We are left with no choice. We must
Make challenging efficiency savings
To reduce our expenditure of vocabulary
To sustainable levels.

In order to help us
To achieve our targets
The verb to say is withdrawn from circulation.
Its meaning can be adequately conveyed
Through the use of to be like
Or to go.

Adverbs are a luxury. It is unfortunate
That because of the credit crunch
We can no longer afford them.
Adjectives already perform many of their tasks.
The new arrangements merely regularise
Existing good practice.

Negative forms act as a brake
On economic recovery. A carefully managed programme
Of quantitative easing
Will introduce additional affirmatives
Which used in pairs will stimulate growth.

Language is an asset. And like all assets
It must deliver value. One hundred thousand words
Are far more than any modern society requires.
A twenty-five per cent reduction
Over the next five financial years
Will place our language on a sustainable footing
Fit for the twenty-first century.

The Minister of State for Doing Your Bit
Was like, “Everyone must do their bit
And speak proper.”

Yeah, right.

via Minister announces bold initiative | The Power of Language.

“Over the past century,” he said, “the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths.”

Ouch.

First a definition or two. The OED defines polymath as “A person of great or varied learning; a person acquainted with many fields of study; an accomplished scholar” and polymathy as “Great or varied learning; acquaintance with many branches of knowledge”.

Next a word of explanation. I’m writing this post to contribute to an online discussion amongst RSA Fellows, in response to the question “What can the RSA do about it?”; but I’m interested in any and all answers to the wider question, “What can we do about it?”.

Schmidt’s first concern is over the polarity and mutual exclusion of arts and science. He says: “First you need to bring art and science back together. Think back to the glory days of the Victorian era. It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges.”

“Second,” he says, “you need to get better at growing big companies. …If you don’t address this, then the UK will continue to be where inventions are born – but not bred for long-term success.”

Most of his lecture is specific to the media industry, though he does make some useful points about innovation and copyright law which have a wider relevance. More on that later. For now I want to focus on his comment about polymaths and what is says about UK society – and most importantly, what we can do about it.

It seems to me that we need to consider three aspects – education; public policy; and the media themselves. I’d like to offer some initial thoughts about all three, and ask for comments from those who are more closely involved in each field than I.

Education

Looking closely at what Schmidt says, his point is not actually that we produce too few polymaths, but that we produce too few scientists and engineers. His concern is that IT teaching in schools is about “user” skills, not computer programming or coding skills. (I touched on this point in Precision Tools, and on the effect it has had on the way society works.) Niall Ferguson has said that the most widespread language in the world is not English but mathematics – and our schoolchildren lag far behind those of the Far East in their mathematical skills.

I know far less than I would like to about the RSA Academy, but there would seem to be an opportunity here for any school that chose to take it up.

I don’t know whether Schmidt checked the OED before giving his speech, but there is also a question inherent in the definition of polymath: the question of ‘great or varied learning’. Is innovation better served by breadth or depth in education? I remember the transition to sixth form as a fantastic moment, as the point at which I started to learn how to think and work and research in depth – all the skills I needed at university and subsequently. I don’t believe we would be well served by increasing the number of subjects people study at A-level. But should our schools be encouraging A-level students to mix arts, humanities and sciences more freely? What effect would this have on the calibre of science applicants to university? And what effect would it have on the non-scientist’s appreciation of science in later life?

Schmidt does not mention the other trend in education in recent decades – the compulsion to help everyone to succeed. Universal success is an admirable goal, but it has an awkward side-effect: if everyone must succeed, the greatest achievements risk being devalued.

A question, therefore: how can we make sure we are placing a proper valuation on the very highest achievers? – whilst still celebrating the significant achievements of those who have perhaps overcome great obstacles in order to accomplish anything at all (which says as much about character as the other says about attainment)?

Public policy

For Schmidt this is about three things – promoting innovation and helping small businesses grow into big businesses; copyright law; and regulation. He also says, “You need to get smarter about how to bridge the divide between public and commercial sectors”.

