Karla Huebner's Blog, page 28
August 22, 2020
Search-and-Replace Amusements
It recently dawned on me that by some fluke I had given the same name--Eli--to minor but significant characters in two pretty different novels. I'm not sure what prompted this--I've only met, I think, one Eli in my whole life and I didn't know him well at all. We worked for the same organization decades ago. So I haven't been naming characters in his memory, or with any particular thoughts about him beyond that he was proof of living Americans possessing this name. But I kind of like the name, so it worked well for my character Sara's presumed father in my forthcoming novel In Search of the Magic Theater.
However, the Eli character in the novel I wrote last fall isn't intended to be the same person, so as the name Eli isn't exactly as common as, say, Dave or Ben or Michael, I felt I really had to change this character's name. Not that I would never name another character Eli, but if I do, I want him to be entirely distinct and obviously not the same Eli. After some fretting and briefly considering changing him to Eliott (and I've had at least two friends named some spelling of this name), I settled on Ira. We'll see if that sticks.
I then had to do the search-and-replace, which is always fraught with danger. It's best to be very cautious running search-and-replace. And so here's what I found in searching the full document rather than going to the end where the character Eli actually entered the story...
People in this novel, especially the protagonist, are constantly feeling things. Note that eli in feeling! While the two narrators in In Search of the Magic Theater also have significant feelings, I'd be surprised if the word comes up quite as often in that novel. Their feelings are largely emotional, whereas the protagonist of the other novel experiences quite a few physical sensations as well.
The words religion and religious also came up a lot in my search for Eli. This was quite a surprise as religion doesn't play a particularly large role in the story. But maybe it plays a larger role than I had thought.
Believe and belief were very frequent. Not generally in relation to religion, but my protagonist does have her share of beliefs, and also disbeliefs, and characters say things like "Can you believe it?"
Relief and relieved also crop up a certain amount.
Delightful appears, but much less often.
Elicit, traveling, peeling, reliably, relics, evangelical, candlelight, celibate/celibacy, eligible, likelier/likelihood, canceling, reliance, delivering, and Queen Elizabeth I of England were the other Eli-containing words that appeared, most of them only once except for traveling, celibate/celibacy, and elicit. And no, the novel is not about celibate clergy nor is it set in the English (or any other) Renaissance.
This was kind of fun and enlightening, and very unexpected. And worth giving a try to even in fiction that doesn't need to change an Eli to another name.
However, the Eli character in the novel I wrote last fall isn't intended to be the same person, so as the name Eli isn't exactly as common as, say, Dave or Ben or Michael, I felt I really had to change this character's name. Not that I would never name another character Eli, but if I do, I want him to be entirely distinct and obviously not the same Eli. After some fretting and briefly considering changing him to Eliott (and I've had at least two friends named some spelling of this name), I settled on Ira. We'll see if that sticks.
I then had to do the search-and-replace, which is always fraught with danger. It's best to be very cautious running search-and-replace. And so here's what I found in searching the full document rather than going to the end where the character Eli actually entered the story...
People in this novel, especially the protagonist, are constantly feeling things. Note that eli in feeling! While the two narrators in In Search of the Magic Theater also have significant feelings, I'd be surprised if the word comes up quite as often in that novel. Their feelings are largely emotional, whereas the protagonist of the other novel experiences quite a few physical sensations as well.
The words religion and religious also came up a lot in my search for Eli. This was quite a surprise as religion doesn't play a particularly large role in the story. But maybe it plays a larger role than I had thought.
Believe and belief were very frequent. Not generally in relation to religion, but my protagonist does have her share of beliefs, and also disbeliefs, and characters say things like "Can you believe it?"
Relief and relieved also crop up a certain amount.
Delightful appears, but much less often.
Elicit, traveling, peeling, reliably, relics, evangelical, candlelight, celibate/celibacy, eligible, likelier/likelihood, canceling, reliance, delivering, and Queen Elizabeth I of England were the other Eli-containing words that appeared, most of them only once except for traveling, celibate/celibacy, and elicit. And no, the novel is not about celibate clergy nor is it set in the English (or any other) Renaissance.
This was kind of fun and enlightening, and very unexpected. And worth giving a try to even in fiction that doesn't need to change an Eli to another name.
August 21, 2020
In Support of Independents: Beasley Books
In the spirit of supporting independent bookstores during a time of crisis, I offer you the Summer 2020 catalog for Beasley Books Chicago-based Beasley Books offers "more than 300 items in diverse fields: Modern First Editions, Mysteries, African American Literature, Radicalism (including titles on the Civil War in Spain,) Jazz & Blues and Art & Photography." Beasley Books also has a special interest in and connection to Surrealism.
