1.
My dictionary lives on the floor beside my desk — out of the way yet easy to reach when I need to consult it, which is something I do upwards of a dozen times a day. It’s the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a Christmas present from my father way back in 1974. After nearly four decades of service, the old warhorse is literally coming apart, its spine broken, its red cover crumbling, its pages yellowing at the edges and breaking free.
Why such loyalty to a book? Part of the answer is that, like most writers, I’m a creature of iron habit. Familiarity and routine tend to breed contentment rather than contempt. But mere familiarity would not be enough to make a writer stick with a tool as crucial as a dictionary. Much more important are what I consider the American Heritage’s three timeless virtues: its illustrations, its etymologies and, above all, its Usage Panel.
The illustrations in the first edition are black-and-white drawings, photographs, charts and maps, beautifully arrayed in the wide margins, a radical innovation in its day. The etymologies are concise, never fussy, frequently fascinating. (People who continue to consult unwieldy print dictionaries in our digital age, for instance, are distant descendants of Ned Lud(d), a late 18th-century English worker who destroyed textile machinery out of fear that this new technology would displace him and his fellow workmen.)
But the Usage Panel is what makes the American Heritage Dictionary unique and, for me, indispensable. For the first edition, the panel consisted of about 100 people, mostly professional writers and editors, mostly white, mostly male, with an average age of 68. They included Isaac Asimov, William F. Buckley Jr., John Ciardi, Malcolm Cowley, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Stegner; the women, outnumbered but not outgunned, included Pauline Kael, Margaret Mead, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, and Gloria Steinem.
Their task, in a nod to the fact that language is a fluid and slippery substance, was to vote on the proper and improper usages of given words. The editors then tallied the ballots and used them as the basis for recommendations contained in several hundred Usage Notes. The notes make for enriching reading. Here, for instance, is the Usage Note on disinterested:
Disinterested differs from uninterested to the degree that lack of self-iinterest differs from lack of any interest. Disinterested is synonymous with impartial, unbiased. Uninterested has the sense of indifferent, not interested. According to 93 percent of the Usage Panel, disinterested is not acceptable in the sense of uninterested, though it is often thus employed.
The last sentence is telling: the Usage Panel was almost unanimous in its verdict, even though many people use the word incorrectly. In other words, as the makers of The American Heritage Dictionary see it, popular usage does not determine correctness; the consensus of knowledgeable people determines correctness.
The editor of the first edition, William Morris (no kin to me), made it clear in his introduction that the democratic methods of the Usage Panel should not be equated with a disdain for rules or an unwillingness to make value judgments. Unanimity of opinion was not the goal, and it was achieved just once — when 100 percent of the panel rejected simultaneous as an adverb. The dictionary debuted in 1969 and was a direct rebuke to the far more freewheeling Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, which had appeared in 1961. In a sense, the AHD was a line in the sand between prescriptivists like Morris, who insist that one of a dictionary’s primary functions is to make informed distinctions between correct and incorrect uses of words, and descriptivists like Webster III’s makers, who contend that a dictionary’s function is merely to chronicle current practices. Here is Morris’s description of the prescriptivist goal for The American Heritage Dictionary: “It would faithfully record our language, the duty of any lexicographer, but would not, like so many others in these permissive times, rest there. On the contrary, it would add the essential dimension of guidance, that sensible guidance toward grace and precision, which intelligent people seek in a dictionary.” A good dictionary, he added, ought to be “a treasury of information about every aspect of words” and “an agreeable companion.”
After nearly four decades of poring over my first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary — it’s a book that invites you to read it rather than just refer to it — I can report that it has been a most agreeable companion.
2.
Maybe the reason that old dictionary and I got along so well for so long was because the man who gave it to me was a Usage Panel in his own right. My father was a newspaper reporter at The Washington Post when I was born, a gifted rewrite man who got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize along with Al Lewis, the cop reporter who would break the story of the Watergate break-in some 20 years later. In addition to being punctilious about grammar, usage, spelling, and style, my father was a lightning-fast typist. Ben Bradlee, a fellow Post reporter who went on to fame as the paper’s editor, wrote in his 1995 memoir, A Good Life, that “Dick Morris was the fastest typist in the newsroom.” To which my father, a proud man, sniffed, “I like to think I was the fastest writer in the newsroom.”
He had every right to be miffed. He was a fine writer and a fine editor, owner of a vast and ever-expanding vocabulary. Not once in his 86 years did I see him stumped when asked to define or spell a word. He was a big fan of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and he shared their belief that a person’s style of speaking and writing is an accurate barometer of that person’s intelligence and worth. As E.B. White put it, “Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition. This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what a man is, rather than what he knows, will at last determine his style.”
My father shared Flaubert’s belief that there is a right word for every situation, there are a great many wrong ones, and sometimes there is one perfect word. I can still remember the night in high school when I finished typing up a 17-page paper on my latest passion, Albert Camus. It was due the next morning, and I took it downstairs to present it to my father, terribly proud of myself. He read the opening sentence and immediately reached for the Cross pen in his shirt pocket. I looked on, aghast, as he circled a word in ink. He read the sentence aloud: “Before his premature death in a car crash in 1960 at the age of 46, Albert Camus had cemented his reputation as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.” Then my father said, “The word premature usually refers to a birth that takes place before the baby is ready. Untimely is the word you want if you’re referring to a man’s death at a relatively early age. Or possibly inopportune.” He continued to carve up my paper with ink marks, then sent me back upstairs to rework it. I spent most of the night editing and retyping the mess. Of course I got an A+ for the paper. Far more important, I’ve never forgotten the difference between premature and untimely.
