Author Hunting

Stephen Fry (the actor and author) has a blog, and on it not long ago he complained about the way that cameras on cell phones have ruined literary readings (here’s an excerpt from Paper Cuts, the NY Times books blog).

His complaint is that people want him to pose for photos, so they get someone else to try and operate their cameras or cell phones, leading to hapless photographic attempts and a lot of standing around and grimacing instead of “agreeable exchanges and chats with the readers.”

Really, go read Fry’s lament and then come back. He does a marvelous job of describing it, far better and more detailed than my hasty summary. In the meantime, here’s a sample photo-with-the-author:

Grin and bear it!

In the comments to the Paper Cuts blog post, some jackass says the following:

My god. Be thankful you’re well-known enough to want other people to take pictures of you. You sound like a spoiled dilettante; you don’t know how many of us would kill to be inconvenienced by “200 hundred versions of the awkward and excruciating performance.” Spare us – quit yer whining!

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend jackass is actually making a valid point. I mean, you’ve got to be really successful before randomfolk come and want to be photographed with you (and jackass is clearly jealous he isn’t successful). Besides, there’s that implicit noblesse oblige of celebrity, meaning that part of being a star is the obligation to pose for photos.

Right?

I went to see the author Carl Hiaasen speak not long ago. The talk was part of Wordstock, an annual book festival. Hiaasen, who lives in Florida, flew all the way out to Portland to speak, explaining that he likes to go to good “book towns,” and for this reason (and for a presidential one), entirely avoids a certain flyover state that sits due south of Oklahoma.

After Hiaasen’s talk there was a book signing, and I bought a copy of Nature Girl, and had him sign it. As I worked toward the front of the line, I saw person after person hand their camera to someone else to take a photo. Hiaasen sat down and signed, stood up and posed, had his eyes blasted with a flash, sat down, stood up, smiled, etc.

Hiaasen was clearly tired. After all, his body was still on Florida time, so to him it felt like 1 a.m. … and he’d been on a jet for probably five hours that day. But instead of coming up and talking to him about books and writing and stories and life—the reason he said he’d come to Portland in the first place!—people were more interested in taking along a little image of themselves with him.

Maybe because Stephen Fry is also in movies and on TV, the jackass who left the comment thinks the rules of the game are different. I disagree. If you go see an author, the discussion should be about stories, and writing, and books … not about digital cameras. And when Stephen Fry is doing a reading of his book, that’s what the discussion should be about then, too.

The reason you write is to connect with people in some way, whether it’s to entertain, inform, amuse, persuade, or some combination thereof. True, there’s a perverse irony in the system, that to write you have to hole up alone in a room for a few hundred hours to produce a good book, which then gets shipped around the country and/or world, and read by people in their homes … in other words, to connect, you do so in one of the most lonely, disconnected ways imaginable.

Think about it from the writer’s point of view: Yes, it’s gratifying that people are buying, reading, and seeming to enjoy your work, but wouldn’t you want to talk to them? Get feedback? Find out all the surprising ways something you wrote touched or amused them? That was a big reason—maybe the main reason—you went through all that trouble in the first place.

And if you’re a reader, once you’re finally face to face with someone who’s written something meaningful, wouldn’t you want to talk to them?

Apparently not. Instead of a writer making meaning for a reader, or the reader making meaning out of a story, and coming together to share in that, people would rather hunt celebrities like big-game animals, nabbing a digital memento to put on their wall as some sort of testament to their egos.

If you agree with jackass, just by virtue of the fact that you’re a successful writer, you should not only not complain about being prevented from actually connecting to people on a human level, (because your image is all that matters), but you should be thankful for it.

The Barenaked Ladies have a song, “Celebrity,” which sums this up in a tidy, biting little couplet:

And all that you will see is a celebrity
All that’s left of me is my celebrity

When I got to front of the line at the Wordstock reading, I asked Carl Hiaasen for advice about writing novels, and he gave me a really good answer. I didn’t take a picture, but what I took away from the evening was something a whole lot better.

