From one of Mark Changizi’s research notebooks. I love stuff like this, immoderately.
Queries on professional authorship today bring back anecdotes of small advances and the impossibility of being a writer without grants, professorships, or some other means of income. Writing is a financially challenging profession (always has been, always will be) but more and more people are making it work. In 1850, eighty-two people of about 16.5 million free American adults claimed they were professional authors and writers. As of 2005, 185,276 out of 216.3 million American adults claimed those titles….Professional authorship started to gain serious ground in America in the 20th century. By the mid to late 1900s, professional writing, supported by thriving publishing houses and a large population of literate adults, had taken off. According to the U.S. Census, the number of self-proclaimed authors in the U.S. rose from 45,748 in 1980 to 106,730 in 1990, likely due to the advent of personal computers and the ease of small- and self-publishing. According to Publishers Weekly, between 1990 and 2005, there was a 39 percent increase in the number of authors and writers, to 185,276 in 2005, 96,158 of whom worked full-time as authors. The median yearly income of these full-time authors in 2005 was $50,800, while the median income of the entire civilian labor force was only $38,700.
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The State of Publishing: Professional Authors.. Wait — is this data? (The article could be better sourced.) According to R. P. Blackmur, in the 1940 U. S. Census “11,806 persons reported themselves as professional authors, and some 44,000 additional reported as editors and researchers.” The population of the United States in 1940 was 123,202,624.
It’s hard to know what to make of these numbers because I don’t know whether the same choices of professions were available in 1940 and in later censuses; probably not. One wonders whether the many novelists and poets who teach full-time today — very few did in 1940, because there were so few creative writing programs — listed themselves as “writers” or “educators.” And it appears that many journalists in 1940 called themselves “reporters” rather than “authors” or even, I guess, “journalists.” And in any event self-descriptions are notoriously unreliable. But these numbers give us something to work with.
Thanks to Evan Kindley on Twitter for the Blackmur link.
The future of writing in America—or, at least, the future of making a living by writing—seems in doubt as rarely before. Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped: anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches. It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a professional writer.
Seriously, I wish people would stop saying stuff like this without thinking about it first. Start by defining “professional writer”: since this is a blog post about Philip Roth, are you thinking only of “literary” writers? There are several other kinds of writers who make a living by writing words. And then ask yourself: how many people made a living by words in any of the years I just listed? What percentage of the population did they amount to? How does that percentage compare to today’s? There were no bloggers in 1963, but there were probably more people paying the rent by writing screenplays, because Hollywood made more movies then than it makes today, though not as many as it had made in 1943 — so how do those numbers compare?
Of course, we don’t know the answers to any of these questions, nor do we know how to get the answers. Anything we say comparing the lot of the writer today to some (any) period in the past is largely hot air.
Faulkner is no thinker — his occasional reflections on politics or the race question do not illuminate their subjects; he is no poet — his purple passages are embarrassingly bad; he is not even, in my opinion, a profound psychologist, but he is a very great magician who can make twenty years in Yoknapatawpha seem to the reader like twenty minutes and make him want to stay there forever. Furthermore, he employs white magic, that is to say, his charms have a moral purpose: he would teach and, I believe, succeeds in teaching us both to love the Good and to realize the price which must be paid for that love.
“I have decreasing amounts of tolerance for unnecessary communication because it is a burden and a cost,” said Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of Cultivated Wit, a comedic creative company. “It’s almost too easy to not think before we express ourselves because expression is so cheap, yet it often costs the receiver more.”Mr. Thurston said he encountered another kind of irksome communication when a friend asked, by text message, about his schedule for the South by Southwest festival. “I don’t even know how to respond to that,” he said. “The answer would be so long. There’s no way I’m going to type out my schedule in a text.”
He said people often asked him on social media where to buy his book, rather than simply Googling the question. You’re already on a computer, he exclaimed. “You’re on the thing that has the answer to the thing you want to know!”
Etiquette Redefined in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com. I think about this kind of thing a lot, and oscillate between getting annoyed with other people for asking so many questions and with myself for being so grumpy. I get a lot of questions on Twitter about my plans or my thoughts or my opinions that I just don’t answer, because I fear that that way madness lies. For one thing, if it becomes clear that I’m the kind of person who answers trivial questions from strangers, questions that arise simply from some mild curiosity, then I could spend the rest of my life doing that — especially since answering one question often (very often) leads to others. But then I think, “Come on, it’s just a question, go ahead and answer it, be nice.”
