Trusting a photograph

Photographs are staged, selected, manipulated, and modified, and are in no way a useful guide to reality. We know that. But when we see a photograph, particularly an old one, we feel we’re seeing something. James K. Polk was not a handsome man, but it is fascinating to see this image of a him (I gather there was a photo of William Henry Harrison, so it's not actually the first of a sitting President, which I had long thought). That’s what he looked like, we say to ourselves. Amazing

And it is. That is, kind of, what he looked like.  Is this steely eyed man John Brown, or this somewhat more ingratiating version?  At least we're pretty sure about the hair.  

But back then, you were conscious of being photographed. The speed of the emulsion meant you had to sit still for a long time for your image to be clear—or be dead, the reason dead soldiers and dead babies make up a large proportion of early figure photographs.

So think about the first-ever photograph ever taken, Louis Daguerre’s image of the Boulevard du Temple.

Standing there, getting his shoes shined, is the first person to be photographed, and it’s a candid shot. That long-legged guy there was one person who didn’t pose, because he didn’t know there was anything to pose for.

But now we’re suspicious. Everything is staged, selected, etc. Did Daguerre put his buddy Jacques up to it?

Daguerre: Hey, Jacques, I’ll show you something fun. See that shoeshine guy out there? He’s not getting much business. Why don’t you go out there and get your shoes shined?

Jacques: What’s wrong with my shoes?

D: Nothing. But if you go out there—

J: They’re old, sure. But if I’d known you would make a comment, I’d have worn my other pair.

D: There’s nothing wrong with your shoes, Jacques. Great shoes. From around here?  There's a great place on the Place Vendome....

J: I picked them up on a business trip to Mulhouse.

D: Well, see? But, anyway, if you’d just go out there to that shoeshine guy, I’ll show you something amazing....

J: Again with the shine. The shoes are clean, Louis. I'm careful about stuff like that.  Why should I go out and get my shoes cleaned?

D: Here. I’ll pay for it. And enough for a tip, too.

J: Do you think I can’t afford to have my shoes shined? I’ll have you know, things have been going pretty well. Pretty well, indeed. I don’t have the free time for fancy chemical experiments, but I got enough to get by.

D: I didn’t mean—

J: You didn’t used to be like this, Louis.  Is it those chemicals you’ve been smelling?

D: For God’s sake, go out there! You’ll see why. You’ll think it’s great. I swear.

J: Fine. I’ll do it. Just don’t expect me to come back.

Poor Jacques. He never knew that generations yet unborn would be looking at him. But if he hadn’t been there, would it have been as interesting a picture? We’ll never really know how it happened.....

Everything you know is wrong

A few months ago I wrote about the slippery nature of truth in personal narrative. Typical level: low to medium.

Fiction was invented for a reason. Reality isn’t “boring”, really, but it is poorly structured, noisy, with obscured causation, and a complete lack of justice. And the final resolution to any problem, no matter how minor or serious? Everybody dies.

Not to give anything away, but pretty much everything we know of as history partakes of the same problem. As far as written evidence goes, it’s all written after the fact, sometimes long after the fact, either by axe-grinding participants in the events or by those who have benefited by the victory of one side or another and are basing their account on the self-serving oral testimony of people who barely remember what happened.

No surprise, photographs are increasingly seen to be made up as well. Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber points me at an account of a famous Robert Capa photo of a dying soldier during the Spanish Civil War: most likely faked, as were various other famous iconic images.

All of the images examined in the article are really images crafted to fit into a prevailing narrative, whether about the fears of a looming European war, the Male Gaze, postwar love among the ruins, or the dignity of the struggle for civil rights. We love things that tell us that what we already believe is absolutely true.

Images too, are contingent and full of distracting non-narrative elements. Really, without narrative support, few of them are readable. Random instants in time are lacking context, past, and motivation, problems made worse by the fact that they are two-dimensional, taken from a certain angle, and have issues with focus and resolution. We see a lot less than we think we see in them. No wonder photographers, through selection, manipulation, and outright staging, try to come up with ones clear enough for us to understand them. Boosting the signal-to-noise ration means focusing on some signals more than others.

