Advance Praise for The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Winning Foundation Grants

Teitel’s warm, witty prose will make even the most timid or intimidated grant seeker breathe easier. He offers not just great, insider advice but stories and examples that bring the lessons to life and make them stick. What a gift!

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and EcoMind

The Ultimate Insider’s Guide to Winning Foundations Grants should be required reading for both grant seekers and grant makers. Teitel packs more than forty years of experience into this easy to read guide. It’s written with wit, humor and sprinkled with personal stories in every chapter.

Mike Dombeck, PhD, Chief Emeritus, U.S. Forest Service, UW System Fellow and Professor of Global Conservation University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

Who knew that reading a book about the fine arts of fundraising could be such a page turner? This sage advice is a must read for everyone who wants to build successful organizations with solid financial infrastructures.

Page Gardner, national political strategist, Founder and President, “Women’s Voices. Women Vote,”

This is a refreshing and honest guide to grantseeking. It's a lively and engaging read with practical tips and helpful strategies throughout. What a great resource for novice and experienced grantseekers alike!

Rochelle Davis, President and CCEO, The Healthy Schools Campaign

The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Winning Foundation Grants

This exclusive excerpt is from my forthcoming book, The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Winning Foundation Grants, with a Foreward by Amy Goldman. Today's blog post is from the chapter on writing LOIs - Letters of Inquiry. It covers writing that crucial grabber: the summary:

1. Your central and first step is to ask a question – sometimes a group of people can do this together: “What, in one brief sentence, are we doing?” Answering a question seems to help, and groups often come up with the right words when one person is stuck.

2. If you put 50 percent of your LOI effort into the summary, half of that effort should be directed toward writing a brilliant opening sentence. I really mean this. If you earmark four hours for writing your letter of inquiry, then you should work on the summary for two hours, an hour of which is just laboring over, and coming back to, that first sentence.

3. Learn from, but don't emulate, professional marketers. That is, make your prose interesting, riveting if you can. But don't write something that sounds like you're selling dish soap. Like professional marketers, you need to know your audience and then create a tone best suiting your purpose. You want the foundation to “buy” your product but without seeming like your goal is selling instead of creating a partnership.

4. Avoid the sticky pit of buzzwords. Don't claim your work is “unique” or “cutting edge” or "raises awareness." Words and phrases like these are (a) unsupported general claims or (b) impossible to know or verify. And beware of flowery adjectives and vague generalities. They don't create an impression of competence, and they won't cause your LOI to stand out from the pile of pithy prose.

5. Instead, let your summary be filled with facts, concrete verbs, and sentences that show action. Emulate the writing of good journalists in mainstream newspapers: be an objective- seeming reporter who lets words create a response, rather than manipulating, exhorting, or lecturing the reader. In journalism school they teach, “Show, don't tell.” 

Money Corrupts Absolutely

With the push of a button on Blogger's "dashboard," I can monetize this blog. Google owns Blogger, the company that hosts us here. I pay nothing for Blogger's hosting. Nor do they pay me. Monetizing means I permit Google's gargantuan advertising program, Adsense, to post ads on my blog. If I signed up with Adsense, I'd be given some small cut of the proceeds from Adsense selling space to advertisers. Your clicks on the ads ("click-through") would help decide how much the advertisers paid. For a blog like this it would be a very tiny sum.

Gray Foot: Our Dog From the Old Days

A great number of pittances can add up: it's estimated that Google earned about $9.7 billion from Adsense in 2011.


I've decided not to rent your eyeballs to Google. Given the hoopla over Google's recent privacy policy changes being forced on us, I'm a little surprised and kind of grateful that I have the ability to keep those advertisements off my blog. Frankly if Blogger required ads on its blogs, I would have signed up anyway - shhh, don't tell them! 


I'm not monetzing because I don't want to have a commercial transaction with you, here. For most of my adult life, I wrote for pay, to spec, for those who employed me. I'm grateful to have earned a living this way, most writers don't get a salary and fringe benefits. But I can't say strongly enough how wonderful it feels to write for you without thinking about the financial consequences of saying something controversial. Or even boring. I edit intensively, if anything I'm pickier than ever: I want to present high quality writing. But the content of High Tide in the Salt Marsh is not tied to the length of my grocery list.