Another thing that drives me nuts: when people ask for me to explain the context of a tweet that could be perfectly explicable if they just read one tweet back in their timeline. But maybe I’m over-reacting to that too.
The one thing I’m certain about is: I think about all this too darn much.
We don’t know if Facebook has some kind of Paedophile-o-Meter. But, given the extensive user analysis it already does, it probably wouldn’t be very hard to build one –and not just for scoring paedophiles. What about Drug-o-Meter? Or – Joseph McCarthy would love this – Communist-o-Meter? Given enough data and the right algorithms, all of us are bound to look suspicious. What happens, then, when Facebook turns us – before we have committed any crimes – over to the police? Will we, like characters in a Kafka novel, struggle to understand what our crime really is and spend the rest of our lives clearing our names? Will Facebook perhaps also offer us a way to pay a fee to have our reputations restored? What if its algorithms are wrong?The promise of predictive policing might be real, but so are its dangers. The solutionist impulse needs to be restrained. Police need to subject their algorithms to external scrutiny and address their biases. Social networking sites need to establish clear standards for how much predictive self-policing they’ll actually do and how far they will go in profiling their users and sharing this data with police. While Facebook might be more effective than police in predicting crime, it cannot be allowed to take on these policing functions without also adhering to the same rules and regulations that spell out what police can and cannot do in a democracy. We cannot circumvent legal procedures and subvert democratic norms in the name of efficiency alone.
So why am I recommending the word [naches] to my gentile brethren? Because we’re all Jews now, in that respect. There are no hereditary places anymore. Meritocracy decrees that everybody must achieve, achieve, achieve. Status derives from the college you attend and the other institutions to which you are able to attach yourself, then later, the ones your children do. (When I got a job at Yale, my father practically printed up cards to hand out at shul.) Naches-mongering is what they do in Greenwich now, as well, and on Park Avenue and Beacon Hill, not to mention every upscale neighborhood or suburb in the country, the West, the world.I asked a couple of East Asian friends whether there is an analogous word in Chinese or Korean. They both said no; the operative concept there is filial piety, a bedrock Confucian virtue. We speculated about this. Filial piety is certainly a value in Jewish culture—it’s the Fifth Commandment, after all—and the notion of parental pride, my Korean friend remarked, is “almost too deep a concept to even be reflected in language,” and yet there is that difference in relative emphasis. It seems to come down to anxiety. East Asian parents do not typically worry that the child will fail to do his duty. But naches is forever shadowed by the fear of its absence. Filial rebellion and parental disappointment are major themes in the Jewish imagination, often figured (think of the Golden Calf) through the vexed relationship between the Children of Israel and God Our Father. These kids—such tzuris!
Wealthy musician Amanda Palmer, who last year raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to produce and release a record, recently used a TED talk to expand on the idea that artists should be willing to work for free. After relaying a story about how she used to be a street performer, Palmer, who is married to a very successful author named Neil Gaiman, told an audience of people who’d paid $7,500 apiece to be there that musicians shouldn’t “make” people pay for their work, but rather “let” people pay for their work. She also explained that she found it virtuous when a family of undocumented immigrants huddled together on their couch for a night so that she and her band could have their beds, because her music and presence was a fair exchange for the family’s comfort. After about 13 minutes of explaining why she is content with people giving her things, Palmer received a standing ovation.
Lights on for safety. From Seven Is Magic, 1969
Great and Mighty Artist of the Day:Bruno Del Favero
Born Princeton, Michigan, 1910; died Greenwich, Conneticut, 1995
Bruno Del Favero moved from Michigan to northern Italy with his parents at age five, returning in 1928 and settling in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he married and remained for the rest of his days. He made his living as a mason, chauffeur, and landscape gardener. It is not known exactly when or why he began to paint his delicate and mysterious landscapes, but he was exhibiting in local art shows by the early 1970s and took himself seriously enough as an artist to join the Greenwich Art Society. He maintained a studio in the basement of his home, but never shared his art with his wife and five children. After the artist’s death his family introduced his work to New York dealers Shari Cavin and Randall Morris in the late 1990s. Del Favero’s first one-man show outside Greenwich was held at the Cavin-Morris Gallery in 1998.
See his work in Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, open now through June 9 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.