Categories vs.Tags = Chapters vs. Index

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tags, tea

(photo: wikimedia)

No doubt this blog would benefit from a better system of categories and tags (the words that appear at the bottom and let readers search for similar content). Here’s a guide from the Elegant Themes blog on how to make those improvements. My tags alternate between the too general (“book”) and the too specific (the name of a person I’ve written about once). Time for a clean-up.

If you’re a blogger, you may have been as mystified about the difference between categories and tags as I still am, and this post will help there, too. It asks you to think about your blog as a book, with your categories as chapter titles and your tags as the index—more detailed, in other words. That means it’s easier to change and add tags than it is categories, if you already have a lot of content. (Ideally, this should have been done two years ago, when I started, but there you have it. Perfection is elusive.)

The link provides a helpful list of do’s and don’ts, too. Many of which this blog violates. Faced with such a situation I always hear the immortal Jonathan Winters calling, “We’ve gotta get organized!”

Can-Can

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Sinatra, MacLaine, Can-Can, Cole PorterWatched the 1960 musical Can-Can last night. Such great Cole Porter songs, and two terrific dance numbers choreographed by Hermes Pan that were awfully modern for “1896,” even in Paris. And, of course, not to mention lots of can-can dancing, followed by police-whistle blowing, followed by general mayhem. This is not a movie you watch for plot. Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chavalier, Shirley MacLaine, Louis Jourdan, Juliet Prowse—all up to snuff, and then some.

The DVD began with the overture playing and a black screen, and just as I was convinced the thing was defective, the 20th Century Fox logo popped up. There’s also a black screen intermission and postlude. Throw up a slide, people!

Charming credits with Toulouse-Lautrec –inspired drawings, so I cannot explain why the poster is so awful! Songs: “I Love Paris,” “You Do Something to Me,” “It’s All Right with Me,” “Just One of Those Things,” “C’est Magnifique.” (Not all of these were in the original Broadway production.) Sigh.

And, amazingly, when Nikita Khrushchev visited Hollywood after pounding his shoe on the table at the United Nations, this is the movie they took him to see!

Olive Kitteridge: on TV

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Olive Kitteridge, HBO, Elizabeth StroutI hope you  spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO’s Olive Kitteridge instead. I’d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I wasn’t optimistic about the television version. Talented Anna Maxwell Martin should have stuck with The Bletchley Circle, where she had an innovative, meaty role.

Olive Kitteridge will be playing on HBO (2 parts) numerous times in coming weeks, so if you missed it the first time, try to catch it. Just for the acting alone, it’s terrific, with Frances McDormand playing Olive and Richard Jenkins as Henry, her long-suffering husband. I’d read the book, so was prepared for Olive’s prickly personality. She’s likely not someone you’d want to spend a lifetime with, but Henry hung in there, and NPR reviewer Eric Deggans calls the production “maybe the best depiction of marriage on TV.”

For me, the television version posed much the same question as did the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. Why was Olive so unyielding, so unmoved by others’ feelings, even as she registers them? She is that rare creature—someone who truly won’t bother to be likeable. “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology,” a character in the book says. Her father’s suicide is talked about on several occasions, and did that cause the big disconnect? It doesn’t seem so. And just when you’re about to give up on her, she’ll do something remarkable.

Finding Philip Marlowe

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Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart

(art: wikimedia.org)

Some authors are unalterably linked to a particular place and time—Faulkner, Dickens, Cheever. For Raymond Chandler, the time and place are Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s. His books about that era convey a very specific mindset, with such classic lines as “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself” (The Long Goodbye), “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” (Farewell, My Lovely); and “You know what Canino will do—beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling” (The Big Sleep). You can’t read his rhythms without seeing Humphrey Bogart as the perfect personification of his detective, Philip Marlowe.

According to Electric Lit, from Malibu to Pasadena, Chandler’s “iconic spots dot the landscape.” Now you can retrace the high (and low) points from this master of the hardboiled detective novel with a new map of the City of Angels
, written and compiled by Kim Cooper and designed by Paul Rogers, which the publisher calls “an insider’s guide to the city Chandler knew.”

Cooper’s company Estouric conducts literary, true crime, and California culture tours, including “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In a Lonely Place” and “The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare,” as well as the uplifting “Mausolea of Los Angeles.” (Mystery writers attending the big Bouchercon conference will have a special edition of the Chandler tour.)

Given the amount of research done for the tours, the map was a logical next step. Cooper had to do a fair bit of digging, too. “I was thrilled to be able to confirm the actual location of Victor’s, the bar where Marlowe and Terry Lennox grow close over gimlets in The Long Goodbye,” (my review) she told Electric Lit.

