Bill's Notes

It's an application of an idea from William Carlos Williams. He said, "A poem is a thing made." Whether he was influenced by philosophical positivism I don't know, but it sounds like a positivistic philosophy.

The application of science is industry; application of scientific methods toward language should produce poetry. And Williams was a language poet, wasn't he?

So I was trying to think of a name for me new blog (yarr) and thought, hey, I like Williams, why not something that pays an obscure tribute to him?

While not a philosophical positivist by any means, I use many positivistic methods in some areas of my writing. Positivism was concerned with understanding the limits of knowledge. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what people are thinking. You can guess, but you don't know unless you get serious clues which are likely open to interpretation. I like that discipline in my writing and in what I read. Writing is about 10 percent art and 90 percent engineering, YMMV. Hence, Industrial Blog.

1. An elderly man approached me when I was 15 one night in a library parking lot and started explaining to me that NBC needed to revive its peacock logo because the curvature of the peacock's tail was the same shape as the nerves on the human eye, and thus was automatically pleasant. NBC, in last place among the networks, would return to prominence once it brought back the peacock, which he was trying to convince it to do. Really, he just told me that out of the blue. Then, he left.

Not long after, NBC brought back the peacock and not long afte that, became the No. 1 network after years of being No. 3.

2. Got into a car accident in Asbury Park once. It was a spring night, dark, misty and foggy, and the girl who was driving ran a stop sign. We got hit in the front fender (remember them — they were made of steel) and our heads (not steel) cracked together during the impact. Ouch. We were okay. The other drivers had no insurance so they decided to just leave. Meanwhile, the car we were in wasn't running. We're trying to figure out what to do.

Suddenly, the clouds part, and the moon lights up the fog covering the sidewalk, and out of the fog walks a middle-aged man in a straw hat and a Hawaiian shirt. "Let me take a look," he says. "Your battery was probably jarred lose." Sure enough, he hooks the battery up right away. Then he walked back into the fog. We drive off, safe and sound. Spooky, huh?

Here is a cool little article where a writer, in love with reading, mistakenly believes readers love reading. Most don't.

To quote a professor from college, "Most readers are dull and lazy and need to be shaken up a bit." Oh, quoth I. Never occurred to me to say, "For what purpose."

Somewhat roundabout introduction

But I read two of the guys' novels (read this one if you're in a very patient mood) and took a semester long course with him, so I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

Readers don't pay attention to what they read and what they observe and what they think. They don't think about their thinking, or their interactions. They live automatically and thus are subject to forces that act on them, instead of acting purposefully with as much knowledge as possible. And they miss the beautiful details of life.

Subheads would just encourage skimming and thus would waste readers' time when they should be challenged. The key is not just communication through content, but communication by forcing a behavior change through form. That's how you really reinforce the lesson.

Nearly shi*canned

By the way, I was nearly fired in a publishing company for proffering this argument. You see, I argued that our job as business newsletter writers wasn't just to offer sound business advice, news and case studies — but to write these in such a way as to force our readers to think more critically, more carefully, by not making the information or the lessons easy to glean.

Irony, ambiguity, subversion — these I argued were the keys to good writing and producing good readers. You see, a true writer is one who produces the reader he wants.

No dice, quick read or perish, punk

My boss was not amused. He'd been to grad school himself, explained that everything I think I knew everyone else around here knew better, and so did our readers. They just want quick information and they'll do serious reading on their own time.

Fair enough, I thought. Then it hit me, oh but wait ...

Excuse this tangent

There's another theory, too. Another author of reader-friendly novels suggested that reading is difficult to begin with, and it's complicated by the fact that people have to try to understand what someone else wrote without any kind of verbal cues. (The novel to read is here.)

Subheads help readers skim a story, reinforces critical ideas and prepares the reader's expectations. As a third writer, but the second with whom I've studied said, writing well is a question of anticipating readers' expectations and then surprising them, not confusing them. (The novel to read is here, but don't blame me if you stop reading halfway through.)

