Brain damage!

Explaining students

Two of the greatest minds in pedagogy recently came together to ponder some of the profoundest educational conundrums of the era. Or, to put it more prosaically, I called up a former student of mine for a chat. I, of course, hold a prestigious tenured professorship at a California community college. He is a lecturer in English at an out-of-state university. No, we are not universally recognized as the leading experts in our respective fields, but we figure that's mostly the fault of other people. Whenever we talk, we quickly reach agreement in our perspectives and opinions. It immediately follows that the many deficiencies in modern education must stem mostly from a failure to sufficiently adopt our preferred policies and emulate our instructional practices. Just listen to us! It's really quite a pity that so straightforward a solution to so many problems continues to languish unrecognized.

However, we should accept the need for a modicum of caution. There is an unfortunate gap in our grasp of the educational enterprise. Upon comparing notes, PiD and I have come to the unhappy realization that our immense intellects have yet to figure out what makes our students go. (Or not go.) It's perplexing!

For example, I told my entire algebra class that our mastery of the quadratic formula meant that we would never again face a quadratic equation for which “no solution” was a satisfactory answer. Solutions would always exist, whether rational, irrational, or complex. Always! Yet on the next exam several of my students labeled some of the quadratic equations as “prime” and solemnly wrote “no solution” in the answer blank.

PiD advised his English composition class that rewrites were a fundamental component of composition and that course grades would rely much more on their diligence in rewriting and improving their essays than on generating sparkling first drafts. As the academic term progressed, several students asked him how to get better grades. “Have you submitted rewrites of all of your essays?” he asked. “We didn't know we had to do that!” they told him. “But the due dates for rewrites are on the syllabus and I send out e-mail reminders as the dates approach!” “Yeah, but we can't know those unless we look at the syllabus or check our e-mail. You should have told us in class.” “But I did tell you in class!” “Well, maybe. But did you check that we were in class that day? I'm too busy to come to class every day, you know.”

A student wrote me a note in response to a problem on the calculus final exam. The problem asked, “What is the area inside the circle r = 3 and outside the cardioid r = 2(1 – cos θ)?” My student wrote, “Failed because I forgot the eq. for a circle in polar coordinates.” Um. Did you notice? The problem said, “the circle r = 3”?

The great minds of the age crumple in defeat.

Perhaps I did not sufficiently recognize a learning opportunity of my own from decades ago, back when my intellect was forming and a famous educator was trying to teach me some vital lessons.  William H. Cosby, Jr., Ed.D. (1976, UMass, Amherst), discovered these clues during highly personalized field research on his own family. Perhaps our students, like Cosby's children, are led into irrational, disturbing behavior by brain damage. It would explain so much!

If only I had paid more attention back then.

Custom-made shoes to fill

From time's deep abyss

It has been more than a quarter-century since I screwed my courage to the sticking point and resigned my sweet and secure civil-service position for a temporary academic appointment. Several people commented at the time that it was a “gutsy move,” and I admit that it certainly felt like one at the time. Fortunately for me, the temporary appointment eventually turned into a tenure-track position, leaving me to live happily ever after (mostly) as a full-time math professor.

My memories of this event were tickled recently while delving into the stacks of detritus that decorate my college office. The semester is over, grades have been filed, and no summer school assignment looms over me. Nevertheless, I have been on campus several days in a row because of a writers' colloquium being conducted by colleagues in the English department. During free intervals I have repaired to my office and sifted through the piles of papers and books, slowly sorting them into stacks destined to be filed, recycled, or shelved. This morning I stumbled across the job announcement that was issued when my state agency was seeking my replacement. It gave me a good chuckle.

The job announcement was drafted by the agency's executive secretary, the semi-competent and ill-tempered appointee who was extremely helpful in increasing the diligence of my job search. Until her advent, I had had a lot of job satisfaction in my position. She injected enough poison into the atmosphere to help me on my way toward the teaching position that I desired. The job announcement was a perfect illustration of the boss's myopia. She created it by simply listing every function I had accumulated in my years at the agency. In effect, she was advertising for someone who was my clone (although preferably without my subversive attitudes and tendencies toward insubordination).

Here are excerpts from that job announcement, shorn of the standard civil service boilerplate and thus reduced to the essentials of the position's duties. It brings a smile to my face when I peruse it:

Description: The Commission has a small, highly specialized staff whose basic missions are (1) to monitor the status of California's General Fund revenues, expenditures, and reserves; (2) to track the collection of federal taxes and receipt of federal expenditures by California and its counties; and (3) to issue regular reports concerning the State's short- and long-term fiscal situation and the impact of federal taxation and spending on the State for use by the Legislature, the Administration, and other interested parties.
The duties of this position are as follows: (1) providing technical advice and support to enhance the Commission's use of its computer systems; (2) being the lead editor of the Commission's publications and being principally responsible for preparing those publications for photo-reproduction; and (3) heading the Commission's legislative tracking system (including the preparation of articles for inclusion in Commission publications on the status of significant pending financial legislation).

Desirable Qualifications:This position provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate, expand, and apply expertise in the use of computer hardware and software. The position also showcases adroit writing skills, as well as providing the opportunity to identify, research, and describe key issues under consideration by the Legislature. Accordingly, the individual who fills it should:

• have a thorough working knowledge of the IBM AT and the Burroughs B-20/B-25 system used by the Commission. [Knowledge of Basic and Fortran programming languages is preferred, as is familiarity with the Microsoft Word, Lotus 1-2-3, Multiplan, and Ventura software packages.]
• write and edit well
• know how to track legislation, analyze its contents, and evaluate its financial implications.

Therefore, the ideal candidate would be a computer tech support person for multiple platforms who would also be the in-house editor and compositor of  publications (one job or two?), a prolific writer (a third job, or doesn't it count because there'd be much less editing on the employee's own documents?), and a legislative analyst (surely we're up to three by now).

I remember taking the job announcement to a state user group where I knew several members had the necessary computer expertise. Many of my fellow civil servants were unfazed by the necessity of supporting two incompatible computer systems, since many state offices had been infiltrated by personal computers in addition to proprietary networked systems. They nodded their heads when I read the first desideratum. They were less sanguine, however, when I tossed in the part about programming languages and desktop publishing. The writing component made several of them nervous because they knew of my background and did not relish comparisons. However, when I added legislative analysis to the package, groans were heard and questions were asked: “Is this supposed to be one job?” “Who is your boss kidding?” “Is she trying to ensure that the position stays vacant so that she has some salary savings to play around with?”

