December 2005 Archives
Rhian in America
Much to my surprise, I love America. We spend a lot of time in Britain bitching about America, Americans, Americanisms and of course the American administration. It’s very easy. But whenever I come here, I find some things very comfortable – familiar, even. Part of it is the universal acceptance of things we try to fight in the UK. Bad TV constantly in the background in bars and airport waiting lounges. Overly enthusiastic customer care in shops and hotels. Massive corporate chains, cars and food portions. All these things are just part of America. No one seems to prickle when they walk into a Starbucks. It’s almost refreshing.
I also like the belief that it’s my god-given right to be whomever I want, do whatever I want, change the world, fuck the world, create my own world. Whenever I come here I return to Britain inspired, fired up, ready to follow my dreams, do the impossible, be that person and create that job. Back in Britain, it’s good to be comfortable, secure, following an accepted path. It’s good to be content with who you are, where you are. There is merit in that too.
Britain has its advantages. A good cup of tea is common, delicious and properly made, scallops are served with the orange bit as well as the white, marmite is a sensible spread for toast, museums and art galleries are usually free, it is relatively easy to see a doctor and not be charged for it and the majority of the population is suspicious of, and a little uncomfortable around, overt nationalism. In addition, Christianity is not referred to either as the Truth or a worrying extreme right wing movement and there’s no problem with Darwin being buried in Westminster Abbey.
On the flip side, our shops close around the end of the working day and sometimes never open at all on a Sunday. Late night licensing has only just been introduced but many pubs still ring the bell at 11pm. And brunch, frankly, is a disaster. Why have Brits not woken up to the profitable luxury that is brunch? Last Sunday I had a divine crab and avocado benedict at my friend’s restaurant but it needn’t be so fancy: good coffee, juice, various egg dishes, pancakes or waffles, and plenty of time for refills and hangover recovery are, I think, the main ingredients.
I did laugh during brunch though when my friend’s six year old daughter pointed to her plate and asked, “Mama, are these potatoes organic? I hope so cos otherwise we’d be eating Darth Tater”. Visit StoreWars for clarity on this, it’s worth it. The day before, in the same town, we went to see a Truckers Parade. Only in the US can I imagine having so much fun watching multiple lorries driving past decorated to the nines with fairy lights, Rudolphs, flashing candy canes and extra large Santas ho ho ho-ing. I like the diversity of this country: the organic-food movement coexisting with the truckers.
On a more challenging note, I have found myself caught between two visions of America, and the world, that are impossible to reconcile. The primary reason for my visit to the States is the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. This is a huge and well respected affair: twelve thousand people, disciplines ranging across all the geosciences, five days of simultaneous poster and oral sessions from 8am to 5pm. The thing that strikes me is that while the debate on the street still seems to be “is climate change happening,” not once do I hear that asked inside. To these scientists, the critical questions now are how climate change will come about, what the implications are and what processes might be implemented that could make the change slightly gentler. What changes are we already observing, what are the models predicting, how accurate are they and what areas need particular attention?
Some of these discussions happen in fields close to my own but most range into places that interest me greatly but travel beyond my full comprehension. The conference includes geophysicists, atmospheric scientists, climatologists, chemists, biologists, physicists, geologists and mathematicians to name a few. Hot topics include simulations which use super-computers to model everything from molecular processes to the entire global climate. There are also results from field experiments taking place everywhere from the tropics to the poles, and covering land, forest, ice, ocean, desert and cities. Big picture, tiny picture, theoretical, experimental, diverse interdisciplinary studies: each one dedicated to understanding one particular aspect of the world a little better.
If I manage to follow the introductory slide and conclusions of a talk outside my field then I walk away having learnt something. I trust that other experts in the room will challenge the presenter if any of his or her arguments are fundamentally flawed. It interests me to discover what the salient points are, where the areas of debate still lie, and what the different disciplines are concerned by. I realise that I trust the scientific method and I trust the people presenting this material even if I don’t entirely understand their work. Perhaps it’s because I received a scientific training. I prefer to think that it’s because that training showed me how the scientific method works and I have been convinced by many of its merits. I believe that this method is, on the whole, applied ethically and responsibly across all of the disciplines I have been listening to. And so, ultimately, I have been convinced that climate change is a reality we will face during the next few generations. In some hot spots around the world such as the antarctic peninsula and the arctic, we appear to be observing its effects already.
