On this morning's walk with the dog and baby, I decided to tell him the story of why papa's been anxious for the past couple months: it's because I've been waiting to get edits on Babel No More from my agent, and then, once I got them, had to squeeze time out of very full days to revise the manuscript. Well, I told him, I finished yesterday, which means that the proposal will go out next week at the earliest, once we do some clean up to the proposal. Actually, that's been very weird this time around: writing a proposal for a book that's already written. A proposal, by its very nature as a sales document, is inflationary in its promises; you'll hang the moon in the first chapter, cure cancer in the second, etc. Everyone understands that the book, when it takes shape, is inevitably human, and the moon's hung with style, and you cured five kinds of cancer, not all of them. That's not deception. It's what you do when you sell something that's not written yet. But my book, which I'm proud of, is finished. It does everything I wanted it to. I pose several questions, and get answers to them all, and it's the first book on the topic that's ever done that. All in a narrative that moves, that shakes off the stodginess of Um..., and is even more thoroughly researched. Writing this proposal was an interesting exercise in honesty, because what's great about the book is actually there -- it's not just a promise, it's really there.

The baby fell asleep a long time ago, but I think he understands.

In my Design Observer essay, "A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention," I imagined what I called an "attention tax" that aspiring writers, musicians, artists, et al. should pay. It was based on the notion that writers don't read or buy enough books, and we pay fealty (and real money) to cultural forms that don't kill writing directly, but endanger it by competing for attention. I summarized the tax like this:

If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. Give your attention to the industry of your choice.

I might have also said, don't bemoan your inability to sell your book if you don't yourself buy books.

Well, the indie press Tin House Books and literary journal Tin House has stipulated that submissions between August 1 and November 30 must be accompanied by a receipt from a bookstore.

In the spirit of discovering new talent as well as supporting established authors and the bookstores who support them, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts dated between August 1 and November 30, 2010, as long as each submission is accompanied by a receipt for a book from a bookstore. Tin House magazine will require the same for unsolicited submissions sent between September 1 and December 30, 2010...ALL MANUSCRIPTS WITHOUT RECEIPT OR EXPLANATION WILL BE RETURNED UNREAD IN SASE.

I love this and heartily support not only the requirement, but that it be made permanent. There's a work-around for writers who can't afford books or prefer e-books, so it's not absolutely exclusionary, which is fair. Anything that makes writers, who would publish and presume upon others' attention, examine what attention commitments (and economic commitments) they themselves make is a wonderful, wonderful thing. (And to see part of my essay come true, well, that's just icing.)

Did Calvin Coolidge's family use sign language when they didn't want to be overheard?

I don't know, but that was the search query someone used to get to the website for Um... recently.

I always thought that Coolidge's best weapon against being overheard was not to say much at all. There's a nice anecdote in Um... about Coolidge, who used to gather reporters to the White House every week for off-the-record chats. He was the first American president with a policy against being quoted verbatim (as I write on page 236 of Um...) -- reporters weren't allowed to quote him directly or even write down his words. One time, Coolidge castigated a reporter he saw taking shorthand of what the president was saying.

"Are you taking down in shorthand what I say?"

"Yes, sir," the reporter replied.

"Now I don't think that is right," Coolidge said. "I don't think that is the proper thing to do. Who do you represent?"

"David Lawrence," the reporter replied.

"Well, I wish you would tell Mr. Lawrence that I don't think it is the right thing to do...I don't object to you taking notes as to what I say, but I don't quite throw my communications to the conference into anything like finished style or anything that perhaps would naturally be associated with a Presidential utterance," Coolidge said.

The irony is this: we know exactly how the exchange went because it was recorded by a White House stenographer.

Last week, The Morning News published an essay I was first assigned to write by Rolling Stone back in 2002, in which I found the first student I caught plagiarizing and interviewed her about how it impacted her life. The piece got killed (because I didn't know what I wanted to write) but I remained fond of the work and recently decided to resuscitate it. The essay is here.

It sparked some conversation around the interwebs when it was reposted at The Awl, Huffington Post , and D Magazine. You can read how and where it was tweeted around here.

It also provoked a letter to the editors at The Morning News, which was posted today here. The letter came from Elliot Hartwell, a graduate student at UC Davis. Here's my response to Elliot:

Dear Elliott,

Your note is puzzling. You start out agreeing with me, and by the end you're in full-blown ad hominem mode. I won't venture to diagnose what this suggests your experiences as a graduate student or as an instructor might be. I will say that nowhere in my piece do I say that I removed a statement of plagiarism policy from my syllabi. Nowhere do I claim to have stopped hunting plagiarists. And nowhere do I say that I stopped dealing with people I caught. You have felt free to read that into my essay. I wrote an essay that pursued nuance of morality and biography, yet it seems to have provoked you (and a few other readers, judging by the comments that were left on websites where this essay was linked) to accuse me of some sin against civilization itself. I invite you to quote for me from my essay where I said that moral standards do not matter. I'll make that offer even broader: I invite you to quote for me from anything I've ever written that glorifies or sanctions cheating in any form. But the essay is imperfect, because I didn't describe what I did when I discovered plagiarism in the semesters following. I responded by doing my primary job, which was to teach writing. Of course, I had to uphold institutional policy, but when policy conflicted with teaching, I let the pedagogical guide my hand. I should have assigned more writing to Haley, not less--as it stood, she only wrote six papers that semester (three drafts, three revised drafts), not the eight papers that her classmates did. I should have made her write me an apology. I should have made her write an apology to the website's author. I should have made her accountable, and I should have made her articulate her accountability in writing. I happen to think that school at any level should endeavor to make better people, not merely better students. In that, the punishment failed. I failed. As for the integrity of the academy you believe in, well, let's just say that scholars and researchers are part of the culture, not apart from it, despite their insistences to the contrary. I don't know you, but allow me the presumption of hoping that you learn this gently when the time comes.

