Nice not to have two-leggeds to grump about: Gypsy moths have clobbered our wooded area this year

Here’s another story about “conditions lately in New Jersey” that isn’t my usual kind of grump. [Edits 6/25/15. Edit 6/26/15.]

And after a weekend of the sorrow (and hopeful liturgy) regarding the shootings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston; some of us’s blithe attendance at popcorn movies like Jurassic World; and some of us slobbing around at the beach or at a hotdog-infested Father’s Day picnic, the following might be refreshing.

In my immediate township, especially on the mountain on which I live, an organism has come and done a lot of damage—followed its natural course, been selfish as such an entity naturally is—and the blight is here to see. Damage up high, and evidence of damage on the ground.

What is this? Gypsy moth damage. Up here in the mountains of the northwest of the state. I don’t know if other parts of the state have gotten this.

My mother had mentioned seeing in the newspaper some weeks back—I didn’t see it—news about how the state or township (my indefiniteness) wasn’t going to spray for gypsy moths this year, as it has done in the past. The article apparently conveyed there was not enough area (in our township) to make spraying worthwhile this year (budget-wise), or some such reasoning.

Over past years, the fact of spraying—as far as I knew about it—had become routine enough, and perhaps whatever gypsy moth presence was minor enough, that I hadn’t thought of gypsy moths as a major problem in my immediate area for, seemingly, decades. (The article you can see here, which is from a newspaper in neighboring Morris County, outlines some of the ways the spraying programs are tackled, which I hadn’t known about. [I didn’t read all this article.] My township, in Sussex County, may have routinely followed a different system; and whether the decision here not to spray this year was typical or not, budget-conscious or not, I don’t know. And I don’t know how much, as a standard thing, local townships and counties work closely with the state on this.)

This year, gypsy moths are a problem in my local area.

They’re a kind of moth that starts out as a caterpillar, which does the most damage. You could see the “tents” of the cobwebby homes a big batch of baby caterpillars live in (though I didn’t really see this sight this year) [correction 6/25/15: after my mother did a rare proofreading of this blog entry, she pointed out that what we've long called "tent caterpillars" are different from gypsy moths, which I could assent to being right; actually, "tent" caterpillars, I think, usually appear later in the summer, and I don't remember when I last saw them around here; but still, gypsy moth caterpillars must be born in small multi-young webs of some sort]; and then the caterpillars, tiny at first, come out and fan out through the canopies of trees. And they eat the trees’ leaves—and eat and eat and eat. And get bigger as caterpillars.

Eventually the caterpillars get into weird, tan, fuzzy-looking cocoon-related things on the trees, with a brown, semi-smooth chrysalis, out of which eventually a moth hatches. The moths aren’t so bad; they may flap around annoyingly, and you don’t want them getting into your house. But as I recall from past infestations, the moth phase isn’t as bad as what the caterpillars do.

This year, there were so many caterpillars that, by now, you see many broken pieces of green leaves all around on the ground: it looks like fall already, in this way. Some trees are missing so many leaves (oaks, especially, seem to have been hit hard) that they look like it’s early April or late October. The defoliation isn’t everywhere, but selective. When you drive past wooded areas near me, you can go from very-densely leafy areas to areas where there are so few leaves, it looks like early spring (or fall) there.

When I was in the valley several days ago, where you could see the mountains (on which I live), which rise about 800 feet from the valley, and you see them from about half a mile away, you could see rich green on most of them, but places where there were brown streaks—the distant view of patches of trees missing leaves, likely due to gypsy moths.

A mile or so north of my home, the township road of Barry Drive North phases into Barrett Road (they were originally one continuous road), the latter of which starts/stops at a mountain top, with the more old-time-design Barrett Road essentially climbing a long way from its opposite end in New York State, on State Route 94; the climb in altitude, for a few miles, is roughly 800 feet. In the winter, if there is an ice storm on the mountaintop that is a function of altitude, you start seeing the icy trees as you near where Barrett Road tops out at its junction with Barry Drive North. Well, now, a lot of trees in this mountaintop “brow” area are so bare of leaves, they look like they are almost ready for winter.

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Also, this late spring, when the caterpillars were at their height of feeding—they are past that, now—you could hear a lot of rapid-succession “ticking” in the leaves as they dropped little pieces of excrement on the ground. Eating and crapping—that’s their illustrious lives. And the specks of excrement—weird, uneven-surface little berry-like things made of slightly discolored leaves—have littered the ground, looking somewhat like olive-colored versions of the white sleet pellets you might see in the winter. Recent rains had swept some of these away.

What a hit we took this year from gypsy moths.

I remember many years ago—the late ’60s or early ’70s, when we first lived here in northwestern New Jersey—the gypsy moths could do such damage to trees that some sections of woods would have a lot of dead trees clustered together. It looked as if something—like a forest fire, or flooding from a beaver—had caused a huge section of trees to die en masse and seemingly for bad reasons. At least, “gypsy moths” was the explanation I heard as a kid. Then, it became a regular program for spraying for them to happen each spring. (Again, I don’t know how much towns did this with help from the state.) I’m not sure if it was regularly (annually) done from the early 1970s to now. [Update 6/26/15: Strangely, for the past week or a little more, a mass phenomenon has been happening with the caterpillars: They have crawled down the trunks of the trees in whose canopy they were eating, and came to a stop near the bottoms of the trunks, and seem to have died there. Some have ended up, individually, in various places on the ground and like limp pieces of yarn, seemingly dead. This sort of thing has happened in past years. What is up now? Has there been a government-done spraying this season (a week or a little more ago)? Or has insecticide left in the trees from a past year's spraying ended up killing them, after they've grown to a fairly adult size (an inch and a half long or so)? Not sure, but it's certain a good number of trees have had their leaves damaged or removed from this year's caterpillar feeding.]

And I think, also, that the amount of gypsy moths coming into an area can vary; that may be something where the infestation cyclically goes way down (the article I linked to in this entry suggests so)—whether or not due to spraying the year before—and comes back as a function of the chancy way these creatures can ebb and flow like other creatures that manage to beat threats to their existence.

Never mind my vague generalities about the history of these creatures. They truly did a number on some of our trees (including in the local state park) this year. My mother said she’d read that trees could take two years’ worth of blighting by gypsy moths before they could then be apt to die from lack of leaves in the summer. Whatever the case, it seems like we’re missing a full complement of summer greenery around here this year; some of the woods have been cheated of their summer due.

And if some would say “All God’s creatures have their place in the biosphere,” I would graciously add that, if this meant I should greet a gypsy moth caterpillar with a kiss and a “Top of the morning to you, Mr. Snuggle-Huggie!,” I’ll leave my share of that to someone else.

PH series, Part 8: Interlude: Facts (from a solid source) on the colorful text series; and an Appendix

Subsections below:

Catch-up on certain facts, including crediting 50 studio workers

Preface to the Appendix: The potential for distortions of perceptions of others’ actions, and reputations

Appendix: An incident from 2008 showing what they don’t teach you in school

[See Part 4 for a set of links to earlier parts. Edits below 6/13/15. Note 6/23/15: The series will continue, starting with Part 9. Edit 7/5/15.]

