Archives for May 2012 | The Great Gray Bridge

#FridayReads, May 31–”Canada” and “United Breaks Guitars”

#FridayReads, May 31–Richard Ford’s mesmerizing Canada, which I blogged about earlier this week, and am savoring. The hapless bank robbers in it, teenage narrator Dell Parsons’ parents, remind me of the crooks played by Al Pacino and John Cazale that try to pull of the bank heist in Sidney Lumet’s great 1975 film, Dog Day Afternoon: utterly heedless of the consequences of their actions. I’ve also begun reading United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice In the Age of Social Media, Canadian musician Dave Carroll’s good-humored personal account of how an airline manhandled his Taylor guitar, then refused to take responsibility for their bad conduct until he humiliated them with mocking videos which drew more than a million viewers on YouTube. Inspiring.

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Danger from NYC Trees, Part III

Following three articles on this topic earlier in May, which I blogged about here, and an earlier piece I wrote after seeing tree pruners at work in Riverside Park, the NY Times has published another revealing article about tree care in New York City, or more accurately the decline of tree care in the city. While the Bloomberg administration has commendably pledged to plant one million trees before it leaves office at the end of 2013–and it claims to be halfway to that goal–the budget for maintaining and pruning the city’s existing trees has fallen drastically. Reporter Lisa W. Foderaro writes that the city’s tree-tending

“work force has shrunk, however, to 92 pruners and climbers today from 112 five years ago. The budget for street-tree care has fallen more sharply. The 600,000 trees on the city’s streets are largely maintained by outside tree-service contractors. Because of budget cuts, the pruning rotation has been stretched, to every 15 years from once every 7 years in 2008. During that time, the budget for street-tree pruning contracts fell to $1.4 million from $4.7 million.”

In the city’s parks, where hazards posed by untended trees often go undetected, she reports that

“Arborists and tree-care experts say that New York City could significantly improve public safety by ensuring that the workers who evaluate trees understand the warning signs of decay and failure.”

Despite the promise of greater safety such training offers, she reports on the decline of the tree care budget even while multi-million dollar damage awards continue to be paid to civil litigants, after fatalities and serious injuries occur. The city has a legal and moral responsibility to keep its inhabitants and visitors safe, within reasonable limits. While all urban hazard cannot be eliminated from our urban midst, the ones that are avoidable should be prevented to the maximum extent possible; when New York City fails to do so–even as reasonable safeguards are within reach–it is a moral and ethical failing. I cannot understand how the Mayor’s office allows this to continue. I will call my city councilperson to request that they restore the budget for tree care. Any other course is just stupid and negligent.

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A Gratifying Recommendation

While devoting much time and attention to this blog of late, I am also working as a manuscript editor so it was gratifying to find yesterday that on my LinkedIn profile one of my editorial clients left this blushingly good recommendation of the editorial services I provided him:

“Philip Turner is an experienced and talented editor. We have collaborated on numerous projects that have been greatly heightened because of Phil’s contribution. He is an accomplished writer and even more importantly a talented thinker. I recommend him highly.” Benjamin Ola Akande, Dean and Professor of Economics Walker School of Business, Chief of Corporate Partnership Webster University, St. Louis, MO

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Toronto’s NXNE Festival & Speakerfile, June 13-18

In addition to covering Book Expo America (BEA) next week as a member of the press I will also be attending the North by Northeast Festival, aka NXNE, in official capacity as a blogger. This annual extravaganza–held in in Toronto each June since 1994–features music, film, and interactive/digital/publishing elements. Their website trumpets “650 bands and 40 films” over the week of activities. I attended last year and had a great time, discovering such bands and artists as Imaginary Cities, Gramercy Riffs, Harlan Pepper, Zeus, Mohawk Lodge, Carolyn Mark, Graham Wright, Wayne Petti of Cuff the Duke, Matthew Barber, and Brian Borcherdt. I also participated in a grand meet-up of many friends from the informal community that congregates on the CBC Radio 3 blog organized by host, friend, and author Grant Lawrence. So it’s a real treat to be going back this year, and this time as a blogger with full access to all festival events. Among the artists on this year’s NXNE schedule I most look forward to hearing live are Matt Mays (#1 on my personal bucket list of Canadian indie rockers I’m eager to see play), Andre Williams and The Sadies, Plants & Animals, and The Flaming Lips. And of course then there will be the serendipitous performances I can’t predict–new musical discoveries–the very thing that makes festival-going such a rich and exciting experience. I hope to be live-blogging and reporting from on the spot as much as possible.

