The importance of the individual and the tradition of the preface are here open to discussionLaurie Maguire The Shakespeare “Preface” is a genre in its own right practised by major critics such as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Harley Granville-Barker. Tony Tanner’s posthumous book reprints the prefaces he wrote for the Everyman Shakespeare in the 1990s. One of the questions this book inadvertently raises is whether this prefatory genre changes when thirty-six “prefaces” are gathered in one volume.
I say “gathered” not “edited”. Errors from the original Everyman volumes are reproduced here. Thus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we are told, Shakespeare drew on “Pluto’s” Life of Theseus. Many critics are named without full references; some are household names and therefore not hard to identify but others, like “Marcia Poulsen”, are less familiar; and shorthand references to “Puritan Richardson”, “Puritan Stubbes” and an unqualified “Meres” may perplex the general reader at whom this book is partly aimed. That this is carelessness and not casual chattiness is evident when Tanner tells us, “I have listed helpful items in the bibliography”; no bibliography exists.
Initially, one is drawn in by Tanner’s Kermode-like attention to language. There is something exhilarating about watching a mind – an open and attentive one – engage with vocabulary, etymology, repetition, syntax. The “it” of the statue in The Winter's Tale becomes “her” within a few lines; Hamlet’s simile “as swift as meditation” is queried as is the comparative within a superlative of “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, / But this most foul”. The description of tears as “guests” in Cordelia’s eyes contrasts with the lack of hospitality throughout the play. The daffodils which “peer” in Autolycus’s song are linked with Perdita's “peering in April’s front” and Hermione’s “peerless” life.
Tanner repeatedly gives us figures to anchor his verbal details. We learn that Ovid is mentioned directly only four times in Shakespeare; that “fortune” is used less often in Romeo and Juliet than in any other play (a surprising statistic this) and “haste” more often than in any other play except Hamlet; “glimmering” and “undistinguishable” occur in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and nowhere else. Numbers abound: “conscience” occurs seven times in Hamlet, “soul” thirty times in Othello, “issue” fourteen times in The Winter’s Tale, “spirit” twenty-nine times in The Tempest. However, Tanner’s word-counting technique, which works so well in single essays, becomes repetitively formulaic over the course of a book.
Tanner’s precise attention to language is surprisingly countered by general impressions. “I assume that if we feel something, he [Shakespeare] felt it too.” Examining the associations of shrews, he writes, “Women, notoriously, have a dread of mice and mice-like creatures, though whether that horror was shared by the dames of sixteenth-century rural Warwickshire, I have no idea”. He is not oblivious to recent critical developments (he cites Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Greenblatt, Graham Holderness) but prefers to sideline them – postcolonial views of Prospero make him “yearn for the old sanities”. These old sanities are seen in statements such as “Admittedly she [Sycorax] was there first; but he [Prospero] seems to have made a better fist of things”. This is the argument of colonialist conquerors everywhere.
At his best, Tanner thinks and writes like an Elizabethan. He loves copia. He relishes vocabulary. Having commented on Shakespeare’s unusual use of “whir” he incorporates it in his own lexicon: Pericles is a “whirring, scattering play”. He turns nouns into verbs: Lear “strangers” Cordelia. This love of words is at its most engaging when he admits interpretative defeat. The chapter on All’s Well that Ends Well is a tour de force in this respect: time and again, Tanner’s acute ear and eye lead him to point out phrases and sentences that simply don’t make sense.
