TRADECRAFT: Surveillance 401

Regardless how good you are at conducting or eluding surveillance, sooner or later, you will run into at least one problem or more. It's the nature of the business. Your target (or you if it's the other way around) may see the same face or the same vehicle more than once and suddenly ask what's going on. How much is coincidence? And, that's if you are looking for surveillance. For the target who is checking behind himself, a surveillance team can easily get into trouble if they're not careful.

So here's a few tips. Just know that these tips can be taken from either side of the surveillance equation. If you are the one doing the following, these may be hints that your target is checking to see if he has grown a tail. Also, if you are in a situation where you wish to check your back trail or maybe ditch any surveillance on yourself, consider these suggestions on actions to take. Use as is appropriate for yourself or your fictional character. Many of these techniques can also be adapted to vehicle traffic.

From the viewpoint of eluding:
  1) While walking briskly in one direction, suddenly turn around. Which people behind you are caught short? Do they abruptly turn into a doorway? Awkwardly start window shopping? Look directly at you, then avert their gaze in embarrassment? When you move briskly, your surveillance needs to move fast too in order to keep up. When you suddenly turn on them, you catch them in mid-stride. It's awkward for them to recover quickly.

  2) Similar to the above is to completely reverse course and go back the way you came. You get all the benefits of #1, plus you disrupt the surveillance team's pattern. If you remember Surveillance 102, you'll know that any professional team has been trained to deal with this situation. In this case, go one block over to a parallel street and pull the same trick. Recognize any of the same faces from the block before? Naturally, you don't want the other side to know you're onto them (knowledge is power), so try to make your route appear to be normal. Have an apparent reason for all these changes of direction. Of course if you are a high profile target, the opposition may have two or even three teams on you and you may keep seeing new faces. However, in those circumstances where you are worth that much expenditure of their assets, you shouldn't be out in the open anyway.

  3) Pause long enough to tie your loose shoe lace or peruse a map, something which appears to be a normal action. What you're really doing is taking time to look behind you, across the street and around you to take notice of who is there.

  4) You've seen it done in thriller and spy movies, and you too can look in store windows to watch reflections of movements around you.

  5) Change your pace. Move slowly, then fast, then slow again in combination with other techniques mentioned here. This allows you to disrupt their team pattern and then catch them off guard.

  6) Enter a building or turn the corner of a building, stop and put your back to the wall. Who followed you into the building or around the corner? How did they react when they saw you standing there, waiting?

  7) Enter a building and immediately leave by another exit. Same faces? People running around the corner to watch the side door?

  8) Get on an elevator. Then get off on the same floor or anther floor. Walk up or down a flight of stairs and take a different elevator. They can't follow you without being obvious. In the end, they have to wait for you to leave the building. Does the building have a basement with a parking garage exit?

  9) Start to leave a building, then suddenly stop just outside the exit. You already know what you're looking for now.

 10) Assuming the opposition is merely following you, but not trying to kill or kidnap you, go down an alley. They either expose themselves by following else have to run around the block to catch you coming out the other end. But, what if you go halfway and then backtrack? Most of their assets will end up in the wrong place.

 11) Go around the same block several times to see who is still with you before suddenly heading off in a different direction. I recommended this one to a friend of the family who was in the middle of a divorce from a child-abusing husband. She used it to detect and record the license plate of a car following her and then reported the license plate to the Air Police when she went back on base. Turned out to be a PI hired by the abusive husband hoping to find some dirt on her in order to contest the divorce. She got the divorce without problems. He went to Leavenworth.

 12) While temporarily out of sight, change clothes, appearance, vehicles or method of transportation. The opposition may not recognize you with the change.

 13) See a policeman on a corner? Ask him for directions to a business you passed about half a block back. When he points behind you, you then turn and point in the same direction. Anyone following you will assume you fingered them to the cops. When you continue on your way, they will be reluctant to follow you past the cop. Our instructors in Basic Agent Training loved to use this one on trainees, only in this case they had the cop stop us to hear our explanation of what was going on.

