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Heading Out

December 07, 2010 - View Single Entry

It's not really December 7th. That's the day I left for Norway, and I'm already back home. I've posted blog entries for the 15th and 16th already. I did scribble a lot in a little notebook while I was gone, but the interruptions were frequent -- and welcome, like who wants to sit scribbling when there are all these other things to do? -- and I wasn't inclined to log on and post half-digested impressions to the bloggery. Over the next two or three days, I'll post some three-quarter-digested impressions, along with some photos. The short version is that I had a wonderful time!

Traveling from and to Martha's Vineyard is more complicated than traveling from or to places that aren't surrounded by water. My plane leaves Logan Airport (aka BOS) at 8:35 p.m., one is supposed to check in at least two hours before flight time, so I count backward: What's the latest bus that will get me to Logan before 6:35 p.m.? The 2:20 from Woods Hole. What's the latest ferry that will connect with that bus? The 1:15 from Vineyard Haven. That meant I should get to the Park & Ride -- the parking lot near the Tisbury dump from which a free shuttle bus runs regularly to the Steamship Authority dock. (For the non-Vineyarders among you, Tisbury and Vineyard Haven are two names for the same town. They aren't 100% interchangeable, but they're close) -- by 12:45. Voilà, my itinerary takes shape. I don't have to get up at the crack of dawn. I have plenty of time to get everything done.

Hah. First I cleaned up my style sheets, prepared an invoice, and packed up one of the worst jobs I've ever had to copyedit: a 1,200-page biography by a first-time author who needed a lot more editorial help than she got. My plan was to have this done by 10 a.m., then deliver Travvy to the kennel and eight copies of Mud of the Place to Edgartown Books. Hah again. It took half an hour to compose an e-memo to the production editor because the book was such crap and I have no idea why it's gone into production anyway: No one knows it's crap? Everyone knows it's crap but the author is sleeping with someone important? Some people know it's crap but they're hoping to hoist the editor with her own petard?

So it was close to 10:30 before Trav, Trav's gear, and I headed for Animal Health Care Associates, veterinary practice and kennel, and nearly 11 before papers were signed and Travvy settled in. Edgartown was another six miles or so down the road, after which I'd have to retrace my path and return home. That was cutting things too close: I still hadn't packed. I aborted the book-delivery mission and returned home. Good call.

I did a pretty good job of packing if I do say so myself. I used everything I took with me and had enough room for the stuff I bought in Oslo. The one omission was extra pairs of long underwear. The pair I was wearing had to do for a week. It managed. I dumped the trash, emptied the compost bucket, and brought my bike and scooter indoors. By noon Malvina was packed. I said goodbye to Sarah next door and headed for Edgartown. On the way I decided that Cape Wind would be a perfect gift for Kristin, since it's all about politics, economics, and landscape/nature. But Edgartown Books didn't have it in stock -- because it's not flattering to the well-heeled environmentalists of Martha's Vineyard? Don't know. I dropped off Mud and bought two copies of Martha's Vineyard Now and Zen instead, one for Lynn and one for Kristin.

Down at the Steamship dock, manuscript safely shipped off, Malvina locked up at the Park & Ride, I headed for the passenger gangway. Brigit T., longtime SSA employee who often works indoors these days, was at the ticket-taker's kiosk. "Guess where I'm going?" I said. "Somewhere warm, I hope?" she replied. "Norway!" said I. As usual, it got a reaction. No one comes out and says I must be nuts, but you can see the thought crossing their minds, mixed with curiosity: Whatever for?

Checking in at Logan was uneventful. My electronic ticket wasn't asked for: the airline clerk got all the information he needed from my passport. Getting through security was likewise uneventful, but still a PITA. Once I'd made it through, I staked out a chair and the adjacent side table and tried to use Logan's free wi-fi. It took some fumbling around before I realized that you have to watch an online commercial before you can log on. Mine was for BMW. The sponsors didn't get their money's worth from me, that's for sure.

