Steve Krause : Blog

Just Follow the Signs...

[From the corner of Market and Morgan in Hartford, CT]

Friends and Strangers

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I've been thinking about two stories. First, there was Abe Zelmanowitz, a worker at the World Trade Center. His co-worker and best friend, Ed Beyea, was a quadriplegic. As the building burned and people streamed down the stairwells, Abe stayed with Ed on the 27th floor landing. Because Ed weighed nearly 300 pounds, they were waiting for a rescue team to safely carry him.

Ed had a health aide, Irma, in the building. Although she found the two men, Irma was having trouble breathing from the smoke. Abe told her to go, that he would stay with Ed.

Both men called their families to say they were okay. Abe's mother pleaded with him to get out while he could. He stayed.

Abe and Ed died in the building that day.

A family member recalled of the two, "If Ed was going to make [dinner] arrangements, he'd make sure it was kosher, and if Abe was going to make the arrangements, he'd make sure it was wheelchair-accessible. They always had each other's best interests at heart."

The second story is about Mike Benfante, who was also working in the World Trade Center. During the evacuation, he found wheelchair-bound Tina Hansen. He was a stranger to her, but Mike and colleague John Cerqueira carried Tina down 68 flights of stairs, often in darkness and smoke, sloshing through areas flooded by building sprinklers. It took 90 minutes. The building collapsed five minutes after they got out.

As the tenth anniversary of that day approached, Mike deflected attention from his heroism to the larger lesson of what 9/11 summoned in friends and strangers alike: "I've learned that 9/11 showed us that there are enormous, untapped reservoirs of extraordinary human kindness and generosity just waiting for a trigger, that this trigger should be pulled daily as most of us are basically good people."

The Long and Short of Average Sentence Length

For an earlier post, I analyzed the text from 616 articles in Slate's sections "The Good Word" and "Books." The purpose was to answer a question about the use of em dashes, but since I had all 697,422 words at the ready, I asked another question: Of all the articles, which had the longest and shortest average sentence length?

For context, the average sentence length across all articles was 25.4 words per sentence. The winner for longest average sentence length was nearly twice that. The shortest was about a third less.

And now, the drumroll please....

The winner for longest average sentence length, at 49.7 words per sentence, was Daphne Merkin's review of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford. Here is the opening paragraph:

Although it is not uncommon for big families to produce a rebel or two along with the chip-off-the-old-block offspring, there are few that can lay claim to as much dissension within the ranks as the aristocratic clan of Mitford. This gaggle of wayward sisters (six in all, with one brother, Tom, who was killed in combat in 1945 at the age of 36) included Diana, the family beauty, who married the dastardly Oswald Mosley, head of the British Fascist party; Nancy, the family wit, whose novel The Pursuit of Love kick-started the proliferation of novels, memoirs, and biographies that would come to be called the Mitford "industry"; and the family madwoman, Unity, who went bonkers for Adolf Hitler and put a pistol to her head when Britain declared war on Germany.

Compare and contrast with the winner for shortest average sentence length, Jason Sokol's commentary on The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson: Mississippi Burning and the Passage of the Civil Rights Act: June 1, 1964-July 4, 1964. Sokol's average of 16 words pers sentence was less than the length of the title. Here is the first paragraph:

President Lyndon Johnson, domineering and manipulative, lives on in American memory as the classic power broker. He bullied opponents, sweet-talked skeptics, and chewed out subordinates. He oozed confidence as he passed one piece of landmark social legislation after another, even as his cockiness helped to mire the country in Vietnam. Yet this is not the Johnson who emerges from volumes seven and eight of The Presidential Recordings, a transcription of his phone conversations from June 1 to July 4 of 1964.

My purpose is not to claim one of these examples is better than the other. They are both well-crafted paragraphs. But side by side, they are a reminder of how stylistically diverse good writing can be.

The Use and Abuse of the Em Dash

In Slate, Noreen Malone makes The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash. She says it undercuts good writing, yet writers are using it more. To make her point, she oversalts her own prose with the em:

The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don't you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won't be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that's not yet complete?

Having thus revealed the em dash's peril, Malone later concludes, "Leave the damn em dash alone."

I suggest not. The em dash is a good thing, albeit the kind where too much good is bad. As we say in software development, that is a feature, not a bug.