Demented Leafs Fan Paints a Plate

There’s some sort of environmental debilitation that results from growing up in Toronto as a hockey fan. It’s an affliction characterized by a hopeless yearning for a team that is, at best, mediocre, and destined never to win the Stanley Cup—and thus destined always to break your heart.

This used to be a common affliction in Boston before the Red Sox won the World Series. Now only Chicago Cubs fans suffer from it.

In Toronto, where hockey’s spiritual gravity is equal to football + baseball + basketball, this means rooting for the Toronto Maple Leafs, despite their 40-year Stanley Cup drought. Who can explain this passion? It’s certainly not rational. I mean, honestly? who puts Maple Leafs license plate frames on their car?

So, when I decorated a plate at work a couple weeks ago, there was really only one design decision to make: blue maple leaf on white, or white on blue?

Irish Woe Means Huge Savings for You!

Let’s talk Notre Dame football. No, not because I’m a big football fan (I’m not, particularly), and not because they had a stellar season (they didn’t).

In fact, it’s worth talking ND football for precisely the opposite reason, since they had one of the worst seasons in their history. (And because it leads into the subject of this post, which you’ll see below.)

Consider their 2007 season:

• Most losses in a single year (9)
• Two of the ten worst losses ever (both 38-0 shellackings)
• Losses to Army and Air Force in the same season for the first time since 1944 (when the services teams were all bulked up for the war effort)
• Winless against the mid-majors

It was so bad that when ND was 1-7, Slate magazine ran an article, with some persuasive statistics, calling coach Charlie Weis “The Worst Football Coach in the Universe.”

• “Of the 119 teams in Division I-A, ND is 119^th in total offense, 119^th in rushing offense, 112t^h in passing offense, and 118^th in scoring.”
• “Notre Dame is averaging 1.09 yards per rush this year … the worst rushing team recorded by the NCAA in the last nine years was still about one-third better than Notre Dame.”

Now, let’s say you’re the marketing director for Blue & Gold Traditions, which sells ND clothes and merchandise, and you’ve got to send out a catalog with ND jerseys, helmets, pajamas, key chains and baseball caps.

What to do? Here’s Blue & Gold’s answer:

“Irish Woe Creates Massive Overstocks … Leading to Huge Savings For You!”

Ouch. Even as an attempt to turn lemons into lemonade, that’s pathetic.

Content Behind Bars

Perhaps that title is hyperbole, but hear me out.

I was on ragan.com not long ago, reading an opinion piece Steve Crescenzo wrote about companies being “conveniently green” and getting PR mileage out of green efforts. His somewhat cynical point is that it’s all the rage, and what happens when times get tougher?

I commented on the article, as did a few other people. Then, a few days later, I went back to the site to see what other people had said.

Guess what? When I returned the article was walled off, and I encountered a screen that said “To read this article you must be a Ragan Select member.”

The reason why I was on Ragan in the first place is that I’d just been to one of their conferences, and was looking for a bit of follow-up information. The conference, on web content management, talked about how social media is a conversation, that it’s side-to-side instead of top-down, and all that happy, wired Web 2.0 stuff.

Despite this brave new era of corporate communications, the Ragan site still has gated content (even though the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal are taking down their gates). Which is fine—except that part of that gated content includes my comments!!

This is admittedly murky water here. After all, they didn’t say they were going to wall off our comments, so I (like most people, I ’spect), imagined it was a conversation … and the thing about conversations is that no one owns them. So I proceeded as if the piece was like a blog post, where the conversation is sometimes as important or even more important than the initial post.

But no, this is proprietary content in the guise of a blog.

It seems like a violation of the social contract. After all, if I add a comment that’s subsequently available only to Ragan Select members (and not even to me!), aren’t I, in effect, working as an unpaid writer for them?

And if that’s the case, does that mean they think they own the copyright to my comment? I’d be curious to see that case tried in court.

If Ragan’s going to close the door later, they should say so. In the meantime, piddle on them for a Web 2.0 bait-and-switch.

Book Review: How Soccer Explains the World

Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World has the subtitle, “an {unlikely} theory of globalization.”

