Self Publishing - Part 2 - Text

Commercial publishers provide services, at least to their more famous authors, that handle every step from editing to marketing. Some even suspect the writing. They often use outside printers. On demand publishers, essentially, take over the functions of the job shop, and leave the rest to you.

The tasks you assume require some knowledge and some computer software, most likely Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader. Before you dismiss services as so many high-priced automotive accessories, consider what it would cost to do something yourself, and how important it is to be done well. Remember, even your nearest and dearest will resent buying a sloppy product.

The first step is the editorial work. To writers this should be the easiest. I had a manuscript I was comfortable with, so didn’t care about editorial services. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded a skilled editor, but I thought my chances of getting one were slim. I’ve rarely found someone who could do critical reading as well as I needed, but then I’ve worked as a technical editor and taught English composition and can do the basic work myself.

If it’s been years since you worried about grammar and punctuation, the surcharge may be worth it. One thing many don’t advertise is the cost of errors. Many publishers invoice you for every correction they make, once the manuscript is accepted. I discovered my space bar had stuck and my spell checker hadn’t caught problems when words merged with dates. The bill for putting back the spaces was $2.00 a space, plus baseline fees.

Other skills in the editorial process that are not disclosed are the techniques used for revisions. My publisher sent the proof in an Adobe file. For the first galleys, I read 500 pages aloud from my small screen. For the second iteration, I printed it and read the typescript. For the final, I only ready the pages where I expected corrections. It doesn’t take long to learn how to "go to" specific pages in a PDF document, or to print them out.

The method for requesting corrections was another matter. My publisher expected me to enter them into a Word table. It took me a while to figure out how to manipulate the table features, then I had the usual problems with Word converting initial letters into capitals. If I didn’t catch the inadvertent changes then the publisher’s literal minded clerk put unwanted capitals into the manuscript, and I had to pay to have my text restored.

A hard copy option for corrections exists, for a price.

Once you consider the tariff for mistakes, professional help may be a good investment. Mine finally ran to about $300. If you live near a college, there’s always a pool of talented, conscientious people who need money who post their names in the copy shops. Alas, there’s also a pool of the untalented or avaricious. If you discover this is what you’ve got, remember it’s probably easier to break a contract with a local than with your publisher, and you have less to lose in the battle.

The proffered levels of help range from simple proofreading and grammar checking to something more. One offered referrals to ghostwriters, and some will type your manuscript.

The second step is preparing the submission package. Most companies ask for the same things: a manuscript, cover art, and cover text. Essays for a web site are required if that is part of the marketing service they provide, not just for you, but for themselves. I learned the last could be changed later without penalty.

Most companies take your manuscript and prepare it for the text publishing software. That is, they do the aesthetic work - change the fonts, add page numbers and page headers, chapter breaks. However, the fine print for one company required the writer send a print ready manuscript. The usual service was an option for every price level.

What "print ready" appears to mean is that you take your manuscript and convert the paragraph structure to the standard indented first line you see in most novels, not the blank space and flush first line used in scientific writing and this column. Then, I assume you do all those formatting changes that make a page look like a book, and finally save the results in a PDF format.

The current list price for Adobe software that will produce, not just read, a PDF file is $450, about the price you’d pay for the base package from a number of publishers. If you already own the software or have a future need for it, then you can weigh various costs. Otherwise, select a publisher that only requires a Word or text file.

However, beware there are still potential problems. My publisher claimed all I needed to submit was an electronic document and it would do the rest. I had problems when it transformed my scientific style paragraphs and there were block quotations in the paragraphs. The software assumed the sentence following the quotation was a new paragraph and that every quotation ended a paragraph. I could not get my publisher to correct problems when the quotation was, in fact, embedded in a continuing paragraph, and I had to refuse accepting the final proofs until some paragraphs were corrected.

My second problem came with my word processor. I use WordPerfect. I had Word translate the text which introduced more errors than if I had let WordPerfect do the conversion. Special characters were not interpreted correctly, including double and single quotation marks, dashes, cent signs, British pound signs, and some special letters in foreign languages. The usual French and Spanish letters like ç and ñ presented no problems.

During the production process, my publisher allowed me to separate my errors from its, and only pay for the former. What I discovered was that it was much easier to get my errors corrected than its. I was still trying to get some special characters corrected when I refused to accept the final proof. The most egregious were Riga and Kyoto, with a club in the Latvian word and an omega in the Japanese. In the end, Riga appeared without a line over the i, while Kyoto had the proper line over the first o. As happened at several critical stages, I ended up having to accept less than I wanted to get the book out.

Most of my serious problems could have been avoided if my publisher had assumed an author was capable of doing some of the preparation. It needed to provide two levels of customer support, one for people whose computer literacy was limited to email, typing a manuscript and shopping on-line, and another for people like me with some experience with computers.