I sent a few e-mails just because I could, and made myself a reservation at Inn on the Square in Falmouth for December 14th: except on Fridays, Sundays, and holidays, the last bus from Logan this time of year gets to Woods Hole after the last ferry has left. At first I'd thought to stay over at one of the hotels near the airport, then someone suggested staying over in Falmouth. Much better idea. "Hotel -- Falmouth" was the only thing on my to-do list that I hadn't managed before I left. I felt very travel-and-tech-savvy doing it on my laptop from Logan Airport.

While in Norway, I read a Boston Globe story about a North Carolina teenager whose body was found in Milton on November 15. At first no one had any idea how it had gotten there. Turns out he stowed away in the wheel well of a jet that left Durham that evening. He fell out when the wheels dropped down in preparation for landing, but reports say he was probably dead from hypothermia and/or lack of oxygen before then. No one seems to know why he stowed away. My first thought was How the fook did he get anywhere close to the jet? How long does it take to climb into a wheel well and why did no one notice him while he was doing it?

Going through the TSA rigamarole, I thought -- not for the first time -- that it's mostly for show. Any half-wise individual with criminal intentions will know how to beat whatever screening procedure can be implemented. How many potentially harmful objects and substances could be innocuously concealed in hand luggage or checked baggage?

So at a moment when hundreds and thousands of travelers were removing their shoes and outerwear, emptying their pockets, and placing their laptops and carry-on bags in the designated tubs at airports around the world, a 16-year-old boy in Durham, North Carolina, manages to get himself across the tarmac and into the wheel well of a jet without anyone noticing. You gotta wonder. You just gotta wonder.

November License Plate Report

November 30, 2010 - View Single Entry

It's actually the 4th of December. Why rush to post November's tally, which was the second goose egg in a row? I was even thinking that it's time to give up this license plate game. I've been playing for more than 20 years. Enough already?

Well, I was driving down Main Street, Vineyard Haven, looking for a place to park, and something interesting caught my eye. Louisiana maybe? I already have Louisiana.

South Dakota. On a little black sedan -- not the truck that belongs to the son of a cool lady in my old neighborhood.

It won't be official till the end of December, but I think I'm in for another year.

Putting the Garden to Bed

November 27, 2010 - View Single Entry

The tomato plants, basil, chives, and marigolds were KOed by the first hard frost. The parsley glowed bright green amidst the late fall grays and browns, but that only made the rest of the garden look more forlorn. Sometimes those hardy optimists make me want to reach for a muzzle, or maybe a muzzle-loader. (Shotgun deer season starts Monday on Martha's Vineyard, by the way.)

It was clearly time to put the garden to bed. I procrastinated, and as usual procrastination paid off: an unexpected horse-sitting job came my way for the holiday weekend, and with the gig came access to some high-quality composted manure. This morning I scored three buckets full. Malvina Forester hauled them with ease; later in the day I filled my neighbors' small trash barrel two-thirds full and hauled it home to Sarah's garden without even putting the seat down.

After yesterday's overcast, the weather was bright, sunny, and seasonably brisk -- high 30s and low 40s Fahrenheit. For a work break (I wish I could compost the interminable book I'm currently copyediting, but nothing healthy could possibly grow in any soil it became part of), I pulled all the dead vines and plants, took a deep breath, and pulled the parsley too. Tomorrow I'll use the last of it in some hummus. I raked the dead leaves out as best I could -- this is challenging because there's a foot-high wire fence around the dinghy that is my garden.

Into the newly naked plot went the three buckets of manure and the last of the summer's potting soil. It was past time to empty the various pots and containers on my deck, so into the garden I shook reusable soil loose from the tangled roots, then tossed the roots into the woods. Several cherry tomatoes had fallen off their vines. I plowed them into the soil. I didn't get around to saving any seeds, so if any of these decide to come back next year they'll be more than welcome.

Now my garden looks a lot like it did when I started last June, as long as you don't notice the lack of green in its immediate surroundings.

