A few random thoughts

Bonding with the cat I am sitting

For some reason, I’ve not had much luck the last couple weeks putting together any blog posts. Perhaps it is just spring fever. But here are a few random observations I’ve jotted down. Go right ahead and skip this and read something more important. Like your horoscope or the most recent political news.

You’re never too old to learn new words

While I rarely agree with George Will, I still read him faithfully. Not for his political views, necessarily (although I think it is important to read multiple perspectives on current events), but in nearly every column one can find an unfamiliar word or two. In his last column it was: psephologist.  In the same essay, he used the word dyspepsia which I had seen before but could not remember the meaning of. Oh, Maureen Dowd recently used the term batrachian to describe Trump’s sexual behavior. Isn’t it convenient to now just be able to right-click on these words to find their meanings instead of hauling out the old Merriam-Webster?

A campaign to eliminate junk mail

A week or so ago I decided I was fed up with seeing a couple dozen messages in my spam folder each time I opened my email. So I have been assiduously unsubscribing, especially from the emails sent by real businesses and organizations*. I am delighted by how many junk emails now include a link to means of being removed from the mailing list. I have read that one needs to be cautious since trying to unsubscribe can alert the sender they have a live fish on their hook. So I’ve been ignoring the obvious spam and phishing notes. The quantity has decreased. But the junk has not disappeared. It's fun to have time in retirement to do such things. Now if I could find a way to stop getting junk physical mail.

*Ironically, I may not have unsubscribe had the business sent me one or two emails a week instead of several emails a day.

How we treat our parents

My son and I spent a long day driving to see my 91-year-old, increasingly dementia-plagued, mother yesterday. While she was delighted to see us and picnic with my brother and sister and other family members, she asked less than an hour after the meal was over what I thought my siblings were doing that day. Were I a betting man, I would not stake anything on whether she remembers my son’s or my visit now. 

I am glad my son went with me, sharing the seven hours of driving. While I am not too worried about needing care from my own children in my dotage, I hope I am setting an example for him when his mom, my ex-wife, needs attention. (To a  degree, he is already doing that now.) Treat others as we would like to be treated. 

Perhaps our children form their opinions of us not just from how we treat them, but from how they see us treat others as well. If either of my two wind up in jail, I will have only myself to blame. 

We take better care of others’ things than we do our own

For the past two weeks, I have been house-sitting for a friend who is on an long cruise with her sister. The primary reason I am staying here is to provide care and companionship for her much beloved cat. (I also fill bird feeders and water plants.) While I am happy to do this, it causes no small amount of anxiety. Should something happen to the cat (escape, illness, injury…), I would feel overwhelmingly guilty - worse, I am sure, than if a pet of my own suffered.

I can put a dent in my car and shrug it off. I can break a dish in my own kitchen and replace it. I can stain or rip a sweatshirt and simply say “So what?” But should the auto, the plate, or the clothing belong to another, it would hurt me, knowing I might have been more careful. Goddam conscience! 

An old favorite

There once was a pretty good student,

Who sat in a pretty good class

And was taught by a pretty good teacher,

Who always let pretty good pass.

He wasn't terrific at reading,

He wasn't a whiz-bang at math.

But for him, education was leading

Straight down a pretty good path.

He didn't find school too exciting,

But he wanted to do pretty well,

And he did have some trouble with writing

And nobody had taught him to spell.

When doing arithmetic problems, 

Pretty good was regarded as fine.

Five plus 5 needn't always add up to be 10,

A pretty good answer was 9.

The pretty good class that he sat in

Was part of a pretty good school.

And the student was not an exception,

On the contrary, he was the rule.

The pretty good school that he went to

Was there in a pretty good town.

And nobody seemed to notice

He could not tell a verb from a noun.

The pretty good student in fact was

Part of a pretty good mob.

And the first time he knew what he lack was

When he looked for a pretty good job.

It was then, when he sought a position,

He discovered that could be tough.

And soon he had a sneaky suspicion

Pretty good might not be good enough.

The pretty good town in our story

Was part of a pretty good state,

Which had pretty good aspirations,

And prayed for a pretty good fate.

There once was a pretty good nation,

Pretty proud of the greatness it had,

Which learned much too late,

If you want to be great,

Pretty good is, in fact, pretty bad.

Charles Osgood "The Osgood File" c 1986, CBS Inc.

Books do sell

Well of course I write for the big bucks, huge prestige, and pure adulation of millions of fans. While the limos, champagne on first class flights and attractive strangers constantly opening their bank accounts and boudoirs to me gets tiresome, having my own line of fashion apparel saves me from having to shop for clothes. Oh wait, that’s some other kind of writer. I write for professional publications. Sorry, lost in fantasy for a moment… from “Why I Write for Publication” KQWeb, May/June 2001

A good friend sent me a blog post written by Seth Godin - “Why Books Don’t Sell.”  In the post, Godin explores the odds of writing a “hit” book. He concludes “...we see that 85% of all traditional books published last year sold fewer than 5,000 copies each in their format. Those are extraordinarily bad odds.” 

