This last week, I’ve been involved with the distribution end of publication.

Grow With the Flow is to be marketed very largely through our web site, which is not yet up and running. Orders placed on the web site will go directly to The Erie Book Store, owned and operated by my sister, Kathleen Cantrell. During the week, Kath and I have spent hours on the phone figuring out just how to make delivery smooth and error free. Looking over the draft of what we’ve come up with so far, my Peak Potential partner, Marilyn Jones, wrote to say “Well! It is incredible how complicated what seems like a simple thing becomes…” As my friend and hiking partner, Rick Price, (tour guide par excellence, so he should know) is fond of saying, “The Devil is in the details.” Now to find a good source for a mailer – attractive, tough, waterproof, quick to seal, fair price, able to hold one book snugly but still have room for multiple orders…

Matt Miller is a guest columnist with the New York Times while Maureen Dowd is on “book leave.” (I suppose she’s writing one, or on the road selling one, but I’d like to think there were a couple she really wanted to finish reading…)

Mr. Miller seems to be making good use of his borrowed pulpit: I quoted him a couple days ago, and yesterday’s column is being widely e-mailed by NYT readers: In “Honor Thy Teacher,” he argues the case that we should

commit to making the best teachers of poor children millionaires by the time they retire. Done right, this idea would be a win for the kids, the teachers, the unions and the pols.

I forwarded the link to two young friends: one works for the Denver-area schools and is a strong union supporter, the other spent a year seeing the New Orleans schools from the perspective of a Teach For America classroom. I wonder what they’ll think of it?

Don’t you love it when two ideas unexpectedly rub together and give off sparks? My wife sent me an article from today’s New York Times, where Matt Miller writes

Still, there is something telling (if not downright dysfunctional) when a society’s most talented people feel they have to sacrifice the meaningful relationships every human craves as the price of exercising their talent.

A few minutes later, my daily quotation from Verba Volant arrived:

Quotation of the day:
Author - Dario Fo

Italian - ancora non si è capito che soltanto nel divertimento, nella passione e nel ridere si ottiene una vera crescita culturale

English - we still haven’t learned that real cultural growth only comes with enjoyment, passion and laughter.

Incidentally, Verba Volant is a great free site: Every day, they send you an interesting quotation, translated in many languages.
Click to subscribe to Verba Volant

John Paul Lumpp, the designer of Grow With the Flow, wrote me this afternoon to say

D,
I just got the proofs for GWTF. I scanned the book for possible errors in pagination, headers, and misplaced graphics. I did not see any problems. Now it’s your turn. I will get this to you as quickly as possible for your review.

Yeah!

Earlier this week, NPR did two linked interviews. One day, they talked to Steven Johnson, whose book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, presents the case “that the complexity of modern TV shows and video games might make today’s media consumer sharper than those of 30 years ago.” The next day, they interviewed Richard Louv, whose book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, “argues that kids are so plugged into television and video games that they’ve lost their connection to the natural world.”

There was just a little attempt to put the two authors at odds – to give each an opportunity to disagree with the other. I thought it was both civil and commonsensical that neither author did. Instead, both of them said that what kids need is balance. Agreed: I’d like to think that both technology and nature are useful and necessary for our kids, and that neither excludes the other, or stands in opposition to it.

Listen to the interviews

John Paul Lumpp, the ever-truthful designer and chief illustrator of Grow With the Flow, wrote me today to say

Take it from me, you will be overwhelmed with excitement when you open the first carton from United Graphics [our printer]. The quality of the printing is exceptional. Totally first rate. So, as a caution, prepare yourself for the event. Have trusted family and friends nearby to help you up off the floor.

Grow With the Flow shipped to the printer Wednesday! I should see proofs in mid-June.

What a fascinating world! “Bird brain” is meant to be an insult. The more we learn about bird brains, the more it looks like a compliment. Consider this: In an article in Science News Online, Susan Milius says

Should humanity get a little too full of itself and its intellectual prowess, there’s always Clark’s nutcracker to think about. This pale-gray bird with black wings and a long beak flits through woodlands in the West, collecting seeds during times of plenty and tucking them away for a hungry winter’s day. During a year, each bird buries 22,000 to 33,000 seeds in up to 2,500 locations, and scientists estimate that the bird recovers two-thirds of them up to 13 months later.

How do you think you’d do on this “bird brain” test? On the other hand, those latter-day dinosaurs who share our back yards with us are notably poor mathematicians (they probably count to around three or four). Each species develops the brain it needs for the evolutionary path it has followed – for the niche it occupies.

In Grow With the Flow I say:

…. We’re so used to hearing phrases like “the Information Age” that we’re in danger of forgetting that this really is a fundamental change — quite possibly as important as the original invention of printing. The skills a young adult must have to survive are different than they were only yesterday. And the evidence is that the process will continue to accelerate: A higher and higher percentage of our intelligence will be housed outside our physical body.

I remember that as I wrote this, I had a vivid picture of myself sitting at my parents’ dining-room table:

Take a second to remember yourself as a grade-school student. You’ve been told to write a paper about Brazil. It used to be that if you knew how to interpret a library card, you were all set. Can you remember that your main problem was to find a single book, or an encyclopedia article, or an old National Geographic? Excuse me now, while I switch to my favorite search engine… Yep, just as I suspected: when I enter “Brazil,” I find 1,216,860 references!

I go on to say that I like what this flood of information does for kids, because it requires much higher-level skills than the ones I needed:

I love it! Back in “my day,” kids could get by with very low-level skills. Once I found a source about Brazil, and a picture or two from that National Geographic, all I had to do was ask one question: “Where are the scissors?” Now I look at those 1, 216, 860 references and I ask: How can I do a more focused search? What do I really want to know? What kind of key words might get me there? Which of these sources is giving me reliable information? This tour company obviously wants me to buy a trip to Brazil, but can I still trust their map? Shall I bookmark this article and see what else I can find? Shall I print this map now while I screen some more articles? Shall I download this image to paste into my paper? Wouldn’t you rather see your child doing this kind of thinking instead of cutting up innocent magazines?

It was perhaps five years ago that I Googled “Brazil” as I wrote this passage, and found a little over a million references. I Googled “Brazil” again today: “Results 1 - 10 of about 108,000,000 for Brazil” Check the zeroes: there are about 100 times as many entries on Brazil as there were when I wrote that sentence, only a few years ago. “And the evidence is that the process will continue to accelerate ….”

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m up to my neck in a task both thrilling and stultifying: I’m giving Grow With the Flow its last look-over before it goes to the printer. It’s thrilling, of course, to see it so close to publication. It’s mind-numbing, of course, to look at page after page, making sure each illustration is where it goes, that no page has been misplaced to the wrong chapter – piddly detail that matters, but scarcely rivets one’s attention. If I’m not careful, I slip into actually reading a bit of the book. Of course, that goes against what I should be focusing. But you can imagine there’s quite a mix of emotions when you read a sentence one last time before it gets set in stone. It feel s a bit like letting go of your first-born’s hand outside the Kindergarten door!

Well, this was going to be about Brazil. That’s for the next post now.