August 8, 2020
Gendered Descriptions of Bodies in Fiction!
There's a very cool visual essay on The Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature over at The Pudding. Erin Davis, with the help of illustrations by Liana Sposto, has run a computer analysis of 2,000 books published between 1008 and 2020 (the majority published after 1900; roughly 35% have at least one female author). Books were selected for cultural relevance and included "New York Times best sellers, Pulitzer Prize nominees and winners, Man Booker shortlisted books and winners, books frequently taught in American high schools and colleges, and books that frequently appear on Best Of lists."
Sad to say, the results show very stereotypical tendencies in terms of gender description. But go take a look, it's much more fun to see how Davis and Sposto have shown the results!
Sad to say, the results show very stereotypical tendencies in terms of gender description. But go take a look, it's much more fun to see how Davis and Sposto have shown the results!
July 29, 2020
University of Akron Faculty Need Your Support
COVID-19 has caused a lot of trouble around the globe, but it did not cause the financial difficulties faced by University of Akron, where the board and administration have decided that COVID-19 qualifies as "force majeure" and therefore can be used as an excuse to cut faculty by 25%.
Show your support for higher education in Ohio (and nationwide!) by sending a letter to the board and others responsible, and by publicizing this campaign!
Show your support for higher education in Ohio (and nationwide!) by sending a letter to the board and others responsible, and by publicizing this campaign!
July 20, 2020
Remind Your Library...
Many libraries--especially college and university libraries--have just begun a new fiscal year and therefore are at the beginning of their annual budget. In other words, it's probably the perfect time to ask your librarian to order Magnetic Woman!
Although we are still in production, libraries (and you too) can pre-order direct from the press.
This is also a great time to request a review copy, should you happen to be a book review editor or a reviewer, and if you think you might be able to use the book in teaching, you can request an exam or desk copy.
Although we are still in production, libraries (and you too) can pre-order direct from the press.
This is also a great time to request a review copy, should you happen to be a book review editor or a reviewer, and if you think you might be able to use the book in teaching, you can request an exam or desk copy.
July 18, 2020
Short Novels? Novellas? Unclassifiables?
One of the reasons I was lax about blogging during May and June was that--grades having been turned in at the start of May--I was busy writing a novella. At least, that's how I'm currently classifying it. The novel I wrote last summer-fall began as what I thought would be a novella but ended up as a shortish novel (66,000 words) but the spring project definitely stayed in what's generally considered to be novella range (27,000 words). It's set in the exact period I was living through--pandemic and protest--and I think it's at its correct length. It has now been submitted to a couple of novella contests and we'll see what happens (and if I find anywhere else appropriate to submit a piece of that length).
Meanwhile, I've discovered an interesting set of blog posts by Katherine Luck that consider what would constitute the shortest novel, versus constituting a novella or a short story or something else. She embarked on this topic as a result of having written what she supposes to be a novella, The Drowned Town, and her opening blog post is here, "What Is the Shortest Novel Ever Written?" She then considers the question in a more thematic way, focusing her posts on individual items that have been proposed to be very short novels.
She says:
In looking at Snoopy and “It was a Dark and Stormy Night”, she tackles medium and whether graphic novels and other visual forms can really be called novels. Here, I have to say that if we're wondering whether graphic novels are truly novels, it doesn't help to use a collection of "Peanuts" cartoons as the example, but I guess the book was marketed as a novel (why?).
Her analysis of The Comedian considers whether the age or literacy level of the intended audience makes any difference in calling a book a novel. With this one, which she finds satisfyingly novel-complex yet very short, the question arises as to how we differentiate novel from novella (and in word count, The Comedian is shorter than what most people would say constitutes a novella, let alone a novel!).
Moving on to Master of Miniatures, Luck considers the role of marketing in determining how a book is perceived. Here, in addition to looking at how Master of Miniatures was blurbed by its small press, she puts forth two opposing options for marketing the Danish band Týr's song “Ragnars Kvæði,” based on a traditional Faroese ballad about a seventh-century king. (I've gotta say that I'm immediately interested in any rock band that works with "a traditional Faroese ballad about a seventh-century king" whereas I don't have the slightest desire to hear "hardcore music of magic runes, merciless plunder, and jacked-up warriors in furs," but that's me and I'm not the typical reader.)
