The Red Menace

What these comrades need is a trip to my newly-opened facility, "The Red Menace Soviet Boot Camp and Rehabilitation Spa"!!! There they will learn the glories of a new work ethic and a new outlook on life, as they all labor to build a grand canal in honor of A Certain Comrade Who Will Be Named Later. Laziest states in America

Comrades, comrades... Chinese state TV footage of air force drill taken from TOP GUN? Cue Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone"!!!

Had heard about this last week in confidence--very sorry I've never had a chance to make the pilgrimage, SJ. I know from mutual friends how much you and your store have meant to them over the years.

Did somebody say Go Big Red?!?

Comrade!!! I myself sometimes ponder the conundrum of which you speak and have lit upon a plan. I have purchased a roomy tomb, replete with a specially-designed 24-disc-changer stereo system, for my inevitable departure. My collection will be buried with me, and each day at dawn the cemetery attendant will place a fresh two-dozen batch of discs in the player. If my present rate of acquisition continues and I live another decade (I am, after all, 94 years old!!!), I should have enough music for a roughly-five-year-long cycle before having to start my posthumous listening anew. However, I do anticipate further releases from Mosaic and am consigning part of my estate to pay for their delivery to my mausoleum (an afterlife subscription service, if you will), where the attendant will read the notes aloud to me as the music plays. That is one solution, anyway.

Why, thank you, comrade!!!

Comrades, I found him!!! I found the Man!!!

not if the deleted post is not deleted from my post count! but seriously jim - who checks the checkers? Why, the Czechs, of course!!! And now back to my worldwide crusade against moderator tyranny. Down with the Man!!! Down with the Man!!! Down with the... er, could someone please point me to the Man here, comrades??? I can't seem to find him!!! It must be my old eyes, weary with the sight of so much oppression, that make the Man so difficult to locate in this latest grievance.

Comrade!!! You've obviously been hipped to Jakob Nielsen!!! It is a lovely style, no???

But how I miss my own beloved team after their premature departure from the postseason: Look at that man, charging like a T-34 across the plains of the Ukraine on its way to liberate the oppressed peoples of eastern Europe!!! What a specimen!!!

Comrades, if you want to win a championship, I always say: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!!!

I get your drift, but I'm not citing Larry's work here in any sort of "could Larry Kart write this way" manner; I'm citing it and re-processing it a la Nielsen style because it's work that many of us (myself included) admire, and it therefore offers a useful contrast. The problem with Nielsen style IMO is that it makes everything look/read like a corporate memo, or a PR presentation. If you took a paragraph of Larry's praising several qualities of a Wayne Shorter saxophone solo, a Nielsen-guided editor would bust up the paragraph and list Larry's sentences as bullet points. There are probably creative ways to work within these guidelines, and this still-pliable spirit will pursue them in the context of his online work. I have a hell of a long way to go as a writer in all senses of the term, too (and just hope that I live long enough to get there, or to at least continue arriving at new and improved destinations). But rhythm and flow are a large part of any writer's approach, and the Nielsen standard acts as a compressor that tends to flatten cadence into a series of proclamatory, self-dramatizing announcements. TTK: I agree. I read differently online as well. I just think Nielsen's guidelines are an extreme reaction (and I didn't even give the full flavor of it--for instance, every name mentioned in the Updike piece or Larry's Kerouac passages should have been highlighted in bold, and Updike's concluding description of the game probably should have been rendered as a bullet-point list). Sites like Talking Points Memo and Jazzwax seem to accommodate online reading habits without that kind of dramatic overreach.

