juliannechat

integrity dispatches from Elliott and Lefsetz

Stephen Elliott recommended that his Daily Rumpus subscribers read Bob Lefsetz's emails as well. (And Bob likely said "Wha?" at all the non-music-biz people who signed on.) This post is about what Bob and Stephen really have in common:

(1) Their usually-week-daily [1] emails are nothing like most things I subscribe to: daily deals, bulletins from people paid to do journalism [2], announcements of events. They are particularly not like the myriad "thoughtful just-the-right-length community building article with a discounted offer at the end" that professional [3] bloggers send me all the time. And yet I make time to read Stephen and Bob, while usually ignoring the rest.

(2) They are not skimmable. And that's OK because I *want* to read them, whether I disagree or not. I read their stuff right after "actual emails from people I actually know."

(3) They have been doing what they do (in an evolving way) for a loooong time [4]. As a result they have fascinating conversations with other people in and out of the biz, and they are also musing aloud on subjects such as "how to do what we love, make enough money to survive, and remain authentic." What gives these emails their juice is the COMBINATION of these two elements. They're musing on integrity, and asking their industry/movement connections tough questions about it, and reporting all this to us on a daily basis. Trying to see the pattern from within the fabric, while keeping the shuttle moving back and forth. A combination of content and attitude, with integrity, about integrity.

(4) They don't always name names. Often when they report a conversation they don't say who it was with. People in their world(s) seem to trust them and understand that sometimes Stephen (or Bob) will want to flat out promote something he cares about and other times they will prefer to say nothing, and it's up to them, because these platforms are so SO personal. It's unthinkable that I would get a message, "while Bob is on vacation, SomeJerk will be filling in." Bob will be filing dispatches from the slopes, if he does some thinking there or has an interesting conversation, and if he doesn't, I'll wait. You too Stephen! *air kiss with a worshipful air slap in it*

(5) Both of them do maintain (likely at intense personal cost) some connection with readers, despite the fact that there are thousands of us. Stephen sends out surveys [5]. Bob posts collections of reader replies as follow-ups [6]. (These are only some of the many Bob-mails that don't make it onto the site. Those are why you want to subscribe.) By sharing so much of themselves and inviting us to do the same, both have created a sort of community...to use an oft-abused term...

Taking a break in the numbering for a moment: don't try to copy these guys. It almost certainly wouldn't work for you or me. It works for them because their personal confessional styles combined with being constantly on the move, connecting and questioning, and having the discipline to write the email regularly so they don't get backed up... I'm afraid if I analyze this too precisely I'll jinx it. Maybe these guys could be called "professional bloggers" but they are so SO different from what that term usually means. Maybe because these emails are not how they make money, but instead a gift to the universe. OK, back to the numbered list...

(6) These emails are a new kind of news: actively filtered but not at all pre-digested. They're a new thing. No, I don't know what they are exactly. But I know fun and experimentation when I see them combined in an intoxicating cocktail [7]. I'm actually only writing this today because I got a feeling that Stephen may be about to move on to his next thing and I want to celebrate what he's achieved. Both their emails today were particularly good. But then, they always are.

(7) The last thing these two guys have in common, is a strong underlying theme: there are no short cuts. In the spirit of that [8], I'm not posting actual excepts here. If you want to get on the journey with them you'll have to risk your own time and attention.

Speaking of which, if you've read to this point, I would like to thank you for your time. (Personal to Stephen or Bob: I am not asking you to link to this; we're taking the burden off you by talking amongst ourselves.)

Wrapping up with two thoughtful codas: Emma McCreary's Tao of Prosperity, and a quote from Suze Orman [9]: "Truth creates money but lies destroy it." 

Footnotes

[1] Stephen calls his an "overly personal email" and he writes one most weekdays. And when he doesn't write one he tells us why. Some of Bob's rants are on his web site, but if you subscribe you sometimes get three and four in a day. Other days none.

[2] God bless them, may they long have jobs!

[3] God bless them too; may a thousand business models bloom. But I find myself unable to read most of the things they send me. Um, thinking why: the voice doesn't sound authentic? Especially when it's trying to? See the Cluetrain Manifesto and its spawn.

[4] Credit to M.G. for popularizing and explaining the concept of the 10,000 hours.

