An Episcopal school, being for the other, and a border guard

Trinity School turned out to be a place with a neat history (it's 300 years old next year) and even though it lost its openly Episcopal religious feel, moral instruction and interdenominational chapel services are still very much a part of the scene. Kindergarten through high school, preparing mostly really smart kids with wealthy parents for leadership in business, government, society in general. At least they're teaching against greed and with a sense of obligation to serve the community. Funny thing is that the school started out as a church charity school for poor kids in the 1700s, and now teaches primarily rich kids from the upper part of Manhattan.

After the school history, I got to index a book on psychology and philosophy at the same time. The author, Paul Marcus, has taken a fresh look at the weaknesses of the psychoanalytic perspective in dealing with the ethical imperatives of life. Psychoanalysis has a very self- centered approach to dealing with the anguish and anxiety of life, and the patient spends most of their time going within to balance themselves. The results are often good for the folks around them in the end, but there's little sense of moral obligation to others in the psychoanalytical process. Marcus has taken the ideas of a French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, and applied his radical altruism to the psychoanalytical project. I was very impressed with Being for the Other; it gave me some personal guidance on how to be in the world myself.

And then, back to Texas history with a short book of memories from a Missouri National Guard and sometime regular army fella from the second decade of the 20th century. Ward Schrantz (a very handsome fellow in his youth, by the way) started out in the Guard in Missouri and then switched to the regular army, and then back to the guard. Looks like this business of the border issue between Texas and Mexico has many antecedents. In the period between 1912 and 1917, the problem for the U.S. was the Mexican Revolution and the semi-chaos after it, all influenced by the beginning of World War I. Schrantz didn't get to invade Mexico in 1916 with Pershing, et. al. in the Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa, but he did participate in the guarding the border in various places in Texas and was a witness to the major changes in control over the National Guard that came from Wilson's administration. This was when the federal government got the power to call up the guard for any and all national military operations and the right to control the troops directly. Ward was a journalist in his civilian life and although he didn't originally write this material for publication, the editor, Jeff Patrick, has done a fine job of making his story flow nicely. I think Ward would have been proud. Schrantz was an excellent storyteller, and I laughed a number of times at his anecdotes about life in the army and the characters he encountered. You should check out the naked swim across the Rio Grande story in particular.

Believe it or not, but the American Enterprise Institute, after some last-minute revisions, is putting out a book on the housing market that I get to index later this week. Conservative think tank perspective ought to be interesting in the current context. I'll let you know how it goes.....

And now that we've settled down from the hurricane......

Sorry about the delay, folks, but there was this hurricane called Ike....kinda glad I'm living in Houston rather than Galveston at present, although Galveston's a nicer place most of the time. Thankfully, we didn't lose our big yard tree, just the fences blown down and some roof shingles torn off. Loss of power for several days slowed down productivity, and then the Internet was out a week longer than that. Had to hang out at Panera Bread for free WiFi for awhile. Been back to normal for about three weeks, but too busy catching up with work to write about it.

Let's just begin where I've been recently, literarily speaking. Most fun since the hurricane was with a lovely coffeetable book on old photo picture postcards from Texas towns from about 1900 to the 1930s. Towns had their own photographers whose main job was to take pictures of all the economic progress as folks came in to farm on lands once part of the open range in the Panhandle of Texas. Some of these places were boom towns at the time and are ghost towns now. The weirdest part is seeing all those "old" western buildings looking brand new for a change. Picture books are cool. It's called Taming the Land, and is being published by Texas A&M Press.

Today I just finished indexing a book on four centuries of Jewish women's spiritual writing. Having indexed a lot of Jewish history for the New England Press's series, I was already familiar with some of the names in the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first-century sections, but the really early stuff was new. They actually found excerpts from some poor Jewish women who were interrogated by the Spanish Inquisition. They had to "confess" to conducting Jewish rituals (Sabbath, Passover, etc.) in secret in their homes. Very sad. Also, although I've read some stuff about the Holocaust as well, it is still moving to read surviving poems and diary entries from the mostly ghostly hands of those who suffered so much at the under the Nazis. The good part is that time has seen a reduction in anti-Semitism as well as a big improvement in women's public role in Judaism, even in Orthodox circles.

Next up is an index for a history of the Trinity School in New York City, some kind of prep school, looks like. Way too many endnotes in tiny print. I'll let you know if the story turns out to be a good one.

