Technical Writer

A Letter Saved from 1840

Poking around an antiques show today in the small borough of East Berlin in southern Pennsylvania, I found a letter amid the saved treasures of long ago. The letter was addressed to Elizabeth in Boston, and that it was to be hand delivered by a Mr. Nichols was neatly written on the front, which was part of the back page of the letter itself. There was no envelope.  

Generations of the family had come and gone and this letter had been preserved and kept safely, but now it was for sale.  The thick, creamy paper is still supple, with just some small discoloration and disintegration along an edge. The letter was written by Susan Nichols to My Dearest Sister Elizabeth, 169 years ago. 

Susan's penmanship was the American Round style of that day, and the ink is now faded to a light brown.  She wrote with a fine line, and her words were most small and as delicate as spider silk. An exhaled breath could seem to blow them off the paper. The letter was long and after I accustomed myself to the faint ink and the penmanship of another time, I stood and read it--it took 20 minutes--and could not put it down. I ached with sorrow as I read, for you see, Susan was writing to the one person in the world, she said, to whom she could confide her grief over the death of her little daughter.  She knew her sister would understand, so lately having her own daughter so near the grave's door.  That little one was spared, but Susan's child was not.  Susan's own dear husband, Mr. Nichols, was no longer himself, for he had loved the little girl so.  Little Marie was her father's darling, and now the days for both parents were full of deepest grief that nothing could assuage.

Susan wrote on and her description of her sorrow was spent by the back of the paper.  She wrote about the neighbors, and the people of the church, and she asked to be remembered to her sister's children.  After vowing to visit soon, she wrote loving words of farewell.  She folded the letter but did not seal it, handed it to her husband, and bade him deliver it to her sister during his travels. He, being a gentleman of full courtesy, would not have read this letter between sisters.

The letter is real, and reading it, time dissolved.  I hope she achieved a measure of peace.

Wordle Word Cloud Fun

A Yorkshire Lass

The morning’s fresh flowers were in their crock on the kitchen table, and the rest of the world just had to manage as it might. Saturday afternoon, I decided to take a walk.

As I walked, I considered the book I had finished at 3:45 a.m., how structure and subject had supported each other, and how with a less poised pen its authorial device would have strangled the living story of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

The book turns on a series of letters written in 1946 between an author, her publisher friend, and a number of the inhabitants of the crown dependency of the bailiwick of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, which were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans in World War Two.  There is darkness and great sorrow in the story, but there is also the depiction of moral (and sometimes fey) substance among rural island people, who display enough outlier characteristics inherent in any isolated, small population to drive the story forward.  By the end I was thinking, “Hurray for the steadfast pig farmer!”

On the way home on this chilly day, I stopped for a cup of hot tea at Michael’s Café Anglais on North Market St., and stayed for a chapter of a parallel book on the war.

The tea room was active.  The young waitresses were cooing over an old black dog who was taking a drink from a water bowl placed before her on the wooden floor next to a table occupied by two women, obviously mother and daughter, for the one was elderly enough not to be out on her own.  The slender old woman had white hair pulled back from her face by a hair band.  She was dressed as Katharine Hepburn would have approved.  Her name is Helen, and she is 97. She and her daughter were reading the morning papers and having tea and scones with clotted cream and jam.

When the daughter went elsewhere in the tearoom, Helen herself came to my table and told me  how she met her husband. 

Some seventy years ago, she ran away from her parent’s home in Yorkshire and joined the RAF.  As she was riding her bicycle home from town after work one evening, she was driven into an air raid shelter by the sirens warning the approach of the enemy.  She met an American soldier in the shelter, and they talked.  When the all-clear sounded, the soldier walked her home, and carried her bike the four miles.  The next morning at her RAF headquarters, an office mate announced the arrival of a Yank, looking for Helen. 

He had decided overnight that she was the girl for him, and he came to announce his intentions. 

Helen stood up at my table and broke into a little song popular at that time,

"I’m going to get me a Yorkshire lass, and we’ll have a love to last."