With Scars on the Soul, Luck examines the question of complexity and whether works that include memoir and/or autobiography--especially memoir, as it is more concentrated than autobiography--can be seen as novels. We know, of course, that many novels (and novellas, and short stories) are autobiographical to some extent, whether or not the author admits it. But since Luck is contemplating what makes a novel a novel, she asks "Is Scars on the Soul a novel? A memoir within a novel? A short story with autobiographical annotations?" and "Is it a single complex narrative, or a composite of two simple texts?" From a technical standpoint, these are great questions to ask. And now I really want to read Scars on the Soul! I read Françoise Sagan's first and most famous book, Bonjour Tristesse, in my teens but can't say I recall that much about it.
In her next installment, Luck deviates from her original list and goes to Koula by Menis Koumandareas to contemplate genre and whether that matters. But--(is this a spoiler? I don't think so) she decides Koula is neither genre fiction nor a novel. On to...
Literary fiction and I Lock my Door Upon Myself. Yeah, she's skipped some books on the original lineup. Well, these things develop. Here she says "Literary fiction breaks many of the publishing industry’s rules of genre novel writing. But is length the one rule that can’t be broken?" I Lock my Door Upon Myself is 23,000 words and Luck judges it a novel, without explaining why it is not a novella.
Next up is Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. That post apparently hasn't appeared yet. Meanwhile, you can get a free copy of Luck's possible novella, The Drowned Town, at The Delve.
I don't feel any particular anxiety regarding whether my own novella is really a novella or a novel--it's definitely not a short story and I'm okay with using its length to define it--but I'm enjoying these moments of attempted categorization, probably because I kind of like reading Jan Mukařovský on structuralism and aesthetics. But don't let that scare you off reading what Luck has to say, just read her posts in order and they will be good fun.
Meanwhile, I've discovered an interesting set of blog posts by Katherine Luck that consider what would constitute the shortest novel, versus constituting a novella or a short story or something else. She embarked on this topic as a result of having written what she supposes to be a novella, The Drowned Town, and her opening blog post is here, "What Is the Shortest Novel Ever Written?" She then considers the question in a more thematic way, focusing her posts on individual items that have been proposed to be very short novels.
She says:
In the interest of classifying The Drowned Town correctly and helping all of us find out, once and for all, the difference between a short story, a novella, and a novel, I’ve put together my own list of extremely short books that claim to be novels. I’m going to read ‘em and report back to you. Here are the top ten contenders for shortest novel of all time:In discussing Wenjack, she considers the role of length, and whether Wenjack is really a novel or actually a short story.
Wenjack by Joseph Boyden
Snoopy and “It was a Dark and Stormy Night” by Charles M. Schulz
The Comedian by Joseph O’Connor
Master of Miniatures by Jim Shepard
Scars on the Soul by Françoise Sagan
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion by V.S. Naipaul
The Circling Song by Nawal El Saadawi
I Lock my Door Upon Myself by Joyce Carol Oates
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
A Small Place by Jamaica Kinkaid
In looking at Snoopy and “It was a Dark and Stormy Night”, she tackles medium and whether graphic novels and other visual forms can really be called novels. Here, I have to say that if we're wondering whether graphic novels are truly novels, it doesn't help to use a collection of "Peanuts" cartoons as the example, but I guess the book was marketed as a novel (why?).
Her analysis of The Comedian considers whether the age or literacy level of the intended audience makes any difference in calling a book a novel. With this one, which she finds satisfyingly novel-complex yet very short, the question arises as to how we differentiate novel from novella (and in word count, The Comedian is shorter than what most people would say constitutes a novella, let alone a novel!).
Moving on to Master of Miniatures, Luck considers the role of marketing in determining how a book is perceived. Here, in addition to looking at how Master of Miniatures was blurbed by its small press, she puts forth two opposing options for marketing the Danish band Týr's song “Ragnars Kvæði,” based on a traditional Faroese ballad about a seventh-century king. (I've gotta say that I'm immediately interested in any rock band that works with "a traditional Faroese ballad about a seventh-century king" whereas I don't have the slightest desire to hear "hardcore music of magic runes, merciless plunder, and jacked-up warriors in furs," but that's me and I'm not the typical reader.)