A Young Lady's Diary, and the Problems of the Poverty Rate

My diary subject, Sallie McNeill, turned out to be a short, tedious and ultimately tragic story. Poor thing wrote about the normal day-to-day of a wealthy slave-owning family in south Texas before, during, and just after the Civil War. The war didn't affect her much, although her brothers were on coastal defense (they both outlived her, actually). In choosing not to get married, Sallie opted for a very lonely and purposeless life of sewing, reading and complaining about herself and everyone else. Because of her gender, her options outside of marriage were very small, and she seemed to not have the energy to pursue anything on her own. She died in her early twenties in 1867, probably from yellow fever, having never lived anywhere near to her potential. But her musings do give us some idea of what plantation life was like back then, although her attitudes toward the slaves did make me cringe. She saw them as ignorant, inferior, child-like creatures who needed white folks to "take care of" them. Sallie's is a little window onto daily life in the antebellum South.

Today, I'm working on the last half of a short treatise on the problems with the official poverty rate, published by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Now, you can imagine what position the author takes, but you'd be wrong to overgeneralize that he doesn't think poverty exists or something. He actually has a pretty good statistical analysis argument that the official poverty rate does not accurately reflect material deprivation in America anymore. It was established in the early 1960s based entirely on reported income, and it doesn't seem to reflect some serious changes in consumption patterns since then that make the official rate way out of kilter with other indications of how folks are doing, like the unemployment rate, education level, expenditure vs. income, net wealth, noncash public assistance, etc. It actually looks like from his viewpoint, that despite the seeming stagnation of living standards according to the official poverty rate, folks at the lower end of the income scale are actually doing better than they ever have, and it looks to me like this may largely be due to public assistance they've received. So the official poverty rate says that government antipoverty programs are not helping, but all other indicators say that they probably are. Looks like the author may be right, and we may need a new measure for the poverty rate so we know how to form policy to help folks.

This coming week, I'm shifting over to a guide to military life for families and antique furniture from eastern Massachusetts. Should be an interesting week.....

Abolitonism and....Detergents?

This world of literary contrasts seems to be a regular pattern for me. I thing that's why I'm still indexing and editing books after thirteen years.

Once I got through the battles of the Vietnam War (see last post), I moved back in time to 18th and pre-Civil War 19th-century American and British perspectives on slavery. This book was a literary and socio-cultural analysis of anti-slavery writing, mostly by blacks, but also some material by whites, that started as early as the colonial period. We tend to think of abolitionism as a 19th-century phenomenon, but writings against the slave trade, and the use of the slave's life narrative go back further, actually. Although the author eventually talked a bit about Frederick Douglass, one of the most famous black writers of the later part of this period, most of the writers were less well-educated, and less well-known to us. They used a variety of methods to get the sympathy of their audience, and the use of certain literary techniques in what Slavery and Sentiment calls the era of sentimental literature is the focus of the book. To me, the interesting bit was the making visible formerly silenced voices of history.

The book on detergents was surprisingly interesting in places, actually. It's a multi-authored explanation of detergent chemistry and production for chemists, so it was a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, I wasn't expected to index this material to a detailed level, so my general knowledge along with the detailed hierarchy of subjects was enough (I hope) to get most of the most important keywords into the index correctly. I did learn a bit about what goes into the tricky business of making chemicals that can handle being in water and still bond with mostly oil-based dirt and stains in order to remove them. In addition, I learned about some of those gobbledygook words on your bottle of shampoo or shower gel and how much of a chemical challenge it is to combine substances to clean the dirt and oil from your hair, for instance, and yet still leave it soft and manageable. Lots of stuff going on in those suds! The latest challenges include making anti-foam chemicals for these high-efficiency, low-water-usage washing machines, and going back to plant-based oils to make detergents more environmentally friendly (we got very dependent on petroleum products over the years since we moved away from soap for clothes cleaning).

This week I've returned to history, this time a diary of a young Texas woman who lived on a wealthy plantation and had to deal with the challenges of the Civil War. One of those "ordinary folk in history" stories that are very "in" among historians these days. So far in my reading, the war has not intruded, and Sallie McNeill's life is pretty sheltered and predictable, except that she is college educated and refusing to marry, both most unusual for this time frame and rural area (we're not talking about the height of the suffrage era here, but the 1850s).

I'll keep you posted on how the Civil War affects her life.

Joanne

Nothing Like Subject Variety!

Sorry to be gone for a bit. Got caught up in a bedroom painting project as well as managing multiple indexing projects.

Global Bioethics was an interesting scholarly collection on ethical issues in the medical and biotechnology areas these days.

More fun was Investing For Dummies. Made me want to check out my IRA's balance of investments and make sure I didn't panic over the recent volatility in the market. I'd say the author is a fan of what's called value investing. Do the fundamentals research on your investment targets, invest for the long term (no day trading--might as well go to Vegas if you want to gamble like that), but don't be afraid of the stock market.

