The Reluctant Blogger

Heads up, buddy!

2009-12-28T05:34:00.009-06:00

One of my New Year's resolutions is to get Hang Fire finished, now that the old ticker is tocking properly, and another is to fan the flames of unabashed self-promotion.

You know that "midlist" (meaning slow-selling) authors get few publicity dollars from their publishers. This means that we poor scribblers have to get out there with sandwich boards and bullhorns if our books are to survive in the marketplace. We can't allow our tiny lights to gutter under a bushel.

I've made a start with the home page of henrykisor.com.

Immodest and in-your-face, isn't it? But that's what it takes these days.

Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ to the Shepherds

2009-12-25T00:01:00.003-06:00

Govert Teunisz Flinck, Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ to the Shepherds. Oil on wood, 1639. Musee de Louvre, Paris. (Click on image for large version.)

The Adoration of the Magi

2009-12-24T03:35:00.006-06:00

Pieter Aertsen, The Adoration of the Magi. Oil on panel, c. 1560. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Click on image for large version.)

Increasing Your Word Power

2009-12-23T05:53:00.003-06:00

Great new words I discovered while looking up other stuff on the Internet:

Seppo (n.) An American, in Australian argot. Backformation from imported Cockney rhyming slang (seppo=septic tank=Yank).

Angel turds (n.) Those annoying Styrofoam peanuts that fall out of packing boxes around Christmas when the air is dry and staticky and stick to your sleeves and the rug.

When the title becomes the design

2009-12-17T05:12:00.020-06:00

Richard Hendel's design for the cover of the newest edition of What's That Pig Outdoors?

Yesterday the new and updated edition of my first book, What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness, took another stride down the road to its August 1 publication date at the University of Illinois Press. Just last week the text editing was finished.

Cope Cumpston, the press's art director, sent me a copy of the art for the cover for the new edition.

The design is spare and elegant, with the unusual title set in an equally unusual font (Geogrotesque Stencil) that almost fades out of a light gray block background. The subtitle -- which reveals the subject of the book -- is set in eye-catching red underneath.

I like it. I think it's perfect for the new edition's most important target audience, academics and students, yet has commercial bookstore appeal as well.

Commercial books -- that is, those sold in bookstores (and online) for the mass market -- need bold and brassy covers to compete with all the others that jostle for space on the tables. They especially must catch the eyes of casual browsers, those who aren't sure what they're looking for, and push them into impulse purchases.

Many commercial bookstores don't carry university-press titles, except for the rare crossover title that attracts both scholarly and ordinary readers. The audience for university press books is different. Much of it consists of solitary professors perusing catalogs and complimentary copies of books in their bailiwicks, searching for fresh viewpoints to expose to their students as well as new data for their own research.

Here the task of the cover is not so much to grab the eye as it is to engage the mind. Subtlety counts. Still, the covers need to be strong enough to attract students browsing in university bookstores, searching out supplementary reading for their courses.

This new edition of Pig is the third. It was first published in 1990 as a hardcover (above, right) by the Hill & Wang imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, then as a Penguin paperback (below, left) in 1991.

The cover designers for the first two editions had a difficult problem: How to illustrate the idea of deafness. Unlike other disabilities (or different abilities, as some folks would argue), deafness is not visible. You can't spot it just by looking at a deaf person. Only when the subject speaks, either in voice or in sign language, can you discern it.

The designers made several stabs at illustrating that difficult visual concept before they settled on the solution: Make the odd title of the book the major illustration. The result in both earlier editions was fine, in my opinion, but I think freelancer Richard Hendel's design for the U. of I. Press edition is the best of the three.

Hendel is a veteran in the business -- he is the award-winning author of On Book Design. He told Cumpston that what he was trying to do is illustrate "the idea of barely heard by making the title not quite seen."

The challenge for a designer, Hendel writes in his book, "isn't to create something different or pretty or clever but to discover how best to serve the author's words."

I think he's done that with his Pig cover. I'm pleased.

The next step in the production of the new book will be to design its interior, then place the text on pages and proof them. I'll see those pages in February.

Squirrel spinner

2009-12-14T06:00:00.006-06:00

Squirrel proof? This tree rat doesn't think so.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a cylindrical bird feeder at Walmart. The box guaranteed that it was squirrel-proof. Ha. Within five minutes the tree rats in our backyard had it figured out.

So on Sunday I installed a newly purchased Twirl-a-Squirrel onto the shepherd's hook and hung the feeder from it. As its name suggests, the Twirl-a-Squirrel contains a battery-driven electric motor that spins the device and (supposedly) causes the squirrel to bail out quickly.

I haven't yet seen the thing in action -- yesterday the squirrels were holed up in their nest playing poker -- but found this demonstration video on YouTube:

Let's hope my tree rats get the idea.

But I suspect the device will be more entertaining than effective.

