Category: Features

“The Grateful Dead Approach to Intellectual Property”

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features, Hoosiers

[NUVO]

That quote came from Moira Smith, the librarian for folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University. I interviewed Moira for my NUVO cover story on Google Books’ basically unnoticed foray into Indiana, and one question I asked was whether she worried that, by digitizing her books, she would undercut one of her university’s great strengths. IU’s Folklore Collection, you see, has historically attracted NEH grants, prestigious visiting scholars, and all kinds of summer programs. “We think it’s going to have the reverse effect,” Moira continued. “It’s going to be fully searchable, and, from a librarian’s point of view, that’s the best research tool you can have.”

That’s the kind of selfless, access-driven talk the Google Books debate could use more of. As I write at the end of the story:

By digitizing information, Google hopes to democratize it. In this future, it wouldn’t matter if you live in New York or Bloomington, Indianapolis or Elkhart. You could access any book—even, or especially, the one you didn’t know existed.

Anyway, if you’re interested in Google Books or the Indiana arts scene, read the whole thing. Here are a few things that didn’t make the cut:

  • First, three tech tangents I couldn’t fit in: Google Books doesn’t necessarily mean the death of print. The Espresso Book Machine, which is showing up at more and more bookstores, lets you you order any public domain title from Google Books; four minutes and eight bucks later, you’re holding a 300-page book. Another interesting aspect is “character recognition.” Even the best computer programs can’t translate images of text into text as accurately as humans, so Google and its competitors farm this out—each time you complete one of those annoying antispam tests (say typing out the distorted letters at Ticketmaster), you’re actually helping scan books. Finally, just a fact I liked: when Stanford University, in the late 1990s, digitized its card catalog, the number of books checked out increased by fifty percent.
  • If you want more intellectual background on the Google Books settlement, start with Robert Darnton’s great essay in the New York Review of Books. Darnton’s actually pretty anti-Google—under his aegis, Harvard pulled out of the scanning program—so you’ll want to balance him with some Google apologists. I reccomend these essays from The Big Money’s Mark Gimein.
  • “That some kind of systematic indexing of this vast accumulation should be undertaken has been long realized. Though several beginnings of such a work have been made during the past century, no plan has been completed with sufficient thoroughness to warrant general acceptance.” That’s Stith Thompson in the preface to his 1957 revision of his Motif-Index, but the same thing could be said today, of Google’s mission. Many of the academics who criticize Google Books seem to push past this big picture in order to wallow in smaller issues—Geoffrey Nunberg’s essay is a good example of this. In that NYRB essay, Darnton worries about Google Books price-gouging university libraries in the same way that scientific journals have inflated their subscription fees. This makes more sense than most Google Books criticisms, but, as IU’s librarians like to point out, Darnton omits the fact that many of these journals are now struggling with a nasty backlash.
  • Finally, there’s this incredible interview with Michael Hart, the affable, offbeat guy who founded Project Gutenberg in 1971, when they had to type books by hand. (Scanning didn’t start until the late 1980s.)

Jericho Scott Has A Cold

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Sports, The Media

[Deadspin]

Over at Deadspin, I’ve got a long feature on Jericho Scott, the 9-year-old baseball player banned for being “too good.” I wanted to explain how and why this became the worst-covered sports story of 2008, but I also wanted to track the kid down—not to interview him, which I never did, but to watch him play. He became my 9-year-old, 58-pound Moby Dick, and, when I finally found him, he was pitching for a spot in the PONY World Series.

Anyway, after almost 3,000 words, you’d think I’d be out of material. But the topic of youth baseball is just that rich. Here’s a few bullet points that didn’t make the cut.