[5] What makes Stephen's surveys fun is that he's asking questions to which he really wants the answer. A question from someone who really wants to know: there's nothing like it! I can't say which parts of Stephen's rants are the most fun for me. Maybe it's his conviction that there are no geniuses, which he keeps worrying at and challenging (himself more than anyone else).

[6] After Bob has discussed or even dissed a business model or industry power, his email bag will contain a reply from this person, as well as a bunch of other emails saying "don't use my name" and Bob passes them all along.

[7] On the left side of this page you might be able to find a link to my article from PerthDAC 2007, published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, entitled "Where's the Party?" Note to self: write a better one, updated, and also make the old one easier to find.

[8] And because I am a process junkie. To quote Chris Berendes and Elin Whitney-Smith (you'll find their links on the RIGHT side of this page), "Content is just a crutch for people who can't handle process." Also, I'm not saying that that theme sums up these two men's work or that they don't have lots more to say.

[9] Quoted in the March issue of Oprah magazine. Thanks to Mary McCartney for turning me on to it, years ago now.

Cheap Complex Devices, ed. by John C. Sundman

Executive Summary: Cheap Complex Devices is of possible interest to e-literature readers, where e=electronic OR where e=experimental. And tragically funny.

Quotation: "Assembling itself into a narrative, the subject of Bees is Bees itself, a consciousness coming into being."

Obvious question: Does Bees have anything to do with the ARG I Love Bees? Answer1: Clearly not, since the novel preceded the game by several years. Answer2: Only in the sense that both of them use facts about actual bees as imaginative points of departure [1]. [Footnote numbers in square brackets.] (Item numbers in parentheses.)

You may know John Sundman as a legendary technical writer, or a blogger at wetmachine, or the guy who wrote so candidly about selling his self-published books directly to readers at Defcon. If you are attending this year’s SXSW you can hear more from him on the self-publishing panel. I now put all that knowledge aside and consider his novel CCD as it asks the reader to consider it.

The puzzle began when I tried to find the book on Amazon. Sundman’s commitment to his art extends to his middle name: each of his novels was published using a different one (appropriate to its content), which meant that I couldn’t click on any occurrence of his name and see his other works. However, a search on "john sundman mind over matter" led to all three of his currently extant books. Any female larva may become queen; this posting is one larva’s reaction to Sundman’s Cheap Complex Devices – Mind Over Matter Volume Red, hereinafter CCD [2].

The artefact/artifact CCD consists of a novel, preceded by an introduction to the novel, preceded by an introduction to CCD as a whole, preceded by a raft of epigraphs and dedications. On page 9.000023 the introduction-to-the-novel suggests stopping to read the novel at that point, before the reader’s mind has been contaminated by the information contained on pages 9.999999967 to 26.0000083 [3], and then returning to page 9.000023 to finish reading the introduction-to-the-novel. Since I have the oulipian merit badge (junior class), of course I played^H^H^H^H^H^H followed this direction.

Rather than bore all of you, I will eventually transmit my detailed list of reader-reactions [4] to John personally. Instead, here is a high level reaction in a techwriterish form that – if it doesn’t completely avoid spoilers – casts them in a form such that they aren’t actually spoilers unless and until you’ve read the book yourself.

[here goes: OL]

(1) CCD contains sentences of terrible beauty that are also terribly funny [5].

(2) Huge chunks of it are structurally flawless.

(3) From the evidence of its language, Bees takes place in a slightly altered present. As a reader of science fiction, I admired the way the changes from my own reality became apparent. But I hesitate to encapsulate CCD within science fiction, since I think the alterations are subtle enough that one could read this for entertainment without bothering about them. Except see (6).

(4) The first page (first epigraph) begins to be explained on page 53.111111. From that point, my foremost ongoing question, as noted in my reading diary and cross-referenced with the dedication, came to be, "Is Amadou real?" Eventually I decided that Amadou was either real (from “reality”) or (because of the way truth emerges in fiction) realer-than-real.

(5) I can describe my issues with the ending of the novel in two ways:

(a) It goes off the rails.

(b) The writer (whom I am explicitly not identifying) switched from writing with his head to writing with his heart.

