In the current climate of economic downturn and fiscal retrenchment, governments, nonprofits, charities, and all sorts of interest groups are seeking positive ways to sustain funding for social goods and services.

Although it’s easy to surrender to a sense of crisis and long emergency, the world’s current money problems have created a context in which proposals for dramatic change are accepted as part of the status quo, rather than risky exceptions. This is an era of upheaval and change, and radical ideas are being proposed in many sectors.

Two prominent and very different examples of experimental, state-based solutions to the social funding conundrum are the Obama administration’s Social Innovation Fund, with its focus on “innovative community-based solutions”, and the Cameron government’s ever-nascent Big Society Bank, which seeks to develop “a sustainable market for social investment.”

Perhaps the best independent example of a new community-funding model for art projects in particular (though the model can be applied to any project) is Kickstarter, which essentially uses the power of individual micro-contributions to make big and small projects possible, without having to submit to the arbitrary will, interests, policies, timing, and inefficiencies of a big organization, or a cadre of powerful individuals.

Canada, as is its wont, is of course paddling along carefully in the arrière-garde in this exciting time. We tend to build dams and slow the flow, preferring the security of the steady pool to the rush of the river; we call out to those forging ahead, suggesting that they slow down and join the rest of us, instead of encouraging them to forge even farther.

So here’s my dam-busting proposal for one big, radical change Canada could make to its traditional social funding model, one I think is appropriate for our times in more ways than one, and hence perhaps achievable:

The Canadian government should institute an ‘Artists Exemption’ on income tax similar to the policy the people of Ireland have enjoyed for the last forty-plus years.

Under this system, the first €40,000 of annual income anyone earns from their works of art is not subject to income tax.

Although the details of how this would work in Canada need to be spelled out, for now I’d just like to give some reasons for implementing an Artists Exemption here.

- Companies get tax deductions for capex because they’re adding to the country’s industrial infrastructure. Since art works are additions to our cultural infrastructure, people who create new works of art should also get tax breaks. They are also many other things, but it is a fact that works of art are material goods produced in Canada that generate revenue, and they deserve the same serious treatment other industries receive, including manufacturing.

- Art makes a big contribution to our national, provincial, and local economies. But there is an inherent cyclicality to the process, which means that an artist might make C$40,000 one year, and then nothing for the next year (or more) while she’s working on her next project. An ‘Artists Exemption’ will effectively smooth out the artist’s income tax contribution over time, better reflecting her average annual income. In a sense it’s just another implementation of conventional deductions for losses, but from the revenue side of things.

- Evidence from Ireland shows that the benefit will go towards those who are poor or who aren’t making a middle-class income. According the Irish Writers Union, “In 2007, 69 per cent of those who benefited from the exemption had incomes of less than €20,000 per annum; 77 per cent had an income of less than €30,000 and 82 per cent had an income of less than €40,000″. This is important in part because it means the benefit to the individual artist and her family will outweigh the relative cost to general tax revenue. (To paraphrase Coleridge, an extra penny in the pocket means more to the poor man than the same penny would mean to the rich man.) It also means that all of her money goes right back into businesses in the local community, since she clearly isn’t making enough money to save or travel. Also, with the security the exemption provides, a highly-skilled artist can devote more of her time to her high-value work, doing more good to the Canadian economy than she would wasting her time at a low-skilled job in order to make ends meet.

- Of course the legislation would include restrictions so that the benefit does not go to very high earning artists (such restrictions are now in place in Ireland).

- For those grumps who generally don’t like artists, let me point out that artists are in a very important sense small business persons. They generally do not have the protections that other ‘workers’ get from being part of large institutions, like a government department or a corporation. Artists may sometimes be shy or in some cases even hypocrites about this, but the fact is that they carry out their business in a highly competitive environment, and they make their money from sales, whether it’s from tickets to the ballet, or the music festival, or their play, or from sales of their books or paintings. Since their business is valuable to the economy but inherently risky, cyclical and independent, they deserve special tax protection.

- Note that the exemption applies to everyone who produces works of art, not just ‘artists’. You don’t need to be elevated to the status of ‘artist’ by any committee panjandrum or be inducted into the self-declared arts conformity in order to benefit; you just need to make art and have a supportive audience.

- Per the previous point, in this form of support for artists, there’s no middleman (except of course the CRA, but they’re always there in any case). The benefit to the artist is linked directly and transparently to the effort she puts into developing an audience or community of supporters. If you can’t find an audience, no harm done; if you can, your audience’s contributions to your work go more directly and completely to you.

- This would largely end the absurdity of forcing artists to pay income tax on the government grants some of them are lucky enough to receive.

