The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

As I get older, I find that multi-tasking becomes more and more of an assumed life and work skill. I don't know if I'm any good at it. I do a little of this thing, a little of that thing, then a little of t'other thing, then a little more of that thing, until finally, like planes, the projects (big things that they are) take off and eventually reach a cruising altitude.

Was life always like this? Was there a stage in social history where people were not doing more than one long-term thing at a time?

I'm reviewing again, it seems, and I'm finding myself returning to an earlier process, more methodically inclined, less impulsive. I don't know what this might mean for the review itself. Perhaps an improvement. There is a feeling, when writing anything, but especially when writing things "on spec," of hopelessness at a certain point, as if the thing is never going to complete itself, as if I might just have to throw up my hands in despair, desert the project, go have something to eat already--and I find that a methodical approach is a stopgap...

You probably haven't seen John Waters' A Dirty Shame, and if you haven't already, you probably won't. But that's not to say you shouldn't. I've never quite gotten John Waters, at all. I always found the overblown, showy nature of the humor in his movies to be too much, too late, not shocking, just loud. But in this case, he seems to have hit just the right note. I mean, geez, maybe my humor is more crude than most, or maybe I just like the contrast between the irreverence of the movie and the hyperhyper quality of the holiday season in New York. But the mix is good... Tracey Ullman plays a superconservative housewife who, after a blow to the head and a "moment" with a pair of horny sex deities, turns into a nymphomaniac. Having previously kept her pornstar daughter (played SelmaBlairishly by Selma Blair, with a strangely large chest) locked up, she now lives to plonk and plotz randomly and indiscreetly, forging onward with her daughter in a fullscale sexual onslaught. A lengthy, convoluted plot follows, with lines such as "There's something wrong with your v****a" and "Let's get sexin'" and "You have a runaway cl**or*s" bouncing off each other with a sort of late-Rome flair. The ending, such as it is, is a happy one... I'll admit that there's something annoyingly useless about John Waters' films, but this one's enjoyable, depending on your stomach for such things.

A lot of writers work in educational publishing. Young ones? Mike Topp, Cort Day, Jonathan Blum, Paul McCormick. Older ones? Well, John Ashbery and Toni Morrison used to. (Ashbery at Mighty McGraw-Hill, Toni Morrison at Holt, I believe.)

The reasons for this could be numerous. One obvious reason would be that educational publishing can promote literacy when it's at its best. Textbooks, mass-published as they are, find their way into students' minds, or are more likely to, than literary magazines. I would say it was "grassroots," but that term has always eluded me, somewhat like the term "metroplex" used to elude me when I lived in Dallas.

Another reason could be that the process of working on textbooks is unpredictable. One day you might find yourself researching Sitka, Alaska, the next you might find yourself reading about Alexander Hamilton's personal quirks (or lack thereof).

I've enjoyed educational writing and editing because it represents a striving towards clarity, which is important to me in my own work... I'm currently an editor at the leading publisher of assessment textbooks. What interests me about the job is the discreet nature of the books I do--they are halfway between test prep and regular texts--passage-based, question-and-answer-based. At a certain level, producing these books require that you be tremendously analytical and process-oriented. Without a pre-established set of steps for working on a given manuscript, the book's complexity, with its question styles, its regulated passage lengths, its foil requirements, its adherence (or not) to a bookmap, might just swallow you up.

Educational publishing itself is a rather tempestuous field. I've worked at my current job for 15 months, and since I began, two of the people who interviewed me have been let go and replaced, five people have quit, and an entire Production department has been added. Changes in protocol happen steadily and without much notice, causing a lot of teeth-gnashing, so much so, in fact, that sometimes it seems as if there's an orchestra of teeth, gnashing privately in the cubicles ... But everyone is smart, and everyone is ambitious, and, for the most part, the people have good values. We have a lot of meetings; I'm still perfecting my meeting posture. Do I slouch today, or do I sit up straight and look respectful? No one ever knows entirely what will come next, or even what is happening at any moment. Which is great. It keeps you spontaneous...

Ahh..... at last my educational writing makes the news.