In complete contrast, I then started on a son's remembrances of his father and mother, who were leading literary figures of the 1920s-1970s. Edmund Wilson was famous for his intensively researched writing on world events and places for magazines like the New Yorker, and his third wife, Mary McCarthy, was famous for her biting satire of the bohemian culture surrounding her. Reuel (the author and their son) focused his memoir on the literary community at Cape Cod, back in the days when you didn't have to be rich to stay there. It was a wild, name-dropping ride for this indexer, with pauses for detailed nature descriptions by Wilson and some pretty good poetry, in between his drunken tirades at his wives (four altogether), and the multiple love affairs that both Wilson and McCarthy engaged in. A bit unstable for Reuel, but he seems to have come through it all right, with a good academic career of his own.

And then, we travel to...Vietnam in the 1960s, which means the war that the U.S. got sucked into. This book, Steel and Blood, is an oftentimes blow-by-blow account of the war from the experiences of a South Vietnamese military officer. He spares no expense in criticizing his superior officers and then-president Thieu, along with the U.S., for abandoning the fight. Way too much detail in places, but a very eye-opening perspective.

More later!

Joanne

Web Programming, Digital Photography, and The Old Leather Man

Interesting set of subjects over the past couple of weeks. The Adobe Flex For Dummies indexing project turned out to be a competitor to JavaScript for creating interactivity, etc., in websites with programming code. Flex has some interesting features and works like most object-oriented programming languages. It integrates well with the animation capabilities of Adobe Flash Player, but folks could still use JavaScript as well. Lots of class, object, and method names in the index.

Digital Photography is part of a modular lesson series from Labyrinth Publishing. They do great stuff to help novices in particular learn how to use the computer and different kinds of software. This book/lesson series is designed for folks new to working with electronic versions of photos. It goes over the basics of how the different types of cameras work and how to download photos and organize them on the computer. Easy and fast to index, and very useful stuff.

Ah, and for a complete contrast, The Old Leather Man. Wish I could have read this one myself, but my working partner, Sue Gaines got to index this fascinating nineteenth-century story. This old French guy just turned up in the mid-1880s in western Massachusetts and Connecticut and parts of New York as a wandering "homeless" person. He had an extremely regular route and the book is made up of all the journalistic references to him in the local papers of the day. He even got a profile in the New York Times at one point! He wore all leather patched clothing, knew how to read and write, spoke some English and lots of French, but mostly said not a word to anyone. He wasn't a beggar, actually, but seemed to have some money and did odd jobs, they think. Legends grew up about how he'd lost the love of his life and took to wandering in his grief. He lived mostly in rock shelters and caves along his walking route. Many of these shelters are still in existence, I guess. Really interesting little story being published by the University Press of New England.

This week, I'm trying to finish up a book index on global bioethics and a small project comparing Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007.

Joanne

Patents and Poverty

Finished the Patents, Copyrights & Trademarks For Dummies index the other day. Found out that my business name is not ideal (too descriptive and not unique enough) and that it's already registered to a neat little cafe in DC and a bookstore, I think. Oh, well. After reading this humorous tome (you will not be bored), though, I don't think I'd ever try to patent an invention. The cost alone would send me home, but I guess if you had some deep-pocket venture capitalist at your side....
It was a good read, though, believe it or not. Those Dummies folks over at Wiley Publishing are pretty good at picking writers.

Finally got back to The Colors of Poverty, a social science book on why poverty tends to concentrate itself in certain ethnic groups. Mostly, the Russell Sage Foundation researchers find so many complex factors involved in anything they research (humans are so fascinating that way!) that their conclusions tend to be very tentative; they just don't get the statistical results that would floor anybody. This book is different, especially the last chapter on the relationship among race, class, welfare policy, and incarceration in this country. The poor are being thoroughly marginalized, particularly when African American, by a combination of welfare-to-work and massive incarceration and post-imprisonment monitoring by government. It's a bit scary, frankly. The authors call this new thing neoliberal paternalism (despite the name, a philosophy of political conservatism). Doesn't seem to make for opportunities for poor people to get out of poverty, though. And this policy is not in the federal laws that regulate welfare per se, it's embedded in the decentralized implementation of the law at state and local levels.

Lots of factors go into social inequality, and the white folks in power are not responsible for all of them, but this neoliberal paternalism is a blow to individual freedom in favor of social control.

Ok, ok, end of rant. I'm just the indexer, you know. Next up is Adobe Flex For Dummies. I'm pretty software savvy, but I don't even know what this is yet. I'll keep you posted.