There will come soft-serve rains

The construction workers/window washers/whatever-they-were finished early(ish) today, only being insanely loud and disruptive until a little after lunchtime. I spent most of the day waist-deep in the big muddy, editing — or rather mostly reformatting — a manuscript, which really could not be more problematic in its formatting if it tried. No, wait, I take that back, not least because there’s a tiny part of me that’s afraid the manuscript itself may be reading this and will have its revenge before I get in tomorrow. (Not really. But yeah.) Truth is, I’ve run into worse manuscripts, messier formatting, bigger problems. But oh man, my head? It asplode.
Otherwise, the day was pretty uneventful. We had another birthday celebration for another co-worker — I’m seriously starting to think everyone I work with was born in June — with red velvet cake (and cupcakes) instead of cookies. It’s a tough life. And the heat continued to rise, slacking off just a little this evening when the skies opened up and it poured rain. But, seriously, when you start talking about the weather, and it’s not even particularly interesting weather…

Never the Twain shall meet

I keep wanting to say something — just something — about that forthcoming new edition of Huckleberry Finn that you may have heard about recently, the one that replaces Mark Twain’s some two hundred uses of the word “nigger” — and let’s just get that right out there at the start — with the word “slave.” But beyond saying, well, I don’t think they should do that, I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. Frankly, lots of other people have already said it better than me.

For instance, Petter David writes:

To me, the bottomline [sic] is this: I have little doubt that fifty years from now the NewSouth edition will be forgotten, seen as a quaint relic of attempted censorship in the same manner that the Bowdler versions of Shakespeare plays are. In the meantime, Huck Finn’s realization that a man should be judged–if he is to be judged at all–by the quality of his soul rather than the color of his skin–will continue to shine as a clarion call for racial tolerance in a way that all the censored versions of classic works will not.

I heard an interview with the new edition’s editor, Alan Gribben, on a recent episode of Studio 360, and his intentions seem to be good, his heart in the right place. Many students, and not just African Americans, he argues, have a very difficult time engaging with the novel because of that word; it’s simply too loaded a word for them to read past it. In his introduction, he writes:

Through a succession of firsthand experiences, this editor gradually concluded that an epithet-free edition of Twain’s books is necessary today. For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore forums, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always recoiled from uttering the racial slurs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom and Huck. I invariably substituted the word “slave” for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud. Students and audience members seemed to prefer this expedient, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed. Indeed, numerous communities currently ban Huckleberry Finn as required reading in public schools owing to its offensive racial language and have quietly moved the title to voluntary reading lists. The American Library Association lists the novel as one of the most frequently challenged books across the nation.

And yet, while his intention is not censorship, it is at the very least sugarcoating, and one of a distinctly odd variety: his substitution may not have the hateful power of Twain’s original, the same slap-in-the-face quality that the n-word has since acquired, but it is, in the end, arguably more offensive.

That’s debatable, of course, and obviously my reaction to either word isn’t going to be the same as a young African American high school or college student’s. It may indeed be incredibly difficult for such a student to work past the n-word, to see past the centuries of racism and hate that have often divided us and made teaching the book so contentious. But isn’t that, to a very large extent, what teaching is for?

Matt Cheney writes about this in great detail, and his post, along with the links he shares, are worth reading in full. In part, he says:

I think teachers have a responsibility to raise and work through difficult, discomforting topics with students, because those topics are not going to disappear if they’re not talked about. Students will encounter racism and sexism and homophobia and all sorts of other privileges, entitlements, and entanglements — they will even, in all likelihood, perpetrate some of those things themselves (I have; haven’t we all?). Education shouldn’t be about memorizing lots of facts and figures, or about reading pleasant and uncontroversial books. There’s a place, certainly, for facts, figures, and pleasant reading. But educators need to have some spark of idealism. We should want to make the world better, and to help empower our students in whatever small ways we can to go forth and help make the world a more beautiful, less painful place. Otherwise, why bother teaching?

Perhaps replacing the word “nigger” with “slave” throughout Huck Finn makes the book better; it certainly doesn’t make the world better.

So, in the end, yeah, I don’t have a lot to say myself beyond, well, I wish they wouldn’t do that. But they’re going to do it, and no doubt the altered edition will be taught in a number of schools going forward. I just think, for however easier it will make the teaching and reading experience, those students and their instructors are getting cheated.

Personal space

One space to bring them all and in the darkness book-bind them…

A casual observer, albeit one with access to Twitter and the patience to wade through my replies to other people yesterday, might think that I take Farhad Manjoo’s argument that you should never, ever use two spaces after a period much more seriously than I do.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t find it surprisingly fascinating. Because I did, enough to dig out my copy of the APA Publication Manual and argue the point over Twitter and elsewhere — although not enough to dig through more than a small handful of the comments on Manjoo’s original article. Internet comments can try any man’s patience.

