Ill-Considered
Today in my Advanced College Writing class, I was explaining to my students that, when they write their responses to journal articles for me, I don’t want any personal responses.
“Like what,” they asked.
I explained that a couple of people would say things like “I don’t think this author really knew what he was trying to say.” And then I said this:
Let me explain to you how one of these articles comes into being. Sometimes, rarely, people like John McPhee can write something on the back of a brown paper bag and have it accepted by The New Yorker. But for us mere mortals, it works differently.
You spend 6 months to a year researching and writing the essay. Before you send it off, you send it to a friend or two to take a look at—just to make sure you’re not crazy. That takes a month. Then you send it off to your target journal. They receive it, and someone gives it a quick read just to make sure it’s not going to waste their time. If that person thinks it’s worth their time, they send it on to the readers. These people get the essay, keep it for nine months, and then send it back to the editor with comments and a recommendation.
Let’s say they reject it.
It comes back to you with some comments. You fold the good comments into the article and ignore the bad ones. This takes a month. You send it back out again.
This time, another initial reader takes a look at it and sends it on to the readers, who keep it for four months and determine that they like it, but they want to see some revisions before they agree that it should be published. They send you a list of revisions they’d like to see.
You make the revisions. This takes two months. You send it back.
They respond, a month later, saying that they like it but would like a couple more tiny revisions.
You make the revisions. This takes a month. You send it back.
They respond, a month later, saying that it looks good to go, and that they’ll be back in touch with you in a year when they’re about ready to begin work on the issue it will be published in.
A year later, you get an email from a copyeditor who says he’ll be working with you to get the piece into shape. He sends you your essay as an email attachment with his initial changes tracked, asking for you to accept or reject them. There are 200 changes.
You accept 198 of them and send the document back.
A week later, he sends another version, this time with only 50 changes.
You accept them all.
He says “Great! I’ll send it off to the layout guy, and it will be sent to the printer in India in a month. You’ll get a galley proof when it’s ready to go to print. Do not recommend any major changes to the galley. Only typos can be fixed at that point.”
A month later you get a galley proof asking for one last look.
You find a number of small things that need to be fixed–misplaced commas, an extra space here and there.
It goes to India to be printed.
3 months later, you get your gratis copy when the issue of the journal is sent out to libraries and databases.
When I was finished I said, “So, look. Do you see how preposterous it is to say that an author didn’t know what he wanted to say? Do you see how many pairs of eyes and how many brains have thought about this article years before it ever saw the light of day?”
And then I said, “Of course, it is also entirely possible that someone wrote a dumb or ill-considered argument.”
In Which I Can’t Always Get What I Want
I don’t write about disability very often, mostly because I don’t think about it that much. I don’t have the kind of disability that I have to really confront all that much on a day-to-day basis. I mean, sure, it’s not like it’s something that really easy to ignore; it’s just that it doesn’t radically affect my life all that often in ways that are frustrating or bothersome. Sure, sometimes, when I’m trying to drive a nail, get a screw started, play a game on the Wii, or really do anything that would be easier if I had two hands, I’ll get really frustrated and yell a lot.
But for the most part, until something like that happens, I don’t think about it much at all. Of course, now that I think about it, I have no idea if almost every other disabled person feels this way. Do we all just sort of muddle through our lives without really thinking about this stuff all that much?
Anyway.
Shelley teaches tonight, and so I’m responsible for dinner. She wanted chili from the Smith’s near campus.
No problem. Except that it’s cold and rain/snowing and everything is wet and slippery and just nasty. I don’t want to go outside. I just want to change out of my wet Carharts and start a fire and warm up.
But Shelley wanted chili.
The store with the chili is not the closest to our house. There’s also no way I can get there via backroads, so I had to drive across town in the slush and the wet and the cold with all the other Utards at 5:30 driving down the main street in town.
When I got to the store, I grabbed one of those handheld baskets and made my way around to the vegetables, which is where the chili is. We’d had it once before while my mother was here around Christmas. Mom and I had gone to pick up a few things and, while I was grabbing some vegetables, she showed up with a little container and said “I’m havin’ chili!”
So we knew it was good stuff.
I walked over to the chili “station”–one of those stands with a ladle and a sneeze guard and a deep pan of soup sunk into the cabinet. You know how it is. You grab a container and ladle in the soup.
Except.
The ladle is really long. And the sneeze guard is really low. I grabbed a container and, like I always do, placed it near the soup. I grabbed the ladle, filled it with soup, and as I tried to pour it into the container, hit the sneeze guard from below. I tried several angles, but the take away is this:
there was no way to pour the soup into the container unless you held the container with one hand and the ladle with the other. I can’t do that. I can only hold the ladle. So I didn’t get chili.
I really wanted chili.
Work
This morning, running/hiking up 700 feet to the shoreline trail, I stopped to catch my breath and prepare myself for the real running portion of my morning. Just as I was getting ready to take off, this old guy who I see most mornings comes hiking down the trail. We chatted for a few minutes about our routes and the snow and the dog.
And then he looked at me and said “Don’t you work?”
Reboot
Shelley and I were talking the other day about all of these rebooted/reimagined TV shoes from the 70s, wondering why the networks always seem to pick the shitty ones. Then Shelley suggested that, if any old show gets rebooted, it should be M*A*S*H.
I wholeheartedly agree. M*A*S*H could do anything (comedy, tragedy, etc.) and a reboot could be set in Afghanistan.
Of course, I would also like to see a reboot of All in the Family.
This Year
This year I quit using Nicorette, and thus entirely kicked my addiction to nicotine.
This year I published a bunch of stuff.
Dailymile tells me that I ran more than 850 miles this year (I only began using it in March) and that I tended to run about 100 miles a month. It’s probably more like 1000 miles.
This year I had my longest run (13.1 miles) and my fastest (a 7:30 mile).
This year I read the following non-work-related books, apparently:
Lars Kepler, The Hypnotist
Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Creer of the World’s Greatest Scientist
Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
Kathryn Stockett, The Help
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station
—, Kraken
—, Embassytown
—, The City & The City
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Bill Willingham, Fables, Vol. 15: Rose Red
Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 12: Life Among Them
—, The Walking Dead, Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters
—, The Walking Dead, Vol. 10: What We Become
—, The Walking Dead, Vol. 9: Here We Remain
—, The Walking Dead, Vol. 8: Made to Suffer
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur
Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City
Farhad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Reading
I don’t know why, but this year I was drawn to Goodreads to see just how much non-work reading I had done this year. Here’s the list:
The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Kraken, China Mieville
Embassytown, China Mieville
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
Fables 15, Bill Willingham
Walking Dead 8-12, Robert Kirkman
The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips
The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson
Well-Schooled in Murder, Elizabeth George
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, Farhad Manjoo
The City & The City, China Mieville
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson
We’re Back!
Here’s where we were:
And here:
And here’s where we stayed:
This was the back yard:
