Category Archives: Writing

The Scandal of Closed Access to Taxpayer Funded Research

On January 21, Timothy Gowers of Cambridge announced he would no longer publish papers in Elsevier’s journals or serve as a referee or editor for them. This boycott has now been joined by thousands of other researchers. (I don’t referee any more for Elsevier, though I have in the past, and I certainly won’t be sending any papers there.) Thanks to the furore created by three Fields Medal winners–Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao, Wendelin Werner–participating in the boycott, many now know what academics have known for a very long time: academic publishing is a scandal. Indeed, it is more than a scandal; it is a racket which is nothing short of criminal. Before we go any further, here is a number to chew on: in 2010, ‘Elsevier reported a 36 percent profit on revenues of $3.2 billion.’

How does this system work? Consider this. Elsevier, or for that matter, any journal publishing house, publishes ‘content.’ Academic content, the results of research conducted by university academics the world over; much of this research is funded by taxpayer money. This research is written up in papers, and sent to journal editorial boards for review. These boards are staffed by unpaid academics, who, after preliminary review, send out papers to be reviewed by other unpaid academics. (When I say ‘unpaid,’ I mean they are not compensated by the journals for their work.) The paper, if accepted by the referee and the editor, is then sent back to the authors who typesets it, prepares a camera-ready copy, and sends it back for publishing. The publishing house, after making authors sign forms handing over copyright to them, then prints the article in the latest issue of the relevant journal, and sells subscriptions to that journal for thousands of dollars per year to libraries at the same universities where their editorial board and reviewing staff work.

So, this material is not open-access any more; it is closed behind a ‘pay-wall.’ If you don’t have a paid subscription, you don’t get to view the published research. If your library, at say, a public university like the City University of New York, is experiencing budget problems, and library funding suffers cutbacks, well, tough tits. You don’t get to view the published research. If you, as a professor, or graduate student, decided to freely distribute the papers, you may be embroiled in copyright infringement disputes. If you are a taxpayer that funded this research, but cannot afford the journal subscription, well, tough tits again. Go rustle up the bucks. Knowledge should be open and available to all, you say? Talk to my accountant; because the face, it ain’t listening.

This is a gigantic rip-off, a racket, a robbery. It is exploitation–primarily of the academic promotion and tenure process and taxpayer money–on a scale that beggars belief. The stench from this should make every thinking person hold his or her nose. And act to make sure this cannot persist.

Right now, the US House and Senate are considering the Federal Research Public Access Act; this will bring about ‘pervasive open access,’ especially to articles reporting on research paid for by taxpayers.  For your own sake and for the sake of researchers, students, teachers, doctors, and the like everywhere, please support it.  A ‘We the People’ petition is up and available for signing at whitehouse.gov. Please sign, spread the word, and end this racket.

A Friendly Amendent to Nina Strohminger’s McGinn Review

Nina Strohminger–a post-doctoral fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics–recently wrote a scathing review of Colin McGinn‘s book The Meaning of Disgust. Thanks to Strohminger’s flamboyant cuffing of McGinn around the ears, her review earned her some well-deserved ‘net fame. I have not read the book so I cannot comment on it but the review does make for quite an entertaining read. I say that as someone who has mixed feelings about such ‘takedowns’ in the academic context; I have no such compunctions when it comes to bad movies (see below). Still, McGinn has dished out plenty in the past, so he should be used to this sort of jousting. (An interesting subtext: Strohminger is a newly minted Ph.D from the University of Michigan’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program; McGinn is a senior professor in a related field. Let’s hope McGinn has the grace to retaliate only in print.)

Strohminger’s review begins:

In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. Colin McGinn’s book belongs to the latter category.

From there it moves on to:

McGinn’s view of disgust is insistently mysterian: not merely ignorant or unenlightening but obfuscatory. Baroque, eye-catching explanations are given precedence over parsimony, evidence, or even common sense….Another property of the book, of which potential readers should be aware, is its unintentional hilarity. The humor derives less from the unblushing content than from the unblushing purpleness of his prose.

And so on. You get the picture. There is however, a missed opportunity in the review, and it occurs when Strominger catches McGinn being sloppy and sexist:

McGinn suggests that inorganic items—a list which includes cars, houses, and, apparently, fine silks—lack the ambivalence of human companions, so we can love them wholeheartedly, unencumbered by the physical disgust that attends our love for children and romantic partners. Diamonds, being forever, do not remind us of death. He muses: “Is this why women tend to love jewelry so—because of a relatively high level of bodily self-disgust? Just asking.” Is Colin McGinn a sexist, penis-gazing blowhard? Just asking!

