Writing – Page 6 – a sibilant intake of breath

Exercise walk after another step toward the next draft

Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Cafe

Sounds like a pleasant and useful place:

Customers must write their name, writing goals and the time they plan to finish. They can also ask Kawai to nag them about their progress. Those who ask for the “mild” option will simply be asked how they got on when they pay at the end of the session; others in need of a heavier dose of discipline can expect him to occasionally stand behind them, although he insists he makes no value judgments on the contents of their laptop screen.

The mild-mannered 52-year-old, who is a technical writer when he is not cajoling his customers to buckle down, dismissed concerns among some social media users that his tactics were heavy-handed.

“Instead of monitoring them, I’m here to support them,” he said. “As a result, what they thought would take a day was actually completed in three hours, or tasks that usually take three hours were done in one.”

The marriage of journalism and intelligence

“One profession that is particularly close to my heart, a profession that can get away with nearly anything,” Wagenbreth told his colleagues, “and this group are our dear journalists.” Journalists with a good reputation, he said, had excellent access to officials with security clearances and business executives, and could even travel through the Iron Curtain without a cover. Intelligence and journalism, in Wagenbreth’s view, had “entered a kind of marriage,” he said. “They complement each other and can’t let go of each other.” The Stasi knew that the press was addicted to leaks, and that scoop-hungry reporters would even publish anonymous leaks; they also knew that it was extremely difficult for journalists to tell whether a source was genuine or fake, and ever harder to tell if the content of a leak was accurate or forged. And it was another notch harder still to tell whether an anonymous leak contained some shrewd mix of both, handcrafted for maximum impact. The symbiotic relationship found its fullest expression in the active measures field. “What would active measures be without the journalist?” Wagenbreth asked the Stasi leaders. “Revelations are their métier.” The X, of course, had the same métier.

For Wagenbreth, more competitive and polarized media outlets presented a major opportunity. “For the man on the street it is getting harder to assess and judge the written word,” Wagenbreth explained. “He is ever more helpless in the face of the monsters that are opinion factories. This is where we come in as an intelligence agency.”

Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

The “wow” from delayed source discovery

There ought to be a name for the experience, when involved in the long process of writing up a dissertation or scholarly book, of coming across a scholarly source and thinking: “Wow! I wish I had read this several years ago when it was published!”

Going through such a document line-by-line in printout form while making extensive marginal notes serves several valuable purposes. It gives you something else to respond to and cite, knowing it has already crossed the bar of being accepted as scholarly. That’s good if they broadly agree with you (adding another reference with a short citation) and probably even better if they disagree, since it lets you contrast yourself with something specific and scholarly. It directs you to yet other potentially useful sources. Finally, it provides an example of a complete and successful piece of scholarly writing, which is always an inspiration and even a source of comfort when striving to produce one of your own.

The fine points of minuting meetings

The British comedic TV series’ Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister — as well as being extremely funny — make some acute and accurate points about politics. One quote from the episode “The Quality of Life” is an arguably cynical, arguably tragically accurate summary of the relationship between civil servants and politicians.

Today, while pondering how to interpret some specific bits of activist decision-making and analysis, I was reminded of another gem from series 2 of YPM: “Official Secrets:”

Bernard Woolley: The problem is, the prime minister did try to suppress the chapter, didn’t he?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: I don’t know. Did he?

BW: Well, didn’t he? Don’t you remember?

HA: What I remember is irrelevant Bernard. If the minutes don’t say that he did, then he didn’t.

BW: So you want me to falsify the minutes?

HA: I want nothing of the sort! It’s up to you Bernard, what do you want?

BW: I want to have a clear conscience.

HA: A clear conscience?

BW: Yes!

HA: When did you acquire this taste for luxuries? Consciences are for politicians, Bernard! We are humble functionaries whose duty it is to implement the commands of our democratically elected representatives. How could we possibly be doing anything wrong if it has been commanded by those who represent the people?

BW: Well, I can’t accept that, Sir Humphrey, “No man is an island.”

HA: I agree Bernard! No man is an island, entire of itself. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee, Bernard!

BW: So what do you suggest, Sir Humphrey?

HA: Bernard, the minutes do not record everything that was said at a meeting do they?

BW: Well, no, of course not.

HA: And people change their minds during a meeting, don’t they?

BW: Well, yes.

HA: So the actual meeting is a mass of ingredients for you to choose from.

BW: Oh, like cooking.

HA: Like, no, not like cooking. Better not to use that word in connection with books or minutes. You choose from a jumble of ill-digested ideas a version which represents the prime minister’s views as he would, on reflection, have liked them to emerge.

BW: But if it’s not a true record…

HA: The purpose of minutes is not to record events, it is to protect people. You do not take notes if the prime minister says something he did not mean to say — particularly if it contradicts something he has said publicly. You try to improve on what has been said, put it in a better order. You are tactful.

BW: But how do I justify that?

HA: You are his servant.

