Statistically Improbable Phrases

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: the perfect gift for people who don’t think they like genre fiction The best Latin name for your little toe is porcellus plorans domum, lit. piglet crying homeward; porcellus fori, domi, carnivorus and nonvoratus are left as an exercise for the reader Hard-nosed advice on how book publishing works (and something I wish I’d read before starting the process) from Mark Hurst Seeing to the “Dark Knight” with someone who rants about tardive dyskinesia and how it’s mean to pick on the mentally ill Rediscovering that A Pattern Language is a wonderful cult, an architecture book that solves the problems of the world, like Ayn Rand for grownups Sure, a minus sign isn’t the same as a hyphen or an en dash, but ditto marks are different from double quotes. Who knew? The new (and superb) Mountain Goats album Heretic Pride and especially its comic-book press kit The cunning laser printer trick of sticking a little piece of tape over the toner sensor to get 1000 or so more copies—sticking it to the Man indeed Kate Atkinson’s crime fiction: funny, novelistic, rich in character, full of ludicrous coincidence—everything crime fiction isn’t supposed to be And lightning shot in slow motion, more awesome than I can describe.

New Zealand being the world’s oldest democracy (Icelandic women didn’t get the vote until 1915, and the Isle of Man is not a country, thank you very much) Jessica caring about apostrophes as much as I do You Look Nice Today, world’s funniest podcast, is what you would expect from three yappy geeks combining potty humour with Voltaire “May the sinews of his hams snap suddenly in moments of achievement!”, chant the artisans in Ernest Bramah’s delectable chinoiserie, the Kai Lung stories I recently unearthed from storage The charango, a ten-stringed South American ukulele played to excellent effect on the latest Minisnap album That pleasing moment-without-a-name when the song on your car radio and your turn signal are in perfect rhythmic synchrony The anachronistic typography in the Indiana Jones movie maps (I was proud I spotted the Avant Garde in Crystal Skull) Having the hatefulness of Comic Sans rudely recognised in the comic Achewood The disadvantage of an elite American education persuasively argued by William Deresiewicz Using a true “et” ampersand like Trebuchet’s to write et cetera as

Helen Taylor created some lovely drawings for the ukulele book; she and her partner Ben Brown have been in the writing/illustration game for a while, and when I mentioned some of my frustrations with freelance artists, they supplied some tips from the professional illustrator’s point of view.

“It’s all about the brief.

“The brief is the basis of the client/illustrator relationship. The client needs to communicate clearly what they want; the illustrator needs to understand clearly what’s required. If the illustrator thinks the brief might be outside their particular ‘style’, ‘genre’, or area of expertise, the sooner stated the better for all concerned.

“The illustrator needs to understand the difference between a ‘commission’ and a ‘work of art’, and so does the client.

“Establish a process: view and approve concepts and roughs before proceeding to finished artwork; know the difference between a quote and an estimate; get it in writing; define parameters; and communicate all the time.”

Barry Crump (detail), by Trevor Dodd,
Drawing Conclusions

I needed someone to illustrate the ukulele book. Nothing fancy or artsy, just simple line drawings of ukuleles, fingering positions, accessories, and the like. I had a small budget and a tight deadline. As compensation, I was prepared to offer “Illustrated by” credit on the cover, and even one of those little “About the Illustrator” blurbs, where the artist could pose in a comical fashion and plug their website. To me it seemed like a great way to break into books and get a commercial portfolio. But I was flummoxed by some of the people I interviewed. Absolutely flummoxed. These were all folks who claimed they wanted to be professional illustrators, yet they made me want to run a mile. In the end I did find a couple of excellent people to work with, but it took weeks.

What was everybody else doing wrong? Consistently, the same things. So of course I started making a list, as a public service. This list is a little different from most of those offering advice to aspiring artists. When professional illustrators are interviewed about how to “break into the business”, they talk about which art school to attend, what sort of style to cultivate, how to stay creative, and so forth. But as a potential client, I. Don’t. Care about that. Here’s a counter-list of very, very simple, practical things an illustrator can do to get work, from a client’s point of view.