Of course, in a small state agency where the staff members wear several hats, multiple responsibilities are standard operating procedure. However, these job configurations develop with time and evolve to fit the capabilities of the people who occupy the positions. I certainly had not started mine with the same portfolio with which I ended it. My initial assignment was legislative tracking and analysis, mainly because I had just come over from the legislative staff. While serving in that capacity I acquired a home computer and developed skills that came in handy when PCs began to invade our office. Furthermore, it was during this period that I began to publish magazine articles in computer publications and math journals. This skill set of mine grew as I worked at the state agency and my job description grew with it. No one should expect many other people to stroll in with the exact same experiences and the exact same skill set. That, however, is what my boss was looking for.

The job opening was announced while I was serving out my final weeks on staff. My position remained vacant for a few months after my departure, until someone took a sharp pencil to the job description and made it a little more generic. At one point I met my successor, who was manifestly not doing the same job I had been doing. And neither was the boss, who had been sacked as the head of the agency.

Happy memories!

Busy, busy, busy

Oops, dropped another!

A funny thing about being a writer: Once you've published a book, it makes it exceedingly difficult to keep writing. Land of Milk and Money is far from being a blockbuster hit, but its demands on my time have been unceasing since it was published last summer. Many juicy topics have begged for my attention, but I haven't added a single word to this blog for over a month. Appalling!

A new pope resides in Rome. I should write about the inevitable American schism, already de facto and in danger of becoming de jure. Our governor in California wants a linkage between student success rates and funding for public schools. Danger! My family is as wild and wacky as ever. (Cue the heart-warming theme music.) I've plunged into reading the literature of the Portuguese-American diaspora. I have reactions!

And, of course, there are the events associated with running to and fro to book events, up and down California, on TV and radio, and even the East Coast. In light of recent events, it's just a little spooky that I was at the Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts, where one of the Boston bombers was enrolled. No, I don't think I met him while I was there. Terrorists tend not to come to book readings. Perhaps they should.

And here is a friend's conception of the UMass Dartmouth campus under lock-down.

Cows in the city

Escape from the valley

Or perhaps I should say, “Cows in The City,” as San Francisco is wont to style itself.

In a few hours I will be participating in my first book event to occur outside the boundaries of California's great Central Valley. My novel will be presented to curious urbanites, no doubt eager to learn about the arcane details of Portuguese immigrant life on a family dairy farm. The subject matter is redolent with a sense of thrills, excitement, and drama. Irresistible!

If you're in the Bay Area this evening, consider dropping in at Books Inc. in San Francisco's Opera Plaza on Van Ness. The event officially starts at 7:00, but I'll be loitering in the area beforehand. (Loitering in bookstores is something I'm good at.)

Reviews are in!

★★★★★ 

Do me a favor? People have been asking me if there's going to be a Kindle version of my novel. The answer is a firm maybe. It will happen only if the publisher gets the notion that there's a significant demand for an e-book edition. Would you please go to the Amazon page and click on “I'd like to read this book on Kindle”? Thanks!

A few unsolicited reviews have trickled in since last month's publication of Land of Milk and Money. The good news is that they're positive. Right now there are three five-star reviews on Amazon, although one of them appropriately notes that it was written by a friend of mine. (Thanks, buddy!) The other two, however, are by people I have never met and don't know. I have to thank them for taking the time and trouble to post such positive reviews of my book. Muito obrigado!

 Here's what Karen Davis of Maryland had to say:

A "read straight through" delight, July 31, 2012

Disclaimer: I read the author's blog, but I don't know him. Still, his writing there is delightful, so I was prepared to enjoy the book. I just wasn't prepared to enjoy it quite so much. I started it on my commute to work this morning, and finished it this evening, doing little else but read. The story hooked me, the characters are vivid and convincing, and the narrative structure pulled me right in. At first I paid a lot of attention to the dates provided, but fairly soon I felt grounded enough in the family's life to be able to place when things were happening — what seems a bit haphazard at first is anything but. The huge family, bound together by the dairy farm, unravels in an inevitable and real way after the death of the matriarch, who knew that "land, houses, and cows" — and money — would come between them. Her attempt to prevent that serves as the spark, and we get to know them all before we learn how it all ends. (Or maybe not "all".) This book is a joy to read.

Jeffrey W. Hatley then weighed in with the following:

A Wonderful Book, August 6, 2012

Short summary: This is the best work of fiction I have read in a very long time, and you should absolutely read it.

Long Summary:

The first thing I should mention is that this is not the type of book I would ordinarily read. If I were browsing the book store, I probably would not have been gripped by the book's synopsis on the back cover. I bought this book because I'm a long-time fan of the authors blog, so I was familiar with his skilled writing.

This book greatly exceeded my high expectations.

Written in an episodic fashion, Land of Milk and Money uses short, non-chronological anecdotes to tell the story of several generations of the Francisco family and their dairy farm, as well as the legal battle that ensued when the family matriarch passed away. While this may sound like a slightly confusing way to write a story, it is not; the author uses it masterfully, creating three-dimensional characters and relating several decades-worth of incidents, resulting in a book which is a model of clarity. The author does helpfully include a Cast of Characters in the back of the book, but one quickly learns all of the major players and ceases to need this cheat sheet.

Despite being about a legal battle, Land of Milk and Money is light-hearted, and I often found myself chuckling at Candy's follies, Ms. Onan's ineptness, Jojo's ingenuity, and Paul's pedantry. By the book's conclusion, I had developed an attachment to many of the characters, and I can't help but feel that there are even more wonderful anecdotes that didn't make the cut. While I doubt it's in the making, I would certainly read the sequel!

Land of Milk and Money is an extremely fun read, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Please, read this!

Nice! How could I possibly quibble with that? (Although I admit that I did correct one misspelling because it's difficult for me to resist such things.)

By the way, Jeffrey is completely correct. There were a number of omitted anecdotes. Here's a little list:

The voyage to Brazil
The wearing of the green
Alberto's wisdom
If I might have a word
Visit to the University Farm
I want to be a priest
A night at the opera
Want to be a teacher?
Walking past the church
The Einsteinian cow

All but the last of these episodes were written up and included in the manuscript at one point or another. The first one, The voyage to Brazil, was published on-line at the Comunidades site early last year while the manuscript was still under consideration at Tagus Press. During the editing process, the segment was flagged for its comparative length and for being too much of a distraction from the main plot. I had to (reluctantly) agree.

“The wearing of the green” is based on an old blog post from 2005. The time of red and green amused me enough to want to recycle it, but my editor deemed it peripheral to the plot. As he noted in an initial reading of the manuscript, “the story of Paul's evolution from child prodigy to mathematician is well-enough told and does present a focal point for an alternative assimilation narrative, [but] I'm not altogether persuaded it fully coheres with the rest of the book.”

Yeah, busted! He singled out several of the more autobiographical segments and recommended them for deletion. Of the ten deleted titles above, I see that fully seven of them were episodes of this kind.