Tanner’s dominant critical influences are early- and mid-twentieth century: H. B. Charlton, G. Wilson Knight, Allardyce Nicoll, Nigel Alexander, Kenneth Muir. His phrases come from the same era: Stephano and Trinculo are “pickled silly”; Egeus is “a bit of a stick”; Arthur Quiller-Couch “knows a cad when he sees one”. These endearing retro-colloquialisms are part of the conversational style. The book is full of verbless sentences. It frequently defers (“I’ll come back to that”; “more of that later”), a luxury of speech not usually accommodated so easily in print. Critical works are recommended in the same conversational manner (John Holloway’s “interesting book on Shakespearian tragedy . . . should not be neglected”). But what works in the lecture room does not always translate into print. Thus, a footnote tells us, gratuitously, that “too much Derrida is the sort of thing that makes the British think twice about taking their holidays in France”. On Berowne’s use of affected language to forswear taffeta phrases Tanner writes, “Nothing like a few taffeta phrases, . . . eh Berowne?”. Stylistically this recalls Northrop Frye’s On Shakespeare where, commenting on the Montague/Capulet decisions to build gold monuments at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Frye remarks, “Nothing like a couple of gold statues to bring two dead lovers back to life”. But Frye’s book, edited by Robert Sandler, was specifically marketed as transcripts of his undergraduate lectures. Tanner is addressing a print readership and the matey tone does not always work.
As a critic, however, Tanner is both brilliant and familiar. He is brilliant at rounding up and condensing the received wisdom on plays and subjects, and anchoring it in his own lexical observations. As a result there are few new ideas but plenty of new verbal details to support them. The “Preface” to Shakespeare is rightly not the place for riding hobby horses. More questionably, it seems not to be the place for addressing textual issues. Tanner sometimes signals his avoidance of thorny textual problems (“need not concern us”; “I will not address the unresolvable question of . . .”) but at other times he makes bold statements (for example, about capitalization) from which a knowledge of compositors, or of Ralph Crane, would have protected him. Given recent and accessible textual work (for example, Oxford’s Textual Companion) it seems perverse to follow E. K. Chambers’s chronology. Repeated comments about Shakespeare’s ownership of Florio’s/ Montaigne’s Essays (1603) move towards uncritical acceptance of one of the British Library’s copies as being his: Shakespeare’s Montaigne is “almost certainly even now in the British Library”. It is (alas) almost certainly not, and a brief look at the wording in the British Library catalogue will encourage any close reader to note the difference between copy C.28 m.8 “with the autograph of Ben Jonson” and copy C.21 e.17, whose “flyleaf bears the signature William Shakespeare”. Tanner reads plays; he does not read rare books. Consequently, an important aspect of Shakespeare, even Prefatory Shakespeare, is missing.
If Tanner offers close readings in the service of New Critical interpretative conclusions, in Shakespeare’s Individualism Peter Holbrook takes outlawed critical terms – like “character” and “the human” – and approaches them both philosophically and politically. The book’s bravery in questioning the gains and contradictions of contemporary literary theory is bracing.
Holbrook begins with a series of questions: why do we admire Hamlet when he is a failure? Why have we fetishized reason as the mark of “the human”? Why has the liberal Left outlawed the individual in literary criticism? The groundwork is established in an analysis of the tension between finding oneself and flouting society. Hamlet is about “someone who does not do what tradition, justice, morality, ‘heaven and hell’, powerful cultural authorities (the classic poets) and even his own father say he should do”. The play is about authenticity (“the most obvious, but also most important thing, to say about Hamlet is that he is not his father”), about trying out parts, about discovering one’s task in life. And unlike Fortinbras, who is happy to become his father rather than himself, Hamlet “‘fails’ in his task because it is not his”.
These deceptively simple observations take us to some sharp close readings – the recurrence of the word “singularity” in Shakespeare, the variants of “I am (not) who I am”, and to a modified Aristotelian theory: tragic heroes inspire envy not pity (envy because they have defied society to become the people they want to be). We are reminded of how “breathtaking” is Coriolanus’s desire to be “author of himself” in a world where hierarchy predetermines the self.
Holbrook argues that freedom is the one item we could not subtract from Shakespeare’s plays “without their, in effect, ceasing to be his”. Freedom is both a personal and a political concept and Holbrook explores them jointly: Shakespeare is aware that personal freedom can often conflict with ethics and morality and social norms. Cordelia’s insistence on speaking in her own voice rather than another’s is both ethically principled and ethically disastrous; the autonomy of villains such as Aaron conflicts with society but so too does that of public rulers like Antony and Cleopatra. Such tensions between self and society lead to larger questions: if it is right for Hermia to disobey her father in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is it also right for a people to rebel against a king?