The scientific community is convinced of the reality of human-induced climate change. We do not know how it will manifest itself, as the world is an extremely complex place with many interactions and feedback processes that we don’t understand. This is what the current science is focusing on, this is where debate lies and these are the aspects where experts disagree. It is the nature of scientific interrogation to debate and question, and hence all the more convincing that the overwhelming majority of the scientific population agrees that climate change is a reality. (This isn’t that uncommon though: gravity and evolution are generally accepted theories these days too.) The question, “how am I supposed to know what to think when the scientists themselves seem to disagree?” drives me up the wall. Of course they disagree, but it’s the detail, not the general trend, that is being argued about. That’s how we find stuff out.
So, what is my challenge? Well, I am wondering: What more scientific results could be discovered that would make any substantial change to public opinion or policy? Although I see the validity in more science being done, including more extensive simulations of climate change that in turn require more field data, it seems to me that the real work now has to be in public education and outreach.
Do we need to explain the scientific method better? Do we need to explain climate change better? It would be a start if we could get the main points across, and increase the public trust in science in general. Without public concern, policies won’t be changed, as the timescale for effect is much longer than a goverment term. Without policy change, the climate system will be pushed extremely hard and extremely quickly and none of us can say for sure what the result will be. What we can say is that no one has yet come up with a model that predicts that all will be just fine.
Part of what I love about America is its boldness. Part of what I hate is its belligerence. How can scientific argument turn things around so we make bold steps in a different direction?
Posted by Rhian at 9:57 EST | Comments (18)
Who is Treasury under secretary for international affairs?
The job of under secretary for international affairs at the US Treasury is a hugely important job which few people have ever heard of. It's a political position, which means the decision as to who gets it is made not by career Treasury officials or by technocrats, but rather by the White House. The present holder of the job is Tim Adams, who most recently held a senior position in the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign. But Adams is no Bush crony – or, at least, he's not only a Bush crony á la Michael Brown or Harriet Miers. Adams is a very smart, very competent guy, on top of his brief, who will do the Bush administration proud in an extremely difficult job.
I can't find a listing online of Adams's predecessors. But since I moved to the US and started getting interested in such things, I can remember Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Randy Quarles, John Taylor and now Tim Adams holding the job. (Do let me know if I missed someone.) All of them are super-smart guys with a genuine ability and passion for the intricacies involved in building the international financial architecture and navigating its more recondite nooks and corners. Put it this way: the least able of the lot, in my opinion, is John Taylor, a highly respected Stanford economics professor after whom the well-known Taylor Rule is named. And he's a very able guy: I've heard it said that he was more or less single-handedly responsible for saving the Uruguayan economy from collapse in 2002, and he managed the enormous problems of setting up the new Iraqi central bank and national currency much more smoothly than anything else has gone in that country.
Adams, Taylor and Quarles are the kind of Republicans that most Democrats can easily embrace. Not because they're moderate (Adams, for one, certainly isn't), but rather because they're simply very good at their job. They quietly and efficiently attempt to ensure America's long-term economic health by looking after the economic health of the world upon which America relies. The irony, of course, is that they're doing this despite the fact that the Department of the Treasury has less power and influence today than it has had at any point since 1945. The under secretaries for international affairs might have been great, but O'Neill is mainly famous for gaffes and gallivanting around Africa with Bono, while Snow has stuck to his talking points so closely he seems to be little more than a White House spokesman.