Several of his points strike a chord. When I started up LaMIS I was faced with any number of sources of advice, from banks to Business Link to a plethora of government schemes. Schmidt acknowledges that “the UK does a great job at backing small firms and cottage industries”. But do we support the next stage of growth? Schmidt says not. He says we sell out to foreign owners.

Equally, LaMIS gave me experience of the divide between public and commercial sectors, and of issues around copyright law. There is certainly room for a much less hidebound, more innovative attitude in both these areas. Schmidt wants our government to “put innovation front and centre of their regulatory strategy” and he is quite right.

As for regulation, we need to think very carefully about our attitude to risk. As a society I submit that we are becoming more and more risk-averse, particularly in the public sector and our other large institutions such as banks. There is no question but that this stifles innovation.

We also seem to apply a blunt instrument to risk. We have developed a whole vast industry to manage the risks of everyday life – everything from crossing the road to building a skyscraper. Regulation is a major part of that industry. Risk management is all about doing the same things repeatedly, as safely as possible.  It is about avoiding careless mistakes (crossing the road without looking; dropping a girder on your mate’s head) and deliberate wrongdoing (skimping on the foundations; fraud).

Yet too often the same tool is applied to the risks of innovation – risks that are by definition about doing something new and untried; not the risk of careless mistakes or deliberate wrongdoing, but the risk that a good new idea, executed with competence, flair and vision, might fail. There is no real innovation without risk.

So how can we support and encourage the taking of intelligent, visionary risk? Is this an area where the Glory of Failure project could perhaps offer some insight?

The media

We cannot make much progress on this issue without asking some tough questions of the media – and of ourselves, about the influence and control we have chosen to give them over our society. There are those who say that the media are symptomatic of many of the problems of society, not causative: I beg to differ. At the very least, they magnify and exacerbate those problems.

In his speech, Schmidt congratulated the UK television industry on the calibre of its programming. But his view of the media is entirely market-driven, a matter of supply and demand: the industry will provide what its consumers want. This view is simplistic at best – and, frankly, irresponsible and destructive at worst.

Consider the example of reality TV. Big Brother is the case in point of this ‘supply-and-demand’ kind of programming, and has become popular out of all proportion to the quality or value of its content. Its influence and effect have spread from TV to the mainstream publishing industry, which focuses on celebrity content to the exclusion of higher-quality writing.

So what? people say. It’s only entertainment.

Er, no, it isn’t. It is contributing directly to the shallowing of thought and the lowering of aspiration. On Radio 4 last week Polly Toynbee said that, if you ask many working-class families about achieving their aspirations, the answer will often involve winning the lottery or appearing on a reality TV show – that education and hard work are not seen as a route to success.

(By Toynbee’s own evidence, it is not that education doesn’t provide that route to success; she cited the outstanding work of BSix 6th Form College in Hackney and Cockermouth School in Cumbria as examples. It is that education and hard work aren’t seen by many as providing that route, nor valued accordingly. Gordon Ramsay once spent a weekend coaching and mentoring a young chef whose ‘aspiration’ was to have his own TV show – yet when he paid a surprise visit six weeks later, the young man had reverted to all his old, lazy habits.)

Or consider the question of literacy and articulacy which I discuss in Precision Tools. Social media have given many people a voice, but they have lowered the bar in respect of what many other people are saying, or are capable of saying, with that voice. I’ve written elsewhere about “the culture of soundbites and instant gratification“; it is sad to see the extent to which the media slope their collective shoulders and deny any “duty of linguistic care” (as Lindsay Johns puts it).

Consider, too, another unpleasant trend in some quarters of the media – the default description of anyone who does their utmost to support and encourage their children to aspire and achieve, who does whatever it takes to give their children opportunities and to ensure that they make the most of them, as “pushy middle-class parents”. It’s hardly a label that will reward the hard work and dedication of either the parents or the children.