Catch-up on certain facts, including crediting 50 studio workers

As I’ve said in other blog entries, I go on memory for some old facts, and when doing blog entries means working within a few-page format (and with them I’m not directly writing a book anyway), you can be sketchy; and for most readers’ purposes, that’s good enough. But in this case, I finally dug out my copy of the ninth-grade Prentice Hall HS lit textbook, and I’m glad I did, because I found some facts in previous entries to correct, and I can also proceed with this blog series later with more elicited memory of these old days.

First, I found that the book I have—for ninth grade—was labeled the “gold” level, and that’s right, I’d forgotten, the different grades were labeled with types of metals: gold, silver, platinum….

Sidebar: You like your pedagogy extra-fancy?

The different colors/levels of the lit textbooks (I’d forgotten about this, but found this list on a front-matter page of the book I have):

copper, bronze, silver, gold, platinum; and

The American Experience; The British Tradition; World Masterpieces

I have a “gold” book, and I strongly believe my book is ninth grade, so I think the first levels piece out this way:

copper (sixth grade), bronze (seventh), silver (eighth), gold (ninth), platinum (10^th)

As for the others, I believe “The American Experience” was 11^th grade, “The British Tradition” was 12^th; and as for “World Masterpieces,” that might have been an alternative upper-grade (11^th and/or 12^th) book.

Now, my memory has long been that our 1997-98 project worked on ninth through 12^th-grade books, so I don’t think we worked on “copper,” “bronze,” or “silver” books, though I do recall there were (as a general concept we somehow heard about) lower-grade books in the series. I know PH School handled grades below ninth; I think the lower-grade lit books were either done by another department there that year (not the studio/upstairs setup I was in) or were not to be prepared in a new edition that year.

Another thing is that in leafing through my ninth-grade book, I am struck, and reminded, by all the fancy formatting (typeface, colors, and a certain density) of the various little parts of the book: larger sections had theme-or-genre-related titles like “The Lighter Side” and “Visions of the Future”; within these, there were parts like “Everyday Humor” and “Out of the Ordinary” (for the first larger section) and “Fantastic Ideas” and “Reaching for Tomorrow” (for the second).

More pedagogically, there were routinely-styled pages at the start of each larger section (such as “The Lighter Side”) tagged “Reading for Success,” with a more specific subtitle referring to some relevant “strategies.” A specific selection of literature would start with a fancily formatted “Guide for Reading” with a mini-biography on the writer of the selection and little boxes highlighting bits of grammar and skills to be mastered: “Build Vocabulary,” “Build Grammar Skills,” “Literary Focus,” and so on. At the ends of specific selections there was a “Guide for Responding,” including questions for the students, and “Build Your Portfolio,” with ideas for larger mini-projects than merely answering questions.

This is just part of what you can see on these pages, but you (I) are struck by how much “value” is here—the amount and variety of information that would have to have been handled by us workers. It can help you understand how a project like this involved so many people and that there were so many, many page layouts to process. The fact that a book turned out just a few months after I came there (which was a large chunk of the total project), with about 1,000 pages, with all the fancy stuff in it, rigorously put into publishable form, was a minor miracle. The little subsections I told you about would come through on layouts in multiple iterations, with whatever variety of errors, incomplete aspects, and so on you could imagine; various people would mark these, corrections could be done. I guess I’m thankful this is so long ago I worked on this, or I might be rather keenly reminded in “posttraumatic” fashion—with something like twitching, shuddering, or a feeling of dread—what this beast of a project was like.

Second, some initial pages in the book show the big “council,” as I crudely referred to it in Part 7, that was behind the editorial planning/wisdom/etc. of the book—so it wasn’t just us lowly craft workers cobbling together, in grubby, pedestrian fashion, the grand materials for learning. There’s a list of “program advisors,” 14 of them, all teachers; there is a “multicultural review board,” nine of them; and “contributing writers,” six, all of them “former” teachers or instructors. I’m sure none of them worked in our office complex in Upper Saddle River, or maybe a few of the writers did (on an ad hoc basis).

In general, when during production it came to verbal-content matters, any number of people could be consulted (by us proofreaders) for resolution: usually, higher-level editors in-house (i.e., PH staffers); and maybe in-house copy editors in their production-related department (for certain technical details). On more macroscopic issues (and this was during the initial planning, not during production), PH workers (not we proofreaders) would presumably consult with the “program advisors.” This should all be as you’d expect.

Sidebar: A proofreader breaking out into writing, like rhythm-guitarist Keith Richards stepping out into a tasty lead-guitar break. Another fact about editorial production is what someone in my shoes does. Not surprisingly to you maybe, sometimes laypeople (when it comes to publishing) will think that a proofreader (which word they seem to think they understand) or a copy editor (which is more arcane to them, if they venture to claim to understand it at all) does little more than put in periods, cross t’s, etc. In fact, in numerous publishing situations at large, even when my named role is a proofreader or copy editor, situations could arise where I could have input on certain content features, and even write some things. (Actually, this could happen in one of a number of ways: how my role was generally defined or how it often allowed this sort of variation; and, alternatively, the sheer weird-variation quality of the setup I was working in, due to lack of professionalism of the setup or not. With a case like editing press releases at North Jersey Newspapers, you could find the situation where it would clearly seem to take less energy and hair-tearing to just write a new item to replace a terrible thing you were proofreading or copy editing, than to tediously edit the mess at hand.) When it came to textbooks, when I worked for Peoples Publishing in 2000, I actually wrote some little items that appeared in the African-American textbook (as it was nicknamed; and whose general author was Molefi Kete Asante) which weren’t editorially changed (much) afterward. That actually grounds some tasty little insider stories about the project, but I have deliberately held off on talking about it, which I’m generally proud and fond of.

The “Gold” PH textbook has many of the “credits” for PH-worker contributors on the copyright page (where, yes, the © date is 1999, while that particular book was finished in 1997 [and, a technical detail, an array of multiple-printing related dates shows that a 1998 printing had not yet been done], and the other books in the series were also “© 1999,” but were printed and bound no later than spring 1998). Slightly oddly, what was referred to as the Production Editing department (as I pretty distinctly recall) is only labeled “Production” here, with Christina B.’s name first (no rank given), Elizabeth Torjussen (she was known among coworkers as Betsy or Betsie), and Holly Gordon (I’d forgotten about her; I had few dealings with her, and she was nice). Interestingly, Debbie McC.-or-O’C. and Claudia D. are not listed on this page. (As I’ve recalled, I think Debbie was more involved with the teachers’ editions, so she would not have been listed in the student texts.)

There was a “design” department—how could I forget?—including, among other names, Laura Bird, whose physical appearance I remember well (she was neat and professional, not the type of art person with, say, purple hair). Yes, the sheer page design wasn’t done by functionaries “upstairs”—design managers were actually on the studio level.

