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Ed Wasserman: As If By Design

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Paying close attention for almost six years to administrative machinations at the university I attended in my youth proved to be perpetually dispiriting, but as a compensating balance I also became aware of the individual academic and educational contributions of members of that community. One such example is a book which was published earlier this year by UI Professor Ed Wasserman, titled, As If By Design: How Creative Behaviors Really Evolve. Situated like a traffic cop at the crossroads between cultural narratives and behavioral evolution, Wasserman’s book not only reveals the concept of a eureka moment to be unfounded in many celebrated instances, but fills in critical context which was excluded over time to bolster the romantic concept of individual inspiration.

Although Wasserman is a professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and as such is certainly familiar with statistics and the rigors of the scientific method, his book is accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, if you’re in secondary or undergraduate education, and looking for a text that will not only spur discussion but engage your students, you would be hard-pressed to find a better current example — and that’s particularly true if you are located in Iowa. (There are a number of Iowa-centric examples which will be broadly familiar to residents of the state, yet for those who believe they are in the know that only makes the missing details that much more compelling when Wasserman fills out the story.)

To be clear, you don’t have to be from Iowa to connect with Wasserman’s examples, many of which will be familiar to most Americans. Personally, as an Iowan I found the section on Iowa’s blackout license plates to be both hilarious and absurd, but if I had to pick a favorite vignette it would unquestionably be the section on Florence Nightingale. Although I already knew a great deal about Nightingale’s importance to the practice of medicine and profession of nursing, I knew nothing about her contributions to what we now call data visualization.

In shot, an enjoyable and informative read, and an important corrective on the all-too-human tendency to create and celebrate idols.

— Mark Barrett

Picking Up Where I Left Off

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Six years ago to the day the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents announced the illegitimate appointment of an unqualified and belligerent crony boob as president of the University of Iowa. At the time that appointment came as quite a shock, but as the weeks, months and years passed it became clear that the university and indeed public higher education in Iowa had been and has been fundamentally compromised by politics. While that illegitimate president finally left office three and a half months ago — and that’s a good thing — we just learned from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller that the university ignored a rape report that was filed with the Iowa City Police Department three weeks before the former president unexpectedly announced his intention to resign last October. In fact, had there not been a series of campus protests over the past few days about that reported rape, it is likely that report would never have come to light — much like similar events which took place at the university in 2018, also under the permanently blind eye of the former UI president. (Likewise, today the Gazette’s Miller also reported that after an earlier unexpected defeat, and the subsequent political packing of the council which delivered that initial rebuke, the Iowa Board of Regents just secured the right to build a massive new hospital complex in North Liberty, after intentionally falsifying the size and nature of that project to the crony-packed council which gave its foregone approval.)

Although the initial shock of that corrupt presidential appointment was disorienting, in retrospect the timing could not have been better. In the summer of 2015 I had been verging on contacting UI about an issue that might prove mutually beneficial in an academic and medical context, but given what I now know those thoughts were grossly naive. Over the intervening six years I learned what I could about UI specifically and higher-ed generally — and along the way probably met the equivalent criteria for a master’s and doctorate in one academic discipline or another — and what I learned was almost universally dispiriting. (As regular readers know, I grew up in and have lived most of my life in Iowa City, where UI is located, so I was not oblivious to the usual problems on a major college campus. But I honestly had no idea how pervasive the corruption is in the ranks of academic administration and by governing boards.)

That said, what a dispiriting six years it has been across the board. The state of Iowa slipped into cultural collapse and is now controlled by arch conservatives and fundamentalists — who, without irony — helped put a degenerate con artist in the White House, then conspired to overthrow American democracy in service of their delusions. Throw in the COVID-19 pandemic and Iowa’s determination to expose as many young children as possible to the virus, even though vaccine approval is on the horizon for kids between five and twelve years of age, plus the ravages of global warming, and a conniving abdication of responsibility by the United States Supreme Court in support of Texas’s subjugation of women, and gosh-golly what’s next?

