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Sixteen Geese and Tristram Shandy

Tuesday morning, when Albert, the border collie, and I went out to Gardiner pond, a half inch of rain had already fallen on our rain gauge. The rain did not let up while we walked. We were later than usual; in these dark days, a few minutes after nine is early enough. The pond was high: for two days, off and on, the inflow had exceeded outflow. The shallow brown water was lethargic and bloated, reaching beyond the pond’s border of cattails, which looked sodden and defeated by the gloomy weather.

We spotted four Canada geese huddled on the north side of the island in the center of the pond. Walking past the old birch that had crashed to the ground in the strong southwest wind that blew in before the rain started, we were surprised by an additional dozen geese across the water, sitting and strolling on the south bank. We don’t often see geese out of the water this time of year. As we rounded the west end of the pond, several geese blocked our path. Albert pulled me on. He does not cotton to anserine interruptions on a serious walk. Goose psychology is not an open book, but I guessed their low cackles expressed goosey aggrievement at the intrusion of a determined border collie and his human.

We saw no mergansers, hooded or otherwise; the heron that surveys the pond from the trees on the island was absent, but the usual dozen oblivious, quacking, and dabbling mallards were checked in for the day.

I’ve been following up on an old promise I made to myself years ago: I’m reading Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a confusing book by an Irishman from Clonmel, County Tipperary, who wrote in Yorkshire England about twenty years before the American revolution. The book is considered a novel, although it is hard for me to think that it even resembles novels written today. Some say that Tristram Shandy deeply influenced authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pyncheon, and David Foster Wallace. I have books by all of these authors on my shelves, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to finish any of them, which says more about my limitations than anything else, I suppose. In Sterne’s favor, he was accused by critics, then acquitted by posterity, of plagiarizing from Robert Burton’s meandering and wordy The Anatomy of Melancholy, written about a hundred years prior to Tristram Shandy. The Anatomy is one of my favorites.

Nevertheless, I have enjoyed Tristram Shandy immensely so far, but it’s hard to read. The vocabulary is more recondite than my own. I keep a dictionary at my side. Saying the book rambles is understated inanity. Duh. I’ve gotten near the end of the second volume of nine.

The book begins at the moment of Tristram’s conception, taking the routine of beginning an epic with the birth of a hero to an extreme. At the scene’s climax, Tristram’s mother asks his father if he was forgotten to wind the clock. From that high point, Sterne bumps, doubles back, and twists on toward Tristram’s birth. Some one hundred fifty pages later, his mother is in the pangs of childbirth with a woman midwife in attendance while Tristram’s father Walter, his uncle Toby, and a man-midwife, Dr. Slop, chosen by Tristram’s father and detested by his mother, listen to a sermon that fell out of a technical book on military fortifications, Uncle Toby’s obsessional HOBBY HORSE [Sterne’s caps.] The sermon is read by Uncle Toby’s theatrically inclined servant, Corporal Trim. If you think the names Slop and Trim are salaciously suggestive, I think you are right.

This is either a train wreck or a masterpiece. Oddly, I am finding Tristram Shandy surprisingly relevant to my thoughts in the first month of 2020.

Father, Toby, and Dr. Slop debate a plan for a wind-powered chariot. Piloting a wind-powered vehicle does not require purchasing horses and feeding them. The vehicle is fast and free, but they decide it should not be built because it would threaten the critical trade in horses and fodder. The climate change debate, anyone?

The sermon read while Tristram’s mother suffers could have been written and delivered by Anglican clergyman Sterne himself. Its subject is the co-dependence of moral ethics and religion. The gist is that a morally ethical man without religion is free to act despicably when ethical rules do not prohibit an action. For example, ethically upright bankers may throw widows and orphans out to starve and die on the streets while following the letter of laws and ethical rules. Without religion to question their greedy motives, they feel no compunction to stop.

Conversely, religious people who place religion above morality may steal and murder for profit, but as long as they intend to later repent, which may be years after the profits from their crimes are enjoyed and gone, they remain secure in the good graces of their religion.

I read op-eds and tweets on these subjects every day in 2020.

