cleaning and new yorker

In preparation for some guests next weekend, I'm undertaking some housecleaning. (Note to Grrrbear and Spice: Whatever it looks like when you see it, it'll be way better than it was before, especially if you stay away from the closets.) As part of this cleaning effort, I'm going through stacks and stacks of old magazines. The good thing about letting New Yorkers get old is, you can really skip almost everything. The articles in the Aug 2, 2004 issue analyzing the election are a bit stale, as are the economics explainers from 2005.

But the best thing? A lot of these are from before the New Yorker started that awful cartoon caption contest. So I get to the back page, and there's actually something there! An essay about a chicken! A cartoon about internet procrastination! (Love Roz Chast.) Things that are actually worth reading and non-stupid!

readers: not that smart

Many times in the six or seven years since I decided I was going to be a journalist, I've heard people in some kind of media say something like, "Our readers/listeners/viewers are smart, they know we didn't mean [thing X]."

You know what, media person? They aren't smart. They don't know what you meant. Your readers/listeners/viewers are going to assume whatever fits their prejudices. Many lack critical thinking skills. Many are in a hurry and do not put what critical thinking skills they have to use. Many of them assume that you are evil. Whatever the reason, your readers are going to fail to see things in the way you see them, even if the way you see them seems, to you, completely freaking obvious.

How do I know readers are dumb? I'm a dumb reader. I once read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker and read the final anecdote and thought, wow, he approves of how that went down? Weird! I interviewed him about the story for a class and didn't ask him about that anecdote directly, but it came up when he was talking about the editing process and how the story changed as he worked on it.

Here's what he said: "Originally when I wrote that, I didn’t make it clear...I didn’t set it up properly. So it made it sound like I thought it was good that the cop blew this guy away as opposed to, this is evidence of an ambiguity. I spent a lot of time revising the end so that it was more ambiguous. But even then there are people who - there was a flurry in the Village Voice or something over that piece. Some readers aren’t very sensitive to ambiguity and they think you’re saying something that you’re not. But, you know, that’s the way it goes."

Here's what I was thinking: "OHHH! That was supposed to be ambiguous!!?!"

Example of readers/viewers being dumb that brought this particular rant to mind right now: This post on Cute Overload. Several of the people leaving comments seem to be unclear on the concept of green screens and the fact that stuff shown in a commercial didn't necessarily happen. I think that is a basic level of sophistication that a person making commercials would assume, and I think they would assume wrongly.

I think this is part of the basic problem we humans have of seeing things from other people's perspectives. On both sides - both the reader and the media person, a category which of course now includes me. I try to be clear when I write, but I can never really know how a reader is going to read my words - and I should remember to think about it more often.

cartoon caption contest

For the last few years, the New Yorker has been running a contest on its last page. Every week they run cartoons from three stages of the competition: a new blank cartoon that needs a caption, a cartoon with three finalist captions, and a winning cartoon. I gather New Yorker editors narrow down the entries to the three finalists, then anyone can vote online for the caption they think is the best.

I hate the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.

Reasons:

1. It's spoiling regular cartoons for me. Here's how it normally goes: You see a cartoon, maybe you smile vaguely (there's not a lot of laughing out loud at New Yorker cartoons), you move on. There's no view of the sausage-making process. There's no possibility that the cartoon could've had another caption that would've been funnier. But I find the caption contest makes me look at the cartoons and consider other possibilities, and I just don't even want to do that.

2. Even the people who win it don't respect it.

3. It's replaced content that wasn't dumb. This is my biggest problem. They used to run something funny on the last page. The last page was a happy place, 'cause there would be something rewarding there for getting through the whole magazine. I had one of those last pages up on my bulletin board for years. (A cartoon by Roz Chast, who is hilarious.) Now that perfectly good page is taken up with other readers trying to be witty. Ugh.

writers I heart

I have to send Calvin Trillin an e-mail, and oh! the self-consciousness! The pressure to be clever! I can't take it! Aaaauuuughhhhh!!!!!!!!

UPDATE, 11:23 p.m.: I can't tell you how much it annoys me that this post refuses to display in the right font. I've tried to fix it about ten times. Gah! Stupid Blogger! Note that I can make the fonts change. I just can't make them normal.

UPDATE, 11:38 p.m.: I am embarrassed to admit that it took me until now to have the thought that I should go into the html version and delete the goofy tags. We have normality. I repeat: We have normality. Ten points to the first person who gets that normality reference without a search engine.

the bad analogy

The New Yorker arrives in my mailbox every week, and I'm pretty much always toting around one or more issues. I like it most of the time, but every now and then I'm reminded that it's kind of ridiculous. In an article about On the Road in the Oct 1 issue, the writer says of Neal Cassidy (the inspiration for a character in the book): "He is the Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, of postwar American culture."

The what? Does anyone (without the help of google) have any idea who either of those people are?