Holbrook extends these themes to an analysis of Victorian and Modernist Shakespeare criticism. F. J. Furnivall’s approach to Shakespeare “reflects the liberal’s wish to break with a coercive morality”; Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and others see Shakespeare “as standing for life and against a life-crushing morality”. T. S. Eliot objected to Shakespeare because he was morally problematic but Holbrook argues that fidelity to self-realization can be ethical; for Shakespeare (as for Montaigne, who gets much attention here), cultivating the self is more important than capitulating to expectation. When Shakespeare presents vice as a choice it becomes a positive marker of self-determination. Richard of Gloucester determines to be a villain, Aaron embraces his blackness, Antony and Cleopatra choose passion rather than just giving in to it.
Holbrook argues that the triumphs of new historicism (what he calls the “new pessimism”) have severed critical contact with the individual. Partly because the modern West sees the self as a group identity and is more concerned with the rights of groups than those of individuals and partly because this prevents recognition of Shakespeare as “a poet of freedom”, Holbrook envisages a bleakly authoritarian future for criticism. He is not unaware of the irony of his narrative: “the Left, the traditional opponent of tyranny and defender of liberty since Milton, has (at least in its theoretical wing), relinquished the language of individuality as so much sentimental and ideological claptrap”. This is not just a book about Shakespeare’s individualism: it is a critical gauntlet.
Tony Tanner
PREFACES TO SHAKESPEARE
842pp. Belknap Press. £29.95 (US $39.95).
978 0 674 05137 9
Peter Holbrook
SHAKESPEARE’S INDIVIDUALISM
246pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 ($95).
978 0 521 76067 6
Laurie Maguire is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of Magdalen College. She is the author, most recently, of Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood, which appeared in 2009.
lunedì 16 maggio 2011
TOWER OF (BOOKS) BABEL
Thirty thousand books make a Tower of Babel, created in Buenos Aires with thousands of books from all over the world
G K Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker
FROM THE TELEGRAPH
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
GK Chesterton was one of the giants of early 20th-century literature. If that description makes him sound less like a human being than a fairy-tale creature, then it accurately captures a character who often gave the impression of having wandered into real life by mistake.
GK Chesterton, c. 1930 Everything about Chesterton was larger than life: his height, his bulk, and a list of publications long enough to stock a small library. In a career spanning four decades, he produced some 80 books, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays and countless newspaper columns that he dictated while chuckling at his own jokes and jabbing at the air with a knife. A “man of colossal genius”, according to G B Shaw, he sometimes seemed to have several other writers nested inside him like Russian dolls.
Though physically awkward, intellectually Chesterton was as nimble as a hummingbird. His writing became famous for its use of paradox: little controlled explosions that ranged from everyday clichés (“travel narrows the mind”) to the perils of the suffragette movement: “Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: ‘We will not be dictated to’, and then went off to become stenographers.”
And whereas Wilde’s slick one-liners were usually polished up in advance, Chesterton’s came as naturally as breathing. Like every true genius, he assumed that everyone thought as he did, and simply needed to be reminded of the fact from time to time.
The greatest paradox was reserved for his own life, because he was simultaneously one of the most knowledgeable men of his time and as innocent as a baby. His first memory was of a scene in his father’s toy theatre, which he later recalled as “a glimpse of some incredible paradise”, and in many ways he spent his adult life trying to recapture that lost vision.
It was a task that was reflected in everything from his Christianity to his propaganda work during the First World War, patriotism being just another example of “the necessity of boundaries” he first became aware of when looking through that illuminated cardboard arch.
It was therefore not altogether surprising that Chesterton stopped off en route to his marriage in 1901 to buy a revolver “with a general notion of protecting [his wife] from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads”. He was behaving like a Peter Pan who had grown older and fatter but stubbornly refused to grow up.
In the years of happy domesticity that followed, stories about him as a “great big boy” multiplied like flies around a sticky bun. Some of these could be put down to simple absent-mindedness, as when he turned up for a dinner at the House of Commons wearing one shoe and one slipper.