There are a number of other benefits an ‘Artists Exemption’ on income tax would bring to Canadians, and to Canadian society. For example, it might help keep more artists in Canada, and it might attract artists from abroad. And it might help some artists get off the sometimes seigneurial, drip-feed life-support of grant-dependency, freeing up funds for other artists.

It’s dishonest to suggest we reduce taxes, or increase funding for government programs, without talking about where the impact will inevitably fall. However, it’s not reasonable to talk about how to handle the impact until we know what that impact will be. That will require a careful study carried out by policymakers. But I suspect that because the benefit of the exemption will accrue largely to people who aren’t making enough money to pay much tax anyway (which magnifies the relative benefit of the exemption in their individual lives), the negative impact to general revenue would be minimal. It would also be offset by the efficiencies gained from freeing up highly-skilled arts workers to devote more of their time to their most value-producing labour. And of course if it does in fact attract artists from abroad, and keeps more artists here, the fiscal benefits would be even greater.

If you think this is a good idea, please use Twitter and Facebook to spread the message. And please send a message to James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages by using this contact form. As John Ibbitson at the Globe pointed out recently, the government is looking seriously at all kinds of reforms, and we need to make every opportunity we can to contribute positively to the changes they’re going to make.

The Artists Exemption was recently subject to significant reform in Ireland. Here are some testimonals to its impact.

[Update: Check out this article from the Economist on the contribution US artists make to the national economy.]

[Update: And here's an interview with National Gallery of Canada director Marc Mayer.]

Where are we? Speaking for myself, I am wandering underneath a complex of decaying overpasses in Memphis, Tennessee. I am taking photographs with an old Yashica Medium Format camera, and metering the light with my iPod Touch. When I get home, I’ll take my negatives to my local lab, and when they’re done, I’ll scan them and put them up on my website or on Flickr.

I’ll admit to you that I am old enough to have begun taking photographs before the digital camera really existed. But I am young enough that I left my old film cameras untended in the closet when the price and convenience of digital photography overwhelmed my love of chemistry. Look, you don’t know me but let me tell you, I have never been an early adopter.

Can I say this now? There was something about the ludicrous colours and saturation of the early digital images that overwhelmed my critical judgment. The fuchsia reds and impossible blues I saw on my first colour monitor were not simply the reproduction of a scene; they were an announcement that film was dead. And me? I was part of the futuristic network mob helping to kill it, or at least, letting it die. Another thing about me: despite appearances to the contrary, I am a desperate conformist.

But film hasn’t given up. Instead, in peculiar ways, film has worked its way back into the network of billions of images that we share on a daily basis. And what is more curious is this: a large number of digital photographers have rejected the hyper-real pretensions of the early medium in favour of filters and effects that mimic the aberrations and limits of film photography.

From Photoshop to the iPhone, huge numbers of digital images are now processed so that they look less like the crisp digital pictures that a high-end camera is capable of producing, and more like the analog images we imagine they could be. Of course, there are many in the traditional film community who complain that this push-button nostalgia is a poor substitute for the complex chemical processes that lie beneath the classical photograph. But I think they may be missing the point, and for two, interconnected reasons.

First, I think there is something exciting about the way in which millions of people rejected the early ideological presuppositions of the digital image. Remember that just like early film photography, this technology was commercialized by technicians who placed the medium’s capacity to reproduce reality above everything else. But the more time elapses, the less we seem to pay attention to any medium’s claims to verisimilitude.

Here is the second point, and it brings us back to me, or us, really. I switched to digital when I moved far away from home, and I wanted to have a way of sharing images with friends and family. By the late 1990s, the internet had penetrated far enough so that I could do this with most, if not all the people that I knew. Despite the insufficiencies of the digital medium, the emergence of the network society had pushed film to the margins. But it was not pushed to margins because it was less capable of reproducing reality, instead, I think it was because the physical photographic print was not easy to digitize and share.

The mass availability of scanning technology that is easily linked to the internet has made digitizing film photography much simpler than in the past. And, complex digital filters have given millions of users the ability to manipulate images in all sorts of ways, taking us well beyond the simple reproduction of reality. The saturation and reach of the internet means that we can not only transform our pictures, but share them with others. We are in a strange and wonderful world of hybridity, where material processes combine with immaterial networks. In this world, the either/or of film against digital makes little sense.

In 2000 I was working for a wireless applications company. While we were busy retrofitting 80s-style games to accommodate the limited capability of cell phones, another technology was migrating from Europe and Asia: SMS messaging. The ability to send short messages over a data line seemed to have limitless possibilities. Then again, it seemed to have none; what the heck could you say of value in 140 characters? Even we, an office full of geeks, agreed: it would go nowhere.

