Periods of intellectual intensity...

Leave it to danah to realize all the cool stuff first... one thing I noticed in the last week (finals week) in more than one place was the tendency for very deep thought amongst my fellow inmates (read: graduate students). While trying to synthesize hundreds of pages of reading into two-page essays, it must be natural that this intellectual intensity bleeds into every aspect of your life.

* Hallelujah *

Intellectual engagement != working. But boy can you justify it as such. Blessed be my friends who came to check in and brought me external stimulii upon which to thrust my spiraling brain. Somehow, the best conversations about philosophy, politics and religion always happen during finals. There's something about feeling like you're thinking intensely so it must be the same as finals to feel refreshed.

There's something else too... I'm not sure what to call this phenomenon. There's a tendency for things to "just work out" during finals week. For example, turning papers in for people when they couldn't possibly do it themselves... or, in my case, learning that an offhand piece of advice I gave someone a month ago has lead to an amazing result.

What was that piece of advice? It was:

"Get a lawyer."

You'd never think that that's the best solution to a problem and I sure as hell think its very low on the list of things I recommend people do to solve their problems. In this case, it worked out.

More detail for the interested: A friend and colleague has been working on a book for almost a decade and a half. This book is one of a kind and there is nothing that treats the subject with such depth, clarity and precision. My friend's been locked into a publishing contract from hell for a number of years. This book, at 12pt font, would be around 1000 pages. Apparently, for this publisher that's just too damn big. So the publisher said my friend would have to either cut some content, reduce the size of the font or put some pages in an external web site.

None of these options were satisfactory to my friend. Eventually, the publisher wanted to get the book down to 9pt font (!!!) and reduce its size to 800 pages. I told my friend, "If there's one thing I've learned from Edward Tufte, it's don't ever let someone fuck up your work. That is, don't end up with 15 years of work down the drain and a book that you are ashamed has your name on it (like Newton's Optica where only the first copy was allowed to be printed with his name on it)."

I said, "Get a lawyer. You need out of your publishing contract." My friend got a lawyer and $3000 or so later, (s)he was out of the contract and slightly depressed that (s)he'd have to go pedal to publishers again.

Here's the kicker: about seven days after my friend is released from the contract, the publisher goes out of business. Bankrupt. Some of you may realize the implications of this, but for those who don't: If my friend's book was still under contract when this publisher went bankrupt, this book and a good deal of my friend's life's work, would have been considered an asset of the publisher to be valued towards paying back the publisher's creditors. My friend's book would have been in publishing limbo... and would have probably ended up as a Fox News special of some sort to attempt to make as much money for the creditors as possible.

One indirect good deed done.

Posted by joebeone at Mayo 22, 2004 10:33 AM | TrackBack