What will I do with all of the chunks of text left over from the manuscript's slimming process? I don't  know. While most of them don't stand alone very well, neither do they form a coherent whole. Perhaps they are fated to go into literature's dustbin. Although crowded, I'm sure the literary waste receptacle can make room for these leavings. And who knows? With a little bit of patience, they might eventually be reunited with the anecdotes that survived the winnowing process, but ... on the shelf or in the dustbin?

The great white hope

Darn! Missed again!

San Francisco Chronicle writer Jon Carroll has a quirky way of signing off at the end of  each of his columns. He embeds his e-mail address in a pithy literary quote. Here's an example from Carroll's July 3, 2012, installment:

The weight of this sad time we must obey; speak what we feel and not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young shall never see so much nor live so jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Do you recognize the quote? It's from the end of King Lear, which Carroll has long been mining for material. And now it had run out!

Well, that's that. "King Lear," the story of a foolish old man and the terrible price he pays for his folly, is concluded, a sentence at a time with a few omissions, and now we turn somewhere else for our e-mail line at the bottom of the column. But where?

Carroll solicited suggestions from his cherished readers for a new public-domain source of meaty tag-lines. Naturally I hastened to his assistance:

Dear John:

A modest suggestion:

Call me Ishmael – or jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

and perhaps

No need of profane words, however great the jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

then

Cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

and

Does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great jcarroll@sfchronicle.com?

until, finally,

And I only am escaped alone to tell jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

That could keep you in sign-off lines for a good while, no?

Of course, if you were hankering for something more contemporary, I could – in a self-promotional move – kindly offer my new novel, beginning with

Greetings! We who are about to lose salute jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

and ending with

“We have a winner,” he murmured to jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Unfortunately, debut novels by math professors turned writers are too obscure to give your readers the desired literary frisson, so I stick with my recommendation of the great white whale.

“There she blows! there! there! there!”

Nice, huh? A good suggestion mixed in with a judicious dash of self-promotion. Carroll wrote back:

Nice stuff ...

I was excessively pleased, so imagine my reaction when I read Carroll's next column and saw this at the bottom:

There's Melville, of course, and Lewis Carroll, and more Shakespeare, and nursery rhymes and old-timey proverbs, all of them candidates for the words before the e-mail line, which is jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Of course, there was no guarantee that Moby-Dick was uniquely my suggestion, but it didn't matter. However many of us recommended Melville, there he was, leading all the rest. I was most entertained. Alas, it was not to be. Carroll pondered his options during a vacation from column-writing and somehow settled upon the runner-up in his list of candidates. The first column after his return ended thus:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Oh, no! “We're through the looking glass, people!” (Of course, that's an allusion to Oliver Stone's epic fantasy movie JFK.)

Not lost in space

The Infinite Tides

The traumatized astronaut is not a new theme in literature. In nonfiction, we have the example of Buzz Aldrin's Return to Earth, which deals with the alcoholism and depression of the second man on the moon, and Brian O'Leary's The Making of an Ex-Astronaut, which chronicles the less dramatic frustrations of a scientist-astronaut who never made it into space. Science-fiction author Barry N. Malzberg penned The Falling Astronauts, in which astronaut Richard Martin gets bundled up by his crewmates after his breakdown and hauled back to earth as a basket case. More famously, Arthur C. Clarke created some extremely stressed astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So ... been there and done that. Besides, the Space Age is old news and these days no one interrupts regularly scheduled programming to report on rocket launches or spacecraft landings. Therefore it might seem just a little surprising that a new author should choose a distressed astronaut as the protagonist of his first novel. What was Christian Kiefer thinking when he wrote The Infinite Tides?

The author shared some of his thought process during the SummerWords conference, which he and his English department colleagues at the American River College organized last month. (Yours truly attended and was most likely the only mathematician in the crowd.) At a session on researching one's story, Kiefer mocked the “write what you know” straitjacket, preferring instead the “write what you can find out” approach. Thus he plunged into astronautics and mathematics, dredging up the information that would give his high-flying protagonist substance and credibility.

Kiefer also talked with the Sacramento Bee, explaining the genesis of his novel to reporter Allen Pierleoni:

Part of it was listening to the news and beginning to feel I might be the only man in America who still had a job. Then sitting at Starbucks (grading papers), watching other men at other tables looking through the want ads, then drifting to the sports pages, then to the funnies, then finally to the front page. Basically using the hunt for a job as a way to fill the endless hours of their otherwise vacant days.

It's pertinent to note that people who have academic jobs teaching math and English—subjects deemed indispensable at college—have a security that is rare in the modern world. We are a privileged few. Who else is so lucky?

Astronauts, perhaps. The men and women of the space program comprise an elite corps of over-achievers. They have reached a literal apex of accomplishment as they leave the earth on their missions. What would happen to an astronaut if he were to find himself grounded, his life and career in ruins? That was the question that Kiefer asked himself and he explores the answers in The Infinite Tides.

Astronaut Keith Corcoran is a genius at math and engineering. His goal is to go into space. Corcoran's entire life is devoted to achieving his goal, even to the point of estranging his wife and daughter. Corcoran notices and regrets the increasing distance between himself and his family, but can't see a way to resolve it without jeopardizing his career. He's actually rather irritated with his wife, who once seemed so supportive, but he plunges ahead regardless.

When it all comes apart in tragedy and illness, Corcoran finds himself alone. Stripped of flight status and living alone in an empty house in a half-built suburban development, he has nothing but time—and nothing to fill it. Having lived all his life with a keen sense of his mathematical trajectory through spacetime, Corcoran struggles to reassess the axioms of his existence. Vectors are mathematical entities possessing both length and direction, telling you both where and what. They beautifully model things like velocities, expressing both where you are going and how fast you're going to get there. For Corcoran, they were real and gave shape to the way he moved through life. Vectors were both tools he used in his engineering work and dynamic forces that drew him through reality.

Tragically, his sense of mathematized reality was one that he had in common with his daughter Quinn, but which also estranged them. While Corcoran lived within the coordinate grid of spacetime, his daughter was not embedded in the same way. While Quinn perceived the same personalities and characteristics of numbers that her father saw, she was nevertheless a different person. She had the gift of being able to live among the mortals, to be popular and social. Instead of jumping at the opportunity to enroll in an elite school to hone her extraordinary gifts, Quinn preferred to stay in a regular high school and join the cheerleading squad. Thus she became a disappointment to her father, who had already mapped out the inevitable trajectory of her life and could not come to terms with her deliberate violation of deterministic fate.

