Is editing set to make a comeback? Let’s hope so. From the Atlantic: “The Internet can feel like a jungle, and journalists are in the business of providing paths through the territory. Writers might blaze the trails, but editors maintain the roads.”

Alexis Madrigal makes the case that editing could follow much the same path as desktop publishing has since the mid-1980s. When desktop publishing tools first came out, everyone thought they were designers. But in recent years consumers have come to realize the importance of good design. Design (good design) is best left to the professionals. And now hopefully the same can be said of editors. In recent years, editors have been undervalued. They were deemed expendable and as a result they have been disappearing. “Text goes online with less editing than it did at magazines or newspapers. More and more of us writers are working without regular editors. More and more people are writing without ever having been edited. Maybe now people will realize what editors did: their presence will be felt in their absence.”

Madrigal quotes writer Paul Ford on what I believe to be a very good description of what editors do. “Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are good at process. They think about calendars, schedules, checklists, and get freaked out when schedules slip. Their jobs are to aggregate information, parse it, restructure it, and make sure it meets standards. They are basically QA for language and meaning.” Here here.

The photo shows the editing made by a well-known editor to one of his recent speeches: President Barack Obama. Another example of editing here.

For more on the topic, check out this interview with Mary Norris, a copy editor who has worked at the New Yorker for 31 years. “I have been on both sides of the process, as a writer and as a query proofreader. Being edited sometimes felt like having my bones reset on a torture rack. I don’t ever want to do that to a writer, but I probably have from time to time. “What is this, the adverb police?” a writer who shall remain nameless once said in my earshot. “You betcha,” I wanted to say. I don’t remove every word ending in “ly,” but I like economy and concision.”

This is one of my favorite Apple commercials. It tells the story. It makes you feel that you are joining a group of free-thinkers who want to change the world. “No respect for the status quo ... About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward.”

Apple - “Crazies" from AdGiant on Vimeo.

Have the distractions of the Internet, and the demands of our busy schedules, taken away the ability to read well? It’s a thought that has been expressed in many different circles. David Ulin writes in the Los Angeles Times that he has always been a lover of books. “Since I discovered reading, I’ve always been surrounded by stacks of books. I read my way through camp, school, nights, weekends; when my girlfriend and I backpacked through Europe after college graduation, I had to buy a suitcase to accommodate the books I picked up along the way. For her, the highlight of the trip was the man in Florence who offered a tour of the Uffizi. For me, it was the serendipity of stumbling across a London bookstall that had once been owned by the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, whose work, then as now, I adored.”

But then lately he finds that he hasn’t been able to read as he once did: “So what happened? It isn’t a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else’s world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine.”

What do you think? Ulin argues that the contemplation that reading demands is needed more today than ever. The important problems that need solving can only be best understood through serious thought and consideration. Ulin asks, “How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?”

An interesting program in Massachusetts allows prisoners to join a book club or go to jail. From the New York Times story: “The class is taught through Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club. At each two-hour meeting, students discuss fiction, memoirs and the occasional poem; authors range from Frederick Douglass to John Steinbeck to Toni Morrison, topics from self- mutilation and family quarrels to the Holocaust and the Montgomery bus boycott.”

According to the story, the program is controversial. It’s not clear that it is successful in aiding rehabilitation. Also, some residents of the community complain that prisoners should not have free access to classes for which students must pay full tuition. Despite those concerns, several participants have called their encounter with literature as causing “changes,” “turning points,” “epiphanies,” even “grace,” according to the story.

However, I’m not sure this exchange is the best first-encounter to the classics: “I don’t want to be all negative,” the officer begins, “but you have to read this book.” Not as in “This is a must-read,” but “We’ve had people go to jail for not reading.”

Bruce plays during tomorrow’s Super Bowl halftime show. I don’t care if the critics have been luke warm in their reviews, I say go out an buy this album. If you are a fan, you will love it. We’re all just workin’ on a dream.

I think my favorite song on Working on a Dream is The Last Carnival, a tribute to the late E Street Band member Danny Federici.

In the New York Times, Bruce has this to say about the recent election: “A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it? What does it mean? ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Badlands,’ I’ve seen people singing those songs back to me all over the world. I’d seen that country on a grass-roots level through the ’80s, since I was a teenager. And I met people who were always working toward the country being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very far away.