She and her soldier married, he brought her home with him, and she bore him six children.   She named her children, and told me that all she ever seemed to do then was knit their sweaters, and feed and diaper them.  She remains an active knitter, and she showed me her blue wool scarf, a bow tie design, being narrow behind the neck, and broad at the tails to warm the front.

 “I live here,” she said, and as she crossed both hands over her chest, “but I am a Yorkshire girl. Next summer I’ll go visit my cousins; I don’t need the children to take me, do I?”  I agreed that she could manage nicely on her own.

Hitting the Books in Schwabisch Hall

One of the chief treasures of this ancient town in old Swabia is the town library.  Actually, there are two libraries; the new, beautiful and glass walled, four-storey building on the pedestrian way in the center town, and the single, lovely room in the town hall where the survivors of wars, reformation, and rats are now housed in majestic simplicity. 

Before I describe the books, I must tell you about how they are housed.  To enter the old book room, the librarian opens a double, fire-proof, keyed door.  The room is small, about 25 by 15 feet, and softly lighted. The graceful arched stone doorway into the room and another on the far side of the little room, leading to a workroom, draw the eye up to a single vaulted arch. The base of the arch seems to rest on top the walls. The vaulted ceiling is plastered white.

There are two levels of books circling the walls, and each level has five shelves, with the biggest books on the lowest and longest shelves.  The top shelves on the balcony are shorter in length than the ones beneath so that the balcony shelves form their own arch up to the ceiling.  To reach the balcony that circles three sides of the room, there are two open but banistered stairways, one on each side of the stone arch doorway.  All of the books on each level may be reached by a person of average height. There are no ladders here.

The wooden bookshelves are painted a faded and rubbed apple green overtop a darker green.  Painted onto the roof of the under-balcony is a geometric pattern in dark red and gold, and dark green.  The floor of the balcony is edged with an elaborate crown molding, painted in the same colors, and with great restraint.  The entire room is quietly, serenely elegant.  In the center of the room is a long, narrow table of oak.  What better place to spend hours hitting the books?

Books fill the shelves and are piled book upon book on the library table.  The old books are facing spine-side out, and their covers are leather or parchment, and frequently leather-covered wood boards.  Many of them are fastened closed with leather and iron clasps with intricate designs worked onto the metal surface. You can’t open a big book one clasp at a time. The way to open a great big volume is to slam your two hands down hard on the flat surface. The clasps will pop open for you.  

These walls of ancient books blend their colors so that the impression is a wall of faded grey and taupe.  These are very old books.  The library at Schwabisch Hall has manuscripts dating from the 900s. The treasure room I was in held the books from the dawn of the age of printing, the very dawn.  In fact many of these books were printed here, on paper made in the locality.  Many books have gold gilt on the edges of the pages, top, bottom and side to keep moisture and insects from attacking the books side on.

The gilt edges have been tapped gently on with a small hammer and a fanciful pattern is stamped onto the gold.  After the Reformation, many of the earliest hand-scribed manuscripts in Schwabisch Hall were torn apart and their parchment pages were reused, either buffed down and printed, or used to bind new books.  Many small books printed after Martin Luther's time are bound in gorgeous pages of early church music, all red and black hand lettered notes writ large to be seen by a choir.  Better to reuse the cursed stuff than burn it all.

The contents, you ask?  I just shivered, and not just because it’s cold outside and I have all windows cracked open so I can listen to the merriment outside in the town Christmas market below my window at the town tower where I am staying.  A while ago, a talented clarinetist was playing some American jazz and the international students were shouting out the words to When the Saints Go Marching In.  Now, a single flute is singing carols of the season.  There is laughter and conversation, and the music.

The books are a book drunkard’s dream. The books may weigh 30 pounds, for use in the library, while the smallest may be slipped in your cassock pocket for reading by candle light in your cold, bare cell. Come to Schwabisch Hall to look at small drawings made in the margins by the literate clergy.  Feast on old maps showing the vast island of California of the coast of the New World.  Read (if you can) the commentary to scripture, the scripture printed in a small center square of a double page that is mostly commentary.  Look upon illustrations by Albrecht Durer—still in the book and not hanging on someone’s wall.