Michael

Clearly, the conundrum that is student authorship in higher education hasn't gone away, and neither has the tendency to moralize simplistically about what instructors' proper responses should be.

Needless to say, we've talked more about signing than we've actually signed. DOG and CAT get into regular rotation, as does MORE. Other than that, we're using spoken English. All throughout the last couple months, the baby's said phantom words a couple of times. For instance, you ask him some question, and he responds with something that sounds like "yes." Dad double takes, Mom double takes, and we ask each other: Did you hear that? Who's talking in the baby's mouth? (Babies, of course, precipitated the birth of ventriloquism: up to about three months ago, I could give voice to stuffed animals and he'd look at the stuffed animal, but now he looks at me. It's not enough motivation to learn how to throw my voice, but I do see where the impulse comes from.)

We're such language magpies around here. When the baby starts teething, we'll give him sushki, Russian for "dry little things." (Picked this up from a New Yorker restaurant review.) His pacifier we call a "suck suck." The toy his mother sewed him she coined "a stick of giraffe," after another toy came, a gift, which she called "a sack of tiger." In his nose are mocos, Spanish for "snots." And this morning he became Señor Fragil. And then there are the baby signs: in semi-regular rotation: cat, dog, eat, more.

Last weekend we went to NYC so I could meet up with my new agent, David Patterson, of Foundry Media, where this was waiting for me at the door:

It was good to talk, talk shop, talk books, talk writing, the whole thing. But first, we had to ogle my son, who loved the conference room and wasn't fazed by the business talk:

Managed to remember to teach the sign for "dog" today. Also invented a sign for "outside," which I know is going to come back and haunt me -- the boy poking one finger through the other hand's closed fingers, over and over and over. But what the hell. And sometimes, we'll want to be outside.

Babel No More is a scientific book -- not in the sense that it's laden with charts and figures, and not because the action takes place in laboratories, but because it attempts to provide reliable information about language superlearners, that is, information that's not self-reported or anecdotal, but that can be verified, compared, and synthesized with other knowledge. And that's never been done before, not on this topic, of people who can speak a lot of languages and who have an easier time than others learning them.

So our baby is 6 months old, and we're about to start using baby sign language, which I view with some trepidation -- oh, great, another language to stumble around in. On the other hand, kids don't seem to develop very big repertoires of signs, so even though I'm sleep-deprived and distracted, I think I can remember two dozen signs. More. Eat. Drink. Cat. Dog. Thank you. Please. Outside.

This decision is pretty representative of the decisions we've made overall. In an interesting scholarly paper analyzing some hearing families who use baby sign, the authors (Pizer, Walters, Meier) write that "baby signing fits neatly into the parenting ideologies prevalent in the professional class in the United States. These ideologies value early communication with infants and promote the adaptation of the physical, social, and linguistic environment to their perceived needs." Yes, that's us. Professional class; adapt the environment to the infant's needs; promote early communication.

One of my favorite books to read in preparation for parenthood was David Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings">, a vast (and very readable) cross-cultural and historical account of the cultural meanings of various stages of parenthood and childhood. There (and on his website, here) he lays out two broad models for when cultures decide that children should be socialized. One model he calls "pick when ripe," which is used in societies where babies and toddlers are largely ignored, may not be named until they're weaned, and undertake what he calls a "village curriculum" -- that is, not a formal education, but running errands, running messages, and doing small-scale versions of adult tasks. The other model, indicative of industrialized societies (Europe, Japan, the US), he calls "pick when green." In that model, it's never too early to socialize babies. Teaching signs to babies for use is pure "pick when ripe."

To be clear, we're not just teaching him how to say what he wants, which will supposedly make our lives easier, we're socializing him.
--We're socializing him into the notion that children's self-expressions are significant in some fashion -- too significant to be merely guessed at or ignored
--We're teaching him that children can have opportunities to display knowledge as soon as possible (and in fact, one of his roles already is to put on display what he can do; his "tricks")
--We're promoting socially appropriate behavior
--and we're promoting how to make one topic of communication the communication itself, which is what you get in a family with two highly verbal people.
--We're socializing him in how people interact with each other, at a more basic level (like how we take one-at-a-time turns when talking), as well as what are the platforms for further interaction.

It is not, I'll admit, about promoting an awareness of Deaf culture, or even building the start of basic fluency in American Sign Language, and I see that websites on baby signing promote this as a plus, including this dubious claim: "Should your baby continue to learn American Sign Language past his or her 3rd year, s/he will have acquired a 2nd or even 3rd language!" I mean, let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, so I'll be posting more on this, including a summary of the research that evaluates the claims that teaching babies sign makes them smarter and verbally more precocious, and maybe I'll dig into some work from Australia about the predictors of verbal precocity.