In that context it has been interesting watching my mind slowly disengage over the past three and a half months from the singular pursuit of tracking events at the University of Iowa. Not that there still isn’t plenty to read, as attested to above, but I no longer feel an obligation to jot it all down and make sure I have the supporting documents and videos, because the narrative arc I was following finally did come to a close. (I’m sure there will be future revelations about the illegitimate president’s tenure, but for now UI is just another bummer in the news.)

What that mental space has given me is a chance to go back and look at old draft posts I was working on in 2015, as well as catch up on clerical and administrative chores I either dropped at the time or subsequently neglected over that six-year span. And as you might imagine, it feels good to be thinking about something other than failed human beings, and to be reconnecting with the positive pursuits I was focused on lo those many years ago. So…where was I?

— Mark Barrett

How to Preview Your Book in Word

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Maybe everybody else figured this out years ago, but I’m passing it along in case other self-publishing writers are still stumped….

I write in Microsoft Word. Specifically, I use Word 2003, which is the last version of Word prior to the introduction of both the ponderous ribbon interface and the defaulting of all MS Office docs to the web-happy in-house .docx file format. (When Office 2007 debuted I decided I was done learning new productivity tools, particularly when the people making those tools were repeatedly and unrepentantly inclined to radical and proprietary changes that did not benefit my productivity. See also Windows 8.)

When you format a document for printing as a book, the first page of your document will become the page of your book that appears on the right-hand side when the cover is opened. Thereafter, all left-hand pages will be even-numbered, all right-hand pages odd-numbered. When previewing your book in Word, then, what you want to see is the first right-hand, odd-numbered page all alone on the right side of the screen, followed by pairs of left-and-right-hand pages showing the correct pagination and formatting (particular the gutter margin) as you scroll through the document.

In Word 2003 there are five different view modes available under the View menu — Normal, Web Layout, Print Layout, Reading Layout and Outline — and not one of those views will give you what you’re looking for. Normal view only shows one page at a time, inline. Web Layout shows the entire doc as an endless scroll. Print Layout will show two side-by-side pages, or more if you zoom out, but the first odd page will always be on the left when it should be on the right. Reading Layout, which does show two pages side-by-side, like a book, also incorrectly puts the first right-hand page on the left. And of course Outline view shows the entire document as a single-page outline.

Way back when I formatted my short story collection, the only way I could figure out how to force Word to display the first right-hand page on the right side of the screen was to add a dummy page at the beginning of the doc (effectively page zero). The problem with that hack was that Word would then display all of the correctly numbered and formatted right-and-left-hand pages on the wrong side of the screen. For example, page two, which should have a larger gutter margin on the right side of that page, would correctly display on the left of the screen, but because Word then counted that as page three of the doc the larger gutter appeared on the left — meaning the outside of the two-page display. Worse, headers and footers were also affected and had to be scrupulously ignored.

Although I repeatedly searched for a solution, I could not figure out how to get Word to display the first page of my doc as a single right-hand page, followed by the correct side-by-side view as if I was reading a book. Because I’m now monkeying around with another book I recently found myself confronting the same problem, and again I refused to believe that Word could not somehow be configured to give me the view I needed. So I did yet another series of searches, and this time I found the answer, which was apparently there all along:

It *does* work, at least in Word 2003 (and every previous version AFAR). I
have a four-page test document. If I select “Mirror margins” then switch to
Print Preview and choose 1×2 pages, I get page 1 on the right. Paging down,
I get pages 2 and 3, then 4. Same if I check “Different odd and even.”
Either of those settings has the desired result.

So there you go. In Word 2003 and earlier, and perhaps later, set Mirror Margins in the Page Setup dialogue, then select Print Preview under the File menu. (It doesn’t even matter what View mode you’re in at the moment.) The first page of your book-formatted doc will appear alone on the right side of the screen, followed by side-by-side-pages the rest of the way as you scroll.

If that works in later versions of Word, please drop a note in the comments. I don’t want any other writers wasting time trying to solve this completely contrarian problem.

