Oddly Appropriate Signage (2012-03-17)

As is true of many places, where I live we are passing through a rather unseasonable spring, and have been since early February. The city I live in is also the ongoing prey of a boom in pork barrel construction projects on one hand and greed-driven condominium projects on the other. Learning which streets are open and which aren't is a neverending source of surprise here — and I'm not exaggerating either, because even I get surprised, and I commute primarily on foot or by bus. On top of the street closure lottery which is human-generated, we have a wind storm lottery that leads to additional street closures as high speed winds tear fragments off of complete buildings and construction materials off of incomplete ones. (This is not as exciting as you might expect.) With all of this going on, it was probably only a matter of time before signage started showing up in strange places.

Th construction sign in this picture is laying in the middle of a snow and ice covered sand bar on the river near the centre of town. I have to admit when I first noticed it my thoughts an briefly along the usual (I think) lines: more construction debris, gross; or wow, that kegger got seriously out of hand. Except that when push came to shove, the image actually isn't that boring, and not just because you don't often see a bright orange construction sign beyond where any person can conveniently reach it as demonstrated by the fact that it's still there over two weeks later.

So what's a not so boring view of this stranded sign? Well, after a few minutes, it occurred to me that the sign was quite correct in its new circumstances. Rivers are not often thought of as bodies that build things. They only tend to make it into the news if they flood catastrophically (the Mississippi River system), fail to reach the ocean because of excessive water withdrawals (the Rio Grande), or are being subjected to massive dambuilding projects of terrible impact and scale (Three Gorges, China). The fact that most of us depend on rivers for all the water we use is almost invisible, and so is the way rivers remodel and build up their banks and shallower stretches. In the case of the river this sign is in, this section of the river is crossed by three bridges within two to five minutes walk of each other, and they would never have been built there if the area hadn't already been a fording place.

So here we have a river that is busy remodelling a fording place that is at least several centuries old, albeit with some unasked for additions by people. People who couldn't get by without the river, which flows through an otherwise semi-arid region. It gives a different perspective on that construction sign, doesn't it?

An Excursion To Salted Beef (2012-02-12)

On a recent grocery shop, I stumbled on a product I had no idea was still made and consumed nowadays (which for those  in the know tells you that this author is not from Newfoundland or anywhere else in the Canadian maritimes). As you can see in the photo, the product I mean is salted beef, also known as naval or navel beef. The buckets shown here are not much smaller than a four litre ice cream pail. This stuff was originally a staple for navies, the British navy being among the best known for it, although this may not have much to do with the product name as such. It seems that "navel beef" may actually be a term used for a cut of meet coming from near the navel of the cow providing the meat. If it had been up to the sailors and soldiers most often subjected to long periods of salt beef as a staple of their meals, it would be labelled "junk" or "salt horse." Evidently such names weren't going to survive the marketing department.

Salting is an ancient means of preserving food, especially where the weather was too hot for raw meat to keep, or for ensuring nobody went hungry during lean winters. Newfoundland, one of the places where salt beef is still a staple of local cuisine, was itself an important salting station for herring fleets long before Europeans officially deemed themselves to have "discovered" it. A significant part of the catch was smoked originally, but as demand for the fish rose, salting became the preferred preservation method because it was faster. Fish preserved this way would survive the long voyage home, which could take up to two months. So in a way, food preservation is a way to extend how long in time or far in space food supplies can reach.

As a method of extending supply lines, especially when supplies were limited, salted beef was both a bane and a benefit. Salted beef like that in the tubs I photographed must be soaked overnight and drained thoroughly before it can be eaten or made into anything. This could be a pretty tall order for an army on the move, and once tin cans became more available and safer to use (lead amalgam was frequently used to solder them in the early days), it didn't take long for someone to invent "corned beef". Corned beef is preserved in salt plus some other spices typically, and before it is canned it is desalted enough to allow it to be eaten practically from the can. I like corned beef, but can't recommend such a thing, not least because it is still pretty salty and tastes best right after it has been heated up. British soldiers in the first world war called it "bully beef" and all too rarely had any means to heat it when they were posted to the trenches, hence their affectionate terms for it.

All this said, I have left out another important reason for salting beef, at least from the perspective of those packaging and selling it. From at least the 1700s, salting was not something you did to good cuts of beef. This was not what you did to a T-bone steak, and if you were a person of means it was beneath you to eat such stuff. So poorer cuts, the stuff with gristle and large blood vessels in it would be relegated down to the poor in general. It was cheaper, kept under adverse conditions, and could be made to go far. In my own experience, a very old trick my mother used to use was to mix a "salad" (add mayonnaise/salad dressing and onions, then mix) for sandwiches using corned beef for example — back when corned beef didn't cost an average of $5 to $7 a (small) can as it does now. Don't let any of this put you off though, if you want to try it. For one thing, salting meat to preserve it also tenderizes it, and today what you get in a bucket like those shown here is a decent cut with minimal gristle. In fact to an unguarded eye based on the foodie photographs I have seen of it, modern day salted beef looks much like Montréal smoked meat.