And his title and subtitle are, perhaps, my only quibbles with his excellent book. This isn’t one of those “Worms: How Fat, Soft-bodied Invertebrates Explain Human History” books.

It doesn’t exactly explain the world, though it is very much about globalization. The first part “tries to explain the failure of globalization to erode ancient hatreds in the game’s great rivalries.”

He calls this the “hooligan-heavy section of the book,” and once or twice he comes perilously close to retreading the same ground covered in Bill Buford’s harrowing and amazing Among the Thugs.

But Foer, an editor at the New Republic, goes the extra mile here, and it shows. His first chapter is how about a Serbian a soccer thug who helped organize troops who became murderers in the Balkan War. By the war’s end, the thug’s men had killed at least 2,000 Croats and Bosnians. There’s another, equally fascinating chapter about a soccer rivalry in Scotland inflamed by religious hatred.

The second section is more economic, with an excellent dissection of the disease-ridden state of football in Brazil, a look at Italian oligarchs, and arguably the most globalized chapter, about a Nigerian playing professional soccer in the Ukraine, where “Even the ruddy Ukranians line up in wool hats, long pants, and heavy parkas. Many Nigerians playing in the Ukraine complain bitterly about their inability to maneuver in these temperatures. They say that their frozen feet feel like sledgehammers, while their style of play demands a chisel’s delicacy.”

Apart from readers such as myself reaping the benefits of him roaming the world and watching soccer (in Brazil, Spain, Italy, the Ukraine, Scotland and the US, among others), the book is a whole new reading on politics, sometimes showing a country in an entirely new light as a result. One of the best chapters is about Islam, and the way that soccer has been a liberating influence for people there (especially women). The chapter on Brazil is no less illuminating. There’s even a two-chapter detour into The Jewish Question that describes Hakoah, a soccer team that’s a bona fide Jewish Sports Legend.

For as well informed as the book is about world events, Foer is no less astute when it comes to the US. He makes a fascinating argument that for children who came of age at the same time he did (I’d estimate he’s between 35 and 40), soccer was

a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Unlike the other sports, it would foster self-esteem, minimize the pain of competition while still teaching life lessons.

That leads to a strange inversion in the United States: “In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class.” In the US, as sporting goods surveys show, “children of middle class and affluent families play the game disproportionately.” I found that a shocking conclusion—not because it was wrong, but because my son plays youth soccer, and I still somehow didn’t see how obviously right it is.

In other words, soccer is an elitist sport, and thus derided by sports talk shows and conservatives who see it as yet another unpatriotic symptom in the American liberal disease of Europhilia.

Again, I’m not sure soccer explains the world, but it does make me see it in a whole new way.

Chicago, Part 3 – Baby, It’s Cold Outside

I live in Portland, Ore., which is actually farther north than Chicago. In fact, it’s farther north than Toronto—and even than Montreal (though by only a mile or two). But because Portland’s climate is softened by the Pacific Ocean, we get snowstorms once or maybe twice a year, making it a novelty. So when I was in Chicago last week (part I; part II) I found the snowstorm and cold spell somewhat exciting, in the way of a tourist safely ensconced in a hotel room.

On day two it got cold. When I left the hotel the next day, the temperature had dropped into the “bitter” range, and the story on the street had changed. Though Michigan Ave. still had a lot of pedestrians, the cold-weenies like me hoofed it with purpose, instead of dawdling and window-shopping.

Signs also appeared on the sidewalks in front of high-rises: Beware of Falling Ice.

The odds were stacking up against a life of ease: it was bitterly cold; the streets were slick; snow was still blowing; and, if the prospect of freezing, falling to the pavement or getting snow in your eyes weren’t enough, you could got smacked by falling icicles.

Winter: It’s not for sissies.

My hotel was a big box, with the eastern side all glass … much of it single-pane. That meant that if I opened the drapes, I immediately felt the draft. The second night I went out and bought goodies at Trader Joe’s, including a bottle of white wine. I cooled it in my ice bucket at first. Then I realized the huge single-pane windows were great for keeping my bottle of wine cold: I just placed it against the aluminum frame and glass.

