Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
By MOTOKO RICH
BEREA, Ohio — Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.
Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.
A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.
Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
Setting Expectations
Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.
Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.
Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.
According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)
“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”
Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.
The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.
It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.
“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
What’s Best for Nadia?
Deborah Konyk always believed it was essential for Nadia and her 8-year-old sister, Yashca, to read books. She regularly read aloud to the girls and took them to library story hours.
“Reading opens up doors to places that you probably will never get to visit in your lifetime, to cultures, to worlds, to people,” Ms. Konyk said.
Ms. Konyk, who took a part-time job at a dollar store chain a year and a half ago, said she did not have much time to read books herself. There are few books in the house. But after Yashca was born, Ms. Konyk spent the baby’s nap time reading the Harry Potter novels to Nadia, and she regularly brought home new titles from the library.
Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.
Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My absolutely, perfect normal life ... ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series “Beyblade.”
In one scene the narrator, Aries, hitches a ride with some masked men and one of them pulls a knife on her. “Just then I notice (Like finally) something sharp right in front of me,” Aries writes. “I gladly took it just like that until something terrible happen ....”
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”
“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”
Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.
Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.
The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.
Reading skills are also valued by employers. A 2006 survey by the Conference Board, which conducts research for business leaders, found that nearly 90 percent of employers rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with bachelor’s degrees. Department of Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher incomes.
Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”
Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.
Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.
Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.
One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”
Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.
“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”
Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.
But This Is Reading Too
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”
Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites.
“On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”
Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”
The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.
Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.
Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.
“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”
A Lifelong Struggle
In the case of Hunter Gaudet, the Internet has helped him feel more comfortable with a new kind of reading. A varsity lacrosse player in Somers, Conn., Hunter has struggled most of his life to read. After learning he was dyslexic in the second grade, he was placed in special education classes and a tutor came to his home three hours a week. When he entered high school, he dropped the special education classes, but he still reads books only when forced, he said.
In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”
When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.
Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”
Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.
“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”
When he was in seventh grade, Hunter was one of 89 students who participated in a study comparing performance on traditional state reading tests with a specially designed Internet reading test. Hunter, who scored in the lowest 10 percent on the traditional test, spent 12 weeks learning how to use the Web for a science class before taking the Internet test. It was composed of three sets of directions asking the students to search for information online, determine which sites were reliable and explain their reasoning.
Hunter scored in the top quartile. In fact, about a third of the students in the study, led by Professor Leu, scored below average on traditional reading tests but did well on the Internet assessment.
The Testing Debate
To date, there have been few large-scale appraisals of Web skills. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, has developed a digital literacy test known as iSkills that requires students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web. About 80 colleges and a handful of high schools have administered the test so far.
But according to Stephen Denis, product manager at ETS, of the more than 20,000 students who have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a score that represented “core functional levels” in Internet literacy.
Now some literacy experts want the federal tests known as the nation’s report card to include a digital reading component. So far, the traditionalists have held sway: The next round, to be administered to fourth and eighth graders in 2009, will test only print reading comprehension.
Mary Crovo of the National Assessment Governing Board, which creates policies for the national tests, said several members of a committee that sets guidelines for the reading tests believed large numbers of low-income and rural students might not have regular Internet access, rendering measurements of their online skills unfair.
Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or taught.
“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”
Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”
The United States is diverging from the policies of some other countries. Next year, for the first time, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools.
Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. “I think they need it all.”
Web junkies can occasionally be swept up in a book. After Nadia read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” in her freshman English class, Ms. Konyk brought home another Holocaust memoir, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton-Jackson.
Nadia was riveted by heartbreaking details of life in the concentration camps. “I was trying to imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”
Hoping to keep up the momentum, Ms. Konyk brought home another book, “Silverboy,” a fantasy novel. Nadia made it through one chapter before she got engrossed in the Internet fan fiction again.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
How books changed Mafia man's life
By Bridget Osborne BBC HARDtalk
Stereotypes become stereotypes because nine times out of 10 they are true.
Hear the words "Mafia boss" and you think: olive-skinned with dark, slightly bloodshot eyes and a sharp suit.
Louis Ferrante fulfils some of those preconceptions.
He is New York Italian, powerfully built, and was wearing a black shirt when interviewed for HARDtalk by Sarah Montague.
He worked for John Gotti of the infamous Gambino crime family that pulled off some of the most lucrative heists in American history.
But he is younger than you would think, given that he ran his own "crew" and did nine years in jail before deciding to change his life and become a writer.
Ferrante's moment of truth came when a prison guard at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center described him and his kind as "animals".
Two months in solitary forced him to ponder the question: was he an animal? If so, why was he one?
"I thought about the people I'd victimised... and I realised I did deserve to be in a zoo," he recalls.
For the first time in his life he started reading books, looking deeper into himself and searching for some answers.
He set himself the challenge to read the entire prison library.
"Prison was the greatest thing that happened to me, because it gave me time to look inside myself, the solitude that I needed to take a closer look at everything around me; to analyse myself."
He educated himself and converted to Judaism.
Burgers and fries
Given his experience behind bars, Ferrante believes the prison services should be about giving inmates the opportunity to change their lives.
But before his own transformation, Ferrante's "greatest aspiration" was always to be a member of the Mafia.
He started off as a kid, sawing the tops of meters to get the coins, and hijacked his first truck as a teenager, using a gun.
"I was 17 years old. I liked girls. I liked to drive fast cars. I liked hamburgers and French fries.
"And I'd just realised that I liked to hijack trucks".
A common misconception about the Mafia is that you have to have a genetic link to a "family" in order to be a member.
Not so, says Ferrante. The most famous Mob bosses were not born into "the Life".
Lucky Luciano, Thomas Lucchese, Carlos Marcello and Vito Genovese all started out as petty thieves, graduating to bigger crimes as the years passed. So did John Gotti and so did Ferrante.
Career criminal
Whether he is accurately described as a "boss" is debatable.
His memoir, Tough Guy, more modestly describes him as a "Mafia insider".
But he was on the list being passed around the five Mafia families and was on the verge of being "made" when he was arrested for racketeering.
"I had a dozen good men under me... I was already equal to a made man, since I answered directly to the heads of my family."
In a legitimate business he would be considered middle management.
At the height of his criminal career Ferrante had the trappings of wealth.
"I'd drop $10,000 at the tables in Atlantic City, pick up a $500 tab at a steakhouse, and hand out hundreds to anyone with a story."
He made his money robbing trucks, selling on bent goods bought with fake credit cards made from stolen numbers, dealing with anything from high quality white goods to bombs.
In an early mistake he robbed a truck load of cheap underwear.
"I was stuck with 500 boxes of brassieres I couldn't sell as slingshots".
But mostly his jobs were highly lucrative.
Money collector
His book enables you to check what you think you know about the New York Italian underworld with reality.
You have to be Italian to be "made"? True.
Under no circumstances do you take your beef with another gangster to his home, involving his family. Also true.
He consorted with characters like Bert the Zip, Tony the Twitch and Barry the Brokester, who always maintained he could not pay you because he was broke.
Bobby Butterballs he leaves us to work out for ourselves.
He maintains that there is honour amongst thieves:
"Jimmy and I had no contract, no lawyers, no bill of sale; a handshake sealed the deal. Try that in the straight world".
And he would have you believe that he was a nice cuddly gangster. He maintains he never murdered anyone.
But that was perhaps more by luck than judgement.
Ferrante glosses over quite how much he injured people, and he admits in his book that he beat someone up and left him not knowing whether he was alive or dead.
Collecting money, he says, was easy for him. "I collected $20,000 from a guy who owned a dress company in a garment centre. I threatened to hang him out the window. He paid, even though his office was on the first floor."
When HARDtalk presenter Sarah Montague asked him how he asserted himself in prison he used elliptical phrases like: I would have to "declare myself" or "express myself".
Writing his life story cannot have been an easy decision. The Mafia are not keen on insiders discussing their modus operandi.
He has changed the names to protect the innocent and conceal the guilty, and says as a matter of honour he has never ratted on his former associates.
HARDtalk's interview with Louis Ferrante is broadcast on Wednesday 3 September.
On BBC World News TV channel at the following times: 03:30 GMT, 08:30 GMT, 14:30 GMT, 20:30 GMT and 22:30 GMT
On BBC News TV channel at 04:30 BST & 23:30 BST
Friday, August 8, 2008
Superior Leader - Warren Buffet by: Michael J. Spindler
Superior business leader and American investor Warren Buffett is often called “Oracle of Omaha” or the “Sage of Omaha” and philanthropist. (Wikipedia, 2007) Buffett is the CEO, and the biggest shareholder of the Berkshire Hathaway Company. Buffett’s has an estimated current net worth of approximately $52 billion in US funds. Forbes Magazine ranks Buffett the third richest person in the world in September 2007 behind Carlos Slim and Bill Gates.
