remediating the convention speeches

by Bill Posted on September 5, 2008

From The New York Times:

It’s interesting to view the mapping of the major speakers’ words with the words of Obama’s and McCain’s acceptance speeches. They’re mapped here using the very cool Wordle, which my dear friend Suzanne Tiedemann introduce me to. Obama and then McCain (click on image for better resolution):

visual representation of obama's acceptance speech

Whereas the overall focus of the Democrats seems to have been to link McCain to Bush and call for the need for Change, the Republicans were focusing on God and Taxes, with secondary interests in Business, Change, and Obama. Obama, however, mentioned Change much less often than one might expect; indeed, he the speech seems to have been written with the understanding that Change would be emphasized by everyone else. He would, instead, describe the Promise to the county of creating One America. McCain’s most used word, on the other hand, Country and Fight suggests something altogether different, one located in a protection of the homeland and taking the Fight to whomever needs to be fought.

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publishing legend Robert Giroux dies

by Bill Posted on September 5, 2008

The New York Times has reported the death of Robert Giroux, one of the most important editors and publishers ever:

How many masterpieces Mr. Giroux discovered will be for the future to decide. As he himself insisted, it can take decades for a book to become a classic. Still, one of the first books he edited is now on any list of the century’s best, Edmund Wilson’s work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, “To the Finland Station” (1940); Mr. Giroux judged the manuscript to be nearly flawless.

He was also T. S. Eliot’s American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell’s “1984,” accepting it at once despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel’s passages distasteful.

Mr. Giroux introduced a long roster of writers who would achieve fame, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, Louise Bogan and William Golding.

The breadth and importance of his work is incredible. And with the emergence of new electronic forms of publishing his passing is one more signal of the end of the print media era.

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