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There’s a puzzle around economics. On the one hand, economists have the most policy influence of any group of social scientists. In the United States, for example, economics is the only social science that controls a major branch of government policy (through the Federal Reserve), or has an office in the White House (the Council of Economic Advisers). And though they don’t rank up there with lawyers, economists make a fairly strong showing among prime ministers and presidents, as well.

But as any economist will tell you, that doesn’t mean that policymakers commonly take their advice. There are lots of areas where economists broadly agree, but policymakers don’t seem to care. Economists have wide consensus on the need for carbon taxes, but that doesn’t make them an easier political sell. And on topics where there’s a wider range of economic opinions, like over minimum wages, it seems that every politician can find an economist to tell her exactly what she wants to hear.

So if policymakers don’t take economists’ advice, do they actually matter in public policy? Here, it’s useful to distinguish between two different types of influence: direct and indirect.

Direct influence is what we usually think of when we consider how experts might affect policy. A political leader turns to a prominent academic to help him craft new legislation. A president asks economic advisers which of two policy options is preferable. Or, in the case where the expert is herself the decisionmaker, she draws on her own deep knowledge to inform political choices.

This happens, but to a limited extent. Though politicians may listen to economists’ recommendations, their decisions are dominated by political concerns. They pay particular attention to advice that agrees with what they already want to do, and the rise of think tanks has made it even easier to find experts who support a preexisting position.

Research on experts suggests that direct advisory effects are more likely to occur under two conditions. The first is when a policy decision has already been defined as more technical than political—that experts are the appropriate group to be deciding. So we leave it to specialists to determine what inventions can be patented, or which drugs are safe for consumers, or (with occasional exceptions) how best to count the population. In countries with independent central banks, economists often control monetary policy in this way.

Experts can also have direct effects when possible solutions to a problem have not yet been defined. This can happen in crisis situations: think of policymakers desperately casting about for answers during the peak of the financial crisis. Or it can take place early in the policy process: consider economists being brought in at the beginning of an administration to inject new ideas into health care reform.

But though economists have some direct influence, their greatest policy effects may take place through less direct routes—by helping policymakers to think about the world in new ways.

For example, economists help create new forms of measurement and decision-making tools that change public debate. GDP is perhaps the most obvious of these. A hundred years ago, while politicians talked about economic issues, they did not talk about “the economy.” “The economy,” that focal point of so much of today’s chatter, only emerged when national income and product accounts were created in the mid-20th century. GDP changes have political, as well as economic, effects. There were military implications when China’s GDP overtook Japan’s; no doubt the political environment will change more when it surpasses the United States.

Less visible economic tools also shape political debate. When policymakers require cost-benefit analysis of new regulation, conversations change because the costs of regulation become much more visible, while unquantifiable effects may get lost in the debate. Indicators like GDP and methods like cost-benefit analysis are not solely the product of economists, but economists have been central in developing them and encouraging their use.

The spread of technical devices, though, is not the only way economics changes how we think about policy. The spread of an economic style of reasoning has been equally important.

Philosopher Ian Hacking has argued that the emergence of a statistical style of reasoning first made it possible to say that the population of New York on 1 January 1820 was 100,000. Similarly, an economic style of reasoning—a sort of Econ 101-thinking organized around basic concepts like incentives, efficiency, and opportunity costs—has changed the way policymakers think.

While economists might wish economic reasoning were more visible in government, over the past fifty years it has in fact become much more widespread. Organizations like the US Congressional Budget Office (and its equivalents elsewhere) are now formally responsible for quantifying policy tradeoffs. Less formally, other disciplines that train policymakers now include some element of economics. This includes master’s programs in public policy, organized loosely around microeconomics, and law, in which law and economics is an important subfield. These curricular developments have exposed more policymakers to basic economic reasoning.

The policy effects of an economic style of reasoning are harder to pinpoint than, for example, whether policymakers adopted an economist’s tax policy recommendation. But in the last few decades, new policy areas have been reconceptualized in economic terms. As a result, we now see education as an investment in human capital, science as a source of productivity-increasing technological innovations, and the environment as a collection of ecosystem services. This subtle shift in orientation has implications for what policies we consider, as well as our perception of their ultimate goals.