The Infinite Tides is an engrossing book. I read the entire thing over a single weekend, rarely putting it down. Keith Corcoran is a fascinating character, often maddening, whose sense of place and purpose is wobbling out of control. When he starts interacting with the neighbor woman whose daughter reminds him slightly of Quinn, you expect certain things to occur, and some of them do—but never in quite the way you were anticipating. The surprises keep you off balance and make you all the more sympathetic to Corcoran's disorientation. You begin to wonder how the author can possibly bring the book to a satisfactory resolution.

And yet he does. In fact, the final pages of The Infinite Tides bring Corcoran's story to a cusp, where many different things become possible. There is no pat happy ending, but rather a blossoming of choices. The man who lived in a mathematical framework that had become a deterministic cage begins to grasp the key that his daughter had found.

A divergent coda

Having traversed the trajectory of my review, I find myself left with notes and observations that did not fit into the flow. I offer them here as a collection of tangent vectors.

The Infinite Tides is a stunning accomplishment and I exhort people to read it and watch for future works by Christian Kiefer. The man has staying power. What's more, his capacity for assimilation of background research is prodigious. He admits to being relatively innocent of mathematical knowledge, yet he absorbed what he needed and magisterially portrayed the life of a brilliantly obsessive-compulsive mathematician.

I suspect that people who disdain math might occasionally recoil from Keith Corcoran, who tries even a mathematician's patience as he relentlessly invokes “equations” (one of the book's most frequently appearing words) and their solutions. Everything to him is a math problem, but that idée fixe is the protagonist's defining characteristic, the leitmotif of his life.

There is one bobble in the discussion of Hilbert's hotel, a warm scene where father and daughter are sharing a joyous discovery about the paradoxical nature of infinity. Suppose you have a hotel with infinitely many rooms: Room 1, Room 2, Room 3, and so on, going forever. Suppose the hotel has no vacancies, infinitely many guests being in residence. Suppose infinitely many new people show up, all wanting rooms. What is one to do? Quinn suggests a solution to her father:

“They ask every other guest to move down one room.... If n is a room with a guest the n moves to n plus one and then—”

Her father quickly understands. Unfortunately, Quinn should have said that n moves to 2n, not to n + 1. If the occupant of Room 1 moves to Room 2, and the occupant of Room 2 moves to Room 4, and the occupant of Room 3 moves to Room 6, etcetera, then all of the original guests end up in even-numbered rooms, leaving the infinitely many odd-numbered rooms vacant to accommodate the infinitely many new arrivals.

I doubt the matter will cause much distress among Kiefer's readers, but the mathematically inclined may wrinkle their brows.

My other reservation relates to astronomy. For an astronaut, Corcoran is remarkably ignorant of elementary astronomy when he converses with his Ukrainian neighbor. When Peter explains that he likes to look at Messier objects, Corcoran says, “I don't know what that means.” But Messier objects are an Astronomy 101 topic, a catalog of celestial objects that could be mistaken for comets when viewed through a telescope. The Andromeda galaxy is M31 in the Messier catalog. Even more unlikely is Corcoran's ignorance of the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia. One expects astronauts to know such configurations for purposes of stellar navigation if the computers fritz out and the sextant has to be dragged out. (This was actually a consideration during the Apollo 13 mission and a factor in the crippled spacecraft's safe return to earth.)

Perhaps Corcoran was exempt from such lessons since he was an engineer-astronaut instead of a pilot-astronaut, but it struck me as unlikely.

I mentioned 2001 in the opening paragraphs of this article. It appears that Kiefer included a related joke to amuse close readers of his novel. At one point, a man named Campbell says to Corcoran, “I'm a busy man. I have the whole day scheduled to sit here on my bony ass and listen to Frank Poole bullshit about the good old days. Let's get out of here before that old windbag shows up.”

No wonder HAL 9000 killed Frank Poole when he went outside the Discovery to repair the AE-35 communications gyro.

www.landofmilkandmoney.com

Die Zeit ist da!

As of today we are merely two weeks away from the release of my novel, Land of Milk and Money, published by Tagus Press of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. The university has a robust program of Portuguese studies and the theme of my novel made it a natural for the “Portuguese in the Americas” series, of which my book is #18. (Collect them all!)

Of course, if my novel were only thematically significant, then it would not be likely to attract much attention. I have it on good authority, however, that it is also a rollicking good yarn. Bestselling author John Lescroart read the entire manuscript and proclaimed it excellent. Here's what he provided me for a cover blurb:

In Land of Milk and Money, the author mines rich family history to create a full-blooded tale that patient readers will find insightful, rewarding, and entertaining.

That's not bad, is it? In the note that accompanied the blurb, Lescroart said, “Really excellent work. Congratulations.”

Well-known California author Gerald Haslam also provided a cover quote:

One of the West’s singular migrations—from the Azores to California’s Great Central Valley—is given faces and voices in Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often-ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read.

Got that? It's a must read! (And we can trust Gerry Haslam because he's one-eighth Azorean.)

Getting a novel published is a success in and of itself, especially considering that math professors are not known for their literary accomplishments. Nevertheless, it would please me greatly if Land of Milk and Money were at least a modest success, forcing Tagus Press into more than one printing. You can help, of course.

The next time you pop into your friendly neighborhood bookstore, please be sure to inquire sweetly:

“When will you have Land of Milk and Money from Tagus Press in stock?”

I would much appreciate it. No doubt hordes of inquisitive blog readers could give the book quite a boost.

I hope, too, to see some of you at book events in various parts of California. A few are already lined up and others are being sought. See the Events page at www.landofmilkandmoney.com for current details. I look forward to meeting you!

Living in Inertiaville

In the state of Catatonia

The spring semester ground to a halt several days ago. As usually occurs after a prolonged stint of intense effort, I lapsed into a semi-coma when it ended. My grades filed, I folded myself up into a tiny space of inaction.

I'm resting. Or something.

Some of my colleagues treat the filing of semester grades as a starter's pistol. Bang! And they're dashing off to foreign climes or holding parties or gorging on movies. School's out! Party time!

I can barely move.

My friends barely suspect the degree to which I shut down when the school year ends. I'm afraid I get overwhelmed by all of the deferred secondary tasks that accumulated during the busy times. Buridan's ass is reputed to have starved because he was fortuitously situated at the midpoint between two identical stacks of hay. Two stacks? Heck. I feel encircled.

Thus it has been that books remain in unsorted stacks, sheafs of papers sit unfiled, laundry rests unfolded in baskets, newspapers pile up unread in the recycling bin, blog posts remain unwritten, and an entire residence awaits a much-needed top-to-bottom clean-up job. (And let us not speak of my office at school.) Instead of attempting anything on the long list of things to do, I've slouched on the comfy chair in the living room, remote control in a flaccid hand, chuckling at the inane antics of Father Ted, the hijinks of Rocky & Bullwinkle, and bits of Fry & Laurie. I've let Simon Schama lead me through British history. (My video tastes are eclectic.)

