Lone Gunman

The author-editor rela­tion­ship is an inti­mate one, and Robert Got­tlieb, edi­tor of many well-loved books and of The New Yorker for five years, knows this more than most. One of the best insights into this rela­tion­ship comes cour­tesy of an inter­view with Got­tlieb in The Paris Review where the ‘ques­tions’ are actu­ally anec­dotes pro­vided by some of the writ­ers with whom he has worked over the years.

With com­ments from the likes of Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Michael Crich­ton and Robert Caro, the one thing that par­tic­u­larly struck me in the inter­view is how Got­tlieb con­tin­u­ously describes how to be a good edi­tor, one must also be a good reader, writer and author.

He’s hum­ble about the craft, too:

The fact is, this glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of edi­tors, of which I have been an extreme exam­ple, is not a whole­some thing. The editor’s rela­tion­ship to a book should be an invis­i­ble one. The last thing any­one read­ing Jane Eyre would want to know, for exam­ple, is that I had con­vinced Char­lotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames. The most famous case of edi­to­r­ial inter­ven­tion in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture has always both­ered me—you know, that Dickens’s friend Bulwer-Lytton advised him to change the end of Great Expec­ta­tions: I don’t want to know that! As a critic, of course, as a lit­er­ary his­to­rian, I’m inter­ested, but as a reader, I find it very dis­con­cert­ing. Nobody should know what I told Joe Heller and how grate­ful he is, if he is. It’s unkind to the reader and just out of place.

A quote I missed on first read­ing the inter­view (but saw high­lighted on his Wikipedia entry) is this brief com­ment regard­ing his approach to editing:

You have to sur­ren­der to a book. If you do, when some­thing in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have sur­ren­dered to a book, the more jar­ring its errors appear.

Many (all?) of The Paris Review’s The Art of… inter­views are online and worth spend­ing some time with. Gabrielle from The Con­tex­tual Life pro­vides a high­light of some of the best inter­views, dat­ing back to Ernest Hemingway’s 1950s inter­view.

via @RebeccaSkloot

Recent talk of the cor­re­spon­dence bias (here) reminded me of pos­si­bly the best com­mence­ment speech that I’ve not yet writ­ten about (and I’ve writ­ten about quite a few): David Fos­ter Wallace’s com­mence­ment address to the grad­u­ates of Kenyon Col­lege in 2005.

The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only pub­lic talk con­cern­ing his worldview, was adapted fol­low­ing his death into a book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Deliv­ered on a Sig­nif­i­cant Occa­sion, About Liv­ing a Com­pas­sion­ate Life and is essen­tial read­ing for any­one inter­ested in per­sonal choice: the choice of think­ing and act­ing in a way con­trary to our self-centered “default” worldview.

Actu­ally, scrap that, it’s just essen­tial read­ing for everyone.

Because the traf­fic jams and crowded aisles and long check­out lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a con­scious deci­sion about how to think and what to pay atten­tion to, I’m gonna be pissed and mis­er­able every time I have to shop. Because my nat­ural default set­ting is the cer­tainty that sit­u­a­tions like this are really all about me. About MY hun­gri­ness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like every­body else is just in my way. And who are all these peo­ple in my way? And look at how repul­sive most of them are, and how stu­pid and cow-like and dead-eyed and non­hu­man they seem in the check­out line, or at how annoy­ing and rude it is that peo­ple are talk­ing loudly on cell phones in the mid­dle of the line. And look at how deeply and per­son­ally unfair this is. […]

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the free­way, fine. Lots of us do. Except think­ing this way tends to be so easy and auto­matic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my nat­ural default set­ting. It’s the auto­matic way that I expe­ri­ence the bor­ing, frus­trat­ing, crowded parts of adult life when I’m oper­at­ing on the auto­matic, uncon­scious belief that I am the cen­tre of the world, and that my imme­di­ate needs and feel­ings are what should deter­mine the world’s priorities.

To read the speech I rec­om­mend the ver­sion from More Intel­li­gent Life linked above as it is true to the speech as it was given. If you pre­fer a slightly more edited read, The Wall Street Jour­nal’s copy and The Guardian’s copy may be more to your taste.

In 1980, as a $5-an-hour part-time office manager, W. E. Peter­son joined the small com­pany that would go on to become Word­Per­fect Cor­po­ra­tion. Then, twelve years later, after help­ing grow the com­pany to half a bil­lion dol­lars in annual sales and becom­ing the Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent, Peter­son was forced out of the com­pany and set out to chron­i­cle the rise and fall of Word­Per­fect in his book, Almost Per­fect.

