gr

I go to a café and the stalker turns up. (Of course, he's not really a stalker, just someone who knew my old address and used to turn up and ring the bell. But this was one of the reasons for moving out.) Anyway, X turns up and asks inside if it's all right to busk. They say yes. He brings out a stool, sits on it, sings a couple of Russian songs while playing guitar. Afterwards he comes over to sit down, orders a beer, talks. "I'd like to kiss you," says X. "Don't you like men?" (I need to find another apartment.) Presently X finishes his beer and leaves, kissing me on the cheek. A patron of the café comes over, says, Sie kennen den Junge? I say (roughly) Well, sort of. He points out that X took the stool outside to play, and now the waitress will have to take it back in. He says, also, that people here like good music, if X comes and plays schlechte Musik he has no chance. So he must either play classical music or pop from the 60s, 70s, 80s. I say (roughly) that I really have no independent access to X, he just turned up by accident at the café. The patron says He kissed you on the cheek. I do not say Is that my fault? He reiterates that X left the stool outside and now the waitress will have to take it in. I agree that this was very wrong. I knew it was a mistake to get out of bed. Dolce vita ist vorbei.

same again

Came across an interview on Poets & Writers of Chuck Adams, formerly of Simon & Schuster, now an editor at Algonquin Press.

When I was at Simon & Schuster, they started this thing on diversity in publishing, and we were all supposed to go through diversity training. To my knowledge, I'm the only person who was not summoned to go through diversity training. I think it was because I wrote them such a scathing reply to their initial query of "How do you feel about diversity in publishing?" I said, "There is no diversity in publishing and we're not likely to get it as long as you just pay lip service to it." There are virtually no African Americans in this business, there are virtually no Hispanics, virtually no Asian Americans. It's because we don't pay competitive salaries, we don't make an effort to recruit them, and, frankly, if they came in and really had a sense of their area of publishing, the bosses wouldn't know what to do with them and probably wouldn't give them a chance to do anything anyway. They expect you to be white like all the rest of us. There's too much of the elitist school culture in New York. The only people who can afford to take jobs in publishing are those who come from enough money and whose parents will help support them. We don't encourage a diversity of people in the business. We don't. We just want more of the same because they're the ones who can afford to work in it.

....

.

Go back to this notion of working very closely with an author—with the reader in mind—to make something as commercial as possible. What are the nuts and bolts of that process? What does the page look like?
Physically, it's a mess. I write all over it. I'm not a shy editor. I edit in ink, and I just sit down as a reader. I start reading, and when I come to a word or whatever that makes me stop, then I think, "Okay, there's a problem." Because any time a reader stops—whether it's because they didn't understand something, or the word is an odd choice and it throws them off, or a character does something slightly out of character—then you have to stop and say, "This is a problem. How do we fix it?" Usually I will have a fix that I just go ahead and write in. I always tell the authors, of course, that my fixes are suggestions. I say, "You don't have to do it this way, but you've got to do something here. Whenever I find a problem, you've got to address it. You can't ignore it. You can find your own solution, but you have to do something."

I go through the whole manuscript that way. Sometimes I just write in the margins, sometimes I write pages of notes and type them up and send them to the author. Sometimes it's just a matter of cutting and connecting and writing little one- or two-word transitions. But it's always a matter of taking the reader with me. I want them to be able to follow everything that's going on and not have to stop and puzzle anything out.

"The."

We don't hear people talking much about "the voter" for, I would have thought, fairly obviously reasons; there are many voters, each with a range of interests which may or may not influence voting patterns ( Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, by Andrew Gelman et al., offers one example of the kind of analysis needed to get a handle on this). When an agent or editor talks about "the reader" I - well, I don't necessarily want to shoot myself, but I do think, as so often, how much happier I would be among statisticians. Readers are not clones. Plenty of readers, presumably, would have no problem with the crucial clue in Lee Child's first Jack Reacher book: a scrap of paper that read "e unum pluribus" meaning, allegedly, "out of one many". (Awwwww.) And plenty of readers (though, probably, a different subset) have no problem with a sample size of one.

Some of you may think that the disadvantage of a sample size of one would be immediately apparent if a sample size of two threw up two radically different opinions. Ha.

What's the most satisfying big edit you've ever done?
It was probably Kitty Dukakis's memoir. It was one of the first manuscripts I was given to edit at Simon & Schuster. It was an unusual situation: It had been bought jointly by Alice Mayhew and Michael Korda, who are two radically different editors. The manuscript was huge, about five hundred pages. Alice called me into her office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much in here about politics. People want to know the personal story. You need to cut out a lot of this political stuff." Michael called me into his office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much personal stuff in here. People want to know about the politics. You've got to get rid of a lot of this personal stuff."