— Mark Barrett

Email Subscription Conundrum Update

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Faced recently with the choice between yet more proofreading and advancing my feeble knowledge, I spent the better part of a whole day digging into the Feedburner issues mentioned in the previous post. The good news is that I learned a lot. The bad news is that none of what I learned has solved the problem, or is likely to do so.

As was to be expected, Feedburner is now toying with me by sending emails to at least some of the addresses in its subscription list. I can confirm that because I registered a couple of test-addresses, and a few days later a message got through on one account notifying me of a recent post. Unfortunately, that same message did not arrive at two other accounts, so I now have to figure out if the issue is with Feedburner itself (impossible to determine) or with the site hosting those addresses (possible but not likely given their disinterest).

As for fixing potential issues with Feedburner, in fits and starts I managed to work through all of the steps that I later found helpfully enumerated here. If you’re having Feedburner issues yourself, that’s where I’d start. (None of that troubleshooting did anything for me.)

On the subject of whether I’m using Feedburner for my RSS feed, by chance I stumbled across confirmation (now lost) that the only thing Feedburner does with regard to feeds is give you visibility to stats associated with their use. And as far as I can tell, it even does a miserable job of that. Then again I am terminally naive about how to exploit the data habits of people who come to Ditchwalk, so I’m probably missing something. In any case, Feedburner seems to be non-essential for feeds unless you’re an analytics junkie.

The ENews Extended plugin, which was closely associated with StudioPress/Genesis themes for several years, now seems to be deprecated, moribund and — while still working — non-viable if you want to use a solution derived from Cpanel or your own ISP/mail package. I asked a couple of people if they’d ever even seen that plugin configured to use something like Mailman, and they said they had not.  [ Read more ]

The Email Subscription Conundrum

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For at least six years I’ve been using Feedburner to send a single email to registered subscribers after each new post is published. A few weeks ago Feedburner stopped working for reasons I cannot ascertain. I’ve tried everything possible to get it to work, but even though all systems appear go the emails are not being sent.

I know this is not a new complaint, and that Google (which owns Feedburner) has allowed the site/service to languish. It is, technologically, adrift, and has been for a long time. I used it because it works, it no longer works, so it’s time to do something else.

One complicating factor is that Feedbuner handles both emails subscriptions and RSS feeds, and I think I’ve been using Feedburner for both. I say ‘I think’ because no matter how much I learn about RSS feeds I’m never quite sure what they are. They seem to be a kind of parallel channel to my published site — like a radio version, or maybe a telex or telegraph. If you don’t want to click on my site you can point your browser or feed-reader to the Ditchwalk feed and get my content that way.

What’s never clear to me is what Feedburner is actually doing to make that feed happen, because I think it’s actually doing nothing. Rather, it takes my feed — which WordPress creates — and then redirects it, or repurposes it, or maybe even reporpoises it, or something. Which means not only that Feedburner isn’t doing anything for me in terms of email subscriptions, it’s doing nothing for me in terms of RSS. Or at least nothing I need to care about if the rest of Feedburner’s functionality is on the fritz.  [ Read more ]

Worth The Paper It’s Printed On

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A few weeks back I was looking at several recently published non-fiction titles, and while holding each in turn I kept having the odd feeling that something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I flipped through one of the books and found a multi-page section which had black text against a light-gray background. The contrast between the light-gray page and what should have been jet-black type was so slight as to make the text almost unreadable, even under bright light.

Without thinking I fingered the paper on that page and suddenly the connection was made. What I was holding felt wrong because the paper was feather-light, like bound newsprint. Checking each of the books in turn I realized that without the covers and dust jackets — which felt as if they were half the weight of each book — I’m not sure any of the titles would have weighed more than a comic.

While I understand that price pressures in the publishing industry are crushing, each of these books was selling for upwards of $25 at retail, yet felt insubstantial at best. In comparison, a copy of my self-published short story collection, while shorter by page count, not only felt more substantial, each page felt weightier and had more contrast.