From a writing perspective, I’m still not convinced it makes any significant difference how many spaces you use. Outdated or not, most style guides do suggest (or at least condone) the use of two spaces in draft manuscripts. And drafts are, by and large, the only thing that writers are themselves going to produce. It’s more an issue for publishers and typesetters than writers, quite frankly.

It’s also worth noting that the one remaining monospaced font mentioned in the article, Courier — which, as a monospaced font, would seem to suggest the continued need for two spaces after a period — is still the preferred manuscript font for many publications. According to author William Shunn’s oft-cited formatting guidelines:

For easy readability, limit your choice of font to either Courier or Times New Roman. Courier (my strong preference) is a monospaced font, which means that every character is exactly as wide as every other. It’s easier for an editor to detect spelling errors in a monospaced font than in a proportional font like Times New Roman (in which the “i” uses less horizontal space than the “m” does). With a monospaced font, there will also be fewer characters on each line, which can make your manuscript easier to scan.

Shunn goes on to acknowledge that “many writers have come to prefer Times New Roman” and that “either is usually acceptable,” but each publication is going to be different. Some editors won’t care what font you use, while some will be incredibly specific. I know Courier is the font I’d prefer to see when reading submissions to Kaleidotrope, for instance, but I won’t turn anything away as long as it’s at least readable. At work, we format the manuscripts we send to production in Times New Roman. As Jeff VanderMeer has noted, “Guidelines are among the roughest and least precise of god’s creatures. They’re usually there simply to ward off the most inappropriate of submissions.”

Vonda N. McIntyre’s manuscript preparation guidelines for the SFWA suggest using only Courier, adding:

The subject of proportional fonts is controversial. I recommend against them. Yes, they are prettier. But they were designed for publication, not for manuscripts. You mix typesetting and manuscript format at your peril.

I find this particularly interesting because John Scalzi, recently elected president of the SFWA, agrees with Manjoo, and quite strongly. But, as I wrote in response there:

In less formal (that is, the majority of) communication, it boils down mostly to two equally valid aesthetic choices — and/or is rendered moot by the automatic single-spacing that happens when, for instance, text is translated into HTML [browsers]. That is, it’s arguing over a pet peeve that’s almost never an actual issue, all in the name adhering to the way you were taught, or to proving the way we were all taught was wrong.

I thought Eric B. raised a few other interesting points over Twitter — he’s not wrong when he says, “There’s no *reason* most grammar rules have to be, other than readability and consistency.” — but I remain unconvinced. Does a difference in the number of spaces we use, one or two, truly impede readability, and is it actually an affront to consistency if my e-mails to you contain a different number of spaces than your e-mails to me? (Heck, even my dogged insistence on hyphenating “e-mail” puts me at inconsistent odds with a growing majority, yet I don’t think it’s unclear what I’m talking about. At least, not for that reason.)

In published documents, online or in print, meant for a wider audience than one’s own personal (or even internal business) communication, I do agree that one space should be the norm. Consistency should be the norm. But for draft manuscripts, particularly those written in that tenaciously monospaced Courier font, two spaces are in fact preferred. It may create a small amount of extra work for copyeditors and typesetters after the fact, who then need to turn those two spaces into one, but it creates less work for the editor who has to read the manuscript. And nowadays, that extra work shouldn’t often be more complicated than a few instances of find-and-replace.

For everything else, that personal and business communication I mentioned above, it either doesn’t matter, or one space is already the default. It comes down to aesthetics, which are important but subjective, and pet peeves, which are silly things to create rules around in the first place.

Tuesday various

  • It goes without saying that “Arizona’s draconian new immigration law is an abomination,” right? [via]
  • In semi-related news: Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black. [via]
  • The Canadian Science Fiction Review is an interesting idea, though I’m not sure I like their chances for getting fully funded by May 15, I’m sad to say. I was also surprised to discover that On Spec, “the Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic,” isn’t an SFWA qualifying market. [via]
  • I’m an editor, and even I don’t think we should get book royalties. [via]
  • And finally, Neil Gaiman on the path not taken:

    The nearest to a real job I ever came actually, is when I was starting out as a young journalist, my father informed me—he knew that I’d starve as a journalist—he had this great idea, I could show off show homes and I could write while I wasn’t showing people around, and I sort of really didn’t want to say no because it was such a kind thing to do, and I was starving.

    So I got on a bus and I went all the way across London by bus and went to this place where I was going to meet this guy for an interview and I sat in the reception for an hour, then they said “we’re really sorry, he’s had to go home, it’s too late” and I said oh okay, and I went back across London by bus. And then I thought, well that was that. I didn’t plan on going back across London by bus, it was a ridiculous bus journey, so I never went back, and that was the nearest I ever got to having a real job.

    Imagine if that guy had shown up!