I Was Expecting Someone Much Older, Too

I enjoyed Publishers Weekly’s roundup of publishing industry veterans’ memories of their early days on the job in days of electric typewriters, fax machines with rolls of shiny paper, mechanical paste-ups, smokers in the office, and even elevator operators.

Here’s a story from Howard Reeves of Abrams Books for Young Readers:

I calmly left the lobby, and ran to [editor] Martha Kaplan’s office. “I just asked Gloria Vanderbilt who she was,” I said.

Martha rolled her eyes and dropped her head in her hands.

“I was expecting someone much older.”

She lifted her head slightly. “Perfect.”

Martha came and fetched Ms. Vanderbilt. Before they disappeared down the hall, I heard Martha say, “Of course he knew you were coming, but he says he was expecting a much older woman.”

I swear Ms. Vanderbilt’s lips twitched ever so slightly.

Dinah Stevenson of Clarion Books:

Old-fashioned crafts like spinning and blacksmithing are being revived. I bet pre-separating artwork won’t be among them.

Ginee Seo of Chronicle Books:

I would sometimes curse the day I told any agent I liked fantasy because those manuscripts were always long, and carrying them plus other submissions for weekend reading made for an incredibly heavy haul.

But my enjoyment was tempered by seeing some of those veterans date their hoary tales to “back in the ’80s,” “in the mid 1980s,” and even “in 1992.” I myself started work in publishing in 1987 (a year earlier if you count a summer job). And I suppose my stories of maintaining the department’s email connection to the Soviet Union would seem unfathomably antique to many professionals today. But still, I’d prefer not to be older than any of the industry’s old-timers.

Surveying OIP Derangement Syndrome

There are a lot of questions now about how the US government should respond to Syrian government atrocities, though the Constitution’s requirement of congressional approval before non-emergency military action should not be among them.

However, for people whose foreign policy is driven by OIP Derangement Syndrome, President Barack Obama’s move toward attacking Syrian military sites has helped to clarify things. Now those folks know they definitely don’t like that idea.

An NBC News survey captured that effect, as Nate Cohn highlighted in the The New Republic:

Surveys conducted earlier this year showed that Republicans were consistently more likely than Democrats to support striking Syria if Assad used chemical weapons. But partisanship is powerful in the age of President Obama, powerful enough to overcome longstanding partisan preferences on international affairs. . . .

In every previous survey, Republicans were most likely to support attacking Syria. Each poll showed more than 50 percent of Republicans willing to strike Assad if he used chemical weapons. Today’s NBC News poll shows far less Republican support, with just 41 percent in support and 49 percent opposed. That’s 15 points less than April’s Pew Research survey, which found that 56 percent of Republicans would support strikes. In comparison, Democratic support hasn’t declined—46 percent support strikes, just like in April.

The most isolationist Republicans were already opposed to getting involved in the Syrian civil war, but this shift in party opinion is significant in both its size and its timing—just when the Assad regime has actually used chemical weapons and the Obama administration is speaking about a harsh response. That shift is reminiscent of Newt Gingrich’s 180° spin in 2011 on whether the US should participate in an attack on Libya right after President Obama took that course.

That wasn’t the only survey that caught OIP Derangement Syndrome this month. Public Policy Polling, whose lean to the left didn’t stop it from predicting last November’s election results well, added this question to a survey of Louisiana Republicans on their presidential choices for 2016:

Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?

Besides those two men’s names, respondents could choose “Not sure,” which we therefore have to treat as incorporating “I don’t want to answer this silly question.” And that was the most common response, with a plurality of 44% of the 247 Republicans responding.

But 29% of Louisiana Republicans told PPP that Barack Obama, serving his first year in the US Senate in 2005, was more responsible for the slow US government response to Hurricane Katrina than George W. Bush, then the President. Only 28% heard those two names and agreed that Bush had more responsibility.

While it was possible to present these results as evidence of Republican ignorance, as Talking Points Memo did, that’s too charitable. More than a quarter of the Republicans polled gave an answer that they must have known was untrue in order to say something bad about President Obama.

A New Angle on Narrative Momentum

A few days ago, author Gail Gauthier raised the topic of “momentum” as it applies to narrative on her Facebook page. In physics, an object’s momentum is defined as its mass times its velocity. Velocity, in turn, is defined as distance traveled over time.