That photo was taken in early afternoon, when the sun was already heading west. I took this one from my deck after the sun went down. The "night snapshot" setting on my camera made a serious difference: on "automatic" the image came out much darker. The little clump of green off the starboard bow is parsley waiting to come up to the kitchen. Sarah advises planting winter rye, I think to nourish the soil and prevent erosion? Can't remember, but I think I'll do it.

Good night, little boat garden. Have a good nap. See you in the spring.

P.S. Monday afternoon: Neighbor Sarah said that her parsley wintered over and came back the next year. Hmm. I just replanted my six clumps of parsley. We'll see what happens. Yesterday I put about a third of a cup of parsley leaves into my hummus. The hummus came out great. Oh yeah: the winter rye is to replenish the soil with nitrogen. Peeing in the garden periodically does the same trick.

Language

November 19, 2010 - View Single Entry

Good dog trainers and dog-training books remind you often that dogs do not speak English -- or Gaelic, Spanish, Japanese, or Swedish, to name some of the languages spoken by subscribers to the Malamute e-list I'm on. "Sit" means nothing to a dog until you encourage him to position himself with his butt and forepaws on the floor and forelegs vertical, and then associate that behavior with the word "sit." You could just as easily associate it with "squat," "scream," or "fred" and your dog would (dog willing) sit when you said that word.

Domestic dogs are all at least bilingual. They speak English -- and/or Gaelic, Spanish, Japanese, or Swedish -- and they speak Dog. If the dogs from Malamute-L traveled to an international dog convention, they'd have little trouble communicating. Because Malamute-L is an English-language list, all subscribers can at least get along in English even if it's not their first language. But if you recruited a dozen humans at random from around the world, the chances are good that they'd have a hard time getting a conversation going that involved all of them. Hell, it's hard enough for monolingual English-speakers if one is from Boston, one from Texas, one from Sydney, one from Yorkshire, and one from Mumbai.

So. I'm going to Norway in less than three weeks. (Gulp.) I'm told that English is widely understood and spoken in Norway, especially in the cities. Indeed, I've worked with several Norwegian writers, all of whom were writing in English, and I'm going to work with two of them on the English-language translation of a book that's about to come out in Norwegian. Nevertheless, I think it's rude to go to Norway knowing not a word of Norwegian, and that is how much I knew when I got the invitation less than a month ago. So I went to the West Tisbury library and took out a basic (very basic) Norwegian-language course.

Now I'm marveling even more than usual at the ability of dogs to live among humans who, in many cases, don't understand much (or any) Dog. Dogs read us amazingly well despite the language barrier and figure out what we want. They manage to distinguish what we say we want from what we really want from what we'll actually put up with. Human babies start figuring this out almost as soon as we're born, and by the time we start formal schooling most of us have it down cold.

It's been a long, long time since I was that young, and I haven't tried to learn another language since I left college. Before I moved to Martha's Vineyard, I lived in D.C. neighborhoods where Spanish was widely spoken; having studied Spanish, and having grown up with a mother and grandmother who spoke Spanish with each other (but made no effort to teach it to us kids), I could often understand what was going on around me and even make simple requests, but that's a long way from trying to make my way where only Spanish is spoken. Listening to very simple Norwegian conversations and repeating the questions and answers after the speakers on the CDs . . .

Wow. I feel like a two-year-old who's learning to say words she understands in a way that the adults can understand, except I'm pretty sure that when I was two years old I didn't feel like a complete idiot. Frustrated, sure, when I couldn't get my point across, but that self-conscious suspicion that you're making a fool of yourself comes later. Just making the right sounds is a challenge. When I started studying Arabic, I couldn't even hear the difference between certain consonants. In English, "soap" is soap no matter how you pronounce the s. In Arabic, "sin" and "sad" (I just tried to use the Arabic letters but this convinced the bloggery's word processor that it should start moving from right to left, so I gave up. Pretend there's a dot under the s in "sad" to indicate that it's velarized) are distinct "phonemes," which is to say that they're heard differently by Arabic-speakers.