The best defense is to try to get technical specifications from as many publishers as you can, and assume the rules for one apply to all. Then, reformat the manuscript into the standard paragraph form, making sure you use what are called curly single and double quotation marks. If you have special characters, make a list and include it with the submission as a warning.

Don’t go any farther. Formatting directions are part of the information you send with the manuscript, not embed in it. It’s a good idea to play with the various formats and fonts available with your word processor, but only so you understand the questions asked by your publisher.

Remember, at this point, your only audience is a computer program manipulated by a technician who is not paid to read your book. It is always easier for everyone if you send a simple manuscript with accompanying notes, rather than introduce problems by trying to do formatting that may look beautiful, but is not what the computer expects.

Self Publishing - Part 1 - Selection

Like some 30,000 other people a year, I recently decided it was time to do more than write a book. It was time to be published.

Since I’m no longer affiliated with an academic institution and its hierarchy of snobberies that pass for tenure requirements, I didn’t care if it was an act of vanity. I soon discovered there’s a more dignified name these days: publishing on demand.

I noticed in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books that several of the major electronic publishers listed books in the small press advertisement. The books they selected, or, more likely the ones whose authors paid for marketing services, tended to be books I would actually want to read.

Something is obviously wrong with the publishing industry if the independents are more interesting than the commercial and the academic. We can all make educated guesses about the influence of conglomerate ownerships and books treated as cost centers. The internet, or more specifically computers, have reintroduced the diversity that existed in the past.

When I began, I wanted to know which company to use, and, more particularly, if any, or the industry as a whole, were a scam. I didn’t find much useful information on the internet. Since there were no reports from states’ attorneys general, I assumed the industry was legitimate. A friend gave me a writer’s magazine, but its article was promotion. It would never name names lest it offend potential advertisers.

I later realized these bastions of consumer protection couldn’t work. When I got angry at my publisher for its multiple near breaches of contract, I realized the cost to sue would be greater than the cost of the book. One appeal of the publishers on demand is their affordability, which means they attract customers who don’t have resources to fight back. The absence of legal actions means nothing.

When I was looking, I couldn’t find any comparisons on the web. I’ve since heard Mark Levine has published one that’s available for a small price. His focus is the legal contract and rights the author retains to his or her manuscript. Many web commentators made the same point: avoid any publisher who makes any proprietary claims to your work. You want to be able to change publishers quickly if you happen to be successful.

A year ago, only Morris Rosenthal made any recommendations for free. He lumped all the companies together, and said it didn’t matter which you selected because they all used the same technology. They made their profit from bogus services, and the main criteria should be price. He suggested their biggest snare was your Cinderella dream that someone would do what a commercial publisher had not, discover you were the next best seller or Nobel prize winner.

He is technically correct. But, it is a service you are buying, not a generic object in a plain brown wrapper. And there are very real differences in what you get.

The way to begin, at least for me, is to define what you need and what you expect. One publisher required a copy of the manuscript before it accepted it. While it suggested it was reading it, its main concern was eliminating pornography, libel and books that didn’t have enough sales potential. These included children’s picture books, religious testimonials, and some kinds of fiction. Some publishers don’t do poetry or cookbooks because of difficulties with formatting.

Even though I had jettisoned prejudices against vanity presses, I found I still cared about the company I kept, and thought I would be more comfortable with a publisher that was a little discriminating in what it accepted. I didn’t much want to show up next to a porn sight in an alphabetical list of authors, although it might increase my sales.

Other writers are interested in royalties and selling prices. There are differences between companies, but with a typical company, you need to sell at least 100 books to break even on a $500 investment in a 250 page book sold through the publisher’s website. It’s 200 books if you sell through other outlets, like bookstores.

Lest that sound easy, Lee Goldberg quotes some Publisher’s Weekly numbers that less than half a percent of the books put out by the largest self-publisher sells 500 copies in a year. My initial investment translated into 300 books sold through both kinds of outlets. Add-on costs took that to 450 books before I even had something to hawk.

I didn’t expect to break even on the project, and so did not worry about who had the best or most efficient royalty effort. I simply assumed picking a larger company might be a guarantee against the rapaciousness found in the music industry.

I wanted the book to have enough respectability to be acceptable to town librarians, a group I considered to be discerning about quality. That meant it had to have the attributes of a commercial book., an ISBN number, a copyright, and Library of Congress citation.

Everyone offers the ISBN, along with on-line availability through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders in a modestly priced package. They profit on your sales, and so they want to make sure it can be purchased. Cheaper options exist and are ideal for family, club or community projects.

The other items I valued were options, and not offered by everyone. One publisher said it didn’t bother with the copyright office or Library of Congress because you could do it yourself and gave web site addresses.