During the discussion, I realized that all those physics concepts can be metaphorically applied to narrative.

• “Distance” is a measure of change in a particular direction. Not just random activity or events, but action along a particular vector, usually defined by characters’ desires and plans.
• “Time” relates to narratives in two ways: the passage of time experienced by the characters and, probably more important, that experienced by readers.
• “Mass” is a good equivalent for the significance of events, determined mostly by the stakes for the main characters.

Thus, narrative momentum is the product of significant stakes and change in a particular direction, both as sensed by readers. When readers see more change happening along the main narrative vector, they sense more momentum. When readers can read those scenes faster, they sense more momentum. And when the stakes are higher, they sense more momentum.

“A kind of literary amnesia” about Violence

The Boston Globe’s recent interview with Michelle Ann Abate, professor of children’s literature at Ohio State, included this discussion of violence in books for young readers:

IDEAS: You went back and reread children’s books from throughout history for your research. Did those books become more violent and realistic over time?

ABATE: It’s actually the opposite of that. I was also surprised by the level of specificity and by the sensational nature of what I was reading. We tend to think of today’s young adult books as being more realistic. But the earlier books were incredibly graphic and violent. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan of the Apes,” which was first released as a magazine serial in 1912, is a great example. There are tons of killings—people killing people, people killing animals, animals killing people. All of them are really gruesome and gory. The same thing’s true of “Alice in Wonderland” and a bunch of other classics, books that would never be challenged today. These examples are all conveniently forgotten when there’s a public outcry about a particular book for being so graphic and so violent. It’s almost a kind of literary amnesia.

IDEAS: It sounds like you’re talking about “The Hunger Games.”

ABATE: It’s funny—“The Hunger Games” gets so much bad press for promoting violence. But actually the books are doing the exact opposite. The entire first book is a cautionary tale about the horrors of violence and the senselessness of killing. It’s not glorifying violence, it’s condemning it with very little ambiguity. When you have a parent or a school board complaining about these books, in many cases they haven’t read the books themselves, or they’re picking out a chapter, a page, a scene.

The Tarzan books don’t seem to be written for children, but then neither did Suzanne Collins write The Hunger Games for all ages.

Abate is author or editor of half a dozen books of literary criticism, including Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism, and Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, with Kenneth B. Kidd.

Ruffles and the Invaders

Here’s a magical moment from L. Frank Baum’s Queen Zixi of Ix, first published in St. Nicholas magazine under the title (for reasons that become obvious) “The Magic Cloak”:

Today, as they came slowly down the garden walk, Tallydab noticed a splendid cloak lying upon the path. “How very beautiful!” he exclaimed as he stooped to pick it up. “I have never seen anything like this since the Princess Fluff first rode into Nole beside her brother the king. Isn’t it a lovely cloak, Ruffles?”

The dog gave a subdued yelp and wagged his stubby tail. “How do I look in it, Ruffles?” continued the lord high steward, wrapping the folds of the magic cloak about him. “How do I look in such gorgeous apparel?”

The dog stopped wagging its tail and looked up at its master earnestly. “How do I look?” again said Tallydab. “I declare, I wish you could talk!”

“You look perfectly ridiculous,” replied the dog in a rather harsh voice.

The lord high steward jumped nearly three feet in the air, so startled was he at Ruffles’ reply. Then he bent down, a hand on each knee, and regarded the dog curiously. “I thought at first you had spoken!” said he.

“What caused you to change your mind?” asked Ruffles peevishly. “I did speak, I am speaking. Can’t you believe it?”

The lord high steward drew a deep sigh of conviction. “I believe it!” he made answer. “I have always declared you were a wonderful dog, and now you prove I am right. Why, you are the only dog I ever heard of who could talk.”

“Except in fairy tales,” said Ruffles calmly. “Don’t forget the fairy tales.”

“I don’t forget,” replied Tallydab. “But this isn’t a fairy tale, Ruffles. It’s real life in the kingdom of Noland.”

Noland suffers a couple of invasions in the course of this book, and both times Ruffles proves his loyalty by helping out his master and the regime. The second and more dangerous set of invaders are the Roly-Rogues, shown above. Earlier the encroachment came from Ix:

When the army of Ix had climbed the mountain and was marching down again toward Nole, the lord high steward [of Noland] sent his dog Ruffles to them to make more mischief. Ruffles trotted soberly among the soldiers of Ix, and once in a while he would pause and say in a loud voice, “The army of Noland will conquer you.”