BW: Oh, yes.

HA: A minute is a note for the records and a statement of action if any that was agreed upon. Now, what happened at the meeting in question?

BW: Well, the book was discussed and the solicitor general advised there were no legal grounds for suppressing it.

HA: And did the prime minister accept what the solicitor general had said?

BW: Well, he accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression… but

HA: He accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression. You see?

BW: Oh!

HA: Is that a lie?

BW: No

HA: Can you write it in the minutes?

BW: Yes

HA: How’s your conscience?

BW: Much better! Thank you Sir Humphrey.

Or, as put later by Linton Barwick in the 2009 satirical film “In the Loop“:

Linton Barwick: Get a hold of those minutes. I have to correct the record.

Bob Adriano: We can do that?

LB: Yes, we can. Those minutes are an aide-mémoire for us. They should not be a reductive record of what happened to have been said, but they should be more a full record of what was intended to have been said. I think that’s the more accurate version, don’t you?

Obviously in these cases there is a clear political purpose being served in presenting the minutes a particular way, but the problem of interpretation is intractable even with no such agenda. Humphrey is quite right to say that minutes which are not verbatim require decisions from the person writing them, and it is as true in political conversations as in talks between friends or lovers that people who take part in the same conversation can come away from it with quite different recollections about what each party tried to say and what was decided.

Growing campus fossil fuel divestment bibliography

As I have been writing drafts of my PhD dissertation, I am working in Microsoft Word for the sake of interoperability with committee members, with the intention of submitting the dissertation in LaTeX format after the defence. My footnotes are just unique identifiers to sources listed in my developing public bibliography.

In it’s way it must be one of the most comprehensive cross-indexings of academic and journalistic writing on fossil fuel divestment campaigns at universities and related matters.

It’s the sort of document it’s fascinating to imagine looking at as some sort of human-computer hybrid or hyperintelligent AI which could take it all in and cross-reference with no restrictions on the number of items it can hold in memory and compare at the same time.

The bibliography is also a valuable document because of how link rot is making many of the sources unavailable as websites are taken down and reorganized. Because of all the specialized information I have been able to collect about the movement, I have been able to find Wayback Machine archives for dozens of sources that are no longer accessible at their original locations or the URLs cited in other documents.

Another round on political opportunities

Some time ago, I wrote a new introductory chapter because my previous issue context and literature context chapters were too long. My committee said they aren’t happy with it and it needs changes, but first I should go through and revise my four core chapters.

I have nearly finished that now, with two revised chapters sent and two just needing a couple of passes to be done in the same way.

Now I have been told that the first of those revised chapters needs substantial work, and to be rewritten again into a new structure.

The only way forward is to do what they want, but it’s hard to express how exhausting the process of editing something into a ready to submit state before substantially revising it and then editing again has been.

There’s still a new conclusion to write too, so not one word of the dissertation is now finalized.

Memory and consiousness

Without our memories, we would be lost to ourselves, amnesiacs flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present. It is hard to imagine being able to hang on to your personal identity without a store of autobiographical memories. To attain the kind of consciousness we all enjoy, we probably rely on a capacity to make links between our past, present, and future selves. Memory shapes everything that our minds do. Our perceptions are funneled by information that we laid down in the past. Our thinking relies on short-term and long-term storage of information. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on reshaping what has gone before.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 4–5

Fry on the brain and memory

It may not be easily accessible to non-Audible subscribes, but Stephen Fry’s 12-part series “Inside Your Mind” is thought-provoking, informative, and excellent. He does a great job as a science popularizer and communicator, sharing experimental research without jargon and in a consistently accessible and engaging way.

So far, I have found the episode on memory to be especially intriguing, with the idea that memories aren’t records stored in static form like journal entries but rather ephemeral in-the-moment creations arising from the work of many parts of the brain, and neurologically very similar to imagining a future situation.

Fry associates the idea with Charles Fernyhough’s “Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts”, which I have added to my non-dissertation reading list.

Framing chapter hand edit complete

Today I continued making progress with finishing the shortened and reorganized versions of my four core dissertation chapters. Specifically, I finished my hand edit of the framing chapter, chiefly intended to split out my own prescriptive normative conclusions from analysis of the divestment movement and scholarship about it.

This is a particularly challenging task because as initially written this chapter was meant to be the normative culmination of the text, with the conclusion largely given over to wrapping up and the niceties of academic writing such as identifying areas for further work.

While it has been labourious and often dispiriting to try to re-sequence the document at this stage, I am growing confident that in the end I will be able to do it in a way that not only meets the requirements set by my committee members but which actually lays things out in a clearer and more organized way for ordinary readers.

Tomorrow I will move on to making the edits to the Word version of the framing chapter, pulling out chunks that belong in the new prescriptive conclusions chapter. It will take another effort to sequence and connect the normative chunks that have been pulled from the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters, but at least that can happen after I have sent the four core analytical chapters back to the committee for their re-examination.