2011 June | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Jun

caught the early plane back to London, fifty acorns tied in a sack

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Still editing the same novel.

I got to talk to Tess Gerritsen about this project when I was at Muse and the Marketplace. I felt so self-conscious during the whole conversation that I became at least three separate people. But the topic of the seminar she’d given was How You Know If You Have A Good Idea, and she’d solicited suggestions from the audience. So I had an in.

She listened to the concept, asked a follow-up question, then nodded. “There’s something there,” she said. “How many words is it?”

“Fifty-five thousand.”

She winced. “Too short. You need a subplot.”

And it’s true that fifty-five thousand words is too short for a commercial novel. Unless my name is enough to sell a book (and it isn’t), almost no publishing houses would be interested. The fixed costs are such that it’s not worth their time.

(As a tangent, this is also an argument for breaking away from traditional publishing arrangements. People still read novels that are shorter than seventy thousand words. The thin paperbacks that you find in used book stores and that you used to find in wire racks in drug stores? Between 50K and 60K. So there’s demand for it. Just not a demand a big publishing house can profitably satisfy)

When I started editing this draft, I made note of places where I could add more detail. I tend to write few, if any, descriptions in a rough draft. Why do I need to describe what a bar looks like? I think. It’s a bar! There’s beer and walls and a TV with the game on. But normal people need concrete details to give them a sense of immersion. So I make notes with red pen in the margins.

I also realized that my heroine plunges into the mystery at reckless speed. This is good for pacing, but it means what she does for a living gets short shrift. While I didn’t pull a complete Homer Simpson on the first draft (“do you even have a job anymore?”), I saw that I could add more detail here. So more notes.

As a result, the editing process has meant a lot of writing. The 53,000 words (I fudged a little for Gerritsen) are already 59,000. And I’m a third of the way through the manuscript. By the time I’m finished, I could break 70K easy.

This wouldn’t bother me if I hadn’t gone from the rough draft to the second draft by taking so many words out. I pared it down from 58K to 53K. Now I have to bump it back up to 70K. Every time I sit at the computer, a constant refrain of do you even know what you’re doing, do you even know what you’re doing hums in my skull.

Not that reverting to the rough draft would help me. All the words I took out in the first draft needed to go. They were stale crust. They were the result of writing like I talk, rather than writing what I wanted to say.

Editing your novel doesn’t make it perfect. Nothing makes a novel perfect. There’s no such thing as a perfect novel. There’s “not done yet” and “good enough for deadline.” The problem with a novel on spec is that no one’s given me a deadline. So I can rush out a half-baked product or I can tinker with it until I’m dead and leave it for my heirs to deal with.

The neuroses that editing induces are mild, and they’re nothing a tall gin and tonic can’t address. Add plenty of ice; garnish with lime to taste.

Jun

when johnny comes marching home again

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

A two-man panhandling team worked the MBTA Red Line on Monday evening.

One was dressed in full Army fatigues: BDUs, boots, cover, duffel bag slung over the shoulder. His jacket had a tag that said “U.S. ARMY” and a flag on one shoulder, but no other patches or insignia. As soon as the doors closed at Park Street, he began asking people for money. He claimed he needed bus fare to Philadelphia, but the amount he asked for kept changing.

The other boarded at the same time. Mid-twenties, dark hair short but not buzzed. “I got a few bucks for you,” he said. “I used to be’na Army.” He slouched in his seat. The jeans he wore had no crotch to them; just a ragged hole showing his faded briefs.

“Bet if everyone on this train pitched in a buck,” the crotchless man said, “you’d have bus fare.”

The complete lack of insignia on the Army man’s fatigues were one sign: no skill badges, no shoulder tab, no name tape. But even before I considered that, I had these two pegged as panhandlers. There’s that odd tone that beggars have, the combination of pleading and righteousness (“I just needa coupla bucks”). People who are genuinely entitled to money are more angry; people who are genuinely desperate are more tearful.

The two of them rode three stops, from Park Street to Central Square. As the train entered the station, the man in the wrecked jeans got up. He beckoned the man in fatigues with two quick fingers and stepped off the train. Maybe they were going to do the same routine inbound, although you have to pay to cross the tracks at Central.

A tweaker in surplus Army fatigues pleading for a fix bothers me in a way that your other Red Line panhandlers don’t. Not because I think it tarnishes the reputation of the Armed Services. It’s not my Army, and the people I know who’ve served will tell you there are plenty of tweakers in uniform.

It bothers me because it exploits such a dominant social trend. Most civilians can’t disrespect a man in uniform. They just don’t have it in them. So when a man in anonymous BDUs says he just needs a few bucks for bus fare, our first reaction – ignore him – gets overwritten.