With Scars on the Soul, Luck examines the question of complexity and whether works that include memoir and/or autobiography--especially memoir, as it is more concentrated than autobiography--can be seen as novels. We know, of course, that many novels (and novellas, and short stories) are autobiographical to some extent, whether or not the author admits it. But since Luck is contemplating what makes a novel a novel, she asks "Is Scars on the Soul a novel? A memoir within a novel? A short story with autobiographical annotations?" and "Is it a single complex narrative, or a composite of two simple texts?" From a technical standpoint, these are great questions to ask. And now I really want to read Scars on the Soul! I read Françoise Sagan's first and most famous book, Bonjour Tristesse, in my teens but can't say I recall that much about it.
In her next installment, Luck deviates from her original list and goes to Koula by Menis Koumandareas to contemplate genre and whether that matters. But--(is this a spoiler? I don't think so) she decides Koula is neither genre fiction nor a novel. On to...
Literary fiction and I Lock my Door Upon Myself. Yeah, she's skipped some books on the original lineup. Well, these things develop. Here she says "Literary fiction breaks many of the publishing industry’s rules of genre novel writing. But is length the one rule that can’t be broken?" I Lock my Door Upon Myself is 23,000 words and Luck judges it a novel, without explaining why it is not a novella.
Next up is Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. That post apparently hasn't appeared yet. Meanwhile, you can get a free copy of Luck's possible novella, The Drowned Town, at The Delve.
I don't feel any particular anxiety regarding whether my own novella is really a novella or a novel--it's definitely not a short story and I'm okay with using its length to define it--but I'm enjoying these moments of attempted categorization, probably because I kind of like reading Jan Mukařovský on structuralism and aesthetics. But don't let that scare you off reading what Luck has to say, just read her posts in order and they will be good fun.
July 15, 2020
A Finalist for the Raz-Shumaker Book Award
I mentioned earlier this year that a manuscript of mine was a finalist for a prize. I can now reveal that my story collection Heartwood was a finalist for Prairie Schooner's Raz-Shumaker Book Prize.
This is an annual prize with two winners, one for short fiction and one for poetry. Here's the scoop on the finalists and winners:
This year’s finalist manuscripts in fiction were “Are We Ever Even Our Own” by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, “Men Are Fools” by Obinna Udenwe, “Three Trips” by Sindya Bhanoo, “Almost Best” by Sharon Hashimoto, and “Heartwood” by Karla Huebner. This year’s poetry finalists were Alonso Llerena for “La Casa Roja,” L.A. Johnson for “Twenty-Seven Nights in the Wonder Valley,” Quincy Scott Jones for “How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children,” Jason B. Crawford for “The Year of the Unicorn Kidz,” Julia Thacker for “Dead Letter Office,” Greg Wrenn for “Origin,” and Devon Walker-Figueroa for “Lazarus Species.”
The Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for 2020 goes to Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for her manuscript What Isn’t Remembered, chosen by guest-judges Kaylie Jones and Timothy Schaffert with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication from the University of Nebraska Press. A Russian-Armenian émigré, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry has published more than forty stories, some essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, the Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Prairie Schooner, Slice, Nimrod, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, and elsewhere. Her short fiction was selected as a finalist for multiple awards, including six Pushcart nominations. Kristina is the winner of the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her debut novel, The Orchard, will be published by Ballantine/Random in 2022.
The winner of the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Susan Nguyen for her manuscript Dear Diaspora, chosen by guest-judges Matthew Dickman, Kate Daniels, and Hilda Raz with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication from the University of Nebraska Press. Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize. In 2018, PBS Newshour featured her as "one of three women poets to watch," and she was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Tin House, diagram, Nimrod, and elsewhere.
I am looking forward to reading the winning work once it comes out!
This is an annual prize with two winners, one for short fiction and one for poetry. Here's the scoop on the finalists and winners:
This year’s finalist manuscripts in fiction were “Are We Ever Even Our Own” by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, “Men Are Fools” by Obinna Udenwe, “Three Trips” by Sindya Bhanoo, “Almost Best” by Sharon Hashimoto, and “Heartwood” by Karla Huebner. This year’s poetry finalists were Alonso Llerena for “La Casa Roja,” L.A. Johnson for “Twenty-Seven Nights in the Wonder Valley,” Quincy Scott Jones for “How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children,” Jason B. Crawford for “The Year of the Unicorn Kidz,” Julia Thacker for “Dead Letter Office,” Greg Wrenn for “Origin,” and Devon Walker-Figueroa for “Lazarus Species.”
The Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for 2020 goes to Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for her manuscript What Isn’t Remembered, chosen by guest-judges Kaylie Jones and Timothy Schaffert with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication from the University of Nebraska Press. A Russian-Armenian émigré, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry has published more than forty stories, some essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, the Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Prairie Schooner, Slice, Nimrod, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, and elsewhere. Her short fiction was selected as a finalist for multiple awards, including six Pushcart nominations. Kristina is the winner of the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her debut novel, The Orchard, will be published by Ballantine/Random in 2022.