• Get a website. I can’t consider anyone who isn’t online. I’m sorry, that seems harsh, but I physically do not have time to spend an hour going to a coffee shop and shuffling through the portfolio of each of the dozens of illustrators I hear about. I need to see all your work in about 30 seconds, then move on to the next candidate.
• Sign up for a basic online space, for example at a commercial portfolio site like this one, or pay someone to design it for you. Even posting your portfolio to a blog like TypePad would be fine, and that’s dirt cheap. People who bother to register their own domain name of course get taken far more seriously.
• Make sure you get listed in some of the online artist directories. How do you find these? Google freelance illustrator [your home town], because that’s what your clients will be doing. Figure out what the top ten results have in common, and do that.
• Make sure all the text on your site is properly spelled and punctuated. I know, you won’t be hired for your writing skills. But it tells me you care about what I think.
• Don’t make implausible claims about the thousand things you can do, or list ten different “specialisations”. Less is more. I felt much more confident in people who did only three things, but did them well. Do, however, show me the full range of stuff you’re good at, not endless variations in the same style.
• What are your rates? I know, every drawing you do is a special snowflake, but show me some sample pieces and say how much they would cost. This is really important to those of us on limited budgets, but nobody (nobody!) does this. It drove me nuts.
• List all your contact details on your website. Insane, I know, but some people forget to add a mailing address or a cellphone, or use an email address that they never check “because it gets too much spam”, or give out their home address and number(!).
• So that means having a working email address, preferably one that ends in your domain name, not gmail or xtra. If you just post it on your website, though, you’ll start
  
  Fingering D7, by yours truly
  Adzebill
  getting spam, and potential clients might end up in your spam filter. There are plenty of ways to hide an email address from spammers: use one.
• Check your email every day, and respond to clients within 24 hours. Your competition does.
• Use capital letters and punctuation in your emails. I know, you’re an Artist and just too creative to use the shift key, blah blah blah. But clients tend not to hire 12-year-olds, so perhaps you should strive to resemble one as little as possible.
• In the signature of your email put your landline, your mobile number, and your web address. If you have a fax, excellent. (I like to mark up faxed copy and fax it back.)
• Don’t put a tiny graphic in your email signature; it means I can’t tell which of your emails have attachments or not. This becomes really important when we’re emailing versions back and forth.
• If you’re offered a chance to do a sample piece, do it within 24 hours if you possibly can, and supply nicely-packaged original art as well as emailing a low-resolution scan. Need I say first impressions count? Apparently I do.
• Email sketches and samples at screen resolution: 72 dpi and a few hundred pixels wide. Never, ever email me multi-megabyte unsolicited artwork.
• Make an effort. If someone wants you to draw (say) a ukulele, go out and find a real ukulele. You may have to borrow one, or actually shell out $30 and buy one. (Or find a photo of one—I hear you can do that without leaving the house these days.) Do a few sketches before the client asks, and you’ll get huge kudos for showing initiative.
• Reassure me that you can work with other people: that you always meet deadlines, that you’ve had work published before and it all went smoothly, that you have a professional invoicing and receipt setup, that you’re GST-registered (I don’t actually care either way, but this suggests that you’ve worked with corporate clients more than once).
  
  Ukulele capo, by Helen Taylor,
  helben [at] xtra.co.nz
• What’s your policy on sending preliminary sketches? What file formats do you supply copy in? How many corrections can I make to a completed work before I’m charged extra? What are your terms of payment? Who holds copyright? (Hint: who’s paying who?) Do you have to be cited when your work’s used? If you don’t know the answers to all of these, I’ll be thinking, “Oh no—am I your first-ever client?” To prevent this sinking feeling, summarise the answers for me on your website.
• The most important thing, and the rationale behind this list: convince me you are not a flake. Everyone knows the stereotype: unreliable, temperamental, disorganised, living in a dream world. This stereotype, I must reluctantly report, is based on fact. For a client, the nightmare would be an illustrator who doesn’t listen to your detailed brief, takes weeks to make changes, comes up with something completely unusable, and then disappears just as the deadline approaches. This is the secret fear your client is nursing, so your job is to assuage it by acting like a professional at all times.
• Finally, don’t take on a job you can’t do; it’s a waste of everybody’s time. If the client supplies a clear brief and examples of what they want, and you’re unable to produce art to that standard, don’t go invoicing them for the hours you spent trying. The client’s paying for finished art, not for your time. Learn to say no.