Railborne wanderlust strikes again

2009-12-13T08:01:00.019-06:00

Amtrak's combined Texas Eagle/Sunset Limited at El Paso.

In another week I will be freed from three months of what amounted to house arrest, the need to stick close to home in order to attend every Monday-Wednesday-and-Friday cardiac rehab class at the hospital.

Let me tell you, cardiac rehab has to be one of the most brain-numbing pastimes extant: Forty minutes on an elliptical trainer or exercise bike plus fifteen minutes with dumbbells and stretch cords while watching a dozen other geezers gasp and wheeze through the routine. Every day the same old thing in front of the same old nurses.

Otherwise I'm not knocking it. (Or the nurses, who are all top-drawer.) I feel better than I have in years.

All this has lighted a fire under my wanderlust, a yearning best satisfied by train travel.

And so I've been researching an Amtrak trip, preferably on trains I've never ridden, sometime in the next few weeks.

The one that seems most interesting is a six-day journey from Chicago to Los Angeles and back.

The trip begins on a Tuesday in Chicago, when Amtrak 421, the Texas Eagle, departs Union Station at 1:45 p.m., heading south for San Antonio. There, early in the morning Thursday, the through cars of the Eagle hook up with Amtrak 1, the westbound Sunset Limited from New Orleans, and at 8:45 a.m. Friday the combined train ties up in Los Angeles Union Terminal.

At 6:45 p.m. the same day, the trip continues back to Chicago on Amtrak 4, the Southwest Chief, arriving in Union Station at 3:20 p.m. Sunday.

Exactly 4,984 miles and five nights in a rolling sleeper room, one of my favorite places to get some writing done. No hotel expenses at all. (Hygiene is not a problem; Amtrak's sleeping cars all have communal showers.) All meals are included in the price ($833.10 at this writing) of the sleeper ticket, but the long layovers at San Antonio and Los Angeles would allow me to go out and gather decent supplemental tucker.

Both the Texas Eagle and the Sunset Limited would be inked onto my scorecard of Amtrak trains, and it would be the first time I'd ridden the Southwest Chief all the way from terminal to terminal.

(Here are RailPassenger USA's route guides (with lots of photos) and maps: Texas Eagle, Sunset Limited, Southwest Chief.)

Hmmm.

E&P and Kirkus bite the dust

2009-12-10T10:58:00.010-06:00

This just in from New York:

Two longtime and influential publications in my line of work, newspapering and book writing, are folding. The demise of Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews is going to leave enormous holes in the daily lives of word workers everywhere.

For decades Editor & Publisher was the most important trade magazine in the newspaper field. It reported on industry news and in its heyday contained pages and pages of help wanted (and jobs wanted) ads.

Now it is dying, killed by the Internet and by lack of industry advertising -- newspapers are on their knees and no longer able to afford E&P ads.

Kirkus never had much advertising and, because its subscriptions cost hundreds of dollars, never had a big circulation (about 2,000 copies every two weeks). Still, it was invariably the first out of the blocks with advance reviews of books to be published two or three months in the future. Booksellers and librarians relied on it to help make purchasing decisions, and newspaper book review editors consulted it before sending out books for review in their own bailiwicks.

So did authors eager to find out how their newest offerings might fare with critics. They were rarely subscribers, but they waited for their editors and agents to give them the good or bad news. A starred review from Kirkus almost always ensured widespread purchasing of their books by libraries as well as picking for newspaper reviews. Favorable quotes from Kirkus often ended up on the dust jackets of new books.

Kirkus was that authoritative.

I know that the Internet will pick up much if not most of the slack, and is already doing so. But so far no Web source has the kind of clout those two magazines had.

For us old print fogies, the Earth has shifted on its axis.

Whistling past the graveyard

2009-12-09T05:54:00.007-06:00

Every once in a while, when I have nothing else to write about, this hole in the blogosphere will be filled with an old review of a book still very much worth reading -- and worth giving for the holidays. The following piece appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2005, a year before I retired.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.
By Mary Roach.
Norton, 2005, available in paperback, $13.95.

By Henry Kisor

There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who believe in an afterlife, those who don't, and those who whistle past the graveyard.

Mary Roach sides with the nervous undecideds. She is the author of Stiff, a 2003 best seller that explored in exquisitely grisly (and hilarious) detail what happens to our bodies when we die. Her new book, Spook, chronicles her equally rollicking attempt to find out what transpires when we shuffle off our mortal coil -- what happens to our spirits when they leave their temporal homes.

Or, rather, if we really have spirits, or souls, or ghosts, or whatever you want to call them.

Never mind Heaven, Paradise, or the nonsectarian Great Beyond. Roach is not out to debunk religion, for she has the good sense to separate faith from science. Those are two distinct and parallel realities that don't mix well (a fact that seems to escape rural school boards with unintelligent designs for their science curricula).

