Endless Knots

Another stop on the writer's blog tour

 

From Miles from Brooklyn (see below)

Accepting the baton toss from Avra Wing’s thoughtful post on the continuing writer’s blog tour to whom I bow in thanks for her lovely work (After Isaac, for example) and for this invitation.

What are you currently working on?

Edits for a novel, the first volume of a trilogy; inching along with the second volume, which I spend more time thinking about than adding words to; returning periodically to a memoir that is probably finished draft-wise but needs a thorough edit; and,, moving to the back of the line for the moment, a nonfiction book or article or essay or just a blog post (the ever-shrinking idea) that is an easier mark for me because I’ve done a number of such books in the past.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

“Genre: a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.” Which means that I don’t fit one. I write different kinds of work with different voices and different intents dictated by the material. So a novel does not read like a memoir or a nonfiction book and yet my style is likely similar across the forms. (I use a lot of parens, --'s, and series of independent clauses.) I suspect that this question was generated by someone who ONLY writes in one form – mysteries for example or children’s books – but I plead genre-less.

Why do you write what you do?

Why do I write at all? It’s an impulse that’s been driving me for as long as I can remember, that never recedes. Sentences, phrases, word choices are always running through my head. I’m waiting for the neurotechnology that captures such things effortlessly. They always sound so great when you think them and then when it comes time to do this, actually record them, well, maybe I don’t want that device after all.

How does your process work?

I write for a bit, whatever that period of time might be – fifteen minutes, four hours, sometimes longer—then call it quits for a while. When I come back to it, which could be a few hours later or next day or …, I start from the beginning again. That return to the starting line is a warm-up and a good editing pass as I see awful things that cannot stay while I try to go on, almost as if the garbage needs to go out before starting to cook again. It may not be the most efficient way to do it but it’s the way I’ve always written even while mixing metaphors.

 

Now I throw the baton to Miles from Brooklyn, aka Miranda Stamps and Jay Albany, who are chronicling their Australian odyssey in a four-wheel drive vehicle towing a camper trailer with Lake and Finn, their five-year-old twins; cancer doctor, mother, and writer Robin Schoenthaler; and the indescribably eclectic techno-seer and writer Susan Scrupski (that link taking you to just one of her writing venues).

"Charting Culture"

The fad to chart massive amounts of data often leaves me (and others) shrugging. Cool pictures but...

This one is original -- charting the migration of well-known people from their births to their deaths, principally in the general Europe-to-North-America neighborhoods. I need to spend more time with it to understand what it's really telling us -- same same problem again -- meanwhile, this is very worth spending time with.

From YouTube description:

This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble. The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals. The team is based at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I'm not surprised to see that Barabasi is involved.

Here's the link (embed not working).

The branches of coincidence during the "anniversary"

Yesterday marked three years since Jeff died, which we spent together, indulging in massages, and eating his favorite meal.

"You're here because it's Dadpa's birthday," either Lake or Finn said when I arrived.

"It's not his birthday," the other said. "After you die, your birthday is called your anniversary."

It was so clever that it wasn't worth "correcting." Right. Forevermore, June 11 is Dadpa's anniversary.

A few hours later and quite out of the blue, I received an email from our neighbor Eleanor Rubin, an artist whose work we loved (we bought several pieces) and whom I only have seen occasionally over the years and not at all in the last three:

Hello, Jessica

It is impulsive of me to send a note and say hello.  I hope my note does not feel intrusive.  I think of you often and miss seeing you both.

Today, reading a book called " The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge," I came across an image of an "OrgScope by Jeffrey Stamp."  It made me remember a day, (must have been '11) when I met Jeffrey out walking his dog and he told me of his diagnosis.  I'm sure my response was inadequate but the moment is etched in my memory. I wished then as I wish now that I'd known how to respond fully.  Jeffrey seemed so much himself and yet I doubted that I'd ever see him again.  And I never did...

And then I remembered that about two years ago, I received a permission request from Manuel Lima, asking for permission to include a picture of OrgScope in this book on "visualizing branches of knowledge." And that I'd blogged one of Manuel's very clear talks here.

 

Explain to me why my neighbor wrote yesterday. Explain, please.

Best fried chicken in Boston? Try Back Bay Station

Vegetarians, avert eyes and try this post. Or this one. Or even this.

But if you're a flexitarian, then I bet you like fried chicken as much as me. Love it.

And so when I stumbled into Boston's Back Bay Station a few years ago starving and about to hop on the train to NY, I was drawn by the redolence of fried chicken. At a food court. Delicious and since then I've tried to procure same again but without luck. I was always there at the wrong time.