Other stories suggested that he had not so much married the long-suffering Frances as been adopted by her. She gave him pocket money, tied his shoelaces and on one occasion was overheard telling the cook to heat some water for his bath, at which ‘“Oh, need I?” came in tones of deepest depression from the study.
His writing turned this innocence into a style. A true democrat, he was interested in everything and brought the same infectious enthusiasm to lampposts or the colour grey that he did to more obviously ambitious essays such as “The Plan for a New Universe”.
His most famous fictional creation took this principle even further, because the skill of his detective Father Brown lies in noticing what everyone else had missed, but everything Chesterton wrote was based on the same “ecstasy of the ordinary”. He described the world with all the wonder of Adam naming the creatures in Eden.
In one way this new biography by Ian Ker perfectly matches its subject. It is very large. It is also thoroughly researched and so generous in the number and length of its quotations that it sometimes seems on the verge of turning into an anthology.
Sadly, in every other way this is a book that punches below its weight. Viewing Chesterton as “the obvious successor to Newman” as a Catholic convert and apologist, Ker devotes many pages to the events that led Pope Pius XI to praise him as a “gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith”. Unfortunately this leaves very little room for the rest of Chesterton.
Passages of sketchy literary history (“Thus arose the movement called Modernism”) and ungenerous social commentary (“The later employment of the euphemisms euthanasia and gay for suicide and homosexual would not have surprised Chesterton in the least”) are bad enough. But by the time page 700 is reached, with its summary of the Chestertons’ final trip abroad (“They met on the quay in Calais. They arrived in Amiens on the evening of the 10th. Next day they left for Rouen…”) it becomes clear that this book has done what should have been impossible: it makes Chesterton sound boring.
G K Chesterton: a Biography
by Ian Ker
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
GK Chesterton was one of the giants of early 20th-century literature. If that description makes him sound less like a human being than a fairy-tale creature, then it accurately captures a character who often gave the impression of having wandered into real life by mistake.
GK Chesterton, c. 1930 Everything about Chesterton was larger than life: his height, his bulk, and a list of publications long enough to stock a small library. In a career spanning four decades, he produced some 80 books, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays and countless newspaper columns that he dictated while chuckling at his own jokes and jabbing at the air with a knife. A “man of colossal genius”, according to G B Shaw, he sometimes seemed to have several other writers nested inside him like Russian dolls.
Though physically awkward, intellectually Chesterton was as nimble as a hummingbird. His writing became famous for its use of paradox: little controlled explosions that ranged from everyday clichés (“travel narrows the mind”) to the perils of the suffragette movement: “Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: ‘We will not be dictated to’, and then went off to become stenographers.”
And whereas Wilde’s slick one-liners were usually polished up in advance, Chesterton’s came as naturally as breathing. Like every true genius, he assumed that everyone thought as he did, and simply needed to be reminded of the fact from time to time.
The greatest paradox was reserved for his own life, because he was simultaneously one of the most knowledgeable men of his time and as innocent as a baby. His first memory was of a scene in his father’s toy theatre, which he later recalled as “a glimpse of some incredible paradise”, and in many ways he spent his adult life trying to recapture that lost vision.
It was a task that was reflected in everything from his Christianity to his propaganda work during the First World War, patriotism being just another example of “the necessity of boundaries” he first became aware of when looking through that illuminated cardboard arch.
It was therefore not altogether surprising that Chesterton stopped off en route to his marriage in 1901 to buy a revolver “with a general notion of protecting [his wife] from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads”. He was behaving like a Peter Pan who had grown older and fatter but stubbornly refused to grow up.
In the years of happy domesticity that followed, stories about him as a “great big boy” multiplied like flies around a sticky bun. Some of these could be put down to simple absent-mindedness, as when he turned up for a dinner at the House of Commons wearing one shoe and one slipper.