What she wants to know is if there's actually something quantifiable within us -- call it a floating consciousness -- that leaves our bodies when we die and goes somewhere to say hello to all those consciousnesses that have gone before.

What is this consciousness? What is its shape? What color is it? How much does it weigh? How does it get in there? And afterwards, where does it go?

Or are these silly questions? Maybe the late Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, had the right idea: "You, your joys, your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

"But can you prove that, Dr. Crick?" Roach asks. It is apparent from the beginning that she wants to believe that humans have a soul, but she is also a skeptic. She wants proof, one way or the other.

First she travels to India to find out if the disembodied human spirit can set up housekeeping in someone else down the pike -- in other words, if it can be reincarnated. The reincarnation researchers she observes may be serious scientists, but their eagerness to believe seriously affects their techniques. There's lots to debunk, and debunk she does.

She enrolls in a school for mediums and learns their parlor tricks as well as weird practices (you'll never be able to watch James Van Praagh again without bursting into laughter). But she is willing to give some of them the benefit of the doubt: "I believe that they believe, honestly and with conviction, that they are getting information from paranormal sources. It's just a different interpretation of a set of facts."

Most mediums prosper, she argues, because their clients are so uncritical, so credulous, so eager to believe that they will grasp at any straw of possibility and ignore a mountain of contrary evidence. Who cares if Uncle Joe never owned the Mercedes the medium said he drove if he actually wore the blue tie she says he mentioned? (Bet you've got one in your closet, too. Who doesn't?)

Roach visits weird historical researchers, such as the doughty Duncan Macdougall, a Victorian doctor who put moribund TB patients on a scale at the moment of their deaths to see if he could weigh their escaping souls.

Most fascinating of all was Harry Price, a famous magician and spirit researcher in the 1920s, who proved that the filmy "ectoplasm" a celebrated medium regurgitated was actually cheesecloth smuggled into the room in her vagina.

She takes us to a University of Virginia operating room where doctors have installed a laptop near the ceiling, out of reach, to study out-of-body experiences during surgery. If someone's spirit takes a brief stroll, perhaps it will report what it saw on the laptop screen. So far, no dice.

In the end Roach answers her questions with a resounding "Who knows?" The existence of the human soul is not proven, she avers -- nor is it disproven.

That would have been a disappointing anticlimax if this book had been written by a sober and single-minded debunker of the paranormal, one whose mission is to annihilate hokum wherever it might be. But Mary Roach is warm, deliciously witty and has the happy knack of unearthing humor under the oddest tombstones. This makes her the ideal guide for a field trip into the otherworld.

When she joined spirit researchers in the high Sierras where members of the snowbound Donner Party turned to cannibalism to survive the awful winter of 1847-48, she took great delight that the International Ghost Hunters Society set up shop at the Donner Camp Picnic Ground.

All sorts of weird facts cause Roach to bubble over in glee. Many of those alleged voices from the beyond claim that in the afterlife, fat people are thin. One dear departed is even supposed to have confided to a medium that "I can wear pleated pants now."

But discarnate beings never seem to say anything truly interesting. They never discuss what we're curious about, Roach complains, such as "Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?"

In the afterlife there seems to be no sex, if we are to believe those dispatches. If that's so, what's the purpose of all those voluptuous houris in the radical Muslim Paradise? Window dressing? All those suicide bombers who were promised an eternity of whoopee for their martyrdom must have been sold a bill of goods.

If you read this book, you'll laugh past the cemetery every Halloween for the rest of your life.

Skinback of the week

2009-12-08T10:27:00.002-06:00

A correction from the New York Times:

An article on Nov. 13 about Sean Bedford, the Georgia Tech offensive lineman who is also an aerospace engineering major, misstated the terms that David Scarborough, a senior research engineer, used in teaching the jet and rocket propulsion class. The terms were “isentropic flow,” “stagnation states” and “adiabatic efficiency for the diffuser” — not “isotropic stagnation state” and “idiomatic deficiency for diffuser.”

That idiomatic deficiency will get you every time.

Whew

2009-12-07T12:38:00.006-06:00

I worried in Saturday's blogpost whether the University of Illinois Press editor handling the manuscript of the upcoming second edition of What's That Pig Outdoors? would do so with a gentle and deft touch, or change stuff just for change's sake to show me who's the boss.

No need. Got the MS. back just now with this note:

"Edits were minor. Most of my edits were simply adding serial commas, italicizing Sun-Times, and correcting the stray misspelling or awkward phrase. I have one comment and six queries in the file. . . .

"I must compliment you on your writing. Your style is very readable and enjoyable. I’m also going to look for copies of your other books, as they all look interesting to me!"

Now isn't that a brilliant and discerning fellow as well as a true scholar and gentleman, and an astute student of human nature, especially the agonies of anxious writers?

His name is Tad Ringo, and I am going to buy him dinner sometime.