Warren Buffett is known for his economical and plain lifestyle. Buffett still lives in the same Omaha, Nebraska house that he purchased in 1958 for $31,500 with a current value of $700,000. In 1989, Buffett spent $9.7 million of the Berkshire’s funds on a corporate jet. He jokingly named it “The Indefensible” because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs. (Wikipedia, 2007)
Warren Buffett decided to make a commitment to give his fortune to charity back in June 2006. Buffett’s charity donation is approximately $30 billion, which is the largest donation in the history of the United States. The donation was enough to more than double the size of the foundation with 83% of it going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett believed that his family had enough money to get started in life so Buffett decided to give his fortune to charity. Buffett’s annual salary in 2006 was only $100,000. In 2007, Buffett was listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. (Wikipedia, 2007)
What makes Warren Buffett a good business leader? This is what everyone wants to know because Warren buffet is so successful. It all starts with leadership. Warren buffet is a true leader where his leadership makes a difference in the world. Leadership is very much related to change and Warren Buffett has the capabilities of leadership change to fit the changing world. Warren Buffett has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to map read in the irregular waters of change. Is Warren Buffett born a leader? The authors of this paper believe not. Experience and research has shown little evidence that an individual who comes to power is a “born leader.” Warren Buffett took the falls that any other leader has to take. Warren Buffett learned from his mistakes and turned his mistakes into a positive thing. Warren Buffett shares his leadership at all organizational levels and Buffett is empowered to share leadership responsibilities. In the world of business, many titles related to leadership roles are actively used in business and Warren Buffett wears those titles to make him effective in multiple leadership positions in business. Distinction between good leadership and good management is made often. Managers are made to be organizational, controllers and budgeters. Warren Buffett has leadership in all three departments and one must have these traits to be a good business leader.
Another important trait in Today’s business leadership is communication. Warren Buffet is a skilled communicator in all aspects of life. Communication is the real key of leadership. Skilled communicators have an appreciation for positioning in the business world. Warren Buffet is experienced at positioning himself at the right place at the right time. Warren Buffet has the understanding of the people he is trying to reach and what he can and cannot hear from the people. Knowledge of audiences’ needs and wants gives the orator the ability to listen. Warren Buffett is an excellent listener with the ability to convey his understanding.
When Warren Buffett talks, people listen. Warren Buffett can send a message through an open door and does not have to push the message through a wall.
Leadership is crucial to any successful business and good leadership is what Warren Buffett is all about. This is what makes Warren buffet a good business leader.
Mr. Warren Buffett’s investment strategies and course of leadership are shining examples of characteristics shared by cognitive theorists. Cognitive theory is an approach of explaining behavior through perception, anticipation, and thinking. Mr. Buffett’s continual approach of analyzing both possible investment choices, market trends, and the ability to place management resources of the right caliber in the right position has consistently brought this investor to the forefront amongst peers and the marketplace. At the core of every sound investor is a creative innovator.
Innovation demands creativity. Creativity in turn draws on our cognitive faculties, across the full amplitude from emotion to reason. In the number-heavy world of global investing, innovative thinking is critical. Innovative investors decipher future trends, spot likely winners by combining science (financials) with art (acuity and perception) and continuously mitigate risk. They assess user needs, product features, the proper deployment of money, professional organizational structures and risk management. (Kore Kalibre, 2006)
Mr. Buffett’s instinct and ability to interpret market trends is also held by tight reigns. Despite over 50 years of growth, Mr. Buffett always adheres to one of the most basic business principles: “…only compete where you have a competitive advantage. Warren Buffett refers to staying within your circle of competence. Social psychologists tell us, though, that we are prone to overconfidence when it comes to assessing our abilities…” (Arthridge, 2006) A man of Warren Buffett’s position and track record could easily be derailed to a sense of over confidence. The principle of only competing within your range of competitive advantage is a principle that can be applied to many other areas in life, and Mr. Buffett’s ability to work and live by this idea has allowed him to continue forward with minimal bruising.
By establishing the previous examples, the authors can reinforce the principles of cognitive theory in that Mr. Buffett behavior patterns are clearly dictated by thought processes, which include interpretation, analysis, and foresight. “As experiences and events gain meaning and value, the process becomes increasingly top down as the mind in (a) attempt at an orderly process influences perception though beliefs, goals and external process” (Gardener, 2007)
Warren Buffett’s is a self empowered leader, because he is loyal, sets goals, plans a strategy for achievement, and stays committed until he accomplishes his purpose. Up to date, he is the greatest stockbroker of all-time. He is a very conservative investor that prefers to invest in companies that sell name brand products that he uses. For example, Coca-Cola, Gillette Razors, See’s Candy, Gulfstream Jet, and GEICO are the major companies he invested in. In the nineties his assets quadrupled in less than five years. He is a smart investor that usually does not take big investment risks. For example, he will not invest in internet stock, because the return is unpredictable. He likes to invest in companies that he is sure will be successful 20 years later. He buys the company with the intentions of keeping it forever. Usually, the management team of each company is the same staff that sold it Warren Buffett from the beginning. He stays loyal to his partners, and the team workstheir best to keep him happy.
After Warren Buffett’s wife died, he decided to donate 85% of his money to charity. However, “he wants his money to be used the same year he donates it”.(Harris, 2006) The requirement will accelerate the process to help the world. According to Fortune magazine, five-sixths of his money will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation which focus on finding cures for diseases that are common in poor nations. The rest of the money will be split among four other charities, that are each run by his three children and one that is in his late wife’s name.
Warren Buffett is not a huge spender. In fact, he still lives in the same house he bought 40 years ago. Warren “told ABC News “Nightline” that being born into wealth did not entitle his children”(Harris, 2006). In addition, he told Fortune magazine that, “A very rich person would leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.”(Harris, 2006) In other words, he wants his children to work earn their money and value hard work and smart choices.
In the year 2006, Warren’s first annual donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was $1.5 billion and the rest was divided among the four charities. He was the first person to make a donation better than Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. It seems as if Bill Gates and Warren Buffett set a good example and lead others to be more generous, because now the Barron Hilton has committed to donating half of his fortune to charity also. Barron Hilton is the founder of the Hilton Hotels and is worth $2.3 billion. Hopefully, a trend started among the fortunate to give to the less fortunate.
The personality of Warren Buffett ties to the Social Cognitive Level, because he tries to understand and make sense of other people. He observes the differences in social knowledge when dealing with people. Social cognition refers to making sense of ourselves, others, and how the information is used. In the sixties and seventies Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel were psychologists, studying personality development. They found that social learning and cognitive principles improve ones abilities to self-regulate and to follow goals. Warren investment choices were successful, because he conditioned his the way he processed information, choices, and expectations.
References - DO Not Strip References!
Gardener, J. (2007). Cognitive Behavior Theory. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://www.cognitivebehavior.com/theory/index.html
Harris, D. (2006, June 26,). Warren Buffett's Unprecedented Generosity. Retrieved December 31, 2007, from http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=2118501
Kore Kalibre (2006, March-April 2006). Warren Buffett’s Innovation: Staying away from Rapid Product Innovation. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://www.korekalibre.com/index.php?option=com_magazine&task=show_magazine_article&magazine_id=26
Legg Mason Value Trust (2006, October 26). Legg Mason Value Trust (LMVTX) Letter to Shareholders. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://markets.kiplinger.com/kiplinger?GUID=323448&Page=MediaViewer&Ticker=LMVTX
Wikipedia (2007, December 25). Warren Buffett. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
Warren Buffett is known for his economical and plain lifestyle. Buffett still lives in the same Omaha, Nebraska house that he purchased in 1958 for $31,500 with a current value of $700,000. In 1989, Buffett spent $9.7 million of the Berkshire’s funds on a corporate jet. He jokingly named it “The Indefensible” because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs. (Wikipedia, 2007)
Warren Buffett decided to make a commitment to give his fortune to charity back in June 2006. Buffett’s charity donation is approximately $30 billion, which is the largest donation in the history of the United States. The donation was enough to more than double the size of the foundation with 83% of it going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett believed that his family had enough money to get started in life so Buffett decided to give his fortune to charity. Buffett’s annual salary in 2006 was only $100,000. In 2007, Buffett was listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. (Wikipedia, 2007)
What makes Warren Buffett a good business leader? This is what everyone wants to know because Warren buffet is so successful. It all starts with leadership. Warren buffet is a true leader where his leadership makes a difference in the world. Leadership is very much related to change and Warren Buffett has the capabilities of leadership change to fit the changing world. Warren Buffett has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to map read in the irregular waters of change. Is Warren Buffett born a leader? The authors of this paper believe not. Experience and research has shown little evidence that an individual who comes to power is a “born leader.” Warren Buffett took the falls that any other leader has to take. Warren Buffett learned from his mistakes and turned his mistakes into a positive thing. Warren Buffett shares his leadership at all organizational levels and Buffett is empowered to share leadership responsibilities. In the world of business, many titles related to leadership roles are actively used in business and Warren Buffett wears those titles to make him effective in multiple leadership positions in business. Distinction between good leadership and good management is made often. Managers are made to be organizational, controllers and budgeters. Warren Buffett has leadership in all three departments and one must have these traits to be a good business leader.
Another important trait in Today’s business leadership is communication. Warren Buffet is a skilled communicator in all aspects of life. Communication is the real key of leadership. Skilled communicators have an appreciation for positioning in the business world. Warren Buffet is experienced at positioning himself at the right place at the right time. Warren Buffet has the understanding of the people he is trying to reach and what he can and cannot hear from the people. Knowledge of audiences’ needs and wants gives the orator the ability to listen. Warren Buffett is an excellent listener with the ability to convey his understanding.
When Warren Buffett talks, people listen. Warren Buffett can send a message through an open door and does not have to push the message through a wall.
Leadership is crucial to any successful business and good leadership is what Warren Buffett is all about. This is what makes Warren buffet a good business leader.
Mr. Warren Buffett’s investment strategies and course of leadership are shining examples of characteristics shared by cognitive theorists. Cognitive theory is an approach of explaining behavior through perception, anticipation, and thinking. Mr. Buffett’s continual approach of analyzing both possible investment choices, market trends, and the ability to place management resources of the right caliber in the right position has consistently brought this investor to the forefront amongst peers and the marketplace. At the core of every sound investor is a creative innovator.
