Writing

Another call for violence in New Hampshire   Recently updated !

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New Hampshire is supposed to be a friendly state. The LPNH didn’t do much to uphold the image when it called for murdering Democratic office holders. Now we have a legislator challenging an opposing political leader to a street fight.

Ned Raynolds, a Democratic state legislator from Portsmouth, challenged Jason Osborne, the Republican majority leader in the state’s House of Representatives, to an unarmed duel in downtown Portsmouth. He wrote, “No weapons, no posse — just you & me. We’ll stop traffic, and I’ll put you on the ground and rub gravel in your face.” That’s literally the language of a schoolyard bully. There seems to have been worse, but the Globe didn’t dare publish it, instead referring obliquely to “crude and misogynistic language” and “a vulgar phrase.” Strange, since Osborne is a man.

Democratic leader Alexis Simpson has responded, “I said it when extremists called for the assassination of Democrats last week, and I say it to members of my own caucus who propose fistfights. Violent rhetoric has no place in our politics.”

Raynolds isn’t running for reelection but has refused calls to resign.

The Museum of Printing

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In Haverhill, Massachusetts, less than five miles from my house, you can find the Museum of Printing. It’s crammed with typesetters, typewriters, computers, printing presses, and lots of other things. It’s open on Saturdays.
Museum of Printing

Recently I started as a volunteer. I’ve found a niche in the library, which has about 6,000 books on all aspects of printing. Its cataloguing system is a spreadsheet; eventually we may improve on it. The library doesn’t circulate, so it isn’t urgent.

When I say “library” I’m talking about the Frank Romano Library. The museum has five libraries, and so far I’ve gotten a good look at only two of them. The other three are font libraries, so they aren’t the kind where you’d sit down and enjoy a nice read.

There’s a “hologram” of Benjamin Franklin; I don’t know how long it’s going to be there. I put the word in quotes because it isn’t actually a 3-D image. It consists of images projected onto three whirling fans that aren’t coplanar. The fans are nearly invisible when running, and the resulting image looks somewhat three-dimensional when viewed from the front. Even if it isn’t a hologram, it’s unusual and eye-catching.

A personal favorite of mine is the Quadritek 1200, a phototypesetting console from the 1980s that used cassettes for data storage. I worked for Itek and wrote software for it, including parts of the data communication module.

If you’d like to see more, here’s my Flickr album from the museum.

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Thoughts on blogging 3

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It’s a full week since my last post. I’ve been busy, adding volunteer work with the Museum of Printing to my schedule and getting back to regular singing with the Exeter UU choir after a summer break. During that time, I’ve been thinking about what blogging (especially this blog) accomplishes and how I might reach more people.

Blogs were once a bigger part of the Internet. It’s easy to set one up, and as long as you don’t do things that will upset the hosting provider, you can say what you want. People can follow it in a variety of ways, and they don’t need to hope the software will declare it worth seeing. That’s not what people want now. They want to have everything in one place, they subscribe to much more than they can read, and they trust the website to decide which items they’ll see. Then they’ll gripe about The Algorithm, but these sites are just giving them what they want. They don’t want the responsibility of being active readers, but they don’t want a big corporation’s software making their decisions for them. What do they want?

A lot of them don’t want in-depth reading. They want a flow of input which they’ll passively absorb. People are reading less long-form material than they used to. Even a 1000-word blog post is too much for many. Still, the written word is vitally important. That’s the best place to record facts and explore ideas. Building and keeping an audience is hard, and sometimes it’s frustrating to see which posts work and which don’t. For a while, my most popular post was a piece of fluff on why the New York Times excluded some words from Wordle and not others. I eventually deleted the content.

I keep a blogroll in the sidebar to link to blogs readers might find interesting, especially if they’re by people I know. That used to be an important way to find blogs, as well as building the search rank for ones a lot of people liked. Google tweaked its search algorithm to give little weight to blogrolls, so many people gave up, but they still help people to find material they’ll like.

RSS feeds are a good way to track blogs, especially ones with irregular schedules, and many blogs have one by default, but not as many publicize their feeds. Maybe I’m just an old Neandertal longing for the old, decentralized Internet, but it had something which the big social media sites don’t have as much of: control over what you read.

I’ll keep writing and obsessing over my readership statistics. Some people will keep reading, and hopefully they’ll find something of value.

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The shifting meaning of “enslave”

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If you’ve done much reading on the Internet about slavery and abolitionism, you must have noticed that a lot of writers and websites avoid the word “slave.” They prefer expressions like “enslaved person.” The idea seems to be to remind people that slavery is an externally imposed condition and, at least in principle, is always subject to change. That’s understandable, even if it seems clumsy. Are there other nouns of status that people are replacing with phrases for similar reasons? We still speak of “prisoners,” “servants,” and “refugees” without circumlocution. Maybe there’s less of a tendency to treat those conditions as permanent.

The phrasing has had an unfortunate side effect, though. The word “enslave,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “to force into or as if into slavery.” It’s now widely used to mean “to hold in slavery.” Dictionary.com gives the additional meaning of “to hold (someone) in slavery or bondage.” Bringing a person into slavery is a more active evil than holding someone in slavery, and the distinction is worth keeping. When a change in usage becomes widespread, there’s no stopping it, but sometimes the language is poorer for it. This is shaping up to be one of those cases. I expect that Merriam-Webster will soon add the new definition, and the watering down of the word will be official.

Nitpick on top of the nitpick: You can argue that when slaves had children and their masters registered the children as property, that was “enslaving” in the proper sense. It hasn’t been automatic through US history that children of slaves were slaves. If we accept that people are born with the right to be free, then treating a newborn as a new slave is an act of enslavement.

Tangentially related: I don’t say that people “own” slaves. The basis of all property is that people own themselves. People can force others to do things, but they can’t have ownership rights to them, and any law that claims otherwise is based on a falsehood.

Credit the songwriter!

This entry was posted in Music Writing and tagged music writing on by

The idea for this post started when I tried to find out if the resemblance of the 1979 song “Gloria” to the “Gloria” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was intentional. (It was.) While doing the usual Internet searches, I found it repeatedly referred to as Laura Branigan’s song, even on lyrics sites, although she didn’t write it. Not to take away from her excellent performance, but she wrote neither the music, the original lyrics, nor the English-language version. Wikipedia credits Giancarlo Bigazzi and Umberto Tozzi as the creators of the original song and Jonathan King as the author of the English-language lyrics. Tozzi performed the Italian song before Branigan. Yet somehow Branigan gets all the credit.

(I’m not counting Beethoven as a creator. The song uses only nine notes of his. They give the song its backbone but not its content.)

I cited another example of failure to credit the song writer in a book discussion a couple of months ago.

It’s routine to give performers the credit for songs they didn’t write. The reason is laziness. People hear someone perform a song and assume that person must have written it. If you believe the lyrics sites, Frank Sinatra wrote over a hundred songs, but Wikipedia lists him as the creator or co-creator of only a handful. An exceptional performance makes the difference between a hit and a flop, but the performance wouldn’t exist if no one had written the song. Before recordings became the most common way to hear music, writers got more attention. William Billings, Stephen Foster, George Root, and Irving Berlin were famous names in their time. Today, it’s rare for songwriters to be well known unless they write musicals or perform their own songs.

When you’re writing about a song, especially if the lyrics or the musical content is important, please mention the writer’s or writers’ names.

This post was partially inspired by Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s campaign to get acknowledgement for the illustrators of children’s books. That’s important, too.