Once of my schemes for surviving life on Social Security is to get paid for writing other things. So I hope you won't mind me promoting my new book once in a while, The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Winning Foundation Grants. Emerson & Church will bring it out in March, and you'll be able to buy it from the usual sources. Having just read every word again in the galleys, I'm very pleased to have this book representing my ideas.


Tomorrow I'll publish an exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming book to whet your whistle, then we'll return to your regularly scheduled blog.

Chatty Cathy

A friend of mine was emailing the other day about a funny reaction from a total stranger she started talking to in a parking lot. She and I call this being "Chatty Cathy."

I have always been inclined to talk with strangers, which is kind of funny, since I am generally introverted. When my kids were little they were horrified by my behavior, and even Mary - who was light years ahead of me in the social skills department - would sometimes raise her eyebrows at what I shared with people in stores or on the street.

In my life, the Vatican of Chatty Cathy-ism was Houston. Just walking down the street, complete strangers would converse with me, often at considerable length and about quite personal matters. People were very cheerful about this intercourse, smiling and happy to be running in to me. I thought the Texas cheerfulness I saw from a distance was hokey, but when I actually lived there, it seemed to be quite real and natural. People really were pleased to meet me.

The kids complained most about my trips to the supermarket, where I think the narrow aisles and shared task seemed to make us all members of an exclusive club. It was common for a straightforward visit to take an extra hour because of the "visiting." Once a tiny, elderly African American lady hiked up her shirt to show me a scar that illustrated her long dissertation on health issues.

My dad Sid was a grand master of CC-ism

One day outside my bank a man in the best western clothes - a string tie on a bright green shirt with pearl buttons, and bright silver tips on his cowboy boots - stopped me, slapped me on both arms, and said, "I know we'll most likely never agree on religion or politics, but we can still be friends, right?" Then he just sauntered off to the parking lot.

Here in Maine public communication with strangers is lower key, but I'm not sure it's really less warm and friendly. People seem to initiate fewer conversations it's true, but when I speak up, I'm almost always greeted with openness and even a sense of gratitude for the conversation.

I have a theory that this kind of spontaneous connection with strangers is on the increase. And the reason might be, because so much of our lives is pre-sliced. Mediated. Digitized. Predicted, marketed to, placed on a flow chart. We are all of us demographic segments, obedient and compliant. Spontaneous connections with strangers - high church Chatty Cathyism - feel reassuring, more under our own control, not part of anyone's plan. A life that is owned, not leased.

Not everyone I visit with welcomes my witticisms and salutations. But most do. The smiles are real. I doubt CC-ism will save the world. But it sure seems to make it a nicer place to be in. Safer, brighter, more hopeful.

Nice meeting you!

Living In Canine Mode

I have a good friend, a southerner (he lives down in Portland), who has been going through the tribulations that all pet owners have to endure at some point: a failing old dog. His beloved companion has cancer and a failing heart. All in his family are suffering.


My friend writes that the dog's "spirits are still pretty good.  And his canine wit - is very much in place. He still remembers all his clowning, his teasing & tricks & fun!"

As for my friend and his family, he says, "We are trying to stay in a more 'canine mode,' that wonderful 'joy of the moment.'" 

Those of us with animal companions no doubt have many reasons for keeping these creatures in our homes - and under foot. But my buddy's statement about "canine mode" has a strong resonance. My creatures show little worry about possible future catastrophes. They welcome novel events with wagging tails and an enthusiastic sniff. Even the cool cats gently pat and poke at every new person and item they encounter.

My Dog Francie

In exchange for food and continual lap sojourns, the pets infuse my daily life with a cheerful focus on the present. They're seemingly as judgmental as I am, but according to criteria that are devoid of ideology and moralism. They communicate prolifically and with as much clarity as they can manage. They seem to enjoy just being near me - and each other. They mourn the loss of each visitor and they eagerly welcome every new one.

No matter what pets you may have, and many people have at least one, I hope they help you have "canine mode." And to that failing old dog in Portland, I send good wishes for a smooth passage, and thanks.

Long Live the US Mail

I want to discuss some of the challenges we're facing from our loss of public communications structures.

In the olden days, after the invention of computer networks, but before the World Wide Web had been created, the Internet was funded by a quasi-military arm of the US Government, available to the public for free. Some of us debated the open nature of the service and the need to keep ads out of the Internet so it didn't become like TV - a crass commercial colony of US business. The argument seems quaint now.

Few people posed viable alternatives to pay for the Internet beyond the government continuing doing so. Comparisons were made to the Post Office, which has always used a fee-for-service model, subsidized by taxpayers.

