An Editor is Always Happy to Help

Twice in the last week I have helped to prevent a calamity from befalling a colleague. One colleague was irritated and the other was infuriated to receive my editorial help, though they each requested it. Both will come out "smelling like a rose" (to use an expression my Dad has always loved and that I now love, too).

In my last couple of years in book publishing back in the early 1990s, I spent more than half of my time, it seemed, addressing legal matters: Making sure that my authors weren't going to get the company I worked for, Prometheus Books Inc., sued for defamation, libel, invasion of privacy, copyright infringement, and the like. Although I did not become an editor so that I could act as an ersatz lawyer, I did enjoy the role, especially because I got to talk to a REAL lawyer, and a great one, Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, a lot. Stefan provided his services for free, because he liked the books we published. He was a wonderful and brilliant and eclectic man, who reached the highest levels of accomplishment as a musical conductor and mathematician and teacher before starting his career in Law. I didn't know he'd been a conductor until I called him regarding a lawsuit one afternoon. Leonard Bernstein had died the day before, and for some reason I brought that up with Stefan. "I was his assistant conductor for a year," he said. "This sounds more impressive than it was. My main job was to have a cigarette lit and ready for Lenny when he came offstage."

Back to my point: Because of Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, many of my authors *didn't* besmirch their reputations and *didn't* get their butts sued. To a person, they were unhappy receiving the help they received, because they believed they didn't need it. They all asked: What could go wrong?

A calamity is smaller than a comma when it's born, and I am indifferent to gratitude.

(cross-posted at basil.ca)

There Is Nothing Too Basic, addendum

In the season's first practice, the great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden would teach all of his players, even seniors who had won multiple national championships, the proper way to put on socks and lace up sneakers. Why? To prevent blisters ... that might cause the players to run down the court off-balance, which could then cause knee problems, then back problems.

I trot this anecdote out when I'm explaining something that my students might find too obvious. Nothing is too obvious when it comes to composing prose. You have to take care of everything.

You just can't

The late, great Diane Middlebrook (author of Anne Sexton biography and beloved Stanford prof) once told me, "You can't edit yourself any more than you can tickle yourself" -- and for the same reason, I might add: You know what's coming.

There are four questions even experienced authors cannot answer about his or her own prose, without a second set of eyes: Is it clear enough, concise enough, complete enough, convincing enough?

Detecting BS

I was delighted when Professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University published On Bullshit, because that book gave me cover to teach a module on the subject to my university students. My short definition of bullshit: language a person uses to hide that person’s real intention. Bullshit can be a lie, or the truth, or something else all together.

A scenario to explain what I mean: A teenage son has been out smoking pot with his friends. His mother confronts him when he comes home: “Have you been smoking pot, son?” The son has many options to BS and thus hide is real intention, which is to make it up to his room without getting busted.

The (incomplete) truth: “Nothing to worry about. I was in a car that some of my friends had been smoking pot in.”

The lie: “Of course not. I always listen to my Mom.”

Changing the subject: “How could you ask me that question, when you know how important your belief in me is to my fragile self esteem?”

I have seen each of these options work nicely.

I love Jonathan’s dissections of bad scholarly prose. Sometimes the badness is the consequence of an attempt to bullshit. The intention that the authors of this prose often wish to hide: “I don’t want my reader to see that I haven’t thought through this argument or idea thoroughly.”

As a professional editor and a former communications consultant for publicly traded companies, I believe I'm a nifty bullshit-spotter, but only when I’m reading it – more specifically, when I am reading prose written by people who are not me. (Face to face, I’m hopeless. Why? A person’s physical confidence usually wins me over.)

I was a good deal older than I should have been when I finally figured out how to detect bullshit, if only sometimes, in my own prose. I’ll try to address that in a later post.