Carol Green, ?-2003

I found out over Christmas that one of my professors died of cancer. She had some rare form in the muscles of her back, and it spread really quickly. Not two weeks ago, I was told that she probably wouldn't make it, but I didn't expect her to go so soon.

Carol Green basically taught me how to write and research professionally. In a large part, she's responsible for pointing me in the direction I took in life. She's the one who whipped my scholarly work into shape. She's the one who guided my interest in Native American history. She's the one who talked me into going to graduate school. I was working for her when I realized that I didn't want to get my PhD. She encouraged me to go into editing. She was always there to give me The Eye when I was being cocky or feeling precocious.

I didn't always like her—in fact, I spent a lot of the time despising her for being mean and unpredictable—but I always respected her as a scholar and appreciated the guidance she gave me. When I found out she probably wouldn't recover, I wanted to write a letter to her thanking her for everything she had done for me, but what do you say to someone who is dying? Now I can't say anything.

To Draft or Not to Draft?

http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2003/poyforum.html?cnn=yes

This Time forum asks a bunch of interested parties whether or not the United States should reinstitute a draft to deal with troop shortages. I certainly don't know everything about it, and I have never served in the military, but these are my preliminary thoughts.

I like how the first guy says "Increasingly we will be a nation in which the poor fight our wars while the affluent stay home." Increasingly? It's been that way since the beginning. In the Civil War in the North, if you paid a $300 fee, you didn't have to go. That's about as plain as you can get.

The next proponent of a draft says "this would stop the unprecedented activation of reservists." Hello!?!? They know that when they sign up for the army, they will serve active duty and then later be on reserve duty. They know that there's the possibility that they will be called up again. It might be unprecedented, but it's not like they didn't know it was a possibility.

The Armed Forces are often one of the only places where minorities get a shot at equality. The fact that minorities are overrepresented in our VOLUNTEER armed forces is a lot easier to stomach than the fact that they were even more grossly overrepresented in the DRAFT armed forces. They join because there are opportunities to get college money, sure, but a lot stay because they are treated like human beings. This might not be the case, though. Any comments from military people?

I don't know if a draft would ever work (although isn't that what Selective Service is all about?). There are so many people who would refuse to support it because of Vietnam. You'd have to have compulsory service of some kind for EVERYONE, so you couldn't have exemptions for college or whatever. So where would they get the money to pay everyone? If you didn't make everyone serve, then you would have all the problems with the draft during Vietnam all over again.

I know that lots of countries have compulsory military service because they need it, but why does Finland have it? I guess during the Cold War they needed it. But Switzerland has it too, and I can't figure out a necessity for it. South Korea has it, probably for good reason—they trained my roommate to be a dental hygenist, because it was completely random where they put you. Had he drawn a different number, he could have been on the front lines.

There's another problem with a draft: tracking tendencies in school would just be continued. They would point all the smart rich kids from good schools into officer training or the posh jobs, and people who didn't have the same opportunities would be stuck in menial or more dangerous jobs, thus perpetuating the unequal class structure. With the volunteer army, you have a chance to go into something that will teach you life skills, where you might not have had the opportunity outside of the army. Any compulsory military service that wasn't completely random would be inherently unfair. But what Senator would support a draft that gave the possibility that his own son could end up toting an M16 in the desert?

So as you see, I'm not in favor of a draft. We wouldn't have the problems with troop strength if we hadn't decided to invade two countries in less than a year.

Thanks to Shane for the link.

Commuting

There are wonderful things about taking the train to work instead of driving. The main thing is that I get to read a lot more than I used to. In fact, I've been reading at such a workmanlike pace since I started my new job that I simply took all the books I own but have not read and put them on the top shelf of my bookcase. I started on one end, and I'm reading them all. I should be done by 2014.

There are also... interesting... things about riding public transportation. You see a lot of crazy stuff, and sometimes crazy stuff happens to you. A drooling drunk man fell on me once. That was bad. That was about the worst. However, I would never have witnessed a guy in a gorilla suit videotaping a nutso homeless preacher, or a man painted silver arguing with drunken Cubs fan about whether they were allowed to touch his silver barrel. They weren't.

This morning, a guy was attempting to pick fights with people on the train. When they would ignore him, he said "Well, have a nice day... in spite of your attitude," while making elaborate hand gestures that were a cross between signals from a third-base coach and Madonna's "Vogue." I was going to make a joke about stealing home when I got off the train, but... I guess I just did.

More Famous People

While I was in New York City with Rebecca this past weekend, I saw Timothy Hutton on the train. Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton, who I admired in Taps, Iceman, Turk 182!, Beautiful Girls, and most recently Sunshine State. He was talking to a young woman. At first I didn't know if it was really him, but then I overheard him talking to her about appearances on talk shows, working on "sets," and producers. I had a great opportunity to approach him and say hello, because his companion left the train and he was sitting right across the aisle from Rebecca. But I didn't. He got off several stops later, and I immediately regretted not saying something. Of course, if he had gotten off on our stop and followed us around, I probably wouldn't have said anything then either.