Strohminger’s retort to the line she quotes is good, but I think it could have been better. By placing an exclamation mark at the end of the ‘Just asking’ Strohminger defuses her counter-volley’s rhetorical impact significantly. With that punctuation, Strohminger’s retort looks a little hurried and nervous, one quickly made, and then withdrawn. McGinn’s ‘Just asking’ ends with a period; its offensiveness is a function of the baldness of its statement. It is the period that makes clear his ‘just’ asking is insincere.

Consider now:

Is Colin McGinn a sexist, penis-gazing blowhard? Just asking.

This, I think, is the right mirror to McGinn’s line. I do not know if reviews ever appear in revised editions; but if they ever do, then Strohminger should take the opportunity to ditch the exclamation mark, replace it with a period, and email McGinn and myself a copy. (Come to think of it, I don’t think Strohminger’s review has been published yet; time yet to revise!)

Note: Thanks to reading around the McGinn review, I stumbled on Anthony Lane’s hilarious review of George Lucas’ disastrous Star Wars episode 3. The review is genuinely funny and Lucas deserves every single word in there.

David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas’ Provenance: Good Writers are Good Magpies

David Mitchell‘s bestselling 2004 novel Cloud Atlas sold millions of copies, and garnered ample critical praise (I have mixed feelings about it). What I found most interesting about the novel was Mitchell’s recounting of its genesis:

The germ of the opening (and closing) Adam Ewing narrative, about a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s, comes from a section in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel…For mid-19th-century language I ransacked Herman Melville, in particular Moby-Dick and his superb sketches of the Galápagos Islands, The Encantadas….Robert Frobisher, the louche second narrator of Cloud Atlas, can trace his ancestry to a book called Delius As I Knew Him by the frail composer’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby….Frobisher’s language comes from Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood….Luisa Rey, an American investigative journalist, is a mix of the 1970s TV detectives I enjoyed as a kid, All the President’s Men and James Ellroy, whose plot-velocity always impresses me….The care home that Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in comes fromOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a young man’s fear of senescence….Architectural features from pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and The Machine Stops by EM Forster…are present, with rich dollops of Blade Runner. The university where Sonmi is housed is a carbon copy of the technical college where I worked in Japan…. The question/answer format for the story was inspired by…those interviews you get in Hello! magazine

Note that Mitchell does not say the ideas, characters and language for Cloud Atlas sprang fully formed from his mind, and in a sudden burst of primal creativity–that owed no debts to any cultural formations around him–transformed themselves into the written word on a blank page. He does not make himself out to be a writer that is a creative singularity or a fount of originality; he is, in short, not suggesting he is that creature so beloved of ‘intellectual property’ defenders the world over. Rather Mitchell is simply acknowledging what every honest writer knows is the case: to write is to borrow; the more you read works written by others, the more you draw upon them in your writing to enrich it; no one is truly ‘original’ or ‘creative’ in the primitive, fantastical, magical sense imagined by deluded artists and IP lawyers. Mitchell has lifted plots, or characters, or language with varying degrees of directness; his writing bears the impress of his reading, his cultural immersion. His skill as an author, acknowledged by many of his readers, and some of his critics, lies in his expert transformation of that material into something simultaneously distinctive and revelatory of its provenance.

What is remarkable about the excerpt above is that Mitchell is able to articulate some of the influences on his writing quite clearly; most artists cannot do so quite distinctly and thus are able to convince themselves of their ‘originality.’ It is a fair bet Mitchell would admit there are numerous other literary and cultural inferences–not so clearly noted–that have also found their way into his writing.

A good writer is a good magpie, building his nest from materials brought home from afar.

Nietzsche as Reservoir Dog With ‘Style’

A few months ago, an  ex-student of mine sent me the image–courtesy bros.failblog.org–above. It made him chuckle out loud; he was in a library when he came across it and decided to send it to me because he thought I would have a similar reaction. (This was shortly after I had announced that I would be teaching a Nietzsche seminar in the spring semester.) Well, it made me chuckle and chortle a bit. I sent it on to a couple of friends–yup, they chuckled too–, and went so far as to make it my GMail profile image.