Another interesting feature is that—aside from Douglas McCollum being listed as “Director of Language Arts” (that’s right; PH didn’t talk about the field, for public school, as “English” but as “Language Arts”)—the upper-level editorial staff is all listed as one big lump of grouped names, no ranks given. Several of the names, of younger workers, I remember (I can picture the faces that went with most). And important to note: There were no “acquisition editors” in PH School; instead, editors tended to function like a committee that worked on books that themselves were rather authored “by committee.” The “acquisition editor” kind of editor was what you’d see in the Higher Education division of PH, where textbooks were typically authored by individual professors or small sets of them. There, the books were closer to like trade books, which is what the term “acquisition editor” may connote. (I will discuss this stuff more when/if I get to an account of my work for PH Higher Ed in 2001 and 2002.)

Ellen Bowler is listed first in the ninth grade book’s credit list of editors, and as I recall, she was one of the more senior editors (if not the most), in fact the main personage to go to for an important, but technical, content issue (meanwhile, Doug, who generally was an approachable enough sort and did do hands-on editing on the layouts, was not basically for consulting on technical issues by us plebes).

Perhaps most driving-home of all the “credits” info in this book is on p. 999, near the very end, where spillover of PH-worker credits from the copyright page is contained. Here, interestingly, four people are listed as among “editorial” (I remember at least some of the names); and under “Production” is a sole name, Claudia Dukeshire (yes, the person I’ve earlier called Claudia D.).

Most of note, under “Design and page layout”—i.e., the studio workers—are 50 names, including myself, Penny, Rebecca, and even Betsy Bostwick; and just about all of the rest were freelance compositors [update 7/5/15: I found the actual technical term for them at PH, at least according to my supervisor Penny, was "operators"]. No labels for any of us are given. I’ve always found it weird that the studio management never separated out us proofreaders/editor-types from the layout people. On the other hand, I’m grateful someone took the effort to type out all of the names (including mine) and put them somewhere in the book. Given how behemoth and hectic this project was, that was actually a gracious development.

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Preface to the Appendix: The potential for distortions of perceptions of others’ actions, and reputations

If you want to know why I try to have a detailed memory of some of these job situations, it’s very simple: Politics goes on in media companies (sometimes of an especially harmful sort) as I’ve seen nowhere else in the work world (and my experience goes back to being an assistant manager at a large student union 30 or more years ago). And in media companies (in my experience, anyway), you usually don’t have competent Human Resources departments who can help; and your trying (with, outside a given firm, the aid of a lawyer or not) to build a legal case can be a non-starter, due to the nature of the relevant evidence—not sensational or obtainable enough for a trial (and the potential cost for litigation that may run roughshod over the parties without accomplishing anything worthwhile in a long-term sense).

(Any New Jersey law firm that I’m aware of that has been apt to tout its specializing in Human Resources–related issues is the sort that, in my opinion, would turn a blind eye to the kind of peculiar, complex, and painful issues that arise at media companies, insofar as such a firm broadcasts that it works closely with HR departments on mundane issues like how an employee is terminated, confidentiality agreements, etc. That, to me, is a lot of square-dancing among idiots, while bigger fish that need to be fried—with a potential to set important, visionary legal precedents—get neglected.)  

To a large extent, all you have on your side is your ability to witness, and your wit in understanding what is going on, which is to a good extent a function of experience. Usually, the most you can do is keep journal entries, and have memories in your head (the latter of which can, of course, degrade). And the worst part is that other people not central to the “nexus” of an issue can have not-good ideas (or form goofy narratives) of what happened: they can look at the situation as a soap opera, e.g., a “love story” of sorts, when it’s not; and they can be seriously mistaken on key work-related facts, even some that aren’t hard to ascertain. And when a certain illusory reputation (conveyed in more “judicious” talk) billows out over time, increasingly divorced from the root facts, that can cloud issues in an almost tragic way, because the real, original issue gets further in the past, never fully addressed, and the illusory reputation seems to “stand for the facts” when it couldn’t be further from the truth.

And when it comes to the Internet age and the fact that some people seem to develop their sense of themselves only through that medium (and not through feet-on-the-ground competence), you have—similar to the billowing-reputation issue just noted—the potentially awful influences of things’ taking on a “wildly” unhelpful, propagandistic image and notoriety through the potent means of Internet transmission and selective or obfuscating representation. About the only thing working in your favor in this latter situation is a sort of saving quality provided by the level of stupidity that seems typical of a lot of Internet “received wisdom.” You hope that readers of Internet stuff who mean the most to you (while you ignore the others) have the smarts to read past the dreck and get informed—even if guardedly—via the presented “facts” that try to represent things more fairly, adequate to the complexity of an issue, and reflective of an appropriate, moral way to approach such issues.

Here’s one gross and sometimes darkly comical example (and for me, it didn’t even originally involve any workplace). In the case of a certain lawsuit in which I was involved in 2008, it seems that some non-central onlookers, in years since 2008, have thought that I remained an ally of sorts with the plaintiff, Barbara Bauer. This seemed especially indicated (but as not the only such example) when, in fall 2011 when the guttersnipe-front The Write Agenda first had been coming to a head with some of its rhetorical business, and especially the blog Writer Beware did a substantive entry on it, there was an uptick in searches on my LinkedIn page. I thought that this implied suggestion of my being connected to TWA was grievously wrong, given that I had labored, from 2009 through 2011 (on a personal Web site that I took down in August 2011), to represent what was appropriately informative to the public (as well as what was a big problem) about the conduct of the lawsuit, and I thought only an idiot would have felt that, ever since Bauer named me as a defendant in an AMENDED, 2008 version of her 2007 suit, I was still an ally of hers. Rest assured: Given how gratuitously she included me in the suit, and given what apparent reasons could be inferred for this inclusion, and given how she violated court rules repeatedly in 2008 as I was fighting to get out of the amended suit (to say nothing of what’s happened regarding various people, connected to her, since), there was no way I would ever be an ally of hers again. (My statement about her Ph.D. on my other blog in recent weeks is a sort of decent but coolly conservative gesture in an angeringly complex situation [not all of which is revealed], not an exercise in my “alliance” with her.)

The one arguable (but very narrowly arguable) way I could be said to have been an “ally” of hers post-2008 was in suggesting, in about 2010 and 2011 and in a sort of pro forma manner, that there was a smarter way for her to pursue her lawsuit—because, in general, there seemed a solid grounds for her to sue. Not that I welcomed this; actually, in line with what some close to me have said or suggested to me was the Monmouth County–vicinage state Superior Court’s incomprehensible handling of this suit, I was anxious by early 2011 about that court, in the future, quirkily letting the same old 2007-08 mess of a complaint be acted on. (Indeed, I’ve been profoundly shaken by the legal system in New Jersey by this suit, and the one positive in it from a long-term career perspective is that it confirmed my decision not to go to law school in 1984 as the best career decision I ever made.) Anyway, the one grounds for her to sue was the Googlebombing of her in May 2006. On no other basis was there grounds to pursue any suit approaching the horrifically messy one she pursued in 2007-10; quite clearly, if there were no Googlebombing, she could not sue the raft of people she did (under the theory of addressing a “conspiracy”) (leaving aside the validity of including certain names).