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What a Terrible Way to Begin a Novel! But I Love It


Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator begins with a description of Dillsborough. Might as well call it Dullsville.

Trollope explains that Dillsborough county has no special landmarks, the village is small, the populace is mediocre, the curate doesn’t preach well, the church is shabby, the prominent families are not that prominent, and no one is notably prosperous. Nothing of interest. He goes on to describe the family history of several generations of the Morton and the Masters clans. Somewhat complex, as most family histories are, but devoid of dramatic tension. Dillsborough is dull. The residents of Dillsborough are dull. Ho hum. Is there a Seahawks game on TV? I’m not a football fan, but when there’s nothing better…


Why would anyone want to read this book? Well, I, for one, love it. I’m reading it a second time now with an online Trollope reading group. If you like Trollope, join the group. It’s informed, witty, welcoming, and civil. If you like Trollope, you’re one of us.

I bought a copy of The American Senator in the book department of Harrods on a business trip to London twenty years ago. A few years before, I received Trollope’s headliner Barsetshire and the Palliser series as a premium for joining the New York Review of Books book club, read, and enjoyed both series, but I had not read much else of Trollope. I was surprised at Harrods’ range of Trollope titles. I came home with as many of Trollope’s less well-known books as I could cram into my roll-aboard and read them all soon after.

I am in the straits of interesting a literary agent in my own novel and have read more about how to construct a compelling story than is likely good for anyone. Trollope breaks all the so-called story rules in the first three chapters of The American Senator.

Henry James complained that Trollope talked to his readers too much. He does that in the first few chapters of The American Senator. When a little interest sparks, the omniscient narrator informs us more will be said later about this person or that place, so we best not trouble our little heads about it. Today, critics would cite Trollope for reader abuse if such a thing could be done, but they would be wrong. Anthony Trollope was no fool. When The American Senator was written, he was a seasoned novelist with his craft well in hand. He was economical and he knew how to keep his story lines straight.

An omniscient narrator is somewhat rare these days, but it’s one of Trollope’s strengths. His narrator is a character speaking in the first person. The narrator is not an active participant in the story line, but he is a distinct and appealing personality. The reader hears the narrator’s voice as he tells the story and his role is as important as any of the plot characters. At times, I suspect that Trollope is offering us an unreliable omniscient narrator, if such a chimera can be permitted. I don’t question the omniscience of the narrator’s knowledge of events, but sometimes I catch a hint that the narrator’s commentary is designed to raise the reader’s hackles rather than represent an interpretation that Trollope, the author, believes is true.

From the day I started reading Trollope, I was amazed at Trollope’s descriptions of people and places that are fiercely remote from my experiences as a farm boy and software engineer, and yet somehow as familiar as neighbors across the line fences when I was growing up. The first chapters of The American Senator exercise that draw on me. Trollope’s descriptions are perfectly scaled to yield a sense of living community. In The American Senator, he adds piquancy to familiarity with the observations on Dillsborough society from a bizarre apparition from a sister planet in a distant galaxy, an American Senator from the imaginary state of Mikewa.

By the time Trollope wrote The American Senator, he was an experienced novelist and author; critics like me should not kid themselves; he knew exactly how far he could go before events had to begin to pop. And he knew how to build a setting to turn pops into explosions.

Trollope exercised some brinkmanship in these three ostensibly dull beginning chapters. The American Senator is anything but dull as the narrative rolls out and the story is enhanced by its contrast with a seemingly dull backdrop. He risked putting impatient readers off, but Trollope was saying “See, even in this dull place, life is intense and dramatic.” The seasoned master novelist takes readers to the edge of boredom, plays them with telling details, then yanks them back like a fly fisherman luring mountain trout.

The first three chapters of The American Senator are clearly not the failure predicted by modern novel writing rules or Henry James’ scolds. And I don’t accept the snide explanation that Victorian readers were starved for entertainment and therefore willing to suffer boring introductions to overly long novels. These chapters are successful for a significant swathe of readers of any era including the digital network age of the twenty-first century.

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Word For Writers

“The biggest problem with Word is that it is way too much program for 90% of creative writers and self-publishers.” JW Manus.