The windows were such a bad layer of insulation, there was a sign next to the thermostat that read, “At certain times of year, you may not be able to achieve a comfortable temperature.”

I should have taken a picture of that sign. I’m sure it applies to the city of Chicago as much as my room.

Chicago, Part 2 – This City Was Made for Walkin’

In my last post, I just described raiding the rails in Chicago … something do to once (and hopefully not too much more). Today we’re getting off the train.

Without getting all gushy and lyrical, I love walking in big cities. And by big cities, I mean places like Chicago and Toronto, not necessarily Portland. Portland is a decent-sized city, but its downtown is fairly small: really it’s just a few square miles on one side of the Willamette River.

Chicago, on the other hand, knocks you on your ass with its grandeur. In my walk up Michigan Avenue, I walked by—in no particular order—the Wrigley Building, The Tribune Tower (fascinating and Gothic), the Corn Cob Towers (this explains more), over the Chicago River, past Donald Trump’s latest ego-creation, past the Art Institute of Chicago and their awesome lion statues. A couple nights later, I walked north a few blocks and saw the Water Tower, and Sears Tower. It’s an architectural treasure-trove (
see some pics). Portland just doesn’t compare this way.

One of the lions.

Tribune Tower

I reached my hotel just as snow flurries started dusting the city. Two hours later, when I went out for dinner, the flurries had become a full-fledged snowstorm, slanting into people’s faces (some carried umbrellas to keep it away), making people squint. As I walked and squinted, it occurred to me that ski goggles would have a practical application—they’d keep the snow out of your eyes, not to mention marking you as a kook (which might deter some of the panhandlers and hucksters).

I went out twice that night, early and late, and saw the progression of the storm. The bridge across the Chicago River was treacherously slick … I followed one woman who wore high-heel boots across the bridge, and she skittered her feet, leaving a trail in the snow like cross-country skis. I mentioned that to her, and she said she did it to keep from slipping.

Umbrellas, shuffle-steps … walking had changed from one kind of an adventure (sightseeing) to another (don’t fall).

Chicago, Part I – Railroaded

I flew into Chicago last Tuesday. Because I was in no hurry, and I’m a fan of public transit, and I could save my company $25 if I didn’t take an airport shuttle, I took the CTA train. Good thing I wasn’t in a hurry: I saw a sign that the train line’s speed was up, from 15 mph to 35. 15 is unbelievably slow. I go 15 mph on my bike!!

While the train follows a freeway for much of the way in, it does so at a slower speed, so I got a lot of opportunity to remind myself just how ugly a northern city is in winter.

The entire palette was dull: grays, browns, dingy blacks, off whites. Even blues and greens looked dull … wisely, because winter is a sloppy season, not many buildings are brightly colored.

The local subway in Chicago is actually elevated—it’s called the “L” for that reason—though it’s been in so many movies (such as the Fugitive with Harrison Ford) that that’s hardly news to many people. But there were a few huge differences between the trains in Toronto (where I grew up) and Portland (where I live now).

First, the “L” is much older than the TTC subway, and the downtown core is surrounded by The Loop. So there’s a loop of elevated track running about 40 feet above the street, making turns right by the windows of office and apartment buildings. Again, I’d seen it in movies, but it had been a long while since I’d actually been peering in people’s windows while riding public transit. I spent an interesting minute watching a woman working at her desk; the train was so commonplace to her, she didn’t pay us any attention.

A station on the “L”

Getting off the train was interesting too. It’s about three flights above street level, and the platform is wooden, and everything feels very cadged together and rickety, and on the turnstiles are textured with countless coats of paint.

In the last week I ended up riding the El in Chicago, the MAX in Portland, and the Toronto subway. The “L” (sometime it’s called the El) is by far the oldest, grottiest, quirkiest, slowest, and hardest to navigate. Funny thing was, it was also the most interesting. Then again, I didn’t have to depend on it to get to work.