My father’s insistence on precision and Strunk and White’s emphasis on the importance of style are not the same as advocating slavish adherence to rules. Quite the opposite. While The Elements of Style contains many rules, in the end the thing that matters most to its authors is a writer’s “ear,” the ability to distinguish writing that sounds right from writing that sounds wrong. For this reason, many writers (the great Elmore Leonard among them) always read their stuff out loud to find out how it sounds. If it sounds awkward or clunky, it gets rewritten because good writing is music made of ink. To this end, the wise writer knows that rules are there for bending, or ignoring. Splitting infinitives, using the passive voice, stringing together adjectives, pairing none with a plural verb, starting a sentence with a conjunction, ending a sentence with a preposition — those things are all against the rules, yet they’re in every good writer’s tool kit. The issue is knowing when and how to use them to make the writing sound right. The issue, in a word, is style.
3.
YOU ARE YOUR WORDS.
Those words, which my father and Strunk and White would have endorsed, appear on a refrigerator magnet that came with my copy of the new fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary. There is also an app (a $24.99 value) that allows one free download of the entire dictionary onto an iPad, iPhone, iPod, or Android. Alas, this Luddite doesn’t own any of these devices, but it was reassuring to know that the makers of my new dictionary are prescriptivists, not technophobes.
The book itself is a thing of beauty: 2,084 pages between sturdy cream-colored covers, weighing nearly eight pounds (up from a little over five pounds for the first edition). The illustrations in the fifth edition are in color, and the word entries are in blue ink, which was jarring at first but quickly became pleasing to the eye. The new edition, like the first, contains an extensive appendix of Indo-European Roots, a sort of pre-history of English words. The Usage Notes have been expanded, and they’re augmented by lists of Synonyms, notes on Our Living Language, and Word Histories, which are breezy, informative essays about how select words evolved. Here’s a sample Word History:
The word outlaw brings to mind the cattle rustlers and gunslingers of the Wild West, but it comes from a much earlier time, when guns were not yet invented but cattle stealing was. Outlaw can be traced back to the old Norse word utlagr, “outlawed, banished,” made up of ut, “out,” and log, “law.” An utlagi (derived from utlagr) was someone outside the protection of the law. The Scandinavians, who invaded and settled in England during the 8th through 11th century, gave us the Old English word utlaga, which designated someone who because of criminal acts had to give up his property to the crown and could be killed without recrimination. The legal status of the outlaw became less severe over the course of the Middle Ages. However, the looser use of the word to designate criminals in general, which arose in Middle English, lives on in tales of the Wild West.
And here’s a note on Our Living Language:
Gung ho is one of many words that entered the English language as a result of World War II. It comes from Mandarin Chinese gonghe, the slogan of the gongye hezuoshe, the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society. (The gong in gonghe means “work,” while he means “combine, join.”) Marine Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson (1896-1947) heard the expression and thought it was well-suited to the spirit he was trying to foster among his Marines, the famous “Carlson’s Raiders.” Carlson began to use it as a moniker for meetings in which problems were discussed and worked out, and his Marines began calling themselves the “Gung Ho Battalion.” Gung ho soon began to be used to describe any person who shows eagerness, as it still is today. Other words and expressions that entered the English language during World War II include flak, gizmo, task force, black market and hit the sack.
For the fifth edition, the Usage Panel was doubled in size and made more inclusive in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and specialty. In addition to writers and editors, the panel included scientists, scholars, linguists, translators, cartoonists, film directors, even a former U.S. senator and a Supreme Court justice. My guess is that the average age of the panelists is now closer to 48 than 68. The writers included Margaret Atwood, Harold Bloom, Roy Blount Jr., Junot Diaz, Joan Didion, Rita Dove, Frances FitzGerald, Jonathan Franzen, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Ozick, Ann Patchett, John Sayles, David Sedaris, William T. Vollmann, and John Edgar Wideman. Among the panelists who died during the decade the dictionary was being put together were Molly Ivins, Leonard Michaels, and David Foster Wallace.
The fifth edition contains 10,000 new words that were not in the fourth (published in 2000), which contained 10,000 new words that were not in the third (published in 1992). Among the new entries are asshat (vulgar slang for a contemptible or detestable person), filk (a genre of music popular among devotees of science fiction and fantasy literature), and ollie (a skateboard maneuver). I knew what an ollie was, but I was delighted to learn its etymology: it’s the nickname of Alan Gelfand (born 1963), the American skateboarder who developed the trick.
For all its many virtues, the fifth edition is not perfect. Its one glaring flaw is an introductory essay written by the chairman of the Usage Panel, Steven Pinker, a Harvard University linguist and cognitive scientist who is also an avowed descriptivist. In “Usage in The American Heritage Dictionary,” Pinker writes, “(W)hen many speakers misuse a word on many occasions in the same way — like credible for credulous, enervate for excite, or protagonist for proponent — who’s to say they’re wrong? When enough people misuse a word, it becomes perverse to insist that they’re misusing it at all.”
What’s that whirring noise I hear? Is it William Morris, who died in 1994, spinning in his grave? Pinker’s argument is the very sort of “permissive” thinking Morris so vigorously decried in his introduction to the first edition. It’s also the reason we get presidents like George W. Bush, who uttered gobbledygook like misunderestimate and said vulcanize when he meant Balkanize.