The rationale was, even if you don't write many letters, our society as a whole benefits from having a sound communications infrastructure to support commerce and civilization. This is the same reasoning that underlies having everyone pay for roads even if they don't own a car, education if they don't have kids, or airports if they don't fly. Many people saw the Internet as this kind of backbone infrastructure - a public utility.

The Internet was invented, however, during the sharp rise of conservative economics in the US, including mindless privatization of public services. I think President Clinton was the last liberal president. President Obama is the first post-liberal president: somewhat progressive on some social issues, conservative on most economic issues.

This is the context for trying to understand how we're doing in maintaining open communication. If you think about non-democracies like the Soviet Union or today's China, you can see that manipulation of the means by which citizens talk with each other is a key feature of social control. Soviet citizens invented their own tiny uncensored communications infrastructure called samizdat - hand-copied, hand-delivered documents. Today's China has been efficient in controlling communication content for the vast majority of their citizens. They've learned that for their purposes, it's fine to control almost all of what its people can find out - the small amount that slips through is mostly inconsequential to their goal of social control.

The US Mail is our most uncensored means of communication. Assuming I'm not a spy or terrorist or dope dealer under surveillance by the government, I can be fairly sure that if I say outrageous things in a letter to my buddy in California, no one but he will know what I've said. The mass of mail is unreadable and unsearchable.

Nothing on the Internet is private. There are some very good encryption programs out there fore sure. But like China, our government knows that the overwhelming amount of Internet traffic, under continual cataloging by the National Security Agency's gargantuan computer arrays in Maryland, is an open book to them.

I don't think the Post Office is going to go away, but clearly it is in a state of transition and probably curtailment. While I'm glad to see Mailman Glenn at my mailbox every day, he mostly brings me bills and unwanted catalogs. Only one friend still writes to me on actual paper, and even she sends emails as well. I learn, communicate, shop, and manage financial and medical documents over the global computer network. All of it, every bit, is open to inspection by whomever in government, corporations, or others with technical ability - anywhere in the world - wants to know what I'm up to.

Government censorship used to be a labor-intensive activity. In the early 1970's when I was running a war relief project in South Viet Nam, my field staff and I quickly learned that if we used certain words over the telephone, the connection would go dead. Because the language skills of the censors listening in may not have been too good, we enjoyed coming up with work-arounds. For example, it was a problem to say the word "Paris," especially during the Paris peace talks. But if we said, "tower-ville," the conversation continued uninterrupted.

When I was based in Laos, while it was still a kingdom, before the communists took over, I sent a telegram to a girlfriend that contained the line, "Du liegst mir im hertzen." This quote from a traditional German song means roughly, "you reside in my heart." Hey, I was young. The next day I was called in by the National Police to explain what they called a "secret code."

Nowadays, the computers that facilitate our communication are also used to censor. Twitter's recent announcement that it would be applying its censorship algorithm on a country-by-country basis is a case in point. Note that Twitter wasn't announcing that they censor messages - they already do that.  We are today being told they are doing so with a finer screen that will permit people in various countries to have different levels of censorship. The computers automatically delete what Twitter deems unacceptable communication. No human surveillance is required.

An issue that can and should go beyond arguments between progressives and conservatives is our loss of private communication. In a country with a relatively open society, it's easy to forget that we must communicate without expectation of privacy, and that we exchange ideas at the sufferance of our government and the transnational corporations that partner with it and in some respects control it. And those massive corporations include the very ones that were bellyaching only last week about proposed legislation that could have censored them. Somehow they feel no conflict in decrying censorship by governments but continuing to make their own secret decisions about what they will and will not transmit on our behalf.

Is it a good idea to lose all privacy, to become an open book to anonymous others, whose interests may be unknown to you? And to have your ability to communicate  decided by a computer program whose standards for censorship are themselves private? Everything we use to communicate over the internet or via mobile phone is digital: easily intercepted, catalogued and manipulated without our knowledge. The two remaining redoubts of analog communication are wired landline telephones and the Post Office. Both are dwindling fast.

Rules for Same Sex Marriage and Grief

Maine is the only state in New England that restricts marriage to a woman and a man. Even the flimsy sop of domestic partnership isn't allowed here. With 100,000 signatures, Maine's marriage equality group is set to announce a ballot campaign for same sex marriage.