Yep. I read discussions of Word on the network all the time. Many of the comments are negative. Sometimes I take time to defend Word or offer tips on how to use Word more effectively. But I have to admit that something about Word is seriously broken, but not the application itself. It’s better than ever.

Agile programing and continuous update have changed the software industry. In the old days, we spent months or years designing a program down to the last detail. Then code and unit test for another year or so. Then quality assurance system testing executed tests based on the design, not the as-built code. Every failed test was a dagger in your heart. If you were “lucky” QA was cut short to meet roll out deadlines. And, more often than not, when the product finally hit the customers, it was a travesty.

Software is maddeningly complex, and its presence often changes its environment in ways that invalidate the requirements which the software is intended to meet, and software is more fluid than any physical object. A program designed several years before a real user touches it, never meets user expectations.

The enormous cost overruns and failed projects that plagued software of the 1990s were largely due to a methodology called called “waterfall development.” In the waterfall, design, construction, testing, and acceptance of the final product proceed in strict order. Each phase must be completed and signed off on before the next phase can begin. Administrators loved it because they always had signed documents to shake in people’s faces. It worked great for bridges, skyscrapers, World War II, and the moon landing, but failed for software.

Today, the prevailing approach is to build software in small increments. Build a single feature, release to a test user group, look at the problems and let the release generate further ideas, then fix the defects, incorporate the ideas, and roll out another incremental release. Keep the increments small and rinse and repeat forever. The network bandwidth and speed available today makes it possible to develop continuously in small increments. This has proven to be much more successful than the waterfall.

Microsoft and many other software developers have adopted the agile methodology, but the new methodology has its own problems.

An unforeseen consequence of agile programming and continuous update is that documentation doesn’t keep up well with the development of the product. Microsoft has opened a fire hose of development and innovation in Word and documentation has not kept up.

Writing and revising documentation often takes as much time as developing and testing code. Asking a writer to document incomplete code easily degenerates into a time-wasting mess. Distinguishing defects from features is often hard and software can turn on a dime. The documentation often has to be rewritten at the last minute anyway. Consequently, the documentation usually trails behind the product.

However, documentation is also critical to software quality. If a feature is not clearly enough documented for a customer to use it well, the system is broken, no matter how perfectly it works.

Microsoft Word has suffered from the efficiency of agile development and frequent updates. Word processing in general has leaped ahead in the last few decades and it becomes more powerful with every automatic software upgrade, faster processor, increase in available memory and storage, and jump in network bandwidth.

So often, when I read of writer’s problems with Word, I think of some poor sap trying to cut a two-by-four with a Skillsaw without plugging it in or turning it on.

And I sympathize. They’re writers. They don’t have time or inclination to become experts on a huge and challenging system like Microsoft Word. Writers usually learn just enough to get the job at hand done and then get back to their serious business of writing. The solution might work but be all wrong down the road. Two months later, when they tackle a similar problem, their half-learned and half-remembered solution lets them down. And intervening updates may have improved the process, but they also changed it. Who wouldn’t be mad?

Microsoft has not made it easy. These days, most developers aspire to programs that are so simple to use, they don’t need documentation. But that’s an aspiration that is devilishly difficult to realize when the work done by the program is as complicated and hard to understand as word processing today.

I’m a software engineer and architect who coded his first word processor at the same time he started using word processors forty years ago. In recent years, I’ve burned hours puzzling over Word help forums. I’ve resorted to reading the xml in docxs and studying Word OLE documentation to get a feeling for Word’s internals. I used to know developers on the Word dev team and watched them stumble while using Word. In the end, I’ve always concluded that Word is a good product, well-designed with surprising power and flexibility, but first priority for writers is to write, not become Word experts.

Nevertheless, the writers who plug in their Skillsaw, instead of going back to a handsaw, will make more sawdust.

Today, if you are having trouble with Word, I suggest getting a copy of Word For the Wise by JW Manus. It will help. I have some disagreements with some of her approaches—I go farther with styles and I think my process is easier and more foolproof—but you won’t go wrong following her advice. Her book is still the best I’ve seen.