I wonder, though, whether it is the same with a character actor as it is with a big star. I'm sure Tom Cruise gets sick of people freaking out and pointing at him, but would a "working actor" like Hutton mind if I approached him politely and said that Taps was one of my favorite movies when I was growing up, and he was the best part of it? I wonder.

Maybe next time I see someone famous, I'll be as brave as I was when I was 11 and saw Brett "The Hitman" Hart in the Detroit airport, eating granola. I stared at him until he motioned for me to approach. He was polite, asked me not to make a "ruckus," and signed my boarding pass... the part they keep when you get on the plane.

I Want Less Realism

http://slate.msn.com/id/2092798/

This Slate article attempts to explain the explosion of popularity of old-style games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Joust.

I think they hit the nail on the head, at least for me: I like the game, not the realism. My favorite game of all time is NHL 96 for Sega Genesis. The graphics weren't all that great, and it got too easy, but I had lots of fun with it. Later hockey games became so realistic and complicated that I lost interest. I don't want eight buttons and two joysticks, and I don't care if Mike Ricci is as ugly in the game as he is in real life. I don't need little movies showing the players lining up for the faceoff. I don't want the commentators cracking jokes—I tend to turn them off anyway. I surely don't want the view to change when I go in for a breakaway, which always messes me up. I like to play the new games once in a while, but they are never as much fun as that Sega game.

Uncle Sam Wants You to Coach

http://slate.msn.com/id/2092472/

Former Lions and Chargers head coach Bobby Ross signed on to coach the US Military Academy's football team for a reported $600,000 a year. This makes him the highest-paid federal employee. If you split hairs, he's not really a federal employee, he's an independent contractor, and only $210,000 of his salary is being paid by taxpayers. Yep, that's you and me. Bill Clinton didn't make that much when he was President.

I'm not one of those people who complains that professional athletes get paid too much. They bring in the cash because people pay to see them, so they deserve a chunk of that money. However, this is a very different situation. This isn't divvying up TV revenues and ticket sales. This is giving him my tax money to coach football, and paying him more than we paid the President until recently.

Next season, Ross will whip the team into shape, and maybe they'll win two or three games, instead of losing all 13 like last season. Great. Good for them. He shouldn't get my tax dollars to do it.

Welcome to My Nightmare

I had a horrible dream recently. I don't normally remember my dreams, but this one was so vivid that I woke up in a panic, and I still remember how it felt. In my dream, the Orwellian government had decreed that it was illegal to express yourself in more than one-word utterances. If you put two words back to back, you were likely to get arrested. People had conversations that were necessarily stunted. "Going?" "Vacation." "Oh?" "Florida."

In my dream, I gave an angry speech about the state of affairs, and the government forces were after me, Minority Report style. I don't think I got away, either. Imagine trying to negotiate with the fake-ID guy about rates. The cops would show up before you got past hello.

For a repressive government, there would be few better methods of censorship than prohibiting clarity and restricting communication to single words. Abstract expression would be impossible under such a system. Imagine protest signs that just said "Corrupt" or "Evil" but were prohibited from having context. Rallies and speeches would be nonexistent.

Even everyday communication is nearly impossible under such a system. Shawn, Brian, and I attempted it while waiting for a movie; Shawn and I couldn't remember if Brian had been with us when we went to see comedian Uncle Lar on Shawn's birthday. We gave up after several frustrating minutes of "Birthday?" "When?" "September." "Where?" "Here." "Huh?" "Him." "With?" "Huh?"

I think the reason it upset me so much is that I make a living with words. One of my greatest pleasures is reading. Another is movies: imagine what the screenplays would be like. Also, I'm half-afraid that the current administration would love it if my nightmare came true.

Reading the Instructions

http://slate.msn.com/id/2091949/

This article, about choosing the dictionary that's right for you, revealed a huge mistake I've been making since I started work as an editor. The author points out that in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, the senses of a word are listed in historical order, not preferred-use order. I checked it against my dictionary, and there it is on page 20a. Hmm. This means that the guidelines I've been following since I started editing (use the first definition because it's preferred) are sometimes wrong.

This is illustrated with the word "job," which most people use to mean that thing we go to every day to earn money. Webster's first definition, though, is "a piece of work, esp. a small miscellaneous piece of work undertaken on order at a stated rate." Our definition isn't listed until #3b. The difference is subtle, but real.

This explains the problem we had at my old job with "hence," which the authors always used to mean "therefore" or "because of this." We "allowed" them to "get away with it," because we all knew that the first definition, and thus the preferred definition, was "from this place."

Whoops. Well, everybody makes mistakes. Who reads the instructions in a dictionary anyway?

The Whole Shebang, or Something

Old habits die hard. When we write or talk, in the blink of an eye, we toss around clichés and overused phrases in the worst possible way. I guess it's the nature of the beast. I'm using these clichés hand over fist, but my hands are tied.

