Bowed bookshelves are an inevitable feature of the booklover’s home. And perhaps like me, you never discard an old book.  If so, the solution to your sagging shelves is near at hand.  Yet another purpose for Oswald Spengler‘s Decline of the West!

In 1727, Voltaire fixed an image of the hardscrabble John Milton that would prove hard to dislodge: he wrote that the poet “remained poor and without glory; his name must be added to the list of great geniuses persecuted by fortune.”

A few days ago, I mentioned Milton’s famous — nay, notorious — contract giving him for £5 for Paradise Lost. Preeminent Miltonist Martin Evans had told me something about this contract a couple years back, and I wrote him to refresh my memory.  Almost by return email, he pointed me to a December 2010 article by his former student, Kerry MacLennan, on precisely this topic in the Milton Quarterly.  It’s online here.

Far from being a patsy, MacLennon insists that “Milton was an expert navigator in the capitalist landscape around him.”

What’s known:  the contract, signed on April 27, 1667, with printer Samuel Simmons, awarded Milton £5 on signature, and £5 on later retail sale for each of three contemplated editions of 1,300 copies each.  Hence, the real value of the transaction was £20.

Still small potatoes, right?

There’s more:  According to MacLennan, “For a writer to be paid in cash at all by a publisher was not customary at the time: seventeenth-century authors typically provided manuscripts to their printers in exchange for a small number of complimentary copies of the published work.”

This was not a royal work commissioned for an aristocratic audience.  Paradise Lost was a “risky speculative venture,” dependent upon “small press runs on speculation, displayed in bookshop windows, and awaiting discovery by readers with the interest, impulse, and either the cash or credit to buy them.”  In short, this contract marks the beginning of the decline of the aristocratic patronage system, to be replaced by a capitalistic, republican framework for writers.

MacLennon reviews Milton’s contact and determines that Milton was entitled to a share of the epic’s earnings — nearly two centuries, remember, before the advent of the term “royalty.”  She finds that while £20 might be slim pickings for the poem canonized as the most famous single poem in English, “recharacterizing the payment as a royalty of between 2.6% and 5.1% should extinguish any lingering indignation on Milton’s behalf.”

“I propose that we consider the likelihood that Milton was the architect, indeed the author, of the contract for Paradise Lost, as much as he was the creator of its poetry … Milton’s father’s professional skills as a scrivener may have directed him how to anticipate, and circumvent, contractual loopholes and trapdoors.”

She concludes:

The contract for Paradise Lost champions and models the rights of artists to manage and control the commercial aspects of their creative production. But rather than writing a pamphlet on the rights of authors, Milton’s polymath mind instead invented, and left us, a template.

(Paradise Lost images provided, of course, courtesy Gustav Doré.)

"...and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’"

“Like.”  Need we say more?  Via Books Inq, we came across this description of “the culture of vagueness.” A suitable addition to our George Orwell Watch. “Nobody likes a grammar prig,” says Clark Whelton, a speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani.  Then he goes on to become one.  At least a bit of one.  Nevertheless, he has a point.  He takes on the current usage of “like,” which has “a long and scruffy pedigree,” buried in the mid-20th century’s Holden Caulfield

:

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Continuing on with a pool of undergraduates he interviewed for the position of intern on Koch’s speechwriting staff, Whelton considers other current verbal tics: “The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding “and stuff” at the end.”  He also noted: “Double-clutching (‘What I said was, I said . . .’) sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation (‘So I’m like, “Want to, like, see a movie?” And he goes, “No way. And I go . . .”), made their entrance.” He finally takes on the trend to make statements into questions for the “all-interrogative interview”:

Undergraduates, I said, seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.

The Orwell connection to public life:

Is Vagueness simply an unexplainable descent into nonsense? Did Vagueness begin as an antidote to the demands of political correctness in the classroom, a way of sidestepping the danger of speaking forbidden ideas? Does Vagueness offer an undereducated generation a technique for camouflaging a lack of knowledge?

More here. A postscript:  Some more thoughts on “vocabulary substitutes”:  How about all those emoticons to signal emotions the reader may not “get” from the text?  Or the insertion of verbal cues  — e.g., “Sigh,” “Snark,” “lol,” or, to suggest a lazy sort of irony, “ummm” — because the words alone cannot guide us to the writer’s intention? (In the case of lol, it’s become little more than a compulsive written tic, a space filler, even when no humor is intended.)  Or how about “Thank You” cards, with THANK YOU written across the front, because the sender couldn’t express the words convincingly in cursive, in his or her very own hand?

Collect the whole set!

Orwell Watch #5: Before we shoot off our mouths again…

Orwell Watch #4: Jared Loughner:  Madman, terrorist, or both?

Orwell Watch #3:  Please. No “gifting” this Christmas.

Orwell Watch #2: Murder in Yeovil

Orwell Watch #1: Paul Krugman vs. George Orwell. (Hint: Orwell wins.)