But what is so funny here? The juvenile rhyming, the placement of the sunglasses on Nietzsche’s otherwise solemn visage, the color coding in black and white that evokes Tarantino-cool? Well, of course. And they work because in turning Nietzsche into a Reservoir Dog,  the image reinforces a well-established not-so-academic impression of Nietzsche that supposedly appeals to angsty undergraduates and teenagers everywhere: the ass-kicking, taking-no-prisoners polemicist, slashing and burning his way through the thickets of orthodoxy.  (This is the Nietzsche imagined walking into a Wild West saloon, and suggesting, not so gently, that everyone put down their rotgut whisky and pay attention to the Zarathustrian gunslinger now in town.) It might also be the Nietzsche that tries to emerge from Ecce Homo, letting everyone know what time it is, and why indeed, the clocks have been commanded to do so by him.

Let’s not forget too, that if you wanted to dig a bit deeper, you could associate ‘sunglasses’ with ‘style,’ and well, when you think of Nietzsche, don’t you remember all those times he went on–and on–about ‘style’?

From The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 290:

Giving style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Or, from Twilight of the Idols, “Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man”, Section 11:

The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in a grand style. The power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws — that speaks of itself as a grand style.

Finally, it might also be that we associate Nietzsche with laughter, for he often makes us laugh out loud when we read him. Sometimes the laughter is provoked by his wordplay, his puns; sometimes it is evoked by the pleasure he provides us as he goes after those that deserve his scorn, far more skillfully than we can imagine ourselves ever being able to. Nietzsche knows he can be a joker and a jester; in dressing him up as he has been above, we are reminded of that aspect of his persona. There was plenty of grimness in Nietzsche’s life, but his writing, at least, often tried its best to keep that at bay.

Nietzsche on the Discontinuity Between Definitions and History

From The Genealogy of Morals, Essay 2, Section 13:

Only something which has no history is capable of being defined. 

The first time I read the Genealogy, I somehow skipped this line, or at least did not pay undue attention to it. When I read the Genealogy again, I didn’t miss it, and I paid attention: I underlined it, put the book down, and went for a walk.  This is no exaggeration; I did have to stop reading for a bit so that I could think about what I had just read. Nietzsche, more than any other philosopher, manages, somehow, effortlessly to produce line after line like this, rich and textured, pregnant with diverse possibilities, meanings, and allusions. Freud famously said he had to stop reading Nietzsche not just because he feared he would find that Nietzsche had anticipated too many of his ideas but also because–as he noted on another occasion–he found the constant barrage of ideas and philosophical theses too rich to digest all at once. While Nietzsche is immensely readable, he is not ‘unputdownable.’ Quite the contrary.

Incidentally, the line that precedes this sentence, reads, in full:

(Today it is impossible to say clearly why we really punish; all ideas in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition. Only something which has no history is capable of being defined)

Only Nietzsche, I think, could have written such a line as part of a parenthetical remark, and only he, I think, could have used that line as a follow-up to the clause that precedes it, amplifying and sharpening it brilliantly.

The line I have quoted is a famous line, and the shelves of libraries the world over creak under the weight of scholarship related to its meanings. (Now I exaggerate, but I’m posting on Nietzsche here, so these sorts of excesses should be forgiven. Constant engagement with a mode of discourse often tends to induce those same modes in oneself.)

But  consider, just for a moment, how much Nietzsche manages to encapsulate in his statement: an acknowledgement of the Heraclitean nature of being as endless becoming, of its history as a ‘record’ of change and contingency, and given the nature of definition as either a statement of identity or the enumeration of necessary and sufficient conditions–so that the definiens and definiendum are linked by a biconditional–the clear, stark, opposition between the two. Being is in time, and thus has history; definitions place themselves outside of time, by attempting to circumscribe, delineate, and establish sharp boundaries. The two are destined never to meet.

The mathematician’s or logician’s definitions work within a formally defined system with tightly anchored meanings; their formal structure, their definite anchoring of symbols is what makes possible their definitions. So the ‘eternal’ truths of mathematics and logic are timeless precisely because they rest on symbols whose meaning is anchored within a formal system and thus, lack history. (Of course, for Nietzsche, even this is a sort of elaborate fiction, an agreement to look past the histories of meanings of the symbols employed; for these systems’ ideas too, have entire processes ‘semiotically summarized’ within them.) For anything else, subject to history and interpretation, caught up in systems of constant reinterpretation and articulation, truth can remain a moving target.