Other stories suggested that he had not so much married the long-suffering Frances as been adopted by her. She gave him pocket money, tied his shoelaces and on one occasion was overheard telling the cook to heat some water for his bath, at which ‘“Oh, need I?” came in tones of deepest depression from the study.
His writing turned this innocence into a style. A true democrat, he was interested in everything and brought the same infectious enthusiasm to lampposts or the colour grey that he did to more obviously ambitious essays such as “The Plan for a New Universe”.
His most famous fictional creation took this principle even further, because the skill of his detective Father Brown lies in noticing what everyone else had missed, but everything Chesterton wrote was based on the same “ecstasy of the ordinary”. He described the world with all the wonder of Adam naming the creatures in Eden.
In one way this new biography by Ian Ker perfectly matches its subject. It is very large. It is also thoroughly researched and so generous in the number and length of its quotations that it sometimes seems on the verge of turning into an anthology.
Sadly, in every other way this is a book that punches below its weight. Viewing Chesterton as “the obvious successor to Newman” as a Catholic convert and apologist, Ker devotes many pages to the events that led Pope Pius XI to praise him as a “gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith”. Unfortunately this leaves very little room for the rest of Chesterton.
Passages of sketchy literary history (“Thus arose the movement called Modernism”) and ungenerous social commentary (“The later employment of the euphemisms euthanasia and gay for suicide and homosexual would not have surprised Chesterton in the least”) are bad enough. But by the time page 700 is reached, with its summary of the Chestertons’ final trip abroad (“They met on the quay in Calais. They arrived in Amiens on the evening of the 10th. Next day they left for Rouen…”) it becomes clear that this book has done what should have been impossible: it makes Chesterton sound boring.
G K Chesterton: a Biography
by Ian Ker
At Google, the Book Tour Becomes Big Business
FROM NYTIMES
The Bay Citizen
By KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI
When Tina Fey visited the Bay Area in April on her book tour for “Bossypants,” she made just two stops. She gave an interview before a sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Theater, as part of the City Arts & Lectures series. And she dropped by the Mountain View headquarters of Google.
At an Authors@Google “fireside chat,” Ms. Fey, the “30 Rock” creator and star, had a friendly conversation with Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, in front of an audience of hundreds of employees who greeted her with a standing ovation.
As Google’s reach into many aspects of media production and distribution grows ever greater, A-list authors, actors, musicians and others are taking part in the company’s six-year-old on-campus speaker series.
Lady Gaga recently shared the stage with Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president for location and local services, as did Christy Turlington, the supermodel turned documentary director. The YouTube video of “Google Goes Gaga” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
The unlikely spectacle of technology executives chatting up celebrities talk-show-style originated as part of Google’s effort to create a quasi-collegiate atmosphere on its campus. The events increasingly dovetail with Google’s interests in publishing, broadcasting, music distribution and other media businesses. The company is selling “Bossypants” as a Google e-book for $12.99 in its online bookstore, which it opened in December.
For authors and other creative professionals, an appearance at the Googleplex, the company’s sprawling complex of office buildings, is good business — but nonetheless conjures some mixed emotions in light of Google’s complicated relationship with content creators. The company is involved in a bitter lawsuit over its efforts to scan all of the world’s books and make them available online, and has long stood accused of unfairly profiting from work that is excerpted and indexed by the company’s search services.
“I think it’s a great thing that they’re doing this,” Chris Clarke, a natural history and environmental writer, said of the talks. “I don’t think that it clears their karma as far as trying to become the sole-source provider of all intellectual property everywhere.”
The speaker series began in 2005 with the New Yorker writers Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki as its first two guests and has since featured hundreds of authors, musicians, chefs, economists and politicians.
Google employees involved in the program say that it evolved out of employees’ interests and at their initiative.
“The program was a grass-roots effort that started when a few Googlers realized that some remarkable people were passing through the halls of the Googleplex,” said Ann Farmer, an information engineer. She is one of more than two dozen employee volunteers who organize the events, which are now held three to five times a week.
Since 2005, more than 1,000 guests have appeared. Garry Kasparov, the chess master, and Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, are among some 600 authors, mostly of nonfiction, who have participated. The list includes a number of authors who have written books about Google.
