends here!’ That’s not even a feint towards realism. That’s tight artifice—and proud of it.

Yet there’s a lot else in the film that is loose: talk, motion (both of actors and of the camera), body parts, a door latch, and even a balloon on the street. And loose stories are told after the fact—or, at least, stories designed to give an appearance of looseness to the filmmaking. That balloon? Supposedly an accident captured and kept. That door flying open? Simply shows the brilliance of a cast that could keep on going in face of the unexpected and of the quick-thinking Harvey Keitel, who simply walks away from the camera and closes the door as the scene continues. Another story claims that the panning away from the ear-cutting was necessitated simply by inability to create a visually realistic cutting.

All three of these touches are brilliant, as are numerous others in the film, creating a tension between plan and execution, tightness and looseness, that’s reflected in action, in construction, and in unfolding. Each creates a sense of motion beyond the purposes of that tight plot, adding a counterpoint that reduces any message of control—a counterpoint that allows Madsen to produce a sense of insanity strong enough to make us forget, as we view, that we are being carefully manipulated by a writer/director with an almost obsessive knowledge of the minutiae of film. At the beginning of the sequence, for example, Madsen moves over to Tim Roth’s character, who has been lying silent and bleeding for quite some time, reminding us that Roth is still there. Why? Because Roth, Mr. Orange, is going to shoot Mr. Blonde quite soon, and conventional Hollywood continuity requires that the surprise, startling as it may be, immediately connects back in the viewer’s mind to a causal agent. Rather than the camera doing it gratuitously, Madsen can do it—gratuitously—and get away with it: Since the moment he pulled the straight-razor from his boot, our viewer focus has narrowed to him; if nothing else, his extra time with Orange serves to heighten the tension as we wonder just what he is going to do to Officer Nash, who sits tied to a chair and gagged with duct tape.

It is here, in the illusion of loose, almost random motion in a situation highly controlled, that the heightened tension of the violence—or the perception of violence—emerges. Along with it comes the power of the scene to evoke viewer reaction more powerfully than do most traditional Hollywood depictions of violence, where the impact is screened by convention, by dance, or by some other mediating factor. The spinning away from expectation (while actually heightening the expectation), more than the violence itself, generates the shock.

“Hold still, you fuck,” says Blonde as he cuts of Nash’s ear—but it is the camera that obeys, having glided away from the action. It now centers on the junction of two walls and the ceiling of the warehouse as Blonde completes his cutting. Blonde then comes into the picture that had moved away from him, holding his straight razor and the ear, examining both somewhat pensively before walking back out of the picture muttering, “Was that as good for you as it was for me?” After that comes the famous bit of Blonde talking to the ear: “Hey, what’s going on?” followed by, “Hear that?” to Nash. The “ear” scene, which runs about six minutes, has a long Average Shot Length (ASL) of 15 seconds, a number that would be longer still were it not for a couple of shot/reverse sequences showing the reactions of Officer Nash to Mr. Blonde's antics. The longest shot is the nearly minute-and-a-half of Blonde retrieving a gas can from his car. The shortest is just one second.

From the start of Blonde’s dance to his speaking to the ear, we only have nine shots, mostly shot/reverse between Blonde and Nash, wide on Blonde as he dances, close on Nash’s face as he watches (and as we watch with him). The longest shot is the hold on the blank walls as the ear comes off, nearly 30 seconds.

That, by the way, foreshadows the final shot of the movie, where Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White slides out of the frame, held still, once he is, well, shot.

Step back again for a moment, so we can set up the role of the camera and its motion, a Max Ophüls sort of role, and its importance here as a moving spectator—as one of the characters in the film, a Mr. Clear, if you will. There's no action at the start of Reservoir Dogs, though there's plenty of movement—by the camera, that is. It circles the table in the diner, eventually resolving into a shot/reverse sequence when Joe Cabot and Mr. White squabble over the address book and then again when the question of the tip is discussed, having already started to pounce on the traits that will be associated with each member of the group, all but two identified by color-related pseudonyms, and all but those two dressed in black suits, white shirts, and thin black ties. Traits we get: Mr. Blonde, devoted to Joe Cabot yet exhibiting a strain of happy, charismatic menace; Mr. White, sure of himself enough to be willing to risk the wrath of his boss Cabot, strong enough to have gained Cabot's respect—quite empathetic and emotional, he could be the perfect husband; Mr. Orange, quizzical, quiet, somehow out of place, a wife in need of protection; Mr. Pink, with little sympathy for others, strong-willed, but willing to put aside his own ideas to work as a team player; Eddie Cabot, strong but none too bright. Also present are Mr. Brown and Mr. Blue, but one talks stupidly and the other not at all—both clearly to be dismissed by the viewer as insignificant to story and plot.