The wonder is that we take any of them as at all representative of that annoyingly contingent reality we know is all around us.

Healthcare and the writer

One negative feature of our current system of healthcare finance is the fact that health insurance is tied to employment.  This makes changing jobs more difficult and self-employment more expensive, since employer-provided healthcare benefits are excluded from tax while self-employed people can only deduct it from their taxes, a deduction that might be worth very little.

I have other reasons for not trying self-employment, but this is a significant barrier.  The reason it's hidden away there in that employer contribution is so that we don't know how much it actually costs, and, as I pointed out yesterday, even the obvious part costs a lot.  The self-employed see more of the real cost.

That's not to say that the cost is obviously too high.  "More than I wish I had to pay" is not necessarily too high.  But I wish we could all clearly see the cost, and that the cost didn't depend on whether you had a large or small employer, or whether you decided to provide your services on a contract basis rather than as part of firm.  None of those things have anything to do with the actual provision of healthcare services.

Hearing aids: one of those things people wish someone else would pay for

Living in a state with incredibly high medical costs (Massachusetts), having worked in several healthcare businesses (including a Medicaid health plan), I'm always reading and thinking about our "healthcare bubble", and trying to understand what the problems actually are, and what a long-term solution would look like (hint:  nothing Congress will come up with).

This article about hearing aids caught my eye.  It's mostly about how to choose them, etc., but it starts by pointing out that they are expensive ($2000 - $5000), and people are surprised that insurance doesn't pay for them.

If I needed a hearing aid, I'd prefer that someone else pay for it too.  Heck, if I had a roof leak or my refrigerator stopped working, I'd prefer that someone else pay for those.  For these examples I tried to pick "things that have gone wrong that really need to be fixed", and in two areas that for most of us affect our daily life much more the healthcare does:  food and housing.

It's not like there's some moral hazard involved in having insurance pay for hearing aids.  It's unlikely that anyone would be more likely to expose themselves to situations involving hearing loss because they know that somewhere down the line they'll be able to get a cheap hearing aid--though moral hazard and risk homeostasis can be slippery things, and are certainly not well understood yet.

It's just that I think that there are medical expenses, with real quality of life consequences, that we should pay for ourselves, unless we are genuinely financially unable to do it.

We don't want to hear that.  I don't want to hear it.  I'm forced to pay a lot for health insurance (many months it is my fourth largest expense, after food, mortgage, and taxes).  Once I've done that, I want it to pay for medical products and services that I need.  If my doctor will lobby for me to get it covered, I'll be fine with that.

Then I'll be irritated that my health insurance consumes an even greater part of my income.

A rare triple divergence

Language Log is one of my favorite blogs, even though (or maybe because) they regularly demolish some cherished bit of usagism on my part.  And they don't like Strunk & White either, and all writers  take an oath to cite S&W when talking about clear writing, even if they have never done more than read other writers' references to S&W.  It's kind of like a secret handshake.  And now that you know it, you can do it too.

Just don't read LL, or you'll feel like an idiot when you do.

Anyway, that wasn't the point of this.  Really.  The point was a post on Conversational Incongruence, which, as LL often does, springboards off the online comic xkcd, because eventually xkcd distills any zeitgeist idea into witty conversational exchanges between stick figures, and LL is on hand to provide linguistic exegesis.

In the comments, various people recalled conversation divergences they had experienced, and I did too:  a rare triple divergence. Once I was having pizza and beer with two friends: a veterinarian and a politically active minister.  We got to talking about "AI".  Each others' responses made less and less sense, until we realized that the  vet was talking about artificial insemination, the minister about Amnesty International, and I about artificial intelligence.