Conversely, English-speakers hear a distinct difference between "bat" and "pat," and that's a good thing because "bat the ball" and "pat the pall" mean rather different things. The p sound, however, doesn't exist in standard Arabic. Arabic-speakers hear b and p (which is an unvoiced b) as, at most, very slight variations in the pronunciation of the same letter.

As an adult, in other words, I know how hard it can be to understand someone whose pronunciation is "off," and when that knowledge is combined with the deep-rooted fear of looking or sounding like an idiot, the result can be total paralysis.

I am, however, persevering with my Norwegian-language CDs. I can now say, in Norwegian, "Excuse me, do you understand English?" and "I don't understand Norwegian." I cannot write these things in Norwegian because so far I've managed to heed the instructions not to look at the written version too soon. Being a written-word junkie, I grasp the importance of this advice. Good dog trainers and dog-training books often advise not assigning a word to a behavior -- for instance, "sit" to that behavior of plunking your butt on the ground while your forehand remains upright -- until the behavior looks the way you want it. I want to get the sounds right before I look at the letters.

If my dog can learn a few words of English, I can learn a few words of Norwegian.

Feedback

November 10, 2010 - View Single Entry

In the online world, everyone wants my feedback. Stores I buy stuff from want my feedback. Seminars I attend want my feedback. Dog trials I participate in and motels I stay at want my feedback. My favorite public radio station wants my feedback, especially around pledge-drive time. Some eBay sellers won't give you feedback till you give them feedback. Websites like Amazon.com even invite me to give feedback on other people's feedback. Even in the real world we've got "HOW'S MY DRIVING? CALL 800-555-1212."

After several years of this, I'm jaded. I don't believe most of these concerns care diddly-squat about what I think. They do want to create the appearance that they care about what I think, however. They also want to know if clients and customers are so dissatisfied they're likely to go elsewhere. So in most cases when someone solicits my feedback I consider it pro forma, like saying, "How do you do?" I only respond if it takes no time or I'm looking for an excuse to procrastinate.

Or if I'm really, really pissed off at whoever's soliciting the feedback. In those cases, the solicitor likely won't pay any attention to my "Extremely Dissatisfied" responses, or even to my time-consumingly constructive and tactful comments, if the form allows for them. In such cases giving feedback serves my own need to think things through (maybe I contributed to this mess?) and to blow off some adrenaline. Practice in translating fury into possibly palatable prose is never wasted. If "tactful" proves elusive, I can endeavor to get off an insult stylish enough to make Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson smile. 

If I believe that the solicitor really cares about feedback, as with the dog-training seminar I went to on Sunday, I'll respond. It's a way to show my appreciation for a job very well done. As a writer, I find it demoralizing and ultimately depressing to work in a vacuum. Response, any kind of response, lets me know people are out there. Thoughtful responses, enthusiastic responses, responses that go off on interesting tangents -- one or two of these can keep me going for weeks. Their power comes in part from the fact that they're unsolicited.

In some cases, though, I find solicited feedback helpful. I read online reviews for products I'm thinking of buying, especially clothes and anything to do with computers. These reviews usually include ratings, e.g., one to five stars, but what matters most are the comments. They help me decide whether this product works well for people who have something in common with me: they're outdoorsy, they're computer-literate, they're around five-foot-five, and so on.  These reviews are so useful to me that when a company I like, such as Duluth Trading or L. L. Bean, solicits my feedback, I'll often oblige.

Writers' groups, formal or informal, online or real-time, deal in solicited feedback. A good critiquer is a joy forever -- at least after you figure out how to fix the passage that she flagged as murky. When you find a writers' group whose members read carefully but differently and who aren't afraid to articulate their response to your work -- don't let it go!

Writers' groups aside, though, for me the most valuable feedback comes during the give-and-take of working together. Plenty of people won't tell you in so many words what they think (sometimes they aren't sure), but if you're paying attention you can figure it out by listening carefully and reading between the lines. When I'm in training mode with Travvy, I try to give him feedback as clearly as I can, using clicks and treats, body position and voice, but he's always watching me for the feedback I don't know I'm giving. If I could be that observant with friends and colleagues, I'd never piss anyone off.