Rochester Fast Ferry tale now in print

Posted on by

Larry Dickens, “novelist and mariner,” has published a memoir about Rochester’s fast ferry.

Dickens served as first mate on the ferry, which former Rochester mayor Bill Johnson claimed would stimulate our economy somehow — I guess by luring rich Canadians across Lake Ontario. And what does the city have to show for it, now? An extra $20 million debt.

But never fear, our politicians have a new plan: a $230 million performing arts center cum underground bus terminal. Think of it as the fast ferry, only lots more expensive and we can’t sell it if it doesn’t work out. Also no rich Canadian angle.

I’ve blogged about my distaste for the Renaissance Square idea several times since I started doing this in February; here’s my most recent post on the subject.

It’s extreme, all right

Posted on by

Via Booksquare, Marc Porter Zasada has an article in the LA Times about “extreme copyright.”

In extreme copyright, you try to push the limits of what intellectual property can be owned and controlled — or you try to penalize those who seem to have pushed the envelope a little too far. For example, not long ago, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. took CBS to court when the network used a tape it had made of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in a documentary (the family prevailed). And a government-authorized publisher tried to copyright official court opinions by arguing that it had introduced “original pagination” to the otherwise completely public documents — which must be cited every day by judges and lawyers.

On the trademark side, people try to register phrases such as “fair and balanced” or protect a single word, such as “Spike.” Marvel and DC Comics may sue you if you misuse the word “superhero,” which they — yes — trademarked in 1979.

These days, if you’re a Hollywood filmmaker and you shoot a passionate love scene in an art gallery and pan past a sculptural assemblage of tuna cans, you’d better get the permission of the artist, and probably StarKist (sorry, make that StarKist®) as well. Big studios employ whole teams to make sure such accidents don’t happen.

Meanwhile, journalists hunger to find derived language in the work of budding novelists. Scandal websites expose lifted phrases in the work of journalists. Computers search pop music for recycled phrases. And people who write little-known books sue when their ideas enter the culture in more popular books.

There’s a backlash as well: anti-copyright activists who believe copyright “is being used less and less to encourage creative work and more and more as a means to discourage it.” [Emphasis Zasada’s.]

I dunno. I can’t see an artist thinking, “Let some movie studio do a pan shot of my art? No! That’s too creative. Gotta force them to do shoot something bland instead.”

I think it’s more personal. For an artist or writer, it often comes down to wringing those extra pennies out of your work — and whether the additional exposure you get from someone’s “excerpt” (I use that term loosely here) will generate more pennies than what you’d get if you charge for the excerpt.

Or it may be wanting the pride of public attribution. I know that’s true of me, and my blog posts. I’d be most vexed if someone lifted my posts and reprinted them without attributing their authorship to me. (I also love to give attribution to others — I see the blogosphere as a self-organizing collection of information where attribution is key, like a hypertexted Wiki entry — you have to be able to trace the pieces back to their origin or you erode the integrity of the entire collection.)

Or it comes down to whether you believe people are trying to cheat you, and if so do you want to crusade against it.

For people who want to out plagiarists, it’s also personal: it’s the rush of proving moral superiority by exposing a scoundrel.

But here’s the thing. Our traditional notions of copyright are derived from our notions of ownership of physical property. We’re in the process, now, of figuring out whether we can apply guidelines based on the ownership of physical objects to stuff that isn’t physical at all, like someone’s name.

Digital technology serves to up the tension because digitized stuff shares more attributes with ideas, and fewer with physical property.

And of course the more a created work drifts toward the realm of ideas, the less plausible the notion of copyright. So just because you have an idea for a movie about a pirate ship — even if you’ve documented that idea — doesn’t mean you’ve been ripped off my Disney. OTOH, if a paragraph has been published in a printed book for all to see & touch, it’s obviously someone’s property . . .