What was the conversation "really" about?  Do any of us, who often spend a week hiking together, actually listen to what the others have to say?  Is there a series of veterinarian/minister/science fiction writer bar jokes none of us have ever heard?  Do you have any idea of what I'm talking about?

The Great Carbon Transition

I used the phrase "Great Carbon Transition" in my last post, and then wondered where I had gotten it.  I did a phrase search and found...that it had come from the inside of my own head.  Google found no other uses.

I think this is a great term for what the next fifty years or so are going to involve.  And it's the kind of absurd Capitalized Phrase For A Historical Period that always appears in SF novels set in the far future to describe historical events that occured between that time and the present, which real people so seldom use.

But we are, after all, the future's past, so Great Carbon Transition it is.  Remember, you heard it here first.

Where's a heavy-lift cargo airship when you need one?

This story in the New York Times detailed how hard it is to move gigantic wind turbine parts to their final locations.  Either truck or train, the limits of how big they can be and still go under bridges and make road turns are being reached.

Where are the graceful lighter-than-air cargo vessels we were so long ago promised?

Like many science fiction writers, I cherish a sentimental attachment to those great whales of the sky, though in my more sober moments (I do have them) I realize that it was a historical accident that allowed them to flourish at all, and that they don't really make any sense.

Except for lifting and transporting large, cumbersome, heavy objects to remote or, it seems, heavily populated areas.  This seems like a perfect use.

I doubt anyone is going to finance the development of the things just for this purpose.  The various efforts of recent years all finally ran out of money and closed up shop.

Since I think wind turbines are a bit of a historical accident themselves, gadgets from the early phases of the Great Carbon Transition, the fad for them might not last long enough for them to provide a good motivation.

Of course, then the airship can be used to take away the gigantic parts once the turbines have become white elephants and need to be dismantled.

Sleep training

Yesterday, in his New York Times column, David Pogue reviewed the Zeo, a sleep analysis tool (you may need to register to read it).  You strap on a headband and it can show you your waking, REM, light sleep, and deep sleep periods.  If you have trouble sleeping this thing will tell you that, yep, you have trouble sleeping.

But we're all after efficiency.  A great feature of the thing is that you can set your alarm to wake you when you are in light sleep, so you don't wake up groggy.  It won't wake you later than a predetermined time.  And, over time, I suppose you could start seeing whether your sleep cycles are 90 minutes or something else, so you can plan to go to sleep so a light sleep period coincides with when you should wake up.  And you can see how that works for naps.

I've always wanted a nap alarm that I could set, not for 20 minutes, but to go off after I had been asleep 20 minutes, which is quite different.

The thing costs $400, so I'm not getting one any time soon.  But there will be competitors and cheaper, more effective versions coming along.  Then I can finally get into sleep training.

The cover of Brain Thief

I’ve always been irritated by writers who post the covers of their upcoming books with remarks about how much they like their covers.

So I should probably feel more embarrassed about posting the cover design for my upcoming book and telling you how much I like it than I am.

But I will disguise it as a bit of an essay on cover semiotics, and also as a marketing pitch: I’m showing you this so when you spot Brain Thief out of the corner of your eye at a bookstore, you will forget whatever else you were there to buy and grab it immediately. I understand why you might even want to shove people out of the way, but please refrain. Jablokov fans are goal-oriented, but laid back about it. Looked at this way, showing you the cover now is just a public service!

A cover is an ad for the book. Its goal is to get you to come over and pick it up. Once you’ve picked it up, its job is done, though it might well have post-purchase signifier work to do (“I am the kind of person who reads books like this!”), signifier work that, as has been much discussed, the Kindle will not perform for you.

But, key to this, the cover should accurately signal what kind of book it is, so that the right person picks it up. Time and attention are scarce resources. It is the responsibility of everyone presenting the book, from author to bookstore, to use these resources wisely.