(By the way, one of the things I’ve held in reserve things to say about the suit is what my set of speculated reasons are that she included me in the suit in 2008 [along with other new names], and one of these possible reasons derives from what a defense attorney conveyed to me in spring 2008; and all of the possible reasons would suggest the bad-faith nature of the suit, as including me. It’s also to be noted that, as it took me a long time to really understand, when the suit was going on in 2007, defendants Strauss and Crispin apparently tried to move the suit to federal court to get it dismissed there. Both attempts failed [and Strauss and Crispin were represented by attorneys], but apparently the question of jurisdiction remained, which helped shape the 2008 amended complaint as it was pursued in state court. All these facts are supported in a document I lately have shared with select viewers, which I’m hesitant to make a blog entry now. Lastly, any future legal addressing I do of Bauer [if any], I believe, should happen in a federal jurisdiction.)

As it happens, for a long while I have taken a tack, at most times, of commenting on the suit only to the extent I “should” as an “affiant”—meaning, what I could testify to as to firsthand or otherwise justifiable knowledge (the sorts of things I could best know, and sometimes might be obliged to reveal) as a “party with standing” in the past suit (as it was conducted through late 2008). I tried not to comment on more global aspects of the suit, or much on other parties’ dealings in the suit. This self-limitation I adhered to before the suit was dismissed in November 2010, and to a lesser extent afterward. Only this year, in the wake of a campaign of sorts against my “Missives from the Jersey Mountain Bear” blog starting in about May 2014, have I been apt to speak on the lawsuit a little more freely than in a long while. Most definitely, the “SAC” (the January 2008 “second amended complaint”), which still gets referred to in Internet search results, to me is NOT a legally actionable or coherent document. It is about as baseless and inflammatory as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This is just one example of how people’s mistaken perceptions of a controversy can create an ever-lingering atmosphere of disinformation on your status, and on your aims when you talk about the controversy, and so on. (And the Bauer suit didn’t have to do with a workplace matter; in fact, my employers in 2008 [of a type where I worked in-house] knew nothing about it. But in 2010, people’s partial knowledge of it at a workplace I was at in-house, and their apparent assumptions about it, were quite mistaken, and these assumptions were most bizarre for their not asking me a thing about it, while they were aware of Internet information about it.)

Similar—and less sensational (or less Internet-mediated)—can happen regarding quieter, in-office controversies.

For example, while I occasionally (less often than people may think) refer to a nasty situation at a medical-promotions firm in summer 2010, some people might think that among other aspects of it, an individual “baddie” I’m (still) talking about is Person X, who was a trafficker (and a new hire at the firm) with whom I was immediately involved in a tightly processed batch of work. But in any serious writings on this matter, I have always felt that the real “baddie” was her supervisor, whom I’ll call Janice E. I. S., whom I gave the pseudonym in my blog entries “Tweedle Dum,” and it pains me a bit—for the sake of all immediately involved (including Person X)—that people (however indirectly or debatably they convey it) don’t get this important distinction.

In any event, this preludes the situation I’m about to describe in the following Appendix, which concerns another young trafficker (with whom I worked a very brief time in 2008), regarding whom my sympathies on a certain level are less, and where the question of “Who is the real baddie here?” can arise. First, I don’t harbor any resentment about this person; to me, what lingers (along with my memory of her ego-tinged behavior) is how atrociously the company (Pace) was managed, and in a way, there are a few solid indications beyond what I’d long remembered of this situation that are available today, that show how tacky the Pace environment was at the time.

First, Donna D., who was a sort of production manager there (who was fired or resigned, I think, right before I left), on her LinkedIn page for some year(s) now (I can’t find it lately) does not reflect her having been at this company in 2008 (it suggests she left in 2007), though not only was she there through at least May 2008, but I was required to apologize to her following an office-mishap (my expressing anger) that ended up a sort of prelude to the situation described below. So, if Donna D. was such a key personage that I had to be required (in the eyes of others there), like a high school kid, to apologize to her, why does she not indicate she worked at Pace in 2008?

Even more amusing (in a dark sense) is a fact I’ve found concerning my editorial department supervisor in my later months there, George K. (who came on board at Pace a month or two after I started as a freelancer in November 2007), who seemed like such a stolid “corporate-manager” type of editorial worker (and even had worked at Reed Reference Publishing back in the 1990s—a company I, in earlier years, got important career-related help from); meanwhile, he was the one to “discreetly” tie off relations with me when my time abruptly ended at Pace. The fact: today on his LinkedIn page, he doesn’t list having been at Pace in 2008. He says his term there was 2006-07, and I know he wasn’t even there in November 2007, when I started. I knew when he came on new, in early 2008.

So not only have I felt embarrassed enough about my association with Pace not to bandy about my connection with it in my own advertising of my services, aside from listing it as a detail on my resume. Even no fewer than two managers, like Donna D. and George K., don’t want it to be known they were at Pace in 2008 (though for what specific reasons they had, I don’t know).

So in the following, if the issue looks like “what a brat this young woman was,” actually, it was this: what a dump Pace was. And this now is supported by LinkedIn info from two managerial sorts, who would be quicker, in general and one presumes at whatever place they work, to suck up to the corporate line than I would.

Appendix: An incident from 2008 showing what they don’t teach you in school

Here is a story that I’ve mulled over for months, wondering when/if I would have a right occasion to use it. As it happens, it’s one of a few very good anecdotes I have from the world of medical promotions that shows how crazy the managerial moves can be, when it comes to the abstract question of treating people with respect as they should be, regarding (among other logical implications) whether someone—myself or another—is providing value for the money we cost, or not.

From November 2007 through late May or very early June 2008, I worked, not constantly, and in a freelance capacity as employed directly by the company (and not through an agency) at Pace, one of the worst medical-promo places I ever worked at. Pace was a subsidiary of the Interpublic conglomerate. As one measure of them: back in about 2000-02, when I still used to scout for work a lot through classified ads, they used to run ads in the newspapers (as did other medical-promo places), and their ads looked really crappy. They had a big logo for their name in the agate-sized ads, and there was something seedy about what it conveyed of them. When I finally worked for them years later, I found just how seedy they could be (they are, I believe, still under the Interpublic umbrella, and other Interpublic firms I’ve worked at weren’t too bad).

Two facts that told about Pace are that (1) sometimes some workers would play a form of stickball in the hall with a broomstick (or cardboard tube) and a tennis ball, in the hall outside my room, and sometimes I would be afraid to go out in the hall lest I get hit by the ball that was hit with a whap! and went whizzing past. (2) On one occasion, someone taped a $5 bill up on the door frame of the kitchen just across the hall from my room. What this exactly meant, I don’t know. But the $5 “gesture” and the raucous stickball game did connote that this place was like “third-rate, spoiled-brat college.”