One of the signatures is mine, and I'll vote for same-sex marriage for the reasons I've mentioned several times here: discrimination based on hatred is abhorrent, and I know that the idea of marriage itself is on shaky ground if minority religious organizations can impose their ideas on all of us.

Nonetheless, this development makes me uneasy.

Today's stunning photos courtesy of Barb

We live in a society that uses voting as the core tool for decision-making. A crucial corollary of this system is the need to protect minorities from harm by a misguided majority. When the majority rules by ballot, everyone is subject to how the winners voted. The 100% can be ruled by the 51%. But some rights and responsibilities are deemed so basic that they transcend the vote.

Human rights - those rights that accrue to a person by virtue of being defined a human - rise above local law. The history of human rights in our world is illustrated by and defined by the usurpation of national sovereignty by defenders of human rights. That's the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and also of various national laws, including in the USA, that permit a leap over the sovereignty of another nation when human rights are violated.

Our civil rights struggles from the 1950s-70s have numerous famous examples of the national government commandeering local control to make insure the civil rights of all citizens. Thus federal troops lined up at schools in the South to protect African American children whose exclusion from equal access to education was perfectly legal according to local law.

We're on dangerous ground now, as a number of states are placing the right to marriage on the ballot: we're putting inalienable rights in play, with potentially drastic consequences for millions of citizens - and for all of us. We're also playing into the hands of cynical politicians, such a New Jersey's bombastic governor, who has said because of his personal religion, he'll veto a same-sex marriage bill, thus forcing the vote.

Once rights are put on the ballot, those of us who abhor discrimination and legalized hatred have no choice but to work as hard as we can for the rights of our friends and neighbors. But using the techniques of politics in this way is a very dangerous game.

Another set of rules is being debated - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, used in psychiatry and psychology. In the USA this handbook defines mental illnesses. As with any illnesses, we do need a definition of the malady and a standard of care to help people receive treatment, to prevent mistakes, and to compel insurance companies to provide support. A definition can also be used to exclude people from being helped.

One of the key drugs I take for my myasthenia gravis is listed in the standard of care. I have no trouble obtaining it and getting my insurance company to pay for it. Another mainstay drug is widely used for this disease, but thus far is considered "off-label" for my illness. I'll be spending part of my day today, as I have been ever since my neurologist prescribed this medicine last year, working on "the system" to get the expensive pills covered.

The DSM is evidently going to add a mental illness based on grief. My wife died 15 months ago today. While one day after a profound loss is really the same as the next, "I live in a present compelled by anniversaries," as poet Donald Hall says. So I'm thinking today about my new "mental illness."

No doubt the DSM is right - grief makes my mind ill. And my body, and my innermost ineffable being. The pain and disorientation of losing my life partner are also normal, natural, and universal. Making grief a disease reminds me of seeing Mahler's Symphony No 2 listed on iTunes as a "song."

As with most rules, the effort will produce winners and losers. No doubt there will be people who can now receive counseling and medicines who formerly were left to their own devices in coping with terrible heartbreak. And by the same token, there will be those whose manifestation of their soul agony doesn't neatly fit within the standardized rule, and so find themselves condemned to wander in their personal wilderness, bereft of both their loved one and the support they deserve and need.

Reading about this new disease, grief, it's hard to work myself up into my usual outraged lather over dubious new rules, because my momentous loss extends so much further than the reach of the American Psychiatric Association. It's far better to set politics and technical experts aside for this day, and instead consult the poets, like Rabindrath Tagore:

I keep gazing on the far away gloom of the sky, and my heart wanders wailing with the restless wind.

Thievery Corporation Remix

Today's post features Jan's wonderful photos. Jan lives just up the hill from where I am on the marsh - these trees make me think he's got a whole other ecosystem going on up there.

You may remember my recommending Kate Bush's "Fifty Words for Snow" as a good winter musical accompaniment. Looking through the latest crop of Jan's work, I've been listening to Transglobal Underground's "Khaleegi Stomp (Thievery Corporation Remix)," Jesus Jackson's wonderful "Running on Sunshine," and a lot from the Ditty Bops. This kind of music is at least as crucial to safely enjoying the long Maine winter as a thick scarf and a snow shovel in the trunk.