In The Way Hollywood Tells It, David Bordwell suggests that one of the results of the ‘intensified continuity’ that has developed since the fall of the studio system is reliance on editing and camera motion for the dynamics of a conversation-driven scene. While Tarantino, as often as anyone, does draw attention to the camera here and elsewhere in the film (as I have said, almost making it a character as much as it is in Tony Richardson’s 1963 Tom Jones), he uses camera motion as only one of his means of constructing a scene, of providing its dynamic. In the commode-joke discussion between Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange and Randy Brooks’ Detective Holdaway, Brooks almost dances around the stationary Roth, himself becoming both camera (dancing around the subject) and action… a situation somewhat reversed when Roth rehearses the story before Brooks, who now is still (and still the camera) as Roth moves on an impromptu stage.

What’s most brilliant about Tarantino isn’t any one particular device or style or subject, but that he takes everything that the Hollywood tradition has to offer, mixes in what he has found in the nouvelle vague, Hong Kong cinema, and cheap genre pictures, and creates something out of it all that we, as audience, find refreshing. He does follow Pound, making him (in my view) much more a product of a modernist or, in film-studies terms, a classicist tradition.

Beyond that, but important to mention, Tarantino is a story-teller in a sense pre-dating modernism or movie classicism. Though some viewers don’t see it—and it is easy to lose things in a Tarantino movie, for much is always going on—there’s always a point he’s trying to make, or a number of them. In Reservoir Dogs, he explores the thin line between the professional and the psychotic and the relations between each and the personal. His characters, in other words, aren’t simply devices for furthering his plot; his plot, here and elsewhere, furthers understanding of character—and not just these individuals, but human character in general. The same is true of his use of motion. Next month, his latest movie, Inglourious Basterds, will premier at Cannes. If Tarantino’s past is any indication—and Tarantino is all about the past, or about making the past into the future—this movie, too, will fall squarely into the classical Hollywood tradition, but will again make it new—and will scare the pants off of the many people who will be unwilling to look beyond the surfaces to the pointed story, for the telling, for all its pyrotechnics, is never just the thing, not to Tarantino. The story is.

Thank you.

Pro/Am Collaboration In Reporting: Is It Really Needed?

What follows is a contribution written by Aaron Barlow for a roundtable at the the Southern States Communication Association annual meeting in Norfolk, VA on April 3, 2009:

Collaboration depends on acceptance of certain assumptions, of course, including that both parties bring something of value to the effort. Given that and my title, you might think that I am going to argue against collaboration, saying that the amateur journalist just doesn't bring enough, that he or she isn't needed, even in the contemporary atmosphere of change and expansion in journalism. But I am not claiming that. In fact, I am not going to propose anything about collaboration at all, for I don't know what the best route for the future is, or if collaboration might be part of it. What I do know is that the amateurs, right now, carry the power in interactions with professional journalists; it is they who control the situation. So, instead of arguing that amateurs are the ones in need (though they may well be), I am going to suggest what many bloggers and citizen journalists have already suggested, that it may be that the professional is no longer be needed, that the fears of journalists over the past decade concerning the future of their profession are justified. Collaboration in reporting, as many see it, may merely be a way of keeping on life support a profession that has seen its day. Perhaps we should, as some have suggested, lay it to rest along side carriage-makers, milkmen, and Linotype operators. Starkly put, what may be feared by journalists for their careers may not be something that the general public need find troubling. The reporter running around shouting “The end is near” may be rousing up nothing more than a yawn. And the public may even be right to yawn.

Though journalists like to take it back a century further, in the United States their profession is not even two-hundred years old. It began with the “correspondents” of the 1820s but only became something distinct and recognizably so from the 1840s, with the rise of the penny press, developing on through the Civil War. The “freedom of the press” of the First Amendment does not, in fact, refer to a particular profession. Bracketed by freedoms of speech and assembly, it was meant, like those, as a non-specific political freedom—for newspapers, in those days, were inherently political creatures. That is, they weren't about politics, but were involved in politics. Only later did the idea of the disinterested observer in the press come into being, an idea that, as we know, never really took hold, ballyhoo for “objectivity” notwithstanding.