However recently (i.e. earlier today) and in the same situation -- and although it was barely 11 AM -- I found myself in front of T.J. Enterprises, talking with T.J. himself, who, once he heard how much I love his fried chicken, was willing to put it on offer earlier than usual. And so I enjoyed an early lunch/late breakfast of fried chicken on the train and learned the following:

1. T.J. is from Laurel, Mississippi, where he learned how to make it.

2. He perfected it via trial and error, a little less of this and a little more of that.

3. He usually serves it from 11:30 on.

4. Much as I dislike nuked chicken, it was absolutely delicious.

5. I should have taken a picture of T.J. but instead have only this to show for it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maya, who lived in Stamps, Arkansas

When people die, their good can inflate to fill the sky, fill the screens, and so they are everywhere for a few days. Which is how we've been learning so much about Maya Angelou this past week, how the glorious tribute from her son, Guy Johnson, also a writer, is in many links. He said the kind of thing you might hear from a child in a eulogy but in this case he said it while she could still hear it: How was it growing up in your mother's shadow, Oprah asked? I grew up in her light, he said.

His tribute matters most but the others are remarkable too, including "Maya and Me and Maya" by Charles Blow in the May 28, 2014, NY Times. "The news of Maya Angelou’s death arrived with the abruptness of a great twister — violent, without warning, tearing things up and flipping things over." And that's just his lede.

 

It got me started on a search for Stamps, Arkansas. Stamps, as in my children's last name, as in my late husband's. Late? As if he's just behind schedule?

 

Charles Blow was from a small town about 50 miles from Stamps, which was where Maya Angelou (née Marguerite Annie Johnson) lived with her grandmother from the age of three to seven and again a few years later during the period when she did not speak (rendered mute after being raped at age 8 by her mother's boyfriend who was subsequently murdered--"[a] breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart," she wrote, none of which should be in parenthesis).

 

So I looked Stamps up and, yes, the Stamps for whom that little town (pop. ~2000) is named is descended from Thomas Stampe, who arrived in Jamestown, VA, in 1635 from Oxfordshire, England, the same ancestor of said husband and those children.

 

In any precise mapping, it's not really a connection at all but it's the way my mind works, always searching for another anchor, another way to tie everything to everything. And so in the subtle world, where faint lines reach across generations, across boundaries, in the vessel that contains all that is and was, a hamlet in Arkansas connects my daughters, their cousins, my grandsons, my in-laws to Maya too.

 

A distant cousin (someone with a genealogical bent could do the math) likely knew of Maya's grandmother in Stamps, extrapolating from this line in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings:

 

Early in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to the sawmen in the lumberyard and the seedmen at the cotton gin. Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time assured her business success.

 

The races were segregated and without a lot more research I cannot find the clickable link, the node that connects the Stamps family to her directly, but they breathed the same dust in that corner of Arkansas, just across the Texas and Louisiana borders.

 

 

 

General Shinseki, a wargame, and the networks of hierarchy

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki is in the news and it's not the first time he's been center stage.

Students of the Iraq War may recall that at the start of the war, Shinseki, a four-star general, was the Chief of Staff of the Army who got into a public row with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over troop strength. Shinseki said the US needed on the order of 250,000 troops in Iraq once the war wound down. In a clear rebuke, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz made it known that they disagreed and Shinseki was forced out of his post.

Ultimately, Shinseki's view was vindicated and supported across the aisle and in The White House.

It was precisely when this was happening in the spring of 2003 that Jeff Stamps and I came into contact with General Shinseki, something we neither planned nor ever imagined. We pulled that story together for an unpublished book, "Leading Networks," and, given Shinseki's prominence at the moment, I think it's worth retelling here.

 

General Shinseki, right, with Admiral Vern Clark, left, also mentioned below,
and Marine General Michael Hagee; photo from NY Times, 1/12/07

 

 

On February 10, 2003, I answered the phone and found an unlikely caller. "I'm calling on behalf of (then-) Major General Jim Dubik," he said. "He'd like you to come to a wargame."

Unified Quest 03, the aide explained, would be the first Joint Forces-US Army Wargame, a weeklong simulation that would take place at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We would be among a small group of outsiders; the other 700 people would be from military forces both in the U.S. and among American allies and from defense contracting firms.

I said that I'd never heard of General Dubik. "Well, he’s heard of you", the aide replied, explaining that Dubik had read and been interested in The Age of the Network, a book we’d written ten years earlier.

Lt. Gen. Jim Dubik, now retired, photo from Penn State Dickinson School of Law site,
where he holds the Gen. Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership

Jeff was as flabbergasted as I when I went into his study to tell him.

We had met as anti-Vietnam War activists in 1968 while students at Oxford University.

In contrast to some of our friends in 2003 who argued with us, we strongly opposed the then-looming Iraq War.

We decided to attend.

And then we told our friends what we were planning to do. Invariably we got the same reply: “You’re going to be doing what?” Then quickly, nearly all followed with, “Thank God. I’m so glad you’re going.”

Thus began our involvement with the American military, particularly the Army, where we’ve discovered that some of its ideas, particularly in regard to leadership, are ahead of those we've encountered as consultants in the commercial and non-profit sectors.

To attend a wargame was beyond our ken. So it was with apprehension, curiosity, and a little discomfort that we went to the Carlisle Barracks, reflected in a summary I wrote after the event:

"My coming-in-picture of a 'wargame?' I thought it would be fought in a space the size of at least a basketball court, maybe even as large as the hangar I once toured at Douglas Aircraft where the MD-11 was being built.