Of the em dash's many uses, the main one is to set off a phrase with greater emphasis. Used in tandem—as here—em dashes are like commas or parentheses, only more assertive. Used alone, an em dash heightens what comes next—more drama if no comma.

Em dashes are effective for emphasis because they are rare. Use them too much and you defeat their purpose, as Malone demonstrates with her wanton em dash abuse. But is today's writing increasingly like that? Malone asserts such a trend but caveats that it's "just anecdotal observation; I admit I haven't found a way to crunch the numbers."

Here's a way to crunch the numbers: Extract the text of hundreds of articles published in Slate from 1996 to 2011. Focus on the sections "The Good Word" (where Malone's article is filed) and "Books." They seem like good candidates for the at-risk writerly behavior that Malone fears.

When I did that, I found 616 articles through the end of June 2011, totaling 697,422 words. Because different years had widely varying amounts of articles, I split the articles into two periods: 1996 to 2004 and 2005 to 2011.

The earlier period had 7.6 em dashes per thousand words; the later period had 7.8. That difference is noise. Malone's peers are not spiraling into an abyss of increasing em-dashery.

So despite Malone's concerns, I suspect that Slate's writers are using the em dash to good effect. They know that with punctuation, as with salt, an occasional dash will do you good.

Dreaming FIDS

Dreaming FIDS (Flight Information Display System) is an artwork in San Jose Airport's new Terminal B.

It's a fish tank. Inside are fish, video screens, and cameras. You see not only the fish but also the cameras' view of the fish.

And who is that in the background of the fish-surveillance video? That would be you, looking at yourself looking in.

Seeing Dreaming FIDS brought to mind the Lou Reed lyric, "This here's a zoo, and the keeper ain't you." However, I appreciated the work even more after I watched this three-minute video. Check it out.

Dreaming FIDS is by Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen. It's located between gate 25 and 26 in San Jose Airport's Terminal B.

Earmarks Away

Per Churchill's quip that democracy is the worst political system except for all the rest, even the best political systems have many flaws. So we should take a moment to celebrate an unlikely correction to one of representative democracy's trouble spots: a spoils system called earmarking, which the U.S. Congress has recently taken away from itself.

Earmarking is the targeting of funds to a Congressional representative's pet project, often as a way to get that representative's vote on other legislation. The practice is associated with the term "pork barrel" spending because it allows representatives to bring home the bacon of government dollars to local projects.

Although many earmarked projects are worthy, the system for granting earmarks invites abuse. The classic example is Alaska's Gravina Island Bridge. A proposed $400 million structure as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and higher than the Brooklyn Bridge, it would connect a town in southeast Alaska with an island that has a small airport and a population of 50 people.

The project was championed by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, then one of the most powerful senators and a big beneficiary of earmarking. However, the audacity of asking for a $400 million "bridge to nowhere," as it became known by detractors, proved too much. The Gravina Island Bridge earmark did not survive, except as a symbol of what was wrong with earmarks.

The extremity of that case aside, earmarks are a byproduct of a representative democracy. If it's legal to trade a vote for an earmark, many representatives would consider it serving their constituents' interests. Such trading is routine enough to have its own name, logrolling.

However, another byproduct of representative democracy is bribing representatives with money. Of course, when someone trades a bag of cash for a vote, we call it payola and say it is illegal. But if a politician trades a vote for an earmark, that's somehow okay?

Even in the most benign circumstances, earmarks will always have the suspicion of bought votes. Also, if representatives are voting not on an issue's merits but because they owe logrolling favors, what do those votes mean for policy?

These kind of concerns, and a unique political climate, are what brought down earmarks. The Republican leadership in the House and, with the Democratic White House's prodding, the Democratic leadership in the Senate agreed to ban earmarks for at least two years.

Political historians will look back on this episode with particular interest. It's a rare case when an entrenched, bipartisan spoils system is overthrown by those getting the spoils. Good for them.

Pig 05049

Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma spent three years documenting what happened to Pig 05049. After being slaughtered at a commercial farm, parts of Pig 05049 ended up in at least 185 different products. Ammunition, train brakes, paint, heart valves, soap, cellular concrete, bread, and low-fat butter would like to thank Pig 05049 for its contribution to them.

To see the other 177 end products, including bacon, you can consult Meindertsma's book, PIG 05049. I saw a copy at The Art Institute of Chicago. Here you can find a video of someone flipping through the book, plus a series of 15 close-ups.

Meindertsma also gave a TED presentation on the subject.