It begins again

2009-12-05T05:47:00.005-06:00

"It" meaning the process of publishing a new book, an enterprise that can be rewarding, frustrating and humiliating all at once.

What's That Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness, my first book, first published away back in 1990, is being re-issued in a new and updated edition next August 1 by the University of Illinois Press.

Most of the manuscript was of course edited and set more or less in stone two decades ago, but the new, 38-page Epilogue I wrote for the second edition has yet to go under the editorial knife. That will happen during the next week or two.

Will the U. of I. editor accept my carefully crafted sentences, praising them for their shapeliness, or savagely rip apart the unholy mess I've dumped in his lap?

A lot of tender ego rides on the result.

I should not be so nervous, having spent 40 years working both sides of the editorial street as the fellow with the typewriter and the fellow with the blue pencil. If the experience taught me anything, it was that no matter how good a writer one thinks one is, a competent editor can always make him look better.

I had a brilliant editor for my first three books, all nonfiction. First at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, then at Random House and finally HarperCollins, Paul Golob actually taught me how to shape a book, how to craft a narrative, how to draw the reader into my tale.

For the three later mysteries, I was on my own, doing my own "line editing" and trusting a freelance copy editor (hired by the publisher) to tidy up the verbal dust kitties. (A smart production editor caught several stupid mistakes before they made print.)

And now I'm back in the hands of a New Guy. I'm a New Guy to him, too. We shall see.

Palin's Potemkin book tour

2009-11-30T07:42:00.010-06:00

I'm a book-tour veteran. Let me tell you, those things were grueling. Today Minneapolis, tomorrow Corte Madera, the next day San Diego. Even when I was traveling by train -- my preference over airlines -- the going was tough, full of wrinkles and weariness and road-food gas.

But when the going gets tough, Sarah Palin gets jetting.

She's on a big bus tour, her book publicists claim, to get closer to the small-town voters who are her base. She travels the way they do, says the meme; she knows how Joe and Julie Six-pack feel, because she's one of them.

Yeah? The veteran investigative journalist and author Joe McGinniss (The Selling of the President, 1969) now gives us The Selling of Sarah Palin 2009 in an article revealing that far from traveling by bus, she flies in a $4,000 an hour private Gulfstream from place to place.

Palin then boards her bus at the airport for the short trip to a triumphant arrival at the target bookstore or lecture venue -- completely pressed and fresh, unlike her weary publisher's publicist, who looks as if she'd been dragged coast-to-coast on Greyhound. Because she was.

Palin's fans are completely in the dark.

Ah, dear Sarah, you paragon of grassroots authenticity.

Today's factlets

2009-11-27T06:14:00.002-06:00

Three things I didn't know I needed to know until I knew them today:

1. It would be kinder to the environment if we dug up and replanted municipal Christmas trees instead of cutting them down.

2. Smoking around your Mac might void the Apple warranty because it creates a biohazard for the repair guys.

3. PC users are twice as likely as Mac users to choose USA Today for a complimentary hotel newspaper. And Mac users are 53 percent more likely than PC users to choose the New York Times.

Yossarian's Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T11:10:00.005-06:00

The Thanksgiving dinner Joseph Heller described in Catch-22 may be the rowdiest Turkey Day in modern American fiction, and today Mark Athitakis, who was a valued reviewer of mine at the Chicago Sun-Times, quotes it on his blog. Thanks, Mark!

Angell of press-box prose

2009-11-26T05:23:00.009-06:00

Today we should give thanks for Roger Angell, the 89-year-old wunderkind of the New Yorker, whose elegant, humane and urbane baseball essays consistently belie the sandbox puerility of most sportswriters.

Let me just quote a few sentences from Angell's wrapup of the World Series in this week's New Yorker:

"I think A-Rod will always be a little beyond us. We can get used to his money more easily than his outlandish talent and his physical gifts; standing near him in the dugout at times, I've had the impression that I'm within touching distance of a new species."

Even at his advanced age, Angell still brings a small boy's awe to the battered old game.

In offering sympathies to Detroit fans for the league-leading Tigers' inexplicable choke in the last weeks of the season, Angell writes, "Many of the long-term ticket holders at Comerica Park are autoworkers, lifers on the Pontia and Chrysler and Chevy assembly lines, who experienced horrific changes in their lives in the past few months and did not expect further anguish at the games."

Now there is a rare sportswriter who looks outside the playground to the wider world around him.

"Their manager, Jim Leyland, stood in the late going with one foot up on the step of the dugout and the same gaunt Dorothea Lange expression on his face that we saw back in 1991, when his Pittsburgh Pirates team, caught up in a seven-game National League Championship Series with the Braves, scored no runs at all in their last eighteen innings of the year."

That "Dorothea Lange" image is perfect -- and no red-faced ESPN table-pounder could think of it, or even have heard of the great Depression photographer.