In my daydreams, I write a single book that sells so well that I can live richly from the royalties and never put fingers to keyboard again. If I remember correctly, J.D. Salinger did this with Catcher in the Rye. My writing hero.

I, on the other hand, have written and published six books with international publishers, two second editions, and one self-published little volume between 1997 and 2015.* I made about as much in royalties each year as I did from a single speaking engagement or workshop. Was my time wasted? Was I a failure as a writer as Godin seems to suggest since I never really sold an immense number of copies?

While the authors whose names appear on the best seller lists get the fame, my assumption is that most of us who are serious writers write for groups far down the length of the long tail. My books were not written to be read on the toilet or while sunning on the beach. The primary audiences were school librarians, K-12 teachers, and school administrators. A couple titles might have been marketed to parents of K-12 students who were interested in how educational technology might impact their kids. It was never my intent or aspiration to appear on any best seller list. I don’t know the exact numbers, but my books in their niche sold well. Well enough anyway for the publishers to ask for more titles and second editions.

What did make publishing books an economic benefit to me primarily came with the reputation I gained as an author garnered the attention of organizers of conferences and staff development coordinators of educational workshop. As I mentioned, I made more money speaking at a single conference than I did from an entire year of book royalties. I always joked that conference planners made the assumption that if one could write, one could also talk. I guess I must have done well enough since kept getting asked to present at nearly 200 conferences and educational organizations over the course of my career. Thanks, in large part, to my professional writing.

Oh, I did find copies of my books in a couple surprising places. The Singapore National Library had one of my books in its catalog when I spoke there on the occasion of its grand opening in 2005. But probably my proudest moment was when I found a copy of one of my books in the education section of the local Barnes & Noble - and a grandson was with me who asked if I was that Doug Johnson. 

Books do sell, Seth. They sell ideas. They sell feelings. They sell stories. They sell reputations. They sell joy - for both the reader and the writer. They may not always sell in a commercial sense, but when the right audience is found, every book sells.

*

• Indispensable Librarian: Surviving and Thriving in School Media Centers in the Electronic Age, Linworth 1997
• Indispensable Teacher’s Guide to Computer Skills, Linworth 1998.
• Indispensable Teacher’s Guide to Computer Skills, 2nd ed. Linworth 2002.
• Teaching Right From Wrong in the Digital Age: An Ethics Guide for Parents, Teachers, Librarians, and Others Who Care about Computer-Using Young People, Linworth 2003. (Awarded a 2003  "outstanding achievement in parenting materials" from Parent's Guide to Children's Media Inc.)
• Machines Are the Easy Part, People Are the Hard Part: Observations on Making Technology Work in Schools. Beaver’s Pond Press, 2004.
• School Libraries Head for the Edge. Linworth, 2009
• The Classroom Teacher’s Technology Survival Guide, Jossey-Bass, 2012
• Indispensable Librarian. 2nd edition, ABC/Clio, 2013
• Teaching Outside the Lines, Corwin 2015

It’s not how many books you read

My reading history according to Goodreads.

I am a long-time fan of the social networking site Goodreads. Since 2014, I have recorded 532 books “read.” I have 53 friends with whom I share titles and reviews. And I have participated in the Reading Challenge for a number of years, slowly increasing the number of books I intend to read to 52 - one per week.

While I plan to continue using Goodreads to record and share comments about the books I read, I am going to abandon the Reading Challenge. It makes me too anxious.

Motivated by watching the new Shogun streaming series, I decided to re-read Clavell’s novel on which it is based. I believe this is the third time I’ve greatly enjoyed this 1000 page tome. 

The problem is that I have been reading it since April 7th - for well over two weeks. It’s completely destroyed the pace of books I need to complete to meet my 52 book challenge for 2024. Yes, I could listen to audiobooks (I still think of them as books-on-tape.) on long drives. I could purposely select short, easy-to-read titles. I suppose I could even up the number of hours each day I dedicate to reading books, cutting back on newspapers, click bait, and solitaire. 

Instead I will ignore the challenge. There are just some authors (Clavell, Michener, McMurtry, Tolkien among them) who do spin very long, but very good tales I just can’t abandon. I read non-fiction titles that may not be as gripping as thrillers and so are less compelling to read and so take longer. Like walking or biking, I need to relax and enjoy the experience rather than try to meet some extrinsic, self-imposed velocity. 

And I will be happier for it.