Innovation demands creativity. Creativity in turn draws on our cognitive faculties, across the full amplitude from emotion to reason. In the number-heavy world of global investing, innovative thinking is critical. Innovative investors decipher future trends, spot likely winners by combining science (financials) with art (acuity and perception) and continuously mitigate risk. They assess user needs, product features, the proper deployment of money, professional organizational structures and risk management. (Kore Kalibre, 2006)
Mr. Buffett’s instinct and ability to interpret market trends is also held by tight reigns. Despite over 50 years of growth, Mr. Buffett always adheres to one of the most basic business principles: “…only compete where you have a competitive advantage. Warren Buffett refers to staying within your circle of competence. Social psychologists tell us, though, that we are prone to overconfidence when it comes to assessing our abilities…” (Arthridge, 2006) A man of Warren Buffett’s position and track record could easily be derailed to a sense of over confidence. The principle of only competing within your range of competitive advantage is a principle that can be applied to many other areas in life, and Mr. Buffett’s ability to work and live by this idea has allowed him to continue forward with minimal bruising.
By establishing the previous examples, the authors can reinforce the principles of cognitive theory in that Mr. Buffett behavior patterns are clearly dictated by thought processes, which include interpretation, analysis, and foresight. “As experiences and events gain meaning and value, the process becomes increasingly top down as the mind in (a) attempt at an orderly process influences perception though beliefs, goals and external process” (Gardener, 2007)
Warren Buffett’s is a self empowered leader, because he is loyal, sets goals, plans a strategy for achievement, and stays committed until he accomplishes his purpose. Up to date, he is the greatest stockbroker of all-time. He is a very conservative investor that prefers to invest in companies that sell name brand products that he uses. For example, Coca-Cola, Gillette Razors, See’s Candy, Gulfstream Jet, and GEICO are the major companies he invested in. In the nineties his assets quadrupled in less than five years. He is a smart investor that usually does not take big investment risks. For example, he will not invest in internet stock, because the return is unpredictable. He likes to invest in companies that he is sure will be successful 20 years later. He buys the company with the intentions of keeping it forever. Usually, the management team of each company is the same staff that sold it Warren Buffett from the beginning. He stays loyal to his partners, and the team workstheir best to keep him happy.
After Warren Buffett’s wife died, he decided to donate 85% of his money to charity. However, “he wants his money to be used the same year he donates it”.(Harris, 2006) The requirement will accelerate the process to help the world. According to Fortune magazine, five-sixths of his money will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation which focus on finding cures for diseases that are common in poor nations. The rest of the money will be split among four other charities, that are each run by his three children and one that is in his late wife’s name.
Warren Buffett is not a huge spender. In fact, he still lives in the same house he bought 40 years ago. Warren “told ABC News “Nightline” that being born into wealth did not entitle his children”(Harris, 2006). In addition, he told Fortune magazine that, “A very rich person would leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.”(Harris, 2006) In other words, he wants his children to work earn their money and value hard work and smart choices.
In the year 2006, Warren’s first annual donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was $1.5 billion and the rest was divided among the four charities. He was the first person to make a donation better than Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. It seems as if Bill Gates and Warren Buffett set a good example and lead others to be more generous, because now the Barron Hilton has committed to donating half of his fortune to charity also. Barron Hilton is the founder of the Hilton Hotels and is worth $2.3 billion. Hopefully, a trend started among the fortunate to give to the less fortunate.
The personality of Warren Buffett ties to the Social Cognitive Level, because he tries to understand and make sense of other people. He observes the differences in social knowledge when dealing with people. Social cognition refers to making sense of ourselves, others, and how the information is used. In the sixties and seventies Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel were psychologists, studying personality development. They found that social learning and cognitive principles improve ones abilities to self-regulate and to follow goals. Warren investment choices were successful, because he conditioned his the way he processed information, choices, and expectations.
References - DO Not Strip References!
Gardener, J. (2007). Cognitive Behavior Theory. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://www.cognitivebehavior.com/theory/index.html
Harris, D. (2006, June 26,). Warren Buffett's Unprecedented Generosity. Retrieved December 31, 2007, from http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=2118501
Kore Kalibre (2006, March-April 2006). Warren Buffett’s Innovation: Staying away from Rapid Product Innovation. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://www.korekalibre.com/index.php?option=com_magazine&task=show_magazine_article&magazine_id=26
Legg Mason Value Trust (2006, October 26). Legg Mason Value Trust (LMVTX) Letter to Shareholders. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://markets.kiplinger.com/kiplinger?GUID=323448&Page=MediaViewer&Ticker=LMVTX
Wikipedia (2007, December 25). Warren Buffett. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
| About The Author Michael J. Spindler - http://www.localmusichits.com - A Musicians Community for Fans and the Bands to promote hits in local music on a national stage. Free to distribute - However- Do not strip Article References, remove the HTML if needed, but keep the URL’s. Do Not Remove the Authors name, Michael J. Spindler and keep the hyperlink to http://www.localmusichits.com - I use software that compares my “library” and scours the web for placements. When I find my article on your site and you have not followed the above binding agreements, Lawyers will be involved. |
How to Successfully Navigate Your Business through an Economic Downturn by: Terry H Hill
An economic downturn is a phase of the business cycle in which the economy as a whole is in decline.This phase basically marks the end of the period of growth in the business cycle. Economic downturns are characterized by decreased levels of consumer purchases (especially of durable goods) and, subsequently, reduced levels of production by businesses.
While economic downturns are admittedly difficult, and are formidable obstacles to small businesses that are trying to survive and grow, an economic downturn can open up opportunities. A well-managed company can realize the opportunity to gain market share by taking customers away from their competitors. Resourceful entrepreneurs capture the available opportunities, from an economic downturn, by developing alternate methods of doing business that were never implemented during a prior growth period.
The challenge of successfully navigating your business through an economic downturn lies in the realignment of your business with current economic realities. Specifically, you, as the business owner, need to renew a focus on your core clients/customers, reduce your operating expenses, conserve cash, and manage more proactively, rather than reactively, is paramount.
Here are best practices that will help you to successfully navigate your business through an economic downturn:
Goals:
The primary goal of any business owner is to survive the current economic downturn and to develop a leaner, more cost-effective and more efficient operation. The secondary goal is to grow the business even during this current economic downturn.
Objectives:
• Conserve cash.
• Protect assets.
• Reduce costs.
• Improve efficiencies.
• Grow customer base.
Required Action:
• Do not panic… History shows that economic downturns do not last forever. Remain calm and act in a rational manner as you refocus your attention on resizing your company to the current economic conditions.
• Focus on what YOU can control… Don’t let the media's rhetoric concerning recessions and economic slowdown deter you from achieving business success. It´s a trap! Why? Because the condition of the economy is beyond your control. Surviving economic downturns requires a focus on what you can control, i.e. your relevant business activities.
• Communicate, communicate, and communicate! Beware of the pitfall of trying to do too much on your own. It is a difficult task indeed to survive and to grow your business solely with your own efforts. Solicit ideas and seek the help of other people (your employees, suppliers, lenders, customers, and advisors). Communicate honestly and consistently. Effective two-way communication is the key.
• Negotiate, negotiate, and negotiate! The value of a strong negotiation skill set cannot be overstated. Negotiating better deals and contracts is an absolute must for realigning and resizing your company to the current economic conditions. The key to success is not only knowing how to develop a win-win approach in negotiations with all parties, but also keeping in mind the fact that you want a favorable outcome for yourself too.
Recommended Best Practice Activities:
The Nuts and Bolts… The following list of recommended best practice activities is critical for your business' survival and for its growth during an economic downturn. The actual financial health of your particular business, at the outset of the economic downturn, will dictate the priority and urgency of the implementation of the following best practice activities.
1. Diligently monitor your cash flow: Forecast your cash flow monthly to ensure that expenses and planned expenditures are in line with accounts receivable. Include cash flow statements into your monthly financial reporting. Project cash requirements three-to- six months in advance. The key is to know how to monitor, protect, control, and put cash to work.
2. Carefully convert your inventories: Convert excess, obsolete, and slow-moving inventory items into cash. Consider returning excess and slow-moving items back to the suppliers. Close-out or inventory reduction sales work well to resize your inventory. Also, consider narrowing your product offerings. Well-timed order placement helps to reduce excess inventory levels and occasional material shortages. The key is to reduce the amount of your inventory without losing sales.
3. Timely collection of your accounts receivable: This asset should be converted to cash as quickly as possible. Offer prompt payment discounts to encourage timely payments. Make changes in the terms of sale for slow paying customers (i.e. changing net 30 day terms to COD). Invoicing is an important part of your cash flow management. The first rule of invoicing is to do it as soon as possible after products are shipped and/or after services are delivered. Place an emphasis on reducing billing errors. Most customers delay payments because an invoice had errors, and therefore, will not pay until they receive a corrected copy. Email or fax your invoices to save on mailing time. Post the payments that you have received and make deposits more frequently. The key is to develop an efficient collection system that generates timely payments and one that gives you advance warning of problems.
4. Re-focus your attention on your existing clients/customers: Make customer satisfaction your priority. A regular review of your customers' buying history and frequency of purchases can reveal some interesting facts about your customers' buying habits. Consider signing long-term contracts with your core clients/customers which will add to your security. Offer a discount for upfront cash payments. The key is to do what it takes to keep your current customers loyal.