I recognize that much of what is lauded as professional publishing amounts to little more than industry droppings from a hits-driven marketing machine. I also realize that nobody expects most books to last twenty years, let alone a hundred. I cannot help thinking, however, that devaluing the physical properties of your own product might diminish interest in that product over time.

Then again, given the margins and production efficiencies inherent in electronic books, maybe that the industry’s goal.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

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So today is the day that Harper Lee’s new ‘novel’ goes on sale. Far be it from me to question the motives of the titans of cultural responsibility at HarperCollins, but if the early returns are any indication this is not a glorious day in the history of literature:

“Watchman”s portrayal of the older Finch as a man who has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting and opposes racial desegregation has already grabbed headlines because of the stark contrast to the noble lawyer in “Mockingbird” who defends a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman.

The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Sacks described “Watchman” as “a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion.”

Several reviewers found fault with the new book on artistic grounds.

David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times called it “an apprentice effort (that) falls apart in the second half” and Julia Teller at the Chicago Tribune said it was “almost unbearably clunky” in parts.

It’s quite clear that until very recently Harper Lee never intended this ‘novel’ to be published, and that until the death of her sister, who was her primary caretaker, that wish was respected. Now, amazingly, at exactly the moment when Lee is alone and also quite aged and infirm, it turns out that the kindly cultural stewards at HarperCollins have been able to convince Lee otherwise. It’s a miracle — and in particular a miracle that has absolutely nothing to do with money.

But there’s a problem, of course, and the problem is how to see this new ‘novel’ in the context of Lee’s less-infamous novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Or rather it’s a problem for some, but not for anyone who has ever written, because what’s being sold as a new novel from Harper Lee is almost certainly an early exploratory draft that held great meaning for Lee not because of what it was, but because of what it led to.

When you’re a writer, and particularly when you work in long form, you learn that your initial work is not always on the mark. Sometimes you get help from others, sometimes you see a better way yourself, but in any case you try something, it doesn’t work, so you try something else. There is nothing new in this. It is the way authors have always written, even as many authors themselves prefer to cling to the self-aggrandizing (and coincidentally salable) lie that great works emerge wholly formed, without typos.

In the graphic-novel genre Lee’s new ‘novel’ would simply be considered an alternate history and discussed in that context, but Mockingbird is sainted literature. Sainted literature that may now be indelibly stained by the noble and benevolent actions of a giant corporation acting only in the best interest of its author and readers. Because many of the critics who bless literature with sainthood are themselves culturally unable to comprehend Lee’s new ‘novel’ as a work product, as opposed to a statement of some kind, the myth will be perpetuated that this new work is in fact a separate work, which it almost certainly is not.

Whatever becomes of Lee and her legacy, the lesson for other writers is clear. If you’ve got an early exploratory draft, and you don’t want someone coming along later and misrepresenting that draft as a separate work, then you need to burn or delete that draft. At which point the academics will accuse you of having stolen or appropriated the final product, because they will find no evidence of how you got there on your own.

— Mark Barrett

Graphics and Interactive Storytelling

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In the mid-nineties I became fascinated by the storytelling potential of interactive entertainment. My interest peaked in the early aughts, during what I now think of as the second great wave of interactive storytelling mania. While the potential of interactive storytelling seems obvious to everyone, the mechanisms — the actual techniques — by which interactive stories might be told are complex and at times counterintuitive.

After finding my way into the interactive industry and meeting with some professional success, I was asked in 2000 to write an article for SIGGRAPH’s Computer Graphics magazine about the future of interactive storytelling. While great effort was being put into replicating techniques from passive mediums, including, particularly, film, it seemed to me that such an imitative approach had everything exactly backwards.

Recently, while conducting periodic maintenance on my computer and sprucing up Ditchwalk, I ran across that article, which for some reason I had never gotten around to adding to the Docs page on this site. That omission now stands corrected.

The title of the article is Graphics — the Language of Interactive Storytelling. Coming from someone who primarily made a living with words that may seem odd, but it and the accompanying text goes to the heart of the interactive storytelling problem, and why so little progress has been made. In fact, the only thing that’s changed is that we no longer worry about having enough processing power to do what we want — yet today’s enviably high hardware ceiling is still rarely used to facilitate aspects of interaction that might truly drive emotional involvement.

