Sometime last week Routledge pointed me toward copyedited versions of the various chapters and endnotes and so on for the book. Even though they weren't reading for content, I was still a bit anxious that someone (a group of people as it turns out) had read everything. 99% of their copy edits were details like paragraph indenting and fixing bibliographic entries to conform to their style. They'd also put the chapter titles and headings into the Optima font, which made things feel different -- holy crap someone other than me is going to make design choices about the presentation of my content! hehe

There were also some queries about spelling of weird things, and a lot of confusion over my use of the word "affect" as a noun. Maybe it's just a new musicology thing but we tend to use the word "affect" in the sense of Affektenlehre, or the Doctrine of Affections. An "affect" in this instance is a basic mood or emotional state, but I can understand that this use might be unfamiliar to non-musicologists, especially given the classic grammatical problem of "affect" vs. "effect."

Also interesting was their attempt to tame my somewhat zealous quoting of words whose meaning I'm attempting to put into play as part of an argument. At times, though, they'd suggest putting the words in italics instead, which had the effect (ha!) of making parts of the ms. seem like a textbook: Now folks, we're going to learn about whiteness, etc. While I was careful to remove all such italicizations, I begin to agree that my quotes became a bit much. The fear of Richard Taruskin's ghostly open-armed quotation gesture only spurred me to agree to more of their prunings than I might otherwise have thought.

It was also an opportunity to fine tune and make consistent my musical examples. They were initially built over the course of several years (in ye olde versions of Finale) so there was a lot of work to do, mostly in terms of regularizing the "P.M. ------|" indications for the guitaristic technique of palm muting. I also wanted to make the size of the examples consistent to 4.25" wide, as well as simply giving everything the kind of good going-over I wasn't able to do when I sent off the ms. Oh, and I sent along 1200 dpi TIFFs this time, instead of 600. Probably overkill for music notation, but there you have it.

It was also the last chance to edit the content before it's fixed in published form, so I did some of that. Mostly word-choice type of things, but a couple of paragraphs got moved around and rewritten, particularly in Chapter 1 and the Introduction. Now that I've uploaded my changes to the Routledge FTP server, the text is done, done, done. It's mostly a relief, since I finally addressed some minor nagging things that had been bugging me. It's a relief until I wake up at 2 am suddenly remembering another issue.

Next up, according to the production schedule, are the first real page proofs. Expected in the third week of December they'll make a nice birthday present.

Final permissions details still in the air. Venom people told me on the phone I wasn't worth a prompt response, but to keep bugging them (argh. Hollywood types...). After months of nothing, the Hendrix people finally kicked me over to Hal Leonard Publishing, but at the moment it's still unsettled. The person didn't think Metallica had actually given me permission to use their stuff -- Hal Leonard also controls Cherry Lane which publishes Metallica song books, etc. -- so I faxed her the relevant correspondence and hopefully Hendrix will be taken care of soon.

Stay tuned... 

At the end of the summer, R3 got a frantic call from the Dean of the Conservatory where she's the music librarian. The Dean had been tasked by one of the entertainment editors at The Record to find someone to review the upcoming season of the Stockton Symphony. The Dean thought she might be interested or know of someone who was, and she thought I'd be interested, and so now we both do it, alternating performances.

It's been a challenging project adapting my writing experience to the style expected of a local newspaper. For one, everything is short. It's a real test of compact writing, and I'm still not used to writing one-sentence "paragraphs." I'm also not quite fast enough yet, and so reviews that have to be in my editor's inbox by 9 am the next day result in some late nights following a performance.

I'm also handling the monthly symphony preview article for the special weekend entertainment section. That actually involves interviewing people and writing up a feature that's at once short and engaging as well as cheery enough to encourage people to attend the performance. It's a weird mixture of journalism and civic boosterism and only confirms the "role-playing" aspect of publicity interviews that I've been writing about historiographically for years.

In all, it seems to be going well even if what appears under your byline is sometimes a paraphrase of what you sent in (space considerations are still a complete mystery to me).

Some examples of the writing are here, here, and here. 

Both Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com now have pre-orders available for Damage Incorporated. This I did not expect so soon. The first round of proofs aren't supposed to be available to me until later this week, and I've heard nothing about the cover design. Still, you don't need those things to start taking pre-orders.

Interesting how B&N and Amazon list different editions (hard cover only at B&N, paperback featured/hard cover available at Amazon) and fairly different prices. The release dates are also different: March versus May 2006. It's still early yet though. I have to say I'm a bit shocked by the $90+ prices for the hard cover edition. That edition will be a very small run aimed primarily at academic libraries, so that more than likely explains the price.

Anyway, see for yourself at the Barnes & Noble and Amazon sites. 