Talks now take place at Google offices around the world, with employees from 18 offices participating via videoconferencing. At larger events, employees use Google Moderator software, which fields questions from the audience, ranking the most popular ones.
In the early days of the series, the employees had to cajole speakers to attend, working personal connections, since the company did not pay an honorarium. But the program gained traction, with some talks drawing more than a million viewers on YouTube. “Let’s put it this way,” said Ms. Farmer. “The tables have turned.”
As of April 1, Cliff Redeker, 27, is the company’s official “speakers specialist.” He used to organize author visits in his spare time as a support specialist, but now his full-time job is dedicated to the speaker series.
The series has made the Googleplex an increasingly important stop for authors promoting their work in the Bay Area, as many major bookstores that featured readings have closed.
“It’s not going to replace bookstore events,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent in Brooklyn, “but if I have an author going to San Francisco, I always want my author to stop in at Google and do an event there as well.”
The Google books lawsuit, though, combined with a broader concern that the Internet is undermining the ability of authors to get paid for their work, remains a big issue for some.
As of last October, Google Books had already scanned more than 15 million titles from more than 100 countries in 400 languages. On March 22, a federal judge threw out a settlement agreement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers. The Authors Guild had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company over copyright infringement.
Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer and author of “Close to the Machine” and “The Bug,” is a member of the Authors Guild, and she sees the speakers program as a way to “soften the blow.”
She said, from Google’s perspective, it is “ ‘Look, see? We’re not making money off of you. We’re promoting you.’ ”
The YouTube factor also introduces a novel dynamic.
“You know this is going to be videotaped, and there is a sense that you’re speaking for posterity,” said Christopher McDougall, the author of “Born to Run,” who has appeared at the company’s offices in Mountain View and New York. “With the Google events, it was more about talking to the camera than talking to the people.”
Typically, some employees have their laptops open during the talk, and the guest speaks not just to them but also to a future audience on YouTube.
Sherry Turkle, author of “Alone Together,” who directs the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self, appeared at Google’s office in New York to promote her book. Yet she says, “We shouldn’t kid ourselves that going on YouTube to watch an author is the same thing as going to a bookstore.”
For many authors, though, it’s all good. T. J. Stiles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” who is on the executive council of the Authors Guild, said of the speaker series: “That’s Google focusing on authors, not just addressing books as the subject of an information aggregation operation. It’s a healthy development.”
For one Bay Area independent bookstore, the program has been a boon. Books Inc. provides books for the events held at the Mountain View campus. At most talks, employees can buy the books at a deep discount, because Google subsidizes the purchases. For some special events, the company simply buys the books and gives them away.
Having a chance to attend the talks is a great perk for Googlers that reinforces the sense that their work, and technology in general, is driving the cultural conversation in a way it never has before.
“This didn’t happen in Web 1.0,” said Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, a division of Frank N. Magid Associates, who was a consultant to Excite in the late 1990s. “I never saw a single celebrity ever.”
kmieszkowski@baycitizen.org
The Bay Citizen
By KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI
When Tina Fey visited the Bay Area in April on her book tour for “Bossypants,” she made just two stops. She gave an interview before a sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Theater, as part of the City Arts & Lectures series. And she dropped by the Mountain View headquarters of Google.
At an Authors@Google “fireside chat,” Ms. Fey, the “30 Rock” creator and star, had a friendly conversation with Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, in front of an audience of hundreds of employees who greeted her with a standing ovation.
As Google’s reach into many aspects of media production and distribution grows ever greater, A-list authors, actors, musicians and others are taking part in the company’s six-year-old on-campus speaker series.
Lady Gaga recently shared the stage with Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president for location and local services, as did Christy Turlington, the supermodel turned documentary director. The YouTube video of “Google Goes Gaga” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
The unlikely spectacle of technology executives chatting up celebrities talk-show-style originated as part of Google’s effort to create a quasi-collegiate atmosphere on its campus. The events increasingly dovetail with Google’s interests in publishing, broadcasting, music distribution and other media businesses. The company is selling “Bossypants” as a Google e-book for $12.99 in its online bookstore, which it opened in December.