Decision-Making in the American Revolutionary War

Last time, I reviewed Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer. One theme from the book deserves extra mention: the contrast of George Washington's decision-making style versus that of the British military leaders.

The British leaders were traditional military commanders, elite and absolute in their leadership. At several junctures they failed because they ignored correct but contrary perspectives from lower-ranking officers. Equally bad, they put too much faith in immediate subordinates whose primary skill was to tell the leaders what they wanted to hear.

By contrast, Washington was "functioning more as a leader than a commander: always listening, inspiring, guiding; rarely demanding, commanding, coercing." He acted this way partly by necessity. His forces were a potluck of regiments and militias donated by the various states. Many unit leaders had their own ideas and agendas, which over time Washington learned to solicit and guide rather than push against.

Although Washington was running an army, not a town-hall democracy, he realized the two were not mutually exclusive. He could encourage debate and still be in charge. He could boost morale by making it clear his men were heard. These techniques often inspired the Americans to fight smarter and harder than their adversaries.

Tobias Putrih's "Re-projection: Hoosac"

When I wrote up my trip to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, I focused on its centerpiece, the Sol LeWitt retrospective. The museum also has other exhibits by other artists.

My favorite was Re-projection: Hoosac by Tobias Putrih. Here is a description from a Boston Globe article:

One installation, by Tobias Putrih, stretches long strands of fishing line across a dark and cavernous gallery. Bunched neatly together, the parallel lines start high on one wall, ending low on the opposite one. A single light source illuminates the strands at about the midway point, causing an optical effect reminiscent of spinning rotor blades or a mystical halo.

You can follow the path of the stretched filaments, which slowly descend below head height to waist level, in a tunnel-like space the dimensions of which become harder to perceive as you move away from the light.

When we were there, the gymnasium-sized room had a buzz of wonder, as people moved within and around the installation, and watched other people do the same. Here is a minute's worth of video, shot by someone moving through the installation.

For further background, here is what the exhibit notes say:

Influenced by the utopian projects — and notable failures — of innovative artists and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and Charles Eames, Tobias Putrih likens his works to experiments, or design prototypes. His use of cheap materials, including egg crates, cardboard, and plywood signify both a sense of potential and impending collapse. Many of the artist’s works reference the architecture and spectacle of the cinema: a space suspended between fantasy and reality, image and environment. With Re-projection: Hoosac Putrih distills the cinema to its most basic element: fishing line stretched across the gallery mimics the conical trajectory of a beam of light. A spotlight hits the strands of monofilament which in turn become a screen, reflecting an image in illuminated dots. Inspired by the Hoosac Tunnel just east of North Adams — a storied, engineering marvel that draws ghost-hunters to the area — Putrih’s tunnel is, likewise, both real and a representation, an optical trick that invites both wonder and investigation.

Ham the Astrochimp

Ham the Astrochimp was the United States' first pre-astronaut in space. I knew that. But reading Craig Nelson's Rocket Men, I learned how tough a job it was.

January 31, 1961: Mercury-Redstone 2 took off from Cape Canaveral's LC-5 carrying three-year-old Cameroonian pilot Ham (aka "#61"), who had been trained by Holloman Air Force Base at White Sands with carrots (banana pellets) and sticks (electric shocks to the soles of the feet). For those who believed NASA was ready to launch human beings, this mission upended that hope. First the training system in the capsule went haywire, administering to Ham repeated electric shocks, even while he was perfectly executing his chores. The capsule was supposed to travel at 1,970 meters per second; instead, it raced along at 2,298. An abort call was made, which yanked the retro rockets, but Mission Control could not slow the capsule for reentry. Then a snorkel valve lost its pin, and the cabin lost its pressure—but since Ham was in his own spacesuit, he was unharmed. He also seemed unharmed by being subjected to just under 15 g's, instead of the 11 that was expected. On splashdown, the heat shield punctured the capsule, and between the holes it made and the broken valve, by the time the navy hauled the Mercury out of the sea, it had taken on eight hundred pounds of water and was sinking fast.

After recovery, Ham got an apple and an orange for surviving his mission, but tried to bite anyone who dared draw near; as the mission log noted, "Sometime later, when he was shown the spacecraft, it was visually apparent that he had no further interest in cooperating with the space flight program."

Ham subsequently went into retirement, spending his remaining 22 years in zoos. He has a Wikipedia page.