Of one long and tense inning in the divisional championship: "Top and bottom, that inning required forty-four minutes, and it felt like a colonoscopy."

Now that's the perfect simile from a man who's spent time on a gurney as well as in the press box.

Of Chase Utley, the Phillies second baseman: "Utley, who has slicked-back, Jake Gittes hair, possesses a quick bat and a very short home-run stroke; he looks like a man in an A.T.M. reaching for his cash."

Only a fan of classic movies could have written that.

C.C. Sabathia's "fastball-cutter-changeup assortment . . . arrives like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft."

That's the mark of the quintessential New York apartment dweller.

Angell also misses the the stands of the old Yankee Stadium and the "wall of noise they produced on big nights."

Speaking of giving thanks, Angell closes his essay with this lovely tribute to Hideki Matsui, who "batted .615 for the Series, with three home runs, and won the Series M.V.P. by about ten furlongs":

"I quickly needed to thank . . . Matsui -- with a bow or something, not just for tonight but for every game of his seven years of super-pro service with the Yankees. His straight-back, left-handed stance, with that almond-colored bat held still; his broad-shouldered, slashing cuts at anything up in the zone; his slightly tilted vertical style of running; the trim black hair just touching his uniform at the nape; the cracked smile -- we knew all this, certainly, but in some oddly formal and removed fashion, because he was Japanese and because he didn't speak English easily. His silence kept him old-fashioned: a ballplayer from the black-and-white newspaper-photograph days, before our heroes talked."

Reading Roger Angell is almost enough to turn me into a baseball fan again.

Keeping it simple isn't easy

2009-11-25T08:05:00.007-06:00

I've been working on a different kind of writing these last couple of weeks: a formal university lecture and a workshop the next day.

This is not exactly virgin ground for me. Back in the late '70s and early '80s I taught a course called "Basic Writing" to freshmen at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. I addressed them as the students they were, while at the same time using the professional syntax of journalism.

There seemed to be no need to worry that some of them might not have the vocabulary of the craft. They were, after all, students at an elite university.

The upcoming lecture will be in January at the National Technical Institute of the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. I'll be talking to the students and faculty about the life of a deaf writer.

Will the students be as smart and savvy as those at Medill more than a quarter of a century ago? Some folks say no, that academic standards have deteriorated over the years, that college students today are comparatively naive, ignorant and unlettered.

That doesn't trouble me overmuch. We said the same thing in the 1980s. And our professors said the same of us in the 1950s. Students, by definition, are naive, ignorant and unlettered; that's why they're in college, to learn how to be sophisticated, educated and literate.

Still I fret. Many of the students and faculty at NTID are deaf-born and count American Sign Language as their first language, English as their second. Can they be expected to have the same adeptness with English, the same vocabulary, as their hearing peers?

I don't know. Should I therefore suppress my natural tendency to use a vivid and sometimes polysyllabic lexicon rather than simple Anglo-Saxon words in delivering the lecture? Would that cheat my audience of understanding?

This is not a matter of "dumbing down." Expressing complex ideas in simple, clear and unadorned English can be damnably difficult. The result may look easy to the reader, but the best writers always struggle to make their prose seem straightforward and effortless.

On the other hand, many of these deaf students may want a career in professional journalism in the hearing world. For that they need to expand their knowledge of syntax and style as well as their vocabularies.

In addressing them, I'm trying to find a happy medium between the complex and elegant on one hand and the simple and clear on the other. It's not easy. But it's good discipline for a writer who sometimes falls in love with his own colorful prose.

Macrophotography

2009-11-22T06:07:00.007-06:00

What am I going to do for kicks instead of fly a little airplane?

No more ten-mile hikes in the mountains -- bad knees. No more gourmet meals -- am on a heart-healthy diet. And so on. Gettin' old, y'know.

So I've decided to expand upon an old passion, photography. With a bit of the proceeds from last week's sale of Gin Fizz, my old Cessna 150, I put together a tabletop macrophotography kit -- a 90mm Tamron macro lens for my Pentaxes, a $50 collapsible fabric light box and two $10 desk lamps from Office Depot for illumination. Hardly a professional outfit, but good enough for learning how to take pictures of small things.

Yesterday I experimented with a few three-inch-long locomotives preserved from an old hobby, model railroading. The first results are now on my photo blog. Not too shabby, I think, for a rank beginner.

Next I'm going to apply this technique to flower photography. The soft, even and diffuse illumination that light tents yield is supposed to enhance the detail of small blooms rather than hide them in harsh shadows, as flash or direct sunlight often does.

Hmm. Winter is almost here, so for experimental subjects I'll have to buy bouquets at the supermarket. After the camera session I can present them to the Lady Friend when she comes home. Two birds with one stone.

When spring comes, bugs. This means I will have to figure out how to stun them so they'll hold still for their portraits.