 14) Use an associate for counter-surveillance. The pros do it and so can you. Let other sets of eyes watch your back trail for you. This technique is difficult for the opposition to detect and therefore is very effective. Unless of course, the opposition also knows who your people are. During the Cold War and even today, both sides of opposing governments keep files on their opponents, which keeps the game a little tighter.

So now are you ready to go out and try your luck? Follow someone or see if you're being followed? Hey, stay a little paranoid. It's good for you. You never know who's out there, or why.

Up, Over, and Through Walls and Fences

In honor of the Fourth of July:

I've been investigating the "hard-core" conservative proposals for immigration reform.  I have no problem with some of proposed requirements, such as ending birthright citizenship - although my next question is, does everyone born in the US - including those born to American citizens - then have to pass the test for citizenship currently given to immigrants?  And if not, what makes you a citizen?  But others make me shake my head in disbelief, such as "English will be the official language of America."  Please.  It already is.  My grandparents on my father's side - immigrants from Greece - spoke broken English with a strong Greek accent; my father spoke both English and Greek with a strong American accent; I speak English.  Period.  That's the way it works.  Give it enough time and all immigrant children/grandchildren speak nothing but English. 

But the one that made me almost fall out of my chair laughing,  was "100% sealed border."
There is, for one, the fact of costs (suddenly we have the billions of dollars to build a fence with barbed wire, machine gun turrets and all the manpower needed to patrol it?).
There is the question of what border?  Most of the Southwest was once Mexico.  The Hispanics were there first.
And there is the simple fact of history:  There is no such thing as a 100% sealed border.  Never has been.  Never will. 

We'll start out easy, with animal control, which leads, naturally, to

Australia and the Rabbit-Proof Fence - which wasn't.  Built in 1901-07 at a then-whopping half a million dollars, stretching over 2,000 miles, the fence was designed to keep rabbits out of farmland.  Although it was very well built, it didn't entirely keep the pests out - border riders had to patrol and kill rabbits that made it through, and it wasn't until myxomatosis was intentionally introduced that the rabbit population fell like a stone.  (Of course they rebounded, since the genetically immune survived, and yet another virus was introduced in the 1990's.  I'm waiting for the next virus to be sprayed upon the bunnies.  Peter Rabbit is tough, folks.)  The unintended consequences? Well, the aboriginal peoples didn't appreciate it, since it disrupted their wanderings, as well as disrupting migration patterns of emu, kangaroos, etc.   

On to the obvious:

The Berlin Wall.  Now THAT was a wall:  it had thick concrete walls, barbed wire, anti-vehicle trenches, and - most importantly - guards stationed in towers with machine guns.  Although the number of deaths is disputed - Wikipedia lists by name 136 people, confirmed to have been killed, of whom 97 were shot; Checkpoint Charlie Museum lists 245 deaths, including suicides, the Cold War equivalent of DBC (death by cop) - the plain fact is that the East German guards had orders to shoot to kill and carried those orders out.  Not only that, but if you were only wounded, the guards would leave you to bleed to death and shoot anyone who tried to help you.  The number of Good Samaritans quickly became nil.  This was a tough wall.

BUT: despite the fact that you could and would get shot if you got caught crossing the wall - up, over, around or through - at least 5,000 people did.  From Wikipedia:  "East Germans successfully defected by a variety of methods: digging long tunnels under the wall, waiting for favorable winds and taking a hot air balloon, sliding along aerial wires, flying ultralights, and in one instance, simply driving a sports car at full speed through the basic, initial fortifications. When a metal beam was placed at checkpoints to prevent this kind of defection, up to four people (two in the front seats and possibly two in the boot) drove under the bar in a sports car that had been modified to allow the roof and windscreen to come away when it made contact with the beam. They lay flat and kept driving forward. The East Germans then built zig-zagging roads at checkpoints. The sewer system predated the wall, and some people escaped through the sewers."