You’re looking over the New Book area. Some books strike you as books you'd like, others not.  All sorts of things go into that decision:  title font, subject matter, the style of the illustration, whether it has people in it, etc.  You reach out...and pick one up.  You glance at it and use your second order analysis--blurbs, reading the first page, reading page 117, whatever.  But if that analysis reveals that this is completely the wrong book for you, then the cover has sent you the wrong signal and wasted its efforts.  If it sent you the wrong signal, it's sending the wrong signal to people who would like it, and they don't pick it up, an even greater loss.

Making these choices isn't easy.  This cover, for example, is making some claims, about style, about mood, about quality.  The book is suspenseful, full of cool stuff, and somewhat creepy.  It's also funny, but that's hard to convey when the book isn't actually a comic novel.  The somewhat pulpy suggestion I made for the cover would have conveyed the humor, but missed the other important information.  So, yes, I do like the cover!

Hard SF and Hyperrealism

I had a good time at Readercon, and saw several old friends.  I did not come up through SF fandom, and the field is not the center of my social life, but I have such a good time whenever I do go to a convention that I should it more.

As I mentioned last week, my one panel was on the narrative voice of hard SF.  Of course, the discussion wandered all over, though I tried to keep it back on the ostensible topic, not to be a control freak (I wasn't even the moderator) but because I was interested in the topic:  does hard SF derive its authority from its content, or from its form?  For those of you not conversant with the various subgenres in science fiction, hard SF is that variety whose writers pride themselves on playing by the known rules of the various sciences, though physics has always been the most obvious one.  That this does not banish faster-than-light travel is just one of the problems with any vigorous definition of this branch of SF.

I brought up a Nabokov quote, from Pnin: "Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood."  This manages to slam both Dali and Rockwell at the same time (when the novel was written, both were working and popular).  Both practiced an absolute fidelity to the specific details of representation, at an incredible level of technical skill.  Both (as I read Nabokov) used that skill to provide a completely false image, Dali obviously, Rockwell less obviously but perhaps more dangerously.

So I said that hard SF was socialist realism kidnapped by fairies in babyhood.  Getting the scientific details write provides a presumptive authority to convey an image of a social reality that is usually false.

Why go on a panel if you can't cause trouble?

My one Readercon appearance

Our local literary SF con is this weekend, at the exciting Burlington Marriott.

Readercon specializes in panels like "Hegelianism in Golden Age Space Opera" and "Adverbs: Threat or Menace?"  It requires not just a willingness to bloviate and a couple of writing credits from the 80s, but some serious understanding of the field and its literary tropes, understanding I don't really have.

Maybe that's why I'm on only one panel, at 11 AM on Saturday, June 11:  "Is Hard SF Just a Narrative Voice?", inspired by an essay by Paul Park.

But I think the fact that you can rate how badly you want to be on a panel, but can rate an unlimited number of panels as "A+, must be on panel or will die miserably" is the problem.  If participants had been given, say, a limit of three A+ chits, I might have gotten another choice or two.  I did my best to rate my level of interest honestly.  Of course, you might say (my readers tending to inappropriate levels of both perception and expressiveness) that if I didn't really want to be on a panel I shouldn't whine about not getting on it.  And you would be right--my readers tend also tend to be annoyingly challenging to the author.

Still, if they don't minimize panel choice inflation, I'll reconsider my tactics next year.  But if you're in the Boston area this weekend, come and attend the convention.  It's great fun, and an excellent place to spot those writers who say "I don't just write stories about elves and spaceships, I'm also an intellectual heavyweight".  I'm lucky it's around here.  It's hard to bike to from my house, because of a busy stretch of Route 3, but certainly doable.

Tragic waltzes and satirical marches

One notable cultural success of the Soviet period was co-opting talented and even brilliant composers.  Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and many others wrote marches, oratorios, movie music, and popular tunes that celebrated and supported the regime.  Stravinsky, perhaps the most brilliant of them all, escaped to the West, but Prokofiev and Shostakovich were two of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.

This is not in accord with our "artist as revolutionary" ethos: current dogma is that all artists are in opposition to the state, and to what is accepted and respected.  So we look for subversion in their works, as we do in the works of all artists. So the musical production of that time seems to be covertly subverting its ostensible purpose.

Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin, and so did not have the opportunity for ex-post-facto justification, but Shostakovich lived until 1975, and so was able to attempt to rehabilitate his reputation in a less-brutal time.  Was he trying to point out subversive elements that weren't originally there?  Music's meaning is notoriously contextual.  Most of what we think we perceive in it is just our own expectations.

Still, the waltzes of the Soviet period have a distinctly end-of-the-party mournful quality.  And some of the marches seem almost absurd in their satire, so much so that you can't believe Party functionaries commissioned them and paraded to them.

One tragic waltz was used by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut.  Here is a good version.  Another is Khachaturian's, from the Masquerade Suite from incidental music to a Lermontov play, here.  The mood reminds me, maybe weirdly, of the Christmas song that manages to catch some of the tragic sense of evanescence that is an essential part of the holiday, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

Then there are the satirical marches, best of which is from the master of genre satire, Prokofiev:  the innocuously named "March for Military Band in Bb".  The first half of it is here.  All of it is in the soundtrack of this horse video, starting at 4'33".  Shostakovich wrote a "March of the Soviet Police" which can be played straight, I think.  I can't find a version online.  But I can't really imagine any collection of serious Soviet types marching toward the future to the Prokofiev.  How did they really perceive these pieces?

Wordless compressed narratives

I mentioned yesterday that I would be back to Up. Near its beginning Up uses an interesting self-contained narrative block, a “wordless compressed narrative” that gains emotional power by what it leaves out. Up uses it to good effect by showing the unremarkable life of a married couple and giving it heft by compressing it into a series of moving snapshots.

WALL-E did this, in a relatively uncompressed form, showing the robot’s routines before they are interrupted. And Saving Private Ryan did it in the Omaha Beach scene that starts the movie. There it is a few hours over a wide area compressed into a tight series of scenes.

Aside from their impressive quality, these three sections share something else: they are all much better than their succeeding movies. Saving Private Ryan becomes a fairly routine WWII movie, with a few annoying Hallmark Card intrusions by the manipulative Spielberg. WALL-E turns into a limp satire of consumerism with cute anthropomorphic robots. I think people were seduced by that first half hour and neglected to be bothered by its other problems. And Up...

Up, I would say, does not fall down as badly, but does tie itself up into mundane narrative knots by the need for an evil protagonist, in this case a lost explorer who, by the order of events, has to be at least a century old, and murders other explorers so he can be the first to find a specimen of a large bird. All that takes a lot of narrative time which would have been better spent just exploring and having adventures. And developing the characters of Karl and Russell, who really could have handled it.

This method has been used interstitially, as in the snapshot flips in Run, Lola, Run, and the character bios Jean-Pierre Jeunet used in Ameilie and A Very Long Engagement, but those were all short.  I'm sure the method has been around for a while, but I can't remember seeing it before, particularly at the same length ( something like half an hour in the case of Ryan).  I’m not up on recent cinema (except, obviously, those I take my kids to).

When bad henchmen happen to good villains

I saw Up the other night, with my wife and daughter. I liked it fine, but certainly did not think of it as one of the great works of art of our era, as others seem to have.

I’ll deal with some of those issues later. Right now, I want to point out a recurrent character arrangement that is characteristic of most children’s films, and seems to have crept into books as well. It certainly appeared in this one.

It’s this: the evil character, villain, criminal mastermind, bully, whoever, always has two moronic, clueless sidekicks. The leader doesn’t have sinister henchmen, resentful slaves, or co-opted intellectual ideologues. He has buffoons, always two.

I first noticed this in the weirdly complex and deranged Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000). The evil Diesel has doofus locomotives to admire his evil, provide comic relief, and execute commands poorly and incompetently, giving the heroes a chance to succeed. Its plot ease and comic relief that are the real functions.