What's more, I suspect that Summers, Geithner, Quarles, Taylor and Adams all agree on much more than they disagree on. Every last one of them is Davos Man incarnate, a sophisticated believer in the virtues of globalization who nevertheless is well aware of its limitations. If they're not dealing with an international financial crisis, they're working very hard on crisis prevention and on setting up a robust system for crisis management. And even the extremely wealthy Quarles got his job through sheer ability and not because of political connections and donations. Adams, here, is the big surprise: despite having unrivalled political connections, it turns out that he's actually qualified to do the job as well. Not that this necessarily means a lot, but he co-founded the G7 Group in 1993, and ran it for a while before moving to the Treasury after Bush's election. And the G7 Group is full of extremely smart people: Alan Blinder is vice chairman, while Arminio Fraga sits on the advisory board.
There are a couple of good reasons why it makes a certain amount of sense that Adams's job has not been hijacked by hotheaded political appointees who might easily do far more harm than good. One is that although the job is extremely important, it carries little prestige: those who would be big Washington fish generally have no desire for the job in the first place. Secondly, the job generally manages to avoid overlapping with US electoral politics. Even conservatives who want to abolish the IMF stop short of wanting to abolish the international affairs department at Treasury, or even wanting to change it. On the rare occasion that Treasury is in charge of a politically-fraught issue, such as Cuba, it generally does what it's told, and the rest of the world is sophisticated enough to understand that blaming Treasury for US Cuba policy would be silly.
All the same, the caliber of the holders of this position is truly striking. I can't think of any other full-time position with such consistently high-level appointees, in business, politics or anywhere else. Maybe music director of the Berlin Philharmonic – but that's at the zenith of its universe, while the career trajectories of the likes of Summers and Geithner show that the Treasury job can be a mere stepping stone on the way to much greater things. The fact that all the recent appointees have been so good is probably more luck than judgment. I'd love to see a list going back a bit longer, to see the degree to which the recent trend holds. But for the time being I'll try and reassure myself that at least there's one small corner of government which seems to be capable of simply getting on with doing a good job, regardless of who's in the White House.
Posted by Felix at 1:25 EST | Comments (0)
Authorship and ownership
The ongoing debate over Google Print Google
Book Search is yet another manifestation of a more fundamental debate over
intellectual property rights. But one thing has been nagging at me for a while,
and it's based on the whole idea of an author owning a work of IP, which ownership
can be transferred to a publishing company. This ownership – known as
copyright – is an interesting thing. For one thing, although it is transferrable,
there doesn't seem to be any market in it. One would imagine that JK Rowling,
say, or her publishers, might be interested in selling the copyright to her
books – I'm sure there are a few hedge funds out there who would pay a
lot of money for such an asset. But to my knowledge, the only way to buy copyrights
is to buy an entire publishing company.
(Why might a publishing company be interested in selling an author's copyright? Because publishing companies are often strapped for cash. Because they might be better at finding new talent than at monetizing existing talent. Because it would help consolidate all that author's copyrights in one place. Because they're planning on stopping printing that author's books. There's all manner of possible reasons.)
More interestingly, the publishers, who have the copyright in the work, are hiding behind an organisation called the Authors Guild in their fight with Google. It's a question of spin: the chattering classes will support struggling writers over Google any day, but a fight between Google and HarperCollins (prop: R. Murdoch) would probably go the other way in terms of public opinion.
It seems to me that the law is based on what you might call the auteur theory of creation: a work of IP has an author, and it's up to the author what to do with the copyright. Publishers might have legal right to their copyrights, but the moral right still resides with the original author. Take a couple of examples from a recent article by Lawrence Weschler in Harper's, on the subject of war movies. Apparently, when Francis Ford Coppola and his editing team were putting together Apocalypse Now, they cut the most famous scene in the film to a particular Solti/Vienna Philharmonic recording of the Ride of the Valkyries. Then, when they realised they hadn't secured the rights, Decca balked at the purpose for which the music was intended, and denied the filmmakers' request. It was only after Coppola personally asked Solti for permission that the rights were acquired.
Weschler also talks about a similar situation 26 years later, when Sam Mendes and Walter Murch were editing the new film Jarhead. Murch was part of the team which edited Apocalypse Now, and Jarhead includes a scene where Apocalypse is screened in front of a room of fresh marines. Once again, the studio was not keen on granting the new film rights to the old film, and once again it took a personal intervention – this time from Coppola – to secure it.