After his descriptivist, usage-determines-correctness salvo, Pinker goes on to disparage something he calls “the paradox of false consensus.” (For some reason he calls this paradox bubba meises, which is Yiddish for “grandmother’s tales,” when the English expression “old wives’ tales” would have done the job.) The most notorious bubbe meise, Pinker claims, is the prohibition against split infinitives, which, as we have seen, is an old rule that skilled writers feel free to flout whenever it suits their needs. But Pinker sees something nefarious, even dangerous, in such rules. He writes:
How do ludicrous fetishes like the prohibition of split verbs become entrenched? For a false consensus to take root against people’s better judgment it needs the additional push of enforcement. People not only avow a dubious belief that they think everyone else avows, but they punish those who fail to avow it, largely out of the belief — also false — that everyone else wants it enforced. False conformity and false enforcement can magnify each other, creating a vicious circle that entraps a community into a practice that few of its members would accept on their own…The same cycle of false enforcement could entrench a linguistic bubba meise as a bogus rule of usage. It begins when a self-anointed expert elevates one of his peeves or cockamamie theories into an authoritative pronouncement that some usage is incorrect, or better still, ignorant, barbaric, and vulgar.
Insecure writers are intimidated into avoiding the usage. They add momentum to the false consensus by derogating those who don’t keep the faith, much like the crowds who denounced witches, class enemies and communists out of fear that they would be denounced first.
I’m still having trouble believing that such lame logic and tawdry sensationalism — beware the witch hunt! watch out for Red-baiters! — were allowed between the covers of this otherwise wonderful book. I can only guess that the editors were hoping that by including Pinker’s gibberish they would defuse charges of elitism. If so, they’ve shown poor judgment and a surprising lack of respect for this dictionary’s rich history, high standards and unapologetically prescriptivist leanings.
So go ahead and call me Cotton Mather or Joe McCarthy or, worse, an elitist. But I’m going to keep following the guidance of Ann Patchett, Cynthia Ozick, David Foster Wallace and their hundreds of elite colleagues who contributed to this new incarnation of The American Heritage Dictionary. It’s one of the most agreeable companions any lover of the English language could hope to have.
Images courtesy of the author.
Normally, residencies are funded by a combination of public funding and private donors and foundations that support the arts. The nation’s oldest residency program is the MacDowell Colony, founded in the early 1900s by composer Edward MacDowell, who noted to his wife, a pianist, that in their summer location on their bucolic farm in New Hampshire, he produced better — and more — music. The MacDowell Colony was born out of the desire to share this experience, and various artists, including writers, visual artists, composers, and choreographers from all over the world travel to Peterborough, N.H., to sleep in communal quarters, eat wonderful food, and work without distraction in a studio out in the woods. Work that has come out of this one place has shaped the American cultural landscape — e.g., Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town there; over the years, the Colony has dispensed this gift of time and creativity to artists as varied as James Baldwin, Aaron Copland, and Meredith Monk. This gift is made possible in part by public funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ah, Mall of America… ! *Shudder*. It was 1995 and I had returned to the US, with First Wife, after 5 years in Europe, to get First Wife a Green Card. I had saved enough for us to live for about 18 months (staying at a friend’s house near Lake Calhoun) but, as it turned out, I *had* to get a job (any job) in order to get her the Green Card…
Cut to: Payless (emphasis on the first syllable) Shoe Source, in the Mall of America. Quite an adventure. The only thing more impressive than the fact that the M.o.A. is so big that it has its own weather (moisture in the upper atmosphere, under the roof, condenses and you get sun showers) is the weight- capacity of the elevators: it seemed as though the average American had gained an average of 150 pounds in the five years I’d been gone.
I was writing quite a lot, so I was an *unofficial writer in residence*, but, if polemic is a minor literature, polemic against the patrons of the Mall of America is even worse. I didn’t get my Muse back until First Wife got the Green Card and we escaped to Southern California, where she took (like a duck to Exxoned water) to the basest elements of So Cal life. I got *so* many (scars and) stories out of that… but… I digress…
It goes without saying that any piece of writing, coming out of a corporate sponsorship, that, miraculously, happened to be *actual Literature*… would not be deemed “appropriate” by the sponsors. Unless, of course, you’re talking about a corporate sponsorship in a hemisphere that doesn’t contain a shopping Mall so big that it has its own weather.
One of America’s greatest failings (beyond the transformation of its armed forces into the world’s most well-funded terrorist squad and utter inability to fathom universal healthcare) is its total disinterest in funding the arts, which is what every other Western nation does. The arts cannot be easily monetized like war, healthcare and now education, though, which is why bureaucrats mock its role in society. Pathetic.
“The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”
You could make a case for this aspect of the week as a sort of performance art opportunity, although my recollection is the Mall wants to exercise control over what the writer has to say for the big “almost real time” screen. So what this is not is a residency or a fellowship, and the copyright aspect is exploitative in the extreme. I have entertained doomed hopes that the Mall would reconsider its terms. If other prospective benefactors ( a word that, alas for me, inevitably conjures Mr Brocklehurst) are inclined to set up arts funding, I hope they will look to organizations like Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell etc for guidance.
For all the disdain directed toward the mall, with fair terms I believe this could be a great opportunity. So many public spaces (malls, train stations, hotel lobbies, public libraries) are ideal places to work and draw on the environment and fabulous people-watching opportunities to create. Look at the hordes of writers hunkered down in coffeehouses or applying for the Amtrak residency.
Thanks for writing this piece, I am going to click on through to your NEA article.
beamish13:
What facts do you have to back that up? What’s the evidence that in the US there’s less public and private non-profit support for the arts than in, say, Germany or the UK? Keep in mind that states and local municipalities have their own programs for funding the arts, that private non-profit and charitable institutions (McArthur, etc.) have gigantic budgets, and that a lot of funding is done through publicly-funded universities.The NEA is but a small fraction of support for the arts in the US. The US has hundreds of literary magazines, and practically all of them are publicly-funded in one way or another. How many does Sweden have, per capita? Got numbers?
Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life. As a result, their writing is sterile, solipsistic, limited. There are many young writers nowadays who have never had a real job precisely because there’s too much support.
“Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life.”
There’s a tricky balance to strike. Too much support (aka coddling) and decadence sets in. Too little or no support, on the other hand, means little or no writing gets done.
When I went through a phase of working long hours at physically-demanding jobs (eg house painting or deck-building), all I wanted to do, after getting home from work, every day, was eat directly out of a pot, read, pass out, groan up out of my dreams before the crack of dawn, stagger off to work, repeat. The first few months of that I was able to get writing done on the weekends, but, as I discovered, after more than a year of this routine, it’s as though the accumulated hours of back-breaking just pile up into a black mountain of bleakest Reality, looming derisively over the twee golden fantasy molehill of Writing. Any sane Writer, in these circumstances, starts questioning the point of the practise.
In other words, it’s not just the fantasy on the page that matters; the Writing Life itself requires a safe space in which to nurture the primary fantasy that Writing *matters*, that it’s a legitimate thing for an adult to do with her/his time. Especially in a pathologically materialist culture. A *bit* of support from the Government (in any concession to the notion that Culture is a serious pursuit) is both a necessary easing and a nod of assent.
I lived in Stockholm, for a while, at the turn of the century and I met some unknown Writers there who were supported by the Gov with the solicitousness you’d expect to be shown to scientists developing advanced weapons systems, which did wonders for those Writers’ self-confidence. This is especially important if the work being done by a Writer is not *commercial*; the so-called Free Market may indeed support the efforts of the (slick) commercial talent, but the Weirdos, experimenting with the Challenging and Difficult, definitely need subsidies from *somewhere*.
I never got (or applied for) grants/stipends/retreats but I moved to a city in a country where Literary Culture is still discussed and debated on prime time TV and where the rents/ groceries/ discos are cheap and one doesn’t feel a fool for Writing. Which is all I need, really. I have (Weirdo) readers and a sense of the usefulness and *sanity* of the practise. Perfect.
People expect “real Writers” to keep on writing, regardless, but I don’t think it usually happens that way. Youthful Enthusiasm catapults one onward to 20-something Inspiration and thence to 30-something Endurance shading to Sheer Cussedness… but then what?
If a few crumbs from Gov saves the endangered species of the talented, forty-something, Weirdo House Painter/ Writer, I’m all for it. Because *those* voices are going to be more interesting, as you point out, for having lived a bit.
By the way, I can’t get over the fact that a published novelist is writing sentences such as “This paradise for the mind is also free or minimal cost, they sometimes come with stipends for lost wages.” None of my eighth-grade tutees would dare send a sentence like that across my desk.
It’s really easy to rip on the “Megamall” – the jokes practically write themselves – but for lifelong Minnesotans like myself the mall we love to hate is an inextricable part of our lives. My father worked on the construction of the original mall; decades later I worked on another project there. Camp Snoopy, the original amusement park, was better than it needed to be; I’ve probably ridden the many iterations of the Log Flume more than any other ride at any other park. I’ve been to the mall for birthday parties, stoned-teenager movie viewings, a prom dinner (inexplicably), a crazy long night with my wife in the 4th floor bars; I’ve seen the wide-eyed wonder of my children as they gaze upon marine life at Underwater World; I’ve played hooky from work to build a stuffed animal with my oldest daughter on Toddler Tuesday; I’ve been baffled by the size of crowds on a random Tuesday morning in April. I remember the enormous Sam Goody and the memorabilia shop on the first floor (home to the most expensive retail space in the state) and the island-themed restaurant on the 3rd.
So, sure, the Mall is capitalism run amok – it doesn’t have its own weather (lol Steven) but it does have its own zip code. Yet the Mall has employed tens of thousands of people over the years. Hearty Minnesotans may sneer at the suckers who do their Christmas shopping there (so expensive) yet almost all of us have made a last-minute trip there (if you can’t find a gift at the Mall…) It is an incredibly diverse place, which makes it the premier place to practice the fine art of people-watching. It draws visitors from around the globe (Japan in particular, for reasons I haven’t quite nailed down), which is the only place in Minnesota that can claim that.
All of this is to say that there are GREAT stories to be written about the Mall. Some sort of “oral history” project would be fascinating. An hour of people-watching in the Rotunda or one of the food courts would provide inspiration for a terrific short story or three. The labyrinthine back-of-house areas – loading docks, mechanical spaces, administrative offices – would be a terrific setting for a murder mystery. It’s too bad the Mall folks are viewing this purely from the PR lens. By giving a solid writer a true residency, there’s no telling what would come out of it – but like the Mall itself, it could not avoid being interesting.
Toad!
I found the place lethally-tacky (and embodying everything wrong, and environmentally toxic, about the “Biggest is Bestest” approach), though maybe it became a domed Greenwich Village, c. 1966, after I left…
…but I *did* get one really useful experience out of it: riding to work one morning, I sat behind a couple who began chatting about what they’d do with the money if they won that week’s Bigass Lottery. It was a long ride, and by the end of it, the chat had become a vicious verbal punch-up, with the lady of the couple changing her seat, the two each then muttering solo, at opposite ends of the bus, for the rest of the ride. Because the gentleman had declared “If I won that money, I wouldn’t give *any* of it to *you*.”
Steve, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling it some sort of hidden paradise by any means – again, the vulgarities are so obvious they need not be mentioned. My only points were 1) the place is a major part of the culture of the region, like it or not; and 2) there are plenty of great stories to be told from there.
Toad!