In wartime propaganda, the enemy leader’s minions are often portrayed as incompetent toadies, cowards, sexual perverts (not common in children’s versions, at least openly, though sometimes appearing as fetishistic attachment to some object or procedure), cross-dressers, and sufferers from obscure and embarrassing maladies. Think of Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering in WWII propaganda.

What’s interesting about this scheme is not whether or not it makes sense in real life (Goebbels and Goering were evil, but far from comical and incompetent), but how stereotyped and unvarying it is. It ranges from Crabbe and Goyle in the Harry Potter books to the shark Bruce in Finding Nemo, with his hammerhead and mako companions. You could lift the pop-culture-laden, befuddled dialog from one movie and plop it down in another and not even notice.

Ticklish tasks: setting up a reader and a writer

You know how it is. If you mention a writer you like to someone without suggesting a specific work, your friend will invariably be drawn to the worst hackwork that writer has ever perpetrated—some Scooby-Doo tie-in book, or a late completely unedited doorstop bestseller dedicated to a much younger third spouse, or the subsequent comic novel set in academia with a recognizable grudge character based on that unfortunate late-period spouse.

But recommending the best, or most representative work might not be a great idea either. Any more than the first book of a series is always the best choice. Some writers get worse as the series goes on. Others get better. Some hit slumps and then come back stronger than before.

For example, I discovered the mystery writer Reginald Hill’s Dalziel/Pascoe novels midway through, with Bones and Silence. That turned out to be an excellent choice. That middle period of D/P novels, from that book to On Beulah Height (including Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection, and The Wood Beyond) are a perfect blend of detective novel and literary game playing. Before that they are more standard, though still good; past that the literary game playing takes over and they make less and less sense as actual detective novels.

Sheer luck on my part. Otherwise I might not have taken to him like I did.

When Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels came out, a reviewer said it was fine, but that Fifth Business was much better, and the best place to start. The reviewer was right, and I’ve since read almost everything Davies has ever written. Even the less-good stuff is great, but I might not feel that way if I’d tried to start with The Rebel Angels.

One collection of recommendations for mystery novels I saw posted in a mystery bookstore recommended starting the Lord Peter Whimsey books with Gaudy Night, possibly the best way to put someone off Sayers for life. I started with Strong Poison, perhaps not the best place, but it worked for me. I’d say start before Harriet Vane appears, probably Murder Must Advertise, and work your way toward her. Not Five Red Herrings either, unless you have a fetish for train schedules.

Pynchon? The Crying of Lot 49 is an obvious choice (short!), but I’d say V.: if you can’t take the length, stay out of the Pynchon.

David Foster Wallace? The Broom of the System (TCOL49 updated), his two great early travel essays “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All”. Try a story, and if you don’t like it in a few pages, try another, because it’s not going to change. Wallace short stories are weirdly isotropic, no matter how long they are. They’re the Red Queen’s Read: you’ll run through a lot of words but you’ll end up in the same place.  If you like that place, great.  If you don't, leave.

And Jack Vance, mentioned in several other posts?  I'd say The Star King, then into the Demon Princes series, though The Blue World is a good standalone.  And here's where reader preferences really do need to be consulted.  Someone with a bent to fantasy might prefer Lyonesse.  But the wrong choice can really put someone off him.  That's actually what started me thinking about this.  Years ago I recommended Vance, and a friend went to The Gray Prince, a weird and twisted little work, a precursor to his later "cosy genocide" manner, which I found a bit off-putting, for Vance completists only.

So, if you can, ask.  And heed warnings as well as recommendations.

Happy birthday mom

I was away this past week celebrating my mother's 80th birthday, at the Lakeside Inn in Southwestern Michigan, near New Buffalo.  Alla has made it through the purges (her father was arrested in the Red Army purges of 1937), the German invasion, traveling alone to America, getting a degree in cytology, raising some difficult children, and a successful career as a watercolorist.  Not that we felt that she had to "earn" her celebration.