I’m surprised we don’t see it more often.

Jun

blood, tits and scowling

Posted by Perich at 9:04 am

New post up on Overthinking It about premium cable’s favorite genre for historical drama: Blood, Tits and Scowling.

And yes, it’s a genre:

The beauty of Blood, Tits and Scowling as a genre is that, when you put them all together, it creates a perpetual engine for drama. A competent showrunner and a good production team should never run out of episode ideas.

Start things off with forbidden love. Two handsome young people fight against their attraction but eventually succumb (tits). When her father / brother / husband find out, there will be hell to pay (blood). Meanwhile, his indiscretion can be used as leverage against him by a sinister manipulator (scowling). How will our lovers escape from this quandary? Either through violence (blood) or intrigue (scowling). Then there will be a temporary reprieve (tits) before the cycle begins anew.

Check it out.

Jun

ready to give up so I seek the old earth

Posted by Perich at 7:44 am

Look, Conor, I’m as intrigued as anyone at the Paul/Frank bill that would end the federal prohibition on pot use. In fact, it’s something of a shame that it’s taken two crusty white men to introduce legislation that would improve the lives of a few million young black men. Were there no better opportunities? Was there no one else in Washington who tried drugs as a youth and whose trajectory to power would have been halted by an arrest for possession? None of the last three Presidents? Anyway.

Unfortunately, Conor’s taken too deep of a drag on this story:

Are Republicans serious when they say that the federal government should cede power to the states? Where do liberal Democrats really stand on drug prohibition? Congress must now confront those questions, thanks to Reps. Ron Paul and Barney Frank. [...]

Hailed as the first bill of its kind to be introduced in Congress – that’s expected to happen later today – its states’ rights approach is significant, and forces defenders of federal drug policy into their weakest position.

[...]

Of course, the bill is likely to fail anyway. In killing it, however, various hypocrisies will be highlighted. As a result, federal prohibition of marijuana will wind up marginally less tenable than before.

Right. That’s the one thing the legislature can’t handle. Hypocrisy. Oh, no, my position on one issue is inconsistent with my position on other issues. Let me kneel in Gethsemane and pray on the night before the vote. Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this spliff from me: nevertheless not what I toke, but what thou tokest. Amen.

Jun

overthrow the effigy, the vast majority

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I had some time to kill in the Inman Square / Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge weekend before last, so I hit up some used bookstores. I only intended to browse there. Of course I ended up buying. That’s what I do in used bookstores. It doesn’t matter that my shelves at home are filled three layers deep. I’m an addict with a problem.

(Tangent: the first job I ever held was at age 16 in the local public library. I was reprimanded on more than one occasion for reading instead of shelving. How am I supposed to stay clean in a cookhouse like that? I felt like Pookie going undercover at The Carter in New Jack City.)

Acquiring a Kindle should have meant the end of purchasing traditional books. The Kindle is an easier format for me to read, transport and manage than a big block of fungible paper. I had this fantasy of paring down my bookshelves, a few outdated items at a time, and making my library more digital every year.

So why am I still buying paperbacks?

The Enemy by Lee Child (Kindle Edition), one of the better books in the Jack Reacher series, retails for $9.99 on Amazon. For that, you get a digital copy of a novel that Amazon can take back at any time. Ten bucks for a book that, while good, you can polish off in a long weekend. Of that $9.99, the publisher collects $3.49.

You could also go to a bookstore (or Amazon.com) and buy a used paperback copy. “Used” in this case means “effectively new,” in that it was never sold to a private reader. Picture Barnes & Noble backing a truck up to Lorem Ipsum and shoveling unsold Lee Childs into a crate. You’ll pay $4.99 for a book that you can keep without fear of repossession, or lend out to friends without hassle, or even resell yourself. Of that $4.99, the publisher gets $0.

Questions:

1) How many people will continue to buy eBooks at publisher-dictated prices if this pricing structure continues?

2) How long will traditional publishers stay in business if this pricing structure continues?

3) Is the latest Reacher novel, Worth Dying For, any good? Fans savaged the last one (including yours truly) and I’m growing skittish.

Jun

but just saying it could even make it happen

Posted by Perich at 7:54 am

Much thanks to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias for reminding us how useless polls are.

The poll in question, a survey conducted at the liberal Netroots Nation conference this past week, found the following:

27 percent strongly approving of Obama and 53 percent approving “somewhat.” Thirteen percent said they “somewhat disapprove,” and 7 percent strongly disapprove of the president.