Were you stationed out in Bloomington or closer to St Paul/ Mpls? If the latter (depending on your vintage; I bet these places are long gone) ever have a “Red Earth Breakfast” at the Seward Cafe? Or buy records at Positively Fourth Street (or OarFolkJokeOpus)? Feeling some guarded nostalgia…
It appears that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, just don’t get it. The problem with taxpayers funding NEA, NEH, and CPB is that these organizations ARE the “propaganda content factories” that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, are so concerned about. If they were not, already, off-the-chart-left-leaning, they would not be on the chopping block. The potential demise of taxpayer funding for NEA, NEH, and CPB has nothing to do with President Trump’s business acumen. It has everything to do with NEA, NEH, and CPB being the propaganda content factories the left.
Frank:
More broadly, the problem with taxpayers funding the arts is that once you fund something with your tax dollars, you feel (rightly) that you have the right to control it. Remember the “Jesus Piss” scandal in that museum in Brooklyn about a decade ago? The left whined about censorship and religious coercion, but the right had a valid point: what right do you have to offend me using my tax dollars? Use your own money to do so.
But the left doesn’t get that. It wants public funds AND the freedom to do with them what it wills. Tax dollars with no strings. And that doesn’t work.
“And that doesn’t work.”
Well, not under America’s current grid of guiding principles. This is an except from William Osborne’s “Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill”…
“As an American who has lived in Europe for the last 24 years, I see on a daily basis how different the American and European economic systems are, and how deeply this affects the ways they produce, market and perceive art. America advocates supply-side economics, small government and free trade – all reflecting a belief that societies should minimize government expenditure and maximize deregulated, privatized global capitalism. Corporate freedom is considered a direct and analogous extension of personal freedom. Europeans, by contrast, hold to mixed economies with large social and cultural programs. Governmental spending often equals about half the GNP. Europeans argue that an unmitigated capitalism creates an isomorphic, corporate-dominated society with reduced individual and social options. Americans insist that privatization and the marketplace provide greater efficiency than governments. These two economic systems have created something of a cultural divide between Europeans and Americans.
“Germany’s public arts funding, for example, allows the country to have 23 times more full-time symphony orchestras per capita than the United States, and approximately 28 times more full-time opera houses. [1] In Europe, publicly funded cultural institutions are used to educate young people and this helps to maintain a high level of interest in the arts. In America, arts education faces constant cutbacks, which helps reduce interest.
plus
“In its purest form, America’s neo-liberalism would suggest that cultural expression that doesn’t fit in the marketplace doesn’t belong at all. For the arts, the alternative has been to maintain a relatively marginalized existence supported by gifts from corporations, foundations and the wealthy. A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves. This philosophy is almost diametrically opposed to the tradition of large public cultural funding found in most of Europe’s social democracies.”
http://www.osborne-conant.org/arts_funding.htm
This seems like a response to my earlier comment asking for evidence, not to my later one. My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. Lee demands that tax dollars be taken from taxpayers and given to her, but she’d be the first to complain that the same taxpayers who gave her the money want her to do with it x rather than y.
“My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. ”
Not sure why that should be axiomatic… if the tax payers *understand and value* Culture (in the sense of The Arts). If the TPs think Culture is just another grouping of commodities and/ or services, that’s a deeper problem than the lack of funding for it. And they often do. And it is. There’s more to Life than money and more to the notion of Value(s) than quid-pro-quo transactions, no?
Not that I want to go around and around on the topic (I know the ideological divide is unbridgeable in either direction), I just wanted to register another POV for the sake of any residual American Bohemians out there, in hiding, reading this, tremulously, in some attic with a secret entrance… (laugh)
Steven:
You’re babbling, and I’ve no idea what you’re saying. My point is very simple: those adults who want to live with their parents have to live by their parents’ rules, no matter how foolish these rules may be. Lee wants the public to fund her art, but she won’t have the public regulate or control her art. She wants to have it both ways. She can’t. So let her get a real job, or let her take that Mall of America residency.
This is why the right wants to cut the NEA: it’s not the money but the principle. Conservatives don’t want spoiled brats to take taxpayers’ money and then whine that their writing space isn’t quiet enough, especially when many of these conservatives are blue-collar workers who actually earn a living the hard way. If I were working in a factory 40 hours a week and then had to read Lee complaining about the inhumanity of having to clock in for a writing gig at a mall, I’d be calling my congressman immediately and ask him to axe the NEA.
Besides, all that whiny “I need a safe, quiet space, complete with a stipend, so I can write” nonsense. What delicate flowers these MFA kids are! Let them work for a living. I’m not saying they have to go all out Eugene O’Neill or George Orwell and eat the wallpaper, but it won’t hurt them to earn a buck.
Sorry, Liam. I tend to babble when I’m bored.
Liam,
Your arguments are boring and fatally unoriginal. You seem to belong to that group of people whose intellectual arsenal consists of about six buzzwords (such as “delicate flower”, “real job”, “safe space” – you forgot “snowflake” “politically correct” and “libtard”) which you rearrange to build whatever windmill it is you are chasing. This is why arts funding is necessary – critical, independent thought is important!
Liam, I didn’t want my tax dollars to support the war in Iraq, or the massive expansion of the prison system, but they were used for those things and will continue to be funneled into similarly morally bankrupt enterprises whether I like it or not. So I’m comfortable with you inadvertently funding a painting or a novel that offends your sensibilities to the tune of two cents a year.
Liam,
As a writer, please direct me to all this sweet free money you speak of. I want to never work again!
Oh, right. This is just bullshit you’re making up. Guess I’ll move back in with my fambly!
I’m sorry, toad, if my reasoning is not up to your standards, but perhaps you could still try to understand my point, which so far has cruised over your head: public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached. And if I may return the favor, “give more money to the arts” is itself somewhat boring and unoriginal. Perhaps “This is how more money would make the arts better” would be more interesting and original, but I’ve yet to see anyone make it. Care to try?