Life is a learning experience, as they say.

Goodbye, Gin Fizz

2009-11-16T00:01:00.006-06:00

My last view of N5859E in flight as Dana Holladay put her through her paces yesterday morning at Westosha Airport in Wilmot, Wis.

My half-century-old Cessna 150 two-seater, the one I flew coast to coast in 1995 for the book Flight of the Gin Fizz, is going to a new home in Massachusetts.

Her new owner is Bill Sanchez, an engineer at an energy company in New Hampshire who lives on a farm, grows hay and boards horses when he's not flying. He will be basing the airplane at Lawrence Municipal Airport in Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston.

I went up to my airport yesterday to prepare N5859E for her ferry flight east -- an old comrade, Dana Holladay, a veteran certified flight instructor, will fly her out today if the weather improves.

Saying goodbye was not easy.

Half the time during the 15 years I owned Gin Fizz, I thought of her as an assemblage of fragile and expensive aluminum parts flying in loose formation. (She is named in honor of Vin Fiz, the historic Wright Model EX that Cal Rodgers -- also a deaf pilot -- flew from Brooklyn to Long Beach, Calif., in 1911.)

The other half the time I considered her a living, breathing being full of affectionate idiosyncrasies, a good friend who took as much joy as I did cavorting in the air and going places low and slow. She is so light and responsive on the controls that sometimes it seemed that she had a soul.

But now it is time to cast off sentimentality and face reality, after a heart attack last August and consequent bypass surgery. My aviation days are not necessarily over -- I can still fly under the FAA's Light Sport Aircraft rules -- but owning an airplane is no longer practical.

Bill Sanchez and his son Bill Barker, who soloed on his 16th birthday last Sept. 24, will keep old N5859E warm, well fed and content.

That's good enough for me.

TUESDAY: Dana delivered N5859E to Bill at Lawrence Municipal last night at 7:30 p.m. after a 9.5 hour flight, with three pit stops. All is well.

Langewiesche flies again

2009-11-11T06:07:00.009-06:00

William Langewiesche is one of our very best journalists (as well as a superb prose stylist), especially on matters of aviation. He knows whereof he writes; he was for a long time a "freight dog," flying cargo in drafty, crapped-out, barely airworthy airplanes from one godforsaken airfield to another, and the experience leached the treacly romance of aviation out of him. He sees blind hero-worship of pilots for what it is.

Today in the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Langewiesche's newest book, Fly By Wire, a revisitation of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger's storied landing of that Airbus 320 in the Hudson without loss of life.

It was a professional performance by a superb pilot, Langewiesche declares, but he also argues that the Frenchman Bernard Ziegler, who long ago devised the fly-by-wire system that really guided the Airbus to the river, may have been the greater hero -- if "hero" is the proper term for someone who executes the job he was painstakingly trained to do.

Garner sums up the book as "prickly and uneven but plainspoken."

That's good enough for me. I'm off to Barnes & Noble to get a copy.

Omt ndlss vwls

2009-11-05T13:46:00.016-06:00

Away back in the 1960s when I was a journalism student, I had to learn the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, the little booklet beloved of city and copy desks that dealt with stuff like capitalization, numbers, punctuation, hyphenization, proper terms of address, grammatical rules and other housekeeping tasks without which a newspaper would have looked like the town dump.

I hated it. I never could remember the difference between "that" and "which" and how to mention the Queen on second reference. ("Her Majesty," I think it was. Or not. It's been a long time.)

But after wrestling with the stylebook for months, I knew where to look things up quickly while batting out a news story or editing one.

The journalism students I taught hated it, too, but eventually came to see its value as a kind of Army field manual for the news infantry, a statement of principles and standards. When they got jobs they were ready to go out and report or stay in and edit, perhaps after mastering their new employer's stylebook, almost always based on the AP version but reflecting local conditions and idiosyncrasies.

Sometimes a newspaper's stylebook difference reflected nothing but an individual's whims. The Chicago Sun-Times, my former employer, had an editor-in-chief from Australia, one of Rupert Murdoch's minions, who forbade the word "gay" in reference to same-sex orientation long after it had passed into common usage. "Call them homosexuals, for that's what they are!" he thundered.

We also had a copy desk chief, a staunch atheist, who changed the manual to stipulate that the deity be called "god," in lower case. His argument was that god was a figment of the human imagination, not a real entity, so did not deserve capitalization. Neither was tom sawyer, I said, or huckleberry finn, but they were proper names, just as God was. The chief was adamant. After he either quit or was fired (I can't remember which), the rule was immediately thrown out.

The style manual is so ingrained in the American journalist's hide that when some enterprising newsies started batting around imaginary AP Stylebook rules on Twitter in the last month or so, there was such a huge explosion of interest that the perpetrators are close to landing a book contract for their "Fake AP Stylebook." The story is here.