When people are determined enough, they're gonna get through.  And there's something about walls that bring out that determination.

Think about Jerusalem.  In 1948, a barbed-wire and concrete fence ran down the center, dividing it - half of it, including the Old City [with Wailing Wall] under Jordanian control, and the rest under Israeli control.  It stayed that way until the Six-Day War of 1967, when - after Jordan joined forces with Egypt despite Israeli pleas for them to stay out of the war - Jerusalem was reunified under Israeli control.  But if you think the fence was 100% sealed during those 19 years...  let me assure you it wasn't.

And of course, today, there's an "Israeli West Bank Barrier" which, when completed, will run about 430 miles.  Most of it is steel fencing with trenches; some of it is a 26 foot high concrete wall.  The Israelis say it is a security measure, built to keep out Palestinian terrorists, suicide bombers, etc., and I believe them.  The Palestinians say it is a way to keep them in poverty and to redraw the map of Israel, and I believe them, especially if you redefine "poverty" as "under control". Does it work 100% to keep Palestinians on their side of the fence?  I sincerely doubt it.  The unintended consequences?  See below:

Israeli-Palestinian Wall on the road to Bethlehem

The simple fact is that any wall or fence that keeps people apart is seen, sooner or later, as a bad thing.  The sympathy level for the Palestinians - despite their avowed dedication to the destruction of Israel, suicide bombers, etc. - is steadily growing, thanks to the Israeli West Bank Barrier.

People don't like fences.  Or walls.  There is no such thing as a 100% sealed border, even if you are willing to shoot to kill to keep people (or animals) out, which I doubt the United States will do.  For one thing, even if we do have armed guards with orders to shoot to kill, what happens after the first child is shot?  I feel certain that, if we do build a 700 mile fence/wall with guards and guns, while it will cut down on the sheer numbers who cross the border, there will be ever-more inventive ways to breach that fence/wall.  Great story ideas are coming, folks.  Let's just hope that, whatever they are on the page, in real life they're more humorous than tragic.

Disclaimer:  I am an immigrant myself, as you know - brought over when I was 2½ as an adoptee, and naturalized by my adopted parents, who were both American citizens.  That's one path to citizenship I hope is never eliminated. 

Nine lives of the catalog

by Robert Lopresti

I seldom write here about being a librarian because I hate to brag, but  I recently attended a lecture that seems relevant to us as readers and writers.  Lori Robare of the University of Oregon spoke on "RDA for Non-Catalogers."

RDA is Resource Description and Analysis, a new set of rules for cataloging library material.  (And here I should hasten to say I was at that meeting because I am not a cataloger, so I may be about to get a lot wrong.  Don't blame Lori!)  Until RDA arrived in 2010 library books were cataloged under Anglo-American Catalog Rules (AACR2), which was (were?) created in the 1970s.

Now, think about what libraries were like back then.  The purpose of AACR2 was to cram as much relevant information about a book as possible onto a small card which would go into a cabinet and probably never be seen by anyone outside that library.

How many of the words in that last sentence are still true today?  "Relevant information" is probably about it.  You don't have to cram information into a card because today's catalogs consist of computer records which can be as long as necessary.  So RDA says forget about using abbreviations.  (And while we're at it, throw out Latin.  Few users understood it back in the seventies.)

And why assume you are cataloging a book?  Maybe you are trying to catalog a DVD, a software program, a website, or realia, which in my library could be a jigsaw puzzle, a figurine, or lord knows what else.

Of course, the fact that the catalog is on a computer means that readers -- and librarians -- all over the world can see it, as opposed to that hermetically sealed wooden case that existed in each individual library back in the seventies, so consistency suddenly becomes much more important.

It was in response to changes like this that catalogers decided not to keep revising AACR2, but to try a whole different approach: RDA, which uses a system called FRBR--

Okay, don't sweat it.  I'll make this easy.  Let's say you want to find a book: Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  In FRBR that would be called the work.