Then all the soldiers would look around to see who had spoken these fearful words, but could see nothing but a little dog, and Ruffles would pretend to be scratching his nose with his left hind foot and would look so innocent that they never for a moment suspected he could speak.

“We are surrounded by invisible foes!” cried the soldiers, and they would have fled even then had not Queen Zixi called them cowards and stubbornly declared they only fancied they had heard the voices speak. Some of them believed her, and some did not, but they decided to remain and fight since they had come so far to do so.

Psychological warfare is so much easier if you have a talking dog.

Titans vs. X-Men

A Twitter comment from UK artist Randolph Hoyte alerted me to Chris Sims’s Comics Alliance essay on Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s New Teen Titans. Sims is careful to note that his assessment of that magazine versus its predecessor is a matter of taste and “probably has a lot to do with reading X-Men as a kid and not getting around to The Judas Contract until I was in my 20s.”

As I’ve noted before, Sims was twelve in the 1994, and the comics we read when we’re twelve shape our tastes and memories, for better or worse. I was in my late teens when New Teen Titans was published, and hadn’t read previous versions of the team. The magazine thrilled and pleased me by doing all I’d learned to like in superhero comics and more besides. I can reread those stories and enjoy the nostalgia, but it’s next to impossible to find the same thrill in other superhero stories—and nothing’s more disappointing than picking up a story touted as “classic” and finding that it’s, well, just a superhero comic showing the traits of the time it was written.

It’s fair to compare New Teen Titans to Uncanny X-Men, Marvel’s alternate-superhero team book of the same era, as Sims does. Wolfman, Pérez, and their editor Len Wein probably did pitch their Titans revival as a possible answer to Marvel’s mutant magazine. And the X-Men issues that Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Dave Cockrum created in the late 1970s and 1980s are top-notch.

But Sims gives more space in this essay recounting favorite moments from X-Men #132 (“Wolverine gets dropped through four floors to the sewer, then comes back at the end ready to literally murder everyone he sees”) than discussing any New Teen Titans story, for better or worse. It’s true that X-Men “feels like a product of the Modern Age,” but that’s because a big part of the “Modern Age” (at its height around, oh, 1994) was Wolverine killing lots of people. A look at The New Teen Titans should highlight its storytelling, perhaps noting some qualities that the “Modern Age” left behind.

Unfortunately, Sims’s aside about when he read “The Judas Contract” is the only time he mentions that best-remembered New Teen Titans storyline. And the only page of Wolfman and Pérez’s work illustrating the essay is one that introduces a supporting character (one whom many readers hate far more than I think is healthy). Those details indicate how glancing this assessment is.

Let’s start instead with the differences between Uncanny X-Men and New Teen Titans to isolate the qualities of each. Wolfman and Pérez worked with a different universe and characters, and they created a different type of superhero saga.

The Uncanny X-Men had the overall theme of being outcast. The Marvel mutants were disliked and hunted by authorities. Their headquarters was a shadowy private school in upstate New York. In contrast, the Titans were celebrities who worked with the government out of a T-shaped skyscraper on an island in the East River.

Even the Titans who felt like outcasts fit in better than almost anyone on the Marvel team. X-Men’s “demonic” character was Nightcrawler, who had a barbed tail, blue skin, and a habit of disappearing in a puff of brimstone. The Titans’ equivalent was Raven, daughter of a horrific giant four-eyed red demon who looked like…a beautiful thin girl with straight dark hair wearing a hooded cape. Cyborg had major body issues, but he was a big, handsome jock. In fact, as Pérez drew them, all the Titans looked like supermodels, and the one who was a supermodel looked like a Playboy fantasy. Being accepted and popular wasn’t their problem. Their challenges grew from their internal lives and their pasts.

The overall theme of the New Teen Titans was inheritance. All four of the established heroes were sidekicks or younger versions of adult heroes, with varied feelings about their mentors and legacies. The three new heroes were all at odds with their parents. (One was sold into slavery by her father, another crippled when his father opened an interdimensional rift, and then there’s that four-eyed giant red demon—the usual issues.) The magazine’s breakout villain, Deathstroke the Terminator, was the epitome of a toxic father. The villainous cult of Brother Blood was a corrupted reflection of the new “family” that the Titans were creating for themselves.