And readers like writers who help them. And business owners pay writers who readers like. Who doesn't want to get paid?

Prepares writers, too

Another key: Subheads help writers organize their thoughts. They force the writer to think out an outline, and then you can tweak the outline, rather than repeatedly rewriting the story.

Oh, but I was on an anecdote.

Slap, slap, slap

Then it hit me. I'm gonna get fired if I don't get off my pretentious literary high-horse and write clearly.

And then it really hit me. Subheads were the key. Headlines, kickers, subheads, pull quotes. I could build the entire story on these, and just write copy to fill in the remaining space.

Of course, to get everything to fit, I had to leave some stuff out. Then it hit me. Slap, slap, slap.

Instead of spending time explaining things, I'd stop explaining altogether. Instead, I'd just hint at things that I implied the reader already knew.

It worked. Before you knew it, I was barely writing any content at all and my bosses thought I was doing great!

Bonus quiz question: In the phrase "Then it hit me," what does "it" stand for?

What about the two subheads and the pull quote?

We had a feature in our newsletters that was really short, probably 250 words. Someone suggested that you really needed two subheads and a pull quote to properly write this feature. So I tried. Turned in the copy with two subheads, a pull quote, and about 100 words.

Result: My boss nearly fired me. "You idiot!" he screamed. "These stories are short enough without your cutting all the copy out. Who the hell hired you?"

I ducked and covered, and thus survived, but just barely. There were bullet holes on the wall behind me.

Happy ending: Thank you, subheads

It all worked out in the end, somehow. Just lucky, I guess. Worked there another six years. And I owe it all to my friend, the subhead.

Source: Somewhat faulty memory.

Michele and Dean Esmay, and now others, are asking people to list the Best CDs of the 90s. I really couldn't say, since I missed most of the 90s music.

My thoughts were Nevermind was one of the best albums ever. And there was a lot of other great stuff in the early part of the decade, but I didn't follow the bands closely. I can't help feeling a bit like Homer Simpson talking to Bart — out of touch. Somewhere along the line I lost my interest in rock music as art.

I read in a comments section somewhere a particularly intriguing insight. Someone said that every person he knew that took rock music too seriously as art stopped listening by the time he turned 30. And that's pretty much what happened to me, except it was age 26.

I took rock music way too seriously, and in my case this seriousness had its upside and downside. The downside was I was confused about art. Despite having a college degree, the truth is I got out of college with neither a good education nor common sense. And I had no idea what art was.

The upside was that my desire to find real art led me toward things of better and better quality. Over the years, through reading, dialogue, more college, travel, and just living and getting older, quality art became more apparent. I learned the inchoate emotions and rebellion in rock music were maturely developed as artistic themes in William Blake and romantic poets such as Shelley, Byron, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth [who still had their own issues.]

Rock music is what it is, and little of it is art. What is honest is often adolescent, sentimental, and corrupted by celebrity culture. What tries to rise to high art is often laughable pompous and pretentious.

Occasionally something pierces the veil and rises to a level of real quality. Like Nevermind. Because Nevermind perfectly expressed what it wanted to be: an unpretentious, direct, clear statement of adolescent frustration. And the music was great. It wasn't a well-wrought urn, but John Keats never came up with a bass line like Come as You Are, either.

Nowadays, I'll listen to a little country, a little folk, a little reggae and a little rock, but the music doesn't have much meaning for me anymore. Besides aesthetic reasons, there may be biological reasons, too. Bodies change; ears become more sensitive and less tolerant of distortion, it becomes more difficult to just give in to energy and volume when something is clearly out of key and the guitar work is ham-fisted. You just become more discerning. A lot of rock music doesn't impact some people's older's bodies.

And let's not even get into the lyrics. Reproductive glands? At least Cobain knew to slur it so no one knew what he was saying.

Chris also has a good takedown of Gore Vidal here.

Gore Vidal is a special case. He's furiously intelligent and well-read. Yet, at the end of the day, despite all these advantages, he's dumber than dirt.