Which brings us back to the question: What can we do to nurture our polymaths, and to allow them to achieve the great things that we require of them?

Answers, please, on the postcard below.

His name is Lindsay Johns. He is a writer and broadcaster and a mentor to young people in Peckham, and I first encountered him on Radio 4 two weeks ago.

Why is he a hero? Because, in his own words (in the Evening Standard of 16 August), in his mentoring work with young people in Peckham he has “zero tolerance towards inchoate street slang”.

It is quite a stand to be taking in today’s culturally tolerant society. It is a long-overdue rebuke to the well-meaning but destructive philosophy that the rest of society should be embracing street patois, complete with all its incoherence and intellectual limitations (implied and actual). It is a direct challenge to those who believe that the evolution of language is something to be observed and recorded, rather than influenced or even resisted.

It is a quiet but authoritative reproach to those who think that accuracy in language doesn’t matter – to the self-publisher who releases an e-book riddled with typos, sloppy grammar, punctuation errors and muddled homophones; to the politician whose diction is a contrived series of glo’l stops and dropped aitches; even (God help us) to the occasional English teacher who has decided that it is cool or “relevant” to allow text-speak in essays.

And Mr Johns gets results. Amazing results. Read more…

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An enormous amount has been written, both online and in print, about the publishing industry in recent years – some of it perceptive; a little (a very little) well-informed; much of it complete rubbish, ranging from the ignorant to the merely opinionated.

The vast majority of this body of commentary has one common factor: its authors have a relationship with the industry, whether as insiders (publishers, agents, authors, booksellers) or as outsiders (mostly self-published authors). That is to say, everyone has some kind of an angle to play, a stance or interest (vested, conflicted or otherwise) to defend, or in plenty of cases an axe to grind.

That stops here. John B. Thompson has written Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century from perhaps the only possible and credible disinterested perspective – that of the academic. He has examined publishing as a business phenomenon, and based his work not on opinion nor on wishful thinking, but on five years’ systematic research, including some 280 interviews with industry insiders amounting to 500 hours of first-hand evidence.

Wisely, Professor Thompson has restricted himself to one field of publishing, and has clearly defined that field at the outset. The book focuses on English-language trade publishing in the USA and UK, i.e. general-interest publishing of both fiction and non-fiction, intended for a general readership and sold through the mainstream distribution network. He includes independent presses in his scope, along with print-on-demand and the e-book phenomenon, but excludes self-publishing; he includes Amazon and other online retailers, but excludes channels such as Lulu and Smashwords.

He also confines himself to commenting on the general fiction and non-fiction market, with only passing reference to academic, professional and scholarly publishing, and none at all to specific market sectors such as children’s, young adult, science fiction, illustrated art books or self-help works. This scope is set out with admirable clarity in the introduction (pp. 12-13).

Thompson traces the rise and rise of today’s publishing conglomerates, noting the three significant forces that have shaped the industry over the past decades: the rise of the major retail chains, the emergence of the literary agent, and the process of corporate acquisitions and mergers which began as early as the 1960s. It is not a story that makes for comforting reading – at least, not to the lover of good literature – as it is the story of the commercialisation and commoditisation of the written word.

He shows, for example, that the early (1960s and 1970s) corporate mergers and acquisitions saw book publishing as just another element of the media and entertainment industry – media conglomerates would buy up publishers in order to secure an ongoing source of film rights. The model failed to deliver, but we are still living with its legacy, for example, in terms of HMV’s transformation of the Waterstone’s chain into a media outlet after 1998 (see p. 54).

If the media conglomerates created the industry structure for the commoditisation of publishing, it was the literary agents who exploited that structure, and created the dynamic of exclusivity that has been a characteristic of mainstream publishing for the last three decades at least. At the end of the book, Thompson observes that the industry revolves around publishers, buyers and agents, with writers on the far periphery (p. 375).