Yglesias is smug:

[It's] a reminder that the proximate problem faced by would-be left-wing critics of President Obama is that they generally have much less credibility with the progressive constituency than the president does himself.

Greenwald is also smug:

[A] poll of hard-core Democrats that finds that only 27% “strongly approve” of their own Party’s president is hardly some sign that criticisms of him are unwelcome and lack credibility: quite the opposite. It’s hardly a surprise that when given a binary choice by Gallup of approve/disapprove, the vast majority of self-identified partisans (“Democrats”) will say they “approve” of their party’s President

And of course they’re both right. That poll can be read either way with equal facility. 80% approval of Obama among his base! Only 27% “strongly approve” of the President’s accomplishments, vs. some much higher percentage last year! And so forth.

Of the two, I find Yglesias’s side to be slightly more ridiculous. If Obama’s approval is as high as the polls paint it, then at whom is his argument addressed? Who is he trying to convince that Obama’s doing a great job, since 80% of the Ruling Party apparently already thinks so? The remaining 20%? Why bother? But of course, this shows the phoniness of the whole facade, like how we discovered the Meet The Press desk was particleboard once we got hi-def television.

The poll itself isn’t a fact until a member of the pundit class reports on it. 80% of the Ruling Party doesn’t approve of Obama until Yglesias reports on the survey that says 80% of the Ruling Party approves of Obama. That’s what makes it news. If 80% of the Ruling Party approved of Obama, there would be no need of a poll to tell them. You’d know it because four out of five of your friends just couldn’t shut up about what a great job Obama’s doing. And if you’re Matt Yglesias, that’s already true.

But don’t take this to mean that Greenwald’s argument isn’t also ridiculous! There are few popular pundits today more strident, consistent and incisive in their condemnation of the growing power of the American executive than Glenn Greenwald. He documents every day the tendency of power to protect and expand itself, regardless of who wields it.

So for Greenwald to point out 27% as if it’s a crack in the foundation is laughable. Only a quarter of a self-selected group of Ruling Party bloggers, themselves a self-selected group of college-educated liberals, approve of Obama. Oh no! What does he think Obama will do next? How will the man who ignores his own Attorney General react to this shifting in the ranks?

“There certainly are a lot of people,” says Greenwald, “who expend a lot of time and energy trying to prove that Obama’s left-wing critics represent only a tiny, fringe minority.” Glenn! You’re a tiny, fringe minority! So what? Were you the only man alive who thought that a President ordering the assassination of U.S. citizens was wrong, that would not make it less wrong. Why should the quantity of critics from within the Ruling Party matter at all?

Let me guess: because you still believe in the conceit of democracy. Because you believe that a different person in the Oval Office wouldn’t wage war, cater to special interests (but I repeat myself) and sell out his constituency. Because you believe that the process of forging oneself into an electable Presidential candidate doesn’t turn a normal human, modest in compassion and blessed with common sense, into a gargoyle through which the river of power flows.

Well, okay. Have fun with that battle.

Jun

ain’t had the blues yet today, but I can feel them coming on

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Those of you following me on Facebook or Twitter know about the hassle I’ve been going through with Comcast lo these past weeks. Months now, if you trace it to the first modem outages in early April.

Throughout this whole ordeal, I’ve been more impressed than I expected by Comcast’s customer service. Every time I’ve got them on the phone, I’ve spoken to someone friendly and full of energy. They’ve sympathized with my repeated frustrations. They’ve not only done whatever they can to get my issues resolved sooner, they’ve offered me other options as well. “If you don’t want to wait for the tech to come out,” one helpful lady suggested, “you can take the modem to the nearest service center and have it replaced.” Which I did, a week ago. But that didn’t really help.

This past Friday, I waited at home for a Comcast tech to come out. The promised window (5pm to 7pm) had nearly elapsed when the buzzer rang. The tech waved at me as he came up the stairs. “You should be all set now,” he said. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that every activity light on my modem was green.

“Wasn’t the modem,” he explained, plugging a diagnostic device into the coaxial cable from my wall. “I got a look at the activity from your unit before I left this morning. See, with models like these, the modem either works or it doesn’t. It won’t cycle in the way you were describing. So I got the ladder off the truck and took a look at the junction box. There were slices in the cable that leads down to your unit.”

“What could have caused that?” I asked (besides my enemies conspiring against me).

“Someone working up there, being careless. Who knows. Anyway, replaced that cable and it’s all better now. You should be getting much faster times upstream and downstream.” He indicated TX and RX speeds on his diagnostic device. “It’s a shame they made you go out to the service center to replace the modem, but I’m sure they’re just trying to be helpful. Normally I wouldn’t go into this much detail, but I feel bad, with the Internet having been on and off a few times.”

