"Human rights" and other four-letter words

It's remarkable that I find myself in agreement with a Wall Street Journal editorial, but today I do. From the WSJ (June 15):

Microsoft's Kowtow

"Where do you want to go today?"

That was Microsoft's slogan in the mid-1990s, one that evoked the unlimited possibilities inherent in the age of the Internet and the software revolution. The answer to that question today would be, "hopefully not where they discuss 'freedom,' 'democracy' and 'human rights,'" at least not if you expect to use Microsoft's new portal in China.

The software giant has just bowed to the Chinese government by banning these words. If you type them on Microsoft's new portal, a message appears telling you to try different ones. If this weren't insulting enough, the message actually says, according to news reports, "this item should not contain forbidden speech such as profanity. Please enter a different word for this item."

To be fair to Microsoft, it is not alone. Yahoo! and Google have also caved in to China. Google chose last year to omit sources the Chinese government does not like from its Google News China edition, saying that it didn't make sense to provide a link to sites that would probably be blank anyway. All of these Internet companies make the point that it is better to make a compromise, gain a foothold in China and then offer China's masses the smorgasbord of information that is out there.

That view got backing from none other than Colin Powell, who happened to be in Hong Kong this week as this story was breaking. Microsoft figured it is "best for them and better for Chinese citizens to get 95% of the loaf," the former Secretary of State said at a conference when we asked him what he thought of an American company banning the word "freedom." While acknowledging that "Microsoft, and Google, and other information providers, have had to make a compromise that we wouldn't find acceptable in the United States," Mr. Powell said, "I think it's probably best for them to make that kind of compromise." Mr. Powell added that he thought the Chinese government was fighting a losing battle in thought control over the Internet, at least "if Chinese teenagers are like the teenagers in my family."

It is admittedly difficult for China's government to block Internet content from its estimated 87 million users, a number that is growing. But it is a lot easier if it has the cooperation of the industry. These corporations might also remember that Beijing needs their business. The Internet is where demand and supply meet these days, and China's leaders need economic growth to continue if they are not to face large-scale upheaval. Certainly the Microsofts and Googles might try to drive a harder bargain.

"Best in Class"

From the New Yorker:

Daniel Kennedy remembers when he still thought that valedictorians were a good thing. Kennedy, a wiry fifty-nine-year-old who has a stern buzz cut, was in 1997 the principal of Sarasota High School, in Sarasota, Florida. Toward the end of the school year, it became apparent that several seniors were deadlocked in the race to become valedictorian. At first, Kennedy saw no particular reason to worry. "My innocent thought was What possible problem could those great kids cause?" he recalled last month, during a drive around Sarasota. "And I went blindly on with my day."

The school had a system in place to break ties. "If the G.P.A.s were the same, the award was supposed to go to the kid with the most credits," Kennedy explained. It turned out that one of the top students, Denny Davies, had learned of this rule, and had quietly arranged to take extra courses during his senior year, including an independent study in algebra. "The independent study was probably a breeze, and he ended up with the most credits," Kennedy said.

Davies was named valedictorian. His chief rivals for the honor were furious--in particular, a girl named Kylie Barker, who told me recently that she had wanted to be valedictorian "pretty much forever."

Kennedy recalled, "Soon, the kids were doing everything they could to battle it out."

You can read Margaret Talbot's "Best in Class," on the lengths some young people will go to to be high-school valedictorians, by clicking here.

How many languages?

Kottke.org poses a fun question: How many languages in your music collection? Here's my inventory, not exhaustive, though many of the examples (e.g., Bulgarian) are the only examples I have:

Arabic: Sister Marie Keyrouz (Byzantine chant)

Bulgarian: Bulgarian Women's Choir

French: Clifton Chenier, Edith Piaf, Poulenc songs, Henri Salavador

English: I'll just keep going . . . .

German: Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera)

Greek: Sister Marie Keyrouz (Byzantine chant), field recordings of folk music

Italian: Beniamino Gigli, great Italian tenor

Japanese: "One Home Run," a song on Van Dyke Parks' Tokyo Rose, sung partly in Japanese

Portuguese: João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim

Spanish: Buena Vista Social Club, Eddie Palmieri

Tibetan: recordings from Buddhist monasteries

Yoruba: Sunny Adé

I have a handful of recordings about which I'm not sure: a gamelan recording from Bali, singers and kora players from Mali, "Ja Pehechaan Ho" (the opening music from Ghost World), and an Indian version of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda."

How many languages are in your music collection? Leave a reply by clicking on comments.

Contemporary Brit-po

3808 students: Here's a recent article from The Guardian about the contemporary British poetry scene:

Poetry is being ruined by establishment--festival chief

by Richard Jinman

British poetry has become almost irrelevant, because the establishment has closed ranks against fresh ideas and forms, the director of an experiment called Text Festival said yesterday.

"[It] has run out of steam," Tony Trehy said. "There's nowhere for it to go other than becoming a mild entertainment or an anachronism."

Mr Trehy describes the festival, which opens today in Bury, Greater Manchester, as a declaration of war against the poetry establishment.

He hopes it will change the staid image of the poet by giving a stage to poets who mix text with everything from music, dance and mime to graphic design and mathematics.

"If people come expecting a [conventional] poetry reading they will go away having had a much more exciting experience," he said.