If you take all these grumpy suggestions on board, and are halfway skilled as an artist, I predict you will get work. Because hardly anyone else is doing the stuff on this list, any illustrator who’s just a bit organised stands out like a beacon in the field. Good luck!

Sister Corita Kent’s Immaculate Heart College Art Department rules Seth Godin’s unconventional and clear-headed Advice for Authors: publishing is venture capital, and books are souvenirs of your ideas Taking a photo every day: doesn’t matter what of, just carrying a tiny camera everywhere and getting into the noticing habit The Design Police’s Visual Enforcement Kit of design warning labels, like KERN THIS and BAD LOGO Nina Simon’s splendid blog Museums 2.0, showing someone is thinking hard about museums and the Net (my favourite is the teen-mag-style flowquiz on how your museum should blog) Some good tips from Ed Boyden on “How to Think”, including drawing while explaining and photographing the results; I’ve typeset them as a handy PDF Buying a fresh brill from off the fishing boat, scaling, filleting, and frying it that same night in a white wine sauce; we called ours Brian The moment when playing Spoon’s “The Underdog” on the ukulele where you realise you’re not sure if this is about the other person, or about you—the test of a good bitter love song My favourite photographer Peter Peryer’s plain-spoken and thoughtful blog, where he mulls over photos that didn’t make the cut. Why don’t all artists do this? Migas made with good chorizo and old bread, both from the Farmer’s Market: a no-fuss weekend lunch for friends

The last few months of my life have been taken up by Kiwi Ukulele: The New Zealand Ukulele Companion. This is coming out in July from AUT Media, 64pp, $NZ19.99, lots of illustrations and Kiwi songs (here’s a publicity handout); the book I wish I’d had when I was teaching myself the uke. My world-famous ukulele page, currently the 11th-most-popular ukulele page on the internet, Lord knows why, is going to morph into the book’s supporting site: it’ll have page-preview PDFs, and ordering information for those of you not in New Zealand.

This is my first book, and it’s impressed upon me the importance of having your own writing space, a good gung-ho editor, supportive friends who chivvy you along, and big dedicated blocks of time in a quiet house. You also have to love what you’re doing and believe that the book is truly worth writing, because you’re not going to get rich from it in New Zealand. So I’ve been cautiously exploring the world of royalties, copyright, proofs, publication schedules, and the all-important advance. The advance’s importance lies in the expectation that the author comes up with all the book’s content, including illustrations (more on the trials and tribulations of using freelance illustrators in a later post).

Back in May 2007, having just defended my PhD, would I have imagined that in a year I would be described as “Lyttelton musician Mike Dickison” by the local community newspaper? (The Bay Harbour News isn’t online but I scanned the article as a monstrous great JPEG.) Yes, I’m now living in the scenic seaside village of Lyttelton—pictured is the view from my patio. It has all the advantages of a very small town without being plagued by annoying open space and sunshine. I love it here.

I’ve also been working with the Museum Detective, whose website I redesigned in time for the New Zealand Radio Awards—she’s a finalist for Best Spoken Programme (Access) (Update May 3: she won!). We were simultaneously in Wellington a couple of months ago, so I introduced her to the visiting Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, a splendid bunch who contributed lots of tips to the book. She was so taken with them that a Museum Detective episode resulted, in which the UOGB and I perform “Anarchy in the UK”. That’s my ukulele you can hear, but I’m only playing the brushes and singing backup. And I fear that if any singing is out of tune, that could be me too.

The article I wrote on museum websites has finally appeared online in Te Ara, the New Zealand museums journal. Unfortunately there are more than a few typographical and web display problems, which make it look like I don’t follow my own advice, so I’ll post a better-designed version on the Adzebill site in the near future. I’ve also been working with Rowan Carroll at the North Otago Museum on their site, and am interested in trialling WordPress and the new museum content-management system Omeka with her. There’s lots that needs doing with museum websites; listen to Episode 14 of Digital Campus for an invigorating discussion.