In the end, then, there is no puzzle. Economists do matter in public policy, even though policymakers, in fact, often ignore their advice. If we are interested in understanding how, though, we should pay attention to more than whether politicians take economists’ recommendations—we must also consider how their intellectual tools shape the very ways that policymakers, and all of us, think.

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When I was a kid, my mom was anti-coloring book. 

She is an artist and a teacher. (It’s been decades since she produced art professionally and she stopped teaching professionally before I was born, but these talents don’t leave you.)

The reason she did not like coloring books was because they put a border—literally—around a child’s creative impulse. She preferred a blank piece of paper, and now, so do I.

I have reminisced about books of my youth here (some of the more obscure titles of my early years), here (influences on my first published book), and here (this one is both recollection and game), and buried among all that nostalgia is a book that was well aligned with my mom’s philosophy.

In fact, it was called—literally—The Anti-Coloring Book.

• M is for Mola Art: A Kuna Indian Alphabet of Quilted Folk Art, for children (Xlibris)
• Please Touch; how to stimulate your child’s creative development through movement, music, art, and play (Simon & Schuster)
• Young at Art: Teaching Toddlers Self-Expression, Problem-Solving Skills, and an Appreciation for Art

• Alphabet of Art (Amazon)
• McGonegal’s Zoo, an alphabet book of Oaxacan wood carvings

Yesterday I challenged you to identity some of my childhood favorite fiction (and one nonfiction) picture books by a single page.

From Harry the Dirty Dog to Leo the Late Bloomer, here are the answers:

Presented for your enjoyment: a favorite page from some of my favorite picture books. 

All are from my childhood, with two exceptions. All are fiction, again with two exceptions. It is not a comprehensive list of all of my favorites, though that does not matter in terms of what I am about to ask you to do...

Can you identify each book from a page?

Answers tomorrow.

Multiple sources, including Bill Finger’s son Fred and Carmine Infantino, claimed that Bill derived some inspiration for the Joker from a grinning figure at Coney Island, in Brooklyn—specifically at an amusement park called Steeplechase Park.

• Bill mentioned the grinning character he saw at Coney Island to the Bat-team (Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson).
• Bill showed the team a photo book featuring Conrad Veidt in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs.
• Jerry designed the Joker caricature on his signature playing/calling card.
• Bill wrote the first Joker story in late 1939 or early 1940. The character looked primarily like Veidt with an aura of the Steeplechase mascot.

By Guy Rowlands

When great powers decline it is often the case that financial troubles are a key component of the slide. The vertiginous decline of a state’s financial system under extreme pressure, year after year, not only saps the strength and volume of financial activity, it also proves extremely difficult to reverse, and the great risk is that a disastrous situation is worsened by misguided and ultimately catastrophic attempts on the part of a government to dig itself out of its hole. So great does the eventual debt become that there is little hope of repaying even a majority of the capital, even with decades of peace and low spending ahead. The protracted financial and economic crisis that began in the West in 2007 provides an appropriate contemporary backdrop for a fresh examination of the decline of France’s financial system in the early eighteenth century under just such a mountain of poorly-backed debt. In the final decades of the seventeenth century France had been the leading great power in the European states system, indeed the only superpower capable of projecting significant force on multiple war fronts. Yet within a quarter of a century it had lost this comparative international advantage, as its financial strength degenerated alongside its military power.

France got into such a terrible mess in the final two decades of Louis XIV’s reign. While war was the essential cause of heightened state spending, as the largest economy in Europe France should have been able to sustain a protracted and extensive conflict, but it could not. The underlying problem was the combination of two classic, fatal ingredients: a weak fiscal base, and a precarious and expensive credit system. The tax base was chronically enfeebled by vast numbers of exemptions and privileges that the government only began to tackle in 1695. But tentative attempts to make the elites — the top 2-3% — contribute more to the costs of the state would, over the following 90 years, prove politically contentious and divisive, sapping the legitimacy of the monarchy. As for the weakness of credit, this arose not just from the problem of weak fiscal backing and the fact much of it was supplied by those entrepreneurs charged with tax collection. It also stemmed from the inherent unreliability of a government dominated by an absolute monarch, which at times was willing to threaten dealers in the foreign exchange and public debt markets with prison and professional proscription for pricing financial instruments on a realistic but unfavourable basis. Compounding these issues were huge concerns over the undependable and sclerotic legal framework for lending money at interest. France was, in short, overregulated, but capriciously so.