The inn had a huge front porch, though you could not actually see the lake from it.  Trees.  Lots of trees in Michigan.  And the beach was many steps below.  My mother climbs up and down from her fourth-floor apartment daily, disdaining the elevator, so she made it up and down better than many people half her age.

We all had a great time, and she did too.  Here's to many more.

The real trolley problem

If you read intellectualoid blogs enough, eventually you come across the trolley problem. This purports to be some kind of psychophilosophical conundrum about "double effects". You know the one: hurtling trolley about to kill five people. Pull the switch and save them: yay! Uh oh, instead, you have to push an avoirdupois-challenged man in front of the trolley to save the other five: boo! Or, actually, I guess, “yay/boo” (it’s meant to be engage contradictory decision circuits simultaneously).

Aside from the dubious notion that you would actually be able to push an individual big enough to stop a trolley with his sheer bulk if he didn’t want to be pushed, no matter what claims this problem makes for itself, it is actually nothing but a gigantic piece of crypto anti-trolley propaganda.

Because what does it say? Trolleys kill people! They hurtle out of control and smash people into strawberry jam. In some versions of the problem they kill small children. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your moral reasoning, somebody dies horribly. Was this example funded by GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone?

Trolleys may or may not be a carbon-correct solution to regional transportation problems. But we need to decide this issue on the merits, not based on the sly well poisoning of so-called “philosophers”.

Who do I pay for news?

This morning Megan McArdle mentions the shortage of hard news from Iran in the wake of its election.  She does mention that The New York Times, my regular morning reading, does have full coverage.  But almost no one else does, because newspapers have been forced to cut their foreign bureaus.

I know that newspapers are going to vanish, to be replaced with some other means of conveying the news.  I also know that keeping expert staffers in various locations around the world, often at great risk, is expensive.  I know that developing stories over long periods of time is expensive.  I know that research, fact-checking, and editing are expensive.

I'm willing to help pay for this.  I'd gladly pay for more news that I get.  I'd pay to find out more about the situation on the ground in Belarus, in West Africa, in Central Asia.  I'd pay for more non-sensationalist news about science too.

My question:  in the future, who do I pay, and how?  I prefer a few well-edited words to many more flaccid ones, and I want a channel I can trust, so I don't have to keep worrying that what I'm learning is wrong.  I don't want to be the only one paying:  I can't support a news channel on my own.  But if there are too many free riders, no one will work to supply me with what I want.

I'm sure I'm not alone here.  I want other people to undergo months of discomfort and danger to bring me the story, and I'm willing to pony up for it.  When the newspapers are gone, who will step up to take my money and give me what I want?

When is it worth updating a classic?

This week I went to a performance of Pirates! (yes, the exclamation point is in the original), a "modernization" of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.  It was not as bad as you might think, largely because the performers and orchestra were good, and most of the music (if not the book) remained.  They even bootlegged in the Lord Chancellor's nightmare song from Iolanthe to open the second act, to good effect.

The modernization involved pretty much what you might think:  sexual references, throwing up, references to colonialism, some more sexual references, including jokes about virgins and the difficulty of finding them older than the original operetta, and some "topical" mentions.  The Pirate King was played as Johnny Depp doing Jack Sparrow, something I'm sure even Johnny Depp is tired of.

Since Gilbert was always topical, it makes sense that those of us not enamored of the cultural details of the Victorian Era would enjoy having references updated. But there is an inherent problem of cultural production here.

Since Gilbert was a genius, you have to be pretty good for your modern patches not to seem even dimmer than they are by contrast to the bright intricacy of his language.  But if you're good enough to match Gilbert's quality, you're good enough to be doing your own work.  So such updatings are either the leisure exercises of people known for other things, or second-rate work by those who have nothing original to contribute.  In this case, it is very much the latter.

All in all, not the root canal of an experience that some recent Huntington productions have been.  But my friends and I have decided not to resubscribe next year, and instead explore a selection of other performances around town.  That's our power in this case:  exit.