It’s true you can do the copyright yourself. The copyright office tells you the basic cost is two copies of your book plus a fee. I figured that came to about $100 for my book, if I did it myself. Anything in the option price above that was overhead and profit. If it was not exorbitant, I was willing to pay for the convenience.

The Library of Congress web site refers only to submissions by a publisher. Further it says that while it will provide a pre-publication control number for any submitted book, it will not consider it for inclusion in the collection and catalog card unless it’s a hardcover. That requirement narrowed my options to publishers who offered both the LC registration and a hardcover option.

My next decision was based on what was required to submit a book. I called or wrote to different publishers for specific information about formats. Some refused to send information without repeated requests; some sent advertising and not technical specifications. I decided how they responded to my questions was probably a useful indicator of the service I would receive and eliminated some more companies from my list.

I subsequently realized this is the single most important element in satisfaction with the publisher. I did not have a single customer service rep who answered email, and when I coerced them to answer, found none could implement my sanctioned requests with the production department.

If you don’t like the response from the sales person who handles your inquiries, do not expect things to improve, and don’t be surprised it things deteriorate once the company has your money, which most demand at the time you sign the contract.

Once I had my list of potential publishers winnowed to those who offered what I wanted at a reasonable price, I compared the available methods for submitting the manuscript. I live in a rural area with poor internet service and a manuscript that was potentially too big to transfer without corruption. Some companies would allow me to mail them the manuscript on a disc, some refused, and some wanted to charge a hefty fee for what is ultimately five minutes work transferring files from one media to another. That became my final criteria, and effectively narrowed my choice to one.

Sources:
Copyright registration, see copyright.gov.

Goldberg, Lee. Quoted by Morris Rosenthal.

Levine, Mark. The Fine Print of Self-Publishing, available at book-publishers-compared.com.

Library of Congress registration, see pen.loc.gov.

Rosenthal, Morris. 2005. Several columns at fonerbooks.com.

Dance - Part 1 - The Nutcracker

It’s that time of year again - pumpkins are replaced with sugarplums, and we get our annual dose of culture with the obligatory Nutcracker. For several years now, I’ve respond by choreographing a version in my head that abandons pandering to children and rescues it from the implicit association that art must be sweetened for the obese masses.

My premise is quite simple. Instead of one company, use a different troop for each dance. Eliminate the boredom of a single choreographer who can only identify different styles of dance with props like fans and chopsticks; replace it with the real thing. Every person on stage must be able to dance. No more cameos for patrons and their brats

It’s easy to see act two. Imagine, a flamenco company doing the Spanish dance, a group of belly dancers doing the Arab, a Ukranian folk troop doing the Russian dance. For the Chinese, I’d recruit one of those dragon dance groups I associate with New Year’s celebrations.

The snow scene is easy to visualize - a genuine full classical corps de ballet, with soloists, pas de deux, pas de trois, and other combinations, all in white tutus, all women. When the choral part begins, the singers enter in the rear. Of course the music is live. The women are in full length tutus and ballet shoes, the men in white pants, white turtlenecks, silver tunics and jazz shoes. The men are the ones who pull the ice sleigh at the end of the scene.

Staging the rest of the ballet requires thinking about the narrative. I would set it in contemporary times, and have four children. The curtain would open on a living room with Clara in jeans combing the hair of her younger sister Cora. Her older sister, Carla, would be on the sofa at stage left rear with her hair in huge curlers, talking on a phone with a long cord using moves reminiscent of those from 1950s Broadway shows. Fritz is dressed and playing with his truck.

The Drosselmeyer catering firm is finishing its set up to the right. The company sent two black dancers. The male rushes over to add finishing touches to a theater arch downstage left; the maid fusses over the small table with a punch bowl downstage right. Please, no complaints about racial stereotypes: this is a snobbish, upperclass home that hires the underclasses.

The mother comes in, shoos off Carla and Clara, sends the caterers to their places behind the table, then takes her position with Cora and Fritz. Guests arrive. The men gravitate to the drink table and demonstrate golf swings, the older boys upstage left feint basketball moves, the young boys downstage take turns showing off to each other, perhaps a clogger, a shoeplotten, a Michael Jackson imitation. Her husband joins the men, the daughters drift in when they’ve changed costumes. The women’s ritual of air kissing is exaggerated when each new woman and female child joins the reception line.

The guests would include one couple with two teen-age children, one a boy for Carla, the other Carla’s confidant. A second couple would have two boys, one for Carla’s confidant, one for Fritz. The third would have two young children, one for Fritz, one for Cora. No one for Clara.

The adults are professional ballroom dancers. After the initial formal circle dance, each would get a solo spin doing a different style. Some might not fit the music as well as waltzes, but I’m sure salsa or tango dancers know how to adapt. The teenagers could demonstrate what ever is the current teenage jazzy dance.