Re (b), perhaps it’s fairer to say that even though the head was still active, the heart took over. And although the heart sections moved and challenged me, I missed the crystalline perfection of the head-created sections. I had previously mentioned (at the end of this posting) that this review would actually be more about me than about the novel; wasn't kidding.

(6) I find myself in total agreement with the narrator when he writes on page 50.000963: “Pay attention.” [6]

(7) Once I finished the "novel", I returned to the "introduction". Page 30.000239 is the heart of a clever attack upon (takedown of?) another of Sundman’s own Mind Over Matter novels. Seemingly they’re all related in some yet-to-be-discovered (by me) fashion. They tell me that once you’ve experienced that uncut crystalline structure, it sets up a craving... "Not for me, they’re for a friend."

[/OL]

A novel that – (I don’t want to use the word "makes" but it’s the most applicable one here). This novel makes its reader take a stand, forced me to decide. Repeatedly. It’s far more than the stunt its introduction suggests it is. Thank you, John.

Footnotes:

[1] Note the way we USians celebrate most fervently that which is lost; as just one example, we began to romanticise "the frontier" (in 1902, by rhapsodizing over Owen Wister’s The Virginian) when all the land stolen from the First Nations had already been divided up and given out and the actual frontier was gone. Similarly, these imaginative celebrations of bees have appeared just as it has become clear the extent to which actual bees are on the ropes. Clearly this is another essay poking its way in here: down, Fang!

[2] Of the three, CCD is the one most worth purchasing in hard cover, because of the pleasures of the frequent changes in typography and the gonzo page numbering scheme, but the power of the text also comes through in the PDF. I enjoyed the many typographical games, with one notable exception: the extensive use of "ct" ligatures in the first section was arch, precious, and unsuited to the content (in Dorothy Sayers’ phrase, "clean out of the period"): each one hit me in the eye like a tiny fist. On the other hand, the joy of self-publishing is that one can do what one wishes, and most of the offbeat things this author has done are very engaging indeed. In early 00speak: whatevs.

Update from John: "...the ligatures were in homage to Donald Knuth, author of "The Art of Computer Programming"-- and father of LaTeX (or however you spell it). The book is set in a faux-Knuth typeface, and Knuth is overly fond of ligatures -- which drives many of his readers batty. Anyway, that's a pretty recerche allusion, but I thought you should know what I was trying to get at." Thank you John, and regardless of the way Knuth's lectures at MIT changed my life, I am definitely one of the readers driven "batty".

[3] Floating point errors are a key plot point, not to say theme.

[4] The first item in the list is: "p. 27: For personal reasons, I do not find jokes about Paavo Nurmi funny." See, you’re not missing much by not reading the rest of them.

Thrillingly, this novel spells “straitjacket” correctly. If there were bated breath in it, likely that term would also be correctly used and spelled. Read it now, people, before language morphs so much further that all CCD’s nuances become little more than static (QRN) and interference (QRM).

[5] In both senses of terrible, (a) "exceptionally" and (b) "catastrophically". Also, as I’ve suggested in my rant about technical writing, some of Sundman’s humor and sarcasm is most easily appreciated by readers who have themselves worked for a computer company. Or who have at least read Tracy the Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. But appreciation of most of it requires no more than a heart and a brain.

[6] Thereby echoing Simone Weil, David Foster Wallace, and several other writers I consider spiritual teachers.

Final note: I have excerpted the preceding opinions in my Amazon review of CCD. They don't let you use italics or footnotes or links, which is why I so very seldom review there.

Technical writers were the guardians of peace and justice in the old Republic

No first grader ever said, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a technical writer.” You might as well say, "...a motel maid." A job which I have also done [1].

And yet: the technical writers were the guardians of peace and justice in the old Republic [2]. Technical writing, like science fiction fandom, flowered amongst a particular generation, at a particular time, for particular reasons. And now many of us who flowered with it are no longer in the role, and all of us are growing older [3]. But walk us past a situation with information missing or badly presented and our fingers tremble uncontrollably, as we fight the urge to pull on the battered armor and lift the heavy jousting pen, one last time…

Aside from the occasional jerks that every profession has [4], I have liked and admired all the other tech writers I met. The brother/sisterhood of tech writers was a cross between a secret society and an effective union. Our informal authority (such as it was) flowed from our knowledge of what was going on and our willingness to tell the truth; to any other who offered the secret handshake, we would tell it. Even if she had just wandered in on a job interview. Especially then!