Winners’ Circle Too Tight?

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Japanese print, road, stream

Flanagan’s book’s title is from a 17th c. Japanese epic poem (photo: wikimedia.org)

The day after the U.K.’s prestigious Man Booker Prize longlist was announced last summer, UK publisher Tom Chalmers expressed his doubts. While he noted the importance of book prizes as “an increasingly key route through which to discover and champion the best writers, to elevate and highlight the brilliant above the masses of books now being published every year,” they too often fall short, he thinks, by making safe choices.

Still, he pointed to a couple of happy exceptions: the 2013 Costa Book of the Year Award that went to The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer and the Bailey’s Women Prize for Fiction that went to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride.

Unfortunately, this year’s Man Booker longlist caused him to make “a quick check of the calendar to confirm I was still in 2014. In fact, in this Millennium.” Last year’s Man Booker prize was the 826-page doorstop The Luminaries, by Elizabeth Catton, while the big U.S. prize, the Pulitzer, went to Donna Tartt’s 784-page The Goldfinch, an award promptly subjected to rampant second-guessing (though not as much as the consternation in the U.S. literary world in 2012, when the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded no fiction prize at all). I read and liked both of these Big Books, anomalous as they are in a world where 350 pages seems the upper limit on publishers’ risk-taking.

As for the Booker, Chalmers doesn’t object to the new addition of U.S. authors to the pool of potential longlistees—though some of the prize-winning authors do, feeling people from smaller Commonwealth nations will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Americans. Case in point: The 2014 winner, Richard Flanagan, is from Tasmania, which most Americans couldn’t find on a map. He won with a book about World War II, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on his father’s experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war. (Flanagan dedicated the book to his father, who died the day he was told the book was finally finished.)

Chalmers does object to the rules change that allows automatic entries for previous winners. And he notes the selection committee’s neglect of independent publishers. These factors shift the prize toward the familiar, the safe, when it should be “discovering and highlighting the most exciting, dynamic and talented writing.” I want the winnowing role played by awards judges to help me find the best-written books. It will be disappointing if it becomes just an insiders’ club.

Henry VIII

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Henry VIII, English king

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, a wildly popular play up until the 1800’s, is rarely performed today. Surely not because we like our history delivered with somewhat more accuracy, and surely not because producers are unable to cut its approximately six-hour running time down to a more manageable two-and-a-quarter, as the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has done in its current, excellent production. The prologue includes a bit of optimistic false advertising in that regard:

Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree
The play may pass, if they be still and willing,
I’ll undertake may see away their shilling
Richly in two short hours.

Today, the play is probably best known for a mishap during a 1613 performance, in which the play’s cannonfire set afire the thatched roof of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, which burned to the ground.

Twenty-four pivotal years are condensed in the play’s action, which covers the early days of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon up to and including his infatuation and marriage with Anne Bullen (Boleyn) and birth of their daughter, Elizabeth. The end of the play is a long forward-looking tribute to the future of baby Elizabeth, anticipating a glorious era, her father’s legacy.

Although most modern dramatizations of Henry’s life linger on the problem of the six wives, the period of the play is much more interesting for the conflicts between Henry and the Pope and his agent in England, Cardinal Wolsey (subject of Hilary Mantel’s award winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies). Although the conflict came to a head over Henry’s wish for annulment of his marriage to Catherine that would free him to marry Anne, it was fed by Henry’s desire to acquire the massive wealth and property owned by the country’s hundreds of churches, monasteries, church schools, priories, convents, and other religious entities. His break with Rome led, of course, to formation of the Church of England with him at its head and turned that country from a Catholic to a Protestant one—a course his daughter Elizabeth vigorously pursued in her long reign.

The STNJ production is brilliantly acted, with special praise going to Philip Goodwin, who inhabits the role of Cardinal Wolsey like a second skin, David Foubert’s King Henry, and Jessica Wortham’s Queen Catherine. The “just enough” set design offers plenty of flexibility and space for the action, allowing large groups of the cast of 15 to be comfortably on stage at once, including for some period dance scenes (Henry was a fair composer). The costume design is spectacular.

I wondered at the drawing on the cover of the playbill of the baby wearing Henry’s locket only to realize that in this play, the baby is much the point.

Life Plus 70

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copyright

(artwork: Christopher Dombres, Creative Commons license)

Copyright is a battlefield for creative types—authors, bloggers, musicians, and artists. As both a producer and a user of digitized content, I want the rights to my creative output (such as it is!) protected and strive to respect the rights of others. At the same time, I want to enrich my content with good graphics, audio and video content, and the resources of other works.

