Monthly Archives: August 2005

Magazines this good make easy Targets

Here’s columnist Lewis Lazare from the Chicago Sun-Times again, following up on his earlier story about last week’s all-Target-ad New Yorker:

The fallout surrounding the New Yorker‘s shocking Aug. 22 issue featuring Target as the single advertiser spread Monday to the American Society of Magazine Editors, an organization of leading magazine editors among whose responsibilities, we’ve been told, is keeping a watchful eye on the so-called sacred (but it would appear fast becoming less so) wall between advertising and editorial in the magazine industry.

Based on our experience the past several days, we would respectfully suggest… Keep seeing red.

Truth, consequences, Schwartz, Laughlin, & you

From the rather profound The Tao of Backup, with a few typos fixed and a little extra emphasis:

The novice asked the backup master: “How often should I back up my files? It has been a month since my last backup.”

The master replied: “Just as night follows day, and Autumn follows Summer, so should backups follow work. As you work, so should you back up that work.”

The novice said: “I work each day.”

The master replied: “Then you should back up each day.”

The novice replied: “I agree, but right now I haven’t got time to make a backup, as I have too much work to do.”

Upon hearing this, the master fell silent.
…
Having defined the data to be backed up, you should perform backups in accordance with the rate at which you are creating data to be backed up.

The frequency with which you back up should be determined by

* The rate at which you are creating data.
* The cost of losing data.
* The cost of performing a backup.

It’s possible to create a mathematical model to formalize all these factors and determine an “optimal” backup strategy. However, such models will not usually reflect the true human cost of losing data. For example, if someone writes a poem or an essay, having to rewrite the poem or essay will usually be stressful to the writer, and the result may not be as special as the original. Similarly, if a potential new customer phones you, and you enter their details into a contact database, and then lose the database, there may be no way of contacting that customer ever again.
…
All these considerations mean that the best “strategy” is to back up often enough so that if you lose a random disk at a random time, the chances are that you will lose very little data indeed. This usually means daily backups, combined with disk-to-disk copies or mirroring during the day.

Send this to all your friends, with the subject line “Guess what lucky duck is getting a fantastic present from me today!” Even they get mad, they’ll still have subconsciously absorbed the words “backup” and “daily.”

Here’s a story I’ve been retelling for years that has suddenly taken on even more poignant meaning. From Adam Kirsch’s ArtForum review of James Laughlin’s memoir Byways:

In the early years especially, Laughlin’s authors were sometimes forced to cool their heels and gnash their teeth while their publisher spent time at his ski resort in Alta, Utah. (There is a painful stretch in his published correspondence with Delmore Schwartz involving a lost manuscript that finally turned up under the floorboards of an Alta mail truck.)

As I remember it, before the manuscript was rediscovered Schwartz buckled down and rewrote it and, of course—here writer-listeners shudder like campers unable to resist nightmare-baiting ghost stories—it was better than ever! First, though, he had a crippling breakdown. Do try to avoid that, won’t you?

It’s been 24 hours

A sad Russian computer.

So it’s high time I mentioned it again: Back up, back up, back up! Here’s a handy article from WorldStart Computer Tips about how to do that:

Just about everybody has important data on their hard drive, from digital pictures to important documents, emails, earmarked websites the list goes on and on. In my experience people are pretty lax about backing up their PCs, and I think this really is an area that deserves attention. With a good back up set you can bounce back from a fatal hard drive crash and be up and running with all the your pictures, documents, downloads, email and favorites before you know it. Having important files stored on removable media is also a good safety precaution in case you get a virus or trojan horse.

There are a couple of different ways to back up important data, from the casual copy and paste to running complicated scheduled backups. There is no wrong way, as long you have a copy of everything you need.

You can save the data on a couple of different types of media (floppy, ZIP, CD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, Flash memory, even dat drives) but for home use I really recommend…

You can’t afford not to keep reading. Think this is kid stuff, RAMypants? Then why haven’t you backed up this week? If you love The New Yorker, emdashes, words, sounds, pictures, ideas, and/or yourself, do it now.