It’s while the teenagers are dancing that Fritz begins fighting with his two friends, and the male caterer rushes over to start the entertainment - the dancing dolls. The first is a native American for Fritz, maybe a Hoop Dancer. The second is a statuesque Martha Graham dancer for Carla, who uses Carla and her friend as assistants, all dressed in the flowing Greek gowns we associate with that style. The last is a Black tap dancer who does a Bojangles routine to Cora and her friend’s Shirley Temples.

Nothing for Clara. The caterer realizes the problem, and pulls the nutcracker from under the drink table. Fritz gets petulant, and breaks it. The guests realize it’s time to leave. While the caterers are removing the table, the mother walks off with Cora and Fritz making faces at each other behind her back. The father gives his arm to Carla and they do a high strutting cake walk off stage.

No one notices the child in the middle, Clara, who settles down on the sofa to repair her nutcracker.

When the stage is empty, the caterers do their mock minuet followed by jitterbug dancing of the kind seen in pictures of Negro dance troops from the 1930s and 1940s. Clara applauds; he gives her a huge hush sign and they exit. Stage lights come down, then blink on and off as the tree in the center rear grows.

When the lights come back on, there are two dolls in fluffy tutus by the tree, one on each arm of the nutcracker. The three dolls from the party scene are posed outside the arch. A troop of soldiers stands or kneels in rows to the right.

The mice begin sneaking in while the dolls do their mechanical toy pas de trois. They are acrobats who have all the best parts as they gambol, form pyramids and leap around the soldiers. When they get too near the doll arch, those dancers protect themselves with karate style moves; the mice roll around, play leapfrog. The toy soldiers start to move, but fall like dominos when the mice tease them. It’s the comedy of insouciance against rigid authority.

The mouse king enters to great bows by his subjects, strides over to the nutcracker, picks him up and starts to toss him about. At this time, the part is danced by a teenage boy. Clara fells the mouse king, the nutcracker rolls over, and the toy soldiers right themselves. They are male dancers recruited from Broadway. They use a high kick line to push off the mice, then get a full chorus line turn.

Clara repairs the nutcracker again, and the two young dancers get a short pas de deux before the exit for the snow scene. Clara must be old enough to wear pointe shoes.

The opening of the second act is always difficult. It’s now set in the tropics with a backdrop of jungle vegetation. Oil or candles burn on tall columns. The curtain opens with a troop of southeast Asian dancers in ornate golden, jeweled costumes. Everything is meant to contrast with the cold north of the first act. Clara and the nutcracker, now adult dancers, enter in a sleigh that’s been transformed into a golden gondola pulled by black panthers.

After the ritual four dances, a troop of Afro-Cuban or African dancers enter. No more Mother Goose. Towards the end, the candles burn out, and the sky begins to lighten for dawn. The dancers leave the pair alone on stage.

Then, the jungle comes alive. The waltz of the flowers is given to a mixed company that can do Balanchine romantic ensemble work. The women are jungle flowers, the men in greens. Then the sugar plum fairy’s danced by a jungle queen, and the pas de deux by the adult Clara and her nutcracker prince. Towards the end, the cats return, and the flowers retreat. The panthers are male dancers, modern or classical, who do the male corps work we haven’t seen before.

For the finale, the couple returns to the gondola which is moved to the far right, and selected members of each group return for the farewells. There’s no reason people from the first act can’t also join this scene. Indeed, a few mice tumble across and land at the feet of the panthers, look up, quickly assume a passive position on the floor. The caterer and maid appear last to let us know Drosselmeyer has brought us this entertainment. He brings back young Clara and her nutcracker for a final turn before the curtain closes.

This kind of dance extravaganza is only possible in a few places like New York where there are so many kinds of dancers or Washington where embassies send their best. They’re probably also the only places with enough wealthy patrons to pay the price of admission.

Realistically, the stage manager would need to be saint. The producer’s legal firm would have gargantuan headaches getting so many prima donas to come together for such small parts and accept a Les Trocs clause, no bows during the performance. Don’t think about dressing rooms. And, as I’ve said, many of the dancers would have problems fitting their work to the Tchaikovsky score. But that union of talents is part of the fantasy that makes this a celebration of the spirit of dance.

Language - Part 3 - Politics

Political discourse is all but extinct. This year, it has gone through three phases in election advertising in my area.

In the summer, commercials ran reminding voters that one of the candidates had given money to candidates in other parties to weaken the opposition. The political tricks had been well documented at the time. Still, people complained to the station who aired the commercials forcing it to explain it was required to carry any valid political announcement. It is not clear if the complaints actually came from offended listeners, or were orchestrated by the accused politician, as an attack on anyone who dared recall hard facts.

About a week ago, the political ads aired by that radio station descended to parody with outrageous accusations against candidates from an unknown environmental group, followed by a disclaimer by a better-known group. Since no reputable political group would accuse a politician of selling horsemeat to the French or playing tapes of wounded wolves, I suspect a Machiavellian stealth campaign to build sympathy for the attacked candidate and antipathy for environmentalists.