So I hand you a copy of the work.  It is titled Män som hatar kvinnor, Men Who Hate Women.  Oh, you didn't want it in the original Swedish?  You would prefer English?  No problem!  But which translation do you prefer:  the English English or the American English?  In FRBR each of these versions is called an expression.  For another example of expressions, think of different recordings of the same song.

You've decided on the popular American translation.  Great!  Hardcover or paperback?  Maybe large-print?  By now you know FRBR has a name for this: it's the manifestation.

Good news!  The library has two copies of the version you want.  And in FRBR each of these is an item.

And somehow  the cataloger has to indicate in the catalog record the work, expression, manifestation and item under discussion.

Easy peasy, no?  What about the movie version of Larsson's book? Is that an expression or a different work?  How about an illustrated edition?  A graphic novel version?

And this brings me to the main reason I am inflicting all this on you.  Lori showed us a diagram made by Barbara Tillett who was, at that time, at the Library of Congress.  She attempted to capture on one page everything that can happen to one little piece of writing.  See if it doesn't blow your mind.

I suppose the only works that have most, much less all of the above, are a small number of  literary classics.  Something we can aspire to, anyway.

Counterclockwise?

“That’s what made it easy,” I said.  “You were circling Margrave.  Not too close, not too far.  And counterclockwise.  Give people a free choice, they always go counterclockwise.  It’s a universal truth…”  

                                        Jack Reacher in Killing Floor

                                        Lee Child

        A year or so ago I was reading an interview with one of my favorite authors, Tana French, and was astounded by something Ms. French said. According to her, while she was writing her second murder mystery, The Likeness, she did not know how the book would end.  She did not know, in fact, who committed the murder.  The Likeness is a favorite of mine and while it is not a classic “golden age” mystery, in which all of the clues are present and can, through deduction, lead the reader to the culprit, it is nonetheless a great murder mystery and a great read.  But the interview floored me:  How can you create such a tight mystery without knowing how it will end?

        I know there has been a lot of discussion on SleuthSayers about writing with or without outlines, but on the base principle of structuring a  “whodunit” I sort of thought we were always guided by the maxim underlying an observation Francis (Mike) Nevins made back in 2005 in his speech during the Ellery Queen Centennial Symposium in New York.  Mike mentioned that people over the years have asked him how he worked out the deductive process in his stories.  Mike rolled his eyes incredulously at his audience and said “of course we know how the deduction works -- we know who did it and how they did it before we ever start writing the story!”

      The incredible bravura performance of Ms. French aside, one of the most difficult aspects of fashioning a detective story is figuring out the ending and the string of clues that will tie everything satisfactorily together, ultimately pointing the reader to one, and only one, solution.  Once you have that well in hand, the rest (as Mike Nevins observed) is simply back-filling the details of the story that will lead up to your conclusion.

      And generally we mystery writers are held to a very high standard.  Those deductions, the foundation on which we premise our story, better hold up to pretty strict scrutiny.  Those who read mysteries tend to be an unforgiving lot that delights in trying to pick holes in an author’s deductive process.  As a personal example, before Janet Hutchings accepted my latest story, Literally Dead (appearing in the December issue of EQMM -- plug, plug, plug), she questioned whether my solution to the “locked room” aspect of the mystery would actually work in real life.  In order to convince her I filmed the solution (I got to play Ellery, my elder son Devon drew the Sergeant Velie straw) and emailed the filmed solution to her as a download.  (Sorry.  Can’t attach a link here.  It would be too much of a spoiler!)  Only after Janet reviewed the film did she accept my story for publication.

      All of which, at long last, brings me back to that quote at the beginning of this post.  

      Up until this winter I had never read any of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels.  I decided to remedy this since so many people around me were devouring this popular series.  I now have three under the belt, and I started with the first book in the series, Killing Floor.  I was happily enjoying the roller coaster ride until I came to the above-quoted language, approximately ¾ of the way through the book.  At that point I screeched to a halt.  