Fast forward ten years and a hundred gajillion text messages, Twitter, using a self-imposed 140-character limit, is now the fastest-growing, most ubiquitous communications tool on the planet.  Created in 2006 as simply a conduit to exchange “short bursts of inconsequential information,” Twitter is at the centre of celebrity feuds, social trends, and bloody revolutions.

It is also a fiction publishing phenomenon. While not as popular as keitai shosetsu (literally, cellphone novel) in Japan, it is increasingly being taken on by serious writers, serious wannabe writers, and seriously get-on-the-bandwagon publishers.

So the ADD generation (the average Twitter user is between 25 and 34, so you can’t really blame the kids) is squeezing their fiction ya-ya’s into 140 character bursts. Some examples:

At eye level, the herring gull floated on thermals, searching the white-capped waves. Its call, sharp, echoing, jolted me. I stepped out. Proving that Twitter really is an impressionist’s delight.

After the rockfall they crawled blindly, holding each other’s heels. At some point they realised there was no beginning or end to the line. This one comes with its own cliffhanger.

I said that the winding flight of stairs would take you to the princess. I never said there weren’t poisoned arrows. It never hurts to borrow from the classics.

While serialized fiction hasn’t really captured the imagination since Charles Dickens, there’s no reason to hold your breath. Even James Joyce can get in on the action: at two sentences per burst, it took booktwo.org eight months to tweet all 24,765 lines of Ulysses. Then again, I started the book when I was 15 and still haven’t finished it.

More recently, Reif Larsen captivated his followers with dozens of “mysterious package” tweets (I am at box #54, with still no sign of the center. At least the boxes are getting smaller. #54 was the size of a woman’s fist) that narrated the opening of a matryoshka box that showed up at his doorstep one day.

If you are on your way to the great twit novel (probably an apt description in more ways than one) you might want to stop by twitip for a few encouragements (What’s great about a Twitter novel is that your content is no longer static) as well some warnings (More than five Twitter posts on any given day can be dangerous).

Hard to say what’s gimmick and what’s the beginning of something transformative or game-changing.  I’m certainly no expert, having poo-poohed cell phone applications from the get-go (all the while designing them). But inasmuch as technological advancements freak me out with their echoes of EM Forster’s The Machine Stops (be careful of what you finish at age 15, it stays with you forever), it seems to me that Twitter fiction does one thing well: it takes the writer directly to her readership.

With its horizontally expansive platform, identifiable followers, daily freshness, and built in feedback loop, the writer is instantly part of a community of sorts. Communication goes both ways and conversations are begun.

But be careful what you wish for: in Forster’s 1909 story, the world is an underground maze of individual living pods where people are connected only via large screen internet-style monitors. But disaster strikes when the machine eventually crumbles and stops, forcing inhabitants out into long abandoned corridors and passageways. Repulsed by the actual sight of each other they are unable to save themselves from destruction.

So, tweet away writers. Go wild with 140 characters. Pile on the hashtags and rack up the followers. Just remember to leave the house every now and then. Oh, and learn how to grow a vegetable or two. It’s a practical skill for when the machine stops.

A recent facebook share of the Oatmeal’s “How to use an Apostrophe” chart prompted a friend to express that he felt the apostrophe on the whole, was more of a hindrance than using it properly was worth: why not stop using it altogether? Don’t we ‘get it’ without wasting precious texting characters on often-misused teardrop-shaped silences anyway (so he implied)?

My personal affront with grammar-gauche internet parlance is on par with that of those who shy from words like ‘parlance’: we the word snobs who point out that, for the love of god, it’s ‘80s not 80’s in every comment box we come upon are as unpopular as grade-school snitches. Why fight it? Why not just hand over the lunch money their wanting alot from us? Well all get along better neways.

Perhaps it would be simpler to slip into an onomatopoeic porridge, pre-fifteenth century sans Cawdrey’s 1604 standardization of spelling, where words gained poetic illumination through the addition of an extra vowel. You have to admit there’s charm in the Chaucerian sound. Writers worth a penny know that if you’re intentionally misspelling, you better have a good reason for it. Allowing free-form spelling and grammar to go the distance could radically unite us! We’d understand each other despite personal choices about whether they’re, their or there best describes the location of something. It all sounds the same when you’re pointing at it.