The writing is on the wall, or at least in Robert Hartwell Fiske's Thesaurus of Alternatives to Worn-Out Words and Phrases. In a savage assessment of spoken and written English, Fiske cuts to the chase, gives overused phrases the third degree, and fights through the muck and mire of our language as it's used today. He reads sloppy writers and speakers the riot act as he blows the roof off "dimwitticisms," which are dead as doornails.

His book packs a real punch: while I was flipping through it, I often found myself feeling like a cowardly lion. Fiske has gone over English with a fine-toothed comb. He shows how our ability or willingness to express ourselves clearly has gone up in flames, gone up in smoke, jumped ship, given up the ghost, deserted like rats on a sinking ship; it's on the lam, not on the same wavelength...you get the picture.

It's a fun and useful reference. Really fun, really really useful. Sometimes he seems to make a mountain out of a molehill, but a lot of the time, he's right on the money. This is entirely too much fun. I'll stop now. Before I go stark raving mad.

Happy Friday

I needed to share this with the world. This is from an email from my friend Shane, a regular in the comments on this blog. It says it all:

"I hate Fridays. Fridays used to be a good thing, but now they suck. You still have to go to work, but the day just drags like a dying camel because you can't wait to leave. And no one ever writes emails or anything on a Friday. And the people who call are always desperate and needy, resulting in extra work. And the sun is always hidden in the valley. And the tears of the samurai flow like a river. And mice scream the last cries of the dying. And the hobo cannot find his tin cup. And the picket fence is yellowed like stained teeth. And the monkeys never play with the baboon anymore.

On the bright side, at least it is not Monday!"

Actually, He Was Second

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung

The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, under dictator Pol Pot, were possibly the most horrible regime of the 20th century, which is notable for its horrible regimes. It's arguable, of course, but my gut reaction is that they were the worst. They managed to kill 1/4 of the population of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, almost 2 million deaths in all. First they attempted to kill off the bourgeoisie by murdering anyone with an education, anyone who could speak other languages, anyone who was not of Khmer descent, anyone who worked for the previous government, anyone who was a capitalist, even anyone who wore glasses (which were viewed as a sign of education). They wanted to make everybody equal by killing off those who were unequal and making everybody else farmers. When they were through with that, they worked their people to death to grow food, which they sold to China in exchange for guns to fight the Vietnamese. Since they had killed off their doctors, there was no way for them to fight diseases or help the injured. It was a systematic destruction of a society, and it happened from the inside.

Loung Ung writes about her family's experiences under the Khmer. Ung's father was a policeman for the previous government who managed to evade execution by fleeing to the countryside with his family, posing as farmers. Ung was five when the Khmer captured Phnom Penh, where they had lived. The book is a harrowing account of her family's desperate attempts to survive together under constant threat of discovery and death. That they managed to stay together as long as they did was remarkable; eventually her father was led off into the woods by soldiers, men just like everyone else. He wasn't the first to die, though: Ung's older sister is sent to a work camp where she dies of dysentery because there are no doctors to treat her.

I read much of it with angry tears in my eyes. I just can't get my mind around the Khmer Rouge. They defy my ability to understand.

My only problem with the book is that Ung was five years old at the beginning, yet there are detailed conversations recounted, and vivid descriptions of people and places. How much do you remember from when you are five? Could you transcribe a conversation between your mother and father? I couldn't. Perhaps she consulted with surviving family members. Perhaps she recalled it all under hypnosis. Most likely she just filled in the blanks by imagining what probably was said. It's a minor complaint, since the book was so gripping, but it should be kept in mind.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Editor

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

I didn't read many of the typical childhood fantasy books that everyone else seems to have read. No Lord of the Rings, no Dark Is Rising, and no Chronicles of Narnia. I skipped from The Hardy Boys to Stephen King.

I was in need for something to read on the train home from a recent poker night, so I borrowed The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from Travis. I'm happy to say that I really liked it. I enjoyed Lewis's chatty, old-fashioned style, where he speaks directly to the reader and comments on what's going on in the book. As an editor, I especially liked when he comments on Mr. Beaver's grammar. I admit I almost teared up when Aslan dies (I'm not giving anything away, since it seems like I'm the only person I know who had not read this book). The only thing that annoyed me was that at the end of the book, the kids are talking like something Mallory wrote for King Arthur to say. Nobody else in Narnia talked like that, why should they?

I had been informed that the books are really strongly Christian, and I was prepared to resent that part of them. However, other than referring to humans as the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve, and mentioning that Lilith is in the White Witch's geneology chart, I didn't see anything egregious. Even the Lilith thing isn't particularly Christian anyway. Maybe the later books are more obvious, or maybe people have overreacted to them.

Amy, Brian, and whoever else: you can no longer gasp in horrified amazement that I have not read any C.S. Lewis. Did you know that this is no longer considered the first book in the series? Apparently Lewis said that he thought they should be read chronologically within Narnia, which would place The Magician's Nephew first. I hope this doesn't shatter anyone's childhood memories.