Of course, it's not all couch-potato viewing. I also take naps. And I have been plowing through lots of books. I do that all the time, but pick up the pace during the summer. Reading is a useful and constructive activity, but I fear I'm using it in alternation with watching television as a way to avoid performing other tasks.

What to do? What to do?

My past history suggests that my suppressed sense of personal responsibility will eventually generate enough pent-up pressure that I will—any morning now—explode into a spate of furious activity that will strike out big segments of the mile-long to-do list. But it hasn't happened yet.

Perhaps writing this post is a kind of mea culpa that will nudge my conscience closer to the trigger point....

Nope. Not yet.

The disconnections

Hawking my wares

I have a long list of summer events in California's Portuguese-American community. It looks like I'll be doing a modicum of traveling this summer to promote my book at some of them. Since the small university press that is publishing the novel is without a generous travel budget or promotional expense account, this is going to be a shoestring operation. Every bit of free publicity is going to be valuable and social media will play its part.

Last year I started to try to drum up endorsements of the type that might play well as cover blurbs or as quotes in promotional materials. While my favorite quote is my sister's prediction that I'm going to get into “a lot of trouble” (but it's fiction—honest!), I also managed to get positive comments from a few real-life professional authors. Just enough to give my work a smidgen of credibility.

Of course, not everyone who I approached was interested in plowing through a 350-page manuscript from an unknown author. (Imagine that!) I did, of course, offer more modest samplers of selected pages, reducing the time commitment substantially. Clever writers, however, figured out that the best way to reduce the time commitment was to politely (or brusquely) decline the privilege entirely.

A couple of my friends were classmates with Joan Didion at UC Berkeley, working with her on student publications at the university. “Go on, write to her!” they said. “What could you lose?” Nothing, certainly. Which is also what I gained. The inquiry via Didion's publisher was absorbed into a black hole of silence.

I got a more substantial reaction from Joyce Carol Oates: a terse note from her assistant explaining that Prof. Oates reads only the papers of the students in her writing class and if only I had inquired before sending a packet of pages, I could have saved myself the trouble. Heck. I knew that! I sent the pages in the long-shot hope that they would be tempted to peek at them (and discover a masterpiece!) before consigning them to the recycle bin. The professor's gatekeeper, however, discharged her responsibilities meticulously. That is, of course, why she has that job.

In October, as I recounted previously, I boldly bothered Jonathan Franzen during his speaking tour of northern California. When he admitted to reading “just about anything,” I naturally thanked him and promptly shipped off a few dozen pages in care of his publisher. As the weeks went by, it seemed that I had run into another Didionesque black hole, but this week I discovered otherwise.

It simply takes Franzen a lot of time—unsurprisingly—to plow through all of his fan mail. He did, however, eventually run into my packet, opened it up, found the stamped, self-addressed postcard that accompanied the sample manuscript pages, and decided it was worth taking a couple of minutes to scrawl me a note and drop it in the mail. He said my novel was “a worthy and entertaining project”! Huzzah! Another useful book blurb! From the bestselling author who garnered the National Book Award for The Corrections!

Um. Not really.

Franzen was being polite. A more extensive quote from the postcard makes this clear:

[Your novel] seems like a worthy and entertaining project, but I'm afraid it's too far from the mode of fiction I produce & support for me to be able to help you. I appreciate your thinking of me, though.

Shucks! See how much better that is when trimmed down to five words? Or, with a judicious ellipsis, even better: “a worthy and entertaining project ... I appreciate.”

If only I had a conscienceless public relations person (is that redundant?), we could make hay of this. But no.

Speaking of hay, though, reminds me. Jane Smiley isn't returning my messages!

Past your eyes

The writer as researcher

I can't help myself. I read prefaces and acknowledgments in books. It fascinates me when the author thanks the people who helped him dredge up the arcana that enriched his writing or when he cites source material that might reward further reading. I want to know where the amazing detail or fascinating inside information came from.

Of course, sometimes it's fake. One of my old college chums pointed out a passage in a bestselling novel that described in loving detail the wardroom of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. The minutiae gave weight and verisimilitude to the scene set therein. But my friend scoffed.

“I've been there. It's nothing like that! The author just made it up.”

I guess it was even more a work of fiction than I realized at the time.

On another occasion I asked a bestselling author about his use of apparently real California neighborhoods. I asked him if he was depicting real-world venues or products of his imagination. He stated that every scene was set in a place he knew personally, and that he either scouted out locales in person or used neighborhoods in which he had lived or often visited.

This question came up as my publisher obtained pre-publication reviews of my manuscript. One reviewer sent in a single-spaced three-page commentary that warmed the cockles of my heart with its praise. Of course, the reviewer also suggested some judicious cuts in the manuscript, which I dutifully embraced, but most of my attention was focused on his more positive observations:

One suspects the author's encyclopedic knowledge of dairy farming comes not only from personal experience, but even more of it must come from serious research.

Um ... no. Research? What's that?

I lived on a dairy farm for twenty years. All of the utterly (udderly?) persuasive detail that so impressed my reviewer was based on simple experience—stuff that passed before my eyes. I would have known even more good stuff had I not been so willing to defer to my eager younger brother when there was work to be done. If he was willing to volunteer, then I was willing to sit behind the haystack with a book.

Every tool or machine employed in the sowing, raising or harvesting of crops is described in loving, complex detail, as is the nurture, handling and transportation of the cows themselves. One chapter entitled “Green Cotton,” for example, could be used as a primer for anyone interested in the cultivation of that particular crop.

This may astonish you, but my editors and I did not choose to quote this on the cover of the book. Nor did we use the line where he praised my “abstruse knowledge.” Hey, bookstore browsers! Want to read a rapturous ode to farm equipment, crop rotation, and animal husbandry?

The movie rights are as good as sold!

Still, the reviewer was exceedingly kind in his comments about my grasp of farm arcana, which I tell you in all honesty is nothing remarkable. Here's the “abstruse knowledge” comment in context, where you can see the reviewer's generous and kind appraisal:

The author’s abstruse knowledge, however, is never employed gratuitously, but invariably to establish some point of character (as in the above instance, the incompetent Candido’s attempts to “cut corners” which invariably end in disaster) or to advance the plot, as is the case of the elaborate description of the marvelously complicated—and dangerous—machine used to harvest alfalfa which causes the young Trey’s life-changing accident. This information is presented with such consummate authority the reader never for an instance questions its accuracy.

So there! I is an expert!