In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) this system unravelled spectacularly. As tax yields declined the government pursued dangerous expedients, including the manipulation of the value of the coinage and the issuing of vast quantities of Mint bills: a hybrid of paper money and short-term credit notes. Furthermore, rather than relying overwhelmingly on well-organised advances on tax proceeds from leading tax collectors, the government turned the paymasters of the armed forces into state creditors on a giant scale. Louis XIV’s government became so dependent on these men and other entrepreneurs supplying the army and navy that they were able to make exorbitant demands. Some of them even penetrated the corridors of power as junior ministers, in an early form of military-industrial complex. All this came at a very high price indeed. The financiers and suppliers were rapacious, though they also needed to protect their own solvency and operations by ramping up costs as a form of insurance against arbitrary state management and the increasing number of revenue sources that were failing. These revenue failures played havoc with the system of appropriating revenue sources to expenditure, which was already being disastrously mismanaged by senior officials, and this earmarking chaos in turn threw the state even further into debt in a desperate attempt to keep the failing war effort going. This war effort was pursued much of the time beyond France’s borders, putting yet further strain on the state: Louis XIV needed vast amounts of foreign exchange to pay and supply his armies and allies in Spain, Italy, Bavaria, the Low Countries, and even Hungary. The volume of foreign currency required would naturally have pushed up its price, but the turbulent and deteriorating monetary and fiscal backdrop led international bankers to build astronomical costs into their exchange contracts for moving state money abroad. The failure to control their transactions, the separation of risky payment sources from their additional instruments of guarantee, and the short-selling of this paper precipitated a monumental crash of the exchange clearing system in early 1709 in Lyon, from which the city never really recovered.

By the time of Louis XIV’s death in 1715 French state debt had risen more than three-fold from the size it had been thirty years earlier, and much of that increase was down to a few short years between 1702 and 1708 — the early modern period may in many ways have seen a much slower pace of life than we experience, but financial crises could unfold roughly at a similar pace. The real danger is that it can take as long or far longer to effect a stabilisation and recovery, thus tempting governments into dangerous policy decisions to try to generate swift recoveries. In the years after 1715 the Regency government for the boy king Louis XV took exactly this course, seeking to liquidate much of the state debt by swallowing the snake-oil solution peddled by John Law of hitching debt to a national bank backed by vast speculation on the highly uncertain economic future of overseas trade and colonisation. The subsequent liquidation of Law’s System forced the government into inflicting enormous haircuts on creditors, further eroding confidence in the monarchy, while future generations were still saddled with levels of debt that the state machinery was not designed to cope with. It also condemned the French body politic to a series of destabilising political struggles over state finance that culminated in final breakdown and revolution.

Guy Rowlands is Director of the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews, and author of The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2012). He is also the author of The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661-1701 (Cambridge, 2002), for which he was co-winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize (2002).

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Image credit: Louis XIV and His Family circa 1710. Wallace Collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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“Give me the Love that leads the way The Faith that nothing can dismay The Hope no disappointments tire The Passion that'll burn like fire Let me not sink to be a clod Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God”  ― Amy Wilson-Carmichael   Amy Carmichael is one of a handful of women who have had a powerful influence on me. I never met Amy Carmichael, of course. Her influence on my life, like that of

"How can we help non-Christians understand that being a Christian doesn't mean living up to a standard of goodness, but rather means trusting a good God to do for us what we can't do for ourselves? As writers we have a unique opportunity to tell the world what it's all about. In our stories and in our characters, we can show what it really means to be a follower of Christ, and that means

The cast of Mad Men. Copyright American Movie Classics Company LLC. Source: amctv.com.

With the season five premiere of AMC’s Mad Men coming this weekend, we thought we’d use this opportunity to introduce you to one of the most highly respected scientists in the field of Persuasion. As a matter of fact, many people consider Dr. Robert Cialdini as the “Godfather of influence”. What better way to do that then provide you with the forward he wrote to a just-released book, Six Degrees of Social Influence: Science, Application, and the Psychology of Robert Cialdini. Enjoy his words below and enjoy the premiere.