He shook my hand and let himself out.

I recounted this story to Sylvia that evening with a sprinkling of admiration. Having led a customer service team when I worked for The Company, I know it’s not easy to get high quality customer service. People don’t always have the energy to devote real care to someone else’s problems, especially when they work the 11pm to 7am shift for a cable service provider whom everyone hates. But every time I’d called, I’d found someone polite, friendly and willing to do whatever was in their power to help me. Plus I had a tech who had gone the extra mile (well, extra thirty feet vertical) to find the root cause of my problem. And from Comcast, no less!

So what did it take to squander that good will? One phone call twelve hours later.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Coldheart! I’m calling from MarketLink on behalf of Comcast, your internet service provider. Before I continue, do I have it correct? Mr. Coldheart?”

“That’s Professor Coldheart.” I glanced across the kitchen, tucking my phone into my shoulder as I did. Sylvia was assembling the brunch fixings we’d bought at the deli next door. I presumed it was a follow-up survey from my tech visit. No problem. I had plenty of nice things to say.

“Thank you, Professor. I see here that you subscribe to Comcast’s Internet service. Are you familiar with the Comcast Triple Play, which offers 120 channels of high-def …”

“That’s the HD cable plus home phone service bundled with the Internet, right?”

“… inition television service, all for … yes. Okay, very good. We can save you fifty percent on what you’re paying for home Internet if you were to bundle your …”

“Let me save you some time,” I said. “I don’t own a TV or a home phone.”

“You don’t own a television?”

“Correct.”

“And you don’t have plans to get one in the future?”

“I do not.” Stringent good breeding kept me civil.

“All right. So I presume you use a cell phone primarily for your calling purposes?”

“You’re speaking to me on my cell phone, yes.”

“All right. Have you considered that, if something should happen to your cell phone, if you should lose it or break it, that it might be worthwhile to have a backup? We can still bundle your home phone plus Internet service, with a landline only costing $19.99 a month for the first three months, then …”

And she kept going. These were the karmic chickens coming come to roost. While I know what it takes to run a world-class customer service team (based on my time at The Company), I also know what it takes to be part of an infuriating telemarketing team (based on my time at Unknown Telecom). This nice lady had a detailed script and was paging through it, one objection at a time, until I either hung up in a rage or gave in. Her suggestions didn’t make sense: no one needs to back up their cell phone to the tune of $19.99 a month, let alone the real cost of Comcast phone service after the come-on price expired. But it wasn’t her job to make sense. It was her job to keep me on the line until I wilted.

The point of a brand is to personalize the giant, anonymous institution that is a corporation. No one can like the army of immigrants, teenagers and slaughterhouse hands that churn a thousand tons of fast food every day. But lots of people like McDonald’s. They have a generally positive attitude toward the golden arches. That attitude translates to the locations, employees and food products which every golden-arched franchise contains. And when your local fast food place disappoints you, you don’t write it off as a cashier having a bad day, or a batch of raw patties, or the inevitable breakdown of a complex supply chain. You pitch a fit. Because how could they treat you that way, after all the love you’ve given them?

Comcast isn’t good because of their friendly customer service. Comcast isn’t bad because of their incessant upselling. Comcast is a conglomeration of wide-ranging offices with competing incentives run by different managers. To ascribe a single will to them is silly.

Still: I almost liked ‘em.

Jun

these are the days when you wish your bed was already made

Posted by Perich at 10:08 am

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

- Arthuer Schopenhauer

Our office shares a floor and a restroom with a rent-a-desk tech center. Coming out of the men’s room the other day, I found a man with professorial wrinkles and a denim shirt smiling at me. “They locked me out,” he said, indicating the door to the tech center.

I was suspicious at first, since HR had sent out an e-mail hours earlier about a laptop being stolen from our neighbors. But this guy looked harmless. A Chicano Noam Chomsky. So I let him into our office and walked him to our front entrance so he could try the other door. He thanked me.

Our office has a glass facade and I sit near the entrance, so I could still see the professor. More importantly, I could hear him: trying the handle of the front door, pounding on the metal shutters that separated the tech center from the hallway, pacing and fretting. I hadn’t even registered the time. When you work for a start-up, 5:30 doesn’t feel late. But apparently our neighbors had locked up for the day and my new friend had left without his keys.