The reviewer shares my Portuguese heritage, which is certainly one of the reasons he was asked to review my novel in manuscript form. He appreciated my efforts to capture and convey the cultural tangles that arose as the novel's immigrant protagonists put down new roots in the New World and are gradually transformed into Americans. He also thought that I was mostly successful in presenting the travails of the main characters.

The plot is long and complex, the cast of characters large, and since one of the joys of reading is to meet them on one’s own terms, they are best left for readers themselves to discover. They are a lively and varied bunch and the author delineates them with considerable verve, humor and intelligence. You will enjoy getting to know them.

The reviewer also gave me some fatherly advice about improving the novel's dialogue. I tend to use direct address quite often, with the use of proper names intended to avoid any ambiguity about who is speaking to whom. In real life, however, people seldom do this, so my conversations were a bit “wooden” in places. (On the other hand, no one ever had to go back several lines to go even-odd-even-odd to figure out who is talking.) I performed the reviewer's recommended excisions and similarly smoothed my dialogue. Of course, I didn't feel obligated to take all of his advice:

Your style is generally clean, straightforward, simple and direct, not much given to metaphor, which, unless it comes naturally, should generally be avoided. Nor do you, fortunately, attempt to wax lyrical. [You are, however, occasionally given to showing off your vocabulary.]

Yep, no waxing lyrical here! But as for showing off vocabulary? Indubitably!

And he finished by calling my book “excellent”! Coming to a bookstore near you this summer.

Adroit gaucherie

A left-handed backhand tribute

David Berlinski has brilliantly resolved the sovereign conundrum of his existence: How can he remain modest while being the smartest member of an anti-intellectual cult? His elegant solution is to not even try. Another effortless triumph!

He again puts his sumptuous vocabulary and self-conscious prose on display as he preeningly pretends to celebrate the life of the late Christopher Hitchens. While Hitchens was a master of the finely honed, sharp-edged phrase, Berlinski prefers to poke about with a dull-tipped poniard. The jewels on his stiletto's hilt are of more interest to him than the blunt tip's inability to make a point. Watch as he uses his supposed tribute to Hitchens as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement, attempting to clamber up to Hitchens' level and stand by his side as a co-equal polemicist. It is an intriguing spectacle. Some excerpts:

Christopher Hitchens's reputation rests on his literary works, his panache as a public speaker, and on his defiant atheism. He wrote on a very wide range of subjects, and his book reviews were often very fine. He liked to praise the writers and poets he loved: Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen, James Fenton, many others. He read closely and he read well. As an essayist, Christopher Hitchens is often compared to George Orwell. The comparison is careless, and it is one that in his final interview with Richard Dawkins, he rejected. Hitchens wrote fluently, Orwell, unforgettably. The difference is very considerable, but it is not to Hitchens's discredit. No man is obliged to be what he might have been.

Poor Hitch. He was no more than he was, but that's not his fault. Berlinski understands, and sympathizes. (As well he should.)

Hitchens was an engaging public speaker, and he had the gift of gracefully holding an audience. His intimate interviews were often wonderful because invariably, he was more elegant and far more articulate than his interlocutors. When faced with a rhetorical bruiser like George Galloway, his natural register failed him, and he did not have the dexterity to secure by means of an ironical divagation what he was otherwise unable to secure by matching bruise to bruise.

Poor Hitch. He was better at fencing than at crotch-kicking. (Really? Perhaps Berlinski overlooked Hitchens' well-known stone-crushing skills. Or maybe David wisely kept his knees clasped tightly together during his debate with Christopher.)

With the publication of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens reached a mass audience. He became celebrated. When he discovered how well he had been received by the public, he tended to regard his own religious beliefs with the indulgence of a man who on discovering that he has been lucky in attracting admirers very naturally concludes that he has been justified in attracting them.

Poor Hitch. He mistakenly thought he deserved the attention he got. Berlinski desperately wants to know how he got that attention and would sell his soul to achieve the same level of recognition. (Perhaps he already has. The house intellectual of the Discovery Institute has a lot to answer for.)

His atheism nonetheless had a kind of shambling boisterousness that made Christopher Hitchens seem a Mirabeau to Richard Dawkins's Saint Just [sic] or Sam Harris's Robespierre.

Poor Hitch. Did he never suspect that he was playing a part in a zany recapitulation of the French Revolution? (By the way, David, the name of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just is usually rendered with a hyphen. Not, of course, that this significantly detracts from your light-shedding simile. Pas du tout!)

Hitchens was uninterested in subtle analysis. On the masthead of the Daily Hitchens, there is the legend: What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. The difficulty with this assertion is straightforward. If it has been asserted without proof, why should it be believed, and if not, where is the proof?

I asked Hitchens about this during a break in our debate. We had retreated to a forlorn hotel loading ramp in order to have a cigarette. “Well, yes,” he said, “it's just a sentence.”

Oh, that Hitchens! Such a sly boots, and yet hoist by his own petard when caught making a statement without proof about statements without proof. Sneaky, clever Berlinski, to catch him out like that! It was also wise of Berlinski, who routinely plays the part of a math expert, to refrain from making the obvious point that every theoretical discussion must begin with unproven axioms at its foundation. Ceding this point to Hitchens would have deflated Berlinski's elegant gotcha. How unfortunate that Hitchens neglected to cringe in humiliation at Berlinski's sly riposte.

Christopher Hitchens found objectionable the very idea of a source of authority, and so of power, greater than his own. This has seemed to some of his readers all of the time, and all of his readers some of the time, both defiant and uplifting. The very same idea is at work in the terrible crimes of the twentieth century. It is inseparable from them.

I hasten to point out that Berlinski is not running afoul of Godwin's law here. Our elegant elegist deftly ducked this faux pas by not elucidating the nature of the twentieth century's terrible crimes. Hitler is only implied. We all understand perfectly well that Hitchens would never have supported Hitler—that is, of course, if he had only possessed the wit to realize that “the very same idea” of disdaining an ultimate authority is “inseparable” from campaigns of mass murder.

At least, that's one way to read Berlinski's prolix paragraph. Antecedents are difficult to pin down. (Does “the very same idea” refer to “the very idea of a source of authority” or the notion that this source itself was “objectionable”?) One of the glories of his prose is that the author will be on a firm footing if he objects to this characterization on the grounds that the sentences are ambiguous and subject to many (and divergent) interpretations.

Christopher Hitchens chose to greet death publicly. Had he thought of it, he might well have invited an orchestra. We signed books together after our appearance in Birmingham, and to admirers on his very long line inquiring after his health, Hitchens replied that he was dying. It was a response that inevitably took his interlocutor aback, the more so since it was true. I followed his interviews and read his essays about cancer and death. I found them moving. But they do not evoke the man.