What do we lose, if we go back to a situation like that of the America before the advent of the journalism profession, one solely of “citizen journalists” reporting the news? Do we lose self policing by trained specialists? It could be argued that journalists have done little of that, and poorly, even embracing into the profession people with no training and no respect for the ethics of journalism... recently even going so far as to leave it to a comedian like Jon Stewart to take the profession to task, as he did with Tucker Carlson on Crossfire soon before the 2006 election, and as he did with Jim Cramer of CNBC just recently. Sure, it can be argued that neither Carlson nor Cramer is “really” a journalist, that they just play one on TV, but most of the profession certainly has accepted them, even embraced them. And it took bloggers to draw attention to Jeff Gannon, who had been attending White House press briefings for a year on day passes before anyone called attention to this male escort posing as a journalist. Members of the press corps, who had been rubbing shoulders with him for months, had either said nothing or were incurious. Not much gatekeeping going on there!

Do we lose the research skills of the professional if we turn to the amateur? The first response might be, “What research skills?” Yes, I. F. Stone spent hours a day sifting data, but he was well outside of the mainstream of professional journalism; few are willing to spend the time and effort delving into something that might turn out not to be much of a story anyway. Rudy Giuliani, on hearing complaints about the closing of the New York City Hall pressroom, responded that the reporters should be out gathering information rather than waiting for someone to bring it to them from his office. And he had a point: too much of modern journalism has been that waiting for someone to give something or for something to happen—and then spinning it for the purposes of impact. Is it any wonder that journalists are seen by the general public as little more than ambulance chasers? Is it any wonder that the play The Front Page has been filmed three times?

It's not the research that thrills many journalists, if we are honest, but the ballyhoo. Walter Burns, in The Front Page remake His Girl Friday, presents the real draw of journalism to a recalcitrant Hildy Johnson: “You've kicked over the whole City Hall like an apple-cart. You've got the Mayor and Hartman backed against a wall. You've put one administration out and another in. This isn't a newspaper story—it's a career!” The question the rest of us outside of the profession have been asking, silently, for the most part, is should this be a career. We're not convinced.

When access to information was limited, when only a few could view an event live, perhaps it was important that there be designated professionals to bring news to the rest of us. By the 1990s, however, many had come to see the transporters of information as a filter as well, and were starting to feel more than a little discomfort with the quality of the information delivered—a feeling that, in part, led to things like the first attempts to bring about collaborations between journalists and their public. A few journalists, having seen what was happening, attempted to bridge the gap that was growing between themselves and their audiences, to break across the custodial moat that had been dug around the news.

These attempts failed, through no fault of the journalists involved, but because the journalism business quickly found itself facing challenges whose nature could not have been imagined at the beginning of the decade, challenges growing from technologies that were suddenly providing information and making it available to everyone at an astonishing pace, challenges that diverted attention from just about every prior attempt by journalists to bridge the gap between journalist and public. Suddenly, the directional force was reversed: it was the public swimming through that moat, the shaky rope bridges earlier thrown over the gulf by journalists ignored as people sped through the water using technological devices that, they had recently discovered, were theirs for the asking.

For journalists, a tactical retreat (at least) was necessary. They couldn't control what was happening at the edge so backed up, some of them digging in to fight, others (realizing the futility of the battle) trying to find paths to a truce, some way of merging forces, of convincing these people who have invaded their territory not to wipe them out completely. To convince them that, yes, the journalists still do have a role to play.

Unfortunately, when people start whining that they are still relevant, they generally aren't.

But it's too easy to make the case for the irrelevancy of journalism these days, to say that collaboration is nothing more than a way to preserve a few careers while an entirely new and non-professional paradigm for journalism emerges. To do so would be to ignore the realities of our society and our economy, both of which are money driven, and both of which cherish professionalism. We can see this today: the blogs are providing a springboard to professionalism in journalism and financial reward, not to concerted and sustained amateur effort. Even young and well-trained journalists, those who have not yet broken into the field, are recognizing that it is through blogging and “citizen journalism” that they can make their marks. Energetic and confident, neither they nor the amateurs now on their way to professional status will ever be satisfied with a collaboration where they don't have either free rein or equal status with the older professionals.