The Unsurprising Renaissance of Reading

Last week, Timothy Egan’s column in the New York Times noted an apparently surprising outcome of the presence of e-book readers and a ‘digital monolith’ like amazon.com, which should have resulted in the loss of the culture of reading, the loss of the culture of “ideas printed on dead trees’ to that of  ’the soulless digital monolith on Lake Union, with its 164 million customers.’

But,

[T]he apocalypse already came and went, and look who’s standing. One technology, the e-book, the biggest new invention in reading since Gutenberg cranked out a Bible with movable type, changed the world — most likely for better. We have more books, more readers, a bigger audience for words, on pixels or paper.

Of course, it might be that the publishing industry as we know it is doomed as is the beloved independent bookstore.  But are people reading more? The answer, it seems, is yes:

[T]he Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined. One-fifth of all American adults reported reading an e-book in the past year….those digital consumers read far more books on average — about 24 a year — than the dead-tree consumers….e-book readers also buy lots of paper books…[they] “read more books in all formats”…By 2025, e-books will be 75 percent of total books sold.

But this ‘renaissance’ should not be surprising at all.

E-books represent a mode of distribution of the written word; they offer a mixed package of conveniences and entail the loss of many of the delightful physical affordances that printed books provide. As such they were never likely to appeal to all readers uniformly and thus unlikely to comprehensively destroy the culture of reading the printed-on-paper word. Readers read books on paper, via objects they can hold in their hand, for many more reasons than simply reading. Page-turning; marking in margins with a pencil (another physical affordance of another long-used artefact); these interactions have their own value and were never likely to be completely over-ridden by the e-book. They might lose their centrality for us as our material world changes and the nature of our embedding in it does. But it will take some doing. It will not be as facile a process as e-book-phobes might imagine.

And fears that e-books and their readers would destroy the culture of reading in general were even more overblown. Why anyone would imagine that reading would be displaced by a new mode of distribution that made it more convenient has always seemed mysterious to me. In a world bursting to the seams with information, with ever more knowledge to be disseminated, processed, and articulated (and I haven’t even touched on the expanding literary world yet!) why would reading ever lose its centrality?

Expressions of fears like those directed at e-books are not so much apprehensions of technology as much as they are expressions of distrust in humanity in general, in a lack of faith in its ability to absorb, and engage with, new modes of being in the world. For far too long, fearing that a particular relationship to the world might be mediated by a new mode of technology has been  considered a fashionable expression of one’s commitment to humanistic concerns; I think instead that it covers up an alarmingly fragile assessment of the resilience of human beings. This does not mean, of course, that concerns about the lockdown of e-books by pernicious technologies like DRM are unfounded; those continue to remain urgent. But those critiques, are, I think, independent of the worry that reading books on e-book readers will impact reading negatively.

Note: I still do not own an e-book reader, and do not anticipate buying one in the near future though my ever-growing archive of reading material in PDF format is making me consider doing so. I’m open to recommendations for the best reader for PDF files; please leave these in the comments section if possible.

Robot Graders: A Professor’s Delight?

Over at Concurring Opinions, Deven Desai makes note of an interesting study–whose details I have not yet had the time to investigate–underwritten by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and conducted by a team of “experts in educational measurement and assessment, led by Dr. Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at The University of Akron.” The study claims to have found that,

A direct comparison between human graders and software designed to score student essays achieved virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases proving to be more reliable [I am not quite sure what 'reliable' means here]

The reaction of at least one kind of college professor is, I suspect, likely to be: Hallelujah, no more grading! Another kind will mutter and grumble about the invasion of a domain of faculty privilege, the mechanization of a humanist skill, the loss to students of vital professorial feedback and so on. I’m not quite sure which camp I fall into.

The reason for that ambiguous response is that I find the business of grading papers (student writing assignments) genuinely perplexing. I’ve now been grading papers, on and off, for some fifteen years. (That is how long I have been teaching philosophy, first as a graduate teaching fellow, and then later, of course, as a full-time faculty member; before that my teaching was centered on computer science classes and there was little writing to grade.) In that time, I have never had a teaching assistant to help me with grading but neither have I had to teach a class with more thirty students in it. But twenty or so six-page or four-page papers–the standard length of my assignments, of which I assign three in a typical philosophy class–is still plenty of work.