The winner of the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Susan Nguyen for her manuscript Dear Diaspora, chosen by guest-judges Matthew Dickman, Kate Daniels, and Hilda Raz with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication from the University of Nebraska Press. Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize. In 2018, PBS Newshour featured her as "one of three women poets to watch," and she was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Tin House, diagram, Nimrod, and elsewhere.
I am looking forward to reading the winning work once it comes out!
July 14, 2020
Course Revision, Ceaseless
It's that time of year when I begin to feel the upcoming school year breathing down my neck. I always find this rather sad, because when I was a student, July and August were lovely vacation months and then once school started (whether in September or in late August) I was always happy to go back.
But of course for those of us who teach, we work pretty much year-round whether or not we teach in the summer. And the latter part of the summer is when things need to be readied for fall.
Now, back when I was on the job market, I envisioned having about three years ahead of intensive course invention, after which I assumed I'd just do some tweaks to existing courses and occasionally create a whole new course on some exciting topic. And this is how it is for many professors. Once they've got their basic set, it's kind of up to them how much to change and when to create something new.
Alas, that's not exactly how my life has gone. While I'm grateful that I got a good job and have congenial colleagues and union faculty and so on, allow me to whine a little, because we all need to kvetch about something or other from time to time.
When I was teaching in grad school, we were on a semester schedule with 15 weeks of class. I created some courses.
I was hired (yay!) but for a quarter schedule. I was also, for the time being, the only person teaching western art, and most of our students took more than six years to graduate. I needed to change all my semester courses to quarter courses and create a lot of new courses.
However, we were also not going to stay on quarters--we were going to switch to a 14-week semester schedule. (Note that previously my semester had been 15 weeks!) After three years of creating quarter courses, I needed to turn them into semester courses. And also make everything taught in the fall go from twice a week to thrice a week, because by that time I wasn't the only person teaching western art and it wouldn't have been fair to make one person teach three times a week all year on the new schedule when the other person got to teach twice a week all year.
The thrice-a-week schedule did not work very well for us because all of the studio courses were twice-a-week (Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday), and students, not surprisingly, did not want to come to campus for a 50-minute class on Friday when they had no other reason to be there. So they'd sometimes take three art history courses per semester, which was hard for most of them to handle because the upper-level art history courses are all writing intensive.
We came up with a new plan, which was for both art historians to teach Tuesday-Thursday plus a once-a-week course on Monday or Wednesday. I'm happy with this, so long as I get to choose which course to put in that once-a-week slot. Because not everything works well taught like that. You really need to be able to break up the lecture-and-discussion with films and activities. And so, I've found that this works pretty well for Surrealism and for Modern Design, and tolerably for Women in Art, but it just is not great for Czech Modernism because there are really no films in English on that topic. And note that every time I've taught Czech Modernism I've had to revise the time blocks; Women in Art has also had its time blocks shifted frequently.
After we adopted the Tuesday-Thursday-plus-one schedule, I thought I would finally be able to focus my revisions on making actual improvements to the courses rather than on juggling the time slots, but of course this year we had a whole new problem: COVID-19.
Yep, in the spring I had basically three days to figure out how to take my courses "remote," and now I'm trying to figure out how to more effectively take another one remote for the whole semester plus create my own remote version of a gen-ed course that I've never previously had to teach. Plus, of course, we may need to teach remotely in the spring as well. Hell's bells, for all I know I may need to teach remotely for the rest of my career in higher ed! And I am one of those professors who has always said I would not teach online, because I would rather work face to face with my students.
You can see why I lament and complain. I'm grateful not to be a K-12 teacher who will probably have no choice at all about how to teach in the fall, but still. I'd much rather focus on making my courses better than on simply making sure they can happen at all.
But of course for those of us who teach, we work pretty much year-round whether or not we teach in the summer. And the latter part of the summer is when things need to be readied for fall.
Now, back when I was on the job market, I envisioned having about three years ahead of intensive course invention, after which I assumed I'd just do some tweaks to existing courses and occasionally create a whole new course on some exciting topic. And this is how it is for many professors. Once they've got their basic set, it's kind of up to them how much to change and when to create something new.
Alas, that's not exactly how my life has gone. While I'm grateful that I got a good job and have congenial colleagues and union faculty and so on, allow me to whine a little, because we all need to kvetch about something or other from time to time.