"And, I wasn’t sure precisely what would transpire on this 'battlefield.' I thought it was unlikely that we'd find people playing laser tag or paintball, but I wasn’t even certain of that. I was unprepared for the wargame to be 'fought' in crowded conference rooms, where it was hard to hear what people were saying and where the commander’s back was usually turned toward most of those in the room."

The wargame that (now-retired Lieutenant General) Dubik invited us to—in this case, a thinly disguised confrontation with a country called “Nair” (unscramble the letters)—included our attending the daily debriefings for the “flag officer” (read highest-ranking officers) at the end of each day. There, the senior military strategists, many retired, would deconstruct the day’s wargame results.

Following the opening session at the War College’s Bliss Hall, which I remember as being very loud and filled with promotional videos for various weapons and tanks, Bill Rittenhouse, then a career staffer for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command and an organizer of the event, found us stumbling around, unsure of what to do next or where to go. He welcomed us, indicating that he wasn’t quite certain what we were supposed to be doing either, but immediately introduced us to Clint Ancker, a retired colonel doing research on the Army’s structure and director of the famed Center for Army Lessons Learned.

We knew who Ancker was because one of his aides had been corresponding with us over the prior few months on “echelonment.” The word, from the French, literally means rungs on a ladder, and is the term the military uses to describe its levels of hierarchy.

Ancker and his group had been tasked with responding to a “request” from the then-Secretary of Defense. Now that the forces were “joint,” meaning that they all had to play nice together, Rumsfeld wanted the Army to remove a level, an echelon, from its traditional command structure, a rung near the top. Over lunch, Ancker drew some pictures about options for the Army’s reorganization, which reassured us that our expertise in networks had some relevance to what they were working on.

From that informative lunch, Ancker moved us along to meet then-Brigadier General (later Lieutenant General) Mike Vane, a self-described California beach boy in his youth, and one of the conference co-chairs.

Lieutenant General Mike Vane, now retired, photo from US Army site

Vane, in turn, took us into a small room to wait for General Dubik. “Hi, I’m Jim Dubik,” said the informally dressed general, extending his hand as he walked in.

After the usual pleasantries, we asked the central questions: “Why are we here and what do you want us to do?” Dubik responded in a way that we’ve become accustomed to in working with senior executives.

“I don’t know precisely,” he said. “I read your book about networks. We’re fighting a networked enemy. We have a net-centric warfare strategy in place. And we’re responding to the SecDef’s request for material on echelonment.”

Dubik told us to “wander around” and to try to absorb as much as we could as quickly as possible, and to reflect back what we noticed. He asked that we pay attention to “jointness” (how the separate forces worked together) and “echelonment,” in particular, but cautioned us not to artificially limit our scope.

These intriguingly broad terms of reference allowed us to follow an unscripted flow. After a tour of the wargame premises by one of Vane’s aides, we were, for the most part, left on our own.

Over the following week, we talked with dozens of people both formally and informally. We sat in on sessions where specific maneuvers were debated in snatches and at length. We shared meals with generals and admirals, trading health tips and nutrition theories with a four-star. We exchanged references with analysts, media, and advisors.

And, we attended the highest-level meeting of our lives, an “out-brief,” military-speak for what business refers to as a post-mortem, with the Joint Chiefs.

On the last day of the wargame, General Shinseki arrived to hear the conclusions of the exercises. It was one of the rare events that we weren't invited to but when it was over, the ground crew involved with putting on the event—the schleppers, the logistics people, and the sponsoring senior military officers, including Dubik and Vane—stood in a line as Shinseki spoke to them, thanking each individually.

Everyone knew what was happening—indeed, Shinseki's disagreement with the Bush administration over troop strength required in Iraq, an estimate that later proved to be entirely accurate, had been broadcast on television—and sadness seeped across the floor just beneath the evident respect that seemed to pour from people's eyes. Shinseki then walked down the line, pressing a medal commemorating the wargame into the hand of each person who'd worked the event. After the meet-and-greet, Dubik pressed one into each of our hands.

The next day, we drove south from Carlisle to Fort McNair in Washington for the “Senior Leaders Seminar,” the last event of this historic wargame. There, the generals and admirals who orchestrated the wargame, along with a handful of participants from the Carlisle exercises, met with the military's top brass, including the Chief of Naval Operations, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the Supreme Allied Commander of Atlantic, along with their peers—as well as the then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz. Of the ninety guests, as best we could determine we were the only true civilians, and I was the only woman. We were seated just behind Wolfowitz and the Army Chief of Staff.

This gathering at the National Defense University took place the very day after then-President Bush landed on the USS Lincoln to proclaim “Mission Accomplished."

General Shinseki led the proceedings. Seated to his left was Wolfowitz, who arrived late and left barely ten minutes later, just moments after the briefing began. (An aide came in, handed him a note, and he said that he had to leave because "the Secretary needs me.")

Surely Wolfowitz could not have wanted to hear the words of one retired four-star Air Force general who said plainly, “Preemption does not work.” Preemption, the Bush administration policy employed in the Iraq War, the general said, violated the principles of war, left the enemy no choice but to respond with unconventional methods (meaning weapons of mass destruction), and placed the preempting forces without any of their conventional means of applying pressure incrementally.