That Slate article is exactly what I'm talking about. Again, I don't mean to dismiss accommodations to online reading habits out of hand; but like Chris, I find the BBC single-sentence paragraph approach inane. Perhaps it's workable for short newsflash/bulletin stories, but in the context of any sort of longer critical or feature writing it's offputting in the extreme. If you're like me, a writer's tone and cadence plays an important part in how you respond to his or her writing. The Nielsen value system IMO moves against that and tends to boil everything down to short, digestible but bland bites of prose. I think Marc Myers (Jazzwax blogger) does a very good job of online writing (he's a copy writer by trade, and it shows--in a good way--in his jazz features), but even his paragraphs are too long for the Nielsen standard, and would be subjected to bullet-pointing, bold headlines, and other layout manuevers. For me, his work and Mark Stryker's at the Detroit Free Press are probably the happy-medium examples for which I'm looking. They are also both excellent writers in general, and excellent writing (such as Larry's thoughts on Kerouac above) will still hold up to some degree even when it's dismembered. Quick note: I just remembered that many of the pieces in Larry's book did originally appear in a newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. I have to wonder, though, what kind of editorial treatment his wonderful 1978 essay on Johnny Griffin would get today, or what Nielsen-style processing would do to it. EDIT: Larry, duly noted--I was in the midst of writing this post and hadn't yet seen your comment, but rather picked up your book and glanced at the attribution page in the beginning. Would the Trib still accommodate that kind of writing today? And not to drag politics into it, but for those of us here with a liberal inclination, I think Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo posts very readable, generally well-written and thoughtful commentary that isn't broken into single-sentence paragraphs replete with the visual bells-and-whistles described by the Slate article.

I should clarify that I'm not talking about (or criticizing) concise writing and clear, simple language. I'm talking about restructuring your prose so that it has a radically different rhythm and cadence. (I should also clarify that I'm doing arts-oriented writing for a multi-platform news-and-arts media organization.) For example, here's the conclusion of John Updike's 1960 New Yorker essay about Ted Williams: Now I'll recast it according to online style guide principles: Or here's a passage from Larry Kart's book, Jazz In Search of Itself: Recast in the current online style guide that I've been given, it might read as: Or: To this (and here I've changed some of Larry's writing as well, to reflect stylistic/tone preferences): The effect is to amplify almost every sentence as a standalone declaration. This may not be at much of a remove from newspaper writing style; I haven't written for a newspaper since college, so writers such as Larry and Mark Stryker may be able to weigh in with authority on this topic. (I haven't read Larry's newspaper columns, only the collected essays in his book.) Rhythmically speaking, I tend to think such a style sounds less off-key for news reporting, but that it renders any sort of reflective writing declarative to the point of self-importance. (Speaking, I hope, without a hint of pandering, I think Larry's prose holds up quite well in spite of what I inflicted on it.) I think there's no doubt that it's much more difficult to read longer paragraphs online than it is in a book or a magazine. Surely, though, there's a happy medium that doesn't involve bold headlines every other paragraph and bursts of single-sentence statements.

Question here for those who write, for either their own pleasure or for professional reasons (or for both): what has been your experience with writing for online venues? I work for an organization where there is increasing pressure to publish all copy for the web in single-sentence paragraphs, or something close to it, and to adopt a simplified, declarative tone. While I agree that one's eyes tend to skip over larger blocks of text when reading online, I'm having a difficult time adjusting to a style that strikes me as close to "See Spot run." Has anybody else run into this? A friend of mine who's a noted jazz critic recently turned down an online newspaper book-reviewing job because of requirements similar to what I mention above.

I have been informed that Comrade Lowe will be delivering a pronouncement that unlocks the secrets of this rather daunting object: I anticipate a profound event!!! In the meantime, I invite you all to join me in my Hot Tub Time Machine for a raucous celebration. If the proceedings grow zany enough, I may just set the controls for the Kremlin and party like it's 1939!!!

But--but--that's The Man they're honoring, comrades!!! Down with The Man!!!

Hmmm... perhaps an intern?!?

Comrades, I must relate that excessive consumption of jazz and Stolichnaya once induced the following vision!!! I felt as if I was being serenaded from a faraway planet!!!

I know of an excellent doctor for young Aric...my good friend Achtung Dr. Freud Calling!!! His methods are, shall we say, idiosyncratic, but highly effective!!!

Ack!!! The comrades always told me, "Never be late to the Party." And here I have gone and done it again!!! Surely this time I will be purged. But nevertheless, I wish you a joyous marking of this anniversary and hope that you were deluged with craven capitalist commodities!!! :party:

Why this Dixieland band?

I had nothing to do with that!!!

I will simply say that comrade Bixie got the axe!!!

"Rescue"??? Comrade, please--the term is LIBERATE. Did you not retain any of your lessons at that posh northern Virginia re-education camp to which I had you sent???