For authors and other creative professionals, an appearance at the Googleplex, the company’s sprawling complex of office buildings, is good business — but nonetheless conjures some mixed emotions in light of Google’s complicated relationship with content creators. The company is involved in a bitter lawsuit over its efforts to scan all of the world’s books and make them available online, and has long stood accused of unfairly profiting from work that is excerpted and indexed by the company’s search services.
“I think it’s a great thing that they’re doing this,” Chris Clarke, a natural history and environmental writer, said of the talks. “I don’t think that it clears their karma as far as trying to become the sole-source provider of all intellectual property everywhere.”
The speaker series began in 2005 with the New Yorker writers Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki as its first two guests and has since featured hundreds of authors, musicians, chefs, economists and politicians.
Google employees involved in the program say that it evolved out of employees’ interests and at their initiative.
“The program was a grass-roots effort that started when a few Googlers realized that some remarkable people were passing through the halls of the Googleplex,” said Ann Farmer, an information engineer. She is one of more than two dozen employee volunteers who organize the events, which are now held three to five times a week.
Since 2005, more than 1,000 guests have appeared. Garry Kasparov, the chess master, and Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, are among some 600 authors, mostly of nonfiction, who have participated. The list includes a number of authors who have written books about Google.
Talks now take place at Google offices around the world, with employees from 18 offices participating via videoconferencing. At larger events, employees use Google Moderator software, which fields questions from the audience, ranking the most popular ones.
In the early days of the series, the employees had to cajole speakers to attend, working personal connections, since the company did not pay an honorarium. But the program gained traction, with some talks drawing more than a million viewers on YouTube. “Let’s put it this way,” said Ms. Farmer. “The tables have turned.”
As of April 1, Cliff Redeker, 27, is the company’s official “speakers specialist.” He used to organize author visits in his spare time as a support specialist, but now his full-time job is dedicated to the speaker series.
The series has made the Googleplex an increasingly important stop for authors promoting their work in the Bay Area, as many major bookstores that featured readings have closed.
“It’s not going to replace bookstore events,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent in Brooklyn, “but if I have an author going to San Francisco, I always want my author to stop in at Google and do an event there as well.”
The Google books lawsuit, though, combined with a broader concern that the Internet is undermining the ability of authors to get paid for their work, remains a big issue for some.
As of last October, Google Books had already scanned more than 15 million titles from more than 100 countries in 400 languages. On March 22, a federal judge threw out a settlement agreement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers. The Authors Guild had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company over copyright infringement.
Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer and author of “Close to the Machine” and “The Bug,” is a member of the Authors Guild, and she sees the speakers program as a way to “soften the blow.”
She said, from Google’s perspective, it is “ ‘Look, see? We’re not making money off of you. We’re promoting you.’ ”
The YouTube factor also introduces a novel dynamic.
“You know this is going to be videotaped, and there is a sense that you’re speaking for posterity,” said Christopher McDougall, the author of “Born to Run,” who has appeared at the company’s offices in Mountain View and New York. “With the Google events, it was more about talking to the camera than talking to the people.”
Typically, some employees have their laptops open during the talk, and the guest speaks not just to them but also to a future audience on YouTube.
Sherry Turkle, author of “Alone Together,” who directs the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self, appeared at Google’s office in New York to promote her book. Yet she says, “We shouldn’t kid ourselves that going on YouTube to watch an author is the same thing as going to a bookstore.”
For many authors, though, it’s all good. T. J. Stiles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” who is on the executive council of the Authors Guild, said of the speaker series: “That’s Google focusing on authors, not just addressing books as the subject of an information aggregation operation. It’s a healthy development.”
For one Bay Area independent bookstore, the program has been a boon. Books Inc. provides books for the events held at the Mountain View campus. At most talks, employees can buy the books at a deep discount, because Google subsidizes the purchases. For some special events, the company simply buys the books and gives them away.