This “After Action Review,” the systematic method the Army developed for reviewing its “actions,” included a ten-minute video positioning the history and chronology of this particular wargame, emerging issues identified by the wargame teams, and feedback from those participating.

We were told that this meeting was historic: It was the first time the highest levels of US military had convened as a network of peers for a wargame debriefing. Hot on the heels of the initial and what then appeared to have been the stunningly successful invasion of Iraq—reportedly the most "joint" operation in history—was “a not-to-be-missed opportunity,” which is how Admiral Vern Clark, then the Chief Naval Officer, described it to us as we were leaving.

The meeting lasted for a few hours; our involvement with the military lasted for another five years until the last of the crop of senior officers whom we knew retired.

What we took away was that while the “joint” approach to military affairs as practiced at this wargame is still being worked out, it is evident that the complexity of global relations in the 21st century demands it.

The immediate, mind-boggling dilemma of security in a pre-emptive, time-warped world with unpredictable enemies who have access to unthinkable weapons no longer allows individual and separate hierarchies to march forward.

 

This American Ira #thisamericanlife

 

 

Photo via Paramount Theatre site with thanks

Of Vermont's many attributes, its theaters are venues for first-rate performers. So it was that on Saturday night we impulsively signed up for "AN EVENING WITH IRA GLASS" at the Paramount, Rutland's premier venue (we saw Joan Baez there last summer; Melissa Etheridge and Ziggy Marley are coming soon, but not together :).

I'm not a regular listener to "This American Life" but I hear it often enough to remember stories and to think that it's an interesting show, one that I learn from. Plus I worry about Ira's dog, Piney. Others do too, apparently, as when he opened the show up for questions, the first was about whether the little canine is still eating kangaroo meat. (No, they've run the gamut of mammal meat and are back to pork. For those who don't know, Piney develops allergies to his carnivorous offerings after a time. We won't talk about the bunnies.)

Ira Glass photo from TAL site (grazie, again)

It was a good show but, don't hate me, Ira, not the best he's capable of. A very clever opening. Ira enters in the dark, carrying an iPad, kitted out to look like a radio in the dark (at least that's what we can see from the balcony), and speaks about the power of radio, the power of voice, the power of just words.

After a few minutes the lights go up and there he is taller, older, and more slender than his voice would imply. And in a suit and tie. If one were to do a suit-and-tie survey of Vermont and compare it with other states, it would place near the bottom, I'd wager. Perhaps this is explained by Vermont having recently topped the charts for the state with the highest number of hippie indicators and, for the third year running, is number 1 in the Strolling of the Heifers Index, which measures a state on the locavore scale--number of CSAs, food coops, and the like. Not too many hippie heifers strolling around in suit and tie in the greenest of states (it means "green mountain," thanks to explorer Samual Champlain who so named it).

Still he looked good in it. And he did a nice job of weaving in appalling stories (one about a thirteen-year-old who'd been bitten by a shark and suffered not surprisingly dire consequences, another about a fourteen-year-old who had become a pedophile, which was horrifying not just because he was one but because the psychologist whom he saw said that she had no idea how or where to have him treated). So the tidbits, including a scatological one featuring David Sedaris (shocking, I know), were alternately funny and thought-shaking-upping.

The centerpiece was for me, finally as in I've been waiting to understand it for years, a decent explanation of semiotics. Perhaps you're different from me and, when you hear about something that sounds very sophisticated, you don't assume that the rest of the world knows about it and that you're the village dunce. Or that references to those associated with it (in this case Roland Barthes) are familiar to these hypothetical in-the-know other people and that they all probably studied with him. Or roomed with him.

Me, I had no idea what semiotics really was (or is as it still exists) until Ira explained it. He majored in it at Brown, in fact, a defeat for his parents who were hoping for a career with a more predictable revenue stream, viz. why the hell didn't he become a doctor? OK, semioticians, I leave it to you to explain properly but what I understood is that this field is more about meaning than style, more about meta-messages of text than whether the writer uses good analogies, so, out on a limb I climb, it's more about the undercurrents, the deep raison d'être of a piece, than its genre or literary/philosophical category. PS: I'm certain I have this wrong as proved by this definition:

 

From Merriam-Webster 

 

But it helped me to understand a bit more about how Ira and Co. put their stories together, about which he offered the following formula: action-action-action, idea; action-action-action, idea. Listen to the program and see if you can make out the pattern. First this happens, then that, then that, then they throw in some kind of overarching statement explaining what they're talking about. 

Ira is funny, self-effacing, and mumbles just a bit, which had my dear companion, who has perfect hearing so far as I can tell (he seems to know what I'm doing from a room or two away), asking, "What did he say?" several times. I didn't always know.

Ira's wrap focused around a clever theme, which I wish he'd used for the whole show. Having just listened to some tapes of the incomparable Studs Terkel interviewing Zero Mostel (as he said, you have to be of an age to get these references), Ira contrasted what he was doing with a genre that Mostel eschewed, what he called "mishpuchah" stories. Mostel disliked yarns about families (mishpuchah, in Yiddish means the WHOLE family, friends, hangers-on, you know, your network) where the same problems happen to the same kinds of people with the same kinds of outcomes. The example, if I remember correctly, was daughter gets pregnant, parents get upset, etc and so on.