5. Re-negotiate with your suppliers, lenders, and landlord:
i) Suppliers: Always keep your negotiations on the level of need, saying that your company has reviewed its cost structure and has determined that it needs to lower supplier costs. . Tell the supplier that you value the relationship you have developed, but that you need to receive a cost reduction immediately. Ask your supplier for a lower material price, a longer payment cycle, and the elimination of finance charges. Also, see if you can buy material from them on a consignment basis. In return for their price concessions, be willing to agree to a long-term contract. Explore the idea of bartering as a form of payment.
ii) Lenders: Everything in business finance is negotiable and your relationship with a bank is no exception. The first step to successful renegotiations is to convince your lenders that you can ultimately pay off the renegotiated loan. You must point out to your lenders why it would be in their best interest to agree to a new arrangement. Showing them your business plan and your action plan that includes your cost-savings initiatives, along with "the how" and "the when" of the implementation of your plan is the best way to achieve this goal. Explain to them that you will need their cooperation to insure that you can survive, as well as, grow your business during the economic downturn. Negotiated items include: the rate of interest, the required security to cover the loan, and the beginning date for repayment. A beginning date for repayment could be immediate, within several months or as long as a year. The key is to realize that your lender will work with you, but that frequent and continual communications with them is critical.
iii) Landlord: Meet with your landlord. Explain your need to have them extend the term of your lease at a reduced cost. Make sure you have a clause in the lease agreement that entitles you to have the right to sublet any or all of the leased space.
6. Re-evaluate your staffing requirements: This is a very critical area. Salaries/wages are a major expense of doing business. Therefore, any reduction in the hours worked through work schedule changes, short-term layoffs or permanent layoffs has an immediate cost saving benefit. Most companies ramped up hiring new employees in the good times, only to find that they are currently overstaffed due to slow sales during the economic downturn. In terms of down-sizing your staff, be very careful not to reduce your staff to a level that forces you to skimp on customer service and quality. Consider the use of part-timers or the current trend of outsourcing certain functions to independent contractors.
7. Shop for better insurances rates: Get quotations from other insurance agents for comparable coverage to determine whether or not your present insurance carrier is competitive. Also, consider revising your coverage to reduce premium costs. The key is to have the right balance-to be adequately insured, but not under or over insured.
8. Re-evaluate your advertising: Contrary to the other cost-cutting initiatives, evaluate the possibility of increasing your advertising expenditures. This tactic realizes the advantage of the reduced "noise" and congestion (fewer advertisers) in the marketplace. The downturn period a great opportunity to increase brand awareness and create additional demand for your product/service offerings.
9. Seek the help of outside advisors: The use of an advisory board comprised of your CPA, attorney, and business consultant offers you objectivity and provides you with professional advice and guidance. Their collective experience in working with similar situations in past economic downturns is invaluable.
10. Review your other expenses: Target an across-the-board cost-cutting initiative of 10-15%. Attempt to eliminate unnecessary expenses. Tightening your belt in order to weather the downturn makes practical, financial sense.
Proactively managing your business through an economic downturn is an enormous challenge and is critical for your survival. However, through well-planned initiatives, an economic downturn can create tremendous opportunity for your company to gain greater market share. In order to take advantage of this growth opportunity, you must act quickly to implement the above best business practices to continue realigning and resizing your company to the current economic conditions.
Copyright © 2008 Terry H. Hill
You may reprint this article free of charge in your newsletter, magazine, or on your website, provided that the article is unedited, and that the copyright, author's bio, and contact information below appears with each article. Articles appearing on the web must provide a hyperlink to the author's web site, http://www.legacyai.com
Terry H. Hill is the founder and managing partner of Legacy Associates, Inc, a business consulting and advisory services firm. A veteran chief executive, Terry works directly with business owners of privately held companies on the issues and challenges that they face in each stage of their business life cycle. To find out how he can help you take your business to the next level, visit his site at http://www.legacyai.com
To download a copy of this article, click on this link: http://www.legacyai.com/Article_Downturn.html.
| About The Author An author, speaker, and consultant, Terry H. Hill is the founder and managing partner of Legacy Associates, Inc., a business consulting and advisory services firm based in Sarasota, Florida. A veteran chief executive, Terry works directly with business owners of privately held companies on the issues and challenges that they face in each stage of their business life cycle. Terry is the author of the business desk-reference book, How to Jump Start Your Business. He hosts the Business Insights from Legacy Blog at http://blog.legacyai.com and writes a bi-monthly eNewsletter, "Business Insights from Legacy eZine." By signing up for Business Insights from Legacy eZine at http://tinyurl.com/2t4fxs you can keep abreast of the latest tips, tactics, and best business practices. You will, also, receive the free eBook, Jump Start Your Knowledge of Business. Contact Terry by email at http://www.legacyai.com or telephone him at 941-556-1299. |
Digital Copyright Jessica Litman
Digital Copyright
Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet
Review of: Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright, Amherst, Prometheus Books, 2001. 208 p.By Karen Coyle; published in Information Technology and Libraries, December 2001. pp 220-222.
If you're like most of us you have some idea of what the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is about but feel you should know more. And if you're like most of us you're not about to read a whole book on the topic in order to gain (or attempt to gain) more understanding of the topic.
Jessica Litman offers us an informative, intelligent and even amusing way to further our knowledge of the DMCA and other copyright issues through her book Digital Copyright. To begin with, this is not a law book, although it is about law. Digital Copyright is instead a social history of copyright law. It is not about the law per se but about how the technology developments of the 20th century changed how copyright law is crafted in the United States and who reaps the benefits.
Although few of us will ever read the 30,000 words of the DMCA (and we probably wouldn't learn much from it if we did), Litman's book provides the reader with a clear picture of why the DMCA matters by presenting a picture of how this law evolved, who it favors, and why it is generally bad for the rest of us.
History
Litman begins Chapter 3 with the sentence: "If history bores you, you should skip this chapter." Don't. This is the most important chapter in the book. It explains how our copyright law went from being a piece of legislation (like other laws) to its current state as a negotiated compromise between the major commercial stakeholders. It began early in the 20th century when the legislature and the Copyright Office decided that although the copyright law clearly needed updating, the issues were too complex for the legislators to understand. The Copyright Office therefore drafted the proposed legislation in a series of meetings with representative members of industries with an interest in copyright issues. This technique led to the copyright law of 1909 and has been the method of revising copyright law ever since.
Admittedly, it does make some sense that stakeholders would be included in the making of laws that affect them and their business, and presumably this is not uncommon in our law-making today. (That's what lobbyists are all about, after all.) The consequences of having the stakeholders dominate the process, however, are quite negative for all who were not part of the discussion. Not included in the process are representatives of future or emerging technologies, minority and non-commercial interests and, of course, members of the public.
Each iteration of the copyright law in the 20th century addresses particular technologies and their commercial interests. The 1909 copyright law addressed mainly issues relating to composers and music publishers. Not included in that process were members of the piano roll and "talking machine" (phonograph) industries, whose representatives were not present at the discussions. The law made the unlicensed manufacture of piano rolls and phonograph records illegal. The 1912 law addressed the right of movie companies to make motion pictures based on books, arising from a lawsuit over a movie version of Ben Hur. Movie companies participated to negotiate a law that limited their exposure in copyright infringement actions. But of course radio and television were not included.
Technology progressed and copyright discussions continued. From 1912 to 1976 numerous attempts were made to pass a law that would cover all of the new technologies: commercial radio, talking movies, commercial television. Negotiations fell apart before bills could be drafted or during the actual legislative process when new stakeholders got wind of the changes afoot and complained to their representatives. It was a chaotic tug-of-war of competing interests, each with their specific needs. Some of these needs introduced new concepts into copyright law: where once there had been one single copyright for a work, new technologies allowed copyright holders to license diverse uses for the same work, such as a music recording, radio play and use in a film.
The 1976 copyright law, which was a major revision, was the result of decades of committee meetings, negotiations, drafting and compromises. The final steps to this law began with a 6-year study and five years of conferences that produced bill text. Another eleven years passed as Congress and the "interested parties" met to compromise on specific issues and add new language to the bill. The resulting law was a pre-agreed upon statement of copyright that satisfied those who had participated in its making.
This doesn't mean that everyone was covered. "Just as there had been no commercial broadcaster to invite to the conferences in 1905, there were no videocassette manufacturers, direct satellite broadcasters, digital audio technicians, personal computer users, motion picture colorizers, online database subscribers, or Internet service providers to invite in 1960." (p. 51) It took decades of work to craft the law and it was out of date before Congress voted on it.
Even more important, however, was the nature of the law that came out of such a process. Copyright law that is crafted in this manner tends to address very specific industries, technologies and situations. These specific legal points do not lend themselves to application to situations that weren't included in the negotiations; they don't generalize well. As an example, application of the 1976 copyright law to computer technologies has led to some very unfortunate court rulings, at least some of which were used to bolster the early process that resulted in the DMCA. One of these rulings stated that every use of a computer file, such as turning on the computer and launching the operating system or opening a document to read it on the screen, made a copy of the software or file and therefore was potentially an infringement of copyright. In the story of the DMCA, it just goes downhill from there.
"... a failure of imagination."
Most of the book, and decidedly the most engaging part of it, revolves around the development of the law that became the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and its aftermath. Litman introduces the Internet into the copyright picture and prefaces the remaining two-thirds of her book with a pithy one-line wrap-up of the process that led to the DMCA's implementation: "What happened next was a failure of imagination." (p. 89) The members of the Clinton administration charged with looking into the potential effects of the Internet on copyright, along with the usual bevy of industry representatives, showed so little understanding of the new technology that it would have been amusing if it hadn't led to such a tragically mistaken law.