Having a chance to attend the talks is a great perk for Googlers that reinforces the sense that their work, and technology in general, is driving the cultural conversation in a way it never has before.
“This didn’t happen in Web 1.0,” said Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, a division of Frank N. Magid Associates, who was a consultant to Excite in the late 1990s. “I never saw a single celebrity ever.”
kmieszkowski@baycitizen.org
domenica 15 maggio 2011
POSITIVO, NEGATIVO
Ho sempre professato l’esercizio della responsabilità, in qualsiasi circostanza a qualsiasi prezzo.Ma la casualità dell’esistenza si è presa beffa di me e mi punisce adesso con una quiete nervosa in cui vorrei abbandonarmi solo all’inerzia della coscienza. A forza di voler dirigere il guado ci sto annegando dentro.
Accetta l’inevitabilità di questo movimento. E’ un percorso ma non lo sai, è cambiamento ed evoluzione anche se è un movimento fermo. Si esistono i movimenti fermi in cui ogni elemento si congela e nella stasi dell’essere scopre l’eternità delle passioni.
Postivo, negativo, bene e male sono le etichette con cui in realtà prendiamo le distanze dal mondo. Da noi stessi e dalla nostra forza creatrice.
Accetta l’inevitabilità di questo movimento. E’ un percorso ma non lo sai, è cambiamento ed evoluzione anche se è un movimento fermo. Si esistono i movimenti fermi in cui ogni elemento si congela e nella stasi dell’essere scopre l’eternità delle passioni.
Postivo, negativo, bene e male sono le etichette con cui in realtà prendiamo le distanze dal mondo. Da noi stessi e dalla nostra forza creatrice.
PENSIERI
Destino d’eccezione con varianti. Pensa questi pensieri mentre le parole si ingarbugliano e cedono alla tentazione dovuta del silenzio. Niente accade perchè tutto avvenga. Niente accade perchè non c’è niente. Niente accade perchè è così che deve essere. E se è così che deve è lecito chiedersi cosa accadrà dopo? O il niente elide anche l’illusione temporale?
sabato 14 maggio 2011
ED ORA UN PO' DI SCRITTURA MIA
E adesso un pò di scrittura mia, per far crescere il blog ed io con lui...
Afferare gli oggetti come fossero l’ultimo richiamo di vita disponibile. Una tazza di porcellana, un giocattolo antico, un libro. Tracce di un antico viaggio già compiuto con un suo inizio e una sua fine, una mappa indiscussa che non trova più le parole...
Dirimpetto al dolore solo l’essenza può sostenere le radici del vivere. E quando anche la scrittura trova una sua via di fuga resta un vuoto primitivo, senza più anelito di creazione. Allo specchio guardandosi strani pensieri rendono opaca l’aria circostante. Così disarmonici da non sembrare più umani ma concrezioni della materia in cerca di un corpo da coprire. Ma non è protezione quella solo una mera casualità delle circostanze. Invisibile al mondo la mia essenza gli è comunque di ostacolo. Un sasso su cui inciampare rapidamente e da cui con la stessa rapidità riprendersi. Non mi vedono ma esisto e questo è un problema.
Afferare gli oggetti come fossero l’ultimo richiamo di vita disponibile. Una tazza di porcellana, un giocattolo antico, un libro. Tracce di un antico viaggio già compiuto con un suo inizio e una sua fine, una mappa indiscussa che non trova più le parole...
Dirimpetto al dolore solo l’essenza può sostenere le radici del vivere. E quando anche la scrittura trova una sua via di fuga resta un vuoto primitivo, senza più anelito di creazione. Allo specchio guardandosi strani pensieri rendono opaca l’aria circostante. Così disarmonici da non sembrare più umani ma concrezioni della materia in cerca di un corpo da coprire. Ma non è protezione quella solo una mera casualità delle circostanze. Invisibile al mondo la mia essenza gli è comunque di ostacolo. Un sasso su cui inciampare rapidamente e da cui con la stessa rapidità riprendersi. Non mi vedono ma esisto e questo è un problema.
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