##

One of my supervisors—a sort of production manager—was Donna D. We got along OK the vast majority of the time (she was maybe a bit younger than I, or maybe a bit older, but she was a career person in her line of managerial/med-promo work). In spring 2008, when I was in the throes of the frivolous-regarding-me Bauer v. Glatzer case, I was more apt than usual to respond to ridiculous things at work with a little emotional jaggedness. Pace was a place, as so often these med-promo places can be, where they hire freelance editors to do fairly sensitive editorial work, yet at times the staff editors can be “away from their desks”—in meetings, whatever—when something needs to be consulted on, and you wonder, “Where the f**k is [editor x, the staffer]?” And some other, non-editorial manager is riding you as the freelancer when really the staff editor should answer for what the manager was bringing up. This, by the way, is part of an example of “inverted pyramid” management, where one person at the lowly craft level has too much on his or her shoulders, and there are more managers (with more demands) than the craft person should be expected to answer for “at their whim.” (If you ask, “Why is this done with a freelancer?,” I say, “That’s part of my point.”)

Anyway, as I’ve foreshadowed in the preface, Donna came to me at one point, and I barked at her in some irascible way—this was purely a situation where she was momentarily demanding as was atypical of her, and I was irritable based on the pace of work or such, and she got offended at my response. There was—what to me added insult to injury in a sense—a subsequent situation where I was required to apologize to Donna, at the hands of some Human Resources so-and-so and maybe someone else. This decision was remarkable for how potentially humiliating it was to me as a seasoned editor (I was about age 46 at the time). Who ever saw a middle-aged professional being asked to apologize to a mid-level manager as if the situation was high school?

##

That situation set up a more farcical, and more “fatal for me,” situation a few weeks later. Here is the crux of my story. A young woman, Marisa C., was relatively newly hired (actually, her LinkedIn page suggests she started there in February, which could well be true, but I don’t remember having any serious dealings with her until May), and on a practical level she took over the role of the production managing that Donna had had (Donna had left [or would soon leave] the company, I believe when I was still there).

The immediately following is an amalgam of conclusions, an early version of which I formulated in 2011 and now gets adjusted by checking on LinkedIn. My earlier recollection was that Marisa had been employed there all of two weeks by late May, but it’s possible she suddenly was placed in a more supervisory role in May, taking over from Donna. But whatever the specific facts on this, she was undoubtedly—to me—a spring chicken. (Her LinkedIn page says she worked for a term as a low-level trafficker, also at Pace, starting in 1999 when she was still in college. [She worked at other places in between her stints at Pace.] It’s amazing how certain types of workers at these places can be tooled, in line with school or not, as a sort of echt-corporate functionary, but to have no skills or standards-defending “balls” the way an itinerant technical craftsperson can. But of course, that’s what medical-promotions places favor.)

Marisa was obviously in her twenties (I would have said, and now infer from her LinkedIn page, she was about 27). And what I recall—though her available LinkedIn page doesn’t reveal this—she had a master’s degree in communications from William Paterson University, a state-supported college in Passaic County, N.J. What I definitely recall is that she had body piercings and a generally recent-student look. All this suggests she was not a really seasoned professional, never mind how many As she might have gotten on her schoolwork. (Her work history, as shown on LinkedIn, prior to her 2008 presence at Pace suggests a stronger professional than I would have gleaned then; but all of us in our rare, more-intemperate moments in a crazy office can seem less experienced and skilled than our resumes show.)

##

In a busy situation one day, with now the two staff editors who were normally on hand being gone for a stretch from the editorial area of the office suite for whatever reason (it’s amazing how such a banal but typical-of-med-promo situation can breed vexatious developments), Marisa came into my small room to ride me about some practical matter. I was busy trying to finish a reference-checking job, the sort of task that anyone in medical editing knows is one of the most labor-intensive, sophisticated exercises in editing you can do in medical promo. I was working diligently to finish the reference-checking (which had been delayed once or twice already, and had to be done that day, I think), and Marisa came in to my little room, chattering at me demandingly as if she’d had too much caffeine. She spoke about the work that was backed up, which I knew about. She moved as if to start prioritizing the very items on my desk, as if I wouldn’t have known how to do that already.

Before I could get much of a word in edgewise, she was virtually (if not literally) snatching the reference-checking task out from under me (something virtually identical—a trafficker taking work almost literally out of your hands while you are busy on it—has happened with me at one or more other places in the last decade, including a large, major firm, though without my reaction occurring as it did here). (Again: if organizing the editors’ work was so important, and since it was true work was backing up and I was trying to keep up, where were the damned staff editors??)

Well, atypically of me at such places, I let fly with some blasted-out curses and, very unusual for me (as I sat), stamped my feet (consider again the ongoing Bauer lawsuit, and by that point I had lost my first MSJ hearing on May 23, which was a few days before). In a way, this explosion of my temper was a repeat of what I did with Donna a few weeks before. But this time, I really blasted off.

Marisa got all indignant (not that you could entirely blame her). “Do you hear this?” she uttered astonishedly half out the door to whomever would listen. She was aghast. She went off to some supervisor and expressed her indignation. When I passed by her in a lobby later—she was a short person—she moved small-steppingly past me, not apt to acknowledge me, as if steam was still coming out of her ears, with a bitter expression on her mug.

Now, anyone who has never worked in these situations probably may not understand this, but on a purely moral level, I felt badly for her. I could understand her distress. But on the level of the work-related ethics and procedural considerations involved, I didn’t really feel bad: for her virtually ripping work out from under me as I struggled to give it the intense attention it deserved, while it wasn’t my fault I was the only editor around to handle work that was piling up, I felt she’d gotten exactly what she deserved. In my opinion, she was totally immature in her preemptive acting with me, with her caffeinated-jabbering, impulsive, arrogant manner. My blasting at her, the rudeness of my tone aside, was the only way she could start to learn, or at least be tactically deflected from her unhelpful behavior. (Of course, one could still argue that was rough justice for an office.)

But of course the company didn’t see it that way. And I knew, right with that contretemps, that my time was done there. If I’d had to be made (weeks earlier) to apologize to Donna, this event now meant my time there would end. Very quickly, a furtive managerial move was made to curtail my term there. The managing editor, George K., who was newly hired just a few months before, rounded out business with me, taking my electronic door key with perhaps a slight hint as if I’d be back (but I knew I wouldn’t); clearly he was hiding the fact that I would no longer be back—and it was actually kind of funny to me that he didn’t suspect I knew this. (Along with this, I knew the situation was rather creepy, as you might expect. I actually grew worried about funding my efforts in the Bauer lawsuit.)

I observed before long that all the people involved with my time’s ending at Pace—including Marisa, George…—were people who started there after I’d first come on the scene. Even Donna, who in nicer times was an ally of mine, was gone. That showed the high turnover there.

This was undoubtedly one of the very trashiest medical-promo places I’d ever worked. I thought it would take some work for someplace to look worse, though I would find it was possible.

So if Marisa was a good student in communications at WPU, with her master’s, she still had a lot to learn in how to be an effective manager in a media firm, never mind the typical abuses that are endemic and epidemic in these places.