“And so on election night it showed its face, for maybe, probably, one of the first times in my adult life,” he said. “I sat there on the couch, and my jaw dropped, and I went, ‘Oh my God, it exists.’ Not just dreaming it. It exists, it’s there, and if this much of it is there, the rest of it’s there. Let’s go get that. Let’s go get it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life. All the songs you wrote are a little truer today than they were a month or two ago.”

I celebrate my 40th birthday later this month. That same month, the world lost a great leader.

An alarming report came out earlier this week. American’s aren’t reading much anymore. The New York Times concludes from the NEA’s report: “As that happens, [students] reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.”

As I reported in earlier posts on this blog, the NEA issued a report titled, “Reading at Risk” in 2004, which found that “fewer than half of Americans over 18 read novels, short stories, plays or poetry.” Yet, this report wished to include nonfiction as well. It’sconclusions we much the same as the earlier study. Reading in America is on the decline, and its consequences can be alarming. Times reporter interviewed Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who said he believes “the statistics could not explain why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia said, “we live in a society where the media does not recognize, celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.””

In the chariman’s preface to the report Mr. Gioia stresses that the report is not an elegy to a bygone era of print. Instead it’s a call to action, based on the evidence of how reading enriches our lives. “All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals—whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihoodof an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. se cold statistics confirm something thatmost readers know but havemostly been reluctant to declare as fact—books change lives for the better.

Find the full study “To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence” (PDF) here.

As many of my friends know, I’m a huge Bruce fan. I’ve been listening to his new albulm, Magic, almost nonstop this week. There’s not much to say other than it’s wonderful. I can’t wait to see him next month when he brings the E Street Band to the Xcel Center in St. Paul. Here’s what A.O. Scott of the New York Times had to say about the album.

“There is a brightness of sound and a lightness of touch that are not quite like anything else Mr. Springsteen has done recently....The paradox of “Magic” may be that some of its stories are among the toughest he has told. The album is sometimes a tease but rarely a joke. The title track, for instance, comes across as a seductive bit of carnival patter, something you might have heard on the Asbury Park boardwalk in the old days. A magician, his voice whispery and insinuating in a minor key, lures you in with descriptions of his tricks that grow more sinister with each verse. (“I’ve got a shiny saw blade/All I need’s a volunteer.”) “Trust none of what you hear/And less of what you see,” he warns. And the song’s refrain — “This is what will be” — grows more chilling as you absorb the rest of the album’s nuances and shadows....And while the songs on “Magic” characteristically avoid explicit topical references, there is no mistaking that the source of the unease is, to a great extent, political.”

Winnepeg has a population of nearly 600,000, of which 413,513 residents have library cards. Traffic at the city’s Millenium Hub has increased 50 percent in just the past year, reaching 1.5 million visitors. Winnepegers can’t get enough. Why? According to Winnepeg blogger Morley Walker, in part its because of the recent renovations to the library building itself, but it’s also due to the fact that the library is turning int a true information hub of the modern age.

“It also has a lot to do with the astonishing volume of information libraries now make accessible, largely through the computer,” writes Walker. “Less than a year ago, the WPL added something it calls the Canadian Newsstand to its online database. This gives library-card holders free access to the digital archives of 19 Canadian newspapers, including the Winnipeg Free Press, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. Another service, the Canadian Reference Centre, provides full-text articles from 150 Canadian and 400 international periodicals. The Rosetta Stone service offers online courses, complete with illustrations, in 30 languages. For Chinese speakers, there’s Dragonsource, a database of Chinese-language newspaper and magazines. The Naxos Music service provides streaming audio for 165,000 tracks from classical, jazz, pop and folk CDs. The Auto Repair Reference Centre provides detailed instructions on some 23,000 makes and models of cars.

“All this is free with your library card — which itself is free to all city residents.”

In my effort to learn more about classical music, I recently came across two quotes from two very successful conductors, composers and leaders of the world’s most respected orchestras. They are very similar, and they made me think about how we manage creative people.

“To be able to work with an orchestra over an extended period is rare, but fruitful. The players get to know my musical language and I get to know their individual qualities ... Spending time with members of the orchestra, and listening to how they interact, influences the way in which you compose in much the same way writing for a particular voice does. Simply emersing yourself in rehearsals, soaking up the problems and the things that work, is all part of the amazing learning curve which is a continuous and lifelong process.”
-Michael Berkeley, composer, recently composer-in-association with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

“It’s my purpose to help them shape priorities and decide, so that at the concert they can be as spontaneous and engaging as possible. The more artistic the musicians are, they more you can work, not on the little details, but on the larger things.”
-Michael Tilson Thomas, music director, San Francisco Symphony