But agents forge their relationships with the big publishers, not with the small independents. A telling comment comes from Chris, previously a publisher at a small independent house before becoming an editor with one of the large corporations. “When I was at [the small independent house] I always thought of agents as my enemies,” he told Thompson; “now I see them as my friends” (p. 206).

Thompson is even more forthright (and even less complimentary) about the role of agents in an online interview with Brooklyn Rail last November, where he necessarily destroys the myth of the five- or six-figure advance for the unknown but competent first-time author.

There is one seeming inconsistency in Thompson’s thesis. In Chapter 3 he sets out five myths about publishing corporations (pp. 139ff). (“Myth 1: The corporations have no interest in publishing quality books. All they are interested in publishing is commercial bestsellers. … Myth 4: In the large publishing corporations, editors have lost the power they once had in the traditional publishing houses. Sales directors, marketing directors and accountants are the new power brokers and they decide what gets published.”)

He seems anxious to dispel these myths, but spends much of the next 250 pages proving that – despite occasional exceptions – they hold absolutely true, at least for the large corporate players that dominate the industry. Indeed, they define much of the structure of the industry. On page 192, a London agent quotes a recent conversation with an editor at one of the big publishers:

‘I don’t like having this conversation with you because I want to publish this book, I love the story but I know what’s going to happen when I go to the acquisition meeting. They’re going to say, “Why are we bothering with these little books that are going to breathe all this valuable oxygen both creatively and promotionally.”’

These two “myths” are further validated again and again throughout the book. Of the 5,000-6,000 new titles published each year by the main US houses, Thompson reveals the alarming fact (p. 189) that only 25% will receive any serious attention from the publishers’ own sales teams. The impact of this kind of industry polarisation towards the bestseller is shown in Chapter 10, where he shows the number of titles selling between 10,000 and 40,000 copies declining by one third, whilst the (much smaller) number of titles selling over 200,000 copies more than doubled in the same period. The causal link is not hard to infer.

In the same chapter Thompson puts a human face on this phenomenon. He tells the story of Joanne, a moderately successful mid-list author, who first discovered that her publisher was spending nothing on her marketing, and was then dropped altogether, despite a track record of nearly twenty years, six books, good critical reception and even winning prizes. The mainstream publishing industry is a hostile place to the writer – as another author puts it, “everything in publishing is disempowering for a writer” (p. 384).

It can be a pretty hostile place for the reader, too, as I have discussed elsewhere. Thompson devotes much of the last 50 pages of the book to a discussion of “the fundamental short-termism of the industry” (p. 386); this takes several forms, one of which is a distinction between “diversity of output” and “diversity of marketplace … the diversity of the books that are noticed, purchased and read” (p. 389). It is a crucial distinction, usually overlooked; the lack of diversity in the marketplace strikes at the very heart of our cultural health.

Thompson takes a refreshingly cautious view of e-books, noting that “the world is often much more complicated than the technological determinist would like us to think” (p. 333). He voices concern over the devaluation caused by the e-book revolution, based on the experience of the music industry: he quotes one publisher as saying (p. 362), “Why are songs 99 cents? Because Apple says so. Can the music industry make money at 99 cents? No. But now what does everyone think a song should be worth? 99 cents.” It is a lesson that self-publishers would do well to think about: as Thompson observes (p. 368), “a major devaluing of intellectual property is unlikely to lead to an overall increase in the quality of content over time”.  (Not that three decades of commoditisation has done wonders for the quality of content, mind you.)

Though there are some rays of hope among small independent imprints, in general this book offers neither easy answers nor false comfort. Those who believe or who wish to believe, rightly or wrongly, that corporate mainstream publishing is on its deathbed – culturally hidebound, intellectually moribund, at risk of self-strangulation by an unsustainable commercial model – will find plenty here to reinforce their opinion.