By the way, her “name card” was in my LinkedIn “People You May Know” list for a long time in about 2013 and 2014.  

PH series, Part 7: Groups and layers of craft-level workers on the 1997-98 HS lit project

Different layers of editing in the massive project, and how this made for the virtue of specialized tasks as well as opened up possibilities for errors, or your own dissatisfaction in your work

Subsections below:

The groups and layers

Compositors (layout workers)

Proofreaders in the studio

Production editors who did hands-on corrections

More content-editing and writing sorts there

Mike’s learning curve on getting there

A purging of an executive flashes like lightning

Appendix: [on a 2008 event; not ready yet]

[As I said in Part 6, the set of textbooks I’ve been discussing had the banner title, “Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes.” See Part 4 for a set of links to earlier parts. Edits 6/11/15. Edit 7/5/15. Edit 7/24/15.]

Given what I said in Part 6—and I haven’t even described situations (among a variety of work venues, not just PH) where teachers were actually in editor’s seats, showing (not that they fully realized this) they weren’t tooled to practical editors’ work—I turn now to a description of the different levels of editors’ work on the PH School lit project, which ultimately will lead to how Mike (competent and earnest enough) fit in when he arrived.

The groups and layers

Compositors (layout workers). There were many “compositors” (as I said in Part 4). They were far more art-oriented than any editors; the ambition of at least one of them, for instance, was to go out west and do titles for movies in Hollywood. These workers were, I thought, treated by PH like princes and princesses. (The head of the studio—I think her name was AnnMarie Roselli—who had a little support staff, was a very reasonable, professional, approachable sort.)

The compositors—most were in their twenties, I’d say—had work stations in rather nice little rooms, with two or three or more to a room, with low lighting, decorations of their choice there. There was a sort of “mellow” college-y flavor to their setup, and some rooms of them were “cooler” than others (I say this without irony).

(If this project was happening today, assuming the same technology, probably a not-tiny number of the compositors would have body piercings and/or tattoos [so might some of the staff managers, for that matter].)

Compositors, despite their “art star” nature as I’ve just suggested, basically did layouts following strict guidelines from above (mainly, staffers on the floor above) [update 6/11/15: actually, there was a design department, art-related rather than editorial, that was on the same floor as the studio; I'll say more on it in Part 8]. They also did corrections to subsequent iterations of what they’d laid out, once editors and others had marked corrections and such on the layouts.

As for our location, we few proofreaders, unlike the compositors, worked in a number of ad hoc places—we were moved around as, for instance, our current space was needed to set up work stations for more compositors. So for a time we worked at little cubicles not far from the compositors…. At some point, Penny and Rebecca came (for a long term) to share a big, round table in their own room (on the level of the studio, I believe, which was on the ground floor at the back of the big PH building in Upper Saddle River), but their location was rather removed from where the compositors were more rigorously arrayed.

Meanwhile, over time I was in a few different locations, ending up (for my last months there, I think) in an unused little office on the floor above the one on which the studio was. Both Mike and I ended up on that level, I think.

If you wondered why I went to such length in Part 4 to describe this project from a “book packager” perspective—and also have made an insinuation (in the same part) to Viacom’s ownership of PH as having some possible effect on textbook content—one piquant example of the type of concerns we in the studio had has stuck in my mind (though I know there was tons of issues that flowed by in the waterfall of work). It’s a little hard to pin down exactly the influence in marketing-related ways within textbooks on the part of Viacom, which was PH’s corporate owner at the time (Viacom owned [along with owning Paramount Studios] Simon & Schuster, the trade publisher, which latter was combined in some way with Prentice Hall in order [not necessarily a conscious or slant-producing aim] for Prentice Hall to seem like a subsidiary of S&S; and then when the British company Pearson was buying PH and other properties, PH’s being disunited from S&S made some staffers in the company a little regretful, as if it was losing a really “cool” cachet—as if there was no longer a chance for Carly Simon to come by in big sunglasses and stylish summer wear [I’m joking with this last detail]).

The HS literature textbooks, which (no shock) went to lengths to appeal to kids with such features as color and allusions to more pop-culture details anyway, had references to famous movies (and they weren’t necessarily properties of Paramount/Viacom). The movie presence in the books wasn’t so meretricious that you felt the books were a slovenly way for a film-studio-related corporation to hawk schoolbooks, but it certainly went beyond what I remembered of textbooks of just a couple decades before.

Anyway, the tasty detail: there was a two-page layout—I don’t remember in relation to what seriously-handled literature item at hand—that had a big picture of a scene from the first Star Wars film (i.e., what is now referred to, with the rest of its title, as Episode IV). The picture included Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill’s characters, I believe; but also, there in his ugly, pile-of-whatsit glory was Jabba the Hut. I thought that, among such pop-culture pictures in the book, this was a little chintzier and more pandering than most. And an issue came up where the layout had to be taken and refitted with a better version of the picture because, color-wise, it looked too X, Y, or whatever. At least one concern involved Jabba’s color.

Now, you know I’m a film fan, but films are one cultural thing; pedagogy regarding literature for growing students is another. Anyway, the issue with this photo, it seemed at the time to me, was petty, regarding a relatively shlocky film. And there seemed a little more concern (inordinately so) over that picture than about some more serious, editorially related point you might have seen, if not on that layout, with others. But that was part and parcel of what the project was like, on a conceptual level as well as regarding everyday business.

Proofreaders in the studio. We proofreaders, at least through October, were mainly to check that errors, changes, or additions that were marked by numerous people (some by various levels of staffers, and some by us) on an older iteration of a page layout, were incorporated (by the compositors in “correcting” mode) in a new layout.

Of course, there was a very fancy, particular set of style rules for laying out pages that was floated to the studio from “on high” (and partly designed by staffers within the studio itself); this was to be followed by compositors in their laying out, as well as proofreaders in our reading of laid-out pages. A lot of this surrounded layout (graphics-related) concerns, and hence there were templates, or sample layouts to be followed. These aimed to govern every detail, including colors of type, typeface style and size for certain subheads, etc. There basically was no room here for creative variation—which, at large, has its positive sides in publishing situations.

As a matter of practice, compositors were variously skilled in how they made changes (as they generally weren’t editors). Not all knew proofreading marks when they came to PH, and had to learn them (to some extent) once they got there (there was a sheet listing marks that was shared with various; I don’t know if it was made in-house or some general item gotten from outside). (You can refer in Part 5 to when I spoke about proofreading marks.) Also, some compositors in doing corrections seemed to rather routinely skip markings by certain people or in certain colors of ink (there were multiple colors). (I’ve seen this tendency in other work situations, too.)

And sometimes a compositor made a correction in the wrong place in the text, which it was up to us proofreaders to find; this was an understandable enough error that is also typical of workers whose forte was textual reading. (If you’re starting to wonder why the compositors were treated like stars relative to us proofreaders, that’s a good question I don’t have an answer to.)