In other words, they have little reason to want to collaborate.

There needs to be a reason for collaboration, not simply a desire—and certainly not simply a desire to protect jobs and careers. In the 1990s, when civic or public journalism was first broached, it was ignored or sloughed off by many journalists, by people who saw no need to share the professional responsibilities they felt they were upholding. Why should they have done otherwise? Few people worthy of note were criticizing the news media—and those who were could easily be ignored. The signs of incipient failure were there, of course—declining revenues and readership, listenership, and viewership—but there was nothing yet actively invading the world of journalism. The moat, deep and wide and serene, seemed uncrossable.

That has changed, of course, and now it is the amateurs and those trying to break into the field who have the upper hand. But they aren't approaching the professionals for collaborative projects, not very often. It is the professionals, for the most part, who are doing the approaching, hoping to be noticed, hoping to make a positive contribution in this new world.

But what are the professionals offering, in their moves towards collaboration, that the so-called amateurs really want? The professionals know—or think they know—what they amateurs need (writing, editing, and research skills, and understanding of the legal and ethical considerations important to journalism, etc.), but have they really considered what the invaders want? That's the question, probably the most important a journalist can be asking about the field today.

If professional journalism is to survive—and I do think it will—it has to start seeing itself comprised not of leaders but of followers, acting as the caterers and not as the hosts. Only then will collaboration really begin to work, with the “people” in control and the journalists in a service role. Few journalists are going to like this, but I do believe that collaboration, with the journalist the junior partner, may just be the key to the survival of the profession. What that will look like, I don't know—but I am sure that the possibility is one that today's decision-makers in the profession need to face squarely, even though doing so may bruise their egos. If not, the profession may, in fact, become nothing more than a curiosity for historians.

Thank you.

Exploding the Monolith: The Value of Teaching Appalachian Literature in Inner-City Environments

The following is a paper I will be presenting at the Appalachian Studies Association Annual Conference at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio on Friday, March 27.

There are, of course, similarities between the Appalachian college student and the Brooklyn one, but you won’t find them if you go looking for racial or ethnic parallels, religious ones, or even economic similarities. There may be a few superficial racial relationships, but these will prove about as significant as lumping together the Basque and the Belgian. Some of the Christian denominations may share names, but the individual churches struggle with problems distinct to their environments. And poverty in the city and in the country mean completely different things. The similarities, instead, lie in traditions of trouble and struggle, of loss, of the internal battle between desires to give up and push on, of fatalism that somehow still pushes one to fight against fate, of a ‘borderer’ toughness that Appalachia has retained and new immigrants must develop—at least until they assimilate or establish a strong enough enclave to maintain themselves by themselves—and, sadly enough, of failure. Oh, and one more: All of the groups have found themselves on the receiving end of stereotyping, insult, and discrimination.

I don’t know much about the ethos of teaching in Appalachia these days but, among educators in Brooklyn, there’s certainly one of liberal condescension towards my students—students outside of the elite, private schools, that is. There’s a distancing, reinforced by choices of the literature to be studied, for instance, literature that the teachers assume can “reach” the student through identity, primarily racial or ethnic identity, or through poverty, which is assumed to be a blanket bad, no different in Delhi than in Duluth. The choices are justified by the argument that they reflect a student-centered orientation. Else, why choose them? The fact is that these are not the works the teachers (for the most part) read themselves, or would choose for their own children. These are not works the teachers can generate much enthusiasm for within themselves. The works are “for” the needy, not for those who are clearly going to “make it.” So, I avoid them.

One of the things that has always been important to me is the enthusiasm I can show for the literature I teach. I’ve had great success, for example, with Nabokov’s Pale Fire in sophomore survey classes. Why? Because I love the book, and am always finding something new and sneaky in it. I haven’t found that it “works” only for sophisticated students from good schools and families with libraries. Quite the opposite; it can work for any group as long as I am able to bridge the student/teacher gap with my enthusiasm.

As we all know, it is hard to maintain the appropriate level of zeal for a particular work or works year after year. I haven’t taught Pale Fire since 2007, for example, and may not teach it again for another year or two; so I am always looking for new books and genres to explore, so that my discovery can be relatively immediate in relation to that of my students.