I began my career in start-ups and had never been edited ("edited? what’s that?") until I worked for Kate Kush and Pam Friedman at Index Technology. Manuals that came out under their direction were like poetry: every word carefully chosen, pulling its weight. Because they described a complex product (Excelerator, for systems analysts and designers), some purchasers even read the manuals [5], and their graphic design was crisp and strong [6]. Maybe you once had a job like that, too, where for a while everything came together, so that despite each of our individual flaws, we could all do good work. Maybe you still have such a job: I am very happy to hear that!

There were also the gritty jobs, where bringing order out of chaos felt like a martial art. Once, documenting the work of twelve programmers, I observed six of them using credits and debits one way, and the other six using them the opposite way: Team A’s credits were pouring into Team B’s debit registers, etc. Fortunately it was three months before ship and the manager quietly sorted it out and the story has never been told (until now). After deployment the twelve (guys) were each given leather portfolios with their names on them in gold, and when I received one too my colleagues said with puzzled eyes, "How nice of them." I still treasure it: a medal for non conspicuous gallantry, the essence of tech writing.

That particular company was also where I learned how to explain tech writing to the managers who employed me. Rather than hiding behind the rather frightening stereotype of the "writer" (has scary hair? drinks? other signs of torment ad lib.), I tried to explain what writing had in common with bricklaying: in the morning the stack of bricks is here, and by quitting time the bricks are over there. Whenever they asked me for a schedule I made a great show of consulting the meticulous records I kept in a desk-sized Day-Timer. "The last time you asked me for one of those it took two weeks from the date when all the information was stable. So if you tell me when your product’s interface will be frozen, I can finish the manual two weeks after that." ("More graceful preferably." – Wolcott Gibbs.)

There is still a need for specifications and documentation; it’s just that there are fewer full time jobs writing and editing them, now that so much software runs on phones and tablets and in web browsers, now that the best interfaces attempt to be their own documentation. (Many tech writers went into usability and UI design for this very reason.) And as I have said in the footnotes, I am thrilled by the continued refinement of online knowledge bases, especially those where each reader gets to vote on whether an article was helpful. The projects we worked on would seem like "constructing a mnemonic memory circuit with stone knives and bearskins" [7] to you kids...

I only mention all this because I am about to review a novel by John Sundman. Back in the day he was a legend among technical writers. And his Cheap Complex Devices contains some jokes that (it seems to me) only another technical writer of a certain vintage would "get". So it behooves me to record my impressions of this novel before all of us perish from the earth. I can already see that my review will be more about me than about John’s novel, but it has ever been thus, or as Oscar Wilde once wrote, "The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography." We will now conclude this arrest with an 'ymn [8].

Footnotes:

[1] The old-style technical writers cleaned up after people, too, so the jobs have significant commonalities. Being a motel maid in a tourist town was not much like working for "Housekeeping (dial 2)" in an actual hotel. We dressed down and the guests never saw us. I’m glad that Maid in Manhattan, as unrealistic as it might have been otherwise, gave housekeepers some love.

[2] You have a mythology about your job, murmured Margery Meadow, the day I first said this. Among her many felicities as a friend is keeping me honest.

[3] (What’s up with that? I thought it was only programmers that burned out!)

[4] An argument could be made that I was one of these. Just trying to keep with the honesty.

[5] My sisters and brothers in the guild will rightly ask for data here. Our surveys at user group meetings indicated that 10% of users (1 in every 10) used the manuals. Moreover, when people did crack the manuals, we got one chance: if the index didn’t have the exact synonym they were looking for (mapping multiple user terms to what the product called it) or the TOC wasn’t sufficiently skimmable, they’d tell their colleagues not to bother, ever. Do these numbers seem bleak to you? Then, sirrah, you lack the mental toughness that technical writing requires. Users only read when their backs are against the wall; they strongly prefer to ask another person for help, so if there is "tech support" they’ll go for that. Some work groups would have a "local expert" who read the manuals for an entire group, thus getting the needed info out there indirectly…

This was back in what could be called the golden age (at least for sets of printed documentation); since then we’ve had the end of shrink-wrapped software, documentation budgets slashed, but also the rise of third party documentation (…for Dummies, Missing Manual, etc.) and interactive web help where users get to rate each article for helpfulness and contribute their own tips. So the locus and methods of writing have moved but it’s still technical.