Page after page of richness and quietness, soft lights and reverence. 

Saturday Flowers #8

Roses and brush have a decidedly autumn flair, don't you think?  This will be the last bouquet from my florist until I return from Germany just before Christmas, and I leave this week.  I've been learning just enough German from my husband that I can negotiate important transactions such as, "Do you have flowers?"

I read a clumsily written book a few months ago that I couldn't put down because it was so lacking in artfulness.  I just had to see how it was constructed, to the end.  The author is popular, and you would know his name if you saw it here.  Reading his name here, however, might also be the signal that knowing this author, you might have declined his book, no matter that there was a dog on the cover, and it was a story about a very good dog indeed. I had an extra bill in my pocket, and I bought the book.  I have since given it away; I left it in a public place for a passer-by to pick up and enjoy.  There was one interesting scene in the book.

The protagonist, an artist, is sketching her beloved dog.  Over and over she draws the dog, narrowing her focus to the soulfulness of the eyes.   She is attempting to capture an ineffable quality that is somehow the most important quality.  She draws portrait after portrait quickly and in an abstract state, and the hours pass.  In what is nearly a trance she hears fluttering and rustling as she nears completion of the very best image she can capture of the beloved dog's spirit shining through the eyes.  What she actually creates is a portal for angelic intervention in a bad situation.  The author understands the transcendence of love and how love uses what is given over to it to work its way in the world.

Saturday Flowers #7

The single stem of dark red yarrow is in the bouquet for drama. 

The front-page, above-the-fold photographs of The New York Times are frequently works of art in composition and meaningful expression, but today the Journal trumps the Times.

I must admit, however, that I am enjoying the Journal less and less these days.

A few minutes ago, my brother-in-law called to ask me to recommend a few books on grammar and language for his student daughter.  I turned my gaze to my nearby shelf of language books and my first recommendation was Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.  In my opinion, this is the quintessential English language reference book.  You may get yourself a used copy for a couple of dollars and have a handy paperback that explains the elementary rules of usage such as

"1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.  Follow this rule whatever the final consonant.  Thus write,

Charles's friend

Burns's poems

the witch's malice"

(Notice that the authors neither begin the phrase the witch's malice with a capital t nor end the final example with a period. One learns so much more than what is expressly stated.) 

Read this book for an excellent grounding in sensible expression and use that will hold you steady in any linguistic head wind, and then trim your sails as need arises with any of the other manuals of style, such as The Associated Press Stylebook, or the MLS guide, and my favorite, The Chicago Manual of Style.With the precepts of Strunk and White clear in mind, you may learn the alternative styles that have developed for the print media, for different schools of academic use, for government and business, and recognize them as variations.

Avoid That Intersection

When a person who comments on art, life, and literature slips in the phrase "articulate a location at the intersection of" and you know they aren't giving you directions to 4th Street and Vine, then you should turn off the radio or skip the rest of the article because the speaker is engaging in discourse aimed at enlarging the discontinuity between subject and the discursive (but vacant) lot out back.

The Joy of Birthdays

A pile of books was the perfect birthday gift. Each one was wrapped and handed to me at my birthday dinner.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

The Guide to the Birds of East Africa

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

Socks Chase the Blues

I just put on my favorite socks to cheer myself up and uplift my mind and mood--it works!   There is nothing like the recollection of visiting Vermont, where I found my socks recently, to reframe my glum view today of the world. (See socks on socklady.com.)

Once on the Bateaux Mouche on the Seine in Paris, I sat transfixed by the bad behavior of a gaggle of American kids who had hogged the front rail of the boat, but then something nudged my mind and I looked at them differently and saw a group of the best kids in the world--adventurous, outgoing with a one-for-all and all-for-one spirit that lacked only discipline, and that could be learned upon need.   The kids were not different, just my attitude, which changed my relation to them and had occasion arisen, would have guided any interaction for the better.