When I was teaching in grad school, we were on a semester schedule with 15 weeks of class. I created some courses.
I was hired (yay!) but for a quarter schedule. I was also, for the time being, the only person teaching western art, and most of our students took more than six years to graduate. I needed to change all my semester courses to quarter courses and create a lot of new courses.
However, we were also not going to stay on quarters--we were going to switch to a 14-week semester schedule. (Note that previously my semester had been 15 weeks!) After three years of creating quarter courses, I needed to turn them into semester courses. And also make everything taught in the fall go from twice a week to thrice a week, because by that time I wasn't the only person teaching western art and it wouldn't have been fair to make one person teach three times a week all year on the new schedule when the other person got to teach twice a week all year.
The thrice-a-week schedule did not work very well for us because all of the studio courses were twice-a-week (Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday), and students, not surprisingly, did not want to come to campus for a 50-minute class on Friday when they had no other reason to be there. So they'd sometimes take three art history courses per semester, which was hard for most of them to handle because the upper-level art history courses are all writing intensive.
We came up with a new plan, which was for both art historians to teach Tuesday-Thursday plus a once-a-week course on Monday or Wednesday. I'm happy with this, so long as I get to choose which course to put in that once-a-week slot. Because not everything works well taught like that. You really need to be able to break up the lecture-and-discussion with films and activities. And so, I've found that this works pretty well for Surrealism and for Modern Design, and tolerably for Women in Art, but it just is not great for Czech Modernism because there are really no films in English on that topic. And note that every time I've taught Czech Modernism I've had to revise the time blocks; Women in Art has also had its time blocks shifted frequently.
After we adopted the Tuesday-Thursday-plus-one schedule, I thought I would finally be able to focus my revisions on making actual improvements to the courses rather than on juggling the time slots, but of course this year we had a whole new problem: COVID-19.
Yep, in the spring I had basically three days to figure out how to take my courses "remote," and now I'm trying to figure out how to more effectively take another one remote for the whole semester plus create my own remote version of a gen-ed course that I've never previously had to teach. Plus, of course, we may need to teach remotely in the spring as well. Hell's bells, for all I know I may need to teach remotely for the rest of my career in higher ed! And I am one of those professors who has always said I would not teach online, because I would rather work face to face with my students.
You can see why I lament and complain. I'm grateful not to be a K-12 teacher who will probably have no choice at all about how to teach in the fall, but still. I'd much rather focus on making my courses better than on simply making sure they can happen at all.
July 11, 2020
Index Submitted!
Just over a month ago, the page proofs for Magnetic Woman arrived. It was time for me to do an initial proofread (had any errors crept in during copyediting, or not been caught by the copyeditor?) and decide whether to pay the press for indexing, hire an indexer, or do the index myself.
I decided to do the index myself.
Why? Well, several reasons. First of all, it would save me money, and art books cost the author money for images and copyright clearance. My copyright clearance fees will soon need to be paid--Toyen and some of the other artists reproduced in the book are still under copyright. But also, I know my book well and I appreciate a thorough index. I'm one of those researchers who expects every mention of an obscure historical figure to show up in the index of a book so that I can glean whatever tiny tidbit of information about that person that might be offered there. Not every index is equally thorough, just as not every copyedit is equally thorough. As a former copyeditor and proofreader, I know that a publisher can say "Do a light copyedit" or "Do a heavy copyedit" on a book, and while some books only need a light copyedit, other books get light not because the author was meticulous with the English language but because fixing the author's clunky prose would be expensive and the book's audience will put up with clunky prose because they need the information. Likewise, a really thorough index takes more time and costs more (if you are paying an indexer, that is).
I am capable of being obsessive about thoroughness and getting things right. Not as obsessive as another member of my family can be (this member of the family is thanked in the book), because at a certain point I do say "The perfect is the enemy of the good" and quit. I knew that this somewhat obsessive tendency, along with my experience as a proofreader, would enable me to do a pretty competent job of indexing despite never having previously indexed a book. But I knew it would not be a quick job.
And so here I am a month later, having finally turned in my index. I've always appreciated what indexers do, but now my appreciation is magnified! The amount the press would have charged me to pay someone else to do the job would have been not all that much above minimum wage had the indexer taken the same amount of time I did. Now, it is true that a professional indexer would have worked more quickly because, well, they are used to indexing and don't have to think twice about everything. But still, I'd say that the pay to index a scholarly book is not great, given that the task requires skill and concentration.