You can read Almost Per­fect online like I did after hear­ing about it from Jeff Atwood two years ago. Why am I post­ing this now? Now that the book has a Kin­dle ver­sion I’m re-reading it and liked this para­graph of busi­ness advice from the after­word:

If you read [Almost Per­fect] hop­ing to learn more about run­ning a busi­ness, then I hope you noted the parts about teach­ing cor­rect prin­ci­ples and allow­ing employ­ees to gov­ern them­selves. In spite of the prob­lems I had under­stand­ing and imple­ment­ing this phi­los­o­phy, I am con­vinced it is the best way to run a busi­ness. In today’s com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment, busi­nesses can no longer afford the over­head of one super­vi­sor for every five or six employ­ees. As orga­ni­za­tions flat­ten and super­vi­sion decreases, employ­ees will make more deci­sions on their own and gov­ern them­selves much more than they have in the past. If a com­pany is to func­tion effec­tively, its employ­ees must have a good under­stand­ing of what is expected of them. Very small orga­ni­za­tions may be able to find suc­cess with­out defin­ing and teach­ing cor­rect prin­ci­ples, but any busi­ness with more than 25 or 30 peo­ple must get organized.

What we know about how we learn to read and how our abil­ity to read devel­oped is fas­ci­nat­ing, and in a review of a book that looks at exactly this — Stanis­las Dehaene’s Read­ing in the Brain — Jonah Lehrer offers us a won­der­ful teaser on exactly that: the hows of reading, from a neu­ro­science per­spec­tive.

The intro­duc­tion:

Right now, your mind is per­form­ing an aston­ish­ing feat. Pho­tons are bounc­ing off these black squig­gles and lines — the let­ters in this sen­tence — and col­lid­ing with a thin wall of flesh at the back of your eye­ball. The pho­tons con­tain just enough energy to acti­vate sen­sory neu­rons, each of which is respon­si­ble for a par­tic­u­lar plot of visual space on the page. The end result is that, as you stare at the let­ters, they become more than mere marks on a page. You’ve begun to read.

See­ing the let­ters, of course, is just the start of the read­ing process. […] The real won­der is what hap­pens next. Although our eyes are focused on the let­ters, we quickly learn to ignore them. Instead, we per­ceive whole words, chunks of mean­ing. […] In fact, once we become pro­fi­cient at read­ing, the pre­cise shape of the let­ters — not to men­tion the arbi­trari­ness of the spelling — doesn’t even mat­ter, which is why we read word, WORD, and WoRd the same way.

Later in the review, Lehrer’s descrip­tion of what it is like to suf­fer from pure alexia reads like some­thing taken directly from Oliver Sacks’ essen­tial and eye-opening book The Man Who Mis­took His Wife for a Hat.

via Mind Hacks

The First Law of Fan­fic­tion states that every change which strength­ens the pro­tag­o­nists requires a cor­re­spond­ing wors­en­ing of their chal­lenges. […] sto­ries are about con­flict; a hero too strong for their con­flict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty. […]

The Ratio­nal­ist Fan­fic­tion Prin­ci­ple states that ratio­nal­ity is not magic; being ratio­nal does not require mag­i­cal poten­tial or royal blood­lines or even amaz­ing gad­gets, and the prin­ci­ples of ratio­nal­ity work for under­stand­able reasons.

That’s Eliezer Yud­kowsky in an intro­duc­tion to his acclaimed Harry Pot­ter fan fic­tion, Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ratio­nal­ity.

The piece of “ser­ial fic­tion” looks at cog­ni­tive sci­ence and ratio­nal­ity in a Harry Potter-type world where Harry, hav­ing been raised by a sci­en­tist step­fa­ther, is a ratio­nal­ist, enter­ing the wiz­ard­ing world “armed with Enlight­en­ment ideals and the exper­i­men­tal spirit.”

Cur­rently 63 chap­ters long–including chap­ters such as A Day of Very Low Prob­a­bil­ity, The Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment, The Unknown and the Unknow­able and Title Redacted, Part I–the Meth­ods is a fan­tas­tic read.

There’s a “book-style” PDF avail­able, ePUB and MOBI ver­sions for those on e-readers, and a great TV Tropes entry.

Although lis­ten to Eliezer when he says “This fic is widely con­sid­ered to have really hit its stride start­ing at around Chap­ter 5. If you still don’t like it after Chap­ter 10, give up”.

via Hacker News