Jonathans are illuminated: Birdy

Chris Watson in the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

For such a little county, it’s amazing how often Santa Cruz wriggles its way into the media.

Just as Beth Lisick was cracking me up about UCSC co-eds, an August edition of The New Yorker magazine was slapped into my mailbox, falling open—sort of—to a nice long article by author JONATHAN FRANZEN, he of “The Corrections” fame and Oprah notoriety.

In his reflective article titled “My Bird Problem: love, grief and a change in the weather,” Franzen focused on his developing passion for bird-watching, proving in his complex essay that good nonfiction is at least as entertaining as fiction.

Gliding easily from one emotional subject to another—his feelings about the life and death of his marriage, the life and death of his mother, the life and death of species—Franzen dallied with issues big and small.

Most impressively, he considered the bipolar tendency in man to, in one moment, cling to “unsustainable” ideas and then, in the next moment, “bankrupt ourselves as rapidly as possible.”

Good stuff.

Now for the Santa Cruz bits.

In the middle of all his emotional turmoil, Franzen meets a vegetarian Californian writer who steals his heart and, incidentally, lives near some fine bird-watching habitats.

While in Santa Cruz, he goes looking for Eurasian wigeons, towhees, grosbeaks and scoters, which is when—binoculars in hand—he has an aha! moment:

“How different my marriage might have been if I’d been able to go birding!”

And later:

“Days passed like hours. I moved at the same pace as the sun in the sky; I could almost feel the earth turning.”

At one with the earth, Franzen became one with the birds: the threat of their extinction became, in the end, a threat to his extinction.

A long piece worth the read.

I have many fond memories of the Santa Cruz boardwalk from my middle-school days in California, although the undertow there nearly killed me once, and there were some unfortunate mixes of corn dogs, blue cotton candy, and mountainous car rides. Nevertheless, that waterslide was top-notch. And the corn dogs and cotton candy were worth it. There were also, sometimes, dolphins.

Categories:

Letters to emdashes: The Target ads

A crossed letter for cross times

Good morning! Before you read this, do something for me:

BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE.

I’m serious, my dear readers. I care about you, as a group and as individuals, and having been though a harrowing loss of data this past weekend as a result of the untimely death of my whirring, alarmingly hot, unhappy-sounding hard drive, I would not wish it on anyone, not even my worstest enemy. And since I’m trying not to have enemies these days, I wouldn’t even wish it on…the worst person you can think of. Please back up! Right now! I’m going to be posting informative and encouraging articles about this all week so you don’t forget.

Really, please do it! I know most of you are at work and you can’t, but you can make some plans for later. Print out, save to your external hard drive, buy an external hard drive, make some data CDs, get a .mac account, upload to your university server (it’s easy!), send yourself a ream o’ gmails, put it on your iPod, do anything to preserve your precious stuff before it’s too late. Because it could be too late, any day, and then you won’t be able to make plans anymore. You’ll just weep. And then you’ll sell a kidney, because that’s how much you’ll need to pay the experts to attempt a data recovery. Trust me. You do not want to have to make those decisions, or have those unsightly scars on your abdomen.

Do you love your novel, your beautifully organized iTunes, your photos, your notes for future projects, your mushy emails, your sonnet sequence, your spreadsheets, your college papers (“Spewing What’s Digested: The Handbook of Epictetus”), your scans, your resume, your myriad lists, your handy files of passwords and phone numbers, your programs, your links, your downloads—all that work and history you’d be lost without? Save yourself the excruciating agony of seeing it all vanish in a single push of the start button and back up RIGHT NOW.

All right, on to the letters to the editor. I solicited readers’ opinions about the Target ad controversy (about which Jon Friedman has just added his comments; NPR’s Marketplace also did a story), and here are two of your responses:

Tom writes from Yokohama, Japan:

I received my copy of the issue on Saturday—they usually come on Friday; sometimes I receive my copy in Japan before my father gets his in California—and the Target ads didn’t bother me at all. It is obvious that they are advertisements, and they are a lot less obtrusive than the usual motley ad mix. The Chicago Sun-Times article you link to goes overboard: The “sacred wall between editorial and advertising” can be said to have collapsed only if it turns out that The New Yorker‘s editors decided to alter their editorial content because Target took out all those ads. I’ve seen no evidence of that, and I don’t see why a one-time full-issue buyout would be more likely to corrupt the editors’ integrity than would repeated advertisements from car makers or whisky distillers.