Coulier: the free money I speak of is the money Lee wants the federal government to give her, the money that is supposed to save her from the horror of the mall residency.
anon: my sensibilities, you may be surprised to note, are very similar to yours. But you don’t fix one giant evil–military and war–by sniveling about a far smaller evil not getting bigger.
I urge all of you to take a look at the situation in Israel if you want to see what happens when artists clamor for state funding and the state says, “Here’s the money, and here are the strings. Knock yourselves out”. Google “Miri Regev” and you’ll see the NY Times article on the first page. This is exactly what you people are bringing us to: the arts serving the state and its wars, nationalism, racism, and militarism.
Liam
“public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached.”
This is just demonstrably false. I don’t know how to help you better understand this. For an introductory list of artists who have benefited from public funding, I would start with reading this article, particularly the 3rd to last paragraph.
However, I think you would best benefit from a formal understanding of the NEA, specifically its grant program for writers. https://www.arts.gov/grants I suppose if submitting an application and, if selected, a few progress reports are “tight strings”, well, then, we have different definitions of “tight strings”.
toad:
The wind of condescension you keep breaking my way rings somewhat odorless when it comes from a commenter who consistently fails to understand what amounts to a very simple argument. No, the strings attached are not the application forms, but thanks for the informative link. Now take out that stick and read about Miri Regev and her attempt to subvert art to the service of nationalism, etc. It happens there and it could happen here, and it will if the NEA here is as strong (read: well-funded) as the Ministry of Culture is over there. Strings, see?
Liam,
So, let me get your “very simple argument”: the culture minister in a foreign country is a nationalist, which means if an analogous American cultural agency, which is .002% of the budget and on the chopping block, becomes too powerful (which it never has in its entire existence, no prominent politician has ever cared about, and no one is clamoring for anything different), the writers lucky enough to receive modest grants from this agency (who are by your own admission all lazy lefties) will be forced to churn out nationalist propaganda?
Are those winds ringing stinky yet?
Where did I say that all NEA grantees are lazy leftists? You’re incapable of arguing like an adult, so you make things up. You’re angry, so you shoot in all directions without reading the comments you’re responding to. I’m sorry, but your dispirited artist’s frustration is not my fault
Have a nice weekend.
“Let them work for a living”
“Earn a buck”
“Delicate flowers”
“Get a real job”
“Spoiled brats”
“Whine/whiny”
My childish point is that NEA funding, and taxes in general, do not work the way you claim they do, and that your “aggressive arts funding leads to increased militarism” white-hot take is not a danger to this country. Have a nice weekend.
You know, toad, I’m in such good mood this morning that I’m inclined to be nice even to you, and even after you’ve collected sentence fragments that were targeted at specific individuals and assigned them, on my behalf, to all NEA grantees.
Whatever. I woke up today and discovered in my mailbox a note that my play had been accepted for production, even though I wrote it over nights, with airport-grade earmuffs to combat ambient noise, and with the horror of the visual clutter of power lines staring at me from across the street. So on this lovely Saturday* morning, I say, can’t we all just get along?
Now, have a REALLY good weekend. I know I will.
* Us working people assign a special meaning to that day. Ask around.
I know a lot of people who work Saturdays; it’s not a special day. Liam, you romanticize too much.
Liam, congratulations! Do tell where and when we can see your play.
I must say, old chap, you are obsessed with work. You would be shocked to know that I, too, have a job. It’s really quite amazing, eh? Two people, with jobs. Not only that, I also manage to write in my free time, without a view, a thousand miles from NYC! It’s perfect! I don’t want or need any grants or residencies. I suppose the only difference between you and I is that I don’t expect a medal for it, and I don’t presume that my circumstances should apply to everyone else.
Anyway, I’m off to seek out some “workers” with whom to discuss the concept of “Saturday”. I’m humbled by how much I have to learn. Cheers!
@Steven Augustine
“A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves.”
And where is it different? Osborne’s analysis makes for good paper and lousy policy, conflating as it does, artistic production with artistic performance.
More “full-time opera houses” by a factor of 28? Means what? That America, not Germany, is the home of “conspicuous consumption”? That “there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing” as long as it’s opera? Or, to the point, that the world is in paradigm shift as a result of the cultural influence of German opera? Soldiers laying down their weapons because of the the 21st century equivalent of the Ring Cycle?
We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache. We don’t even need to look.
It’s all capital, art-loving friends. The only difference: who’s laundering the funds. Britons launder theirs through the National Lotto – 40-billion pound sterling per annum to be sure St Martin-in-the-Fields never fails to perform Bach at Christmas. Germans put the squeeze on poor EU relations to make sure every province has an “opera”. And Americans do what they do and still manage to lead the entire world (save China, who, admit it, is pirating American production) in books published. Are any of these models – indirect public tax, direct public tax, hybrid – ideal? The question should be more pragmatic: where is the good writing coming from? The era-defining visuals? The groundbreaking sound?
***
Private residencies are a great thing, if you can lasso one, but the MoA residency sounds like a trainwreck. “The artist is given time to ‘social network'” and “scroll his work on a big screen in real time”? I live in the land of government funded art, and my experience is that THAT system attracts “artists” who are as adept at sniffing out grants as they are mediocre at “making art”. Liam has a point: you MAKE somebody contribute to support the arts, he’s going to assume some aspect, albeit tiny, of “the patron”. Under those conditions, the threat of self-censorship is ever lurking, and any artist who says it’s not at the back of his mind is fibbing.