By Robert Cialdini, Ph. D

The capacity to persuade — to capture the audience, convince the undecided, convince the opposition — has always been a prized skill. But, thanks to relatively recent developments, it is no longer only an elusive art, the province of those with an intuitive grasp of how to time an argument or turn a phrase just so. For most of us, this is welcome news. After all, one problem with an art form is that only artists can truly manage it. But, what about the rest of us? Must we resign ourselves to fumbling away open opportunities to move others in our direction because we so frequently fail to say the right thing or, worse, say the right thing at the wrong time? Fortunately, no. As is evident in the pages of this book, the delicate art of personal persuasion has been transformed into a solid social science.

There is now a substantial body of systematic research into how people can be moved to agree with a request. It is worth noting that the persuasive practices covered in this work rarely concern the merits of the request itself. Instead, they concern the ways in which the merits are presented. There is no question that having a strong case is crucial to success. But having a worthy argument or set of arguments is not enough, because other worthy (yet competing) arguments are likely to exist as well. So, although making a good case is important, it’s the person who can make a good case well who will gain the lion’s share of assent. For the optimal persuasive effect, our focus should be on methods for communicating our case in the most effective manner.

Dangerous Fruit

Before encountering that information, though, a brief foray into the past is in order. The renowned scholar of social influence, William McGuire, determined that in the four millennia of recorded Western history, there have been only four scattered centuries in which the study of persuasion flourished as a craft. The first was the Periclean Age of ancient Athens; the second occurred during the years of the Roman Republic; the next appeared in the time of the European Renaissance; the last was the 20th century, which witnessed the advent of large scale advertising, information, and mass media campaigns (McGuire, 1985). Although this bit of background seems benign, it possesses an alarming side: Each of the three previous centuries of systematic persuasion study ended similarly when political authorities had the masters of persuasion killed.

A moment’s reflection suggests why this should be. Information about the persuasion process was dangerous because it created a base of power entirely separate from those t

One day, this will influence her to fly airplanes….or maybe it’ll just influence her to draw her playing airplanes.

When I was a kid and my dad worked overseas, he would fly back on holidays and vacations always with a bag full of gifts in his hands. One time he came back with a toy airplane that would levitate itself a few inches off the ground. When my dad left I sat on it hard thinking it would fly me to my dad….

…it levitated no more.

This week's 2000ad, prog 1740, features all new stories. One of the occassional 'jumping on progs'. I trust you'll all be doing the sensible thing and getting re-aquainted, introduced or just plain staying with the programme!


This isn't the cover, sadly. This is a mock 2000AD cover based on a Tharg I did for the 2000ad twitter spoof I did with Rich Clements last year - I've spruced it up and added some other effects since then though.

Oh, and I'm now on tumblr too!

I'm still reading and/or re-reading the articles in the front of Alice Pope's 2009 Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market. I think I'll cut these pages out and store them in a binder. I've already discussed "Authors & Illustrators: Dividing Details in Picture Books" by Sue Bradford Edwards. However this edition contains several more articles dealing with PBs along with great articles about

Dr. Karen Dill is a social psychologist who studies mass media, particularly violence, gender, and racial stereotyping, as well as positive aspects of media.  Her new book, How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence, argues against the premise that just because we understand that mass media stories are fantasies, they cannot affect our realities.  In the excerpt below Dill introduces her argument, showing us how fantasy can indeed influence reality.

When I discuss the effects of exposure to mass media with various audiences, one of the comments I hear most often is that anyone old enough to “know the difference between fantasy and reality” is not affected by media content. In other words, fictional stories do not influence us because we “know they are not real.”  This fantasy/ reality argument represents a major misunderstanding of the psychology of the media…

First, let’s look more closely at the words “fantasy” and “reality.”  When an adult says she knows the difference between fantasy and reality, how is she defining each word?  I think by fantasy she means fiction.  According to dictionary.com, the word “fiction” has a variety of meanings.  Fiction can mean a creation or an invention of the imagination.  Fiction can mean a lie…When someone says media do not affect him because he knows the difference between fantasy and reality, I think he means by “reality” that people and situations on TV are contrived or invented.  We know, for example, that the TV show Friends was a fictional story about the relationships and exploits of a group of twenty-somethings.  In what ways is the story based in fiction rather than fact?  Well, the adult audience is aware that the people in the stories are actors who are paid to play parts… The friends’ dialogue is the creation of professional writers.