Some examples:

While it's tempting to call them "baristi" because of the Italian roots, the plural of "barista" is "journalism majors."

Do not change weight of gorilla in phrase, “800-lb gorilla in the room.” Correct weight is 800 lbs. DO NOT CHANGE GORILLA'S WEIGHT!

Dr Pepper doesn't have a period in it. An easy way to remember this is "Doctors are dudes and dudes don't get periods."

Breasts should not be referred to as "jugs" unless you need it to rhyme with something else in the article. See also: cans, sweater puppies.

Always capitalize Satan. You don't want to get dead goats from those people.

It almost makes me want to un-retire. (Or is that unretire? Where did I put that Stylebook?)

With thanks to Jim Romenesko for the heads-up.

The wisdom of Stanley Walker

2009-11-03T17:58:00.010-06:00

As the Lady Friend worked on cleaning out the attic today, she found in the boxes of my accumulated crap a brittle, yellowed sheet of copy paper punctured at the top by a dozen tack holes. On it was neatly typed:

What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

He is not only handsome, but he has the physical strength which enables him to perform great feats of energy. He can go for nights on end without sleep. He dresses well and talks with charm. Men admire him; women adore him; tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets with him.

He hates lies and meanness and sham but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it.

When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.

-- Stanley Walker, "The City Editor"

Walker (1898-1962) was the celebrated city editor of that old writer's newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, from the 1920s to the 1940s, and was a culture hero to two generations of journalists, including mine. In that passage he captures what newspapering once was, in all its humor and pride and ego -- and nails its reality.

Today Walker, too, is forgotten. There isn't even a Wikipedia entry on him. Only one of his famous books remains alive, The Night Club Era (1933), in a ten-year-old Johns Hopkins University Press reprint.

There is, however, a roadside historical memorial outside Lampasas, Texas, his birthplace.

Sic transit gloria scriptor.

Another for the bucket list

2009-11-01T07:14:00.023-06:00

A shot from the front porch of the Station Inn at Cresson, Pa., by the noted railroad photographer J. Alex Lang, taken from the hotel's web site. Click for larger view.

One of my enduring passions is staying at old railroad hotels by the side of the tracks where one can sit on the front porch with a camera and long lens and watch the trains go by while debating the relative merits of this locomotive model and that with fellow rail buffs all the livelong day.

This is generally a pastime for old-guy trainiacs, but spouses often come along and discuss choo-choo widowhood among themselves. Trainwatching ("trainspotting" in Britain) is a hobby for a certain kind of person, one who is not exactly a Luddite but perhaps an aficionado of a historic old technology kept alive with modern innovation.

In my particular case railroad hotels are a fine place to get some writing done -- I'm actually more productive in a small room by the tracks that I can leave from time to time to watch a fast freight go by. The thunder of locomotives and the aroma of diesel exhaust somehow inspires me. (Don't ask how.)

My preferred railroad hostelry is the Izaak Walton Inn at Essex, Montana, on the transcontinental High Line of the old Great Northern Railway (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe), reachable on Amtrak's Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. (See here, here and here).

I've also taken the Southwest Chief to the newish Depot Inn at La Plata, Missouri, on the Burlington main from Chicago to Los Angeles. (See here.)

Last weekend the New York Times' travel section reported favorably (although with barely suppressed amusement) on another rail buff's favorite, the Station Inn Bed & Breakfast at Cresson, Pennsylvania, on the old Pennsylvania Railroad (now Norfolk Southern) main line from Pittsburgh to New York City.

One can get there from Chicago by taking Amtrak's Capitol Limited to Pittsburgh, laying over for a couple of hours, then boarding the Pittsburgh-to-New York Pennsylvanian and debarking at Altoona, where one can rent a car for the 18-mile, 21-minute drive back down the line to Cresson. Alternatively, the time-challenged can fly to Pittsburgh and rent a car for the 100-mile, 2-hour drive to the hotel.

Gonna do it next spring. The Lady Friend wants to go, too.

Reality catches up to fiction

2009-10-30T06:06:00.014-05:00

On page 111 of my 2003 novel Season's Revenge appears this paragraph from the Porcupine County Tribune of October 24, 1932:

SIX FINNISH PEOPLE
LEAVE FOR RUSSIA

Mr. and Mrs. Simon Talikka, Mr. Arthur Weser and sons Arthur Jr. and Elmer, and Heinrikki Heikkila, who have lived at Greenfield for several years, left Thursday for Kontupohja, United Soviet Social Russia.

A farewell party was given for them at the Farmers' Hall at Greenfield Monday evening.

The paragraph was reproduced nearly verbatim from the October 24, 1932, issue of the Ontonagon Herald, the actual weekly paper of the Upper Michigan county that is the model for Porcupine County in my mystery fiction. All I altered was the real name of the paper and the real name of the town, Green. I added a fictional character, Heikkila, to support a subplot of the novel.