      When it comes to deduction I am a strict constructionist -- like other mystery readers alluded to above, I have to be convinced that the deduction works.  There seemed to me to be a number of things wrong with Jack Reacher’s deduction that this particular character would predictably begin circling the town in question in a series of bus trips at all.  But what bothered me most was Reacher’s (and Child’s) conclusion that he would begin this by going counter-clockwise and that there is a universal tendency for people to head counter-clockwise whenever they have a choice. So I set aside the book and started to research.

     As it turns out, I was initially surprised.  There is, indeed, a counter-clockwise bias in many of our movements.  In sports, for example, all races are run counter-clockwise, and baseball is also a counter-clockwise sport.  Moreover, studies have documented that virtually all joggers, if given a free choice, will settle on a circular route that runs counter-clockwise.  After a little digging I found that Professor Watanbe Hitoshi of SOKA University in California has devoted a great deal of time studying clockwise versus counterclockwise choices.  

[Professor Hiroshi] reached a point in his research where he had to decide if it was better to design stairs that you have to go down clockwise or counterclockwise. Experiments had been carried out previously and it was known that there is tendency to turn counterclockwise, for example, if you cover your eyes and try to walk straight almost always you will end up walking a little bit to the left. But Mr. Watanabe wanted to investigate more: 

• Most . . . human beings are right handed.
• Most . . . left-handed people are right-footed, while most of the right-       handed people are also right-footed.
• Most . . . human beings have slightly longer right leg than left leg.

These three factors make our right leg . . . dominant over the left leg, which causes a tendency to turn to the left, and to be able to run faster and more comfortable in a counterclockwise direction. He also found out that:  Humans walk instinctively protecting the left part of their body (for example by putting their left part of the body nearer to walls) because our heart is in the center-left part of our chest.  Drifting to the left is basically human nature, and running in a counterclockwise direction practically an instinct.

        So.  All good so far, Mr. Child.  

      

     But consider this:  Executing a counter-clockwise circular route requires a series of left-hand turns.  Indeed, Jack Reacher’s deduction concerning where he would find that missing character was premised on a supposition that the first turn the character made would be to the left.  All of that counter-clockwise research notwithstanding, an equally large body of behavioral research indicates that, given an uninhibited choice, most people at an intersection will naturally turn not to the left, but to the right.  Professor Stephen Bitgood of the University of Alabama, in his article collecting and distilling prior studies on pedestrian movement noted the following:

The tendency to walk on the right side of a path is a common finding (at least in the United States). The sociologist William Whyte (1980, 1988) has studied people’s behavior in city plazas and on city streets. Whyte (1988), in his chapter on the “skilled pedestrian,” summarized the pattern of walking on the right of city sidewalks:

Pedestrians usually walk on the right. (Deranged people and oddballs are more likely to go left, against the flow.) 

        Summarizing earlier studies, Professor Bitgood also concludes that “[o]ne of the most frequently reported findings is a tendency for people to turn right at a choice point or intersection.”  Evidence of this is all around us.  Professor Bitgood notes that the right hand turn is always the easier and less energy consuming choice.  In recognition of this fact stores tend to be designed, as Bitgood notes, to allow shoppers to steer to the right upon entering.  There is also some evidence from highway studies that in cities circled by beltways the more predominant way to drive around the city is by beginning with a right turn, and then driving the beltway clockwise, not counterclockwise.  (A study by the Washington Post published just last Sunday noted differing commuting times for clockwise and counterclockwise trips on the Washington beltway.)  

     Bitgood also references a number of studies that have focused on museums and zoos, and by and large these have documented a pronounced tendency of visitors to enter and then turn right, although some (but not all) of the studies also indicated that the museums or zoos were then toured in a counterclockwise direction.  It has also been noted that typical grocery store design anticipates that the shopper will enter the store and turn right, usually towards the vegetables, but then circle the store counterclockwise with a series of left turns.  Professor Bitgood conducted his own study of shoppers entering several malls and found a pronounced, but far from universal, tendency of the shoppers to veer right, not left, upon entering the mall.