@Il’ja
I’m not going to formulate a point-by-point rebuttal of an interrogation of someone else’s words (what’s in it for me?), the gist of those words being: a little more of America’s fiscal War Budget could and should go to support The Arts… I think it’s more useful to compare the America of the near, and almost-near, Past, to its Present, regarding the topic. Also, if we cast the net of this discussion too broadly (re: Capital, Capitalism, Capitalismitis and the CIA) we’ll ignite one of those raging off-piste fests, familiar from the days of yore (and is this topic/thread really worth that…?)
(sidebar: Liam only has a point to the extent that Reaganite Reactionaries like Liam cowed the NEA into being the shriveled organ it is today, but read the excerpt, below, for more on that…)
So, let’s focus on the controversial idea of Gov support for the Arts (however dirty the support-money is) and look back at the good old days, before the Reagan Revolution declared ketchup a vegetable and High Culture a drug in need of stricter regulation:
“The NEA was a fundamental part of democracy’s expansion. Its Literature Program had two distinct but overlapping goals: to sponsor more exciting, experimental writing and to democratize the field of literary production. The fellowship program, founded in 1967, was the most important means it used to achieve both of these aims. Agency administrators recognized that writing fiction or poetry requires resources—time, money, childcare, travel—that few citizens could afford.
“As poet and program director Carolyn Kizer put it, the fellowships to individual writers—totalling $205,000, roughly a quarter of the Literature Program’s budget in 1967—were designed to “buy time.” As Kizer’s words suggest, the NEA de-commodified time, granting it to writers who needed it most. Grant winners with dependents received more money than those without—this was especially important for women, who were often saddled with domestic work. Between 1967 and 1971, the NEA sent talent scouts around the country, looking for writers who might not have access to the traditional avenues for publication. “Discovery Grants” were awarded to these unknowns, including a young West Coast fiction writer and poet named Raymond Carver. With these efforts, the NEA reshaped literary production, transforming the conditions under which talented citizens lived and worked.
“These state-funded writers, many from marginalized populations, experimented with literary form. The inaugural class of fellowship winners, who received two-year grants in 1967, included two socialist-feminist fiction writers, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley. A former Young Communist, Olsen in particular revolutionized the writing and teaching of literature. Her fiction and essays about the American working class married unconventional, modernist form with radical leftist politics. In the years before and after she received the NEA grant, she clamored for revised university reading lists and increased financial support for women, writers of color, and members of the working class. She called these would-be writers the “silenced people” who, “consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life,” rarely had time to produce creative work. How much great writing, she asked, has been lost to history? The NEA shared Olsen’s concern with amplifying historically silenced voices, just as it shared her belief that these voices would speak—would write—in radical, resonant ways.
“For the NEA, this ambition led it to seek and support writers who lacked market appeal. In addition to granting fellowships to individual writers, the agency funded small, independent presses and avant-garde literary journals. When the agency compiled an anthology of American writing in 1968, it drew largely from the “little magazines,” literary journals that published work by young and unknown writers. One reviewer commented approvingly that the anthology mainly included “non-commercial” work, by fledging writers and by controversial figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). The NEA provided writers with several different ways of circumventing the literary marketplace, freeing them to write fiction and poetry that was difficult, politically radical, or both.
“Despite its penchant for niche literature, the agency flourished during the 1970s. The number of grants awarded increased each year, as did the money for each creative writing fellowship. By October 1977 the agency’s budget had increased from $2.5 million to nearly $124 million, thanks largely to the politicking of chair Nancy Hanks. During these same years, the government provided direct grants to some of the nation’s most contentious and innovative writers, including John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, and Ishmael Reed. The literary climate favored experimentation: the decade also saw the publication of Toni Morrison’s debut The Bluest Eye, a novel that used wordplay to critique racist standards of beauty, and the rise of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, an avant-garde, politically leftist movement that challenged the conventions of lyric poetry. Though the era had its share of battles (the deputy chair once had to visit the offices of forty-six members of Congress to explain why a seven-letter poem deserved $750 in public funds), the 1970s were a high point for the NEA and for experimental literature as well.”
So far so good… until the good times hit a wall when, essentially, during the ’80s and ’90s…
“the NEA met with increased resistance to its grant programs. The agency came under siege for funding (often indirectly) formally challenging, politically radical art by feminist, queer, and non-white Americans. With the support of fellow politicians from his own party, Republican Senator Jesse Helms launched a multi-year campaign against the NEA, charging it with funding “obscene” art by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Karen Finley. The controversies surrounding these artists as well as several performance artists prompted the agency to experiment with a short-lived loyalty oath. More importantly, these difficult years led to the elimination of all grants to individual artists—except for grants to writers. Today, the NEA still awards $950,000 in individual fellowships for fiction, poetry, and translation, all of which are drawn from diminished public funds.”
Even worse, in time:
“Castigated by the right for its irrelevance and indecency, scorned by the left for its cowardice in the face of prejudice and supposed philistinism, the NEA has lately turned to the market for guidance and started placing a few safer bets. In its first decades, the agency served as a literary bellwether, funding unknown writers, often at early stages in their careers. Though it still funds such writers, it also funds successful writers, who receive their NEA grant after winning major awards or writing bestsellers; such winners were more rare in the 1970s. Recent grant winners have included Jonathan Franzen, following the publication of his prize-winning and best-selling The Corrections; Cristina García, after she wrote the National Book Award nominee Dreaming in Cuban; and Jhumpa Lahiri, who, by the time she received her fellowship, had already won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies, a book that sold 15 million copies worldwide. Lesser-known writers still dominate the awards list, but the presence of writers like Franzen insure the agency against charges of idiosyncrasy.
“Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists who may never find market success, or who may not even desire it. On the whole, today’s writers are less materially secure than those of previous generations. They are more likely to be saddled with student debt, from undergraduate as well as graduate education. They are less likely to find day jobs that provide enough income to pay off loans, never mind to support creative work. The “hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life” has only gotten harder today, when healthcare, housing, and other essentials have become unaffordable for many.”