On that same trip to Paris, I recall sitting on the subway wearing my brand new Dr. Marten's Mary Janes. Notice the stitching around the sole; it is the dead giveaway that these are the authentic counter-culture shoes worn by hip radicals, revolutionaries, and me.  I have always wondered what the pale lad sitting across the aisle from me was thinking as he stared at me, then my shoes, then back at me in disbelief.  He was a veritable Marius in his to-the-barricades jeans and torn shirt, and I was dressed, well, for walking.  He recognized the shoes but didn't see his Cosette in me. I remain charmed by the memory of his face.

My attitude has needed a little improvement of late.  I'm looking out at this moment over the upstairs balcony, over the garden with its late summer flowers.  I know this is all transitory, that is, summer flowers and even summer itself, but summer always comes around again, even when comets smash into the earth and obliterate the sun for decades and species forever.  Eventually life establishes itself anew because the impulse of life is optimistic. With this thought I could have warmed myself had I been sitting Galois in hand listening to the radio at an outdoor cafe on the Rue de Rivoli in the spring of 1940, hearing bad news coming from the east.  Having just seen The Wizard of Oz, I could have clicked together my ruby slippers and wished myself in a cornfield instead, or in the pages of a good book, and Philip Roth comes to mind.

Philip Roth's 2004 The Plot Against America takes us through a hypothetical revision of our history had the nation through insidious circumstance fallen prey to Nazi takeover of our government.  The story takes place on United States soil, but I was led through the daily accommodations and unbelievable encroachments on liberty and democratic thought until I realized that Roth was demonstrating how easy it is not to recognize what is coming because we do not want to believe it could happen here.  Roth's mirror on the past reflects one potential historical circumstance, but there are many others such a mirror could reflect.

So, come to think of it, why not extend the physical barrier being rammed across parts of the Mexico-U.S. border along the entire length?  While we're at it, let's eliminate once and for all the books that could sully the pure minds of our youth.  There are so many opportunities to envision a future gone wrong.  I would rather give my thought to a future going right, so I think I will take Roth's mirror and seek the images of well being, health and prosperity in our country and restoration in the world that we can have when I vote for Barack Obama in November. 

Charming Modesty

I write for a living, and I have a breather for a few days while the person who commissioned the article considers what direction he'd like to take on parts of the draft.  I am always anxious when even a minor piece is out for review. 

I was in the third grade when I knew I would always write.  Sadly, I was not a good speller.  My teacher, Mrs. Hammond knew it, too, and many a time I was sent to the big dictionary on the lectern in the hallway to look up a particularly difficult word for me, such as elephant. The dictionary was a discovery. 

The next milestone was in the fifth grade, when I learned how to diagram sentences.  For people versed in the practice, and who delight in bringing order to complexity and revealing nonsense in ambiguity, there are few activities more revealing than sentence diagramming for a child.  Even now when I read, especially essays, I am searching for structure in the language, and the structure in ideas; and now I also delight in finding the occasional expressive and beautifully balanced sentence that is long. 

Early in his essay "Here is New York," for instance, E.B. White wrote a 201-word sentence. Honestly, E.B., could you not have nicked out a single word? The odd word aside, the sentence is what I call a fulcrum sentence in the little essay.  Sometimes a fulcrum sentence is what sets the tone for all that lies on the other side of it by being a compressed view, weighted in each word with ideas that the reader knows will be explained shortly.  Other fulcrum sentences may be unintended, as I suspect of Peter Matthiessen's singular one in The Snow Leopard, a favorite book of mine.  Only a few pages into his narrative of a journey to the Himalayas, I was shocked by a single sentence that I recognized was the force behind all other exploration and discovery to follow.  Each word drops like a stone, worn smooth by geological ages, but which rests cradled in the hand about to fling it as far as strength and training takes it. The single sentence, which is too personal in the narrative to be taken out of context here, was so laden with meaning that it took the entire book to balance.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is a more recent, but no less potent example of the use of a fulcrum sentence, and hers occurred as the last sentence of her book.  The sentence so struck me that I immediately reread the suddenly reframed text of all that had preceded it, to clearly understand how she arrived at it. 