The best and most innovative New Teen Titans stories focus on family: the ground-breaking issue built around Wally West’s letter to his parents, Starfire’s rivalry with her sister, Changeling’s rage at the killers of his adopted mother, Donna Troy’s search for relations, Dick Grayson’s decision to move past being Robin, and even “The Judas Contract.” Those emotional issues reflect the superhero storytelling style of the early 1980s when the big fights were held together with extended melodramas full of thought balloons.

As Sims says, that sort of superhero saga might not be to everyone’s taste. Undoubtedly my own fondness for those stories is rooted in the fact that I was in my late teens when they appeared. But the best of Wolfman and Pérez’s work stands up just as well as Claremont, Byrne, and Cockrum’s, and may hit deeper emotions.

The New Didacticism

The International Reading Association’s Literacy and Social Responsibility Special Interest Group has announced a new award for children’s books: The Social Justice Literature Award.

The group’s announcement says:

This award is presented to honor books that address social responsibility towards individuals, communities, societies, and/or the environment as well as invite reflection and socially responsible action by the reader. . . .

Selected books include picture books and non-picture books, with poetry, narrative, and nonfiction titles appropriate for each category. Books selected for a given year must be published in the United States by the end of the preceeding year…[and] must meet the following criteria:

Strong Literary and Artistic Qualities, including but not limited to:

• Fostering respect and understanding of a diverse population
• Promoting equity, justice, peace, and/or social responsibility
• Presenting social issues in their complexity
• Addressing social responsibility towards individuals, communities, societies, and/or the environment

Reader Response:

• Appealing to the intended audience
• Inviting reflection and socially responsible action by the reader
• Analyzing causes of injustice and revealing alternatives and/or challenges to the injustice, opening the imagination to other possibilities

I support the social goals stated in the award criteria. I don’t think that books which promote such ends or are even written to promote them must necessarily come across as didactic. Nor do I think that books without explicit political or social messages really lack political and social implications. And I even think that the American children’s-book industry is already somewhat didactic, though it may resist that label.

Still, I see in this award description a conflation of “Literary and Artistic Qualities” with political goals and outcomes. I’d prefer to see an award for books that promote those ideas or explore those themes and also exhibit strong literary and artistic qualities separate from ideology.

Rep. Kerry Bentivolio’s Plan to Avoid Being a Laughingstock

Rep. Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan provided this week’s example of OIP Derangement Syndrome. As quoted by Buzzfeed and elsewhere, Bentivolio responded to a question about presidential impeachment at a Birmingham Bloomfield Republican Club meeting by saying:

If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true. I feel your pain and I know. I stood twelve feet away from the guy and listened to him. I couldn’t stand being there, but because he is president I have to respect the office. . . .

I went back to my office and I’ve had lawyers come in. These are lawyers, PhDs in history, and I said, “Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States.”

Until we have evidence, you’re going to become a laughingstock if you’ve submitted the bill to impeach the president…

OIP Derangement Syndrome usually begins with a visceral feeling of dislike about seeing Barack Obama as President. That feeling is clear in the way Bentivolio emphasizes “pain,” how he “stood 12 feet away from the guy” and “couldn’t stand being there.” Physical proximity is not a factor in rationally disagreeing with someone else’s political ideas.

Many people with OIP Derangement Syndrome seek out an acceptable reason for that visceral feeling, an excuse to tell themselves and others. Bentivolio’s dislike is so strong that he dreams of writing a bill to impeach the President, which would suggest that he needs to find very strong reasons.

But the representative is still working on that last part. He’s ready to unseat a twice-elected President, but he doesn’t have “evidence.” For rational people, collecting evidence precedes making an important decision. For Bentivolio and others with OIP Derangement Syndrome, the desired conclusion comes first, then the attempt to justify it.

As a member of Congress, Bentivolio is actually a fluke. The Republican who represented that district in Michigan botched his reelection in 2012, leaving Bentivolio as the only party candidate on the ballot. He started as a “Tea Party” candidate trying to keep the congressman from moving to the left and ended up as congressman himself.

It’s unclear when Bentivolio started to develop his current political drive. According to Human Events, he was “a local volunteer in Republican campaigns going back to Ronald Reagan in 1980.” Yet the story he told National Review put more weight on a running into Tea Party protesters:

One weekend, as he drove around in a rented car, he noticed a group of what appeared to be Revolutionary War reenactors. Intrigued, he pulled over.