A couple of years ago, after posting a rant against Jane Smiley who had, in my view, besmirched my own Appalachian roots through use of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, portraying us as the cause of all of America’s troubles, I heard from one Rodger Cunningham, whose book Apples on the Flood I soon devoured.

I was hooked; I felt I had come home.

My growing interest led me to apply for an NEH summer seminar last year at Ferrum College organized by Peter Crow. Though I had to leave early due to the illness and death of my mother, I learned enough to give me the confidence to construct a syllabus for the course in the Appalachian novel that I taught last fall.

The students didn’t know what they were getting into. We have an umbrella sophomore grouping of literature courses with rather generic titles. Mine was Introduction to Literature I: Fiction. Most students end up in a section of that, or of the poetry or drama courses, more by chance than anything else. So, as I walked in with a stack of books by Lee Smith, Denise Giardina, John Ehle, Charles Frasier and James Still, the students had no clue that I wasn’t saddling them with, say, Edwidge Dandicat, V.S. Naipaul’s early work, and Jean Rhys—all of whom I could easily and willingly teach under the same umbrella had I a different geographic focus.

At City Tech—our shorthand for New York City College of Technology, one of the campuses of the City University of New York—the sheer diversity of the students makes the task of attempting conclusions about them and their cultures daunting. Of those responding to one survey, 46.6% said they were born outside of the United States (representing 134 countries), 60.6% said a language other than English is spoken in their home, and only a third listed a parent as having graduated from college. Almost half of the students have African ancestry, through generations in the United States, through the Caribbean, or through recent immigration. Very few have any conception of Appalachia. In my particular class, only one had even visited any of the core counties of the region. An African-American woman, her father was born in West Virginia and she occasionally returned with him for family reunions.

Back to that first day: As I quickly discovered, few of my students knew of “Appalachia” as anything more than a vaguely familiar word representing mountains somewhere. For a survey I conducted towards the end of the semester, I asked the students what the word had meant to them at the beginning of the course. Only one, the woman with a West Virginian father, said it had meant much more than “mountains.” Her attitude, clearly coming from her father, was much more akin to my own nostalgia and that of others who have left the mountains: “I always think of beautiful landscapes. There truly is a relaxing, laid back lifestyle to be had there.”

When I asked, “What does the word ‘Appalachia’ mean to you today?” most of the answers dealt with culture instead of landscape or geography: “an undiscovered culture that is perceived as a ‘dumb’ culture through today’s society”; “People struggling and being looked down on. A very hard life with a lot of secluded ideas and perceptions”; “Appalachia is a culture that needs to be acknowledged”; “it is not just the mountains with mountain people, it is a place just like any other that has real people with real feelings and issues.” The general tenor was one of a movement from alien landscape to familiar culture—or to culture understood to be analogous to the students’ own—for many of the comments, clearly, could have been made about the people in the New York neighborhoods where these students live.

One of the questions whose answers would, I knew, fascinate me was, “’Hillbilly,’ ‘cracker,’ ‘redneck’: what do these words bring to mind?” The answers showed that, over the course of the semester, the students had, among other things, begun to break up what they had perceived as the “white” monolith. Not all groups of white people, they were beginning to understand, are alike or successful or powerful: “It brings to mind a person that is not intelligent to ‘white’ standards only because it is ‘white’ brainwashing with shows like Dukes of Hazzard, etc.”; “It’s a racial insult against whites from the culture”; “Racism! Well some people who come from different countries, they tend to be called names representing their culture”; “It makes me angry because they are meant to be a put down”; “Racism, I hate those words!” Admittedly, a high percentage of the students still associated those words, without any sense of irony, with people they have contempt for—racists, bigots, and people who live in trailers. Overall, however, they showed more cognition of the impact of these words than have many of my colleagues, one of whom actually said to me (when I called her on her use of “hillbilly”), “I’ve nothing against your people. I’ve seen them when they come down from the mountains, pasty skin and bad teeth, and I feel sorry for them—I don’t dislike them.”

[Which reminds me of the groups my students liked best in the movie Matewan: the blacks, the immigrants, and the “real” (actually, stereotype) mountaineers who appear for only a moment. They understood completely the reply of one of them to a union-buster who tries to make fun of his rifle, asking if it came from the Spanish-American War. The mountaineer just smiled and replied, “The war between the states.”]

