Category: Lit/Pub

Why is it either/or? Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk

I watched this Amanda Palmer TED Talk “The Art of Asking” over the weekend and  found it both remarkable and inspiring.  Her frankness and humanity are unassailable.  Who can argue with an artist who says, “I put myself and my work out there, I ask to be embraced, and I am embraced”?  Kudos to her for doing it.  Kudos to her for talking about it.  But if we are meant to draw a conclusion that her experience is the new model, as some will claim, I think we’d do well to remember that there is more than one kind of artist and more than one medium; and I don’t know why the principle of creators’ rights is not seen as inclusive rather than exclusive in this regard.

As much as I enjoyed Palmer’s talk, my immediate thought after watching it was about one of my favorite authors whose work is no less provocative in literary form than Palmer’s is in music and performance. John Irving still writes prodigiously in longhand, and his own descriptions of his work habits reflect an asceticism typical of most serious authors.  I don’t think Mr. Irving takes time to tweet let alone crowd-surf, and he is unlikely ever to strip down so that his fans can sign his naked body (at least let’s hope not). But jokes aside, we are blessed to have a society that produces both the Amanda Palmers and the John Irvings; and I don’t understand why anyone thinks we need to choose a system that would favor one over the other.  Believe it or not, the one unifying principle that supports these two artists, as well as all others, is copyright.

Copyright doesn’t say Amanda Palmer can’t mange her career as she sees fit; it says that it is her absolute right to do so.  Combine that right with the First Amendment, and she’s a force to reckon with.  But so is the comparatively reclusive novelist who may best be capable of “connecting with fans” only through his writing. Copyright gives that author the freedom to stay home, indulge in one of the most solitary activities imaginable, and accept publishing deals, if that’s what best serves the work.  And nothing about that model prevents the Amanda Palmers of the world from doing things in a completely opposite manner.

It’s hard enough to be an artist and to seek approval in the form of both praise and patronage, which Palmer makes abundantly clear in her talk.  But creators’ journeys are as varied and unpredictable as the work itself.  In his novel Until I Find You, Irving writes of his actor protagonist that there are two things that can’t be controlled — where your first break will come from, and where that break will lead.  Amanda Palmer is lucky to have found the harmony between her work, herself, and her approach to marketing; and I think there’s a reason we see musicians find this balance more readily than some artists in other media.  But why does Palmer’s success in this regard suggest that we would devalue other voices that speak loudest from very quiet places not shared with the entire world?

At its core, regardless of all the noise, copyright simply bestows the right of choice upon the individual.  So, while I applaud Ms. Palmer for her courage and for sharing her experiences, I also assert that the conclusion we draw from her insight should not be that the future of art is an either/or approach to the rights of the creator.

A Healthy Case of Logophilia: Are Dictionaries Democratic?

English lexicographer Jonathon Green offers this well-reasoned article criticizing crowd sourcing for dictionaries under the thesis “dictionaries are not democratic.”  As a confirmed word snob and English language fetishist, I have to say that I generally agree.

To study and love the English language is to accept and even celebrate that it is and always has been the most mutable language in human history.  The properties that make English so hard to learn for the foreign student are exactly those traits we logophiles find so attractive. I believe good writing, beyond clarity of intent, is about two things:  sound and connotation.  For the student of English, it’s enough to acquire the denotation of a word like grumpy, but the serious writer will spend more than a little effort considering the contextual appropriateness of prickly, testy, waspish, churlish, or irascible.  This is both the joy and the mania of the medium.

So, one might assume that if embracing the ephemeral nature of English is part of   loving the language, then the rapid mutations of digital-age neologisms would be eagerly accepted as well.  For some, I’m sure this is the case, and it’s true that fleeting colloquialisms are always fun when they add color and spice to everyday parlance.  But the professional communicator also wants his language moored to something a bit more firm, which is why I believe Mr. Green makes a good case for lexicographers beyond mere job security.

Take the word I used above, logophile.  I knew such a word existed, but writing this at dawn and half a coffee short, I couldn’t think of it. One thing Web searching offers that a dictionary does not is a means to stumble about with half words and phrases in search of the target.  While doing exactly this, I found wordophile, cited in Meriam-Webster’s online urban dictionary.  Wordophile is sort of fun sounding, so why not choose it over logophile?  In the context of this piece, the correct choice for me is the word that has more solid roots in the language, whereas I might use wordophile in a more casual or flippant circumstance.

The question of professional vs amateur lexicography feels anachronistically futile in a world where many college educators are happy to receive papers using whole English words at all rather than the truncated form of Tweetish.  Still, Mr. Green and his ilk are guardians of something more profound than dusty and heavy stacks of paper.  When language is stretched too thin and too rapidly, vagueness becomes the norm in all communication.  We see this in corporate and political shorthand all the time — two worlds where speaking without saying anything is often a purposeful strategy.

In the next podcast I’ll be posting, writer Jeffrey Turrentine refers to one downside of the Web as its being a tool for achieving “epistemic closure.” There is nothing particularly new about the observation that the Web offers the user evidence for whatever bias — political, scientific, historic, social — he brings to the keyboard, but when we combine this phenomenon with too much democratization of language itself, I believe we ultimately serve anti-democratic interests who too easily manipulate the masses through the fog of an unbound lexicon.