State of the Blog

The January thaw has hit. Meteorologists say this weather phenomenon occurs too regularly to be a statistical fluke, but no one knows why. You can see the ice on the marsh just outside my living room window here, it's waiting out the warming spell:

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court decided unanimously that putting a GPS tracker on someone's car falls within the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. These decisions may be particularly difficult for the fundamentalists on the Court, because it's not easy to see how the Founding Persons could have had the space-based Global Positioning System in mind when they were framing our government. Technology forces the Court's members to make our legal system contemporary.

Societies always play catch-up with technologies that significantly alter power. The 21st Century seems to be bringing a collection of new challenges to our traditional ideas of privacy, search, and seizure.

One provocative privacy topic comes from the ability of other people to learn where you are and where you've been. GPS tracking, which now requires a warrant, isn't as complex as more passive tracking. For example, the companies that sell you mobile phone service  know your location from the relationship of your phone to cell towers - that's how you're able to make and receive untethered calls. Turning off the GPS function in your phone won't change this and some phones even interact with the network when completely switched off. Who has access to that location information? Sometimes it seems like the answer is: just about anyone but you.

The toll transponder on your car's windshield leaves records of your route, and these gizmos are fast becoming the standard for travel in some places - the new toll structure for entering New York City, for example, puts a sizable financial penalty on drivers who enter without a Fast Pass.

The satellite photos of the Italian ship lying on its side reminds us of the degree to which anyone can find out what's in your backyard by use of on-line overhead image databases. Governments have access to much greater detail than ordinary citizens do, using secret surveillance satellites, space stations and high-altitude aircraft. Low-altitude drones are being tested in the US - with scant public notice.

Is any of this covered by the Fourth Amendment?

Other challenges to privacy abound. Today's New York Times had a piece about Google trying to get states to change their laws to permit driverless vehicles. The article wonders, if a cop pulls a driverless car over (and how would that be done?), is this a seizure of your property?

Biology brings up another list of privacy issues. I remember sitting in the courtroom as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts heard a case about a man compelled to give his DNA to the state. This is not the same the state taking an image of the outside of your body (a mug shot or fingerprint), because the government is taking something tangible from inside your body, along with the unique identity it represents. The issue here isn't the use of DNA as evidence - including for exoneration - but rather the state seizing something of yours without your permission.

These challenges to our evolving social system are to be expected, just as the agrarian tradition of children working on the farm had to be modified as industrialism took hold and led to the creation of child labor laws. It's worrisome that some in power say "trust me, I'll behave myself," as our President did when he recently signed the Defense Authorization bill undermining our protection from being jailed without a hearing.

The rule of law exists so that we don't have our liberties depend on the good will of a company, government or person. Laws at least potentially apply to everyone, all the time. This is bedrock for a civil society - authoritarianism or anarchy are alternatives.

I have GPS and a cell phone and I access my medical records on line. Let's not do away with progress - but we'd better make sure that the unintended consequences of transformative technologies don't put new power into the hands of those who intend to reduce or eliminate our freedom.

Yesterday I promised you images of Jimmy's first trip to the groomer. Both Jimmy and I were glad when the ordeal was over. We came home, curled up together with tea and biscuits (respectively), and I kept telling Jimmy, it will grow back:

Worth A Thousand Words

There are some wonderful images available on the Internet. Unlike word-based material, it's a little trickier to discover interesting pictures, because graphic depictions are themselves not searchable.

Here are some pictures I'd like to share.

Channel 19 in Akron, Ohio wasn't permitted to bring its cameras into the courtroom to show the public the corruption trial of Jimmy Dimora. Since written transcripts of the trial are available, Channel 19 has been airing a series of reports using the trial's actual words - acted out by puppets. Here's episode 1, the rest are with it on You Tube - there isn't anything much funnier:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jEkAPYR5BM

Second is a picture from space. We've become used to looking up our own houses and many other things using Google Earth and similar services. Somehow the creepiness of being on-camera at all times has faded.

Here's a current image that needs no explanation:

Credit: DigitalImage

Third - lest I get too cosmic - I want to show you a "before" picture of Jimmy. Today we're going for his first store-bought haircut. I'll share the "after" picture once we both recover:

Protect, Preserve, Protest

When visitors to my salt marsh house look out during an astronomical high tide, they often can't stop themselves from asking if the house will flood. I usually reply, I have faith. Really though, I rely less on belief and more on a French drain and my sturdy basement.

Every structure relies on a solid foundation to keep it stable. Politics has a basement too. And the United States’ political system desperately needs foundational repair.