And Kristin from elsewhere in cyberspace writes:

…I start a lot of sentences with “I was reading this article…” and everyone knows it was from The New Yorker, every time. I’ve read every issue, cover to cover, for about fifteen years, missing only a few right after Sept 11.

Anyway, I like the Target ads. I think they’re kind of cool; it’s artistic, it takes advertising to a whole different level. We’re not going to get rid of ads, so might as well experience them in a new way. (Not unlike the ironically pretentious ad-but-not-an-ad Ketel One ads, but considerably more visually interesting.) It was fun to see what the different artists did with it. Frankly, I liked it. If there’s anything weird about the ads, it’s that Target doesn’t seem to be the right demographic for The New Yorker. Technically speaking, as I learned from a New Yorker article some years ago, they don’t even have a Target in Manhattan.

But perhaps they’re right after all, if I’m any indication; I’m a huge New Yorker fan, and I, frankly, love Target. I like it that Target did something that sophisticated—the ads, the artists, The New Yorker. Funnily enough, the article—possibly a Talk of the Town item—about Target was one of the few times I thought the magazine was just off. [I’m pretty sure Kristin is referring to this 2002 Talk by Nancy Franklin about Christmas shopping at Target’s temporary Chelsea Piers shop.) Struck me as a urbanite’s misunderstanding of life outside the big city; they were mixing the benefits (if any) of big box stores like Sam’s Club with those of, literally, Target. You don’t drop money at Target because you buy in bulk—as the writer stated—but because you buy a wide variety of things there, all well designed and reasonably priced.

Update: Bright and early this morning, Kim from London adds:

Love your blog.

Re the Target ads and the Sun Times: I’ve never heard such a load of precious crap in all my life.

I’m moving to Chicago and looking for work as a reporter in a couple of months. None of this improves my opinion of the holier-than-thou U.S. press. Stick it up yer punter!

You can print that, if you want.

Agree? Don’t? Your opinions are always welcome. As it says over there in the upper-right-hand corner, no correspondence or conversation is printed without permission, and everyone is guaranteed anonymity (that goes for you paranoid big shots, too; you’d be surprised how often this comes up). But links, letters, and miscellany sent as signed contributions are also warmly welcomed. As in other publications, your letter may be edited for space and clarity, but mostly I’ll just leave it be.

This seems like kind of a silly disclaimer, but some bloggers (like me) really are journalists, and so I’ll disclaim that my childhood pal Jonah works for Target as an industrial designer, and…that’s it. Despite the store in Brooklyn, I’ve only been to Target once—in Minneapolis, to find an outfit for Jonah’s wedding a few years ago, as a sartorial homage to his fabulous design-career rise from Lego salesman at the Mall of America to top-secret Lego genius in Denmark to Super-Target Man. Good thing he wasn’t still at Lego when he got married—in what I would have worn, dancing would have been tough.

Did you back up yet? Did you make some plans? I’m counting on you.

Fall books: Edmund Morris on Beethoven, more

Edmund Morris, an occasional New Yorker contributor, has held off completing his trilogy of Theodore Roosevelt books to write a biography of Beethoven, out this fall [on October 1]. The Bob Dylan Scrapbook [out September 13] includes pictures, memorabilia and a 60-minute CD. Peter Guralnick’s Dream Boogie [out October 18] should provide the most thorough account yet of singer Sam Cooke.

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. Yes, other cities have newspapers.
Another December event at the 92nd St. Y to mark on your calendar now, if you’re so inclined: Morris giving the Newman Lecture (all about Beethoven) on Dec. 13. From the Y site:

The Newman Lecture: Edmund Morris on Beethoven
Edmund Morris, the musically trained, Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of presidential power, examines one of the mightiest and most brilliant musicians of all time. Morris’ biographies, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan and Theodore Rex, were national bestsellers. His newest book is a HarperCollins Eminent Lives biography of Beethoven.