Recently, R3 and I finished watching the entire series of Babylon 5, the second-most popular sci-fi TV series of the sci-fi mad 1990s. I was adamantly a Trek fan in those years, and studiously avoided contaminating my enjoyment of what I believed was the purity and intelligence of ST:DS9 by trying to juggle two space opera sci-fi shows set in different universes. I like to think of myself as one who can easily get by without television, so when I do get attached to a show I typically get attached to the exclusion of anything generically similar to that show. Set thus in my ways, I have little interest in breaking out of the particular "universe" being explored by my current attachment, particularly when it comes to sci-fi.

So I watched about one half of an episode of Babylon 5 during its original run (I think it was the first season). I immediately ran into a problem with the aliens: I mean, come on, sentient alien races who are reptilian and insectoid? Perhaps I'd been watching too much MST3K, but it all seemed a little too close to cheap B-movie (is that redundant?) horror/comic book thinking and with no place in "hard" sci-fi. And, I couldn't find anything compelling about this. It all seemed so desperate. How could any of those characters compare to the intrigue or coldness of Gul Dukat or Weyoun (played to perfection by Marc Alaimo and Jeffrey Combs, respectively)? How could another show come up with writing and story enough to produce something like "In the Pale Moonlight" or the entire Dominion War arc?

Ha. Shows you how much I knew. Flash forward to 2005 and I decide it's time to revisit Babylon 5. After all, I know several people whom I respect who had (and continue to have) exactly the same feelings about their show as I did about mine. Apparently, B5 is also like "alternative rock" compared to the corporate schlock that was Trek. Then I read that the entire series is essentially one pre-planned arc and was intrigued further. The reviews on Netflix mentioned that if you could get past the first season and into the second and third you'd really like it. So I gave it a shot, and while I did have to look past the relatively basic special effects of the early episodes, the reptilian problem wasn't so bad and I got hooked rather quickly. It became almost a nightly occurrence for us after R3 scolded me for watching a few early episodes without her (I didn't know! I didn't know!).

The underlying reasons for my admiration of DS9 was most likely a good reason I began enjoying B5 -- both are "static" in the sense of their exploration of life in a single locale -- a space station that serves as something of an international hub of commerce and politics. However, the brilliant move on the part of B5 was to present its universe as as thickly as possible. Seemingly minor details like Sinclair and Garibaldi walking out of the men's room, or the entire episode dedicated to a strike by the station's dockworker union injected a kind of complexity unheard of in DS9 (or any other Trek series). Granted, these kinds of stories were relatively rare (B5 is a space opera after all), but they were always in the background. The sense that the human future was not the utopia depicted in Trek (Section 31 notwithstanding) was refreshing.

And then G'Kar (the reptilian ambassador linked above) provided the voice-over at the end of the finale for Season 3 ("Z'ha'dum") and I was blown away -- the writing of that speech symbolized the incredible craft that had been running throughout the show. That episode, along with "Coming of Shadows" from Season 2, became B5's "In the Pale Moonlight" and G'Kar became my favorite character (imagine that!). His verbal jousts with Londo Molari, though a bit predictable by Season 5, were brutally incisive and thoroughly compelling.

In all, if you have a few months free I'd say go for it. 

Next on the Netflix queue is the first season of Battlestar Galactica, but since the first disc is listed as having a "very long wait" we've started in on a recent BBC series called Foyle's War. Initially rented as fodder for my recent interest in WWII (I'm also slogging through many of the epic WWII movies from the 60s -- for completeness sake; they're not very good by themselves), Foyle's War is set in Britain beginning in spring 1940, just as the German army began its conquest of western Europe (thus ending the eight-month "phony war" following the fall of Poland). However, the show is a fairly standard detective drama centered on murder-of-the-week cases solved by a character called Christopher Foyle (hence the show's title). I wouldn't describe myself as an ardent fan of the detective genre, despite my regular watching of modern-day detective-like shows such as Law & Order, and CSI (Las Vegas only).

Foyle's War is, simply put, great. The writing and acting are compelling, the complexity of the stories is just right. Most of all, it totally nails the cultural context and background aspect for me: the first episode dealt with German citizens living in Britain, the second dealt with British anti-Semites/fascists (Foyle's assistant, a wounded veteran of the failed Norwegian defense in April 1940, isn't so sure those guys are completely wrong, which makes things very interesting), and the third dealt with conscientious objectors and pacifists. Throughout each 90-minute episode is weaved other details of the war experience in Britain, from general anxiety about an impending German invasion, to working-class fishermen racing to rescue anyone they could find off the beaches of Dunkirk to a secret coffin-making factory (preparing for the Blitz). Foyle's son is also a new recruit in the RAF, so all in all it's a very rich setting. All three primary contexts are also just the kind of history I'm interested in regarding the war years, and it's so far been a refreshing change from the rah-rah-yet-weepy rhetoric about the "Greatest Generation."