I sat down and thought, "Okay, who are you going to please?" I decided to just please the reader.

Oh. Um, right.

Whole thing here.

dolce vita ist vorbei

Overheard at Café Kleisther last night.

Unimprovable.

et in academia, äääääääähm, tu

Jenny Davidson has a link to this post on how best to tackle a dissertation as a route to an academic career.

I'm tired.

I'm a feminist. Qua feminist, I feel under some sort of obligation to chase prizes. If I drop out, I feel I'm letting the side down. And I once had a psychopathic (or do I mean sociopathic?) boyfriend who had an unerring instinct for what it took to rack up points on the scoreboard. So I must rack up points on the scoreboard. My tutors, at what had once been a women's college at Oxford, may, for all I know, have had this instinct; if they did, they chose not to share. So I found out about prizes, not from a mentor, but from a psycho- (or possibly socio-) path.

On the one hand, I went in for prizes of fiendish technical difficulty that women did not normally go in for (I think because their tutors assumed that public school men would have it sewn up, why cause unnecessary angst?). And, occasionally, won. On the other hand (know what? I don't wildly want to talk about this. But I've just read Nina Power's MS of One-Dimensional Woman, so I sort of feel I ought to)-- OK, on the other hand, when I had my final exams coming up, the psycho/sociopath would turn up at the library and want endorsement in the form of coffee in the Covered Market or some such thing, when I was just trying to prepare for the fucking exam. A week before the exam I went up to London to stay in a B&B for a night so I could revise for an exam in an X-free environment, except that X wanted to be called from a phonebox. I actually don't want to think about what it would have been like if I had had a tutor or tutors to explain how the system worked, without invocation of the crying need for a double bed.

Anyway, hm. I finished my thesis (Oxford for "dissertation") in four years, and OUP offered to publish it. But I couldn't face spending any more time on the fucker.

What I would say.

Superficially, academia looks very different from commercial publishing. I think they're really sisters under the skin.

As a graduate student, I did my doctoral research in the place that had offered me money. I did not survey the field of classicists, and/or the field of philosophers, and go where I could work with someone whose work I found exciting. I did my research in a place where I'd been offered three years' funding.

In academia, at least, you can find out about interesting people working in your field, even if you can't get money to study with them. So you can probably have some kind of intellectual engagement with them anyway.

In publishing, you have no way of finding out whether there are interesting people who would be receptive to the kind of book you want to write. Because, um, duh, in academia people have to publish to get jobs - you can get some kind of idea of whether you'd like to work with someone by his/her, um, publication record. Without which s/he couldn't had got the job in the first place. But in publishing, of course, there is no requirement to have a publication record to get a job. So. Well. Hm. It' s hard to be sane.

Anybody know about this?

Having sworn I would not get sidetracked by LaTeX again I naturally was unable to resist trying to install it on my new laptop. Went to MacTex on the tug.org site, and my Norton Security flagged up a warning saying this was a known fraudulent site. Can that possibly be true? Tug.org?

going bonkers

Apparently involved in some kind of dodgy deal. Which I can't talk about. Which makes jumping off a bridge look so good.

I think I should just go back to the States, move with in my long-suffering mother and start a degree in statistics at the University of Maryland. Spend the rest of my life among statisticians. Be sane.

When I wake up in the morning, I always think what a bad idea it is to get out of bed. As long as I stay in bed nothing can go wrong. And every day I make the same mistake.

Meanwhile. Inference for R can now be used with PowerPoint. Trying to write a story for the New Yorker which incorporates this thrilling fact.

tips

The latest issue of The Author, the quarterly magazine of the Society of Authors, was waiting at my PO Box. I read a number of dour pieces on publishing, which is going to the dogs, and then come upon a piece by Norman Leaver on how to sell from your website. Mr Leaver explains:

Since getting that initial CD-ROM onto the shelves of shops in 2006, I have extended the range and I now have three training and revision CDs for plumbing trainees, a home study and reference book for both experienced gas engineers and trainees, and a series of six sets of study notes dealing with domestic gas appliances. I have picked up some useful information along the way which works very well for me, and may be of use to others.

...

Since putting the site up in September 2007 there have been well over 20,000 downloads. Installing these two areas was way beyond my ability, so I resorted to the professionals. And that was when I discovered Rentacoder.com.

(There is, of course, more. I don't think The Author is available online. But you can check out Mr Leaver's website, www.learnatrade.co.uk, and, of course, www.Rentacoder.com.)

I think the lesson to be learnt, sadly, is not that Rentacoder is the answer. If I had written a series of six sets of study notes dealing with domestic gas appliances, I think I too might well have achieved 20,000 downloads, with or without Rentacoder.