Writers must practice every day, and we must write from the heart, or at least from significant knowledge.  Early in my career, I researched pieces for a magazine column in a journal of country living, now no longer published.  I collaborated with the primary author, who was my husband. I would go to the research libraries of the state university and pour over scientific journals searching for information that could become interesting items for the column.  I interviewed authors and drafted preliminary text, and he would take it from there.  When asked by the magazine if I would like a co-byline, my husband simply told me that it was important for his ego that his name alone appear.  The reply he sent to the magazine, however, was what in later years I recognized as a pivotal moment for me in the marriage that later dissolved, and the response was, "A byline would subvert the charming modesty that so informs her womanly character."  I did not react much at all and it took me a long time to untangle my conflicting thoughts, but it became a defining time in my life.

When lives are revealed in letters, essays, and the substrate of most written work, even though it is not the intent of the author to reveal much personally, it is nearly impossible to ignore the eye of the beholder and the perspective that define the places, events, or people being considered.  When the piece out for review is technical and impersonal, it still reflects the author's perception and style of presenting information to pique a reader's interest and solve a business problem.  I must take a deep breath and await my client's response and not worry too much about it. 

November is Write-a-Novel Month - Swainmote of the Cloud

Kris plans to write a novel in November, and her enterprise is inspired by http://www.nanowrimo.org/.  I have urged her to write a murder mystery that takes place in the online  community of the Swainmote of the Cloud.  Kris is already versed in the modern-day Swainmote Courts, having studied them up a bit in their work as verderers of the New Forest.  She also has a fine appreciation for the nuances of techno-speak, and she is adept in intrigue and covert operations, fine qualities in the present undertaking.  Cloud discussions offer grist for the mill, but whether the novel is a mystery or sci-fi, time will tell. 

The group dynamics support some skullduggery.  There are tensions aplenty simmering in the real online and utterly fascinating group of cloud computing enthusiasts.  I have named it the Swainmote of the Cloud, but the members know themselves (all 2,592 members) as the Cloud Computing Group.  You might ask, "What is a cloud?" There are many evolving definitions of cloud computing because the topic is in its youth.  In a bare bones definition as I understand it, cloud computing is Internet-based development whereby consumers use IT without particular concern with the specifics of platform, server, or software.  Is this the ultimate commoditization of IT?  I do not know. As an interested observer, I have peered from the edge at discussion strings of complicated ideas as they are examined by the group, modified, tossed into discussion streams and pummeled by the rigors of intellectual aeration. Behind the discussions are complex individuals with clear personalities and motivations, agendas and points of view.  When you get 2592 engineers together to debate the issues, what also emerge are the charming and fey sidebar discussions that seem to provide levity in the group.  The Swainmote of the Cloud is a likeable group and deserves respect, but this does not preclude having some fun with it, too.

Swainmote of the Cloud

Emboldened by comments of readers who, like me, rejoice in the beauty of language and regret with sorrow the passing of estimable words, I propose a new use for swainmote that may startle you, but which I believe will convince you that this elegant word will renew its ancient vitality and importance by becoming the descriptor of a collective of clever and wise adjudicatory souls inhabiting cyber space, whose purpose is to explore and define the phenomenon of cloud computing. My request to the gatekeeper for admittance to the cloud computing group of 2,535 engineers and developers as a technical writer returned this reply, too good to let lie.

Normally we do not allow non-technical persons (besides venture capitalists and lawyers - they deserve to suffer), but... .  Let me know if something in discussion becomes unclear. Cheers, KS

Now I can spend endless time following the intellectual exploits of thousands of gifted uber-coders, CTOs and assorted rascals.

Consider the thoughtful Sam who writes,

"Cloud Computing is the realisation of Internet ('Cloud') based development and use of computer technology ('Computing') delivered by an ecosystem of providers."