…When we watch a fictional TV show, we’re essentially imagining “what if” these were real people and these situations and events really took place… to the extent that we believe these characters and their circumstances and relationships are plausible and valuable, we take an interest in them.  To the extent that we buy into the fantasy, we are drawn into the show.

So where does the reality come in and what is a more meaningful definition of “reality ” in this context?  The reality of a fictional story is not whether it is fantasy or a creation; it is whether it is believable and attractive…  Paradoxically then, the best kind of fantasies are the ones that strike us as in some way real or genuine.  I think one of the joys of experiencing really good fantasy and fiction is the very fact that they allow us to imagine “what if”- to feel as though a very interesting or gratifying story could be true.

…Studies have shown that if you build false information into a fictional narrative, people actually come to believe the false information.  For example, in one study, German college students read a fictional story called “The Kidnapping” into which either true or false information had been inserted.  A control…group read a comparable story without the assertions inserted.  One true assertion was that exercise strengthens one’s heart and lungs.  The false assertion was this statement’s opposite – that exercise weakens your heart and lungs.  Results showed that the college students were persuaded by the factual information in the story regardless of whether the information was true or false… These researchers also studied a phenomenon called the sleeper effect – that persuasion through fictional narratives increases over time as the source of the information becomes remote.  While at first the students’ confidence in their newly formed attitudes was relatively low, two weeks later their confidence had returned to baseline levels.  What this research shows is that we can be persuaded to believe false information that is inserted into a fictional story.  Also, over time, we forget where we learned this information and our confidence in its truth increases…

The theory explaining why people are persuaded by information in fictional stories is called transportation.  People reading a book, watching a movie or TV show, or playing a video game become transported, swept up, or lost in the story, even feeling like they themselves are part of the story.  This is one of the appealing properties of media.. When a fictional story transports us, we are persuaded rather uncritically because transportation decreases counterarguing (questioning assertions) and increases connections with the characters and the sense that the story has a reality to it.  Engaging with a story means we have suspended our disbelief, and this facilitates our persuasion to points of view embedded in the story…

This discussion of fantasy and reality reminds me of a funny story line from the movie Galaxy Quest.  Galaxy Quest is a good-natured spoof of popular science-fiction and its fans.  Basically, Galaxy Quest asks what if Star Trek were real?  In the film, the actors who play science fiction characters become embroiled in a real-life encounter with aliens and spaceships… the “commander” enlists the help of some extremely devoted fans he’s met at a sci-fi convention.  Earlier in the story the fans had indicated that they knew the spaceship and its crew’s adventures weren’t real.  However, when the commander needs their help, he tells them the news that those things that were supposed to fantasy really are real…I think fans of Star Trek…found this scene amusing because they’ve personally experienced what it’s like not only to wish that the fictional universe really existed but actually found it so compelling that somewhere deep in their psyches it really is real to them..

Speaking of Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played the role of Lt. Uhuru on the original series, often speaks of another kind of reality her appearance on the show created.  In the fictional universe of Star Trek, people believed in the notions of interracial harmony and equality.  The ship’s officers who were form a variety of racial backgrounds exemplified these values.  Nichols the actress has told of a conversation she had with late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which she told him she was thinking of quitting the show.  Dr. King reportedly responded that she could not because her being in a respected position in this fictional story was affirming and uplifting for African Americans in America…having an African American officer on Star Trek was a real victory for civil rights.

Mike’s insistence and my persistence call to mind the age-old question, what wins in a fight between an irresistible force and an immovable object?

Whichever of the two Mike was that day (November 21, 1987), he won. I signed up to sing (“sing”) my version of “Bad” in the talent show.

I was so nervous that I sat the whole time.

Note two things about the next photo:

1. the album cover next to the DJ
2. the gender of everyone visible in the front row

The crowd, to my relief, did indeed love it. I’d never been cheered for before. And the effect on me was immediate and profound. At the dance that followed the talent show, I went up to a cute girl I had recently met and, in front of her friends, asked her to dance. She (in front of her friends) said no, but Rachel and I did become friends, and still are today.

The next day we left. Our pre-departure ritual sounds so quaint today: we wrote our friends little notes and chaperones distributed them on our respective bus rides home. The reviews were in:

Opinions expressed at age 15 are not necessarily still in effect 20 years later.