Ira thrives on mishpuchah (although he pronounces it mishpAchah, which means he's from a different Yiddish background from mine, mine being right naturally). His stories are all mishpu-ah-chah and they reel us right in.

That to me is his theme and that could be his hook, line, and sinker, speaking of reeling us in. Who am I to tell Ira Glass how to tell a story? But if he asked, here's what I would say: Start with Zero, throw out your counter-intuitive hypothesis that challenges one of the greatest performers of all time, illustrate with a bunch of shark/pedophile/Piney stories, and then end with a clip from a show, going out with music, leaving the last words unsaid.

Still I loved it: We rated the show to each other: my he, the trained engineer, gave it a 6, I, untrained critic, gave it an 8, and I'm busily integrating what I learned even as I type. Thanks, Mr. Glass.

Real PS: The question about his use of music was perfectly illustrated. The iPad is his guitar, piano, and harmonica all in one, and he demonstrated how they use music in the show to show progression, how they fade to make points, and how they go silent to stun the audience with the big reveal. 

Wheat House is on the market and the Boston Globe likes it

 

 

 

The Samuel Wheat House
399 Waltham Street, West Newton, MA

In about two weeks' time, my house will look like this again. The peonies, which I transplanted from the far edge of the property to the front garden some years ago, always bloom around my birthday, the moment that may be Wheat House's most glorious.

Why Wheat House? Read on. But first: the house is on the market and Boston Globe reporter Eileen McEleney Woods gave it a very nice write-up in Sunday's Globe Magazine. Scroll about halfway down the article and you'll find this description:

PROS Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Samuel Wheat House, a pre-Revolutionary Georgian built in 1735, exudes warmth: Much of this gambrel, particularly the kitchen, is sunny, five rooms (including two bedrooms) have fireplaces, and the original wide-plank hardwood flooring is golden. Amid all of this history (the dining room was once used as a doctor’s office, and the original doorway, ornate and stately, still graces the front entrance) are modern conveniences, such as the stainless appliances in the kitchen and the sink in a mudroom closet. It’s a five-minute walk to the commuter rail. CONS Take care pulling out of the driveway.

Thank you, Ms. McEleney Woods. It's heartwarming to read such a glowing description of the abode that our family has loved so deeply for so many years.

There are houses that people live in and there are homes that even the one-time visitor remembers. Looking at comments on my Facebook page where I first posted about the house being on the market, I find a number of visitors who were there perhaps once or twice.

• I will miss your house dearly!
• Love your house. 
• The house looks amazing Jessica, I have a lot of fond memories ...
• I have MANY very fond memories of that house, even before you moved in... don' t forget to tell people about the bomb shelter under the back yard!
• I remember that lovely home very well.....and leading the seder at your dining room table during college!
• I will always cherish the first time I went to your home it was wonderful and I love the house.

It's an instant nostalgia machine, a great place for gatherings, and a very easy house to live in. It's also in walking distance of the famed West Newton Cinema, one of Boston's premier movie houses; 10 places to eat including Lumiere, Blue Ribbon, The Local, Shogun, L'Aroma, Comella's, and West Newton Pizza; the commuter rail; the express bus; and at least 45 banks (a new development).

And further to two of the Globe reporter's points: 1. It is indeed sunny because, wisely, those pre-Revolutionary builders knew what solar advocates today seek--it's the only house on the street that faces south (all the rest face east and west); and 2. Yes, when a road is built around a house that went up nearly 200 years before there even were cars, then driveways can be a problem, which is solved by creating a turnaround so you're always facing out.

 

 

Having lived here for so many years, I know every nook and cranny, every detail, like these facts:

• What is now the den has seven doors (to the second floor, to the cellar, to the china cabinet, to the playroom, to the dining room, to the kitchen, and to the passthrough);
• There are four giant linen drawers outside the second-floor laundry (the best place for a laundry);
• There's a plug in the middle of the dining room floor because that's where the doctors who previously lived here had their offices;

 

 

• There's a third floor with a full bath and two bedrooms or studies or studios or whatever you want there that are so far away from the kitchen that it's as if you're in a different building;
• The original horsehair insulation is so good that until it's well over 90 for a few days running you don't even need air conditioning;
• What was the sixth bedroom is now a walk-in closet, making for easy living;
• The closets overall are large, plentiful, and unusually ample for an old house;
• There's a coat closet under the front stairs;
• With six rooms on the ground floor, a hundred people can still circulate at a party;
• The post in the northwest corner of the kitchen is actually a tree trunk;
• The wideboard pine floors (18" and wider) in the former dining room were installed in the early 1800s (you can tell by the nails, one refinisher told me); 

 

 

• The yard in back feels like a secret garden and, once inside, you have no notice of the street; and,

• Bucky Fuller had dinner here on February 10, 1977.

 

It's a treasure and it's hard to part with.

I pulled together a history of the house for use by the real estate agent (this link takes you to all the pictures). There are relatively few houses in the US with this kind of provenance that have survived intact.