Thanks to all my friends, here and overseas, who wondered where I had disappeared to. I’m back.

Wallowing in the seriously comprehensive art and design bookstores of Sydney J. G Ballard’s 1964 collection Terminal Beach, just for the story “The Drowned Giant” Buying DRM-free Amazon MP3s; part of the satisfaction is watching iTunes sweating John Crowley’s reading list of human cultures far weirder than fiction Clive James’s poetry, particularly “The Pilgrimage of Peregrine Prykke”, and “The Book of My Enemy has Been Remaindered” Re-reading Code of the Woosters and rediscovering its small and cheerful perfection The beautiful plating of the ratatouille in the movie of the same name, for which I gather we must thank Thomas Keller If you have so many fonts they’re effectively incomprehensible and unusable, and start using proper font management software like FontAgent Pro with auto-activation, the scales are lifted from your eyes and you feel ten feet tall Getting a Christmas kete from your bosses of yummy local and organic treats, including home-made hummus Buses that don’t just say SORRY, but alternate by flashing NOT ON SERVICE (Christchurch) or NOT IN SERVICE (Auckland)—Mike Bradstock drew my attention to this prepositional shift with latitude. John Scalzi’s photo-essay of his visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky

The Canon
Natalie Angier
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
ISBN: 0618242953

A whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science. The subtitle says it all. Natalie Angier provides a one-chapter crash course on each of the natural sciences, and the scientific method and probability to boot. Worthy stuff, and I’ve been looking for a single volume like this; something I can give to my friends and family, not too demanding, but enough science to excite them and help them see things a little bit from my nerdy point of view. It’s not a long book (although the designer cheats with very tight linespacing), and Angier is a New York Times reporter with a Pulitzer. So why did it irritate me so much that I reached the end only through sheer bloody-mindedness, audibly wincing every few pages?

Like I said, the subtitle says it all. We know what a whirlwind tour is, but what the heck is a whirligig tour? Poetically, one that’s hectic and constantly changing; literally, it’s a pinwheel, a brightly-coloured child’s toy that’s amusing and pointless. An unfortunate metaphor, and the first of many. Angier loves slapdash metaphors. Also flowery turns of phrase, obscure and only somewhat-appropriate words, zany non-sequiturs, and alliteration (e.g., the beautiful basics in the subtitle). Here’s a typical paragraph.

Scientific notation works just as well for the furtive as for the discursive, although in this case you’re talking about powers of one-tenth rather than powers of ten. One-tenth of one-tenth is one-hundredth, written as 10^-2; one-tenth of one-hundredth is one-thousandth, or 10^-3. Keep biting the right-handed bit of Alice’s toadstool. Down you go, you’re a fractionated Italianate family. You’re milli — a thousandth, 10^-3; or micro — a millionth, 10^-6; or nano — a billionth, 10^-9; or pico — a trillionth, 10^-12; or femto — a millionth of a billionth, 10^-15.

Some people might like this sort of wordplay, but it gives me hives—and it’s not even good wordplay. Furtive for small is nice, but since when did discursive mean big? Meandering and full of digressions, like Angier’s metaphors, yes, perhaps expansive, but only incidentally large. And what’s up with Italianate? Does she mean Latinate (although the prefixes are actually Greek)? Or do Nano and Pico sound like comical Italian names? (Pico Iyer’s the only Pico I know of, and his name’s Indian.) Lastly, the Lewis Carroll reference is just a bit too sloppy: it’s a mushroom, not a toadstool (an important distinction, if you’re eating it). And it makes you grow taller and shorter, not bigger and smaller—in the original, Alice elongates and contracts like a caterpillar.

Every page is like this. Angier plunders the dictionary for shiny words: proptosically, vinculum, slub, and surl. As she flails for synonyms, the soup of particles in stellar formation becomes a cosmic chowder or a plasmic bisque, until the star and the metaphor collapse in a ball of baklava, whatever that’s supposed to look like. Every page has its pun, mostly lame. Pop culture allusions abound but are random and baffling rather than illuminating. And lists of three or more things always, without exception, conclude with something wacky.