2/5/88

8/88

4/28/90

The sheet on the wall behind us covered the word "BAD" written in masking tape; I ripped it down at the start of the first chorus. I remember thinking this was feverishly exciting.

You can see a bit of the "BAD" in masking tape. My friend Seth was discreetly helping me unzip my jacket, which was on backwards in a primitive attempt to mimic one of Jackson's looks. I ripped it off at the start of the third chorus. This revealed a shirt to match that chorus, which is about someone wearing plaid. Again, high drama.

6/5/90

The last performance of "Bad," and most ill-fated, but not only because of that outfit. Separately, pink shorts and baby blue tank tops are misguided. Together, with brown shoes thrown in as a bonus offense, they are unforgivable.

Since June 25, I have debated posting on this topic. Coming up on a month later, I won the debate. (That’s one nice thing about debating yourself—you always win.)

I owe my writing career to Michael Jackson.

In 1987, starting my sophomore year in high school, I was a bit adrift, more withdrawn than I’d ever been. People who had been my friends in middle school had gone in a different direction without me. But people I had been friends with back in grade school were coming back into my orbit—one in particular, Mike (still one of my best friends today).

Mike saw things quicker than most people. He and these other kids I was becoming reacquainted with were members of the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, a nationwide Jewish youth group. Since the spring of our freshman year, Mike had been trying to persuade me to join—not because he had anything to gain from it but simply because he thought I’d thrive in it. Ever the sly pitchman, he would work me, casually mentioning the aspects of BBYO he thought would most appeal specifically to me.

I resisted until the fall. The tipping point, which in retrospect should’ve been the most obvious ploy, was when Mike told me “Every weekend we have sleepovers. With girls.”

Even though this turned out to be only partially true—it was not every weekend—joining would be a step up for a guy who spent most Friday and Saturday nights home (doing what, I honestly don’t remember). So I went to my first meeting, and felt warmly welcomed by new-old friends and strangers alike.

At the same time, one of the most eagerly anticipated follow-up albums in rock history had just come out and was dominating the pop culture landscape: Bad by Michael Jackson.

I liked the title song so much that I wrote a parody of it. It was also called “Bad.” (I wrote it the nights of October 12 and 13, 1987. I just checked—those were not weekend nights. And for the record, this was a full four months before the most famous parody of the song—“Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Fat”—was released.)

I shared my parody with Mike, already my comedy-writing partner for articles for our BBYO chapter’s newspaper. He loved it.

A month later, some two hundred BBYOers from my region bused up to the frosty Catskills in New York for the annual Fall Convention—two nights in a hotel without parents. (Hence these conventions were anticipated even more eagerly than follow-ups to blockbuster albums.)

The programming highlight of these conventions was the Saturday night talent show. Perhaps I should write “talent” show. But still, there were always at least a couple of funny performances and watching bad ones could be just as fun.

I was still on the shy side when Mike directed me to the talent show sign-up sheet and encouraged me to sing “Bad.” Not breaking with tradition, I resisted. He assured me that the audience would love it. And to prove it, he was willing to put himself—and the other four guys in our little gang—on the line. He said they’d all come up there with me and “dance in the background.”

I thought all of this was a bad idea.

Really, really bad.

No singing ability.

No choreography.

No rehearsal.

No idea that this four-minute parody I wrote for myself was about to turn me back into the person I was and the person I was perhaps destined to be.

Part 2 (including photos) tomorrow.

Is it possible to convey the particular essence of a writer’s style – its unique flavour? That’s no easy task, but luckily for reviewers and blurb writers in a hurry, there’s a convenient shortcut, which is to suggest that a book be seen as the literary lovechild of two others. Philip Reeves’ Here Lies Arthur, for example, might be described as “Morte D’Arthur crossed with House of Cards”, while Animal Farm would entice new readers under the banner of “Charlotte’s Web meets The Lord of the Flies!” If you don’t like the idea of these Frankensteinian creations, or are simply squeamish at the thought of beloved classics making the beast with two backs, an alternative is draw on the vocabulary of mind-altering drugs, as in “Coraline is like Alice Through the Looking Glass on speed!”