Valentine’s Day postscript (hat tip, Jim Erwin):

Working for peanuts

For writers, the subject of remuneration for our humble services is always a subject of endless fascination, at least for us.  So I was naturally intrigued by an interesting article in on the McSweeney’s website, written by a young colleague.

The article reminds me of what a great career I might have made by, say, becoming an airline stewardess.  Or perhaps an insurance actuary.  Or even an aromatherapist.  The upshot:  writers don’t make much money.  As the article reminds us, “never have, never will.”

The statistics it cites make me wonder:  Do the numbers mean anything?  And who collects these little suckers anyway?

The witness in the dock appears to be the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  And they get their numbers … where?  Nobody talked to me.  One obvious source might be IRS reports.  But the professional identifications on the IRS forms are not supported by anyone else:  for example, are there any penalties for identifying yourself as a writer on your IRS form if 75 percent of your income in fact comes from waitressing tips?  And does the bureau’s statistics for writers include, say, advertising copywriters?  Does the category for authors include faculty members, who constitute a substantial percentage of today’s authors, yet are likely to list their profession as “professor” rather than author?  In any case “authors and writers” are not interchangeable – many writers are not authors, and vice versa (cookbook authors, for one).

According to the bureau, as of 2005, 185,276 out of 216.3 million American adults claimed those titles.  That makes us less than one out of a million.  I can’t believe that.  I, personally, believe I know more than 185,276 writers.  Look at my Facebook page.

Here’s another reason why I question what the bureau’s numbers:

In May 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the median annual wage for authors and writers had risen to $53,900, up $3,100 from the medium income average for the past decade. In 2008, 70 percent of writers and authors were self-employed and in 2009, the upper quartile of writers earned $75,740 or more.

But technical writers might be making a whole lot more than this; a starving poet considerably less.  For every Dan Brown there’s a hundred self-published authors writing on their lunch breaks at Costco.  Again, who calls themselves a writer?  Who an author?

Moreover, many, many writers are supported by a spouse or a family income.  A low level of income may not reflect their penury, but rather that they have the freedom to write what they please on their own timing.

The Census Bureau also has  some dismaying news:  it estimates the number of writers and authors will increase by 20,000 by 2018.  With reservations, I concur with Nicolás Gómez Dávila that “literature does not die because nobody writes, but when everybody writes.”

In any case, when everyone writes, no one will make any money doing it. Tim Rutten has already panicked about the influence of the HuffPo/AOL acquisition and the effect that “the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.” As Frank Wilson writes over at Books Inc., what we really need are plumbers.  Really.

As for John Milton’s famous £5 for the first edition of Paradise Lost, I remember that there’s a story behind that.  Can’t recall what it is.  Martin Evans told me, and perhaps I will check back with him.

In any case, check out the intriguing article at McSweeney’s here.

Seneca: One too many?

Old joke in Russia:  “The optimists in Russia study English, pessimists study Chinese, and realists study military equipment.”

But if you want to succeed in life, look no further than Facebook.  According to a recent article in Britain’s The Spectator:

No doubt some people will persist in questioning the usefulness of Latin. For these skeptics I have a two-word answer: Mark Zuckerberg. The 26-year-old founder of Facebook studied Classics at Phillips Exeter Academy and listed Latin as one of the languages he spoke on his Harvard application. So keen is he on the subject, he once quoted lines from the Aeneid during a Facebook product conference and now regards Latin as one of the keys to his success. Just how successful is he? According to Forbes magazine, he’s worth $6.9 billion. If that isn’t a useful skill, I don’t know what is.

The Spectator claims that “there is actually a substantial body of evidence that children who study Latin outperform their peers when it comes to reading, reading comprehension and vocabulary, as well as higher order thinking such as computation, concepts and problem solving.”  But what about Mandarin, you may ask — wouldn’t that boost cognitive skills even more?

All very well if you go to China, but Latin has the advantage of being at the root of a whole host of European languages. “If I’m on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals, none of whom speak English, I find we can communicate if we speak to each other in Latin,” says Grace Moody-Stuart, a Classics teacher in West London. “Forget about Esperanto. Latin is the real universal language of Europeans.”

Well, not entirely.  I’m half-Hungarian, a language whose closest forebears (and they’re not very close) are Turkish and Finnish.  It’s on an entirely different language tree — or rather, no tree at all. But that doesn’t entirely get me off the hook:

Unlike other languages, Latin isn’t just about conjugating verbs. It includes a crash course in ancient history and cosmology. “Latin is the maths of the Humanities,” says Llewelyn Morgan, “But Latin also has something that mathematics does not and that is the history and mythology of the ancient world. Latin is maths with goddesses, gladiators and flying horses, or flying children.”