The fine condition of the house is a testament to the quality of the materials and the skill of the original builders. In all the years that we owned it, we never had a major repair, just the typical things that householding brings: painting, replacing appliances, the occasional clogged sink. And so, herewith, culled from a variety of historical records, including the Massachusetts Historical Commission's superb compilation of multiple sources, and which I quote extensively here, though without the quote marks as I rewrote it somewhat extensively--thanks MHC!, I offer...

Wheat House, A History

The house at 399 Waltham Street, known as The Samuel Wheat House and named for its first owner, Dr. Samuel Wheat, has been owned by eight families since it was completed in 1735.

Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, this pre-Revolutionary Georgian retains architectural details typical of the period, including a steep gambrel roof and narrow side elevations. Evidence of alteration includes chimney additions and a six-over-six window sash in the 19^th century and such 20^th-century additions as the garage and library in the 1930s, and the sunroom in 1985. Even with these changes, the house remains remarkably intact and is considered to be of major historical significance.

Samuel Wheat and his wife, Hannah, whose gravestone lists her as a “professor of religion,” were reported to have had 17 children. Dr. Wheat, who came to West Newton in 1713, was the village doctor. First one of their sons, Samuel Jr, and also a doctor, and later their daughter, Catherine, who married Capt. Thomas Eustis, owned the house, which eventually was sold at the turn of the 19^th century to the Davis family, perhaps the same people for whom nearby Davis Avenue is named.

Briefly owned by the Woodford family (he was treasurer of Second Church), the house then became the home of Samuel S. Kilburn (a designer and an engraver) and his family, who lived here until the turn of the 20^th century. In 1898, Mrs. Edward Augustus Holyoke Allen, moved into the house with her children, following the death of her husband, who was a first cousin of Nathaniel Allen, who taught at the Allen School on Webster Street, where the educator Horace Mann also taught.

In 1929, the house was sold to the Baker family, who made a number of renovations, including turning the woodshed into the library, adding the mudroom, the garage, and the sun porch, removing the side door on Waltham Street, which is now where the shelves are between the dining room and the den, and planting the gardens, many of which specimens still survive. The Bakers owned the house until 1955, when they sold it to Dr. Nick and Joyce Stahl, who were married in the garden.

Mary and Richard Burack (who was also a doctor) bought the house in 1959, raising their five children here. During their tenure, they removed the old bake oven in the den, built the fireplace and paneling that now surround it, replaced the front sill, replaced clapboards on the front of the house, and built a bomb shelter in the backyard.

They sold the house to authors Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps on April 18, 1972, three months after they were married, and who renewed their vows in the garden in 1986. While previous owners had previously used the current dining room as a doctor’s office (an electrical plug remains in the middle of the room for the former examination table), the new owners converted several bedrooms to studies where they wrote many books, bringing the first computers into the house when they moved in.

They added storm windows and doors, enclosed the sun porch making it a four-season room, opened an interior window between the kitchen and the den, added 220 wiring throughout, removed all the peeling wallpaper, installed first a woodstove and then a fireplace insert in the den, stripped, stained and polished the mantel around the den fireplace, lined the chimney, replaced the roof, added wood flooring to the kitchen, planted the decorative flower and herb garden in the front yard, added the 1868 bell to the front door, installed brass and porcelain locks on the first floor windows, converted one bathroom to a laundry room, converted a half-bath in the mudroom area to a utility sink for gardening, added Italian glass tiles to the half-bath off the dining room, and returned the house to its original color—red.

They raised two daughters here, Miranda, born in 1977, and Eliza, who was born in the house in 1980; held many birthday parties, meetings, and gatherings; hosted many weddings and wedding receptions for friends; and celebrated the publication of many books of their own and for those of friends.

The house is being sold for the first time in 42 years.

 

Leading ourselves via "the lattice"

June Holley, whose insights and methods for establishing and growing networks are in a class of their own, points today to Phanish Puranam's post on the INSEAD blog, "What Bossless Firms Can Teach Us."

Puranam's round-up of companies that have eschewed traditional hierarchy and bureaucracy for more intelligent self-management points to some popular and successful examples: Valve, the Seattle software company where employees vote with their seats for projects they want to work on (no votes, no project); the California tomato processor, Morning Star, that, as Puranam writes "bases its organisation on a sort of mission statement that is negotiated peer-to-peer rather than imposed by a boss, laying out each employee’s tasks and organisational affiliations;" and, the grandparent of them all, W.L. Gore and Associates, which I mentioned here.

 

We (Jeff Stamps and I) stumbled upon W.L. Gore when we were doing research for The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book. Given all the hoopla about self-governance and jettisoning old authoritarian structures, I'm offering this excerpt which details how Gore has done it all these years. It's simple, sensible, and worth a try, C-Suiters. Good sense can prevail when the agreements, policies, and governance are in place throughout an organization, top-to-bottom. Gore's approach reflects both good organizational design, mutual respect, and a mature approach to how people come to work.

Take a look and see if this makes sense to you, noting Bill Gore's realistic caveats, typically overlooked in the idealistic vision of "leaderless" organizations espoused by people who haven't carefully considered what it takes to make people-working-together work.