While in Toronto I will also meet with book biz friends and contacts and a new company called Speakerfile that I’m representing to literary agents, authors, publicists, and publishers, in New York City, and elsewhere in North America. They’re building a great platform–think eHarmony®–for conference organizers and meeting planners on one side and experts and authors on the other. I will also be working with them at Book Expo America (BEA) next week, and again when I’m in Toronto the following week. If you are one of my friends in publishing or the media and are intrigued by Speakerfile’s model, please ask me to brief you on them. We also have meeting times still available for next week at the Javits Center, and I would be happy to introduce you to their CEO, Peter Evans. They have a great product and services that will be helpful to many in the publishing community eager to surmount the discoverability challenges that face us all nowadays. I’m really excited to be working with them.

It’s sure to be a great week, attending and covering NXNE, and working with Speakerfile.

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A Star for Dante’s Inferno

I was delighted to see this new, modern translation of Dante’s Inferno received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. I had made the book one of my #FridayReads on April 27. PW writes, “This will be the Dante for the next generation.” Here’s the entire review:

♦Starred review♦

Inferno

Dante Alighieri, trans. from the Italian by Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, $35 (352p) ISBN 978-1-55597-619-4

Bang has done for Dante’s most famous poem something akin to what Baz Luhrmann did for Shakespeare in his 1996 film of Romeo and Juliet: updated the presentation of a classic for a contemporary sensibility without sacrificing its timelessness. Bang (The Bride of E) has preserved the feel and tempo of the original—and the many English translations that readers will be familiar with: ”Stopped mid-motion in the middle/ Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—/ Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost,” she begins. She has, however, modernized the metaphors; where Dante looked to the politics and culture of his contemporary Italy for allusions to illustrate his sense of faith and morality, Bang mines American pop and high culture. Yes, traditionalists and scholars may shriek upon seeing Eric Cartman (of South Park fame), sculptures by Rodin, John Wayne Gacy, and many others make anachronistic cameos in Bang’s version of Hell, but this is still very much Dante’s underworld, updated so it pops on today’s page. The result is an epic both fresh and historical, scholarly and irreverent: “ ‘Pope Satan, Pope Satan, Alley Oop!’ ” begins Canto VII with a line in which Bang mines various previous translations of Dante and the roots of the phrase “Alley Oop” in French gymnastics and a newspaper comic about “a Stone Age traveling salesman from the kingdom of Moo who rode a dinosaur named Dinny,” according to Bang’s comprehensive notes. This will be the Dante for the next generation. Includes illustrations by artist Henrik Drescher. (Aug.)

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A “Model for Entrepreneurial Journalism”

Interesting article by Jeff Sonderman at poynter.org, the journalism and media hub, about the model that forbes.com has created for itself, “’a full-fledged platform’ for 1,000 expert contributors and Forbes staff alike, and ‘a social media operating system’ to engage 30 million monthly unique visitors.” I know two of their thousand bloggers, friends Rick Ungar and Tom Watson–last month Tom invited me to cover the Hillman Awards as one of a posse of bloggers–and I’m definitely intrigued by the platform, what its originator Lewis DVorkin calls “our model of entrepreneurial journalism.” Unlike Huffington Post, to which it’s been compared, forbes.com pays many of its contributors, and seems to have developed reasonable metrics for rewarding writers based on their readership. They are also developing their own style of social media that their contributors can draft off of, what DVorkin calls the “FORBES Follow Bar,” making “it easier for our growing audience to follow and find all our staffers and subject experts.”

Importantly, given their connection to Forbes magazine, forbes.com goes well beyond just business and finance, and it is not in thrall to the conservative ideology identified with Steve Forbes. Ungar has a blog covering healthcare and politics, while Watson is a contributor commenting on “social ventures, media, and change.” Forbes.com’s audience doubled this year, from 15 million monthly visitors to 30 million. According to Sonderman, “Fifty-five writers have more than doubled their audience since last June, DVorkin recently wrote, and ‘a handful’ periodically draw more than 1 million readers a month.” Sonderman reports “that Forbes hires each contributor to write about a specific subject, and requires them to stay in their lanes.” Considering that I cover more than half a dozen subjects on this blog–city life, books, music, culture, media, current events, and city life–I wonder how writers do operating in a narrower silo like that. Of course, people like Tom don’t write only for forbes.com, as he also has a site and blog of his own.

I don’t hear too much about Forbes magazine nowadays, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that forbes.com is increasingly important to the company’s future.