But those who dismiss or ignore mainstream publishing are missing the point.  For whether we love the Big Five or loathe them, these are the organisations that have shaped our cultural landscape, our reading habits and expectations, for two generations or more. And Professor Thompson’s great achievement, at this time of tumult in the publishing industry, is to offer a comprehensive and dispassionate view of the forces that have shaped and continue to shape these organisations. Anyone who is interested in our shared cultural well-being ignores the implications of his work at their peril.

View all my reviews

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His thesis is that reading fiction is good for you.

Well, I, inveterate bookworm of this parish, could have told you that – though I couldn’t have offered any hard evidence. I’m sure there are members of book clubs all over the world who would say the same thing. The Greeks thought it was the case, but again, without proof.

Professor Oatley, on the other hand, has come up with something more empirical. His study established a direct link between the amount of fiction a person reads, and their degree of empathy with and understanding of others (as measured by accepted psychological tests). The link was so strong that it seems to have surprised even him.

It’s worth listening to the interview (it’s on the BBC iPlayer, so will probably disappear in a few days’ time – though as of 24th July it’s still available). He compares fiction to a flight simulator – it is a way of encountering a wider range of situations and people, of living a richer and more interesting life than one might have the opportunity to experience directly. And it has a positive, demonstrable effect on the way people cope with the world.

Aside from its obvious intrinsic interest, there are three things that struck me about this idea.

The first it the delicious irony that, on the day of Professor Oatley’s broadcast, the British Medical Journal published a news item (picked up the next day in the Telegraph) suggesting that Mills & Boon novels “cause marital breakdown”. Now, I’m no fan of Mills & Boon – I find their characters are one-dimensional and implausible, their plots repetitive and predictable, and I can get quite irritable about their cavalier and misrepresentative portrayal of history. It is little more than escapist fantasy. But escapism offers hope. And it is interesting to note that Professor Oatley – in his interview, at least – did not distinguish between different types of fiction.

The second point was made yesterday at the Chalke Valley History Festival. At the talk on historical fact and fiction, a member of the audience asked whether the panellists (historical novelists all) chose to write historical rather than contemporary fiction, so that they could be free of the mundane trivia of the weekly Tesco shop, and could focus on saying something about the human condition.

This is a big part of the appeal that historical fiction has always had for me. I have often said that Dorothy Dunnett’s Checkmate helps me to walk taller. Dunnett certainly has something profound to say about the human condition – even when that condition is degrading and squalid – as too do authors like Charles Palliser, James Clavell, Robert MacNeil and (yes) M.M. Bennetts. And all these authors manage to portray a whole civilisation in the course of a novel.  How is that not going to help the reader to understand and empathise with his or her surroundings more fully?

The third point takes me back to a knowledge cafe I attended in May, hosted by David Gurteen. David was talking about the benefits of conversation over confrontation. I like that term ‘conversation’ in a business context; it seems less structured and stilted than ‘dialogue’, and David emphasised that a conversation can go wherever you want it to go. He also stressed the value of storytelling as a business technique. I got quite excited by all this.

The interesting and slightly disappointing thing, though, was the subsequent attempt at conversation with one of the others in the room. If a conversation can go wherever I want it to, I thought, I’d like to talk about the value of fiction.

Maybe I picked the wrong person to talk to about it, though, because I got a mystified and slightly contemptuous look. A look that said, That’s all very well, but that’s not what he meant by storytelling. A look that said, Storytelling means including a couple of anecdotes in your management seminar. A look that said, This conversation is supposed to be about organisational intelligence and knowledge management, not about fluffy things like novels. A look that said, This conversation can go wherever you want it to, as long as you want it to stay within certain tacitly defined boundaries.

Such a pity. Because if reading fiction improves our social understanding – if, as Professor Oatley claims, it has a positive and demonstrable effect on the way people cope with the world and understand each other – it seems to me that it might, it just might, have some untapped value in a business setting too.

Would anyone like a conversation about that?