From The TeamNet Factor, Chapter 4:

Meet the Lattice: The Free Form Organization That Makes Gore-Tex

Gore-Tex is" a miracle weave in the fabric of the world’s outdoor life." It evaporates sweat while protecting its wearer from the drench of rain. Gore-Tex is a visible, distinctive partner with producers of ski gloves, tents, and clothing of all descriptions. Like Dolby sound, Gore-Tex is known for the special contribution it makes to a wide range of products.

If ever there were a company whose product mirrored its culture, it is W L. Gore & Associates. This lattice textile is made by a lattice organization, a company designed for horizontal interactions where employees are known as “associates.”

In 1982, Inc. magazine runs a cover story on the Newark, Delaware, company best known for its popular product Gore-Tex. Headlined “The Un-manager: Without Ranks and Titles,” the story describes Bill Gore’s “not your average” almost-billion- dollar company. By 1991, the company is among the “400 largest private U.S. Companies.”2

The name “W. L. Gore & Associates” captures the essence of this remarkable enterprise. The design of the company is that of a network. Its core glue is the philosophy of its husband-and-wife founders, Wilbert (“Bill”), who died in 1986, and Genevieve, who remains involved in the company. Business Week features their son Robert in 1990 in an article titled “No Bosses. And Even Leaders Can’t Give Orders.”

The 1982 Inc. story so excites us that we call its author, Lucien Rhodes, who in turn forwards us a poorly typed document with a few handwritten notes on it that Bill Gore has sent him. “The Lattice Organization—A Philosophy of Enterprise” describes the Gore “bureaucracy”:

People group around projects undertaken on the basis of commitment.

The firm’s 5,600 associates (not employees)—now in 46 plants in six countries— have sponsors (not bosses), who serve as their mentors and advocates.

Gore’s projects are boundary crossing teams. “The mathematician, engineer, accountant, machinist, chemist and so on provide a combination of capabilities of a much broader scope than the mere sum of their number. This synergism . . . impels us to join together for mutual benefit.”

STUMP SPEECH TO THE TRIBES

Bill Gore’s paper, written in 1976, was the basis for many talks that he gave over the years to the company’s associates.4 (Which brings us back to the name: everyone who works at W. L. Gore & Associates is an associate.)

It’s not your typical corporate speech. With his ponderous, sometimes mystical tone, Gore sounds more like a 19th-century transcendentalist than the late-2Oth- century entrepreneur that he is. He begins with the “Nature of Man,” the starting point, usually unstated, of every corporate culture. One part of our heritage, he says, comes from hunters and predators with the urge to attack, destroy, loot, vanquish, and overcome competitors. Fortunately, humans evolved new social capabilities that carried the species far beyond this endowment. ‘A further great evolutionary invention is the cooperation of groups made possible by friendship and love.... The tribal group ... combines aggressive capability welded together by emotional interactions.” To Gore, the essence of human nature is co-opetition.

Besides being capable of friendship and love, he says, people are also dreamers. He asks what would happen if people doubled their brain capacity. “If the norm in our society is the utilization of say 10% of our inherent human capabilities, what would be the result if we were able to restructure . . . this to double to 20%?”

People participate in groups because together they can accomplish more than alone, he says. Gore believes accomplishment peaks with about 150 people in the same group. After that, results decline, and it’s time to form another group, a principle that the company puts into practice. Gore breaks plants apart when they exceed 150 to 200 people. This is, roughly, a tribal size, the upper-limit size of groups that people lived in after the invention of language but before the development of agriculture and cities.

When groups pass out of the realm in which everyone knows everyone else, Gore believes “we" quickly translates into “they.” This tiny language signal announces the beginning of turf wars, the identification of enemies, and win-lose maneuvers that eventually bring down even great companies.

THE LATTICE BEHIND THE FACADE

There’s another downside to groups of more than 150 to 200, Gore says. “Beyond some such level, it becomes necessary to impose rules, regulations, procedures and the like that dictate how the cooperation shall be done. Special teams evolve within the lattice structure usually led by someone particularly competent in the discipline or activity of the team. One individual may participate on several such teams and have a leadership role in them. These multi-participant people serve an important liaison function and are often involved ina number of different teams,” Gore says.

To avoid bureaucracy and to reach for that doubling of human capabilities, the company uses the lattice, which has these characteristics:

• No fixed or assigned authority;
• Sponsors, not bosses;
• Natural leadership defined by followership;
• Person-to-person communication;
• Objectives set by those who must make them happen; and
• Tasks and functions organized through commitments.

Leadership “evolves” at the company, according to Daniel D. Johnson, who eventually followed in his former co-worker’s footsteps, leaving Du Pont to join Gore. “You look behind you, and you’ve got people following you.”

In Gore’s view, “Every [successful] organization has a lattice organization that underlies the facade of authoritarian hierarchy. It is through these lattice organizations that things get done. Most of us delight in ‘going around’ the formal procedures and doing things the straightforward and easy way. The legendary subversion of official military procedures by the ‘non-coins’ is an example of this. All astute military leaders utilize this sub rosa lattice.”