This way of putting things makes life easier for the reviewer, and can be a service to the reader too, to whom it says, in effect, “You liked Author Y, why not give Author X a go?”

Well, that’s fine, but what does it say about the writers themselves? Writers tend to be ambivalent about the whole notion of influence. Of course, all writers have influences, and most will admit to them. I was delighted when reviewers said that some of my books were reminiscent of Alan Garner. Garner was (and is) a hero of mine, and someone whose influence on me has been palpable. What better model could one take? At the same time, I didn’t want to be seen as just an Alan Garner knock-off. I wanted to be recognized for my own voice. So my pleasure in such acts of recognition was never entirely free of chin-jutting rebelliousness. This quasi-Oedipal anxiety is of course exactly what Harold Bloom’s classic, The Anxiety of Influence, is all about.

Besides, we live in an age that fetishizes originality and novelty. Nothing could be more complimentary than to be described as a “A unique talent”, “A fresh voice”, or “A writer who shows as little respect for convention as a hyperactive toddler at a society wedding.” In that sense, to be compared to anyone is a little galling. Thus, J. K. Rowling (remember her?) caused some irritation with her refusal to admit that her work was steeped in the tropes of children’s fantasy literature, presumably because she feared that to do so would diminish her achievement. In fact, much of her work only makes sense in the context of those tropes.

What would I recommend to the hapless blurb writer, torn between praising a book in terms of other books and praising it for being one-of-a-kind? If I had to pick a cliché, I think I would go for “In the tradition of...” It’s a phrase that settles the matter equitably, paying due regard to the fact that writing comes from somewhere, without closing off the possibility that it may be going somewhere else. So, blurb writers of the future, remember the phrase: “This is a highly original book in the general tradition of Alan Garner.”

Alternatively, just go with “The Bible crossed with Shakespeare... on speed!”

It’s Banned Books Week and I’ve been discussing issues of access. Today the Boston Globe has this alternatingly irritating and sweet article this week Bookmobiles’ final chapter?. Forgetting for a moment that they broke the cardinal rule of using dippy headlines to downplay whatever seriousness the article might have had, this story talks about the demise of the bookmobile at the same time as it reports on the Beverly Public Library’s fundraising attempts to buy a new one. It seems, again, like a reporter has decided on the article they wish to write before actually learning about the topic and if I were the Beverly Public Library I’d be pretty annoyed that this article frames the bookmobile idea as something from a bygone era. The article doesn’t even have the wherewithall to cite any actual data preferring to allude to experts saying “Some blame skyrocketing gas prices. Others say bookmobiles became irrelevant in communities where residents can get easy access to other resources, such as the Internet.” The caption of the photo even puts the word “Bookmobile” in quotes as if it’s some weird made-up library word.

Do people really think that the Internet is replacing the bookmobile? I’d be much more inclined to think that increasingly mobile patrons and the increase of decent school libraries has done more for making the bookmobile less needed. We still have bookmobiles, part of the year, in rural communities here. Heck we have a mobile DMV vehicle that comes to remote towns to help people register their cars. Not everyone can drive the 45 minutes from here to the DMV, particularly if their car isn’t registered. The ALA is the voice of reason in this article, with Satia Orange quoted as saying “There are communities where bookmobiles are the primary place to get information, in rural areas where getting to a library is difficult or a low-income area where computers are not in every home, where people cannot afford to buy books.” Let’s keep in mind that if you’re rural enough to not have a nearby library you probably also don’t have nearby broadband.

Here’s what an Internet Bookmobile does in Finland. [thanks urmas]

Many of us have a bookmobile fetish. I know I do. I was heavy in negotiations with the Internet Archive to get to drive their bookmobile around NH/VT with Casey this Summer but life intervened and it didn’t happen. How happy was I, then, to see my friends James and Shinjoung from FreeGovInfo as well as Sarah from the September Project [and a colleague of mine from MaintainIT] driving the adorable van around Northern California. Steve Cisler wrote about the Internet Bookmobile for First Monday several years ago and it’s an article worth reading.

Sarah’s bookmobile posts are here, James and Shinjoung’s posts are here. (hint for drupal blog maintainers, you’ll get better results in Google if you change the URLs for your texonomy to include the term not just a number). They’re still going, through September 15th, if you’re in Northern California, see if you can see them.