That subplot involved the historical reverse migration of more than 10,000 struggling Finnish farmers from Upper Michigan, Minnesota and Ontario to Karelia, a Finnish-speaking Soviet province next door to Finland, during the Great Depression. Most of the farmers were never heard from again, presumably having perished during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. Many of their American properties were abandoned for taxes and sold to greedy land speculators -- giving rise to a possible motive for murder.

This morning I sat down at the computer to the following e-mail:

Dear Mr. Kisor,

I was shocked when reading your book Season’s Revenge when I came across the section that talked about Karelia and Simon Talikka, Mr. Arthur Weser and sons Arthur Jr. and Elmer, and Henrikki Heikkila, who have live at Greenfield for several years, left Thrusday for Kontupohja, United Social Soviet Russia.

The reason why I was shocked is because your fiction story as it relates to Karelia was more non-fiction to me. You see, I have been searching for decades trying to find out what happen to my missing relatives that went to Karelia from Green, Michigan. They are: Simon Talikka, Mr. Arthur Wesa (your book says Weser), and sons Arthur Jr. and Elmer, and Eero. I find your story of them more than coincidence. Simon Talikka and his wife took in (unofficially adopted) Arthur’s boys shortly after Olga died (Arthur’s wife). Arthur also lost a very young son named Onni.

I pray that you might have some information (letters, news paper articles, etc) of my missing relatives. My family was from Green, Michigan, not from the fictitious Greenfield noted in the story. After Simon Talikka and Arthur Wesa and the boy’s went to Karelia sometime around October 29, 1932, we lost contact with them in 1936. According to Mayme Sevander's book titled "Of Soviet Bondage" has a listing of "Vesa, Arthur; from Green, Mich. US 1931." in Appendix 5, titled Wartime Labor Camp Victims. This suggests that they may have become victims of Stalin's purges.

The last time anyone heard from Arthur and the boys was in a letter written by Simon Talikka in 1936. Simon writes; "At this time he was no longer living in Karelia, but rather in a different area of Russia working in a gold mine. Wesa [Arthur] stayed with his boys in Karelia. They are working there in the woods. Young Paavo [Walter Kytöneva - Wesa] is a teacher in Tunkua.” [Tunkua is a town in the northern part of Karelia]. This was the last piece of solid evidence that Arthur and the 3 boys were still alive.

Thank you for your time and would appreciate any help you can provide.

Respectfully,
Kevin Levonius
Gilroy, California
Cell (408) 710-6606
e-mail kevin@levonius.com

Accompanying the e-mail was a reproduction of a listing of the members of the Wesa family (also with their mother's maiden name, Kytöneva) who had emigrated to Karelia -- and three photographs:

Left to right: Onni, Eero, Lauri, Paavo and Viljo.

Arthur Kytöneva-Wesa

Olga Kytöneva-Wesa

I had to tell Mr. Levonius that I had no further information on his family, but that I would post his letter on this blog in the long-shot hope that someone researching the Karelia period who might know what happened to the Talikkas and the Wesas would discover it during a Google search.

Agincourt and the Whiskey Rebellion

2009-10-25T08:01:00.011-05:00

Family lore, especially legends about heroic and illustrious forebears, gives us a sense of rootedness. But just because a story has been handed down through the generations doesn't make it true.

For a century or more, one branch of my family has taken enormous pride in the belief that its first American ancestors arrived in this country from Northern Ireland in 1770, settled in the Monongahela Valley and fought in the storied Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-94 against arbitrary federal taxation of alcohol.

Now my brother, a retired professor of economics and a trained researcher, has discovered two strong bits of documentary evidence suggesting that the family did not get to this country until 1798, far too late to have participated in the Whiskey Rebellion.

Such are the vagaries of oral history, of unsupported memory. We don't, as a rule, remember things as they actually occurred; we tend to remember events the way we want them to have happened.

These musings are spurred by an article in today's New York Times suggesting that the Battle of Agincourt, fought on this date 584 years ago, may not have been the impossible victory against overwhelming 1-to-5 odds that Britons have celebrated for nearly six centuries, helped along by these stirring lines from Shakespeare's "Henry V":

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Indeed Agincourt was a great win for the English against the French, some modern historians now say, but involved closer to 1-to-2 odds (and maybe less) than literary posterity has claimed. Like my brother, the revisionist historians have taken a hard look at actual documentary evidence -- in the case of Agincourt, military and tax records -- and come up with a different truth. It isn't what traditional historians and popular dramatists have said it was all these centuries.

Why is this stuff important? The Times article points out that the recent discoveries have led to a "new science of military history" that today's generals in Afghanistan and Iraq are carefully consulting in making their command decisions. If he who ignores history is doomed to relive it, so is he who relies blindly on national myths.

It's great to believe stirring stories, but it's better to have the truth.