Living in a situation where the whites they encounter are generally people of some authority, many of my students imagined white culture as the homogeneous monolith of TV depiction—even those with troubles having houses and cars, good jobs and security. So, the last question on my survey was, “Has this course changed any of your attitudes towards Appalachian culture?” Responses included, “I see that people who are in the Appalachian culture had the same struggles as any other American who was not ‘privileged’ as some other Americans”; “I came here 3 years ago and I can say that first time I realized that there is a division between white cultures in the U.S.”; “This course has changed my entire attitude towards Appalachian culture because it has exposed me to the individuality that they possess”; “Yes a little bit. I now see that all are not the same just like all Spanish people are not the same.” Many others said that their attitudes hadn’t changed—simply because they hadn’t had “attitudes” before the start of the term.

Though my specific purpose in planning the course had been to teach what I like, what interests me, so that the students could benefit from my enthusiasm, I took away quite a bit more from the experience. First, I saw how parochial my students were becoming through the narrow universe of text choice based on the rather condescending assumption that they cannot find interest in anything outside of their own immediate experience. The lack of exposure to cultures outside of the city, outside of minority and immigrant experience, had allowed many of them to fall into a belief that white culture is some privileged, gated estate that they could never enter, a powerful and alien, undifferentiated monolith.

More important than that, however, was the pleasant surprise that my students were able to use exploration of Appalachian culture to achieve greater understanding of their own. On the last day of classes, one student, the child of immigrants, came up to me and told me, wonderingly and surprised, that reading about Appalachia had made her better able to understand the stories her parents told about her grandparents’ lives back in China.

There may have been a reason, thirty or forty years ago, to try to find readings that did reflect the cultures of the students. But there is reason, also, to show them that, quite often, cultural differences can hide basic similarities, that the markers we use to distinguish ourselves from others are often little more than masks. When we manage to take them off, we often find that looking at others is not so different from looking in a mirror.

From my experience, studying the literature of another culture, especially one that shares essential—not superficial—features with that of the students, allows students whose own backgrounds have been limited by circumstance to begin to contextualize theirs and their families’ experiences in ways that texts chosen because they somehow reflect something within the specific cultures of the students can never do. It also avoids the sorts of condescension we often see in choice of text for students whose backgrounds have been deemed “disadvantaged.” Perhaps, then, were I teaching in Appalachia, I would attempt a course featuring the Caribbean literature of Dandicat, Naipaul, and Rhys. After all, our job is to expand our students’ outlooks, not to cater to the worlds they are already in.

The Daily Us

Perhaps Nicholas Kristof (whom I do admire) hasn't been keeping up with his John Dewey.

In today's New York Times, he writes:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

He worries about this because "we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices" and implies that the situation is new to the Web--conveniently forgetting that New York City, a century ago, had more than a dozen major newspapers (not to mention all of the smaller ones, the newsletters, the magazines, the flyers) and that readers were feeling exactly the same then, and acting exactly the same.

Before the explosion of news possibilities on the Internet, it is true, the choices among sources of news and opinion were dwindling, the remaining ones falling under a "collective wisdom" that excluded most opinions. The "gatekeepers" also served as shepherds, keeping media sheep in their pastures and charging the rest of us to view them there.

Yet it does remain true that most of us (and I include myself as much as Kristof does himself) stick primarily to sources we fee we can trust--that is, sources that share our prejudices.

The thing to do, however, is not to blame this on new-media possibilities. The problem doesn't arise there, but from a population that has not challenged itself to learn and to communicate (which means being more than the object of someone else's desire to communicate).

And that brings us back to Dewey, who writes

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a common understanding -- like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces. The communication which insures participation in a common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions -- like ways of responding to expectations and requirements.

There is actually a point to going to where the like-minded are, as long as the like-minded aren't walling others out or blocking the windows to the outside. There's a point to exploring and understanding one's own beliefs instead of pretending to be a tabula rasa waiting to be written on. The end result of Kristof's contention that we go read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal if we don't want to be served only by The Daily Me is confusion and cacaphony. It would mean that I should continually read David Horowitz, the anti-Darwinists, the writings from Focus on the Family, Red State, and any and everything else I have already determined are based on faulty logic and poor thinking.