[6] The designers, who worked upstairs, were both gifted and humble, and they had state-of-the-art tools. And the development staff had an unusually high percentage of women. An unintended consequence of this was that too many development shops in the area had almost no women, but for awhile, it was an amazing team. I’ll have to write more about it.

[7] "The City on the Edge of Forever", Star Trek: The Original Series episode #28, story and script by Harlan Ellison and others.

[8] "Dead Bishop Sketch", Monty Python. Almost no one notices this ending line because they’re still considering the list of "afters": rat cake, rat sorbet, rat pudding, and strawberry tart. Those of you of a certain age may now recite the rest. You know you want to.

Peter Gomes, 1942-2011 (a few good links and the "Gomes for Pope" campaign of 1978)

Here's a terrific Charlie Rose interview with Peter Gomes. On this day of Peter's death, it's interesting to hear how he describes his life's work, and which Scripture he wants on his tombstone, but also to listen to him argue that it's possible to reconcile evolution and the Bible, and pose the question that he believes we Christians should be asking ourselves.

In the interview he also argues for the good bits of St Augustine and John Calvin, and discusses homophobia among people of good will (who believe they are doing the right).

Peter was a handsome young man when he arrived at Harvard in 1970. I met him in 1975 when he was my "freshman advisor". Something I wrote (? but I had just turned 17 so I can guess that it was unformed) had made the Freshman Dean's office decide to find me an advisor who would not think my faith was bonkers.

When I arrived for my first appointment with Peter I found his outer office occupied by a woman pacing back and forth, with her arms crossed at her waist. She explained to me that she was possessed by a demon. Peter's secretary explained that he would reschedule our meeting. At WHRB even some of the non-Christian members appreciated Peter's sermons, and we organized a "Gomes for Pope" campaign in 1978 (the year of the two papal conclaves). When he came out as gay (although celibate) in 1991, in response to an anti-gay issue of a college publication, some of us changed our slogan to Gomes for Pope: Now More Than Ever.

I admired the way that although Peter was gay, it was not the most interesting thing about him. An interesting non-spiritual biographical detail is that he grew up in Plymouth (aka Plimouth) Massachusetts, and for a time as a young man (high school or college student) worked in the town library. One of his primary responsibilities was to answer letters from (white) people writing to find out whether they were related to anyone who came to the original colony on the ship Mayflower, or rather, whether a person who had the same name as an ancestor of theirs had had any kids. Peter admitted to having experienced a touch of unholy glee, especially when the letters were high-handed, in replying that so-and-so "had no known issue."

Over the years I have been privileged to hear Peter preach many times, and most of his sermons were tactically astute and prophetic and eloquent, all at the same time. (Fortunately we still have the ten books of them to enjoy and be challenged by.) During the tumultuous school year of 2001-02 I was, for medical reasons, able to attend Memorial Church almost every Sunday, usually sitting in my favourite pew next to the plaque for the four Germans (an opportunity to recall my Latin). I will never forget the sermon he preached on September 23rd, 2001. Bishop J S Spong was the guest preacher on the first Sunday after the towers fell (and his message was so much not what I needed to hear that a good friend, who had heard it on the radio, called as soon as I had left the church to ask whether I was okay; I'll write about that another time)...but in the sermon linked above Peter spoke for me and for so many others...

One evening in the late seventies, Peter was sitting beside a roaring fire with John Duff, Nancy Dart, and Mark Roberts, and my name came up (John told me later). And Peter told the others about how every time he saw me in the Yard I would have my coat open and flapping, and my muffler on the outside of the coat, as a Southern Californian who hadn't figured out how to dress for cold weather. (It was years before I figured out the muffler thing, and the first coat I bought "back there" wasn't right either - not even waterproof.) Over the years I have many times planned to write and thank Peter for his spiritual direction and catch him up with the many twists and turns my spiritual life has taken. Now that goes on the list of things I took too long to get around to.

Peter, I give thanks to God for your life and ministry. As Thomas More said (in Robert Bolt's play), He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to Him.