       But let’s get back to Killing Floor.  I don’t want to end up dishing out a “spoiler” for Mr. Child’s first Jack Reacher mystery, but suffice it to say that the purported “universal” tendency of people in all circumstances to bear left, that is counter-clockwise, is a key element in Jack Reacher’s deduction concerning where he predictably will find a critical (and missing) character.  From this postulate of “universally” predictable behavior Reacher concludes that when booking passage on an inter city bus to a random location one will always pick a bus that turns left, and heads out of town on a counter-clockwise route.  But would this be the case?  Does a person choosing a bus route on a map behave like a jogger or a baseball player, or does he or she behave like a shopper in a store, or a visitor to a museum?  And what about those beltways that have more clockwise than counterclockwise drivers?  Even in Lee Child’s native England (where driving is on the left) the answer is just not that simple nor that predictable.

        So here the deduction is simple for Reacher, but only because Mr. Child (the man behind the curtain), consistent with Mike Nevin’s observation, knows the result in advance.  But the deduction does not objectively and invariably flow from the evidence.  It is, in a word, far-fetched.  It would not, in the real world, support an incontestable conclusion.  

     Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoyed Killing Floor and the other Lee Child books that I have read thus far.  But if I structured a deductive conclusion based on a premise as suspect as Mr. Child’s, I would expect the Janet Hutchings of the world to at the least raise some very legitimate questions -- or more likely just send me one of those damned rejection notes!

Co-Conspirators

by Fran Rizer

My favorite King photo.  You'll see it anytime
I write about him.

John Mellencamp when
he was
John Cougar Mellencamp

On June 6, 2013, I watched Stephen Colbert when Stephen King, John Mellencamp, and T-Bone Burnett appeared as guests.

Any one of these three being interviewed would interest me.  As we all know, Stephen King is a tremendously successful writer who also happens to be a favorite of mine.

John Mellencamp is a rock star, also a favorite of mine for more than just his best-known "Jack and Diane."  I was a Mellencamp fan back when he was a Cougar and I wasn't.

T-Bone Burnett

  T-Bone Burnett has multiple musical credentials. He's a musician, song writer, and arranger, but his greatest achievements and awards have come from production of such people as Roy Orbison and Elvis Costello and producing  music for many films including O Brother, Where Art Thou?  He's won the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing, Golden Globe Awards, and many Grammy Awards.
    

Sorry this current photo of the
threesome is a bit fuzzy.  It
came from a video.

 Since their appearance on The Colbert Report, the three of them have appeared on multiple shows including Morning Joe, NPR's World Cafe, NPR's All Things Considered, SiriusXM's Outlaw Country, The Charlie Rose Show,and The Late Show with David Letterman--all during the month of June!  (Oh, John, don't we wish we had their publicist scheduling our signings!)

WHY ALL THIS?  Here's the answer: 

AEG Live has announced that the southern gothic, supernatural musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County will be touring twenty cities throughout the Midwest and Southeast beginning October 10th in Bloomington, Indiana and ending November 6 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tickets are on sale at aeglive.com.

Ghost Brothers of Darkland County began when Mellencamp told King about a cabin on his land in Indiana where two brothers had gotten in a fight over a girl resulting in one brother killing the other. Only a few days later, the surviving brother was killed in a car accident. The girl was with him and died also.

Mellencamp shared this story over thirteen years ago.  King outlined a play about it. After that, they were off and on, back and forth, until they developed it into a full-length musical.

On advertising and the book covers, CD, and DVD covers, King, Mellencamp, and Burnett refer to themselves as "co-conspirators."

King wrote the story/play and made some significant changes from Mellencamp's tale.  It's about two sets of brothers, Jack and Andy, dead in an apparent murder/suicide, and their nephews Frank and Drake.