“People told me they were the Tea Party, and I said, ‘You’re supposed to be in Boston!’” he says with a laugh. “And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean by that?’ ‘It stands for Taxed Enough Already.’ I said, ‘Well that’s a good idea!’”

Such Tea Party demonstrations were a 2009 reaction to the election of President Barack Obama.

Bentivolio was, among other things, a schoolteacher, and by the 2011-12 year he had developed a bad reputation for talking “constantly in class about political stuff,” as reported in the Detroit Free Press.

But he also acted in a friend’s amateur movie called The President Goes to Heaven, released in 2011, about a Bush-like President faking an attack on New York skyscrapers. And there was an odd moment in his campaign when he and his brother traded accusations of mental instability. So we may well see more news from Rep. Bentivolio, once he concludes his important campaign against traffic cameras in the District of Columbia.

The Visual Display of Edward Tufte

About a quarter-century ago, I was a young Editorial Assistant at a publishing company, and someone handed me a copy of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

I already had a copy of that book, a holiday present from my mother. (I think I’d entered a “hard to shop for” period after years of easily identified obsessions.) I’d found The Visual Display of Quantitative Information quite interesting, both in its content and in its backstory: Tufte had self-published the book back when desktop-publishing programs were new and Amazon and print-on-demand barely conceived of. I read that he was making big money from the book and/or speeches and consulting contracts based on it.

That success evidently caught the attention of higher-ups at my employer. One of them sent a copy of the book down to the editors on my floor along with a memo to look into this and do something about it. I saw one of those editors carrying around the book and naively piped up that I was familiar with it already. That was how I came into possession of a second copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

I was too new to realize that corporate activity around the book wasn’t really driven by a wish to start publishing oversized volumes on quantitative displays. Rather, it was driven by a wish to satisfy the higher-ups’ desire to have someone handle this matter. The book was like the monkey in the old Harvard Business School analogy: passed off from one desk to another within the organization until someone figures out a way to toss it back outside.

I don’t clearly recall how the episode ended. I think I was still wrestling with how best to explain “We can’t afford him” when word arrived that our department’s higher-up had passed along the book because an even higher higher-up had given it to her, so she wasn’t really pushing for any action. Tufte went on to self-publish more volumes without being bothered by us.

All of which leads up to the news that for several years Edward Tufte has been working on large-scale sculptural installations, sometimes in collaboration with stone worker Dan Snow. Three that caught my eye are:

• Rocket Science 3: Airstream Interplanetary Explorer.
  
• The Walking Wall.
  
• A Lacy Wall, shown below.

Tufte’s website says the next open-house viewing at Hogpen Hill Farms in Woodbury, Connecticut, will be on 5 Oct 2013.

What Fell Out of 52 Pickup

It was a warm, clear day when I heard that crime novelist Elmore Leonard had died after well over eighty years and forty books. That news reminded me that I’d been meaning to write about the experience of recently reading one of his novels—52 Pickup, to be exact—in digital form.

Like many caper novelists, Leonard wrote lots of short scenes and jumped from one point of view to another as needed. When one of those shifts occurred within a chapter, his print publisher followed the usual format of leaving extra space between the end of one section and the start of another. If those blank areas wound up at the bottom or top of a typeset page, the publisher hauled out the simple • dingbat to alert readers to the otherwise hard-to-spot section break. 

Typesetting conventions for ebooks are different, however. Most notably, the standard ebook format follows most web pages (including this one) by putting an extra line space between paragraphs and not indenting the first line of each new paragraph. 

In converting 52 Pickup to its digital format, HarperCollins ebooks reformatted the paragraphs: no indent, extra space in between. But it also wiped out the extra spaces between one section and the next. If there was a dingbat on the printed page, the • also appeared in the digital form, but most shifts from one point of view and scene to another come with no such signal for readers. That meant Leonard’s transitions, originally smooth, were bumpy, requiring me to notice the shift, stop, and look back to confirm when it happened.

The copyright page of the 52 Pickup ebook says it was converted in 2002. I hope the process has grown more sophisticated since, but then I’d hope it would have been applied to older books. It’s an easy fix, and Leonard and his readers deserve better.