Fifteen years on, during the fourth great wave of interactive storytelling mania now taking place in the industry, little has changed. Another generation of eager developers is grappling with the same questions, reaching the same inherently limiting conclusions, attempting to once again adapt non-interactive techniques from passive mediums, and confusing the revelation of pre-designed outcomes with choices that determine outcomes.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Daniel Menaker

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One additional nugget I managed to recover while fixing broken links was a post on the Barnes & Noble site, written by Daniel Menaker. Who is Daniel Menaker? Well, at the time I knew almost nothing about him, to the point that I described him — hilariously in retrospect — as “another dirt-dishing voice” in the publishing industry. (Saving me somewhat, I also noted that he was a former Editor-in-Chief at Random House and Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.)

Re-reading the B&N post after five years, however, I found myself more curious about Mr. Menaker than about publishing. A quick search led me to a memoir he’d written, titled My Mistake, which was published in 2013. Interestingly, in reading that book I found that the context of Mr. Menaker’s life gave more weight to the views he expressed in the B&N post, as well as those in that book and in other writings I discovered.

Now, it may be that confirmation bias played a part in my reaction because much of what Mr. Menaker had to say jibed with my own conclusions, but I don’t think that’s the case. Not only do I think he would disagree with some of my grousing here on Ditchwalk, but my interest in understanding the publishing industry has decreased so much in the past five years that I now consider such questions moot at best. (For example, five years ago I would have deemed this story important. Today it seems meaningless.)

Still, as an outsider corroboration is useful when you’re assessing any human endeavor, to say nothing of doing so from the relative orbit of, say, Neptune. In reading My Mistake I found a fair bit of corroboration for conclusions I’d previously reached, yet after I finished the book I also decided to see what others had to say as a hedge against my own potential bias. That impetus quickly led to this review in The New York Times, which caused me to stare agape at my screen as I read what seemed to be a bizarro-world take on the same text I’d just digested:

Make no mistake, this is an angry book. Menaker is angry at himself for his character flaws (a flippant one-­upmanship that alienates others), and he is thin-skinned, remembering every slight. As a former executive editor in chief of Random House, he is proud to have nurtured writers who went on to win literary acclaim (the Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, the National Book Award winner Colum McCann). Menaker is understandably upset over being ousted from that job in 2007, but what seems to truly infuriate him is being shunned by the publisher, Gina Centrello, during a transition period.

I honestly don’t know what that reviewer is talking about. My Mistake is not an angry book, unless your definition of anger includes expressing an opinion. And no, Mr. Menaker is not infuriated about being shunned by anyone — or at least not anyone in the publishing biz. If anything, he’s infuriated by his own serial incapacity to connect with other human beings in his life, though over time — and particularly in the writing and structure of My Mistake — I think he belatedly squares things with his departed father.

Then again, that’s the publishing industry in a nutshell. You can spend a year or two writing a book, yet when it’s reviewed — in this case, by no less than the self-anointed consensus cultural steward of commercial literary criticism — you can still end up being cleaved by a reviewer with an axe to grind, or mischaracterized because of a reviewer’s blind spots or personal acidity. (If you also worked in publishing for a time you might even be the recipient of some score settling.)

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Site Seeing: Laura Resnick

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Speaking of reclaiming busted links, one benefit I didn’t anticipate was that chasing down lost pages put me back in touch with information and sources I previously found valuable. For example, while I was ultimately thwarted in my ability to recover an excellent post by Laura Resnick concerning cover design, digging around on the web for that missing content led to two informative discoveries.

First, I eventually found what I think is a more recent discussion of the same subject here. (The first link at the bottom of that interview is the same busted link I was trying to track down.) Second, when I went to Laura’s new site I found a great resource page that every independent author should bookmark and peruse.

Sure, the fact that I don’t have a resources page suddenly makes me look very bad in comparison, but that’s all the more reason to visit Laura’s site and check it out.

— Mark Barrett