As we know now, the recent changes to the copyright law have greatly enhanced the rights of copyright holders and have consequently greatly reduced the rights of the reading public. The justification for this shoring up of the law was good old American patriotism: according to the Working Group on Intellectual Property, chaired by the Clinton Administration Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman from 1994 to 1996, nothing short of the entire future of the American economy was at stake. New protections for copyright in the networked economy were needed to protect American profitability in that environment. There would be no investment in the National Information Infrastructure and no content to sell both at home and abroad if adequate protection was not provided.
For those of us who were actively working on the Internet in those years, it is astonishing to hear that the Net was considered by Washington insiders to be "... a collection of empty pipes, waiting to be filled with content." (p.93) The entire movement to reform our copyright law ignored the fact that we already had a vital electronic information infrastructure bursting with content, albeit primarily non-commercial content. Yet it wasn't difficult to sell this vision to industry, the legislature, and the few members of the press who got wind of the Working Group's activities, most likely because most people had very little, if any, experience with the Internet itself. If they had, they dismissed it as being "academic" and therefore not relevant to the vital commercial world that the National Information Infrastructure promised to be.
The entire DMCA was based on a vision of a market that didn't exist in a world that was destined not to be. Not only that, the resulting bill was so long that it was subsequently itself published in book form. The original bill was about 3,000 words long. As it passed through committees it grew to 4,000, then 12,000, finally being passed at a whopping 30,000 words. It covered not only the digital millenium but such special interests as boat hull designs. And no one, not even the most ardent of copyright attorneys, understands it all. As Litman says: "Our current copyright statute has more than merely a provision or two or three or ten that don't make a lot of sense; it's chock-full of them." (p. 114)
This incomprehensibility of the copyright law has a great effect on the ability and willingness of the public to obey it. A theme that runs throughout Litman's book is that no law is effective if the people whose behavior it is supposed to control cannot understand it, or find it so absurd they are not willing to believe in it. Laws that are not obeyed are ineffective, as we saw with the Federally imposed 55 mile-an-hour speed limit that was routinely ignored even by those who consider themselves generally law-abiding. Rather than embarrass itself further, the government rescinded the law. The DMCA already has examples of public disbelief, the foremost being the development of the DeCSS program, a "hack" that allows the owners of DVDs to play them on Linux machines even though the DVD industry hasn't provided drivers for that platform. To many individuals it is an affront to be told that you can't choose the hardware platform to view a movie of which you own a legal copy. It's also rather absurd that the industry is making a big deal about the decryption of their copy protection when the details of the copy protection scheme are at this point public knowledge, having been published on the Internet, and simple enough that it was first broken by a 15-year-old. Litman doesn't come right out and say that the DMCA is doomed to failure, but she offers some good reasons not to bet on its success.
Criminalizing the Customer
Arguably the most significant development in the DMCA is that for the first time in the history of our copyright law we have specific provisions aimed at the individual. Previous incarnations of copyright law were focused on competing commercial interests, and individual non-commercial actions, although theoretically infringing, were not considered sufficiently threatening to warrant a response. As Litman says: "As a comprehensive strategy, litigation works best against commercial actors." (p. 167) The anticircumvention language of the law makes breaking through technological protection, such as the CSS encryption of DVDs, a criminal act. This might be an effective strategy unless a large portion of the public engages in such acts, in which case an industry is faced with having to treat its customer base as criminals. Even those who haven't passed Marketing 101 can see that taking legal action against the bulk of your customers is probably not good for an industry's bottom line.
You can add to this the complete failure of some major industries to understand the new technology, most notably the music recording industry. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spent years trying to outlaw the sale of devices that play MP3 files, while the total number of available files in that format grew into the millions. Meanwhile, the RIAA offered no alternative format to MP3. While talking the moral high ground, the recording industry continued to sell CDs at inflated prices (which became even more obvious when writable CDs came to the consumer market and people learned that even they could purchase the blank CDs for around $.50 each). And although Metallica sided with the recording industry (and alienated many of its fans) other artists spoke out against the industry with stories of exploitation and near starvation, even while they were making number one hits for record companies. Napster is the evidence that many, many individuals don't believe what the record industry is saying, even though they care about its product. "If forty million people refuse to obey a law, then what the law says doesn't matter. It may be that people flout it because they're natural lawbreakers, or it may be... that they don't comply because it doesn't make sense to them. Whatever the reason, the law is not going to work well in the real world." (p. 169)
The DMCA is a huge, incomprehensible law that entirely failed to taken into account the hundreds of millions of consumers of intellectual property. It has placed the intellectual property industries in direct opposition to the public, and the very public that buys its goods. When you think about it in these terms, it's a pretty amazing mess that they have gotten themselves into.
Access
I first encountered Litman through her testimony at hearings related to the Green Paper on Intellectual Property that was the draft report of Lehman's Working Group. The transcripts of the hearings were published on the Department of Commerce web site (presumably, though, without counting as "content" by the Working Group's own definition). After slogging through hundreds of pages of some of the most toady-ing lawyer-ese, Litman's testimony leapt from the page like some minor miracle of truth and justice. It was Litman who pointed out during those hearings that, as formulated in the Green Paper, copyright law was moving from control over copying to control over access. For the first time the law sought to control the acts of reading, listening and viewing of copyrighted materials. She said then (and reprises this theme in her book): "What I think is needed now is for someone to act as the copyright lawyer for the public. To examine these proposals as one would if the public had retained one as its copyright lawyer and said: here is a proposal--is this in my interest? . . . I believe that the public's copyright lawyer would see an amendment expressly privileging individuals using their computers for ordinary reading, viewing, or listening to authorized copies of copyright work." (US Department of Commerce, National Information Infrastructure Task Force Working Group on Intellectual Property, Public Hearing on Intellectual Property Issues Involved in the National Information Infrastructure. September 22, 1994.)
Unfortunately, the public's copyright lawyer did not appear and the DMCA was crafted without such representation. We now have a law that actually encourages limitations on access and use of copyrighted materials. The CSS program that protects DVDs does not prevent copying of the DVD content, it only prevents unlicensed access, even though the DVD may itself be a legally owned copy. The digital rights management systems that are being developed for electronic books will have the same effect: they will regulate access and use, not copying. The intellectual property industries seem to be bent on developing some of the most user-hostile controls over their products that the world has seen. Where can we possibly go from here?
The Future
The last chapter of Litman's book opens with the sentence: "As of this writing, the future is murky." I wanted the book to have a neat ending, one that wraps up the whole question and makes me feel better about things. Of course, it's difficult writing a book on such a volatile topic, and Litman can't be faulted that she can't predict where we are going with digital copyright -- no one else knows either. We can only hope that she comes back to us from time to time to continue her analysis. When she does, she'll be speaking or writing to an audience that has a better understanding of the current situation. Although we may not know where copyright is going, thanks to Litman we can understand how we got to where we are today.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Oddballs in the Desert
Oddballs in the Desert
By ALEXANDER THEROUX
August 1, 2008; Page A11
August 1, 2008; Page A11
![[Oddballs in the Desert]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AH977_book08_20080731140334.jpg)
From Greenwich Village to Taos
By Flannery Burke
(University Press of Kansas, 248 pages, $34.95)
The protagonist of Witter Bynner's misogynistic play of 1926 -- "Cake: An Indulgence" -- is a wealthy, oft-married woman, identified only as "the Lady," who seeks adventure, romance and pleasure in various exotic locales. It was well understood at the time that the Lady was modeled on the domineering but irrepressible Mabel Dodge Luhan, the "salon primitivist," in D.H. Lawrence's words. Between 1917 and 1929, Luhan transformed her adopted Taos home in northern New Mexico into a cultural hinterland for those on the avant-garde of cultural expression, including artists and writers she had come to know in New York City. This salon in the desert is the subject of Flannery Burke's entertaining "From Greenwich Village to Taos."
It was an art colony predominantly, but it included a range of creative guests: the painter Georgia O'Keeffe; the journalist John Reed; writers D.H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein; the feminist Mary Austin; and Carl Van Vechten, one of the guiding lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Mabel Dodge Luhan knew everybody and, in a sense, everybody visited her in Taos.
"You have a certain faculty," the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens once told her, "a centralizing, magnetic, social faculty. You attract, stimulate, and soothe people, and men like to sit with you and talk to themselves!"
This somewhat crackpated romantic from a banking family in Buffalo, N.Y., had a compulsive passion to celebrate art, beauty and nature. Though three of her four marriages failed, she was able to take the money she accumulated -- added to her family wealth -- and move to Florence, Italy, and Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., and Greenwich Village and eventually Taos, collecting artists and writers along the way. To be at the center of modernity, to explore the "now," meant everything to her. Radical journalists, anarchists, mad activists, sex elves, naturopaths and networkers had gathered around her long before she moved west in 1917.
Curiously, Luhan herself was not an artist or a writer or an activist. She was generous, though -- with her money, her invitations, her advice and quite notably her body. "Free love" advocates abounded in her circles. She vamped whom she wanted and bedded all she could. John Reed, who covered the Russian Revolution in "Ten Days That Shook the World," was one of her lovers. Witter Bynner said that she had a "frontier libido."