These examples clearly show the distinction between legal and moral copyright – or, to put it another way, between ownership and authorship. Although the record label or the film studio was the entity which owned the rights, it was ultimately the author of the work who made the decision as to whether or not it could be used.
What I'm unclear about is the degree to which the ability to make those decisions is a function of the success of the author. If Solti and Coppola hadn't both been giants in their field, would their publishers have cared so much about their will? If it came down to a situation where the CEO of the publishing company wanted to say no and the author wanted to say yes, who would win? As a journalist, I often sign contracts signing away any and all rights to my own work – I can't even put it up on my own website without permission. So I'm not sure that moral copyright is particularly strong or useful these days, even though it certainly does exist.
The thing which fascinates me even more is the lack of any ambiguity, in the vast majority of cases, as to where the authorship lies. Walter Murch, who edited Apocalypse Now, was in no position to provide rights to it; that privilege belonged not to the editor but to the director. The Vienna Philharmonic, which played the Ride of the Valkyries, was not consulted on whether or not its music could be used in Apocalypse Now; that decision was made by the conductor, Georg Solti. And I'm sure that if I wanted to reprint Weschler's essay in an anthology of film-themed literature, it would ultimately be Weschler himself, and not the publishers of Harper's, who would make that decision.
As we all know, moving pictures and orchestral recordings are highly collaborative affairs. Both involve hundreds of creative individuals working very hard to make something that no one individual could ever come up with alone. It's hard to see what gives the director of the film, or the conductor of the orchestra, the moral right to make decisions about the use of the work of art which he created in conjunction with so many others. Writers have long sought authorship of films, and the orchestral example is even more fraught: it would seem that the conductor is the author if the composer is dead, but the composer is the author otherwise.
But even magazine articles are much more collaborative than they might seem. I'm sure that many of us have had the experience of reading a book which has previously been excerpted in the New Yorker – Kitchen Confidential, say, by Anthony Bourdain, or Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer, or Uncle Tungsten, by Oliver Sacks. In each case, I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who's read them both that no matter how good the book is, the magazine excerpt was better. The New Yorker takes its editing process seriously, and the output is of a much higher quality as a result. Even relatively mediocre prose stylists like Simon Schama are a joy to read in the New Yorker.
More to the point, the New Yorker's editing process ensures that good writers never have an off day. I think that Weschler is one of the great non-fiction writers alive, and will read pretty much anything he writes; his books, just like his New Yorker pieces, are wonderful. But that article in Harper's was, well, not up to his usual standards. It was sloppy, not very easy to read, overfull of verbatim impenetrable theory from the likes of Adorno. I'm sure it would never have got past the New Yorker's editors in such a state.
So does even a solitary author like Weschler deserve all the credit for his works? I think not. A great magazine article is, I'm convinced, a genuinely collaborative effort – which is why you'll almost never find a great magazine article in an otherwise mediocre magazine. (I think this also might explain why many small literary magazines often feel a bit underpowered: they kowtow to their writers, and don't edit nearly enough.)
I had dinner with Oliver Sacks on Sunday night (um, excuse me, I think I might have dropped something around here?) and took the opportunity to ask him this very question. He said he's working on a book about music at the moment, and that he's probably not going to submit any of it to the New Yorker. A book is looser than a magazine article, he pointed out, and he seemed worried that if he got caught up in the New Yorker's long and laborious editing process, he could lose momentum on the book. In fact, he seemed if anything a little annoyed about that process, and I learned that when the Uncle Tungsten excerpt was being edited, there was a lot of tension between the New Yorker, on the one hand, which wanted something closer to pure memoir, and Sacks, on the other hand, who wanted to keep as much chemistry in there as possible.
If there was tension, however, I think it was highly productive tension, since the final product was great. And so I think that authors should be more willing to give real credit – not just a bit of lip-service in an acknowledgements section at the front of the book – to their editors. Credit in the form of some kind of joint ownership of moral copyright. Now there's a challenge for creative commons.
Posted by Felix at 2:50 EST | Comments (7)
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