Joe, Frank and Drake's dad, and brother of Jack and Andy sees his sons headed in a downward spiral similar to their uncles.  He decides it's time to reveal his own terrible secret at the site of the tragedy before it's too late.

Mellencamp wrote the music.  Instead of the songs telling the story, they reflect the feelings of the characters.  The blues 'n roots music covers a wide range of styles, and it's masterly produced by T-Bone Burnett with many famous artists.

Multiple products are available--the musical and recordings and books. You can even win prizes from the Bloody Disgusting Contest.  Check the Internet for merchandise, tour info, and ticket information.  You can find it on any of the three co-conspirators' pages as well as Ghost Brothers of Darkland County's website.

A quote from Stephen King:

"John can make rock & roll records and I can write books for the rest of our lives, but that's the safe way to do it, and that's no way to live if you want to stay creative.  We were willing to be educated, and at our age, that's an accomplishment."

I looked them up.  Stephen King was born 9/21/47; T-Bone Burnett, 1/14/48; and John Mellencamp, 10/07/51.  They're all in their sixties, and I am, too.

I think it's time to stray from the safe way.  I just sent the Christmas Callie to the publisher yesterday.  Tomorrow, I'm beginning a paranormal.

A Totally Digital Library

by Louis Willis

I think I’ve written at least two posts on libraries. I’ll probably write a few more before I am able to give it up because each time I read an article about a library closing or trying to change to keep up with the digital age, I worry. The thought of not being able to hold a paper book unsettles my mind. Of course, a world in which there are no paper books and in which a library goes completely paperless is not likely to happen in my time, but I still worry because I’m a natural worrier. I worry despite the good news that libraries are trying to remain relevant in the coming digital age. One is in fact trying to be the first to go completely digital.

Image courtesy of adamr
at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

County leaders in Bexar County Texas are planning to launch the first completely digital public library system called BiblioTech (from Spanish biblioteca). While other libraries have tried to go totally digital, none has succeeded because the users complained about not having access to paper books. Many libraries now lend both paper and ebooks.

BiblioTech will lend ereaders so that users will be able to download the book they want to checkout. They will be allowed to borrow only one book at a time. If they fail to return the ereader, the book will be deleted and the ereader will become just another piece of electronic junk. And, as a county leader noted, the library will have the resident’s name, phone number, and address. Imagine the library police showing up at his or her home to retrieve the purloined ereader. Good luck to Bexar County.

I can’t imagine not being able to hold a paper book in my hands and marking passages I admire. Yet, experience with my nine-year-old grandson tells me paper books might become a thing of the past in a few years. He uses his iPad to read, play games, and do research on animals because he wants to be a zoologist. I sometimes imagine my great grandkids going to a museum to see what a book looked like back in the golden age of paper books.

Two Interesting Library Tidbits 

While reading about libraries, I came across an article on the NPR website about a unique way the town of Basalt, Colorado is trying to save its public library. In addition to books, residents can check out seeds, yep, seeds.

Here in Knox County our public library is battling an interesting problem. Recently a reader found a bedbug in a book, prompting library officials to take action to have the main and all branch libraries inspected to make sure they are free of the little bloodsuckers. Such an extensive inspection will be expensive, so, to save money, they plan to contract with a “canine pest detection service.” Yep, they’ll use dogs to sniff out those little varmints.

Maybe a digital library will not be so bad. No bedbugs. And the books last forever in cyberspace.

Dumbing Down: Self-fulfilling prophecies about the loss of culture

by Elizabeth Zelvin

Sad to say, and present company excepted, there is a trend in our culture, especially in its literature, to assume that Americans, in particular, will not understand sophisticated or even mildly historical cultural references. The current solution is to change those references to something that whoever is in charge of these decisions believes will be comprehensible to everyone, on the unstated and insulting assumption that many readers are illiterate cultural ignoramuses. The consequence of these changes is that as new generations arise, they have never heard of the terms or bits of history that they’ve been protected from exposure to (or make that “bits of history to which they’ve been protected from exposure,” since today’s readers also suffer from the neglect of good grammar).