And that is so because fifteen years on, I’m still not quite sure how to provide good feedback to my students. I find writing to be very hard work; I struggle with it constantly; I still remain terrified by the blank page. More to the point, when confronted by a piece of writing that doesn’t ‘read well,’ I don’t quite know how to instruct someone other than me in the business of how to make it better. There is an exaggeration here, of course; I can point out problems in relevance (‘You haven’t addressed the question I asked!’); I can note elementary mistakes in spelling and grammar; I can point to mangled sentences and constructions that don’t make sense. And so on. But at the end of this process it still seems like there is something that I haven’t managed to convey to my students. It is for this reason that I urge my student to consult with writing tutors, to have their papers read by their friends (or even their parents, if they have time!).

The long and short of it is that I continue to find writing a bit of a mystery, and given that I find it so intractable, I find the task of teaching someone else how to do it to be particularly insuperable.

Any help would be much appreciated. Bring on the robotic graders!

We Robot 2012 – UAVs and a Pilot-Free World

Day Two at the We Robot 2012 conference at the University of Miami Law School.

Amir Rahmani‘s presentation Micro Aerial Vehicles: Opportunity or Liability? prompted a set of thoughts sparked by the idea of planes not flown by human beings, and in turn, the idea of an aviator-free world.  It has been some 109 years since Kitty Hawk, and in that time we have come to the point that we might seriously consider the idea of all aircraft being exclusively robotic (I should hasten to add that I doubt man will ever stop flying but at the least, a very significant attenuation of the role of the pilot looks likely. Peter W. Singer’s Wired for War notes, for instance, that UAV operations in Afghanistan, which account for a significant percentage of all aerial operations in that theater of operations, are carried out by desk-pilots working from home bases in the US. The culture that has sprung up around that community is interestingly different from that of pilots who fly combat aircraft from front-line bases.) While I generally welcome the idea of a ‘robotic uprising,’ i.e., a  greater role for robots in our society as a means of spurring greater introspection about ourselves and our place in this world, in this domain I find the idea of a pilot-free world curiously melancholic. And it is entirely unsurprising that such a thought is sparked by a set of deeply personal interests: After all, I did grow up on air force bases, watching jets take off, and admiring, like only young boys can, all those impossibly dashing, crew-cut, sunglasses-wearing aviators (then, they were exclusively men; now, women have joined the ranks of armed forces aviators as well).

The twentieth-century might have been the century of the pilot, and all the imaginative possibilities associated with the image of man borne aloft on wings, above this grubby world, into the skies, placed in a position, as John Gillespie Magee put it, to ‘reach out and touch the face of God.’  It was a century that saw the rich flowering of  a literature born from  the radically different viewpoint of man that aviation  afforded its practitioners (and those who admired them).  Antoine Saint-Exupery was a product of that century, as was Michael Collins (whose Carrying The Fire still remains one of most literate and passionate books about aviation and manned space flight).

So my concern here is not so much the loss of employment for pilots, a rather mundane economic worry. Rather, it is the idea that a whole domain of creative imagination might be lost. Hopefully, new creative possibilities might spring into being. Perhaps the little flying that will be done by humans in the future will generate a new form of literature, one that sees the aviator’s role not as a ‘worker’ flying airlines or as a ‘soldier’ flying combat aircraft, but returns perhaps to the original role of the aviator as an adventurer trying out and flying radically new craft. Perhaps. More on this possibility later.

Ann Patchett is Wrong About the Pulitzers

Ann Patchett has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, which waxes angsty over the failure of the Pulitzer committee to award a prize in fiction this year: This decision, besides affecting book sales, might lead readers to think there wasn’t any good fiction around. For as Patchett puts it, the Pulitzers are indispensable in drumming up the excitement that sends readers to bookstores, and play the same role in the literary world that the Oscars play in the world of cinema:

Unfortunately, the world of literature lacks the scandal, hype and pretty dresses that draw people to the Academy Awards, which, by the way, is not an institution devoted to choosing the best movie every year as much as it is an institution designed to get people excited about going to the movies. The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we all lost.

So presumably, having failed to receive a directive from the Pulitzer prize committee on which books to purchase the next time they are at Barnes and Noble or browsing on Amazon, people will read less fiction. Oh, the horror!

