Behind the mule

Farmers have always been used to the notion that year by year their work disappears. The crop goes into bellies; the stubble is plowed back in to fertilize the soil; the weeds that are pulled always return. Only the land itself, ready for the next crop, endures from year to year. The work of carmakers lasts a little longer--ten years, twenty years for some, fifty for a tiny few. The rest is crushed for scrap. Artists and writers, on the other hand, have always had their eye on eternity, expecting their work to endure on paper or canvas, stone or bronze, moving on into the future after their creator has been plowed back in.

But modern media has a shelf life shorter than a Twinkie. I've spent a lot of time over the last months trying to resurrect for reprint a book I designed back in 1992. I found it finally among a stack of dusty floppy diskettes--old Mac-format floppies with the files compressed via a no-longer-available utility. If I could extract them, they would be in a design format for software I no longer possess. If I could reinstall the software on a machine old enough to run it, it would be too old to connect with the Internet or network to a newer machine needed to convert it for contemporary use. It might as well be the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I tried--cajoling antique hardware back to life, searching out old applications and relearning how to use them--but, in the end, no luck. So I have taken the dusty book itself from the shelf, to laboriously scan it page by page, to re-edit and design from scratch. And that should do it for a few more years--the lifetime of a Twinkie, perhaps. Progress has put us all back behind the mule.

10,000 Hours

I have yet to read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success, but I was fascinated by a recent interview where the author discussed something called the 10,000 Hour Rule, to which he devotes a chapter. He maintains this rule of thumb--to become expert at anything, from arts, to professions to athletics, it requires about 10,000 hours of practice. That would be around 20 hours a week for ten years.

This is bad news for generalists and dilettantes. There aren't that many 10,000 hour chunks available in life. After one has become expert in the disparate skills of sleeping, eating, watching television and driving automobiles from place to place, the windows are few. It has probably taken me all of my 55 years to rack up 10,000 hours of writing--I may still be a little short. But by the rule, you can expect a dramatic improvement in these postings anytime now.

On the other hand, I am close to having my 10,000 hours in on video games that haven't been available for 20 years. They told me then that I was wasting my time. Ya think? And I am close to having 10,000 hours in on playing the guitar, but I'm still kind of lame at it. So one must always account for underlying talent. I definitely have 10,000 hours in on reading science fiction novels, but I search the classifieds in vain for openings that require an expertise in fictional xenosociology. I'll keep practicing; but before turning my hand to something entirely new, I'll keep the rule in mind--tick, tick, tick.

Just in time

Back in the old economy, if it was time for a little home baking, Mom might send me down the block to Don's Market for a can of sweetened condensed milk. Don would take out his can claw and hook me down one, and blow the dust off the top. If the shelf was bare, no matter--he'd order a year's supply at a time and keep the extra cases back in the stock room. These days nothing has a chance to gather dust. They teach just-in-time manufacturing and inventory in MBA school. Fedex has offices in Papua New Guinea. If you asked people what they really wanted from the Internet, they'd tell you they want the ability to download a cup of cappuccino and a ham sandwich, because they don't have time to leave the desk. Busy, busy, busy, knocking off the to-do list just in time. (Cappuccino, by the way, generates 22,600,000 search results on Google.)

Paul Willcott was in the studio this morning, working on the audio book of his novella A Franklin Manor Christmas (which Joel assures him will be done "just in time" to accompany the print release). Paul asked if I had my Listening Post essay done yet, and I had to laugh. There were hours to go before the deadline. As usual, I hadn't a clue. He suggested something about Sundays, but writing about the day of rest requires more leisure than I have available. Besides, I had to write all the other stuff first.

Joel dropped by my digs later on, just in time to put the kibosh on a concert feature for the online section, but Kevin, also just in time, came up with an alternate feature from our reel-to-reel archive. This would have been a good time to have had a couple of essays in the can--back in the stock room, as it were. But that's 20th Century thinking. So here's a new one, just in time to make the email deadline.

A liberal artist

A reader gave me a mild rebuke a few weeks back about how I appeared to devalue my liberal arts education while reporting on the technical problems that arose while our station engineer was away. His point was that the focus of the liberal arts on creative flexibility might enable one to function in a wider variety of situations than the utilitarian approach to learning that comes with technical education.

That I should be properly grateful for my education was brought home to me again by the death Monday of my great teacher and friend, Kelsie Harder, who for many years chaired the SUNY Potsdam English Department. He had the gift for transmitting his passions, taking such unpromising material as myself and my callow classmates, and infecting us--not just with interest, but with fascination--for unlikely topics such as linguistics, grammar, etymology and onomastics. He labored in the sub-basement of language, where the qualities of time, matter and space intersect with the mind to become speech. How does a meme come to mean?—or, Shakespeare’s more-than-rhetorical query, "What's in a name?"--these are questions that will never come up in a job interview, unless the job is writer. But what the study of Clausewitz is to the general, these matters are to the author. Their study unlocks all the strategy and tactics necessary to communicate with clarity, integrity and effect.

Kelsie was a great exemplar of and recruiter for his vocation, teaching. More than a few of his students have gone on to do likewise. I think this is because he treated the student-teacher relationship as just that, a personal relationship, not a pedagogical contract. That makes his loss a personal matter to thousands.

Frosty reception

I've been out exploring the googlesphere to find the text of the 88-year-old Robert Frost poem, "War Thoughts at Home," recently discovered by grad student Robert Stilling and published in the new edition of Virginia Quarterly Review. Given that one can find online the full text of thousands of books written before and after 1918, find the full text of Rep. Mark Foley's IM chats and emails, find endless accounts of the informal genetic experiments of celebrities, full-length pre-release Hollywood movies, 911 call audio, and every bad poem written in the last decade somewhere on the internet, I assumed this would be an easy search. Nada—locked up tighter than the next Harry Potter. Four lines here, four lines there, no more.

There's something out of whack in our notion of intellectual property. Robert Frost is, I am sorry to report, long dead. But through the endless legal extension of copyright beyond the lives of the artists whose right to benefit from their own work it was intended to protect, we are instead cutting ourselves off from the richness of our own cultural legacy. The estates and publishers of long-dead artists cling to their debatable rights more fiercely as time goes by. The text of the poem appeared briefly on one website, and was forcibly removed within hours. Ironically, the only new intellectual property associated with the discovery, Robert Stilling's account of the find, is posted on the VQR website for all the world to read for free. I was happy to read it; it's an interesting story. But I will pay VQR's $25 subscription price in order to read the poem online, only if they can promise to bring back Robert Frost to collect his cut. It isn't as if I can't walk over to the Owen D. Young Library and read the current issue for free. Frost himself probably took a similar walk around the St. Lawrence campus when courting his bride-to-be.