Am I sorry I did the index myself rather than shelling out the money for someone else to do it? No--it's summer, I was able to make time for the job, and with my particular personality type I kind of enjoyed the work so long as I didn't have to do it all day. I'd say I averaged about four hours a day; at a certain point each day I got brain-dead and couldn't concentrate. On a few days that happened after two hours and on a few days that happened after six hours.
Because indexing isn't just a matter of noting every page a name or idea is mentioned on. Note that idea. Ideas come in many forms, and there are a lot of choices to be made in terms of how to index them effectively. My book deals a lot with collage and photomontage, for instance. Naturally this topic has its own entry. But there was also the question of how thoroughly to include subentries for this under the entry for Toyen (and other artists whose collages were discussed), and under the entry for the Devětsil group, which made what they called picture poems. Index entries aren't supposed to be duplicative--but readers might only look in one place for what they want to find, and while good cross-references are necessary, you can't cross-reference constantly. So you have to decide where to be a bit duplicative and where to avoid it like the plague.
I'm glad I did my own index, I'm glad it's now turned in, and if this stage of production had occurred during the school year, I would have paid someone else to do the job because I would not have had the time to spare.
I decided to do the index myself.
Why? Well, several reasons. First of all, it would save me money, and art books cost the author money for images and copyright clearance. My copyright clearance fees will soon need to be paid--Toyen and some of the other artists reproduced in the book are still under copyright. But also, I know my book well and I appreciate a thorough index. I'm one of those researchers who expects every mention of an obscure historical figure to show up in the index of a book so that I can glean whatever tiny tidbit of information about that person that might be offered there. Not every index is equally thorough, just as not every copyedit is equally thorough. As a former copyeditor and proofreader, I know that a publisher can say "Do a light copyedit" or "Do a heavy copyedit" on a book, and while some books only need a light copyedit, other books get light not because the author was meticulous with the English language but because fixing the author's clunky prose would be expensive and the book's audience will put up with clunky prose because they need the information. Likewise, a really thorough index takes more time and costs more (if you are paying an indexer, that is).
I am capable of being obsessive about thoroughness and getting things right. Not as obsessive as another member of my family can be (this member of the family is thanked in the book), because at a certain point I do say "The perfect is the enemy of the good" and quit. I knew that this somewhat obsessive tendency, along with my experience as a proofreader, would enable me to do a pretty competent job of indexing despite never having previously indexed a book. But I knew it would not be a quick job.
And so here I am a month later, having finally turned in my index. I've always appreciated what indexers do, but now my appreciation is magnified! The amount the press would have charged me to pay someone else to do the job would have been not all that much above minimum wage had the indexer taken the same amount of time I did. Now, it is true that a professional indexer would have worked more quickly because, well, they are used to indexing and don't have to think twice about everything. But still, I'd say that the pay to index a scholarly book is not great, given that the task requires skill and concentration.
Am I sorry I did the index myself rather than shelling out the money for someone else to do it? No--it's summer, I was able to make time for the job, and with my particular personality type I kind of enjoyed the work so long as I didn't have to do it all day. I'd say I averaged about four hours a day; at a certain point each day I got brain-dead and couldn't concentrate. On a few days that happened after two hours and on a few days that happened after six hours.
Because indexing isn't just a matter of noting every page a name or idea is mentioned on. Note that idea. Ideas come in many forms, and there are a lot of choices to be made in terms of how to index them effectively. My book deals a lot with collage and photomontage, for instance. Naturally this topic has its own entry. But there was also the question of how thoroughly to include subentries for this under the entry for Toyen (and other artists whose collages were discussed), and under the entry for the Devětsil group, which made what they called picture poems. Index entries aren't supposed to be duplicative--but readers might only look in one place for what they want to find, and while good cross-references are necessary, you can't cross-reference constantly. So you have to decide where to be a bit duplicative and where to avoid it like the plague.
I'm glad I did my own index, I'm glad it's now turned in, and if this stage of production had occurred during the school year, I would have paid someone else to do the job because I would not have had the time to spare.
June 12, 2020
Page Proofs and Indexing, Oh Boy!
The page proofs for Magnetic Woman arrived a week or so ago, which means that for the month of June my life will be largely occupied with checking for errors and, in particular, creating the index.
Authors always get the chance to check for mistakes, and some people are better at that than others. As a former proofreader, I'm fairly good, but it's always dangerous to proofread your own work without someone else also taking a look. Still, I've already noticed a few things that will need fixing.