However, we know that the legal and medical fields, to name a few, would suffer, for an improperly-placed comma can make all the difference between a crucial clause or an unnecessary slice. Whether a reader is seasoned or just learning, the eye stumbles on irregularities. For most, our language centre inexorably links sounds to two-dimensional shapes as we learn to read: patterns are key. This is what written language is: we’ve moved on from hieroglyphics, and even they had rules of style. Rendering grammar, usage and spelling patterns chaotic because it’s too hard to learn how to use an apostrophe is being lazy about the language, and very much like trying to raise the Babel tower, and we all know how that worked out.

~~~

*I should note here that text and chat-speak have their own valid and highly useful lexicon, which is not of consequence here…unless the chatter forgets the difference between mid-term paper and txts to bffs, producing gems such as “Hamlet was like—imd, he killed my dad so wtf, wdyw?”

“Hamlet was like—in my defence, he killed my dad so what the f***, what do you want?”

It was a dark and stormy night… April 26, 2011. A few hunched figures scurried from their cars seeking shelter at VV Taverna, Montreal. The weather was fit for neither man nor beast. But translators are a hearty bunch…

I have heard stories of literary events that have failed to attract crowds, but this particular night was my baptême de l’air.  To mark World Book and Copyright Day, the Literary Translator’s Association of Canada (LTAC) had organized an evening of readings and discussion featuring authors and their translators. French-German translation team Louis Bouchard and Marie-Elisabeth Morf, Jacques Godbout and his Russian translator Ludmila Proujanskaïa, Quebec author Jocelyne Saucier and I were to form a panel, to be moderated by Louise Desjardins.

The panel table was spot lit and a row of microphones were in place, looking very official. The hour the event was to begin came, and then went. The door opened, and all eyes turned to it, hoping to see the audience stream in. Then, shoulders sagged in unison when a lone person appeared, a friend of the bartender, wondering what he had done to disappoint. In the end, we had six panellists, two hosts, a barman with a literary bent and three audience members. Thank god for friends and family.

It turned out to be more than enough. We dispensed with the mics, formed a circle next to the fireplace, drank beer and talked about translating literature. Every member of the audience beamed with the keenness of at least ten, and panellists became audience members when they weren’t speaking. We all went home quite satisfied, except for the organizer, who was a bundle of nerves, the poor dear.

I’m not going to bemoan the lack of interest in things literary. I’m not going to gripe about how translators don’t get no respect. There are no fingers to point here. It was April 26, 2011; Game 6 of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Habs against the Bruins. The Bruins, for god’s sake. There’s not a translator on earth who could win against them odds.

***

LTAC, by the way, does fine work organizing both casual and more formal literary events that showcase translated works and try to bridge the gap between Canada’s two literary divides. And VV Taverna on Bellechase in Montreal deserves our custom for gamely hanging a sign that night that said “No hockey tonight. Literary event instead.”

In a podcast entitled “Language”, the writer/actor Stephen Fry expounds on his idea that the English language isn’t evolving as it should. Unfortunately, according to Fry, the evolution of the language is being inhibited by an insistence on outmoded rules of diction, syntax, and punctuation. Grammar, says Fry, is keeping us from expressing ourselves freely and imaginatively.

I don’t necessarily agree with Fry that language is not evolving. As a professor in a Department of English, I get to watch its evolution every day. My students use words very differently than I do. They use nouns as verbs, negatives as positives, cultural references as common knowledge. I won’t show how un-cool I am by trying to provide examples. Just know that, with some effort, we manage to communicate very well and that I learn from them all the time.

And, to be fair, Fry does know his grammar. Early on, he acknowledges that there is a difference between “less” and “fewer”, “disinterested” and “uninterested”, and “infer” and “imply.” But, he also states that “none of these are of importance to [him],” and then he acknowledges his own grammatical error of using “are” when it should be “is.” Clearly, Fry is in such command of his English that he uses improper constructions on purpose to prove a point.

His point is that, instead of insisting on archaic rules, we should pay closer attention to context. After all, we know what “five items or less” means or what a speaker, given his or her age and education, really means when he or she says “disinterested.” We can get it. So the grammar police should stop complaining.

But aren’t we already considering language in relation to context all the time? We take body language into consideration during a conversation at a party just as we think about the friendship when we read a single sentence e-mail reply. I often remind myself that, given the context of the relationship in which it occurs, the abrupt letter/e-mail/wall post might not be as aggressive as it sounds.

I think that adding another layer of contextual interpretation to replace adhering to the rules of grammar will make communication even harder. I worry that, eventually, we’ll be left to infer so much meaning that we won’t actually communicate at all.

You can watch Matthew Rogers’ animation of Fry’s podcast at: http://vimeo.com/15412319.

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