"If establishment figures like Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy are judging a competition, you know what kind of result you're going to get," he said.

"There's real excitement about the Turner Prize, but who cares who wins the TS Eliot prize nowadays? The dead hand of the British poetry establishment means more challenging and inventive work is being seen somewhere else."

The poet laureate, Andrew Motion, said he had some sympathy but it was an old argument. "A lot of those barriers have been torn down now, and bloody well right too.

"The poetry scene has got more tolerant than it used to be and this is reflected on all sorts of levels," he said.

"I can see the shape of his [Trehy's] argument, but I don't see much evidence of a closing of ranks. We all have something to learn from one another, but in the end there is more take-up for one kind of writing than another."

The Text Festival opens with an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Bob Cobbing, an internationally recognised British exponent of concrete, visual and sound poetry, who died in 2002.

If you'd like to see the article itself, you can find it here.

Crooked teeth?

"I don't know what makes me any more interesting than anybody else," he says. "Crooked teeth?"

Paul Giamatti, quoted in Rolling Stone. You can read the article by clicking here.

[Note: Paul Giamatti is one good reason to see Cinderella Man.]

Editing

From Jeremy Wagstaff's Loose Wire:

I only recently realised, for example, that I’ve always been saying 'esconced' for some reason. Only yesterday did I find out it should be 'ensconced', as I’m sure you all know. (Well, maybe not all of you: There are more than 5,000 sites where the word 'esconced' is used. But you're right to laugh at me.)

This doesn't stop me having my bugbears. I once nearly got myself fired for suggesting to his face that the then head of the multinational news organisation I was working for was using the word 'enervated' incorrectly, and that it meant the opposite of how it sounded. (It means 'lacking energy'.)

Then I noticed a couple of newspapers recently have misspelled 'loath' as 'loathe'. Loathe is the verb, loath is the adjective. I am loath to point such a thing out, but loathe it when I see the words misused.

I must stop being an editor. Two things happen: You quickly turn into a pedant, while at the same time realising that you knew far less about the English language than you thought you did.

You can (or should it be may?) read "The Humiliation of Being an Editor" by clicking here.

E-mail from Stefan Hagemann

My friend Stefan Hagemann writes:

On another note, I just finished rereading Slaughterhouse Five. I think it sort of counts towards your suggestion to reread a "crucial book from childhood," though I didn't read it for that reason. Rather, I was talking politics with a neighbor who is also an avid reader and somehow our conversation came around to Vonnegut. We'd both read it in high school, and while I probably remembered it a bit better (maybe because I'm a little younger), our memories were pretty fuzzy, so we both revisited it. It was a good experience and I'm looking forward to discussing it with her. There were entire scenes that I'd forgotten. My favorite is when Billy Pilgrim is time traveling/hallucinating and he encounters a war movie in reverse:

"The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. The used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new....The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby."

Now I'm rereading Paradise Lost in preparation for the fall semester. Like Slaughterhouse Five, it's a much easier go this time than the last, but unlike Slaughterhouse Five, there aren't a lot of laughs. Lots of infinite wrath and infinite despair, however. So it goes.

A's for everyone

From a piece by Alicia C. Shepard, journalist-in-residence at American University:

It was the end of my first semester teaching journalism at American University. The students had left for winter break. As a rookie professor, I sat with trepidation in my office on a December day to electronically post my final grades.

My concern was more about completing the process correctly than anything else. It took an hour to compute and type in the grades for three classes, and then I hit "enter." That's when the trouble started.

In less than an hour, two students challenged me. Mind you, there had been no preset posting time. They had just been religiously checking the electronic bulletin board that many colleges now use.

"Why was I given a B as my final grade?" demanded a reporting student via e-mail. "Please respond ASAP, as I have never received a B during my career here at AU and it will surely lower my GPA."

You can read the rest by clicking here.

In the groves of academe

From the Associated Press:

A community college professor has been charged with using his students' names and Social Security numbers to obtain department store credit cards.

Bradley Neil Slosberg, 49, of Winter Haven, was arrested Friday on charges of criminal use of personal identification and scheming to defraud, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said.

Slosberg and his girlfriend, Deborah Hafner, stole the identities of at least three of the students from his anatomy and physiology class at Polk Community College, sheriff's office spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers said.

Hafner, 45, filled out the credit card applications and committed the forgeries, Rodgers said. She was charged with two counts of forgery and one count each of criminal use of personal identification and scheming to defraud.

The couple could not be reached for comment early Monday.

Slosberg had asked his students to write their names and Social Security numbers on a sign-in sheet, students said. "We all signed it," Amanda Bracewell said. "We figured, 'He's a teacher, what is he going to do with it?"'

(Via CNN.)

Oprah picks Faulkner

From Reuters:

Talkshow host Oprah Winfrey propelled Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner up the bestseller list on Saturday, proving again why her television book club is one of the biggest sales drivers in publishing.

Within 24 hours of being picked as the summer reading pick for Oprah's Book Club, a boxed set of the three novels "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August" was the number two seller on Amazon.com, second only to J.K. Rowling's next Harry Potter book, which hits the shelves in July.

Publishers Weekly reported that publisher Vintage, a division of Random House, had already shipped 500,000 copies of the boxed set.

You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.