A related post …

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Robert Basil

Popular bar in Olympia, Washington:

husbanddaycare

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Bringing Children in

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Robert Basil

From an excellent article in Mediate.com called “Best Interests and Little Voices: Child Participation in the Family Mediation Dialogue” by Jennifer Winestone:

Children were historically excluded from post-separation decision-making, because of the  assumption that children lacked the “legal and psychological capacity” to participate in decisions and that insulating children from the decision-making process would somehow protect them from the turmoil of divorce. But these were not the only reasons children were left out of the post-separation conversation.  In accordance with the old adages “father/mother knows best”, “[a] related assumption was that parents know what is in their child’s best interests, and children’s views would, therefore, be adequately represented by their parents.”

Studies show that these assumptions are false; in fact, “children’s  meaningful participation in decision-making can reduce the negative affects of family breakdown” and “often promotes their social well-being.” Empirical findings suggest that children want to have a “voice” in the processes that “fundamentally affect their lives,” and that not listening to children’s voices “may do more harm than good.” Accordingly, there has been an increase in developments aimed at promoting  the “voice of the child” in family law processes.

Recognition and respect for the “voice of the child” has evolved not merely as a value-added phenomenon, but from a social recognition of children as “rights-bearing individuals rather than as merely objects of concern or subjects of decisions.” [footnotes included in full article]

I learned a lot from this piece.

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Audience Analysis

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Robert Basil

Picture 3

This mash-up of recent country music hits demonstrates aesthetic ossification. Via Language Log.

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Communicate for Free

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Robert Basil

I had always found eHarmony Inc.‘s advertisements vaguely disconcerting: too optimistic about romance, and too confident about its vaunted heuristic (the “Relationship Questionnaire”!).

An advertisement currently in frequent rotation on television promises viewers that “You can start communicating for free today” – a trademarked phrase (of course). This advertisement is specifically disconcerting. The company is presenting a birthright as a corporate gift.

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Ginormous

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Robert Basil

Bryan Garner, lawyer and English language usage scholar, on one of my favourite words:

A portmanteau is a type of luggage with two separate sections. A portmanteau word is formed by combining the sounds and meanings of two different words. Linguists also call such a word a blend.

Most portmanteaus merge the initial part of one word with the end of another: smog (smoke + fog) and infomercial (information + commercial). Others combine one complete word with part of another: docudrama (documentary + drama) and palimony (pal + alimony). Sometimes words with the same sounds are combined to create a pun: shampagne (sham + champagne). …

The popularity of portmanteau words continues to grow. …

My favourite recent portmonteau is “bankster.”

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Independent Creativity: Making Yourself Successful

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Robert Basil

The wonderful Molly Crabapple explains what she has learned, in fifteen paragraphs. Here are a half dozen:

Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment’s notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they’re getting paid, and don’t buy into the financial negging of some suit.

I’ve cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I’m not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.

Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they’ve actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look – you’ll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.

I’ve never had a big break. I’ve just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn’t there any more

Don’t be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don’t have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.

Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you’re probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?

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#MRKT3311

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Robert Basil

westendatnight

Students in my “Marketing in the Digital World” class at KPU are educating one another and myself via numerous social-media platforms. Here’s the class twitter feed for your edification, too. It’s very lively, intelligent, and in tune.

Photo by Miles Basil

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“Bucks for Clicks” journalism

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Robert Basil

I like Virginia Postrel‘s take on the recent controversy over at Forbes.com. A popular author, Bill Frezza, published a controversial column on that website – advising university fraternities to beware of female students who show up at their parties drunk – and was fired. Comments Postrel:

What has drawn little comment is the business model that produced a journalistic fiasco. Forbes.com (not to be confused with the print magazine) is a publication that acts like a platform. It hires columnists, gives them a general turf, tells them to write and post pieces, and pays them by how much traffic they attract. Unlike a traditional publication, it doesn’t spend money on having editors review the topics or articles beforehand.

In the traditional model, Frezza’s article either would have had the backing of the publication–which would have stood up for it–or it would have never seen the light of day. If the argument seemed beyond the pale, an editor would have said, “No thanks. What else do you have?” There would have been no public blowup and no firing. One way or another Forbes.com would have taken responsibility. (As anyone who reads Forbes.com knows, its lack of editorial oversight extends to basics of proofreading.) Forbes.com’s business model has been successful in a tough environment, but it presents editorial perils.

Under the new model, columnists have to guess what readers will find interesting and they also have to guess what editors will find a firing offense. They are expected to internalize vaguely defined standards and self-censor accordingly.

Other, very bad problems with this model: (1) Authors are financially punished for writing stories that take a long time to report or that are important-but-boring; (2) livid, invidious opinion is likely to generate more “clicks” than researched journalism; (3) writers must now aim to please rather than to inform their readers.

Back in the day, Sports sections, for example, subsidized important-but-boring stories about school-board meetings and treaty negotiations among Asian nations. No more, alas.

Reposted from basil.CA

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Accent-removal class

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Robert Basil

Notes Mark Liberman at Language Log: “In a better world, the speakers of the ‘standard’ variety would take a prejudice elimination class instead.”

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The Work of Molly Crabapple

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Robert Basil

Molly Crabapple‘s only peer as an illustrator / artist / journalist is the great Joe Sacco. The tone of their work is very different, though. Whereas Sacco’s reporting is dispassionate and ironic, Crabapple’s is emotional and argumentative. Sacco’s art – black and white illustrations – is famously detailed, and everybody, including the artist, has ugly faces. Crabapple works in colour as well as in black and white; all of her portraits and her scenes are exuberant; even pictures that convey mourning or disapproval are done with a Dionysian, fluorescing density. She hasn’t given up on life, anywhere.

This is from her wonderful piece called “We Must Risk Delight After a Summer Full of Monsters,” published by the irreplaceable Vice.com:

Journalism often feels like vampirism. Before Ferguson or Gaza, I’d been reporting from Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. Before that, Guantanamo. Sources told me about repression and violence. A journalist on the disaster beat told me to be a funnel for this pain. “Let it go through you. Get it down truthfully. Move on.”

I could not.

Writing about others’ trauma bears no relation to living it. Yet I was a ruin more and more. The word “burnout” is dead from overuse. Constant exposure to pain burns in.

Quinn Norton once advised me to write about what I loved. Rage came more easily. I’d make my lines bloody, my words damning. I didn’t know how to write about happiness. What did it mean, the night I danced on the street in New Orleans? A brass band howled. I’d woven flowers into my hair, but they dissolved beneath the Halloween rain. My friends and I danced for hours. …

Power seeks to enclose beauty—to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarized zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street.

The world is connected now. Where it breaks, we all break. But it is our world, to love as it burns around us. Jack Gilbert [in “A Brief for the Defense”] is right. “We must risk delight” in the summer of monsters. Beauty is survival, not distraction. Beauty is a way of fighting. Beauty is a reason to fight.

WeMustRiskDelight

[reposted from basil.CA]

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