I love the ability of the Animate concept to catch and keep the interest of the viewer. I love the impression it gives of freshness and spontaneity. I love its low-tech, non-threatening look and feel. It seems…  well, human in its tone and its scale. It seems to be something that anyone could do, given a couple of marker pens, a whiteboard, a video camera and some basic artistic ability. And, of course, a compelling story to tell.

I am not alone in thinking this.  Here’s a truly fantastic example of a California high-school student, Madison Kerst, creating her own Animate to discuss issues of gender equality in US sports.

I shall come clean.  I, Bennetts The Luddite, am completely sold on this idea (along with the notion of an app for Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is the first and only thing ever to make me regret that I do not possess an iPad).  I am wholly convinced of the value the technology can add for someone with a message to get across.

Animate has its limitations, of course.  The RSA’s Animates are all linear and one-directional:  like a lecture, they consist of a single narrative voice and a single narrative thread – though no doubt it would be possible to adapt the technique to animate, say, a dialogue or a series of what-if scenarios.  Animate is good for conveying complex ideas, but not necessarily a high volume of detail - it does not, for example, lend itself to tabulated data (so some Animates could perhaps include links to appendices, for those who require a further level of detail). It is not a particularly interactive medium, in that the viewer cannot influence the outcome of the narrative (though again, maybe there is a technical solution to this). But the idea still offers huge potential.

I am thus delighted that there is a small group of Fellows of the RSA now looking at the scope for a self-service Animate tool – something to help people like Madison to produce these excellent resources. The proposal is the brainchild of Beth Wanono FRSA and is provisionally entitled YOU Animate.

As a contribution to the YOU Animate concept, therefore, I would like to ask for your ideas. With the right sort of tool or app, I can see how a local community might use YOU Animate to formulate and convey its response to local planning issues. I can see plenty of educational potential in the concept – scope for getting ideas across to students who don’t respond well to a traditional textbook medium. I’d love to see how a sixth-form literature student might use it to capture a response to poetry. Or in a completely different context, how it could help to capture and convey the reaction of a child who has witnessed or experienced abuse. I am sure there are many others. How would you use it?

Answers, or at least ideas, on the digital equivalent of a postcard that appears below – the comment box. Thank you most kindly.

STOP PRESS – The RSA and Nominet are running a competition for people to create a film accompaniment to an RSA lecture audio track.  The closing date is 1st September 2011.

Its pilot, Fred Kemp, left behind a wife and three young children. Its navigator, James Farrar, left arguably a more enduring legacy – an extraordinary collection of poetry and prose, characterised (in the words of a review in theSpectator) by “an inner clarity and quality, an authority of imaginative expression far beyond his actual experience”.

Unlike his near-contemporary Keith Douglas, four years his senior and killed in Normandy the month before him, Farrar never achieved recognition in his lifetime.  His mother sent his manuscripts to his lifelong literary hero, Henry Williamson, who published an anthology in 1950 under the title The Unreturning Spring (republished in 1986, edited by Christopher Palmer, as Spring Returning).

As a writer, Farrar’s extraordinary strength and maturity is in description.  (Be warned:  if you are one of those who spurn the adjective or the adverb, look away now:  there is nothing for you in this post, nor in Farrar’s writing.)  His imagery is of the sort that demands to be read deeply and thoughtfully.  (I posted about this kind of thing a few months back.  Yes, I feel strongly about it.)  Here he is at sixteen, watching a Battle of Britain dogfight:

Read more…

I left a comment drawing a comparison between the internship debate and the destructive influence of celebrity publishing deals on the publishing industry. (Let me apologise here and now to Alison and to RSA Projects for hijacking what is undoubtedly an important debate.  But it got me thinking, you see…)

As I understand it, the internship debate accuses businesses of offering unpaid work to those whose parents (a) have the contacts to get them a placement and (b) can afford to pay their living costs while they get some work experience.  These interns get their placements over the heads of those who may be far more capable and talented, but can’t afford to work unpaid and can’t get a foot in the door in any case.  Have I understood that right?