For all his unusual ideas, Gore is not a romantic. He doesn’t propose replacing every aspect of hierarchy with lattices because of what he calls obvious difficulties:

• “Stability and long-term constancy require a firm hand at the helm;
• “Decisions must be made. Complete consensus is never achieved;
• “There seems to be some upper limit for which the lattice is effective; and
• “It’s unrealistic for people to set their own salaries."

VOW TO AVOID BUREAUCRACY

“The rest of Corporate America is only beginning to think about how to motivate employees now that there’s a shrinking hierarchy to slot people into,” Joseph Weber says in the 1990 Business Week article. “But Gore, a quirky, family-held plastics company, has never had much of one: It has been experimenting with an almost free-form management structure for 32 years.... Gore isn’t some little countercultural outfit, mind you. By turning a flexible form of DuPont’s Teflon into Gore-Tex, used in fabrics and assorted medical, electronic, and industrial products, the company has grown into a nearly $700 million a year outfit, whose return on assets and equity puts it in the top 5%, whose sales quintupled in 8 years.”

As irony would have it, of course, Gore started his own company because “as a DuPont chemist, he couldn’t get his innovation—Teflon coating for electrical wires—marketed by the big company. When he left, he vowed to avoid stifling bureaucracies, so he tossed out the traditional chain of command for a ‘lattice’ system. In it, any staffer may take an idea or complaint to any other: A machine operator can talk directly with plant leaders.”

In his lattice organization paper, Gore gives DuPont credit for inspiring his “ahead of the time” ideas. “The concept of the lattice originated from my consideration of the operation of ‘Task Forces’ created during the 1950s to carry out research and development within the Du Pont Company. The original ideas have been refined and extended over the past 18 years. The record supports the belief that a lattice organization releases and promotes the creativity of human beings.”

Task forces at DuPont and lattices at Gore are just two expressions of the worldwide, simultaneous, uncoordinated “experiment” with boundary crossing teamnets in the past few decades. 

 

 

World Blogging Tour thanks to BlarneyCrone #WBT

So apparently there's a movement of sorts, passing the blogging baton from poster to poster, under the rubric "World Blogging Tour." The runner who's just come up on me is BlarneyCrone herself, Liz Barron, who's shown up here before. And here. And elsewhere but alas not the point of this post. My job is to reply to the following queries, one of scores, hundreds, thousands, well, at least four bloggers, including Liz (who answered here) participating:

What am I working on?

While I've been blogging less in the past few months, I've been writing more, finishing up some old pieces, including short stories, revising a novel, rough drafting a memoir, and applying to contests and residencies. I'm at the start of a year-long self-imposed writing intensive, which I've been waiting to begin since I was, say, 16.

I got the idea for the novel/trilogy I'm working on walking past the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, site of one of the early battles of the American Revolution. The novel has nothing to do with that but the nearby visitor center (it's now a national park site) has a bookstore that sells the work of famous Concord writers, yup, those pesky Transcendentalists, among them Ms Margaret Fuller, who was not of Concord but spent much time in it. There, on Patriots Day, in 2004, a Massachusetts-only holiday that the rest of the world knows as Boston Marathon Day, I found a small booklet written by Carolyn Wells Healy Dall, containing her recollections of the famous "Conversations" that Margaret convened in Boston in the late 1830s-early 1840s. By the time we were back in the parking lot, I'd conceived the idea for a story, which turned into the first volume of the novel, which has spawned a second...

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

This question raises so many others that I can barely answer it. Genre? Having written business books, articles, humor, poetry, children's stories, literary fiction, satire, and whatever this blogging thing (now in its 9th year) is, I'll go with "completely."  

Why do I write what I do? 

Phrases and sentences are always running through my head. Before a thought is complete, I'm often rewriting it. Titles appear as I'm trying to park the car, choose an item from the grocery shelf, click on a website. I write out of compulsion and desire, often with someone in mind whom I imagine is interested. (Are you? Only you know for sure.)

Much more wants to be written than is and I spend a good amount of time castigating myself for not writing more. 

So why do I write what I do? Because this configuration of molecules, born of New York parents in a small Pennsylvania Dutch town not far from Philadelphia, is passing through its unique spacetime, absorbing, shedding, observing, ignoring, and desperately trying to make sense of this confusing wonder called life. That's why.

How does my writing process work?

I write very quickly, typing as fast as I can, then stop due to time constraints, hunger, an interruption, or because I'm suddenly pleased to see that I've gotten 1000 words out. Then I go back before going on, retreading the same words. A "final first draft" for me could have 30 or 40 passes before the end. This is probably not the best way to write but it's the only way I've ever written. It's as if starting at the beginning gives me the momentum I need to leap ahead. Although I want to get everything out as quickly as possible, I hold on to material for eons, which means I have cartons and cartons of unfinished stuff. My hope is to get a lot of that material into circulation in the months to come.

Now, according to Liz, I'm supposed to pass the baton to four other bloggers. Here goes, Bill Ives, whose blogging helped get me started, the inimitable Alex Bain, Myfanwy Collins, to whom very good writing things are happening, and to Jon Keller, author of Of Sea and Cloud, who's just started blogging.