Now we’re in the final stage of campaigning, and the commercials never mention the party affiliation of the candidates and are produced by unknown organizations, identified only by web addresses. As I head for the poll Tuesday, my head is filled with names disassociated with any useful information.

When the public arena is filled with noise signifying nothing, disquieted voters are left in a state of ennui. Since I left the academic world, I have rarely heard a political comment from any but those who repeat their daily doses of blogs. No doubt, it’s a matter of politeness, an internalized belief that one does not discuss politics or religion in public.

This year it’s different. Several friends have brought up politics, not so much to promote a candidate, but to indicate they’re uncomfortable with what’s going on and really don’t know what to do. I even had a customer begin to express anxiety about the election, until she remembered her manners and apologized.

So far the conversations have gone no farther than initial expressions of anxiety, perhaps because I haven’t made encouraging noises. I suspect I would need to act as a therapist, encouraging them to talk, like the friend who listens to the abused wife or alcoholic grope for her or his first public confession. I’m not that patient about something I care about, and I know, if I said anything, I’d more likely lapse into a diatribe which would harm the friendship.

The destruction of political discourse has gone beyond the public arena to inhibit the private one. When language is neutered so people do not understand what is going on, when any attempt to speak the truth is brutally attacked, they fall back on pre-linguistic verbal tools that express their mood without putting anything directly into words. Unconscious concerns bubble up through the reserves of articulate people and what is alluded to is more potent than words would be.

But language is our means of understanding, and without it we’re incapable of rational acts.

Language - Part 2 - Art

In a recent essay about John Sell Cottman, Sanford Schwartz commented on the ubiquity of drawing masters in upper echelon homes in the early nineteenth century. Rather a commonplace, except he went on to suggest it was a tool for amateur historians and naturalists to record their explorations of the English countryside which were then an activity of the most advanced intellectuals.

When I sat with a box of watercolors in public school, I never considered them an implement for exploration. I assumed we were condemned to them by economics. They were the cheapest possible medium that was the easiest to clean from clothes. Certainly, none of my teachers, either in elementary or secondary school, gave the slightest hint the paints were good for anything more than filling some obscure requirement that children be exposed to the arts.

The use of watercolor by Cottman’s friends would have been both an accompaniment to natural history, and an antidote to it. Following Linneaus, the language of plants became more and more precise, and more and more focused on the reproductive mechanisms that probably were not discussed by male teachers with properly educated young ladies. Painting allowed enthusiasts to continue to focus on what interested them, any discrepancies with reality could be excused as impressions, especially after Monet and others looked primarily at the effect, not the reality.

Once photography was available to people of my social class, the function of the amateur disappeared. The obsessive connection between art and the reproductive aspects of botany continued in the work of Georgia O’Keefe, certainly not someone mentioned in my Michigan hometown in the 1950s. But then, I don’t remember hearing Monet’s name either.

Photography was promoted for preserving memories, the emphasis was on portraits. In a period when the affable were praised and conformity expected, the camera gave people a way to preserve their position in society, to make the everchanging concrete.

Scientists, who implicitly trust impersonal technology over unreliable human senses, preferred photographs to illustrations in field guides. When I was a child, lecturers would visit town to show their photographs of plants and animals; if they were flush, they had films. I don’t remember an artist ever being booked for the nature travel series.

Contrarily, I find guidebooks with photographs the most difficult to use. Sometimes I think plants are included only if they take a god picture, since tiny flowers in my yard don’t appear. The closeups, while true, aren’t usually what I see. If the plant is still available I can get on the ground and stare, or reach down and pick it. But if I saw it from a distance, I can do nothing but turn pages in frustration.

I prefer line illustrations grouped by flower color and shape (implicitly, plant family). I usually can get a rough match that provides a genus and potential species. With that, I can look the plant up in other books and make a determination based on the descriptive words.

I rarely use the field guide I have that uses watercolors and photographs. I suspect the artist took the pictures to aid her memory when she did the paintings which are neither detailed nor impressionistic. She lacks the skill of Cottman, and gives only dabs of color for flowers, but renders stems and leaves with relative accuracy.

Now, I can take the tentative name and turn to the internet, where I find digital photographs posted by people like me. They vary from mass planting habitats to the closest closeup. With patience, it’s possible to find someone who sees something exactly the same way, and finally identify a flower.

This summer I bought a digital camera, and for the first time, picture taking is free - so long as I already have invested in a computer. The high costs are still in reproduction, in color cartridges and paper for even the cheapest printer. But storage is cheap. I already owned a zip drive, and at $15, the discs are the price of three rolls of film, when I last had film developed. They store considerably more that 102 pictures on those three rolls.