I’m genuinely perplexed by this. I can understand Patchett’s angst from the perspective of authors. The Pulitzers do provide a massive marketing boost to a book, and bump up sales. And thus, one easily understands her angst from the bookseller’s perspective. But as a reader, pardon my French, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Pulitzers. I read plenty of fiction, and I have not once, never, ever, ever, felt more excited or pumped up on reading about the Pulitzer award for fiction. (I watch a lot of movies too, and I remain resolutely unexcited by the announcement of the Oscars.)

I read fiction because, to quote Patchett, I realize that

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

I started reading fiction as a child, and haven’t stopped yet; in my universe of reading  the Pulitzers exert no influence whatsoever. I’m not saying this as a snob; I imagine it is the same for many other readers. Patchett is genuinely confused: The Pulitzers don’t make people read more; rather they channel that reading into particular directions, towards particular locations of influence and connections in the world of writing and publishing (If you imagine the Pulitzers are free of lobbying influence, I have a bridge to sell you.) Readers read fiction for the reasons Patchett cites above; those reasons will not go away just because a Pulitzer was not awarded this year.

Patchett’s argument is an economic one; she should keep it that level, and not make the crucial mistake of imagining that somehow readers’ lives have been impoverished by the failure of the Pulitzer prize committee to award a prize. Patchett should feel free to speak as an industry spokesperson, for the machinery of publishers and authors. But she should leave readers out of it.

David Simon is a Little Too Proprietary About The Wire

David Simon has made some waves recently in a series of interviews regarding the Wire (here; here; and here), viewer’s relationships to it (and its characters). I’m not going to repeat or reproduce Simon’s remarks here; please do chase down the links. But in a nutshell: Simon (was) is unhappy about the ‘pop’ understanding of the Wire that seems to have made its way into our broader culture, a function, he thinks of its late uptake by a whole viewer demographic that wasn’t around when the show was struggling with ratings, an understanding that is obsessed about characters rather than the overarching theme or narrative, and that ‘misunderstands’ the show.

Simon’s remarks are peculiar for several reasons. For one, there is something rather quaint and old-fashioned in the suggestion that viewers are getting it wrong, that they misconceived the show, that there is, so to speak, some sort of gap between their understanding and take on the show and the meaning that Simon intended, and that this is a crucial lacunae. I hate to break the news to Simon, but once the show was made and released, any kind of control that he might have exerted over its meaning was gone. The show doesn’t exist in some autonomous region of meaning that Simon controls access to; it is in a place where its meaning is constructed actively by its spectators and in many ways by the larger world that it is embedded in.

What if, during the fourth season,  a fierce Diane Ravitch–Michelle Rhee-type debate had been  dominating airwaves elsewhere? Wouldn’t viewers of the Wire have had a very different interpretation of the show’s characters and action in that period? Is this something Simon could control or even cater for in his writing and direction? What if California and Washington had legalized marijuana during the third season? Would that not have affected viewers’ understandings of that season’s themes? This co-construction of meaning is a well-established trope in our understanding of how artworks acquire and establish traction. Simon might have had a vision and meaning for the show but having decided to give it to  viewers he must realize the work isn’t his anymore in any meaningful sense of the word.

The other peculiar point in Simon’s interview is his insistence that the Wire is a long-form story, that it is a coherent whole, and that it be understood as such and that the episodic reaction to it so typical of the long-running series relationship with its fans, gets it wrong. But Simon chose to work in a particular medium that afforded him freedom for lengthy development of character and plot.  The periodic release of the episodes meant–just as above–that their meaning was always going to be constructed over a period of time, subject always to those sort of short-term reactions typical of the television show. Why would Simon be surprised or upset by this? The Wire was the best television show ever and a great story. But those that watched also made it.

Side note: Much as I liked the Wire, I think Simon needs a reality check if he thinks his work was nothing but gritty realism (not that he ever makes any such claim in those interviews above but there is a kind of insistence on his having provided a social documentary). McNulty is a cliché in some ways; Omar, no matter how fascinating a character, is an implausible one; the drug markets in season three were ridiculous; the fifth season’s McNulty-creation of the serial killer was by far some of the most contrived story-telling I’ve ever seen. Simon might think he had transcended every single genre in making the Wire but he didn’t.