As for indexing, nonfiction usually ought to be indexed, and as University of Pittsburgh Press is a scholarly press, I did not have to make a case for why my book needs an index. However, there was the question of whether the press would hire an indexer (and charge me for it), whether I would hire an indexer (and hope it would cost less than the press's charge), or whether I would do the index myself.
I have never previously indexed a book, but--having been a writer for many years and also worked some in publishing--I had a good general idea of what was involved. I knew I was capable of the job, assuming I had enough time. But were there exciting new ways of accomplishing the task?
I asked around, and learned that there are indeed various software tools, some of them in my word processor. (I wrote the book in Nota Bene and submitted it in Word, but it is now in pdf.) But indexing remains largely something done in one's mind rather than with software, because while software can easily create a concordance, a good index deals heavily with ideas, many of which are not identified by name at every occurrence in the text. While, if I were a professional indexer, I might want to invest in special software to speed the task, the cost and learning curve didn't seem worth it to index this and the small number of other scholarly books I expect to publish.
It turned out that writers of my acquaintance on Facebook who responded to my inquiry did their indexing in pretty much the same way as the job has traditionally been done, except that not all of them used index cards, preferring to type the entries directly into a Word document, where the entries can easily be edited. Once I learned this, I decided that yes, I would do my own indexing and that simple methods are often easiest and best.
And so, at this point I have reached page 75, which means 95 pages indexed as the front matter takes up 20. I find that I can index pretty well for most of a morning (depending on how many interruptions and to what extent my neighbors are producing construction and lawn-care noise), but it's not quick work because each page has so many things to index. Luckily, my temperament seems well suited to doing this amount of indexing. I would hate to spend all day indexing, but I find that three or four hours of indexing per day (at least on my own book) is kind of enjoyable. The part I like least is trying to deal with topics that are huge throughout the book, like Toyen, surrealism, and the avant-garde. These have to be broken down into sub-entries (as do many other topics, of course), but that still can be complicated.
However, for the most part I'm just happily working away each morning and waiting to hear back from Artists Rights Society about copyright clearance. Because yeah, even dead artists' work isn't necessarily out of copyright, and Toyen's art will be under copyright for decades to come.
Authors always get the chance to check for mistakes, and some people are better at that than others. As a former proofreader, I'm fairly good, but it's always dangerous to proofread your own work without someone else also taking a look. Still, I've already noticed a few things that will need fixing.
As for indexing, nonfiction usually ought to be indexed, and as University of Pittsburgh Press is a scholarly press, I did not have to make a case for why my book needs an index. However, there was the question of whether the press would hire an indexer (and charge me for it), whether I would hire an indexer (and hope it would cost less than the press's charge), or whether I would do the index myself.
I have never previously indexed a book, but--having been a writer for many years and also worked some in publishing--I had a good general idea of what was involved. I knew I was capable of the job, assuming I had enough time. But were there exciting new ways of accomplishing the task?
I asked around, and learned that there are indeed various software tools, some of them in my word processor. (I wrote the book in Nota Bene and submitted it in Word, but it is now in pdf.) But indexing remains largely something done in one's mind rather than with software, because while software can easily create a concordance, a good index deals heavily with ideas, many of which are not identified by name at every occurrence in the text. While, if I were a professional indexer, I might want to invest in special software to speed the task, the cost and learning curve didn't seem worth it to index this and the small number of other scholarly books I expect to publish.
It turned out that writers of my acquaintance on Facebook who responded to my inquiry did their indexing in pretty much the same way as the job has traditionally been done, except that not all of them used index cards, preferring to type the entries directly into a Word document, where the entries can easily be edited. Once I learned this, I decided that yes, I would do my own indexing and that simple methods are often easiest and best.
And so, at this point I have reached page 75, which means 95 pages indexed as the front matter takes up 20. I find that I can index pretty well for most of a morning (depending on how many interruptions and to what extent my neighbors are producing construction and lawn-care noise), but it's not quick work because each page has so many things to index. Luckily, my temperament seems well suited to doing this amount of indexing. I would hate to spend all day indexing, but I find that three or four hours of indexing per day (at least on my own book) is kind of enjoyable. The part I like least is trying to deal with topics that are huge throughout the book, like Toyen, surrealism, and the avant-garde. These have to be broken down into sub-entries (as do many other topics, of course), but that still can be complicated.
However, for the most part I'm just happily working away each morning and waiting to hear back from Artists Rights Society about copyright clearance. Because yeah, even dead artists' work isn't necessarily out of copyright, and Toyen's art will be under copyright for decades to come.
