Editing at Sea

I came home from a year's sabbatical at Cambridge on the Queen Mary 2 -- the dream of a lifetime. I've spent a lot of time on the Maine coast. You can see ferries and cargo ships far out at sea, and I yearned to traveling on one of them, feeling the swell of waves, smelling the clean salt air, watching sun glint off water or storms whip up whitecaps.

I'd printed out my book manuscript, and my plan was to spend the voyage line-editing while watching the sea and its life slide by beyond the ship's rails. 

I was editing the chapter on Anglo-Saxon imagination and the sea, sitting in the ship's library and looking out at the fog, as repeated announcements asked a crew member to report to his supervisor in the kitchen. The ship was searched and he was determined to be missing; the captain turned the ship back. Eventually shipboard video was located that showed the crew member slipping overboard several hours before; given the water temperature, it was clear the search was for a corpse.

I joined crew members and other passengers on deck, squinting against the fog, trying to peer into the gray-blue sheet that was the water many feet below. At dusk, the captain reversed course once again, giving up the search.

The crew sails together for six months at a time, working seven days a week, 12 or 15 hours a day, then getting two months off before the next shift. They live in close quarters, share bunkrooms, get to know one another very well. They were rattled and upset. But the show -- and life aboard the Queen Mary 2 is nothing if not a show of opulence, service, entertainment, constant attention to the wants and whims of passengers -- went on.

After that, I sat in the library, concentration shot and editing abandoned, peering again into the fog, craving a sight of land, another ship, a whale (a few passengers had seen them) -- anything but the shifting liquid light that had surrounded us since we left England.

When we arrived in Halifax for a day on land, I eagerly inhaled the air and its odors: pine trees, hot sun on asphalt, decaying seaweed, truck exhaust. Coffee shops and human bodies and grassy earth. 

When we sailed into New York Harbor two days later, I awoke at 4 a.m. to take photographs of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. I suspect I was the only passenger also photographing the Port of Elizabeth and gazing with longing at the Shore Parkway, watching the late-night/early-morning traffic pulsing like the city's heartbeat.

Back on land, we went to Maine to visit family, as I've done every summer. I watched the big ferries and the cargo ships creep by on the water, barely visible far in the distance. And I was glad to be grounded.

Lost in the Digital Debate

I've had the privilege of hearing and seeing quite a few live performances of classical music recently, and it's served as a reminder that in addition to dynamics and pitch and time, music has a spatial dimension that recordings can't capture, even high-fidelity stereo and surround-sound systems designed to give the feeling of sitting in the midst of a performance.

The length of a keyboard, the movement of fingers along strings, the arrangement of musicians playing different instruments -- these are lost in an audio recording.

A recording, whether analog or digital, is a substitute we've come to take completely for granted for hearing a live performance. We can listen to the same recording over and over and over again. Vinyl records lost quality in the repetition, the grooves worn down and the sound quality diminished over time, but CDs and MP3s retain whatever qualities they had in the initial recording, no matter how many times they're played.

Audiophiles argue fiercely over variations between analog and digital recordings, but both replace the presence of human beings with a flat piece of plastic that produces sound waves coming out of speakers. A record or a CD or an iPod can't interact with a human auditor.

Meanwhile, people are panicking about the demise of the book, as most of us move to reading on screens of various kinds, for various purposes. You might not have a Kindle, but you're reading this blog on a screen, and your email, and maybe Facebook or the news, scholarly articles or Google.

According to Socrates, written language is a lousy substitute for the spoken word. No matter how many times you ask a book a question, you get the same answer. We've moved since Socrates through stone and wax tablets and papyrus and animal skins to paper. In the past decade, we've fixated on the idea of the book as a physical object rather than a medium for transmission of language.

Watching hands on a keyboard last night, then walking home and hearing an owl hoot twice behind me and to my left, and another bird twittering to my right, I wondered what it is about ink on paper that, at this moment in time, inspires both devotion and fear of loss.

Virtual Realities

Offspring: There's not enough wood in Minecraft.
Treehugger Mom: Can't you plant some trees?
Offspring: They take too long to grow.
Mom: Well, plant them now and let them get started. Can't you fertilize them so they'll grow faster?
Offspring: I can put bone meal on them.
Mom: Where do you get bone meal? Do you have to grind up the bones?
Offspring: You just use the workbench.

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I have Facebook friends that I've met on the walls of other friends.  Most of them are people I know about otherwise from the strange land of academic publishing, but a few are just ... Facebook friends.  I suppose this is the new normal, but I find it a bit unsettling.

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When you "buy" something, you don't always actually own it.  This has been true for a while in the also strange land of Manhattan real estate, where you don't buy the apartment, but only the privilege of leasing it from the cooperative.

But it's expanding.  If you buy a cell phone on a service contract and the contract expires, you can keep the phone and switch to another provider ... right?  No, turns out phones are "locked" and it's illegal to lock them.  (Al Franken wants to change that law; you can sign his petition if you're so inclined.)

I've commented on this here before, but you also don't own books that you "buy" for your Kindle.  You just get a license to use them until your Amazon account is terminated ... or you are.

Amazon doesn't want you to think of it quite that way.  Here's how they phrase it:

There is no limit on the number of times Kindle content can be downloaded to a registered device, If any Kindle is registered to your account then you'll be able to access the content on any Kindle device. However, Kindle content cannot be transferred to another account. 

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Then there are bitcoins, which are apparently a form of exchange less real than paper money, less real than checks, less real even than credit cards. I don't get it.

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In non-virtual news, here's something to contemplate: David Rosnick suggests that if we start reducine the amount of time we spend at work, cutting back on the work week by half of one percent each year and taking longer vacations (kind of like the Europeans), we could significantly reduce carbon emissions.  Half of a percent of a forty-hour week is 12 minutes.

Book List

What I've been reading, since about 2008.  Undoubtedly a partial list, since I forget to update, and then add several books at a time to the list.  I may try to fill in some of the gaps.

Andreas Kieling, Ein deutscher Wandersommer: 1400 Kilometer durch unsere wilde Heimat

Walter Lewin, For the Love of Physics

Henry Roth, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park

Michael Common and Sigrid Stagl, Ecological Economics

Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

Deborah Rumsey, Statistics for Dummies

David Kessler, The End of Overeating

Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft

Laurie R. King, Garment of Shadows

Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

Laurie R. King, The Pirate King

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo*

Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome

Deborah Luepnitz, Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas

Donna Leon, The Girl of His Dreams

Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

William Styron, Darkness Visible

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Allen Carlson, Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics
Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, Apartment Therapy's Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces
Stephen Harris and Brion Grigsby, ed. Misconceptions About the Middle Ages
Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

Laurie R. King, God of the Hive

Rick Steves, Travel as a Political Act

Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne, ed., Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Robbin Crabtree, et al., Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward

Nikolas Coupland, Style: Language Variation and Identity

Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Kindheit in Ostpreußen

Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh, A Presumption of Death

Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

Best American Essays 2009

Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

Elizabeth Peters, The Laughter of Dead Kings

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

Laurie R. King, The Language of Bees
Mark Harris, Grave Matters : A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial
Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World

Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Annie Leibovitz, At Work

Gail Sheehy, The Silent Passage: Menopause

Jasper Rees, A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument

Margaret Atwood, Payback: The Shadow Side of Wealth

Laurie R. King, Touchstone

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)

Best American Essays 2008

Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

Heather Armstrong, Things I've Learned About My Dad (In Therapy)

Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

David Albahari, Götz und Meyer

Jacquelin Cangro, ed. The Subway Chronicles

Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years

*Read as ebook.