I rediscovered the joys of exploration and the frustrations of art. I began by taking pictures of flowers in my yard. I was soon disappointed by poor color, and began experimenting with settings that control the amount of light. After some trial and error, I am able to photograph roses and other pink and yellow flowers, but the color of blue flowers never comes true. I’m assuming there’s some technical limit in my camera in how it records the reds and blues it sees.

The camera’s focus is beyond anything available when I was a child. I can get closer to the subject before things get fuzzy. There are limits, which I’m sure are overcome with money. I probably cannot get pictures worthy of Linneaus, but I can see the hairs on a Shirley poppy stem and the scales on the cup holding an aster.

I’m not a natural scientist. I have to work at seeing things and logging them. I assume this is an innate aptitude for those who stay with the discipline.

The thing about my pictures is I realize how feeble is my memory and how poor are my writing skills. I may look on the same things as the camera lens, but one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t capture what I see. Only later can I appreciate that it preserves what I didn’t notice.

I simply lack the linguistic skills to write about the plants that interest me. One part shirks from the absolute precision of botany, when, if I mastered it, I suspect I could barely communicate with myself. My observations would be as dense and obtuse as the papers I wrote in history in graduate school.

The alternative for writers has been pure poetry, which focuses only on impressions.

My experience of nature is somewhere between O’Keefe and Monet, between Linneaus and Wordsworth. There is no language for what I see.

I think this is the less the result of a failure to write, than the fact that watercolors and pencils made it possible for people to communicate without words. Art, even poorly rendered sketches, was far better at preserving observation and memory than writing.

With that realization, the focus on the drawing master suddenly becomes much more obvious in the world discussed by Sanchez. It was indeed as important as the mathematics teacher, who taught the rigors of science, or the French and dancing masters who taught social skills to children who saw only their siblings and cousins.

The masters represented, not artifice, but an engagement with the natural and, according to Schwartz, historic world. Language didn’t develop because it was not needed.

Digital photographs represent a revolution in botanical illustration. Even more, it may be restoring the world of the amateur that bridged the arts and sciences and disappeared with the professionalism of both. The technologies of the internet and digitalization make it possible to revive the world of Cottman described by Schwartz and rebuild the missing link rued by C. P. Snow.

Sources:
Schwartz, Sanford. "The Neglected Master," The New York Review of Books, 21 Sept 2006.

Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," 1959.

Conspiracy - Part 4 - Cory Lidle

The recent crash of Cory Lidle’s airplane into a New York apartment building illustrates the dynamics and limitations of modern news.

By chance, I heard the first rumor like I did the one on September 11, from a woman who was sent a flutter by all the possibilities that drifted into her head. Last time, the Cassandra greeted anyone who came into the work area, with the latest news. This time, the magpie found a media outlet on her computer to listen to, at full volume, so we couldn’t miss a word of it or her commentary.

The thing that’s striking is how few people remain calm in the face of the unknown. From the beginning it was a small plane or helicopter and a small, unimportant apartment building. Common sense should have said it was not a terrorist attack.

But, of course, reporters had to ask the question. Denials by government officials sounded irrelevant since the known facts were still one plane, one small fire. No second plane, no architectural catastrophe, no gluts of dead or injured bodies, no missing persons with hysterical relatives calling the media for names. It didn’t really matter if they were informed or knee-jerk denials, there was nothing to deny and they sounded silly.

By the end of the day, editors looked lazy for retaining those paragraphs in every lengthening stories that
compounded knowledge rather than reporting it.

Police barriers kept journalists from the scene, so there were few to interview. Most were as unreliable as witnesses usually are. Some were minor celebrities who volunteered their names with information, a photographer, a novelist. Since they lived in the building, they inadvertently added contextual background, by placing the building in New York’s social structure as not one significant enough to attract the attention of a strategic bomber. The Trump Tower would have aroused my office mate.

When the fire was extinguished with no more crashes, the web-available stations reverted to their regular programming and the self-important woman returned to her work.

The other person in the office, the man who flies a small plane, and I continued to talk desultorily. I suspect that every crash awakens anxiety for him, the way serious accidents resonate with amateur race car drivers. The woman was only interested in anything about John Kennedy Junior’s death.

His interest increased when the name of the plane owner, Cory Lidle, emerged. None of us were big enough sports fans to know who he was or who are still playing in the off-season games.

At that time there was little information except Lidle either didn’t have a license yet or had just earned it. The danger of inexperience was important to my co-worker. We didn’t yet know the flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was only 26 years old, not the grizzled, war tested ace of movies who would have taken the controls and saved the day.

After work I went to the local wellness center, with its single, low volume television screen that the caretaker jocks had set to ESPN. The story had morphed into a human interest sports report with wannabe celebrities competing to inflate their importance by their near association with the slightly more famous. I heard about the normal guy who happens to play ball, the teammate who supported charities. The career cut short, the child who would never know a father. But no games were cancelled; there was only the obligatory moment of opening silence.