And neither does Berlinski's supposed encomium.

Shameless self-promotion

On not being famous

My editor-in-chief pointed out the other day that I am not a famous person. Naturally, this took me by surprise, since I have followed my career with rapt attention and had not realized that others were not doing the same. I'm sure you can understand.

Having recovered from the initial shock of this discovery, I wondered why my editor had made this obvious—in retrospect—observation. In response, he reminded me that his main occupation was professorial, not editorial. Although he headed up a university press, it was not a gigantic publishing firm with crack teams of publicists and salespeople. (Rather, they have catalogs and websites.) He suggested that sales of my novel would get a significant boost if only he could run some cover quotes from more famous authors—where “more famous” means “famous at all.”

The solution, of course, was simple. I just needed to get in touch with all of the famous authors I know and ask them to please send me enthusiastic encomia to emblazon on my book cover. You know the type of thing: “An excellent book!” “Laugh out loud funny!” “Exceptional descriptive writing!” “Brilliantly orchestrated, hilariously funny!” “As good an ending as ever written!” “One of the best books I’ve ever read!”

Yeah. That kind of stuff.

One teensy, tiny problem, though.

All the successful authors I know are involved in math or computers. Not in fiction. (At least, not intentional fiction.) Rats. This means I have to go trolling for endorsements from people I don't know. I have to sidle up to famous and semi-famous people and make a nuisance of myself. The task is an unpleasant one. However, I may be good at it.

The unsuspecting Jonathan Franzen came to Northern California on tour. He made a stop at the Mondavi Center at the University of California at Davis. I got myself a ticket and made plans to get up to the home of the University Farm for Franzen's talk. He won the National Book Prize for The Corrections and reaped a huge publicity windfall from his public spat with Oprah (followed by a highly publicized kiss-and-make-up event on her show). The man is either a promotional genius or incredibly lucky. Either suits me just fine.

I got to UC Davis early (not much traffic in Davisville on Saturday nights) and wandered about the Mondavi Center for a while. A few years ago I was there on the invitation of a nephew who scored a pair of tickets for an appearance by Stephen Hawking. It was a different crowd for Franzen's talk (less of a comic-con vibe and more of a white-wine-and-cheese ambience).

Franzen read his talk—somewhat to my surprise—but there's no rule that says a good writer must also be a good public speaker. He was starting to hit his stride when he interrupted his talk to fish a pen out of his briefcase and scribble a couple of corrections on his typescript. In fact, the talk was punctuated with such interruptions. At one point, he shook his head and confided to the audience that he had written “actually” three times in rapid succession and at least one of them had to go. He was also in fear of encountering a fourth, actually.

Whether intentional or not, Franzen was giving a good illustration of a writer's travails, fussing over text and vocabulary. The talk was, overall, a well-received success, with enthusiastic applause, after which Franzen took a seat on stage with a UC Davis faculty member who fed him some Internet-delivered questions for a Q&A session. In addition, a live microphone was set up in an aisle in the orchestra section of the hall. When Franzen suggested it was time to go to a live question, heads swiveled to discover that no one was at the mike. I popped up out of my seat and strolled over:

Thank you for being here, Jonathan. I'd like to ask you about the importunities visited on successful authors. You must have lots of people making demands for chunks of your time to provide pre-publication quotes for book covers. How do you decide whether an author's unpublished manuscript is worthy of the stress of your regard?

Franzen laughed and said, “That's an original question. That's why I love university audiences. The questions are so clever.”

Then he rashly answered my question: “I don't know if I should really say this, but I actually look at just about everything that gets sent to me. If the first page contains no clichés, I'll read the second page. If there are no more than one or two clichés on subsequent pages, and I find it interesting, I'll keep on reading.”

I was still standing at the mike while Franzen wrapped up his answer, so I leaned back toward it and said, “Thank you, Jonathan. I'll be in touch!”

That got a good laugh from the audience. Afterward, I got in line so he could sign my copy of The Corrections.

Just to be clear, Franzen has promised me absolutely nothing and committed himself to nothing. When he gets the packet of sample pages from my manuscript, he might riffle through it, yawn, and toss it aside. On the other hand, he might like it. And then say so. I live in hope.

P.S.: The “pretend” quotes above are actually¹ genuine. They were actually² sent to me by people who actually³ read the manuscript. When these folks get famous, I'm all set!

A capital paper greets the spring

The curdled milk of human kindness

The April 6 front page of The Sacramento Bee paid tribute to spring with a peculiar headline concerning the capital city's unfortunate homeless population:

Homeless survive winter: Now what?

How do you read that headline? It seems to suggest disappointment. Oh, darn. The cold weather didn't kill them off. Now what do we do? I suspect that wasn't the intent, but it sure can be read that way.

Reporters are seldom responsible for the headlines that run with their articles, so this is presumably a faux pas that can be laid at the doorstep of a momentarily thoughtless editor. Still, it made it into print without anyone noticing and suggesting that it might need revision. (I often have lunch with a group of retired journalists who have Bee experience. They assure me that proofreading is a thing of the past at their old newspaper. Sometimes they suggest that the same thing is true of fact-checking.)

The Columbia Journalism Review may want to take note of this item for its next collection of unfortunate and easily misconstrued headlines. It's not as catchy as “Bishop Defrocks Gay Priest,” but it has a certain piquancy of its own.

Lettered ladies

Always the gentleman

The other day I found myself in the unaccustomed position of defending Sarah Palin. It was, I admit, a very mild defense, but a defense nonetheless. A member of the Friday lunch bunch was castigating the former half-term governor of Alaska for having attended five colleges (University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, University of Idaho, and Matanuska-Susitna College) on her way to a bachelor's degree in communications. Having attended and earned units at five different colleges myself, I did not consider persistence at a single institution to be a virtue in and of itself. (I did, however, complete degree requirements at four of them.)

The habitués of the Friday lunch bunch are mostly former journalists these days, the ink-stained wretches having supplanted the coterie of old legislative hands that used to frequent the TGIF observances. And “ink” is the right word, too. All of them served in the trenches when hot lead and metal plates and barrels of black goo were standard tools of the newspaper business. I don't go back quite that far, but I am accepted into this journalistic fraternity because I, too, have worked for a major metropolitan newspaper (but not for very long). Besides, I have seniority in the lunch bunch, being one of the last survivors of the original gang with state capitol experience.