There was one story where one of us editors had made an instruction to insert an m-dash somewhere. The proofreading symbol for this looks like a fraction, like a 1 over a lower-case m. Well, a compositor—as Penny (or Rebecca) told the story—actually tried to insert onto the page, via some text controls of some sort (in Quark), a fraction that looked like 1 over m. (This, of course, was corrected.)

Errors aside, and given the different personalities, (1) the compositors’ handling their ton of work and (2) we proofreaders’ checking the work, and (3) our returning clumps of items clipped together for a given page (or little-section) layout—all worked in a fairly clockwork fashion, with all of us cooperating amenably enough.

(In fact, I’m amazed to recall how well the big group of us got on, which was quite different from the sophomoric and sometimes abusive stuff I would see in the medical-promo realm after about 2006.)

Production editors who did hands-on corrections. There was the Production Editing department, which was in the same office area (on the same floor) as the studio, and which had both staffers and temps. This was where staff manager Christina B. held court, and this department will become relevant toward the end (in a future entry) of my PH story. They did more of what you would expect low-level editors to do, and their work was categorized as copy editing there (the type of work, regarding books, I wanted to get more opportunities in), making changes to conform with certain verbal rules, whether general types or project-specific ones, or simple rewording of something in order to have words fit on a page (a very pragmatic sort of move) or otherwise meet some not-so-art-related requirement.

The copy editors in this department I remember are Betsy Torjussen (more on her just below), Debbie McC. [am I right on name?], Claudia D., and Betsy Bostwick. The first Betsy was a staffer; Debbie and Claudia were, I believe, freelancers; and I’m not sure about the status of Betsy Bostwick.

Betsy Torjussen was a senior copy editor (and a staffer) in this department, and she was an elderly (maybe 60), teacherly sort (I don’t know if she had ever actually worked as a teacher; I think she had). She was usually amenable enough to work with. She didn’t get on an academic high horse, or act stuffy; she was very practical, as the situation demanded (in fact, this showed how much unlike a traditional teacher she could be in a publishing situation); and meanwhile, she could voice understandable exasperation at the volume of work as did the rest of us, sanely.

Among the more-junior editors in this department was Debbie McC. (or O’C.; I could check this in my records [update 7/24/15: Her surname was O'Connell; more info on her is in Part 10 subpart A]), who was a young woman (age about 27?) who (in my view) was a little stiff in attitude but nice enough generally. She was freelance, I believe (and all the freelance copy editors on this project, if I’m not mistaken, were not there through a temp agency.) I think Debbie was also (outside PH, of course) a part-owner of a restaurant; arguably in some kind of line with this, she struck me as a little snobbish (she was definitely on the smug side—cordial but a bit remote and stiff).

(Interestingly, one of the higher-level staff editors at PH School—who was some kind of content-related editor, maybe an “ac ed” or whatever slang was used for “acquisition editor” [clarification 6/11/15: the nature of these editors, not quite conveyed rightly here, will be discussed in Part 8]—remarked in passing that a certain tedious kind of editing, such as revolved around “key words,” was a “Debbie [McC.] kind of editing,” or something close to this. In part this showed how un-technical-details-oriented such “ac eds” could be. But also, I thought something like, “So, even the very Bergen County–ish Debbie McC. could be regarded with some bit of irony [from another presumably Bergen County denizen], even though Debbie isn’t extravagant, tediously pedantic, or nerdish in her work role.” More as an aside, I found it interesting how some females didn’t bond or mutually respect each other, whom you might think would, at PH; another example is, when I was back there in spring 1998, I found that Amy Capetta, a new freelance proofreader of about 23 at the time, and Frances T., a compositor/supervisor [age maybe 25] who was there as a long-term temp [with whom I’d gotten along well], didn’t seem to interact as if they would have any sort of mutual work-related interest. This is an area worth pondering, and subject to subtlety, far more than I can do here.)

More generally, notwithstanding this little joking instance regarding Debbie, there was something a little “uppity” about the more-junior production editors (even when some of them were freelance), compared to us studio proofreaders, who by comparison were the more “earthy,” pragmatic/hustling, feet-on-ground sorts, and by whatever train of reasoning in the studio were (I think) more warmly embraced by the culture of compositors there.

(Another more-junior copy editor, also a freelancer I think, was Claudia D., who was a bit of a dry personality [and seemed to be in her thirties, at least], but I also recall her as being a little more approachable than Debbie. I think the reason for these editors’ aloof nature was that a lot was being expected of the few of them, regarding niggling textual issues, in a way that was different from what was expected of us more “visually oriented” proofreaders. [Probably more can be said about the likely reasons.])

Rounding out the Production Editing hands-on group was Betsy Bostwick, whom I remembered in a certain particular way enough to almost comment about her (in an abstractly comparing way) in part of an entry on Jason Aronson Publishers that I did in winter 2014, but cut out at the last moment. Betsy, I think, had a copy editing role in the literature project more tailored to the teachers’ editions of the textbooks, so it makes sense I hold off on her until I start talking more about Mike in a future entry. (If you think I have a grump-fest in mind regarding her, don’t be so sure: I am reusing an old folder in my briefcase that I had used for PH work stuff in 1997-98, and in it is an old Post-it from Betsy reading “Merry Christmas!”)

More content-editing and writing sorts there. What “editorial visionary brains” were in the PH School division comprised almost entirely staffers, who were located on a floor one flight above the studio’s level. Actual generation of new copy (not minor rewordings, as a copy editor would do) came from them—and of course, all the designing of the books came from their direction along with, presumably, other staffers. Such designing was formulated at the highest managerial level according to marketing concerns as well as, I believe, some kind of “council” relationship with some academic people or entities outside PH. [Update 6/11/15: More will be said on this in Part 8.] [All this description is done partly on fuzzy memory and partly on reasonable inference and presumption.] (In fact, I remember being surprised, hearing from proofreader Rebecca I think, that a lot of the content-designing that went on was done under the rubric of “marketing”: imagine if your local schools’ curricula were designed under a “marketing” agenda.)

On the other hand, a lot within these HS lit books—which were vaunted in the promotional stuff for the “Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes” set of books as newly designed—was “pick-up,” or material transferred from a previous edition, from the last edition of this series of books (basically, this “pick-up” was most of the esteemed literature that was represented). Meanwhile, what verbiage was new was mostly student questions, and explanatory, pedagogical text of sorts. (You can now see why I invoked a “book packaging” concept in Part 4 in talking about the details of this production process.)

The staff editors at PH School were in the most corporate sort of relationship and work structure there (unlike the studio, which was more ad hoc and tailored to the practical needs of this project). Among staff editors there was one junior editor assigned to each grade level, and these editors were usually youngish people (pretty approachable). Then there were more senior-level, managerial editors. Anyway, it was staff editors who wrote new copy, and could be consulted with (including by us proofreaders) on certain problems. They were generally receptive to our consultations.

##

So you see, even though some of us were temps brought in just for this project, we all functioned as a sort of family working on this project. Which made it all the more a kick in the tail when some of us temps were let go from the project in winter 1998. (I was reminded recently that my time there ended at the very end of January 1998.)