Our democracy is supported by a vigorous civil society. But new policies and candidates, and all that's damaged in our system, can't be fixed if the mechanism for change is itself not working. I see four areas in the foundation of our political system that deserve and need attention:

The first area is voting - the core method for a large number of people to make decisions together. Voter suppression abounds in our country. Suppression is accomplished using techniques to deter certain groups or categories of people from voting. An example is a modern poll tax disguised as voter ID laws, which are based on false or wildly exaggerated claims of fraud. Other voter suppression techniques include manipulating voter rolls, banning classes of people from voting (usually felons), and a whole list of dirty tricks such as publicizing incorrect information about voting times and places, even physical harassment and intimidation.

Aside from voter suppression, some groups of people have lower overall rates of voting participation, for example younger unmarried women and youth in general. Our democracy will work less well if we’re governed by a subset of people who are not representative by gender, social class, race, age and disability status.

Quite a few organizations specialize in increasing voter participation among specific groups of citizens and need our support. A much smaller number of agencies work on voter suppression, but so do many state attorneys general and especially secretaries of state.

Money in politics is the second area of great concern. Maine is one of about half a dozen states that provide a way for citizens to pay for politics - and not incidentally, to lessen the influence of non-humans on our civic life.

Non-humans? 

I'm referring to the slow-rolling coup d’état by corporations. Because political campaigns have become extraordinarily costly, companies pay for elections of beholden representatives, and they either promote or squelch ballot initiatives.

The big companies manage to trump our civic participation by claims that they are really people and therefore enjoy civil rights, and that as people they can pay for political campaigns. The corporations change their tune, however, when other matters like liability and tax rates are concerned.

It seems incredible that people with brains and hearts are not in charge of our country, but are politically dominated by fabricated non-living entities - demonstrably without brains and regrettably, often without hearts.

In the last 40 years companies have purchased a controlling interest in the means of governance in the United States. While other countries have many difficulties in their political systems, I don't know of another country on earth with this degree of corporate-based political corruption.

The “Citizens United” decision of the US Supreme Court two years ago, unleashing unlimited corporate money into the last barbicans of our election system, is opposed by 75% of Americans - Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Specifically, 75% polled were in favor of an amendment to the Constitution barring the Super PACs that resulted from the Citizens United debacle.

It seems paramount that we remove the wildly disproportionate influence of corporate funds in our political system. An increasing number of organizations are working to pass laws or even a Constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and do not enjoy the same civil rights as human beings.

The third area of our country’s civic basement is civil rights. Specifically, I'm hoping we'll support the organizations and movements - of whatever politics you prefer - that work to ensure equal protection under law and a classless judicial system. Our civil system still incorporates systematic discrimination, legalized hatred, and deeply corrupt policing and courts. If the legal structure of our democracy is a stacked deck, then even our efforts to reform voting will fail.

Civil rights work has been going on for a long time, but there's no less a powerful continuing need for attention to the skewed and manipulated rule of law.

Fourth - we have no hope of fixing any of this if we can't find out what's going on. The explosive growth of social networks and narrowcasting has masked the shattering of national institutions of objective investigation and reporting. Big companies that own the politicians also own the blow-dried news anchors and the fiber optic cables and modems and servers.  It's great that people can use their cellphones to figure out when to get together for a protest. But effective protection of our democracy will come from genuine debate, widespread sharing of ideas, accurate information, and timely intelligence.

So fourth, we need investigative reporters. We need people and organizations that aren't bought out to help us decide what needs investigating, how to safely research what the rascals are up to, and how to create independent conduits that accurately disseminate what is learned. Because the means of communicating is developing and changing rapidly, and because of the long-predicted concentration of communication ownership, we’re faced with formidable challenges in maintaining and fostering the free flow of information necessary to support our public lives.

To recap, I think we can go a long way to shoring up our civil system if we support:

•  Voting protection

•  Corporate de-personalization

•  Protection of civil rights

•  Investigative reporting

If you're a crypto-anarchist or a registered Republican, your manifestation of these efforts will vary – diversity is auspicious in a real democracy. People can work towards these four ends via methods ranging from poetry to shooting clubs – there is lots of room to find which of these areas fits with your political views and personal interests. But if we disengage entirely from this foundational work, our other efforts to improve the world won’t stand a chance.

I feel unnerved that our country has sunk to such political degeneracy. But it's not too late and frankly, even if it is, there's no reason not to try. We have the need and the means to redeem our democracy. This election year is a perfect time to get started.