Sure, there's a point to looking at the opposition, and in learning from it. And, sometimes, even in being convinced by it. But what Kristof is advocating is a return to the news-media of objectivity, something that never did exist (except in its proponents' minds) and never will.

The Product as Process: Implications of New-Media Publication

What follows is the text of a short talk I will give as part of a roundtable on Saturday, March 21 at the New Jersey College English Association Annual Conference, Jubilee Hall, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ at 2:30. The session is called "New Media and the Literary Artifact."


Rather than an extension of our old texts of granite, solid and unwavering, what we have gained, through new media, is a 'book of sand.' As in the Jorge Luis Borges story, it is now impossible to find the first or last page, or to return to a page one has found before. Or, at least, to be sure it is exactly the page we saw before. Text has lost its solidity, textual scholarship its underpinning. You may think I'm stretching the analogy, but think again—by the time you do, the world will be different. And text will be different, too.

Not that text, even in pre-Internet days, was ever as stable as we like to imagine. The 'urtext' was always something of a chimera, at best. Today, not only is it illusory, but it may well have been shown to be irrelevant. Remember the 'intentional fallacy'? Maybe that will soon be married to a 'textual fallacy,' a belief that text itself has an unchanging aspect to its identity. If “author” once seemed to fade in significance, so may “text,” as we have long understood it, also fade and then reconfigure.

Be that as it may, even deciding on the primacy of a particular text has always been difficult. The science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick authored a short story, “The Unteleported Man,” that appeared in 1964. A longer version became as a book in 1966. In 1983, an “uncensored” version came out—after the death of the author. A fourth version, called Lies, Inc., was published the next year. Which to focus on? The question was relatively or comparatively simple, pre-Internet. Today, for new-media era texts, it can be a monster.

Not only is Dick’s book rather unstable, but it contains in it a most peculiar fictional book. Freya Holm, on being handed it, “at once she turned to the index and sought out her own name. Two citations in the first part of the book; three later on” (168). A couple of lines later, one of the people who had given her the book says, “'Better get the book back from her again... I still think she's reading too damn much” (169). That's from the later version of The Unteleported Man. In Lies, Inc., another character also consults the index—or, as we would do today, Googles himself: “After the entry Ferry, Theodoric, he found virtually unending citations” (182). After reading a bit, “'Listen,' he said severely…, 'my private life is my own business; there's no valid reason in the galaxy why my doings should be listed here.' I ought to bust this outfit, he decided. Whoever these people are who put together this miserable book. Eighteenth edition? Good lord” (183). The book is up-to-date and constantly changing. Like Borges' 'book of sand,' it may be a more accurate vision of what a text is today than just about anything else we have—even in new media. Not surprising, the book's title claims it as “True and Complete.” It is this ‘truth’ that we grapple with today. To succeed in our struggle, we are beginning to understand that we have to develop a vision of text different from that which grew, post-Gutenberg.

In 1971, as a young man at loose ends, I contracted to print a small book for a literary magazine. I had access to an old Chandler and Price clamshell press, sufficient type fonts, and a saddle-stitching device—and knew how to use them. All I needed was ink and paper, readily available.

The process wasn't simple. I had spent years learning and practicing typesetting—taking each single letter from a job case, transferring it to a composing stick, filling in the line, justifying it with variable spacing for the necessary consistent tightness, inserting a line spacer, and then starting on the next. When each page was completed, I ran proofs using a small flat-bed press specific to that purpose. Changes were made, lines re-justified, and a new proof produced. When the proof-reader was satisfied, I locked two completed pages into a chase specific to the press using variously sized wood blocks and tightening quoins. Once again, a proof was made—this time (generally) for the editor (even the author) and not just my composing room proof-reader, for this was the last chance for change before production of the product.

Next, the chase went onto the press. After adjustments made using pins to insure that the placement of the ink on the page would be correct, I took an initial impression to determine if the type was hitting the paper evenly and with the requisite pressure. Adjusting this was a tedious and time-consuming process. Not only did it involve the look of the final product, but its consistency. If pressure was uneven, the type wore at differing rates, changing the look of the page later in the run. Printers want to keep wear to a minimum anyhow, for the fonts need to be protected for re-use.