I heard nothing about why an athlete could cause an accident. Any possibility that drugs reduce responses will disappear into a hobbyhorse for someone, whose very predictable comments will render then worthless. Likewise, any penchant for gambling.

Certainly, nothing was said about how the arrogance of success might make a 34-year-old panic or refuse to turn over control to a flight instructor, or about the possible infatuation of a trainer awed by a client who babbled athletic skills could be transferred. No one mentioned the failures of Michael Jordan and Walter Payton when they tried baseball and auto racing.

Any deeper stories about the nature of sports were already gone. By the next morning, the official spokesman who confirmed Lidle’s death owned his ball club, not the fire department or federal government.

Only a few continued to discuss Lidle’s actual career, from the time he got his chance as a scab in the 1994-1995 player’s strike to the seven games he played for the Yankees who did not win the pennant. Some grumblings came out that he condemned his fellow players for not having his winning spirit and some complaints from the criticized that he never finished a game, left it to others to salvage his messes. All the usual drama of any small group of disparate people thrown together by chance job skills.

Of course, there were no comedic speculations about what kind of terror attack a ball player would engineer. Now, if they were still competing against another New York team, one could wonder whose apartment was hit, but that’s as far as that story could go. They weren’t in the series, and the attack wasn’t in Detroit.

No one tried to visualize a terrorist attack with small planes, each filled with explosives, flying a convoy up the Hudson, peeling off to take out individual buildings. We know the military responded, that jets from Selfridge were heard over Mount Clemens, no doubt headed for Dearborn. Again, visualize the damage if they attacked that hypothetical convoy of explosives, assuming they could get down to their level.

My office mate speculated on an angry man who’d lost his apartment in a divorce settlement who was going to get even, and didn’t care who got hurt. One could go farther, and postulate the man was so angry, he got the wrong building or so incompetent he couldn’t aim the aircraft and got the wrong apartment.

Comedy is possible, but the underlying anxieties run so deep, public humor is not permitted. The lone pilot is as dangerous as the bicyclists from Palestine, and not to be imagined. Neither is an exploration possible of the sociopath’s opposite, the normal individual grown desperate by circumstances. Only one person slipped the slightest hint about despair after defeat when he denied any suggestion Lidle committed suicide.

We’re left where we were in 2001. We have poor, vain local reporters, inexperienced editorial staffs, conventional bureaucrats, decently trained professionals and no political leaders until a story has developed. George Bush made no comment that afternoon that betrayed any interest in the possibility that gripped television watchers in the first minutes or any sympathy later. His stories stood: we wouldn’t invade North Korea and the acts of Mark Foley were reprehensible.

One knows Clinton’s political instincts would have driven him to make some comment that he had followed the story and shared the concerns of his fellow Americans. He would have learned who lived in the burned apartments and made some phone calls. Even Nixon had better instincts: he would have called the ball club, found Lidle’s most famous, closest teammate to commiserate with.

The story that didn’t develop is the canonical one about how we confront the world, our fears of the uncontrollable when comedy and despair are not permitted. Surprisingly, there were no calls by the on-line media to popular psychologists or therapists who would address these for us.

This time the underlying story that attracts the day late politicians who tap the latent fear of conspiracies and blame other jurisdictions is how is it possible small planes can get so near buildings in New York City. The answer’s simple: men with money buy planes, and, like Lidle, want to go sightseeing and there’s no reason, except paranoia, why they shouldn’t. Stopping all freedom of movement is probably as futile as preventing players like Lidle from playing badminton or getting pilot’s licenses.

The story that continues is the central mystery, what happened. There is still no reason people won’t trust findings of the NTSB. So far, the interests of those who would gut investigations or pervert them with coverups have been stymied by fear of lawsuits by corporations that own, maintain, manufacture or insure planes that crash. It’s just that the answers aren’t immediately obvious, and it takes time to reconstruct what happened. Political influence will play in how quickly the problem is solved. How many resources are available before the next crash could reveal the hidden costs of slashed budgets, lower taxes and deficits, but won’t.

No one yet knows who was at the controls, and some suggest we may never know. That question is the one most susceptible to corruption, since the name of the pilot will be important to the estates of two widows and myriad insurance companies. Friends of both were soon saying neither man would have been showing off, neither was a hot shot, quickly implying it was the plane or conditions that were at fault. Cirrus soon countered Lidle had never taken any of their training and more ominous adjectives appeared for the weather.

In the meantime, people like the man I work with are the ones to listen to. They are the ones who will continue to ponder the pragmatic and philosophical issues of flight.

