Sotto Voce.

Our boys asked if they could share their thoughts on California’s Proposition 8 with the Courage Campaign’s Please Don’t Divorce… photostream on flickr. We here at Sotto Voce Central believe that any couple should have the right to marry because, quite simply, love transcends all. We’ve seen it, and we believe it.

I found out about the campaign through The Joy of Tech, which is part of this complete nutritious breakfast reading.

We’re in Santa Fe for Christmas with my mom and brother, and yesterday morning we awoke to some pretty impressive white stuff.

It came down hard until around 10, then we went and shoveled the driveway and sidewalk to earn our keep. The clouds scuttled away, allowing the snow to glow and sparkle against the trademark vibrant deep-blue winter sky.

The most memorable sight, though, was during the thick of the snowstorm. Against a gray backdrop of driving snow emerged a lone figure, leaning into the wind as he trudged up the street. He could have been straight out of Scott’s lost expedition, wrapped in a thick hooded jacket and large backpack, snow crusted up to his booted knees, picking his way carefully with a ski pole in one hand . . . and a cell phone in the other.

lol i may be some time kthxbye

Feliz Navidad über alles.

The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki has some interesting things to say on the future of revenue-generating newspapers: “News You Can Lose.”

The money quote:

“The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. … But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.”

Note, of course, that Surowiecki’s article is offered for free, in its entirety, on the New Yorker website before most subscribers’ issues arrive in the mail. It’s not unreasonable for subscribers (like me) to ask, “Why the @#$% am I paying for a subscription to this @#$% magazine when everyone — including me — can read it for free online? I’m canceling my @#$% subscription right now!” (I have endowed my hypothetical subscriber with Tourette’s.)

Granted, a New Yorker subscription costs less than I spend on Girl Scout cookies in a year — the sub price is something like $0.50 Zimbabwean per issue — but when the advertisers see declining subscription rates and start getting nervous about running their nice big expensive ads, that’s the big drain plug right there.

What’s true for newspapers is true for magazines as well: if we want to avoid getting what we pay for, we’re going to have to start paying for what we get.

It’s that @#$% simple.

# # #

P.S. — Not long after writing this, I read a recent article by the very-smart Paul Graham in which he bandied about the word “free” in a way that made me cringe. I feel increasingly uneasy about how fast and loose we play with that heavily-loaded word, particularly when it comes to “free” newspaper and magazine articles on the Web. And so I found myself composing the following observations:

1. “Free” is qualified. While an article might be free for readers, it certainly cost the publisher something to create and make available. Whether it’s server and bandwidth expenses, staff salaries on project time, or the writer’s travel expenses and the phone bills he racked up doing interviews, expenses were most certainly incurred.
2. The customer is the one who pays. If the advertiser is the only one giving the publisher money, he’s the only one that the publisher has to worry about pleasing.
3. Therefore, no pay = no say + no stake. And we citizen-readers cannot afford to lose either.

I know this is all Business 101 stuff, but a lot of people are forgetting that capitalism is a closed cycle. Anemic revenue from online ads is causing advertisers to grumble ever more loudly. The current model is unsustainable, and it can’t be levitated by chanting articles of faith (”Om mane the web has changed how business is done peme om”) ever more fervently.

Newspapers and magazines of the world: make the readers your customers.

(NOTE: My faithful PowerBook has been in the shop all week for a RAM upgrade and a bigger hard drive, and since that’s where my incredibly temperamental and precariously calibrated scanning software resides, I can’t typecast until I get it back. Poor thing doesn’t even know that Obama is president. It’s gonna be so happy.)

So for the past five years, I’ve been very casually writing a novel that’s set in the 1950s and is an homage to flying saucers, pulp sci-fi, and duck-and-cover paranoia.

So when she was in town to promote Balticon this summer, my favorite science fiction writer, Connie Willis, told the audience that she’s working on her next novel, which will be set in the 1950s and is an homage to flying saucers and duck-and-cover paranoia.

So yesterday at the Baltimore Writers’ Conference, Larry Doyle told the audience that his next novel will be set in a parallel universe in which everything is an homage to the 1950s and pulp sci-fi.

So should I:

1) Try to hurry up and finish my novel so that reviewers can say I’m just another hack who’s trying to hitch a ride on the bandwagon?

2) Let the novel come out in due course so that reviewers can say I’m just another hack who missed the bandwagon?

Go.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Right now I am still bleary-eyed from staying up to absorb every last drop. Every moment of the advancing electoral map throughout the evening. Every sweeping shot of the cheering crowd in Grant Park. When President-Elect Obama (Lord, how I love the sound of that) stood at the podium and summoned history in service of the future, suddenly, somehow, he was not alone on that stage anymore.

We didn’t want to go to bed. And even after we finally did go, Mrs. Sotto Voce and I kept breaking out into spontaneous giggles for a long, long time.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about last night’s two speeches. While President-Elect Obama’s was one for the history books, I found Senator McCain’s farewell address to the troops to be every inch the gracious and classy exit that I had hoped the old lion would make.

But as Sen. McCain left the stage and disappeared behind history’s curtain, the music that accompanied him off sent a message — and a quite surprising one — all its own.

Music, you ask? What music?

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