Thanks to Chris at PowerBlogs, Industrial Blog now has comments for future posts. You'll have to e-mail me about old posts, but for the new ones, you can just tell me what you think.

Excellent news.

Given up two weeks, five years, and 15 years ago.

I feel great, but if I occasionally tear your lungs out, you know the reason.

That, and I turn 40 on Tuesday. If this is Tuesday, I must be 40.

If I run screaming off into the night, you'll know why.

If you're into grammar quizzes, check out this one from my friend Brad.

While I found many of the questions illuminating, Brad was TOTALLY WRONG on this one.

Q: When the lights blinked in the auditorium, everyone returned to _______ seats.


A) their

B) his

C) his/her

D) his or her

Here's Brad's answer:

The correct answer is A: their

Why? The notion of the missing word is certainly plural. After all, we are talking about seats--plural--not a single seat. It wouldn't make sense to assign a singular pronoun here, even though a grammarian may argue that the antecedent to the pronoun is singular ("everyone"). So what. The correct pronoun is "their."

My answer: So what, my ass. The answer is none of the above, and you phrased the question so there is no possible correct construction.

The correct answer is "his or her seat". No 's'. Once you make it "seats," you can't answer the question unless you make a plural substitution for "everyone."

Everyone is a singular pronoun, and subject-verb-object agreement is not optional in English, it is mandatory. Everyone means "each person". Each person returned to his or her seat. All returned to their seats. Their collective asses were on the line, but each bureaucrat made individual efforts to cover his or her ass. Like that.

Upon such things hang civilization.

Meryl Yourish complains [legitimately] about some anti-semitic remarks by a Greek musician.

Now, as one-quarter Greek, I know the Greeks tend to think of the Jews as Johnnys-come-lately who overstate their cultural importance. And when you're Greek, you're allow to say that. But Meryl then begins a comparison of the Greeks and the Jews, and this is what I take issue with:

Okay, let's put this in perspective, shall we? The Greeks have more history than the Jews? Yes, perhaps they were around longer, and yeah, they had some pretty good ideas with people like Socrates (who the Greeks forced to drink hemlock, remember). Sure, modern philosophy wouldn't be the same without the Greeks. Of course, they did get their asses kicked by the Romans, but who didn't?

Excuse me, did she just blame the Greeks for the death of Socrates?! Very sly. Socrates was a Greek. You can't blame Greeks for killing another Greek. That would be preposterous. Fortunately, there are no examples of this kind of ethnic scapegoating in history.

Also, as I recall, the Romans did a number on the Jews. So thoroughly, in fact, that they're only finally getting back together now. Can't say the same of the Greeks.

The cultural lineup of the Greeks is simply unsurpassed: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus ... when Paul, a Jew and a Roman, wrote his letters, he wrote in Greek. The Romans fell in love with Greek culture and never remotely surpassed it. The Greek Orthodox Church remains the pearl of Christendom. And let's not forget Winged Victory.

The Jews on the other hand, have brought us Marx, Freud, Derrida, and Philip Roth's tender novel of relentless masturbation, Portnoy's Complaint.

On the other hand, what have they given us lately? Let's compare: The Jews have given the world a vaccine for polio (Jonas Salk), relativity theory (Einstein), instant messaging (Israel), agricultural drip technology (Israel). The Greeks have given us: Michael Dukakis. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And the man who epitomizes the New Age music industry probably even more than John Tesh: Yanni.

What have the Greeks done lately? Just try catching up to where the Greeks were culturally in the Hellenistic period. Then we'll talk. And relativity theory is old news. Instant messaging was an inevitable technology in an age of open source software. And agricultural drip technology isn't particularly exciting.

But to give you one example: Nikos Kazantzakis.

Do I sense a touch of jealousy in--what was his name again? Oh, Theodorakis, thanks--whatshisname's rant?

I need to change tone here. I don't want to say anything to this because Meryl's statement is directed more at the actual anti-semitism of the Greek musician's statements. As I said, I agree with her. I'm just having some fun at some of her other ideas.