North South - Part 1 - Traffic

Sitting at a traffic light is one of those times I can’t do much except stare ahead, so I let my mind wander. Instead of following the byways of Walter Mitty, I find myself pondering the ways traffic reflects the values of cities who install traffic lights.

The one thing all planners do is try to slow drivers to prevent accidents. Beyond that, they have little in common.
In Detroit in the early 1980s, legend held that lights were set so a driver, who went the correct speed, would never stop for a second light. Automobiles are the local economy, and no one wants driving to be a painful experience. The ideal speed for each town was passed on as covertly as the name of the local bootlegger in prohibition..

New Jersey in the mid-1970s was divided between traffic circles in the north and jug handles in the south. Both were attempts to engineer the roads themselves to control traffic flow. Circles were the more challenging. You entered on the edge, and by centripetal force ended in the center before trying to edge out to make an exit. If you failed, you simply went around again. It was all a bit of a carnival ride, an exercise in vertigo that made my favorite circle the one that emptied into a road with an overpass for horses leaving their barns for a racetrack.

In Georgetown in the mid-1970s, drivers simply ignored lights. Whenever traffic moved, people would charge into intersections, even though they knew they wouldn’t clear when the light changed. Gridlock was not just deliberate; it manifested that every single person was too important to yield or compromise for the greater good.
Abilene, Texas, came close to that attitude in the middle 1980s. Someone had installed a traffic circle, but someone else erected stop signs at two places. If you came from the south, as I did, you had to stop every few feet. If you came from the wealthy neighborhood, you never stopped, never had to yield, and certainly never experienced vertigo. The democratic forces of the one were overruled by the power elite of privilege. I admit, I used to fantasize dropping those drivers into northern Jersey.

In Dallas in the early 1990s, I used to imagine the drivers suddenly transported onto Telegraph Road or a Detroit expressway. They had no concept of fast lines to the left, slow lanes to the right. The three lane road north towards Plano were always stopped as slow cars filled each lane. Since the only shopping mall was miles up that road, I turned to mail order catalogs. E-commerce hadn’t developed yet, but it was an idea waiting to be born.

If the patterns in Detroit and New Jersey demonstrated efficiency which promotes egalitarianism and the Texas roads showed the elitism of the old south, the place I live now exemplifies traffic in a world where government either does not exist, or is directed by people who think it a costly luxury.

The place I live has never risen above family ties to organized government. I go through four lights to get to the post office. They not only are not consistent among themselves, they are not consistent to themselves. Sometimes, the left turn arrow is at the beginning of the cycle, sometimes at the end; sometimes both directions get the arrow, sometimes only one. When only one gets it, sometimes only turning traffic is allowed, other times through traffic is permitted. Then, since they are supposedly on demand, sometimes no arrow appears for several cycles.

The most accidents I see continue to be at the lights that were placed where there were the most accidents. People act on the patterns they expect, but haven’t learned to cope with no pattern. The only sure thing is someone will run the red light.

In the town where I work, it’s worse. The city planners seem to think the smooth flow of traffic is as dangerous as recreational sex. Folklore says the merchants don’t want traffic to move where the chains are building, and think making traffic bad will encourage people to continue to use them. I learned early to either do my essential shopping early Sunday morning, or get through the place as quickly as possible early Saturday to shop in the next city.

Even so, I often get stopped at every single light early Sunday morning, and marvel that people still have accidents at that hour. It got worse when they were widening the road near the area where the big boxes were building. The cops ran speed traps, ticketing anyone going more than ten miles through a construction zone when no men were working, no equipment was stored and the pylons had been moved.

I used to visit some of the stores in that area to see what they had; I haven’t been back since the road construction, except when it was absolutely necessary. I’m usually in such a foul mood by the time I get through the traffic, that I grab what I need and get out as quickly as possible, irritated even more by long check-out lines.

When one drives through cities on the interstate the landscapes look like the cities have been homogenized by government engineers. The persisting variations in surface roads may be as surprising as the discovery that red and blue states signify more than political preference. The roots of the differences are probably the same.

Back during the age of Andrew Jackson, politicians argued the function of government in encouraging economic growth. Northerners promoted internal improvements like turnpikes and canals, while southerners argued limited government. When automobiles appeared, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio built turnpikes; Detroit started it expressways. Folklore says North Carolina developed speed traps to fleece northerners headed for Florida and to harass and intimidate Negroes.

Enabling legislation for interstates depended a great deal on Eisenhower arguing the military necessity of moving materiel quickly. The first exit opened near by Michigan hometown in 1959 just three years after the act was passed. It took southern cities choked by traffic years to take advantage of available money.

Where I live, there still are no good roads. When I told a woman I work with that one deep ravine on a county road I cross to get to my house has no shoulder or guard rail, and that the dry river bed beyond my house has no bridge and at least one woman has flipped her car there during a storm, she dismissed the problems. She said, don’t you realize how much bridges cost?