Her fourth marriage to the full-blooded Pueblo Indian Antonio ("Tony") Lujan (later changed to "Luhan") did not stop her from throwing herself at the young black writer Jean Toomer, to whom she lustfully wrote: "I hardly could look towards you for fear of starting something psychologically bad for Tony -- yet more & more as time went on I felt with you & in a relationship that was positive and wonderfully refreshing. I am not mistaken, am I? You do feel it too, don't you?"
D.H. Lawrence's wife, Frieda, objected when Dodge invited her novelist-husband to work on the rooftop that formed a patio to Dodge's Taos bedroom. The Lawrences soon moved to a ranch north of Dodge's home. (I recall driving up north of Taos one snowy spring day 10 years ago and finding a small memorial to Lawrence, a sort of roadside grotto just off the road.)
"I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had," Lawrence himself wrote. "The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine up high over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend." Yet Lawrence mocked Luhan and other Anglo women for "romanticizing" their Pueblo neighbors. Lawrence seemed to find the land in the Southwest -- and only the land -- transfiguring.
Ms. Burke commendably records in detail how Luhan was let down by the work that Lawrence did in Taos: among other titles, "St. Mawr," "The Plumed Serpent," "Mornings in Mexico" and "A Little Moonshine With Lemon." They hardly amounted to the triumph she expected when she invited the author of "Women in Love" to her special domain. But Lawrence's own sense of the primitive -- a dark, subintellectual "blood-understanding" between attuned people -- was different from Luhan's simple, natural volkishness. And the control she wanted to exert -- as a sort of queen ruling over her ranch-world -- was at loggerheads with his odd principles of manliness (and womanliness).
Ms. Burke has done her research and neatly documents the tensions in New Mexico among Mexicans, Native Americans and Nuevo-Mexicano "Americans," residents descended from Mexican families or Spanish-Native American unions. Luhan and her Anglo arts community plunked itself down right in the midst of all this.
But Ms. Burke too often meanders among a variety of themes and strikes a humorless note pretty much throughout her book when the oddballs on hand invite something more exuberant or mocking. There is Carl Van Vechten, for instance, invoking the primitivism of Harlem to try to outdo Luhan and her pueblo Southwest; or Mary Austin striving to make of northern New Mexico a "woman's sphere"; or Georgia O'Keeffe painting memorable pictures but also engaging in "romantically charged correspondence" with busy Jean Toomer -- did Mabel Dodge know about that?
When Ms. Burke writes of Mabel Dodge "that her marriage with [Tony] Lujan brought white people into contact with a culture necessary for humanity's survival. Only by incorporating an Indian worldview, she believed, could whites undo the harms of civilization," I thought I spotted a moment of whimsy. Humanity's survival? Indian worldview? Mabel wanted Tony in bed!
Mr. Theroux's latest book is the novel "Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual" (Fantagraphics Books).
A Look Back at the New Age
By PAUL BESTON
July 22, 2008; Page A17
July 22, 2008; Page A17
![[A Look Back at the New Age]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AH910_book07_20080721182708.jpg)
Farm Friends
By Tom Fels
(RSI Press, 407 pages, $19.95)
While campaigning, Barack Obama has criticized the politics of baby boomers who are still "fighting some of the same fights since the sixties." Such a criticism must resonate with many Americans, who have grown weary of the boomer cohort's fondness for itself.
Tom Fels's "Farm Friends," although a 1960s memoir, does not really belong to his generation's self-celebratory tradition. It concerns a group of people who, in the manner of 19th-century utopian communities, lived on a communal farm in western Massachusetts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked diligently to usher in the New Age -- living as self-sufficiently as possible (aided by the stealing of food and tools), sharing responsibilities and avoiding "the world of trauma outside." That world included the Vietnam War as well as American middle-class culture, with its apparent lack of interest in realities deeper than consumerism. Farm life would supposedly help create the kind of peace and harmony that the 1960s counterculture was so keen to find.
Naturally, the New Age did not arrive, and the farm members went their separate ways. But Mr. Fels is not intent on merely condemning the experiment or praising it. He shows an appealing resistance to sweeping philosophical explanations and to aphorisms disguised as existential truths, both favorites of the 1960s. In "Farm Friends," he describes life on the farm, interviews the commune members in later years and examines how their lives reflect (or do not reflect) the ideals they once espoused.
Dozens of people pop in and out of the narrative. We meet the prodigal daughter of a French admiral who, as Mr. Fels puts it, "believed that the world was in a stage of decadence, degeneracy, and decay comparable to Rome." Then there is a writer who begins as a chronicler of commune life and eventually composes a novel that he deems "the 'Godfather' of the stoned generation." The commune's founder, Marshall Bloom, is a frequent subject of conversation. He was an iconic figure of the counterculture who committed suicide in 1969.
Mr. Fels treats his friends with gentle skepticism but also respect, and he writes with considerable psychological insight. Still, he can be overly indulgent. He labels one commune member an "entrepreneur" even though the man's first business is drug dealing. In fact, drugs are a constant among the farm friends, who consume them with the same aplomb with which an earlier generation drank scotch and sodas. The taste in drugs tracks consumer trends -- pot and hallucinogens during the 1960s, cocaine a decade later.
But Mr. Fels seems determined not to pass judgment. He quotes without comment from one friend's 1970 book, "Total Loss Farm," an earlier commune memoir whose author recounts the militant radicalism that he came to reject: "We dreamed of a New Age born of violent insurrection. We danced on the graves of the war dead in Vietnam, every corpse was ammunition for Our Side." Mr. Fels writes of the admiral's daughter, apparently without irony: "On her thirtieth birthday, at the farm, she had changed her name to Lilly Stillwater and adopted the calm, organic lifestyle that ought to have gone with it, only to be deeply disrupted shortly after by the growth of a consuming passion for the music of Tina Turner."
Mr. Fels visits with one farm friend who has become a drug-taking hipster corporate attorney. "Isn't it great?" the man exults. "Corporate America is paying for this lifestyle!" Like other former radicals, he is eager to maintain the fiction that, even by joining "the system," he is somehow subverting it. Other farm friends take up social causes, like the anti-nuclear weapons campaign of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the campaign against nuclear power. One former commune member is arrested for toppling a weather tower that had been erected as part of a nuclear-power plant.
Still other farm alumni make no pretense to continuing the revolution but instead engage in the boomer habit of replacing youthful extremism with a middle-aged version: "We used to think money was the least important thing. Now I can see that it's the most important," says one former commune member, sounding like a budding Randian. "Money buys freedom."
Few of the farm friends are terribly likable or sympathetic -- with the notable exception of Tim, an "alienated citizen" of the farm while he lived there. Tim found the commune's group dynamics stifling. He wanted time to himself and was promised that he could build his own room and work space in the barn, but the objections of others to his solitary plans thwarted him at nearly every turn.
Of the farm's whole New Age mission, Tim remarks: "The error was, I think, imagining that there was somewhere new to go, someone new to be. It became increasingly clear that a closed system of myth did not jibe with the world as it really was." Looking later at the outside world, Tim saw "a system formed less from malice than from a kind of natural order, less from inordinate greed than from longings much like our own for privacy, comfort, individual freedom, and one's familiar or chosen way of life." Unfortunately, "Farm Friends" spends too little time with Tim.
In the last part of the book, Mr. Fels details his studies in art history and his career as an independent art curator. For all his memoir's moderate tone, he cannot resist a note of narcissistic complaint: "Have you noticed that . . . we have had to make compromises, find ways to support our visions, create a framework in this difficult world through which to live and to survive?" Usually, though, he leaves the self- involvement to others. "I'm still doing my thing," a friend tells the author in a typical passage, "such as it may be, and my thing goes on, and on, and on." We've noticed.
Mr. Beston is the associate editor of City Journal.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings By and About Maxim Gorky
Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings By and About Maxim Gorky
Translated by Donald Fanger
(Yale University Press, 320 pp., $30)
Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, the future Maxim Gorky, was born in 1868 in Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga River, and grew up in what he later described in his melancholy, violent autobiography as "that close-knit, suffocating little world of pain and suffering where the ordinary Russian man in the street used to live, and where he lives to this day." It was the world of the provincial petty-bourgeois--neighbors cut the tails off each other's cats and sons besieged their fathers' houses, knocking all night on the doors with fists and clubs.
Gorky was struck from the start by the chaos and the carelessness of the life that he saw around him. Many of the most lyrical passages in his autobiography describe the silences that followed the savage outbursts of his relatives. He remembered his lazy cousin Sasha, whose two rows of teeth were "the only interesting thing about him": "I liked to sit close to him," Gorky wrote, "neither of us speaking for a whole hour, and watching the black crows circling and wheeling in the red evening sky around the golden cupolas of the Church of the Assumption, diving down to earth and draping the fading sky with a black net.... A scene like this fills the heart with sweet sadness and leaves you content to say nothing." The cruelty around him made him want to embellish and to correct what he saw. In his best work, however, he told his stories without ornament.
Literarily speaking, Gorky was never a true "realist": inventing heroes who were better than life, he placed them in realistic settings and convinced his readers and himself that he was a "chronicler of everyday events." According to the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, "he himself half-believed in that half-truth all his life." Gorky had a tendency toward a broad, bright clarity that blurred life into myth. "In Gorky's books," Victor Shklovsky noted, "things take on an inflated quality without being enlarged out of proportion.... It's like a card game played by some officers sitting in the basket of an observation balloon a mile up in the air."
Gorky may have been his own greatest character, but the story of the character Gorky is one of the most disappointing and upsetting in modern literature. It is, in fact, the sort of story against which Gorky himself protested all his life: a story of disillusionment and "low truths," of a revolution wildly off its course.