Who Said Bookstores Were Boring? (2012-02-05)

Given the previous Thought Piece, and the fact that I'm a writer, it is probably overdetermined that I would have an irrational fondness for books and bookstores. I am certainly far from alone in this, but must confess that it has never occurred to me to do something remotely as cool as what Adam Adman and Sean Ohlenkamp did to make this movie that they posted to YouTube. It's a stop motion tour de force, with practically the entire contents of a Toronto bookstore having a grand party while the staff and owners are away for the night. Go ahead and watch it full screen, the video is crisp and clear, and you will be even more impressed at some of the things the film makers came up with to synch with the music.

The past ten to twenty years have been far from easy times for bookstores. The usual explanations for this I have heard are: Amazon or any other on-line book retailer, "big box stores" which should be called the unpleasant warehouses they are, or various electronic alternatives. It is undeniable that all of these things have increased competition with brick and mortar stores, and encouraged the consolidation of book franchise chains into book warehouses sited at the strange wastelands where big box stores are built on the edges of suburbs. However, I think this view underestimates the role of encouragement to misunderstand what bookstores can become in a community.

Book warehouses certainly have their place. If you already know what you want and are quite certain it is reasonably mainstream or that it is part of the stock of current nine-day wonders that often get abandoned in train stations, then you can be assured they'll have what you want. In fact, they're probably your go to place if you happen to be a person who needs to make a bulk book order for some reason. If you have no expectations that the staff will know where anything is or be able to discuss books with you, then you won't be disappointed in that score either. Unfortunately such places exact a time penalty, since you're expected to do for yourself what a more traditional bookstore hires staff to help you with, and of course you have to get out to these giant stores somehow.

If you would like the opportunity to chat with knowledgable staff about potential purchases, let alone avoid giving the book warehouse chains free labour, then it's a book store you'll want. These are also the places you can listen to readings by local authors, college and university students, or authors that aren't the latest Franzen or Meyers. Depending on the store, there may or may not be an attached coffee shop (an excellent innovation accidentally driven by the book warehouses, it should be admitted), or classes or reading groups of various types a few days a week. Then there's the fact that barring something egregious, the staff aren't under orders to move you along if you seem to be taking your time to purchase something, or *gasp* are having a long chat with another customer. These sorts of happy features are more likely in independent bookstores than chain stores, although no doubt a determined store manager can achieve remarkable things even when faced with franchise regulations.

Some Thoughts On Editing (2012-01-31)

To be a writer is to be a person who attempts to convince somebody else to publish your writing, at least some of the time. This remains the case despite the advent of spell-checkers, e-books, and self-publishing options that don't make your work look as if it belongs on the news stands of half-deserted bus stations. If someone else is going to publish a piece of your writing, then inevitably you will need to work with an editor, maybe even two editors at least, if there is 'editing' and then 'copyediting.' These days I have my doubts about there being two stages of editing, especially considering the state of some of the books I have seen lately, let alone the advertisement pictured here. This billboard is a few blocks from my apartment building, and logically you would expect advertising copy to be checked as thoroughly as the text of a book for similar reasons: many, many eyes will potentially be reading this thing, and what they see reflects on the publisher as much as the writer. Working with an editor can be of significant benefit to a writer and the piece of work being edited. The "working with" part is not optional, however.

In the course of reading Alberto Manguel's essay "The Secret Sharer" in his latest book A Reader On Reading, I learned that editorial approaches vary in a broad way between countries. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. Manguel discusses the dangers of what I would call the intrusive North American approach to editing, with the editor trying to bring out "the author's intention." "Intrusive," because this means far more than seeking out typos and highlighting areas where meaning is unclear or things have gotten out of order. It can mean extensive rewrites, additions, or restructuring that alter the manuscript significantly. Other writers may want this sort of attention, I certainly don't. The editor is welcome to write their own book, and they are welcome to reject the book because it isn't what the publisher wants to publish.

It can happen that a manuscript slips in that actually has no fit with the publisher's current catalogue, and no fit with where they want their catalogue to go. I found myself involved in an unwanted publishing debacle of just this kind, with the added problem that the publisher did not consider it necessary for author and editor to work together. It gradually became clear that no one had actually read the original sample chapters I had provided as per their submission guidelines. They were looking for simple romance novels that could be lengthy but not challenging reads, although that was not well expressed in their call out for samples. Still, that is the point of calling for samples in the first place. Evidently the selection process went awry in this case, but I think my experience shows that editors may not always be "searching for the author's intention."

At least for now, it seems that North American publishers have become deeply risk averse. This goes beyond taking only as much risk as you can afford, to demanding books that will be guaranteed to make money. Any books different from what already sells well are going to have a tough time getting published at all in that case, and I think its fair to say that the struggles of smaller bookstores and the contents of "book box" bookstores bear this out. An editor working for such a publisher will be under pressure to smooth out anything in a manuscript that is too far from the features of what already sells well. That can lead to quite significant editing, let alone rewriting, for a purpose that bears no relationship to finding the writer's intention, unless of course, the writer had writing for whatever "the market" in question is in the first place.

The North American focus on "the market" may also be encouraging a thinning of the editorial ranks, especially the under-appreciated copyeditors. Which leads to gaffs like the one on that bulletin board, or the numerous typos in at least the first edition of the Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures to pick a recent example I've seen.

UPDATE: As of 5 March 2012 or so, this sign has been corrected. It is part of a broader ad campaign (as you would expect), including a sign that declares that the business in question is neither right brained nor left brained. This made me wonder with a wince, "okay, so are you guys any brained?"

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