Mike’s learning curve on getting there

When Mike finally was brought in in (I believe) early October 1997 [correction 7/5/15: I found that Mike didn't arrive until very early December 1997; this to be detailed in series Part 10], he not only had the unenviable task of getting up to speed on what was needed on this massive, ever-flowing project, but he didn’t realize that we proofreaders occupied a certain narrow area of responsibility in this process. Then, when we already-there proofreaders started doing “copy editing” to teacher’s edition (TE) material in about October, we were adding a new dimension to our work that was fairly easy for us to adopt, with our having been boned up on the characteristics of the series by our lower-level tasks for months beforehand.

Thus, as memory serves and as seems reasonable to infer, Mike was coming in meant to do only (or primarily) “copy editing,” as it was conceived, to the TE copy—which generally allowed for all of us to give more judgmental input, particularly as it was handled by the higher-ups in a fairly flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants way anyway. Here, as it happened, there were still art-related concerns for us to heed, such as layout structure, propriety of certain colors and subheads, and so on. We had templates for this. So Mike—who would turn out to be a pretty verbally oriented academic—had to adjust to the art-related aspect, too.

Naturally, Mike was “put upon” to square with the need to keep up with purely conceived, honestly-faced reading/editorial-changes aspects as well as the art-related aspects, and this made him a little behind the curve in understanding. Also, it left him quite-understandably vexed (if in a good-humored-tinged way) with the demands, quirks of the project, etc. So if his personality came out as rather disagreeable in some ways as we all worked, he couldn’t really be blamed.

But his ways of expressing himself did create some “blow-back” among workers outside the proofreader circle where, I think at times, some staff editors (on reading our comments written on layouts) thought his semi-sarcastic comments were coming from me and not from him, which Mike’s and my distinct styles of handwriting alone should have shown wasn’t true. But that goes to show how some staff editors could have not the best judgment here, and anyway the rapid, hustling nature of the project in its last months might have made bad or hasty assessments of us inevitable. (I wondered if Mike’s voiced attitude is what led to my being dropped—along with him—in January 1998, even as aspects of the PH lit project went on afterward. This though I’d also find, at other types of media places, that droppings of sets of editors, completely in disregard for their respective ways of working, was not terribly rare, especially with temps.) (And this doesn’t have to do with Christina B., either. Her role regarding me would be in later 1998.)

##

Anyway, if there’s one thing common to large corporations—and other examples in this series will make this clear—the whole structure of them, with their large amounts of people (of different levels of talent and intelligence), and the overriding concern of transmission of power, do not conduce to every craft-level worker’s being valued for just what he or she brought to a given project, and what profitable use might be made of that worker at the same company in the future. This held even if anyone with any sense should have inferred the person’s value from, if nothing else, the volume of work the person handled and the competence that he or she had to have been exhibited (or else the person would have been jettisoned, like the bloke who was kicked up to sales before I ever got there).

From another angle: Big corporations that get involved in what has often been handled in a “cottage industry” way—like the fashioning of books, which involves a specially skilled, labor-intensive type of craftwork (from the likes of me)—end up maximizing their corporate imperatives, which can mean flouting the interests (in more work) of the craft worker, while the corporation marches on contentedly (if a bit robot-like) to its steady future.

(Doug McCollum, who was lauded as the executive editor for the PH HS lit project, was not a genius of an editor. For one thing, he spelled aid—as in help (to students)—as aide. Routinely.)

##

A purging of an executive flashes like lightning

One big aspect of this project should be consistent with all I’ve said, but I’ve held off on it: Why was PH doing this project in-house (with the studio “cast of thousands”), when apparently it used to typically do this (as Penny told me) with outside vendors (and apparently has preferred to use outside vendors in subsequent years)? I don’t know, but when the issue of PH’s being sold to Pearson hung in the air in 1998, that ongoing business created some weird concerns on the upper echelons that we footsoldiers only got piecemeal and vague indications of.

For instance, despite the voluminous, frenetic work on the PH HS lit project, all the sudden it was decided (in fall 1997) that the woman at the very top of PH School had to be jettisoned, and she was. And a new person took her place, another female, whose first name (nickname) was Marty, I think. The reason the previous executive was ousted was that our project had failed to meet some key deadline or two. (Meanwhile, there was never any flavor I got [from coworkers at large] about this executive than that she was lauded, liked, or whatever.)

Well, we on the ground level hardly knew about this failing to meet a deadline. All we knew with what we were doing was what work passed through our hands and how management seemed to impinge on us, which was generally a cordial enough “Do what you can to get it done.” So then, as we continued our work while the new executive was in place, the work on our grassroots level didn’t change. The lack of procedural change was almost hugely resounding. After all, we were hustling as fast as we could anyway. (I seem to recall there might have been tiny changes in what we did, but nothing super-appreciable.)

(In any event, the phenomenon of a publishing company’s “addressing” into a near-term failing by firing someone “high up” is rather like a banana republic’s purging a mustachioed functionary, as if to appease the gods, without any other, larger change in government functioning—because the execution seems more for symbolic reasons than for practical. This is a whole other area to discuss elsewhere.)

In about late November or so, especially odd in view of the purge of the top executive of PH School, there was a little get-together of us underworkers in a lobby, held by some relatively mid-level manager, to celebrate how we low-level peons were doing. Champagne was passed out; some clerical type virtually shoved a glass of the “bubbly” into my hand. I drank it. (The “pep-rally” type event was almost to reassure us despite how the purging of the upper executive may have appeared.)

The Champagne ended up making me a little shaky for proofreading, but in a way that was a nice little gesture from management to us underlings. So you see, despite the excesses of a huge-corporate project, there were also some charms and wonders to the whole thing.

##

This experience, without stretching too much, I think is like the way some actors who were in the film Apocalypse Now characterized their experience over the years. In the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness, various actors (Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms) voiced resentment and the like at director Francis Ford Coppola for excesses, big and small. But by the 2006 DVD, which includes new interviews with the actors, the same actors seem to recall the experience with more gratitude and forgiveness, if not unadulterated fondness.

The 1997-98 PH project was rather like that. It was a big monster in terms of number of people, and management challenges. There are some aspects of it I feel a bit angry about, in reviewing the old experience. But in other ways I am pleasantly surprised at how, all flaws of the experience aside, there was a lot of positive here, almost despite the unwieldy conditions there. The fact that I got good gigs at other firms shortly afterward may help explain this forgiveness, but I think the real root of it is that the experience really was of a group of people working together, with relatively rare instances of managerial bitchery (and this word is deliberate: such at publishing companies usually comes from females).

Even when we get to how Christina B. ended my time at PH School in June 1998, I can definitely say she was a witch in how she did it; but on the other hand, there were some behaviors you would never see at PH. For instance, no one at PH but a psychopath, no matter how long the person (typically a female) had been working as a manager, would think it wise in any sense—never mind the legal actionability of it—to broadcast via the company intranet some insinuation about how a freelance editor comported himself (in some relatively or presumed “taboo” way) with a female worker, with the net result that the editor couldn’t possibly see how he could work there again.

To be continued.