So I'll just comment on the name thing: Yourish is making fun of Theodorakis? Seems six of one, half dozen of another ... to me. But I've got a waspy last name.

UPDATE: Madame Yourish responds here. No "Kick Me" sign here. Just the cold, hard facts. Balanced and unfair.
Also, I do not have a mustache.

NOTE: My comments [just installed today] aren't working yet, so you can e-mail me at industrialblog at hotmail dot com if you have a comment.

Hat tip: Classical Values, Instapundit, and Andrew Sullivan. [Sullivan has his moments.]

I usually ignore Ted Rall. But this odious piece is repugnant to every decent thinking person in America.

Here's a particularly disgusting bit. He's writing to encourage the Iraqis — the "we" is Ted and the Iraqis, the "they" is the Americans minus Ted.

Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.

Even though we pretty much ignore treason in this country, this causes me to wonder about the idea of treason. From Article III of the U.S. Constitution:

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

The question is this:

Does "adhering" mean actually physically helping them, or does adhering mean advocating for an enemy during a time of war?

In any case, Ted Rall, what a scumbag.

I like Reagan. But in the 80s, during my extremely liberal days, I thought he was dangerous.

What can I say? Back then, I believed what I read, and I read a lot. Newspapers, magazines, books. It was the objective opinion of all the best thinkers that Reagan was going to get us killed in a nuclear war, and if not, backrupt the country forever, and if not, allow industrialism to get so out of hand the world would cook to a toasty 150 degrees from global warming. I took that for objective.

Then, in 1989, Michigan faced off against Seton Hall in the NCAA basketball championship. A friend of mine from U of M and I (a SHU alum) placed a bet. If the Hall won, he'd have to subscribe, in his name, to The Nation. If Michigan won, I'd have to subscribe to National Review.

There it was. National Review made sense. Here was a set of dissenting opinions, argued reasonably, with good humor, and well. It didn't change me overnight. But it started the questioning.

I'm still not that conservative, though. But I no longer believe Reagan is, or ever was, evil. Now I think he was a great president — one of the best we've ever had, who masterfully boosted the country's morale and closed out the cold war. Call him the Manual Rivera of the Cold War. Just shut the Russians down.

OK, I'm being a smart ass with the title.

A couple of facts first. I am a native speaker of American English. And I get paid to write and edit for a living. And yet I struggle, for reasons that I cannot fathom, with one aspect of English. It also bedevils most non-native speakers of English.

Prepositions. I frequently cannot remember the recent one. I'll mix up "ins" and "ons" and "fors" on a regular basis. And I have no idea why.

I wrote to someone in a private e-mail something along the lines of, "I'm sick of politics and this is the default setting in my gender." Duh. It's "default setting for my gender."

Brain rot. That's what I think the preposition problem is. Brain rot caused by misspent youth. I blame Reagan. He encouraged wretched excess in the 80s and I was swept away in the cultural rip-tide.

[I refuse to continue that metaphor on a matter of principle. Well, what the hell.]

As the rising tide lifted all boats, mine was tossed and turned by hull-crushing tempests and sail-tearing windstorms until my vessel finally ran aground on a desert island of American folly, where the natives fed me beer and Buffalo wings and told me to forget all about the wind and the sky and the waves and smell of the sea and the briney taste on my parched lips but just yield to the eddys and pools of GOP-driven consumerism and consumption and explained that the root cause of all that sturm und drang was the election and re-election of Ronald Reagan, who in my 80s advertising-soaked mind represented the very source of, you know, well, whatever. Never mind.

Go here and look around. There's a photo album here.

Lots of pictures and stuff for the curious about life in Gabon. If you've got a Peace Corps invite, accept it and be prepared to gut it out no matter what. Many volunteers end up loving it.

Or maybe my memory has gotten funky with age.

Nov. 11, 1918, 11:11 a.m., the war that ravaged Europe and broke European civilization ends.

And today we honor those who fought.