A recent Louis Menand article in The New Yorker crosses into this fraught territory, starting with a little history. Legal backing for copyright began with Britain’s 1710 Statute of Anne, and, in the United States with Article I of the Constitution, giving Congress power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In 1790, the law set that time limit at 14 years, renewable for another 14. By 1998, as a result of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the time limit was extended to the author’s life plus 70 years—which some regard as a lengthy prison sentence for creative works.

Menand points out how different our attitudes about copyright are in the print versus the online worlds. “If , a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article . . . I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated.” Most people, Menand asserts, would agree with that. But if a Web site (like this one) posts an article referencing Menand’s piece and hyperlinks to it on The New Yorker website (as this one does), that seems normal in today’s world. Even a service. Courts have questioned the propriety of this, and it remains a grey area.

Meanwhile, billions of files are being downloaded—perhaps 40 billion a year—and an estimated 94% of these downloads are illegal and unmonetized, to the tune of $552 billion so far this year, according to Stamford, Conn.-based Tru Optik (“Game of Thrones” has the dubious distinction of being the world’s most illegally downloaded TV series).

Despite the uncertainties, various bibliographic initiatives worldwide are attempting to digitize the content of written works. Most visible in this country is Google’s effort to scan all known existing 129,864,880 books by 2020, an effort that has been plagued by numerous lawsuits. Google settled with publishers in 2012, and authors plan to appeal a negative ruling a year ago that deemed Google’s efforts “fair use,” since only “snippets” of text are provided for works under copyright protection, unless the copyright owner has granted permission for a more expansive view. However, the status of copyright protection is not always clear, as many potential rights-holders are unknown. (Google Books is a boon to genealogists, I can tell you.)

These disagreements arise in part because of a fundamental conflict in people’s understanding of the purpose of copyright. On one hand are those who think that, as Menand put it, “individual rights are intended to promote public goods.” These are the people, like the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who want to see works moved into the public domain for sharing, education, and entertainment. Historian Peter Baldwin characterizes them as “Silicon Valley.” On the other hand are those who believe the right to control one’s works “is not a political right. It’s a moral right.” These are people who want to maintain absolute control—Hollywood and the music industry.

The latter view comports more closely with European than Anglo-American views on the matter. My literary hero Charles Dickens conducted several popular speaking tours in the United States, in 1842 and thereafter, in which he read from his works. They added to his fame here, but his purpose was as much to fight for U.S. copyright protection for his and other foreign works, something that didn’t happen until the early 1890s.

The “moral rights” view is what gives the Broadway producers of Urinetown the ability to sue Akron’s Carousel Dinner Theatre for using “significant aspects” of the original Broadway production—direction, choreography, and design—beyond the script and songs for which the Ohio theater had a license. At the other end of the control spectrum, Menand says Samuel Beckett and his estate were well known for requiring theater companies wanting the rights to produce his plays to comply literally with Beckett’s stage directions. (Perhaps this is why all productions of Waiting for Godot look so bleakly similar—in form as well as content.)

On the Web, the problems and opportunities for misuse of others’ content are multiplied. It’s temptingly easy to obtain words, pictures, film, and music files to repost. The perils of doing so are described here and here. While one might think the sea of website postings offers virtual invisibility for a tiny misuse or sloppy repost, technology works against the user, through imbedded code that might as well put a flashing red light on an unauthorized use and search engines that patrol the web looking for them.

When I started my blog two years ago, I was clumsy in attempts to find good pictures for my posts and used a couple that were found and taken down and replaced with flashing warnings. Embarrassing, to say the least. Now, I check the “labeled for reuse” status in Google Images, have a slight preference for Creative Commons licensed pictures, or use one of my own. I also like the free and low-cost options at Imgembed, and while I can use those purchased photos on my website, I haven’t yet solved the problem of using them in the related social media promotion.

Yesterday, I posted a lighthearted exchange about Eminem and M&Ms, and found a trove of photos linking the two. Most appealing—and found with a second search under “labeled for reuse”—was a graphic portrait of the star created out of the candy. Perfect! I looked at the source website, which is an aggregator of cartoons and images that has lots of rights information for submitters but no information for reusers. I posted the photo, then, working on this article, pulled it down and sent the aggregator a permission request, returned to me as undeliverable. I know somebody “created” that artwork and should have credit. Absolutely not worth it to use it.

In one of my novels, I want to refer to lines from “Burnt Norton,” the wonderful T. S. Eliot poem. I’ve heard his estate is prickly about granting usage rights, even though a “Burnt Norton” Google search generates some 2.87 million results. I’ll work around it. There’s only so much time to write, and none at all to sit in endless conferences with intellectual property lawyers.

