Salon.com > Kevin Canfield

Why everyone hates the media

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

The cover of Jonathan M. Ladd’s new book shows a pair of newspaper vending boxes that have been vandalized. “Lies,” reads the graffiti scrawled across the machines.

Lots of people seem to agree with the sentiment expressed by this anonymous street-level press critic -- even if most of us are more apt to express this by screaming at the TV. In his meticulous and informative “Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters,” Ladd cites a 1956 study that “found that 66 percent of Americans thought newspapers were fair.” Within 50 years, things would change dramatically. By 2004, he writes, “only 10 percent of Americans had ‘a great deal’ of confidence in the ‘national news media,’” according to one poll.

Speaking from Washington, where he teaches at Georgetown, Ladd discussed some of the factors that caused such a remarkable about-face -- and how it affects public policy.

Early in the book you point out that “an independent, powerful, widely respected news-media establishment” only began to take root in the middle of the 1900s. Why did this happen when it did?

How do you say “balls of gold” in French?

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist’s “The Map and the Territory” — Knopf will publish the first American edition in January — when he came to a chapter about a character who’d decided to commit suicide at a legal euthanasia clinic. As the book’s narrator put it, the clinic’s medical staff was “going to 'se faire des couilles en or,’” Bowd recalled. “Literally: they were going to turn their balls into gold.”

Herein lies the translator’s dilemma. Bowd’s mission is stay as loyal as possible to the original text. But in this case, a strict translation would be ridiculous. “I translated: they were going to make a killing” in fees, Bowd added via e-mail from Scotland, where he teaches French at the University of St. Andrews. “In the context, I prefer that.”

Can Harper Perennial reinvent publishing?

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Just over two years ago, an Atlanta writer named Blake Butler submitted a story to Cal Morgan’s short fiction website, Fifty-Two Stories. Morgan, the editorial director of Harper Perennial, was so taken with Butler’s voice — “I was awestruck by how brilliant, unusual and challenging it was,” he said recently — that he published the story that day. Morgan soon signed him to a two-book deal, and he was confident enough in his new find to arrange a marathon, four-night public reading of Butler’s 400-plus page novel “There Is No Year.”

Butler, 32, is young and talented; and as the editor of a popular website of his own, HTML Giant, he brings a well-established link to his readers. He’s prolific, and he writes books that manage to be both earnest and cool. And for a major publisher like Harper -- part of the HarperCollins family -- he’s inexpensive. Butler received just a $10,000 advance for his first novel with Perennial, he said in an interview, and $20,000 for his follow-up, out this month, "Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia."

The Republican war on science is un-American

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 20:30:00 +0000

In his new book, “The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America,” (Bellevue Literary Press), Jonathan D. Moreno delivers an impassioned defense of scientific study. “The alternative to experimental confirmation is, in a word, dogma,” he writes. “Dogmatic statements may have many fine qualities. They may be beautiful, inspirational, and convey a kind of wisdom, or at least the impression of wisdom. But they can never be verifiable and self-correcting in the manner of science.”

This seems like common sense. But at a time when several presidential hopefuls are tirelessly trying to demonstrate their anti-science bona fides — Republican candidates have taken strange positions on everything from vaccines to evolution and climate change — Moreno’s book offers an essential dose of logic.

A professor of science and medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team, Moreno talked to Salon about politicians who don’t understand science, how other countries are catching up to work being done in American labs and why Mitt Romney could be called a flip-flopper on a key scientific issue.

Why Bob Dylan won’t win the Nobel Prize

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:06:00 +0000

According to the British bookies at Ladbrokes, Bob Dylan is suddenly a 5-1 choice to capture the Nobel Prize for literature when the Swedish Academy awards the annual honor Thursday in Stockholm.

A dark horse just a few days ago, Dylan has pulled ahead of Adonis, the Syrian poet and one-time Nobel favorite, and is now a far safer bet than fellow Americans Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. As one handicapper told the Guardian this week, "At first we had him down as a rank outsider but the committee have been known to spring a shock and punters the world over feel Dylan will be the beneficiary."

Alas, something is happening here and the punters don’t know what it is. Bob Dylan is not going to win the Nobel, at least not in the foreseeable future. Here are five reasons why:

He’s too famous.

“Can we ever really know Ernest Hemingway?”

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:01:00 +0000

As Paul Hendrickson concedes early in his new book, "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961," the world isn't in dire need of another Papa bio. "Ernest Hemingway," he writes, "has been examined by so many scholars and memoirists and respected biographers and hangers-on and pretenders and doctoral students desperate for a dissertation topic that I feel sometimes we have lost all sense of who the man really was."