I have never been locked out of my apartment. Whenever I change locations – home to work, restaurant to movie theater, car to store – I pat down my pockets to make sure I have everything with me. Keys, wallet, cell phone. I have backups of every key I need secreted away in clever locations. It would take a concerted effort, with teams of ninjas and monkey pickpockets, to strand me outside my apartment.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to me at a young age that terrified me of being locked out. Sure, being trapped outside sucks. But there are worse fates. And the marginal increased risk of leaving the house without my little ritual might be worth the marginal gains to my blood pressure. Two hours locked outside of my home one night vs. another year of life.

We’re collections of habits masquerading as planners. I wonder what created the habits I follow. Why I can’t leave the house without keys, wallet and cell phone but I’ll sometimes leave credit card bills unpaid through sheer forgetfulness. Why my desktop (on my computer) needs to be tidy but my desktop (actual) is a sprawling pile.

Always knowing where my keys are doesn’t make me smarter or more careful than everyone else. It means I devote my focus and care to particular things. What I want to know is why those are the things I focus on. What set my priorities for me?

After a few minutes, a lady with frizzy hair answered the professor’s knocking. He didn’t look like a laptop thief anyway.

Jun

your former glories and all your stories

Posted by Perich at 11:03 am

Guys, I figured it out. One of the key dilemmas of human experience. The question of why the artists we discover in our youth – our turbulent adolescence, the college years where we develop our critical stance – seem so much better to us than the artists who start their careers when we’re old. “Today’s music is crap,” say the old, but when the old were young, the last generation’s elderly said the same. Whence this paradox? Why is it so hard for a mature audience to appreciate new sounds? Why do we look so fondly on the art of our past?

Anyhow, I figured it out. It’s cool. No problem. Listen: we stay in love with the artists of our youth because they’re older than us, and it’s really hard to respect anyone who’s younger than us.

I was thinking about this through the lens of music, but it works for any representational, composed art: literature, film, etc. I fell in love with Pearl Jam, Led Zeppelin and The Who as a kid. While I’m no longer the obsessive fan I once was, the type of sound they produced – grungy, fuzzy rock full of passion – still resonates with me. That’s what I seek out. The sort of rock that’s popular today, like that yearning Doughtry crap, does nothing for me. But if I’m being honest with myself, I must admit that were I a teenager today, that’s probably the crap I’d like. And it’s not just rock music. I still like Republica and can’t stand Far East Movement, even though they’re the same act in all the ways that matter.

The reason is because Eddie Vedder et al are older than me. And they always will be.

This doesn’t mean I love every rock band that’s older than me. You’ll never see me at a Patti Smith concert. But it means I’m highly unlikely to love a rock band that’s made up of people younger than me. Those kids! What do they know?

This is weird because it works even for acts whom I’ve outlived. I’m older now than Biggie, Tupac, Cobain or Hendrix ever were, but they were older than me when I first started listening to them. So they will always be older than me, even though I’ve survived them, like Tommy Lee Jones’s father in No Country for Old Men.

Why is this? I’d guess because composed representational art (music, literature, film) is a way of experiencing something vicariously. As a species, we survive and adapt because we can share experience. We’re not limited to what we see or touch ourselves. We can also integrate the experience of others and, if we take it seriously, learn from it.

What makes us take someone else’s experience seriously? Age helps. It’s not a guarantee – the disrespect of the young for the old is documented better than lunar eclipses – but it helps. Even young punks look up to slightly older punks for social cues.

If composed representational art is another form of experience, then it makes sense that we find the art made by artists we consider “older” more respectable. We can still enjoy the art of the young, but it often lacks the emotional resonance we find in the artists we admired in our youth.

Of course, this is all half-baked evolutionary psychology, so it’s probably wrong. But it explains why I keep “discovering” artists from my childhood – Kate Bush, Siouxsie and the Banshees – and why contemporary pop is so much hollow ringing.

Jun

x-men: tinker, xavier, lensherr, spy

Posted by Perich at 7:36 am

New post up on Overthinking It comparing X-Men First Class to the spy fiction of the Sixties:

Despite the explosive mutant battle on the shores of Cuba that caps the film, the primary conflict in First Class is espionage. Sebastian Shaw operates behind the scenes to provoke the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to the brink of nuclear conflict. He’s an ex-Nazi scientist, but he’s so useful to the Eastern and Western powers that they still take meetings with him. To combat him, Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr team up with the CIA. They recruit a team of special agents from the private sector and turn them into paramilitary operatives.

First Class is a story of the Cold War. While there are established (if not always honored) rules of warfare, a cold war – a war of spies and diplomats – has fewer explicit codes. The question of methods is foremost. Is blackmail acceptable? What about torture? Assassination? If you use immoral means to achieve a moral end, does that leave you on the side of the angels? And if you use moral means but fail to achieve your end, was it worth it to even try?