Friday, December 16, 2005
I'm hosting Carnival of New Jersey Bloggers this week, & it's really consuming
a lot of time. Have to work with google gmail, which still seems to be in a beta
stage. I lost some e mail & had to track down a couple of posts.
My editorial instincts have me looking beyond what's being submitted. The
one experience I had as a "professional" copy-editor was not gratifying,
in part because I was dealing with two publications devoted to ethnic cultures
that were not my own, Italian & Indian. The Indian one gave me fits with
spelling. Not to mention that India transplanted to America retains most of the
regional & religious variations & tensions, not to mention a caste consciousness
that also took on some attributes of British class attitudes. I couldn't
sort it out. In a way, WFMU spoiled me. A free form program is a kind of audio
magazine where one collects together a lot of recordings plus a list of reminders
scratched in a notebook, then creates something on the fly, in real time. It's the
radio waves taking up the space. There's no page. One doesn't chop up copy
to fit it around a bunch of advertisements. There's no headlines to write.
Best of all, it doesn't matter how many people, if any, are paying attention.
The only similar job I had was copyediting newsletters for elected politicians.
As long as politicians are satifisfied with the number of times their names
& photos appear on each page, the actual content is relatively unimportant.
My term for this was mayorizing. Aides & assistants provide the words, &
since these unheralded people receive no byline, they're not too finicky.
They're also concerned mostly with mayorizing, getting the boss's approval,
& then kicking ass at the local post office over bulk-mailing fees & timetables.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
a lot of time. Have to work with google gmail, which still seems to be in a beta
stage. I lost some e mail & had to track down a couple of posts.
My editorial instincts have me looking beyond what's being submitted. The
one experience I had as a "professional" copy-editor was not gratifying,
in part because I was dealing with two publications devoted to ethnic cultures
that were not my own, Italian & Indian. The Indian one gave me fits with
spelling. Not to mention that India transplanted to America retains most of the
regional & religious variations & tensions, not to mention a caste consciousness
that also took on some attributes of British class attitudes. I couldn't
sort it out. In a way, WFMU spoiled me. A free form program is a kind of audio
magazine where one collects together a lot of recordings plus a list of reminders
scratched in a notebook, then creates something on the fly, in real time. It's the
radio waves taking up the space. There's no page. One doesn't chop up copy
to fit it around a bunch of advertisements. There's no headlines to write.
Best of all, it doesn't matter how many people, if any, are paying attention.
The only similar job I had was copyediting newsletters for elected politicians.
As long as politicians are satifisfied with the number of times their names
& photos appear on each page, the actual content is relatively unimportant.
My term for this was mayorizing. Aides & assistants provide the words, &
since these unheralded people receive no byline, they're not too finicky.
They're also concerned mostly with mayorizing, getting the boss's approval,
& then kicking ass at the local post office over bulk-mailing fees & timetables.