Additional Resources:
The Copyright Wars – by Peter Baldwin, 2014.
Stanford University Libraries Copyright and Fair Use Center – helpful advice, including for Web usages

Halloween Reads

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pumpkin, Halloween

(photo: pixabay)

Book lovers have been compiling their favorite scary reads for this season, and here are 10 culled from Book Riot and various other sources:

  • Snowblind by Christopher Golden – phone calls from dead people, missing children
  • The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon (this one was on some other lists, too) – poor housing choice
  • The Woman in Black by Susan Hill – (film starred Daniel Radcliffe) stay away from Eel Marsh House
  • The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero– from gothic to “wickedly twisted treasure hunt”
  • Booster & Reeves: The Night of the Revenants by Troy Blackford – both terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny
  • We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory – a support group of survivors of stuff “too crazy to be true”
  • The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers – classic inspiration for much that has come after, including last spring’s tv series True Detective
  • Song of Kali by Dan Simmons – on several lists, takes place in the dark (in every sense) setting of Calcutta
  • The Boy Who Drew Monsters by Keith Donohue – art not only imitates but becomes life
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King – a horror classic; even King thought it “too scary”
  • And here’s a bonus link to Neil Gaiman talking about the value of scary stories

The links are to Amazon.com for convenience, but, as always, I encourage you to do business with your local independent bookstore!

11-1-14 A Mysterious Conversation

Russian Ark (2002)

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Russian Ark, Alexander SokurovA combination of incredibly poor planning and the exigencies of our Netflix list in one week produced two arty but, let’s face it, slow-moving movies set in museums [Museum Hours reviewed 10-22]. Russian Ark (trailer), too, had rave reviews from critics and is perhaps best known for the incredible way it was shot. The whole thing—all 96 minutes of it—is one unbroken take. Really. Filming in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the royal-palace-cum-art-treasurehouse, director Alexander Sokurov and his cinematographer Tillman Buttner had use of this incomparable setting for a single day. You can say this for them, they made the most of it.

The film follows a mysterious and unnamed museum visitor, purportedly the Marquis de Custine, who wanders its hallways, back passages, and famous galleries, encountering notable Russians from the past—Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, the Romanovs (that’s the Romanov daughters, destined to be gunned down in the Communist Revolution in the picture). For the most part he is unseen, or at least ignored, as he turns and talks to the camera (you).

There’s no plot, just this drifting, mostly through the 19th century. But it’s an incredible tour and a costume-lover’s dream. At one point the Marquis heads into a ballroom where an orchestra plays for hundreds of dancers and onlookers. After this spectacular ball, the camera watches the guests leave, ultimately moves ahead of the crowd, and exits the museum. Fini. How I interpret all this is that the people in the scenes, like Noah’s giraffes and sheep and bluejays, may have led separate, unconnected lives (in this case, over time), but they are all inevitably connected in the arc [!] of Russian history.

Some reviewers asked whether the film would have received such a positive critical response if it had been made in the usual way, with cuts and edits, since images and scenes accumulate, disconnectedly, without any discernible central point. Roger Ebert’s response was “ʻRussian Ark,’ as it stands, is enough. . . . If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening. ʻRussian Ark’ spins a daydream made of centuries.” (Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 89%; audience score: 81%).

10-28-14 ****Bastard Out of Carolina

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Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison, Southern gothicBy Dorothy Allison – The West Windsor Library’s annual book sale is where I stock up on books I should have read a long time ago. Set in Greenville, South Carolina, this debut novel, published in 1992, was probably somewhat more shocking as a tale of parental oversight and abuse at the time, and so beautifully written it’s no surprise it was a National Book Award finalist. It remains a powerful and empathetic portrayal of class and gender differences in the 1950’s.

Prior to this book, Allison had published two volumes of poetry sharing the same main title, The Women Who Hate Me, and it’s interesting how she’s able to tamp that back and stay in the voice of the pre-teen first-person narrator, Ruth Anne Boatwright, whom everyone calls Bone, even as she reveals great depth and precision of language. Bone both lovingly and mercilessly describes the hard-drinking, violence-prone Boatwright men and the frustrated and hard-working Boatwright women. They may be poor—“trash” people call them and they call themselves—but they are tender toward Bone and her only thin protection against her mother’s new husband.

You may be familiar with the 1996 movie version of the novel, but I haven’t seen it. Anjelica Huston directed, and it starred Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ron Eldard, Christina Ricci, and Dermot Mulroney. Jena Malone played Bone. A 100% critics rating from Rotten Tomatoes!