Let’s start with the universally popular Harry Potter series, written for kids but enjoyed by adults across a broad spectrum of reading tastes from don’t-usually-read-at-all to highly literate (that would be us). In England, the first volume was entitled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. If you’ve heard of the Philosopher’s Stone, raise your hand. Keep your hand raised if you learned about it by reading a book. The Philosopher’s Stone has been around since at least the 8th century. Well, not around, or alchemists, philosophers, and early scientists (including Sir Isaac Newton, John Dee, Paracelsus, and even perhaps St Thomas Aquinas) wouldn’t have tried so hard over hundreds of years to find or fabricate this legendary substance that was believed to turn base materials into gold and maybe confer rejuvenation or even immortality. I bet school kids even nowadays are told at least once in the course of their education who Newton was. Would it have been so hard to explain the Philosopher’s Stone? Yet thanks to a publishing decision, the millions of American kids who read and loved Harry Potter have never heard of the Philosopher’s Stone. The “Sorcerer’s Stone” they’ve read about is just a thing, a fictional magical object like the “Horcrux” in the later books, without cultural resonance outside the world of Harry Potter and easily forgotten.

Here’s another example from children’s literature, the source of many mystery writers’ and adult readers’ lifelong love of the genre: the Nancy Drew series, first published in 1930. The original Nancy was feisty and independent. She drove a roadster and always had a pocket full of tools (rope, flashlight, sewing kit) to get her out of the tight spots her love of adventure and desire for justice invariably got her into. Reading them in the 1950s, I didn’t know what a roadster was. But did it matter? A brave and active heroine of the 21st century, with a cell phone and a hybrid car, is nothing special. But against the cultural backdrop of less feminist times, Nancy shines. My cousin Emily, now fourteen, started reading the Nancy Drew books when she was ten. When I asked which version she had, she said she thought they were the originals. But when I asked her what Nancy drove, she said, “A convertible.” All that cultural texture is unavailable to Emily and her generation.

Some revisions are bowdlerizations, playing to our supposed prudishness rather than our supposed ignorance. As a kid in the 1950s, I learned a lot of history from Elswyth Thane’s popular Williamsburg series of historical novels. The Day, Sprague, and Murray families (from the Revolutionary War in Virginia to World War II in England) were probably, for me, the first fictional characters so well developed and likable that they felt like family. A few years ago I found them in library editions that took a kind of Victorian attitude toward certain cultural references. In one book, the fortyish male companion of the rather demi-mondaine seventy-year-old Cousin Sally, mysterious and unexplained in the original, is described as a “doctor” in the library edition, presumably so readers won’t be shocked that they are clearly intimates. (No sex scenes, but he sits at her bedside reading aloud. Horrors!) Elsewhere, references to champagne—a metaphor for a refined hedonism, life’s fizziness as opposed to its earnest Puritanism—are amended to “wine.” On the last reread I found one I’d missed—this one more of a dumbing down. A character in London in 1896 refers to his solicitor and man of business, saying, “I’ll refer the matter (the character’s divorce) to my man Partridge.” Nobody who’s ever read an English novel would have trouble with this, surely. But in the American library edition, Partridge has become a “handyman.” Ouch!

Finally, let me share a query I got from a young editor, passing on a query from the final proofreader before the book in question went to press. It’s a scene in which a couple of my characters arrive at an office building on Wall Street after hours. The night security man at the desk in the lobby says, “Now stand on that spot for ten seconds, please. State your name and who you got the apperntment with for the camera.” The proofreader, and apparently the young editor as well, wanted to know, “Should this be ‘appointment’?” When I’d recovered from the shock, I wrote back that the passage was correct as it stood, and “apperntment” was “what used to be called Brooklynese.” I’m glad they asked. Otherwise, it would have been another nail driven in the coffin of American culture.