In his youth, Aleksei Peshkov tramped numberless miles all over Russia--the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan, the Mozdosk steppe, Bessarabia--and worked an endless series of odd jobs: ragman, stevedore, icon seller. In each new town, he would show up with a change of underwear and a small suitcase full of books, and dazzle his listeners with stories of the bizarre men he had met. At the age of twenty, he spent his last money on a pistol and shot himself in the chest. He survived, but he carried the bullet in his lung for another forty years. His friend Leonid Andreyev later told him, "You know yourself that a man who hasn't tried to kill himself isn't worth much."
In 1892, he published his first story in a newspaper in Tiflis under the pseudonym Maxim Gorky, which means "Maxim the Bitter." It was the age of invented names--Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin--as the thought of revolution promised every individual a chance at a new history. When, in 1898, his first collection of stories was published in two volumes, Gorky was launched into an iconic celebrity, his picture appearing on matchboxes, postcards, and cigarette packs. Here was the author as "emissary from the anonymous masses," the representative of the "Lower Depths," as he later named his most famous play, which depicted the destitution, both physical and spiritual, of prostitutes and minor thieves. For two decades, Gorky was the object of adoration by many Russian readers, and even took on the image of a kind of people's protector. (On Gorky's fiftieth birthday, a convict sent him this request from prison: "Dear writer!... I am in prison for murdering my wife, whom I killed on the fifth day after we married because she [followed by a series of extremely frank details].... Would it be possible to obtain an amnesty for me?" ) In fact, Gorky's immediate ancestors--particularly his grandfather, who owned a dye factory--were of a higher class than those of Chekhov, whose grandfathers were both serfs. Across Russia, false Gorkys began turning up wearing his trademark long overcoat and boasting a collection of anecdotes about the heroic outcasts they had known.
An obsessive corrector, Gorky would sit for hours with a blue pencil annotating manuscripts--his own and everyone else's. Finishing a newspaper, he would cover the pages with additions and alterations, then throw it away. A conservative group once sent him a rope noose and a threatening note. He threw out the noose and corrected the note in blue pencil, so that the rabid ideas remained but were expressed more clearly. No one ever saw him sleep. His bed was as neat as a hospital bed. He stayed up nights, making himself a medium for grammar.
His memory was prodigious. Many who knew Gorky recorded his miraculous ability to remember the names of streets and towns that he had visited decades before, and to recall the plots of hundreds of novels by writers whose names had already been forgotten. He was astonished when someone once asked him how he knew a certain fact. "How could anyone not know?" he asked. "There was an article about it in The Messenger of Europe for 1887, the October issue."
Gorky appeared bearing tales of hoodlums and tramps, but also scraps and pamphlets of anarchist ideas charged with revolutionary hopes. His financial support, much of which came from his own royalties, bolstered Lenin and the Bolsheviks from 1903 until their seizure of power in 1917. Wishing to believe all his life that human reality could be improved and even perfected, Gorky achieved a greatness that was ultimately social, not artistic; at his best he was a grand-scale inspiration for a worldwide cult of human progress and social struggle. He was a famously mesmerizing raconteur, but many who heard his stories in person were disappointed when they read them. He was himself attracted to power and the raw energy of self-assertion, and idolized men who tried to remake the world.
When Gorky met Tolstoy in 1900, the two men were the most famous writers in Russia. Tolstoy was long into his religious "conversion," having abandoned literature and positioned himself as the wise, troubled savior of Russia, preaching nonviolence and personal spirituality, dressing as a peasant, and receiving pilgrims and truth seekers from all corners of Russia and the world. Gorky was a young writer in search of a literary idol. His memoir of Tolstoy is the centerpiece of Donald Fanger's fascinating new volume of translations.
The memoir, which Fanger translates for the first time in its entirety, is torn-edged, surprisingly vicious, unpredictable, and empathic to the point of being almost an X-ray of a spirit. Composed of forty-four fragments recording anecdotes and quotations, as well as an unfinished letter written on the eve of Tolstoy's death, the memoir is held together by contradictions--the galactic attraction of Tolstoy's charm and self-regard against the willful slyness of his half-hearted preaching; Tolstoy's insistence on peasant simplicity against his silent, agonized consideration of complexity, human and divine; the tenderness for the man, so vast that Gorky almost falls into it like a sea, against Gorky's own defensive animosity.
Always fascinated by the way people talked to and about God, Gorky caught in Tolstoy's preaching the wavering false note of the non-believer. His memoir is an alternative gospel relating the teachings and contradictions of a god-like man, who himself rewrote the Gospels in search of a god who could save him. It is clearly a hagiography, but one that goes out of its way to emphasize that its subject was not a saint. In this, Gorky was challenging the Tolstoy cult, which insisted on the authentic martyrdom of its patron saint. It was not for his gigantic faith in God that Gorky admired Tolstoy, but for his gigantic faith in Count Tolstoy. Searching the world for a spiritual mentor, a figurehead for the theory of men's elevation that would enable his country to transcend the darkness of the past and the mindless cruelty and ignorance of the present, Gorky found Tolstoy, who must have appeared to him as the incarnation of his hopes.
Gorky's literary portraits capture the culture of reading in which their subjects lived: classics, forgotten treatises, learned tomes, and pulp novels are mentioned in single breaths and passed between interlocutors like playing cards. References swing back and forth like punches. The Tolstoy memoir contains one of the most vivid accounts anywhere of the physicality of literary conversation, the atmosphere of toughness and prowess, the insults, the writers' comparisons of each other to bewitching women, the emphasis on work and perfection of technique, the cultivation of style and personality. The conversations between Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, and their friend L.A. Sulerzhitsky, each competing for the affection of Lev Nikolaevich, read like a mixture of a boxing match, a tea party, the judgment of Paris, and a pilgrimage to an enlightened and damaged hermit. Chekhov plays Jacob to Gorky's Esau, but he requires no fur on his arms to gain the patriarch's blessing: it is his smoothness--"like a young lady!"--that Tolstoy secretly prefers.
Tolstoy appears in the memoir as a Russian god who "sits on a throne of maple under a golden lime tree"; a wizard; a satyr with the mouth of a sailor; Sviatogor, whose name means "sacred mountain," the Russian hero whom the earth itself could not hold; a force of nature. Once, in the Crimea, Gorky saw him walking along the edge of the seashore:
And suddenly, for one mad moment, I felt that he might be about to stand up and wave his arm, and that the sea would grow calm and glassy, and the rocks would move and begin to shout, and everything around would stir and come to life and start talking in different voices about itself, and about him, and against him. I cannot put into words what I felt then; I was filled both with rapture and with horror, and then everything came together in one happy thought:
"I am not an orphan on the earth so long as this man is alive."
Whereas Tolstoy's work, especially War and Peace, is shot through with protest against the idea of the "great man," Gorky's life and work record an ongoing search for just such a figure--a "Man with a capital M," as he called Lenin. "I think that such men are possible only in Russia," Gorky wrote, "whose history and way of life always remind me of Sodom and Gomorrah." In his literary portraits, Gorky is so drawn to his subjects that his admiration at times verges on chameleonic impersonation. In one uncanny photograph from 1920, Lenin stands in front while the much taller Gorky, in an identical suit and with his head shaved, leans diffidently to one side behind his idol, like an uncertain, elongated mirror image. The scene is right out of Zelig--Gorky the remora, the parrot, the perpetual acolyte.
He found his first hero in Tolstoy, and then hoped to find an alternative in, of all people, Mark Twain (who invited him to a banquet in New York and then dropped him because Gorky, on a fund-raising mission for the Bolsheviks, crossed the Atlantic in 1906 with a woman who was not his wife); and later found an even more beguiling one in Lenin; and lost his will altogether before Stalin, who badgered him to write his biography (Gorky never did) and lured Gorky back to Russia with the promise that Gorky, too, would be recognized as a great man.
Gorky sought a man with a "living faith," but in Tolstoy he settled, ironically, on the embodiment of possibly the greatest spiritual crisis of the age. Tolstoy sought the simple truthfulness of the peasantry, and instead met the eyes of a proletarian revolutionary lighting up at a usable idea. Each mistook the other for the mascot of his cause. Considering Tolstoy's view of Western influence upon Russia, Gorky observed that "the culminating figure of our history ... wished (both consciously and unconsciously) to lie like a mountain across the road that leads to Europe, to that active life which demands of men the utmost concentration of all their spiritual powers." Tolstoy stands for the "Old Russia" that the revolution would leave behind; but still he offered something without which it could not succeed.
When Gorky published his memoir of Tolstoy in 1919, at the height of the Russian Civil War, he must have been thinking of Lenin. (It would be useful to have a translation by Fanger of Gorky's memoir of Lenin, which in its controversial original version--never translated in full--contains Lenin's praise of Trotsky and Gorky's comment about Sodom and Gomorrah quoted above, along with bitter remarks on the Russian peasantry.) Immediately following the Revolution, Gorky became the most prominent source of internal criticism of the Bolshevik government's methods and ideology. He published articles ferociously attacking Lenin and the authorities for their brutality, arbitrary violence, double-dealing, and hard-headed disregard for Russia's intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution had no greater believer than Gorky, and he believed it could go another way. The way it actually went was nothing like the way he dreamt it.