******
The entire article is interesting reading. The main point being: things weren’t always this way (this awful way), and Gov support of The Arts, handled tastefully (without an eye to The Bottom Line), can be a very good thing. Yes, American Civilization was once so advanced that they could decouple the notion of State Sponsored Support for the Arts from the Philistine requirement that the supported Artist becomes, therefore, a hireling of some sort. The monies involved, after all, were just crumbs from the table.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/who-pays-writers-welfare-state-literature
PS “We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache.”
The last time I attended the Opera, here, in Berlin, at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans; maybe a third couldn’t have gotten into a mid-level nightclub in Chicago, the way they were dressed. Cultural differences.
“…at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans…”
When a ticket for Tannhäuser at the Berlin Opera goes from 53€ to 169€ the fact that half an audience is in jeans – dressing down or cheap signalling? – tells us, in comparison, very little.
What the left, (yes, I’m among it) doesn’t seem to grasp in this flareup over .01% of the budget comes across in both your cursory dismissal, i.e. “Cultural differences” and the article’s assumption that statements like “Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists…” should just be accepted as fait accompli.
Who needs it most? What does a “politically radical” writer sound like in 2017? Is it the same as in 1980? Who determines this? Has the environment of private arts funding / retreats / etc. improved or worsened since Reagan et al. took the knife to it? A writer who leans to the right should just shut up? Put down the pen because this is not intended for you? The particular taxonomy of this is getting dangerously close to a course of events that I think we both agree is unacceptable. But the perception is out there that the Left is unaware of how shrill, how fascist, how bankrupt it has begun to sound exactly because of issues like this one.
To make this practical: WHICH of the following do you think Trump would appoint to head the NEA? Rush Limbaugh or Toni Morrison. And do you think that appointment would legitimize the work of the NEA? Would we be happier if he appointed Rush and then put $10B into the Agency?
We are in agreement. That a nation with a $14T budget should ignore, or worse, attempt to commoditize, the humanities is disgraceful. Where we disagree – I assume – is that the bourgeois-flavored models of arts funding in Europe’s social democracies provide much, if any kind of workable example to follow.
Clearly, anyone interested in seeing Opera cheaply in Berlin should consult me before consulting you, Il’ja; here’s one quick reference, slightly dated (2011):
“Deutsche Oper:
The West Berlin opera is a mammoth black box of acoustic wonder. Nosebleed seats are €14, and as the theater is much bigger than the other two, you may actually struggle to see everything from up there. Students under 30 get 50% off all tickets one week before the performance, and pay no more than €13.50 one hour before performance.
Extra cheapo tip: Sometimes your opera ticket doubles as a public transportation ticket from and to the theater, so check the fine print on the ticket. If you have Berlin Welcome Card, you also get 25% off certain tickets at all of the three operas.”
more recent info:
“If you are under 30 years old and are planning on seeing several productions during your visit, you should invest in a Classiccard, a wonderful scheme that costs 15 euros to sign up for an annual membership. It entitles you to the best available seats at any of the three opera houses and various other orchestras and musical groups (the Berlin Philharmonic is the notable exception) one hour before curtain at the evening box office for 10 euros (again, cash only). 1 ticket per Classiccard unless a special offer is on.”
“If you are sadly not 28 years old or under, you can still get into the Philharmonie either with a Podiumplatz, which is a seat on the onstage bleachers in back of the orchestra, or a Stehplatz, which is standing room. Of the two, the podium seats are easier to score, but they aren’t offered when a choir or extra-large / usual instrument ensemble is required. They go on sale at the beginning of the week for that weekend’s concert series (typically the same program will be given on Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and cost 16 euros.”
How much does it cost to see the “Hulk vs Thor vs Trump” movie in Manhattan…?
But, back to The Topic; here’s an article, from 2014, that doesn’t mention Opera:
“Culturally Impoverished: US NEA Spends 1/40th of What Germany Doles Out for Arts Per Capita”
“1. Germany: Germany’s cultural budget was approximately $1.63 billion USD in 2013. According to Ian Moss, research director of Fractured Atlas, Germany’s art funding in 2007 equated to roughly $20 per German citizen, which “dwarfs the 41 cents per red-blooded American provided by the NEA. What artist wouldn’t want to live there?” Moss told Huffington Post.”
http://www.alternet.org/culture/culturally-impoverished-us-nea-spends-140th-what-germany-doles-out-arts-capita
****
The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances are Expat Artists, enjoying the superior conditions, for Artists, over here.
Even my health insurance (which is *amazing*) is special health insurance for Artists; incredibly cheap, with access to absolutely topnotch care (our Daughter, who was born in a high-tech birthing salon hot tub, before we all spent the night in a private birthing suite, cost me no more than the equivalent of 200 dollars being born, including months of birthing classes and a follow-up house call from the doctor!). This is not an abstract or hypothetical debate, for me. I lived (all over) the US my first 30 years, and I’ve lived in several countries in the EU thereafter, and the reality of “State Sponsorship for the Arts” in the US has to be examined through the dirty lens of the US’ Gulag (or cattle farm) mentality when it comes to the 99%.
Not that creeping NeoLiberalization isn’t trying to degrade the rest of the West to the same Feudal standards….
But to circle back to the question of private sector funding for the Arts, and the M.o.A.’s generous (and typical) offer to some lucky Writer to be a sideshow attraction at one of Mammon’s bloodiest Colosseums for a working week…
““The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”
How could writing, produced under such conditions, be anything other than cat shit in a sealed baggie on a hissing radiator?