There is, then, a strong parallel with the mainstream publishing industry (and the media in general) and its relationship with celebrities.  Far from celebrity autobiographies (sic) “maintain[ing] less profitable niche parts of publishing houses”, as one comment on Alison’s post suggested, the overwhelming evidence is that mainstream publishers have all but cut out those less profitable elements altogether.  Mid-list authors, those who have been able to turn a modest profit for themselves and their publishers alike, those whose work provided the variety that used to be found on Waterstones’ shelves, have been dropped by their publishers.  Equally, mainstream publishers are doing precious little to invest in first-time authors.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s Lexi Revellian on the subject.  (Don’t want to take the word of a self-published author?  Read John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture.  But be warned; it is an uncomfortable read for anyone who wishes to believe that mainstream publishers are trustworthy guardians of our literary heritage.)

The results are fourfold.  Firstly (and most unforgivably), it perpetuates the lobotomocracy of our celebrity-obsessed culture.  Secondly, it has homogenised the mainstream offering and killed its variety – though the variety is all there in the self- and indie-published world, if one can but find it.  There is some fantastic self-published and indie-published material out there, but it is swamped by dross.  For the reader, paradoxically, it can actually be harder to find the good quality writing than it used to be in the old days of a well-stocked bookshop with well-read staff.

Thirdly, by forcing new and aspiring writers down the self-publishing route, it deprives them of the support structure that can nurture whatever innate talent they have.  Plenty of self-published work is good on plot, but is sadly let down by incoherent grammar, bad spelling and worse punctuation.  And that does no favours to a new generation of either writers or readers.

Fourthly, self-publishing has forced the author to become their own publicist.  The internet has all but removed the barrier to publishing, but its effect on the barrier to audience is mixed at best.  Self-publishing overwhelmingly rewards those with self-promotional skills, not necessarily those with writing skills.

A post by Dominic Basulto, on the BigThink blog, makes much of the fact that “Artists are no longer just “artists” – they are now entrepreneurs, marketing gurus and branding experts, all rolled up into one”.  This, he says, is unequivocally a good thing.  “When the artist is also an entrepreneur, it leads to a flowering and diversification of creativity in wonderful new ways.” Agreed.

What, though, when the artist is not a natural entrepreneur, but is still faced with the remorseless demand of the digital age for self-promotion?  At best it distracts them from doing what they do best; at worst it buries real artistic talent under a deluge of hustlers.

“To get a creative project funded [says Basulto] requires a mix of marketing savvy, digital social networking prowess, and, yes, the ability to summarize your project with a pithy, viral-like video.”  True again, but these qualities don’t necessarily make you a good artist or writer or musician.  Quite the opposite, for many people.  Here’s a case in point.

And sadly, this means that much debate that is supposedly about ‘artistic innovation’ is actually about social-media marketing technique.

What the new publishing model does do – though I don’t believe anyone is exploiting this yet – is to create a space for partnership between the kind of artist who doesn’t want to become a “hustling entrepreneur”, and the marketing-savvy social networkers.  That really would be an exciting combination.  Any takers?

Next month, the Plain Writing Act of 2010 comes into force in the USA.  Its purpose is “to improve the effectiveness and accountability of Federal agencies to the public by promoting clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.” It sounds a bit like the Plain English Campaign with teeth.  Not a bad idea – not least if it forces Government officials to think, really think, about how ordinary people react to information. A … Read More

via The Power of Language

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Charles II is, in many ways, both too easy and too difficult a subject for a biography. He is one of those great defining characters of the British monarchy – like Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Victoria – whose reigns stand out in our collective memory for one or two well-known events, and about whom most people think they know plenty.

So Jenny Uglow takes a different approach in ‘A Gambling Man’. The book is indeed a biography of the Merry Monarch, but it focuses on the crucial first ten years of his reign, and on Charles’s many gambles to stabilise his three kingdoms during this period.