We are a largely left-of-center group, naturally concerned that the president is not even close to being the extreme liberal of right-wing accusations, and cheerfully derogatory in our references to the various nut-case conservative cabals running Republican legislative caucuses throughout the nation and in entirely too many governors' mansions. Palin gets extra contempt from the Friday gang because of her journalistic pretensions and her slender résumé as a reporter (but not as slim as mine). It doesn't help her cause, of course, that even her prepared remarks come out as tossed word salads of right-wing talking points: blah, blah, blah ... American greatness ... blah, blah, blah ... Reagan ... blah, blah, blah ... God bless America ... blah, blah, blah ... war on terror ... blah, blah, blah. Jealousy is probably involved a little. Imagine pocketing $50,000 a pop for that kind of disjointed drivel, as Palin did at Stanislaus State University.

Despite her degree in communications (with an emphasis in journalism), Palin opted to hire a ghostwriter for her autobiography. She's apparently been too busy doing other things.

Like serving as a role model.

California has spawned a Palin camp follower who boasts that she is a “blogger extraordinaire” (that may be premature) with a master's degree in English on top of a bachelor's degree that included journalism coursework. This phenomenon was brought to my attention by a regular visitor to my blog (hi, Kathie!). She was puzzled by the prospect of an English major with a graduate degree who spews out this kind of breathless prose (spacing, spelling, and punctuation preserved from the original):

I'm a San Diego girl& patriotic American at heart!I graduated from San Diego State University in 2005 where I studied English & Journalism.I also have a Masters' Degree in English.I never thought I'd be setting up a blog,but feel I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to share with readers topics that are important to me & I hope to you as well.I will use this blog as a platform of sorts to promote not only conservative values,but strong,conservative female candidates.Sarah Palin is the epitome of this female.Strong,sincere,classy,intelligent & graceful.I have heard individuals describe her as a modern-day Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan.It is she who has inspired me to get involved politically.The mere mention of her name sends the main-stream media into a tizzy.It is also my hope this blog will become a platform for conservative females everywhere.(God knows we could use more representing us).And yes,I also hope to prove that,contrary to popular opinion,it CAN be cool to be a young conservative.You can also catch me from time to time as a guest on #1 AK Talk Radio Host Eddie Burke's show where I discuss Sarah and national issues.

Odd stuff. While the political sentiments are obviously contrary to mine, I am struck by what an admitted English major does to the language. That can't help but catch my attention, if only for the moment. Does San Diego State University offer a master's degree in English as a third language? Was writing part of the curriculum? Optional, perhaps?

At least we can rest assured that she does not suffer from a narcissistic obsession with her own prose.

What's in a name?

The quest for catchy

Earlier this month I received a very welcome e-mail message from the general editor of a university press:

We are very interested in publishing your novel

I stared at the screen for a while. Time was frozen and it took several seconds to thaw and allow me to catch my breath.

That morning I had been shrugging on my coat and preparing to pick up my briefcase when my computer beeped to indicate the arrival of new e-mail. It was time to go to school for my first class of the day. I glanced at my watch and decided I could take a few seconds to see what had dropped into my in-box. It ended up, of course, stretching into several minutes. I composed a quick thank-you-thank-you-thank-you note and then dashed off to school.

It was observed that I was unusually high-spirited during the morning's classes.

The general editor sent me a summary review from the manuscript editor he had commissioned to plow through my tome. Key phrases jumped out:

Not only is the story itself generally well told, but it effectively conveys significant aspects of Azorean-American life in California.... [T]he courtroom scenes are especially well managed.... [M]y overall evaluation of the ms remains fully positive, and I look forward to the opportunity of sharing my thoughts with the author directly.

The ellipses, of course, conceal the manuscript editor's tiny little quibbles (“the book is at least 15-20% longer than the central narrative thread warrants,” “though the story of Paul's evolution from child prodigy to mathematician is well-enough told and does present a focal point for an alternative assimilation narrative, I'm not altogether persuaded it fully coheres with the rest of the book,” “something might be done to differentiate the speech of less well-educated from better-educated characters”). Hardly worth mentioning!

He also didn't much care for my working title. Thus my faithful readers get to join in part of the fun. What should my book's title be? For some useful background, here's is a plot summary that I used to pitch the book:

This is the story of the Francisco family, Portuguese immigrants from the Azores who settle on a dairy farm in California’s Central Valley. Their plans to eventually return to the Old Country fall by the wayside as their success grows and their American lives take root. The legacy of one generation becomes a point of contention as the members of the next generation begin to compete to inherit and control their heritage, which includes herds of cattle and tracts of farm land. The death of Teresa Francisco, the family’s matriarch, sets off a string of battles (both personal and legal) between brothers, spouses, in-laws, and cousins.

Yes, Teresa is based on my grandmother, the linchpin of my family and the vital center without whom the family flew to flinders. A wily old lady, she drew her will to force her two sons (my father and my uncle) to cooperate as co-executors of the estate. As the elder son, my uncle was deeply aggrieved that he did not get to call the shots himself, but I'm certain it was no accident that my grandmother chose to clip his wings in the way she did.

Unfortunately, there was also a lawsuit. My father and uncle had an older sister who predeceased her parents. She was my much-loved aunt and godmother (and is the dedicatee of my novel). Her widower, my embittered uncle-godfather, resented receiving nothing from the estate (although his children got quite a lot) and bankrolled a legal challenge to the will. The battle left scars that remain to this day, nearly thirty years later.

That was the raw material I drew upon to write my novel. Since I was not privy to all of the backstage maneuvering and scheming, I had to speculate on motivations and make up events to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Real-life people provided the models but their fictional representatives were not obligated to conform to the originals that inspired them. It's a novel. It's based on a true story, but I made it up. So far, the readers of the manuscript have been all over the map in guessing what parts are “real” and what parts are purely fanciful creations of my fevered imagination. For future readers, I'll admit that the accidental circumcision episode is quite true to life. Hey, if Laurence Sterne can write about such an event in Tristram Shandy, why can't I? (Mom wishes I would drop that section, but my manuscript editor favors “holding on” to the damaged foreskin—in what I'm sure was a deliberate choice of wry language on his part.)

But let's go back to titles. Here's an alphabetical roster of some of the candidates we have considered thus far. Which, if any, do you favor? If you wish to nominate other possibilities, I'm eager to hear them. I look forward to seeing what pops up in the comments.

• California Dairy
• California Gothic
• Cow
• Cow Boys
• Crying Over Spilt Milk
• Curdled Milk
• Dairy Family
• Dear Dairy
• Don't Have a Cow
• Have a Cow
• Land of Milk and Money, The
• Milk of Human Kindness, The
• Moo Cows
• Past Your Eyes
• Promised Land
• Raw Milk
• Sour Cream
• Spilt Milk
• Split Milk

In the meantime, I am trimming and editing the manuscript with an eye toward an April 1 deadline. If I can deliver a satisfactory revision by that date (or close to it), the university press will put my novel on its publication calendar and it could see print as early as January 2012.

Darn. Too late for Christmas!