…one might find organisms that take in nutrients, excrete waste, replicate, and actually use the fondue set they got as a wedding present.…

As for Pluto and Sedna and others of their subcompact class, whether you consider them planets, dwarf planets, planetismals, planet parodies, or Planters party mix…

Dave Barry it’s not. Which is a shame, because if you can get past the florid language she does a pretty good job of explaining one or two core concepts from each of chemistry, physics, astronomy and so on. There are some factual blunders, as you’d expect in a book covering all of science—I only picked up the biological ones. She says the platypus comes from New Zealand, and the carpal is just a single bone. Those hackneyed tetrapod forelimbs get trotted out again (she’s got me doing it now), and they’re poetically called homonyms—words that sound the same but have different meanings—but her metaphor is almost exactly backwards: bat and cat forelimbs are superficially different but share a deep, homologous, structure. Most importantly, she constantly confuses the fact of evolution (using examples from the fossil record) and Darwin’s theory; the fossils she cites support descent with modification but not natural selection.

It’s a shame. Angier is an great science journalist, but The Canon’s enthusiasm has a whiff of anxiety, as if she was so worried about getting through to the science-averse that her entire rhetorical bag of tricks was upended on the table. If you’re happy to sort though the pile for the good stuff, you’ll enjoy this book more than I did. But I’d still rather recommend Bill Bryson.

(I quickly stopped using New Zealand vocabulary and learned to speak American. Because folks laugh at you when you say…)

• Get off the grass
• Turned to custard
• Skiting
• Ute
• Lollies
• Gummies
• Sweet as
• Jandals
• The too-hard basket
• My oath
• Spat the dummy
• Sook
• Fizzy drink
• Packed a sad
• Too right
• Choice!

I’m here on the top of Mt John, in the Tekapo Valley. The observatory here has scientist accommodation if you’re connected with Canterbury University; the décor is a bit Research Station Cinderblock (a Star Wars poster and a collection of interesting pine cones) but, hey, there’s wireless.

Mount John is rather grandly named; it’s more of a a solitary hill rising out of the Mackenzie Basin. You’re ringed by the Southern Alps, and look down on the amazing turquoise waters of Lake Tekapo. The lake and valley are both products of twenty or so glaciations, which scoured out the basin and left Mt John sitting like an increasingly battle-scarred veteran each time they retreated. The surrounding mountains do keep the clouds at bay, and make a good spot for an observatory (which, the Museum Detective reveals to my disappointment, consists mostly of people looking at monitors; computers are doing all the stargazing).

But walking round Mt John by day, when the astronomers are asleep, is an experience. Skylarks (Alauda arvenis) are all around, trilling as they ascend from sullen earth to sing hymns at Heaven’s gate, or at least they try when the wind is not howling too forcefully. It’s a bit blowy today, and I watched a surprised lark fly backwards. Supposedly there are chukor (Alectoris chukor) in the tussock, but I had to descend to the larch forest on the southern slope to see any other birds; various finches and grey warblers (Gerygone igata).

The vegetation has been sadly rather munted by rabbits and sheep, though pockets of subalpine native plants persist. In the rockfalls are various spiky and twiggy divaricating shrubs, the occasional nibbled-on native broom (Carmichaelia), and golden spaniard (Aciphylla)—even ferns (Blechnum penna-marina), perhaps the last things you’d expect to see on a wind-blasted, sunbaked mountain. I do love spaniard, with its ferocious spines and crazy yellow thatched flower spikes, just daring you to touch it. The spines don’t seem to work too well against mammals, but they almost certainly evolved as a defense against moa browsing, a poke in the eye for Megalapteryx.

This landscape used to be full of totara forest, but now the blasted emptiness of the tussock-clad basin is sublime. You could paint it with a very minimal watercolour kit; the tricky part would be getting the opaque blue of the lake. It’s almost like the blue of the sky at the horizon, perhaps because the fragments of quartz in the water scatter the light the way dust does in the atmosphere.

And you’ll see the mirror image of this if you ever have a chance to visit Mt John overnight: the lights of the lakeside town twinkle for the same reason stars do. As above, so below.