Shklovsky called Gorky the "Noah of the Russian intelligentsia." He formed committees to provide work and shelter for Russia's threatened poets and scholars, composing hundreds of letters of recommendation, and swore into the phone at Lenin. He secured ration tickets by claiming all writers as members of his family, suddenly boasting dozens of siblings, children, and wives. Most notable among his ventures was the World Literature Publishing House, which set out to translate into Russian the world's literary classics for "the new Soviet reader." Sitting in his office, Gorky discussed the best translator for Gilgamesh while sporadic gunfire erupted in the streets.
A subsection of his enterprise, the Committee for Historical Representation, would produce plays based on every great event in human history. When Alexander Blok, one of the great poets of the age, read his play on the life of the Pharaoh Ramses, Gorky suddenly remarked, "You should do it a little like this," and stretched out his arms to the sides like an ancient Egyptian. There was also the Studio for Literary Translation, the House of Scholars, the Expert Commission for the Preservation of National Objects, and so on. (It is worth noting that in Kafka's The Trial, the only communal activity in which Joseph K. participates is the Society for the Preservation of Municipal Monuments of Art.)
Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of the dystopian science-fiction novel We, which appeared in 1921, imagined the World Literature venture as a spaceship on an interplanetary mission which, after an accident, began to fall, though it would be a year and a half before the vessel actually crashed. Wondering how the voyagers would behave, Zamyatin pitched the story to Gorky, who responded: "Within a week, as if nothing had happened, they will start shaving and writing books and in general acting as if they had at least another twenty years to live.... We've got to believe that we won't be shattered, otherwise all is lost. "
Gorky's decision to leave Russia in 1921 was most likely made because of his extreme disillusionment with the Soviet government--Blok had died from scurvy, exhaustion, and spiritual despair; another poet was executed for supposedly participating in a conspiracy. He was also repeatedly encouraged to leave by Lenin, who claimed that Gorky's weak lungs needed a rest. Gorky was furious with Lenin, whom he denounced as a theoretician who "carried out a planetary experiment" that failed. He was deeply exercised by the condition of Russia, which was experiencing a catastrophic famine. After three years traveling Europe, raising money for famine relief, Gorky moved to a villa in Sorrento with a view of Mt. Vesuvius, where he lived for almost ten years before returning permanently to Russia. While in exile, Gorky remembered a scene from his days with Tolstoy:
Leo Tolstoy once asked a lizard in a low voice:
"Are you happy, eh?"
The lizard was sunning itself on a rock in the bushes along the road to Diulber, and Tolstoy stood facing it with his hands stuck into his leather belt. And looking around carefully, that great man confessed to the lizard:
"I'm not ..."
(Heinrich Heine, whom Blok was translating for the World Literature Publishing House, wrote in one of his Italian travel sketches that the lizards on a certain hillside had reported that the stones expected God to manifest Himself among them in the form of a stone.)
Where was the revolution, with its elemental image of man in search of meaning? One source records that, in Italy, Gorky received thirteen thousand letters from Russia. But what sorts of letters was he getting? According to the KGB archives, many of them were from Soviet citizens detailing the injustices and the absurdities of Russian life. Convincing himself that Russia was nonetheless on the right track, Gorky chose not to focus on their warnings.
Like Tolstoy, Gorky appears to have experienced during his exile a spiritual turning point that impelled him to take a false position. But whereas Tolstoy's crisis demanded that he disown his past life as harmfully misdirected, Gorky's crisis forced him to act as though his past actions, and the revolution as a whole, had been right. What was at stake was Gorky's place in the narrative that he had spent his life constructing: if the revolution had been a failure, his role as its prophet and its bard would be meaningless, or worse.
Gorky's return to Russia was marked by a fury of re-naming in his honor, at the suggestion of Stalin. The main street, the central park, and the Literary Institute in Moscow as well as the Art Theater; the city and region of Nizhni Novgorod; hundreds of collective farms, factories, and schools--all took Gorky's name. He was given an Art Deco mansion and estates outside Moscow and in the Crimea. In 1932, an airplane named Maxim Gorky, which boasted the widest wingspan in the world, flew over Moscow in a tribute to him. (The plane crashed the following year.) By the end of his life, Gorky's remarkable talent for remembering the names of places was no longer necessary: every place he went was named "Gorky."
And so Gorky became the single most prominent apologist for Stalin's regime. During the drive toward collectivization, which resulted in the deaths of millions of peasants, he provided a slogan for the authorities' struggle against the kulaks: "If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated." Perhaps most notoriously, he led an expedition of writers to the site of the White Sea Canal, the first grand-scale construction project completed by the labor of convicts in the Gulag, during which more than ten thousand prisoners died. Gorky edited and contributed to an anthology praising the work for its ambition and its successful rehabilitation of criminals. The scholar John Freccero has pointed out that Dante's Inferno resembles a prison camp. Returning from Hell, Gorky told the world that it was only Purgatory.
And yet, at the same time, Gorky continued to write letters to the secret police for "the release of prisoners or leniency in punishments." He appears to have been kept under a stultifying house arrest in "the country of the pharaohs. " Observers noted that he barely touched the food at the banquets in his mansion. At the end of his life, Gorky, the great believer in positive literature, was given specially printed newspapers with "the necessary cuts and alterations." Just before he died, he proposed that one hundred writers should be mobilized for a new project:
All world literature and history, the history of the church and philosophy must be rewritten: Gibbon and Goldoni, Bishop Irenaeus and Corneille, Professor Anfilonov and Julian the Apostate, Hesiod and Ivan Volnov, Lucretius and Zola, Gilgamesh and Hiawatha, Swift and Plutarch. The entire series must end with oral legends about Lenin.
The project was typical of Gorky--the variety of reading, the love of collective work, the certainty that the answer can be found in books, the fanaticism for correction. The taste was bitter.
Tolstoy found that the truth was a leveler that cut across every aspect of life, leaving the same inhospitable wilderness of death and suffering. This revelation jarred him, and his "teachings" were constructed and preached in an effort to regenerate his own faith. Yet his faith in himself was always vast. He was a great man and he knew it. His attitude toward the truth never really wavered, but he could not bring himself to face completely the consequences of his search for it. Women reminded him of death, and he hated them for it.
Gorky, by contrast, felt extreme pity for mankind, but he seems to have been pursued by the suspicion that the fight was fixed, that the smart money was on the world and on suffering. What Fanger's book strikingly shows is the extent to which other writers had Gorky's number, even early on. During the Russian Civil War, Blok, on the steps of World Literature Publishing, had told Gorky, "We have become too clever to believe in God, yet not strong enough to believe in ourselves. As a basis for life and faith there is only God or oneself. Humanity? Can anyone really believe in the reasonableness of humanity after the last war, with new, inevitable, and crueler wars in the offing?"
But Gorky put his faith in humanity. And he embellished and polished humanity so as to keep his faith in it secure. "You always want to paint over all the nicks and cracks with your own paint," Tolstoy told Gorky. Like Tolstoy, Gorky was unable to face life as he suspected it to be, but he lacked the belief in his own powers that kept Tolstoy from committing any real self-betrayal. Gorky's terror at powerlessness was so strong that in the end he favored cruelty itself to the acknowledgment of cruelty. He appears to have believed that from where he stood, down in the "lower depths," there was nowhere to go but up, and that people needed to be convinced to strive to this end. Any repression would be temporary. Always the believer in revision, Gorky treated Russia like a young writer who needed only to be further edited and encouraged. He was wrong: there was an even lower depth. His need to adorn life caused him to side with those who, for their own purposes, wanted to show it as better than it was. The corrected manuscript metamorphosed into the correctional facility.
And yet the Tolstoy memoir is so strange and moving that it is hard to comprehend completely what followed. It is a great work (Gorky never approached its quality before it or afterward), but it is not a modern work; and it is misleading to class Gorky among the ironic prophets of the twentieth century, when he was in many ways a nineteenth-century writer who lived on into the next awful age. The memoir is utterly lacking in irony. Two elements appear to have misled its readers. The first is its subject: Tolstoy himself comes off as the massive, tormented precursor of modern man--a Moses of the Modern who peers into the promised land but does not enter it. Readers seem to have taken this to mean that Gorky was modern, too, when in fact the whole piece could be read as his attempt at exchanging one certainty (religion) for another (the collective faith in Man). The second is its open-ended, fragmented form, which looks not only modern but even modernist. For Gorky, however, this form was conceived not in a modernist spirit, out of experimentation and irony, but rather out of necessity. When he writes that he cannot finish his letter, he means it: he actually could not finish it. For us, however, there can be only modern writing. We have lost the ability to write with Gorky's certainty, or even to read him with certainty. Where Gorky saw a bridge, we see a chasm.
There was certainly a sense of the Promethean in Gorky's hopes for the Russian Revolution. Man would acquire for himself aspects of the gods and gradually replace them, in this way eliminating all suffering and chaos. Kafka himself retold the story of Prometheus, dividing it into four legends. In the first, Prometheus was chained to the Caucasus for betraying the gods to men, and eagles fed off his liver, which perpetually grew back; in the second, Prometheus pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock to escape the beaks, and became one with the rock; in the third, the betrayal was forgotten by the gods, the eagles, and by Prometheus himself; in the fourth, the gods and the eagles became tired of the meaningless story, and the wound closed wearily. Finally, Kafka concluded, "there remained the inexplicable mountains of rock." So, too, in the story of Gorky, we are left with rock: the rock of the hero Sviatogor, the "sacred mountain"; the rock of Tolstoy stretching himself like a mountain range; the rock of Vesuvius, seen from the Sorrento villa; the rock of the White Sea Canal; the mysterious rock of the individual; and the sight of a mountain that makes us imagine moving it, being negated by it, recreating it.
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