On a press such as the one I was using, the actual 'run' takes much less time than composing, especially for an experienced pressman. Decades after my last print job, I can still feel the motion of paper to platen to product and could probably still feed a Chandler & Price 10x15 press at a reasonably high speed without injury—a key component, by the way, for the press is unyielding and can easily destroy the fingers and hands of the careless or unwary.

Once this process is repeated for every two pages of the book (running each sheet through twice, for front and back, each representing four pages to the reader), the pages and cover are collated and run through the saddle stitcher for stapling and a paper cutter for trimming. Only then is an actual finished copy available—anything done before is nothing more than a mock-up, a vision of what the actual book is supposed to be.

It is important, today, to understand the complexity and finality of this process of the past if we are going to comprehend the attitude towards that printed text that grew in European culture from the time of Gutenberg to the dawn of our own era, a shift from orality to literacy of profound impact. Making changes, clearly, was difficult, the process lengthy and expensive. Through this, the text, the product, was raised to a height unknown before and unequaled since. Necessary care in production had led to veneration of product. As Walter Ong writes:

The orality-to-literacy shift throws clear light on the meaning of New Criticism as a prime example of text-bound thinking. Writing, it will be remembered, has been called 'autonomous discourse' by contrast with oral uterance, which is never autonomous but always embedded in non-verbal existence. The New Critics have assimilated the verbal art work to the visual object-world of texts rather than to the oral-aural event-world. They have insisted that the poem or other literary work be regarded as an object, a 'verbal icon'. (157)

Structuralism and deconstruction, following on the heels of New Criticism, have retained the centrality of 'text.'

Though veneration of text does remain to some extent, the care in production that led to it is gone—or no longer necessary. When a 'press run' can be of one, when change can be made at the click of a mouse, when composition contains flexibilities unimagined even a generation ago, there's no longer reason to view the product as 'the final word.'

The cultural change in our attitudes towards 'text' this portends is tremendous. The central place of 'text' as 'thing' in literary theory, for example, will surely change, with 'text' no longer elevated to a level equal to (or above) author and audience.

Journalist and professor Jeff Jarvis explains why:

When something is published on a blog and distributed over the Internet, it’s not finished. That’s just the beginning of the process. When I write something on my blog, oftentimes somebody will come after me and say, “No, you’ve got it wrong.” And maybe they’re right that I do have it wrong, so they copy edit me, which I well need….

So the blogosphere offers a much speedier cycle of correction than traditional media do. That happens because the audience is so much more involved in creating, fact-checking, and improving the content than they are with newspapers. (282)

Poets have always hated handing their work to the printer, feeling it is then calcified. Though changes were possible and new, revised editions frequent, the poem remained, an artifact available to anyone caring to find it, carrying with it the authority that printed product had attained. Today, as our reliance on static, paper product continues to decline, the poem becomes both more plastic and more within control of the poet (and not the producer of printed product). Lack of a 'paper trail' significantly changes the way a poem is presented and even studied.
More significantly, new media technologies both increase and narrow possibilities for consideration of audience. As Ong, again, writes:

Unlike members of a primary oral culture, who are turned outward because they have had little occasion to turn inward, we are turned outward because we have turned inward. In a like vein, where primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reflectiveness implemented by writing is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided spontaneity is a good thing. (134)

Spontaneity, as my recounting of one of the more extensive processes of printing should indicate, is not something we find when the orientation is towards text-as-independent-object. In a new-media context, however, a text has the flexibility to be tailored to individual communication and/or to be presented differently to a broader or alternate audience. And change can be immediate.

The revolution we are experiencing today point towards an entirely new type of literary criticism, one that does not view the work of art as product, as a final and finished (for the purposes of the criticism) artifact but, in some way or another, as process. Some new framework, whether those of us born before 1990 like it or not, will be adopted. Our job, as scholars of literature and language, will be to develop the new paradigm, a foundation useful to us in a milieu where the text, the rock we used to stand on, is proving to be nothing more than sand.

Thank you.


Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Book of Sand.” Trans. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. The Book of Sand. New York: Dutton, 1975.

Dick, Philip. Lies, Inc. London: Granada, 1985.

-----. The Unteleported Man. New York: Berkley, 1983 (1966).

Jarvis, Jeff. Interview with David Kline and Dan Burstein. In Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture, David Kline and Dan Burstein, ed. New York: CDS Books, 2005.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2002 (1982).