My kid was lucky, I guess:  At a Montessori school, she got French, Italian, Latin, and a smattering of Greek before she entered high school.  She had studied with a popular teacher who had taught at the Boston Latin School.  She went on to a Japanese minor at UC-Santa Cruz.  But the problem in the U.S. is that having a language other than Spanish is little more than a curiosity, like having a sixth finger.  Where do you use it?  Hard for me to believe I used to be able to read La Chanson de Roland in the original…

Over the years I’ve picked up a little Latin of the debauched medieval variety, but not much of the purist’s classical kind.  Most usable quote from Seneca the Elder. I pass it on to you:

“Bibamus, moriendum est.”
(Death’s unavoidable, let’s have a drink.)

Extraordinary man, extraordinary mission.

Yesterday’s email brought news of a death, and a name that won’t be known to many outside Tibet. E. Gene Smith, a Utah-born Mormon who traced his lineage to founder Joseph Smith, became a rebel of a different kind — a man charged with an extraordinary mission: to save the Tibetan canon, almost single-handedly.  He has been called the greatest Western scholar of Tibetan literature, the most important person behind the Tibetan collections in university libraries across the U.S.  In India, he is regarded as an important lama. Lisa Schubert, who had been a director at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, which had housed his collection, called him “a savior of civilization.”

He died at his Manhattan home, of complications related to diabetes, in December.  He was 74.  A public memorial service is planned for Saturday, February 12, at 2 p.m. at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.  (The New York Times obituary is here.)

Here’s what I wrote about the mild-mannered hero on March 12, 2004, for the Times Literary Supplement:

… when a Tibetan lama, the scholar Deshung Rinpoche, came to teach at the University of Washington in 1960, Smith converted to Buddhism and studied Tibetan – linguistically an endangered species since the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s. A few years after Smith began studying the Tibetan canon, the lama suggested that he leave for India, to find and publish the most important works of Tibetan literature before they were lost forever.

The lama’s charge has been Smith’s life work. He became an indefatigable collector, eventually gathering well over 12,000 books of poetry, medicine, history, biography, and, principally, Buddhist religious texts, including hundreds of books long missing and presumed destroyed. His collection, spanning ten centuries, is said to be the biggest in the West, if not the world. Some of the titles: the funeral rites of Kublai Khan, on Tibetan wood blocks, printed sometime between 1294 and 1304. A complete set of the biographies of all the Dalai Lamas, from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. Or the tales of Gesar, King of Ling.

With Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche in 2008

The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center has guaranteed the library a kind of immortality by digitizing it.  About 14,000 volumes — more than seven million pages — are available on its website. (Some film clips from a documentary about his efforts are here.)  The site gets more than 3,000 visitors daily.

But the founding of the library was anything but high tech:

The way he did it was “absolutely legendary”, according to a colleague. He had to gain the trust of monastic officials and others. He consulted the Dalai Lama. He was respectful and remarkably sensitive. Had he not taken on the task, it’s unlikely that it would ever have happened. No one else could have done it. The amount of material involved is staggering, says Smith. More Buddhist literature exists in Tibetan than in any other language. For instance, the Kanjur, or words of the Lord Buddha, takes up 102 volumes, not counting commentaries and sub-commentaries. Moreover, each Tibetan sect has its own traditions, its own literature.

Until 2001, this astonishing collection was housed in Smith’s six-room duplex in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stacks and stacks of Tibetan books covered surfaces and floors in every room but the kitchen. (He slept on a bed sandwiched between bookshelves.) “I have no kids”, the genial collector had told a reporter. “I didn’t have to send them to college. So really, all the money went into books.”

What led him on the gentle, modest, and slightly rotund scholar on his daunting quest?  “Karma, I guess,” he said.

gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha…

Postscript on 2/10:  Still thinking about Gene Smith.  He was a lesson for me in forbearance.  Certainly, as a firsthand witness to the destruction of Tibetan culture, he could have been harsh, but he only reminded me mildly that the Chinese had destroyed their own culture as well.

This paragraph of my piece had attracted the most attention:

We often talk about the extinction of languages and cultures; obviously, the computer era offers unprecedented opportunities to reverse this process, and the remarkably enterprising and industrious Tibetans may show us how. They may be about to present us with a linguistic miracle on the order of the twentieth-century resurrection of Hebrew as a living, spoken language. Hebrew provides another analogue: the indestructibility of the reproduced, written word is what kept the culture of the Jews, alone in their region, alive and intact for millennia, especially since their strict interpretation of the Decalogue prohibited more perishable kinds of art, such as sculpture and painting. Only one copy of the Torah had to be rescued for an unlimited number to be reproduced from it, all alike in literary value to the original, in spite of conquest and displacement. If all that exists in Tibetan literature is online and downloadable, it becomes virtually indestructible – unlike the fragile, ethereal tangkas that line the walls around Smith’s offices, where electronic reproduction can only give a whiff of the original.

I am less confident than I was than about the immortality of an online culture.