The foolish reader thinks, “How obvious,” but Sam keeps writing-- 2,000 words more--to explain his statement.  If ever there were an individual prone to moot exposition, Sam’s the man. Of course, I use the word moot in the earlier sense of a subject open to discussion of an important matter not settled. I do not intend the current U.S. meaning of a point having no practical importance. Think of the discourse of the Ents instead. Their matters were weighty, as are these.

Other commentary surrounds keeping the joint safe. For instance, Reuven, a tech glitterati asks,

Are we on the brink of seeing the rise of private corporate darknets aka dark clouds? And if so, what are the legal ramifications, and do they out weigh the need to protect ourselves from criminals who can and will use these tactics against us?

Reuven, the simple answer is yes, if you trust the agility of a trans-national legal system for protection. The complicated answer is also yes, because without the rule of universally applicable law we descend into anarchy, which requires everyone to be on their best behavior. The potent rationalization aside that governments themselves sink to crime on behalf of presumed national interests, remember that crime, no matter how wide its net, is always a small and crabbed, banal thing that ultimately affirms its complete vulnerability. On the other hand, I've yet to meet a developer who didn't leave herself a backdoor to save the world when all else fails.

I believe that of all groups, the cloud computing group rises to the status of a swainmote. The cloud group considers all matters relating to their field of interest, defining and expanding inquiry.  The members of the group are all freeholders in their own right. They own their patch of intellectual turf.  Like the swainmote of old, these independent participants adjudicate matters brought before them every bit as eagerly as did those ancient judges of the vert and the verdure. 

_____

You may ask to join the cloud computing group through Linkedin or Google groups, or if you are not a member, then write to join.cloud.computing@gmail.com.  Ask nicely.

Swainmote and Other Beauties of Language

When I turned 50, my husband gave me a new, complete 20-volume set of The Oxford English Dictionary, the second edition. I so value my dictionary that it has pride of place in our library, and the books attract the eye as one enters the room.  I look at those books and am happy in the presence of the compendium of the English language. Our language has more words than any other, and more cross the threshold of our inviting language every day.  They are welcomed as eagerly as every new birth in any community.

Turn each page of the OED; the words become visiting dignitaries, announced as they enter the room with their formal positions within society.  Their antecedents trail them, sweeping the ground at the hem of their robes. Each word is garbed differently, yet all recognize in others similarities enough of culture and purpose that they enter the salons of discourse ready to combine meanings, turn, shift and awaken realities different with every new combination.  There is power of creation and ideation in a word.

There are words, however, which have languished on the cusp of disuse and have been forgotten, nearly.  Once upon a time I entered the recreated schoolroom of a long-ago Shaker village. Next to the schoolmaster's plain desk was a lectern and open upon it was a book I should have left alone, but could not. It was an enormous dictionary, published in 1876.  I turned its pages and looked at words available to any inquiring child, and found a lovely word. Swainmote. Its message was brief. The swainmote was the body of English village elders who not longer than 500 years ago were responsible for adjudicating the matters of vert and the verdure. Perhaps the young scholars whose bottoms would have been pinned to those hard benches knew the difference between the vert and the verdure, but I did not.

Swainmote refers in the OED to the now obsolete swanimote, or swainmoote.  Ah!  J.R.R. Tolkien modeled the venerable Ents after his friend C.S. Lewis, a fellow Oxford don who loved endlessly long discourse because we know the Ents gathered in moots when it was most important.  The Ents, too, adjudicated their domain. The vert was the green forest capable of holding cover for deer, and the verdure was the green forest and marginal land grazed by sheep, pigs, and cattle.   

The swainmote is the moot of the swon, the swineherds.  The word is from Old English and came to mean the assembly by the Forest Charter of 1217 of certain free men of property who came together three times a year to "enable the forest officers to superintend the depasturing of pigs in the king's woods in the autumn and the clearance of the forest of the cattle and sheep while the deer were fawning in the summer."

The swanimote fell into disuse in modern times, and by 1809 there was a general neglect of the Swanimote Courts, as they had become known.  Two hundred years later I regret that the word itself has disappeared from common speech.