Her task is helped by the events of the period – restoration, war, plague, fire and constant sexual intrigue – which in themselves make for a rollicking good read. It is further illuminated by Pepys, whose voice, through his diary, offers us a ringside seat. (It’s astonishing how much he managed to witness first hand).

Given these ingredients, the greatest risk is that the author will over-simplify for the sake of populism. The greatest strength of ‘A Gambling Man’ is that Mrs. Uglow does not do this. She presents the politics, society, religion and intellectual life of 1660s England as a rich tapestry – complex, often paradoxical, sometimes frayed at the edges. And she is a meticulous chronicler of that complexity, whether it is the political manoeuvring of the King’s ministers or mistresses; the fine balancing act that Charles was forced to play between Royalists and former Cromwellian sympathisers; or above all the religious factionalism that threatened to destabilise the Kingdom from the moment Charles landed at Dover.

This last, so crucial to an understanding of the period, yet so often over-simplified or marginalized by historians (perhaps the worst example being Edward Dolnick’s ‘The Clockwork Universe’), is handled with particular thoroughness and insight. Freedom of religion was, of course, one of the first things offered by Charles on his return to power in 1660; his Declaration of Breda promised ‘liberty to tender consciences’. It was Parliament, and not the King, who forced religious conformity on the nation, outlawing both Catholics and nonconformist Protestants from worshipping in public and from holding public office. The effects would be felt for another 150 years or more; some would argue they are still in evidence today.

Also very much in evidence today, not just in Britain but throughout western democracy, is another and more profound legacy of Charles’s reign. Uglow reveals the very foundation of the relationship between government, parliament and private enterprise. (She even traces the origins of the two-party system, which crystallised in the later part of Charles’s reign.)

Government in the seventeenth century was still in the King’s personal control, but this King had been invited to rule by Parliament – by the common consent of the governed – and Parliament was his paymaster. The idea of monarchical rule by the explicit consent of the governed would, of course, be dramatically underscored by the events of 1688 – the enforced abdication of James II, the accession of William and Mary, the Glorious Revolution. It’s hereditary monarchy, Jim, but not as we know it – or not as we’d known it up to that point.

We see too the birth of commerce as a political force. The wars with the Dutch and the French were not fundamentally about political or dynastic control, nor about religion and ideology, but about control over trade routes. The City and her merchants, the generators of the nation’s wealth and prosperity, emerge as a political force in their own right.

(Niall Ferguson, in his recent book ‘Civilisation – The West and the Rest’, identifies private property rights as one of the six ‘killer apps’ which have allowed the West to dominate global civilisation for the last 500 years. 1660s London was that ‘killer app’ in action; the City would dominate world trade for the best part of the next three centuries.)

The book is structured broadly chronologically, but with a sensible thematic sub-structure. Thus politics, economics, foreign affairs, society and scientific innovation are depicted as separate, parallel strands of the tapestry, making for a whole that is coherent and digestible. Wisely, Uglow does not over-reach: it is a biography of Charles II, not a study of 1660s society. Equally wisely, she focuses on England, although she regularly refers to domestic events in Charles’s other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland.

This is serious history, full of names and events and facts, but it is by no means po-faced. We get to have a lot of fun. The intrigues of Charles’s various mistresses make today’s headline-chasing celebrities look like unimaginative amateurs. It is amusing, too, to discover that the property speculator Nicholas Barbon, who rebuilt areas of London after the Great Fire, was in fact christened If-Jesus-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Had’st-Been-Damned Barebones. (His father, the preacher Praise-God Barebones, had a walk-on part in Neal Stephenson’s novel ‘Quicksilver’.)

But towering above all the ministers and mistresses and merchants, above the scientists and the architects and the playwrights and poets, his loyal subjects and strident critics, is the character of Charles himself – the dazzling monarch with the popular touch, the man who gambled everything to hold his nation together at this time of tumult.

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