Ted, Ted, Ted

Laura gave a presentation about the Chinese language for a 7th grade class at her cousin Adam’s school today. She was a little nervous, but she got through it, and her turtle joke went over well. Mary took a couple of severe, Salgado-like pictures to capture the atmosphere at St. Bede’s.

Here is a site with an online multimedia show about Woody.

TheMoMI.org — Exhibition: Bound For Glory: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie

Here’s what I’ve been forgetting to report on: A couple of weeks ago our friends Henry and Mark went around town picking up discarded Christmas trees, and invited us all to watch them burn at Ocean Beach after dark. (The trees, not Mark and Henry. They’re both married. [Welcome to the land of jokes gotten only by catechism class survivors.]) We brought some hot dogs and drinks and had a regular spectacle. Those things go up like a pile of firecrackers. (The trees, not the hot dogs. [Welcome to the land of writers who are so lazy they would rather just pile on the brackets than make properly structured sentences.]) It was beautiful, but watching those sparks fly made me glad we’ve switched to a boring old artificial tree at our house.

Auntie Nic was here the last few days. She seems never to stop doing crafts and stuff. The kids dig it. Here they were making little painted glass refrigerator magnets. (As usual, click on the picture for more.)

We have cut our total co-op memberships down to one (the biodiesel coop) from a high of three last year (that one plus the food co-op and the preschool co-op). I’ve been in co-ops forever, and the one thing they have all had in common is the net expensiveness of the product they offer, both in raw dollar terms and in the wads of time they require. I went into all those memberships consciously, and got all I wanted from them and more, but I have to say it’s going to be nice saving some money and having some free time during this period of low co-op involvement, however long it lasts. Adam Kotsko was writing about it this morning:

I confess that the other day I went to Europa Books and saw that they were selling Sein und Zeit for over $50. Telling Ted about this, I mentioned, “I think it’s cheaper at the Co-op,” then realized that that may well have been the first time I — and perhaps anyone in history — had ever used the phrase “cheaper at the Co-op.”

December is always multiple madness month at our house. Lilly’s birthday, then Laura’s, then Christmas and New Year, then (today) Mary’s.

Here are some pics of all the stuff we crammed into the week between Christmas and New Year.

The Santa summary: Mary got the Kitchenaid mixer she’s been wanting. I got the pair of congas I’ve been dreaming of, plus a pair of bongos that I hadn’t even hinted about. Lilly got some cool clothes (picture) and a new trapeze-y thing to do acrobatic tricks on in the front room. (For her birthday she got a safety mat to go under the trapeze. Not perhaps as good as those bouncy nets that the grownup acrobats have, but it would be tricky to string up a net in the front room of our house.) Laura got both the iPod Nano and the guitar she had been wanting. Everybody was pretty gruntled, all in all.

Writing is not a team activity. Editing is a team activity. Writing never works collectively, because it depends on a large number of threads being held simultaneously in a person’s short-term memory. That’s not something you can share. It’s a waste of time to try. Of course, people try all the time. We can see the results in bad corporate documents, legal boilerplate and technical drivel, and in the endless meetings held to hammer out that bad work.

Often someone says something in a meeting that captures a thought perfectly. It may even seem elegant, like something that everyone knows but that hasn’t been expressed so well until now. Someone will say, “Get that down.” Later, at editing time, it may turn out to make no sense at all. The context has changed, of course: what’s said in a meeting grows out of the experiences of everyone there, complete with unspoken assumptions, agreements and compromises. Text has no context at all. It appears out of nowhere, bearing all of its antecedents within itself. It has no hope of matching the immediacy of a spoken conversation.

Writing has a tense, complicated relationship with speech. Good writing gives the illusion of resembling speech, or being derived from speech. But writing that is transcribed from speech is generally bad writing. It does not feel like real speech. Some writing does feel like real speech; that writing can seem stilted when you read it out loud. The speech writing evokes is imaginary speech, speech that takes place in your mind’s ear.

Don’t write to cover your ass. It won’t work, and if you write well you won’t need it. Writing is not a contract. Diligently including every word that every stakeholder wants in the document is not writing but listing, note-taking, at best. Writing that aims to protect the writer from liability is not good writing, even if it is necessary sometimes. Preserving the ability to say, “Yes, we mentioned that, look right here” is not one of the goals of good writing.

Many technical people have been taught the virtue of brevity. They have been taught too well. Brevity is not any greater a virtue than punctuation. It is necessary, but not sufficient, and much less important than clarity.

Writing is an exercise in empathy. We test our writing by forgetting our own hard-won knowledge, positions and interests and reading our work from the perspective of the stranger. A turn of phrase that’s familiar to us may be baffling to someone who wasn’t in the room when that phrasing emerged. We can only know how baffling if we can suspend the self for a moment and read like someone who has no idea what is going on here. Good writers are able to suspend the self for sustained periods — to be both the stranger and the insider in turn.

This site tells you how to get a live human being on the line when you call one of a long list of giant soulless corporations.