  • First, some closure: CBC went 2-1 at the PONY World Series—very respectable, especially when you consider that, after all the rain outs, they finished up in New Haven on Monday afternoon, then boarded a 6 a.m. Tuesday flight out of LaGuardia. Caguas, a team from Puerto Rico, won the whole thing.
  • Back to the New Haven tournament. The weekend’s best game actually came in the losers’ bracket—Stratford sent it to extra innings with a bottom-of-the-sixth home run, with CBC ultimately winning 9-8. But the real fun came afterward, as I briefly mention in my piece. I didn’t see who or what instigated it, but two men testosteroned at each other until one took a verbal cheap shot at another, older man in a wheelchair. At this point, everyone began lunging, restraining, or screaming, as was their wont, and a New Haven official made a panicked call to the cops. The whole time this was going on, Mark Gambardella was calmly rechalking the field.
  • Most of my game notes (like the one above) focused on parents and coaches—and rightly so. After each game, the kids just climbed trees or played on dirt piles.  Still, from the beginning, the CBC players seemed much more tense, tearing up after every negative outcome. Is this related to the fact that CBC coaches retied their players’ shoes for them so they didn’t have to remove their batting gloves? I think so.
  • Last week, the New Haven Register ran its own one-year-later story on the Scotts, the first item I’ve found that doesn’t date from the original uproar. The story repeats the errors I describe in my piece and adds a few of its own, starting with a description of Gambardella’s “Little League all-star team.” When I mistakenly said “Little League” in our first interview, Gambardella corrected me: “We’re not Little League—we play real baseball.” The man is a municipal treasure.
  • While we’re talking about the Register: they were one of the many dead-ends in my attempt to find Jericho, which took multiple months and was much harder than I expected. In fact, Jericho’s most lasting legacy might be making it impossible for future generations to find a baseball team. (If you Google “new haven little league,” you get a bog of blog posts, but no contact info. For posterity, then, the organization’s online presence is here.) Some highlights from my quest included emailing the Scotts’ lawyer (his reply to my email read, in full, “They decided to move on and not pursue the matter”); calling the national PONY offices (someone answered as if it were a personal cell phone); and asking a New Haven school district about a principal and baseball coach (the secretary immediately started screaming, “No! No! No! He no longer works here!”).
  • Finally, if you’re in the mood for another instance of the sports media bringing a story to life only to kill it, check out my old interview with banned student sportswriter Michael Daly.

Scenes from a Life

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Hoosiers, TV and Movies

citybeat dillinger cover

Today, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies opens nationwide, and I’ve got a couple of new stories tying into it.

First, there’s this Cincinnati CityBeat cover story on “the Dillinger legend”—and by that, I mean not only the historical person, but also the previous movies about (and by!) Dillinger and the Depp-mania surrounding Public Enemies‘ filming in small towns like Crown Point, Indiana. (I have yet to see the movie or read many reviews, and I’m actually a little leery of the Depp casting, but count me in for Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover.)

Second, and spun off from the first, I’ve got a review-slash-essay at The Rumpus of Dillinger: The Untold Story. It’s the first book you should read if Public Enemies piques your interest about Dillinger and his era.

So, if you need help planning your Fourth of July weekend: read the CityBeat story, watch Public Enemies, then read my book review and its subject. (For extra credit: there’s a lot of great stuff on 1930s gangster movies I couldn’t squeeze into the CityBeat story, but I highly recommend this NYRB essay on “pre-Code” Hollywood. Well worth the $3 micropayment.)

The Lester Bangs of Saudi Arabia?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Music, The Media

[Gelf]

A few months ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Accolade, a Saudi Arabian rock band composed of female college students. Most of the reaction to this story focused on the band—their MySpace friend count went from 17 to more than 1,000 in 24 hours—even as no one seemed willing to admit that they sound like a watered-down Evanescence (a thought that didn’t even seem possible five minutes ago).

Anyway, a few of the story’s quotes come from a young Saudi reporter named Hasan Hatrash. Hatrash is a musician too, but he also writes about the Middle-East music scene from the inside. He’s a fascinating and thoughtful person, and, in a new interview at Gelf, I talked to him about rock and roll, at home and abroad.

(Thanks to my editor, Michael Gluckstadt, for the original story idea.)