So Hendrickson, a winner of the National Books Critics Circle Award for his 2003 book "Sons of Mississippi," decided to go at his subject in a roundabout way. The result is a book that is as much about Hemingway himself as it is his relationship with Pilar, the 38-foot seafaring vessel on which he spent endless hours during the final decades of his life. On board Pilar, Hemingway wrote, loved, argued, drank and, for a time during World War II, went looking for enemy submarines. And it's a boat, Hendrickson believes, that may have had a distinct impact on the evolution of Hemingway's prose.

In a recent phone interview, Hendrickson talked about traveling to Cuba to see Pilar for himself; his delight in locating a still-living Hemingway contemporary; and how the book took root in a long-ago meeting with a stranger who just happened to be Ernest Hemingway's brother.

The worst fiction about 9/11

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:09:00 +0000

As the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, there has been much discussion about the best novel about the attacks and their aftermath.

Of course, there have been smart and sensitive novels wrestling with the horrors of terrorism and the many traumas of that day. There's also been some embarrassingly bad prose -- lots of it by authors who should know better.

For some writers, 9/11 offered an excuse to write about the anatomies of sexy Western temptresses or the siren song that is rock 'n' roll performed by men in spandex. For others, it was simply an obligatory and careless plot point tossed into the mix, a cynical narrative device meant to energize a flagging story line. Here are a few of the worst offenders.

Don’t just buy the record — help make it

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:02:00 +0000

Juliana Hatfield, a singer-songwriter whose acerbic single "My Sister" was a staple on modern-rock radio during the summer of 1993, was planning to quit the business not too long ago. Music, she recalled thinking, "is for kids. I'm not a kid anymore." She was considering grad school, maybe making a documentary. But when she was taken by the urge to write more songs, she realized she didn't have the money to pay for studio time, musicians and the like.

And so, like an increasing number of her peers, Hatfield appealed directly to her smaller-but-devoted fan base: Help me pay to make my new album, she asked listeners, and in exchange for your contributions, I'll take you behind the scenes of the recording process, interact with you along the way and deliver a solid record. Almost 1,200 people contributed, enabling her to complete "Speeches Delivered to Animals and Plants," which she released this week.

Though she declined to discuss how much money she raised, Hatfield said the fund drive "saved my ass, really. It made the project possible. I literally did not have the funds at hand. I would not have been able to make this album without the money that I raised."

How to bring an author back from the dead

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 23:01:00 +0000

Erica Heller tells a lovely story about her father Joseph's delight in the success of his first book, the novel "Catch-22." As she recalls in her new memoir, "Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22" (Simon & Schuster), "When 'Catch' was finally taking off, about a year after publication, my parents ... would often jump into a cab late at night and ride around to the city's leading bookstores in order to see the jaunty riot of red, white and blue and the crooked little man -- the covers of 'the book,' piled up in towers and pyramids, stacked in so many store windows." Typically, she writes, this left Joseph and Shirley Heller feeling "giddy."

Heller remained proud of the novel that many readers and critics consider his masterwork, but his debut was both a "curse and a blessing," said Tracy Daugherty, the author of the recently published "Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller" (St. Martin's). "By the end of his life his reputation had declined quite a bit, although 'Catch-22' was still selling thousands of copies a year," Daugherty said. "He was disappointed, I think, that he was expected to write that same book over and over."

This year’s model

Tue, 27 May 2003 20:00:00 +0000

Venture to the top floor of the three-story Borders store in midtown Manhattan, and chances are the first face you'll see will belong to Pete Yorn. Squinting out from the cover of his second album -- the record has been conspicuously displayed to meet the gaze of buzz-hungry shoppers stepping off the escalator -- Yorn has the eyes of a handsome brooder and hair so thick it might flunk a test for performance-enhancing substances. He looks like a cross between an "On the Waterfront"-era Brando and a dark-maned Kurt Cobain. In other words, Yorn is this year's Rock God in Waiting.

The folks at Columbia Records are all too aware of what they've got on their hands; the label clearly envisions the 28-year-old New Jersey native as the successor to another famous Garden Stater, a fellow named Bruce Springsteen. If you doubt me, check out the packaging and liner notes of Yorn's new record, "Day I Forgot." Then have a look at Springsteen's breakout 1975 album, "Born to Run." The black-and-white photos, the soulful gaze, the common-man lyrics -- it's all there, just like it was 28 years ago.