Lamenting ‘Style’

This is my very first entry on my very first blog. I want to use this as a place to put my writing “out there” into the world. I’ll be writing about music, sports, art, politics, and my unremarkable (but deeply fascinating to me) daily life.

To begin: It is a strange time right now. After months of banter and argument we attacked Iraq. In the long period that led up to this most folks quickly formed an opinion one way or the other and then as the barage of information and insights and new developments came to light, they adjusted their views many times. Some stayed at the extremes while others, like myself, wavered uncomfortably in the middle. I want to believe that we are doing the right thing, and so far I’m pretty sure that I’m not deluding myself. Here in Los Angeles, most folks are either uninformed and uninterested or are badly misinformed and delight in disseminating incorrect information and adding their own personal, implausible spin to things. A good example of this was the anti-CNN rally that took place at Sunset and Cahuenga today. I find it amusing and more than a little bit frightening that so many folks derive so much satisfaction from from deriding something like CNN. To claim that CNN spouts propaganda and is a puppet of the government betrays a fundamental disconnect about the very country in which these people live. If they believe that the current government is the bad guy, then, thanks to the protections of the Constitution, the competition between the multitudes of news sources out there, and the ability of every citizen to seek out news from whatever source he or she please, CNN is one of the good guys. In fact, they have no choice but to be the good guy. The Constitution grants them the freedom to report what they please, and even if the government tried to stifle a major news story, CNN would have too mcuh to gain by being the first to break the story. They would do their best to report accurately because it pays off for them in increased viewership. And in the end, they have the force of law behind them anyway. All that this protest in LA really accomplished was the closing down for the day of many retail establishments along Sunset, which I’m guessing resulted in lost wages for the people working in the Staples, Jack in the Box, and Bank of America among others. Not to mention the traffic that they backed up. Does this accomplish anything aside from negatively affecting the lives of your fellow citizens. I don’t think so. I just hope that this is all over soon, and that we are doing the right thing.

Tao Lin, a young writer with a flair for cleverly drawing attention to his work, is in the news again. His latest scheme is to take investments from “the public” in his novel-in-progress in exchange for a portion of the royalties.The move appears to have been successful; shares are no longer available and Lin got written up in several mainstream publications, including a fairly lengthy piece in the Telegraph, and dozens of blogs. What nobody mentioned, however, is that this has been done before, some 40 years ago, by another outsized, New York personality.In the early years of his career, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn did the same thing, according to a John Lahr piece that originally ran in the New Yorker and is collected in his book of profiles, Show and Tell published in 2000. Shawn, son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, was a struggling writer going out of his way to achieve literary success without tapping into his father’s considerable influence. Lahr writes:Back then, Wally was forced to follow his own quirky, unconventional path. He told me he’d “sold stock in himself” – his way of rationalizing a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loan he took from a consortium of friends in the sixties, in order to go off and write his plays. (To this day, the investors receive a small yearly check).The juxtaposition of the two schemes presents an interesting notion. $2,500 40 years ago got you some small percentage of a budding artist’s career in perpetuity. $2,000 now only gets you 10% of the royalties for a novel. Inflation, I suppose.Finally, despite Shawn’s scheme (I believe) initially being revealed in a New Yorker piece and despite Shawn’s obvious ties to the magazine, The New Yorker, in its (admittedly very brief) mention of Lin’s plan on its own blog, did not catch the Shawn connection.Given the fractured state of publishing and the enthusiasm for trying new models, perhaps this shareholder form of patronage will take off, but it will have been Shawn, not Lin, who was the first innovator.