Oh, well. Somewhere in this mess there’s a line that, once articulated, would put everyone at ease. But as long as there are lawyers willing to scuff the line away and ask for a new one, we’ll be wasting more time & energy on copyright battles . . .

It’s all in the margins

Posted on by

For unpubbed writers, it sometimes seems that the “standards” held by agents and publishers are, at best, too stringent; at worst harsh, opaque, even perverse or malicious.

I don’t subscribe to that view. I think the actions of both agents and publishers are completely understandable when you consider the margins in the print publishing business. According to this New York Times article, for instance,

Publishers generally receive a wholesale price for new books that is about half of the retail cover price, or $13 for a hardcover book with a $26 jacket price. Thirty percent of the publisher’s share, or 15 percent of the cover price, goes to the author as royalties, and another 40 percent of the publisher’s take goes for the production, distribution, marketing and publicity costs of the book.

That leaves about $3 to $4 a book for the publisher, before accounting for the cost of corporate overhead or the books that will be returned — on which the publisher earns nothing.

For paperbacks, authors generally earn only 7.5 percent of the cover price as a royalty. But the lower price also means publishers earn far less, about $1 to $2 a book, before returns.

If you look at these numbers, it’s obvious that publishers can’t make too many bad acquisitions or they’d be bankrupt in a matter of months, if not weeks. Large publishers, in particular, can’t survive if they acquire books that only sell a few hundred copies. They need books that appeal to a wide audience, generate buzz, and inspire word-of-mouth.

It’s not their job to do me, the novelist wanna be, favors. I need to write a book that will meet their criteria. If I want them to publish it.

Spam relief!!!!

Posted on by

Although it never gets posted to my blog, because comments are moderated, the comment spam manure-pile has been growing a larger every week.

Several times a day I’ve had to go through my comment queue to manually sort out the spam from the legitimate comments.

That job should be easier now: I just installed the Akismet plug-in. It will automatically divert comments from URLs that have tried to post spam to my blog in the past.

It’s too bad that bloggers have to be plagued by these parasites. I love getting and reading comments, but I can understand why some bloggers don’t allow them . . . who has the time?

Golf!

Posted on by

I bought myself a set of golf clubs today.

It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for awhile. I last played regularly as a kid. Then some years ago I started thinking I might like to play again, and from time to time I’d look at clubs. Then my parents took it back up after a 20-odd year hiatus. And my daughter and nephew did a week of golf camp last week, so now they’re all gung ho to get out and play.

Tell you how long it’s been since I played — I have to fight to keep my left foot planted on my backswing, lol — I was taught to raise my left foot up on its toe.

I took my daughter out to a driving range this evening at one of Rochester’s 20-odd public courses. I’ll sneak over for a lesson sometime this week and then maybe she and I can try nine holes.

I’m beyond happy about this. I don’t know why. But I have a really good feeling about it :-)

Everywhere else, it’s 2006

Posted on by

But on the NY State Thruway, it’s still circa 1950, apparently.

How do I know? Because I sat on it for two hours this afternoon, and the AM radio station (1620) that is supposed to provide Thruway traffic information was as opaque and unhelpful as if digital technology had never been.

When I first tuned in, the recorded message said there was a concert (!) and therefore the Weedsport exit was closed. Concert goers, the message said, would be detoured to their destination via the Waterloo exit.

How inane is that? “People are using our highway to attend an event, so we’ve closed an exit so they can’t get to it, which by the way is going to screw up every one else’s itinerary as well.”

Sounds like an idiotic rumor more than useful information.

Then, sometime after 3:00 p.m., the message was changed. Now it informed listeners that there had been an “incident” “off the thruway” which had required the Weedsport exit to be closed; that there were significant delays “in the Syracuse area” as a result; and that motorists were advised to consider alternate routes.

Great job, guys. Not. Because by the time that information was provided, I and thousands of other drivers were well past the last Syracuse exit. No way off, unless you count an illegal U-turn. We were trapped.