Wow, lots of adjectives there! Good work, Y copywriters. I like that Eminent Lives seems to be a sly attempt to trump Penguin Lives as a series title, though especially in this penguin-dreamy moment, a penguin life has come to seem pretty triumphant, too. I reviewed Jane Smiley’s Penguin Life of Charles Dickens some years ago, and enjoyed it. Dickens was a manic so-and-so, as you know, and Smiley evokes the adrenaline blastoff of even his most ordinary days with admirably graceful gusto.
The Unknowable: Ronald Reagan’s amazing, mysterious life [New Yorker; remember this obit? I really liked it. I didn’t read Dutch but read a lot of the babble about it, and was glad to be impressed by Morris’ clear-eyed, touching, and truly three-dimensional piece.]
The Method President: Ronald Reagan and the Movies [New Yorker; Anthony Lane expresses skepticism about Morris’ reportage on Reagan’s sex appeal. I’m gradually forming a theory about Lane’s philosophical quirks—no, it’s not at all personal. Haven’t you noticed I don’t print stuff like that? Any critical insights will be appreciated.]
The Living Hand [Morris in 1995 on Reagan’s letter announcing his Alzheimer’s disease: “The throb of sympathy that ran through the country last November, when Ronald Reagan wrote his farewell letter to the American people, went beyond the ordinary sorrow we all must feel on reading that someone familiar has succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Much time and space, not to mention cyberspace, was devoted to the news, and many tears were shed, even by people who despised everything President Reagan had ever stood for. After nine years of studying him with objective coldness, I confess that I, too, cried at that letter, with its crabbed script and enormous margin (so evocative of the blizzard whitening his mind), and, above all, at the mystery of that black and scary erasure, concealing God knows what.”]

Slate on the Target ads

Bryan Curtis: “Would Eustace Tilley shop at Target?” Read on.
Update: The Chicago Sun-Times makes its views on the subject pretty clear in the hed: Target, New Yorker Cross Line.
What do you think? I wonder if the magazine will do one of its rare letters pages for this one; I’m doubting it. I find the Target ads a little distractingly big and bright and, well, red, but I think people can tell the difference between advertising and editorial in this case, especially since Target has such an unmistakeable logo. I feel mildly concerned that this doesn’t bother me more, and the pages should probably all be labeled “Advertisement,” but I’m not particularly outraged. I guess the advertorial blur of my commodified-dissent upbringing has pretty well seeped into me, after all. If Target started putting text into those ads and that was ambiguous and quasi-editorial, then I’d raise the red (concentric-circled) flag. If any of you want to send in your views to be aired on Emdashes, I’ll consider them.
Here’s my shameless reproduction of the Times piece from last week, too.

S/FJ, Newton, Teachout in December, NYC

The eagle-eyed Looker sends advance notice of a 92nd St. Y event that must be attended:

The Art of Online Criticism 

Maud Newton, Sasha Frere-Jones and Terry Teachout / Bryan Keefer, moderator

Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone’s a critic.

Tickets are $12 in advance; $15 at the door.
Date & Time: Tue, Dec 6, 2005, 7:00pm
Location: Steinhardt Building, 35 West 67th Street
Code: T-MM5LD61-01
Price: $12.00

Teachout has not one but two great Thurber passages up today. Don’t be a booby—go and read them.

I want to wake up in the festival that never sleeps

Via the great Gothamist, abracadabra! The New Yorker Festival schedule. Filled with so many treats, you’ll think Halloween was a swindle. While I was signing up to get emails about the festival here, I answered a questionnaire (I love doing that—I’m a market-researcher’s dream, except when I enter false information; don’t worry, Festival, I didn’t do that here), I encountered this question:

That sounds like fun, but have you ever heard of The New Yorker Compass? Me neither, but if I hear from them, I’ll certainly report back. I always do, you know.