How could it possibly have taken the Thruway Authority nearly TWO HOURS to start advising people to take alternate routes? I know there were State Police out there–they were helping to clean up one multi-car fender bender that was triggered, no doubt, by the back-up.

How could the Authority not know what was going on?

Does it have anything to do, I wonder, with the risk of losing toll revenue?

And why wasn’t the radio message a bit more informative? Why didn’t it tell people which exits they should use to avoid that mess? Why not also provide the milepost numbers those exits are near, for motorists who don’t have exit information memorized?

I’m astonished that this was managed so poorly. What a crock.

On a Saturday afternoon in July. What a crock.

The decline of the imperative

Posted on by

Writing in Slate, Ben Yagoda muses on the displacement of the imperative by the construction “need to.” It’s become increasing rare to tell or be told, directly, to do something. Instead, we tell people they “need to” do this or that, or we’re told something “needs to be done.”

The ascendance of need to dovetails perfectly with the long and sad decline of the traditional imperative mood. Sad, because it’s a great mood. Without it, the Ten Commandments would be the Ten Suggestions. In our society, where giving offense is always feared, the imperative is rarely heard. So, instead of the pleasingly direct “No Smoking,” we have the presumptuous “Thank You for Not Smoking” or the loopily existential “There Is No Smoking.” The last remaining preserves of the imperative are the military, traffic signs (“Stop” has an estimable eloquence), innocuous adieus like, “Have a good one,” “Take care now,” and “You be good,” and, intriguingly, the titles of works of art. The biggest trove is pop songs, from “Come On Do the Jerk” through “Love the One You’re With,” all the way up to “Say My Name.” Command titles form a large subcategory of Beatles songs, including “Come Together,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “Get Back,” “Help,” “Let It Be,” “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “Think for Yourself.”

Yagoda traces this to the Abraham Maslow paper “Hierarchy of Human Needs,” and from there to “a Maslow epigone named Thomas Gordon, founder of “P.E.T.” (Parent Effectiveness Training)” — the fellow who told us that rather than order people around, we should express our needs using “I” constructions:

His copyrighted “Credo for My Relationship With Others” includes the classic sentence: “At those times when your behavior interferes with what I must do to get my own needs met, I will tell you openly and honestly how your behavior affects me, trusting that you respect my needs and feelings enough to try to change the behavior that is unacceptable to me.”

But here’s my question. If your spouse, for instance, says to you, “I feel neglected when you go out with your friends, and now that you know, I trust you’ll stay home every night,” does that really make the exchange more tolerable than, “please don’t spend so much time with your friends”?

Either way, the emotional subtext is loaded; either way, both the neglected and the neglectee are bound to feel uncomfortable, hurt, undervalued, alternately controlled and controlling.

All we’ve done is to render our language more baroque and less direct; we’re imposing an elaborate code of manners that while fascinating is, ultimately, only so much clutter.

What do you think? Is our language becoming more baroque?

Related: A speechwriter notes that our spoken language is also becoming increasingly vague.

Beginning a new book

Posted on by

It’s the balm, they say, that soothes the query-monitoring itch.

I’m excited about it–the new book–but it’s scary too, vertigo-like to start to peer into the widening crack that’s now opened into yet another world and realize I have no choice, if I’m going to capture it for the telling, but to squeeze through the opening, close my eyes, and let go . . .

When writers are in the driver’s seat

Posted on by

Jessica Faust at BookEnds has a post up on her blog that discusses an important turning point in a writer’s search for an agent. When you receive an offer for representation, she writes, you are suddenly in the driver’s seat:

This is your opportunity to contact all the agents reviewing your work, and, if more than one offers, interviewing them to find the one agent you feel is best for you and your work. The one who shares your vision and enthusiasm and the one that you feel you can work the best with.

Do click through and read the whole post. Jessica relays a story of an author who didn’t do this–and quite probably wrecked her chances to sell her book as a result.