Tweeted by the New York Review of Books:

"If Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave that room.”

Solar Hoovering

Late on Thursday Sunspot 1401 exploded and headed out towards us. Those of you who live in northern areas might be seeing some fabulous sunspots tonight.

This "corornal mass ejection" will also be heading towards Mars and on the way, envelop our latest Mars Rover, which is enroute. The Rover has instruments for measuring a CME: this may be a great chance for humanity to learn.

And finally - before you click through below and get all the details - these big solar eruptions cause the earth's atmosphere to swell. Thus some of the junk orbiting the earth will be in a bit of atmosphere instead of airless space. The air makes the junk slow down and then burn up.

In other words, the sunspot eruption serves as a clean-up tool for our planet.

http://spaceweather.com/

Undisclosed Locations

Low Tide

The kind of light, powdery snow we had over night is easy to shovel, it makes me feel strong.

If you're hiding out in your snow-covered cabin, you can watch the recall petitions in Wisconsin being counted. The location is secret, but the process is as transparent as it can be. Here it is:

http://mirrors.5nines.com/stream/

If under the hood politics isn't for you, how about a web cam in the den of a wild black bear here in Maine? Also at a secret location:

http://bangordailynews.com/link/watch-mama-bear-lugnut-and-her-cubs/

Jan has contributed a number of winter photos over the past few days.

Saint Sally, Walking Her Dog and Mine

Possible Mailbox Fatality

Say Goodbye To Your Books

Being married to a minister was like being married to a soldier - we moved around a lot. With each move, we'd have what we called a "book rampage," sorting through our epic library, giving away the books we could live without. It was a running joke that the pile of books Mary could live without were mostly mine, and vice versa. Over the years, we did give away hundreds of books, possibly thousands.

Today's winter relief photos courtesy of Jan

Even so, now I sit in my little house on the salt marsh surrounded by books. There are five jammed bookcases within my sight as I write this, not counting parts of the two bookcases I can see in the back hallway and the rows of cookbooks over in the kitchen; more are upstairs and everywhere else. I love these books.

I gave away some of Mary's books when she died in 2010. I also gave away her Kindle. I'm on my third Kindle, and I use it almost every day. The other day, just when I was musing about my ambivalence towards electronic books, I heard from my youngest son Sam, who's about halfway through writing his second book of poetry, not counting his many self-published chap books.

Sam asked: How long before physical books go the way of vinyl, and would an e-book world produce Catcher in the Rye, or Howl?

As of May, 2011, Amazon was selling 105 e-books for every 100 printed books. Let's call them p-books. This is an enormous change in how we read, although I want to suggest that the most important aspects of the change may not be the physical form of the books, but what is implied in the second part of Sam's question: who gets to write, who gets to read, and what is available?

First, the first part of the question: will p-books go the way of vinyl, which I interpret to mean will they turn into a niche market, rather than be the dominant form of knowledge and creative transmission? I can't see a path for long term survival of p-books. I think we'll see books printed on paper for a while yet, but the modern book publishing business is composed of several interlocking parts, and when one of those parts is no longer economical, the whole house of cards will collapse.

In practice this will produce a death spiral for printed books - e-books are so much cheaper to produce and sell and buy. As fewer people are ready to pay for p-books, the per-unit cost will keep going up, discouraging more buyers, and so on. I don't see much of a mass market for printed books in a decade.

The loss of p-books is very important for how human beings express themselves. In the old days, 7-10 years ago, there were many more authors than there were publishers. Getting the attention of a publisher and convincing that company to publish your book was a big deal. Writers collected rejection slips as ironic talismans of our tragic struggles. Getting an acceptance from a publisher was for most of us cause for champagne.

Nowadays anyone can post their deathless prose on the internet. Mass distributors like Amazon are increasingly willing to devote a few electrons to marketing your memoir or spine-tingling tale - if a handful of copies sell, they can recoup their tiny investment.

Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951 by Little, Brown & Company, has sold about 65 million copies - and still sells a quarter of a million copies annually. Nowadays it's much easier to make your book available to the public, but it wouldn't be prudent to expect 65 million copies to sell. 65 is a more realistic number. And electronic publishing generally doesn't come with a marketing budget - no bookstore readings or promotional tours.

One wonders how many great books never got past the gatekeepers at Little, Brown and so we never got to read them. By the same token, how many wonderful e-books are hidden out there on the internet, doomed to languish in digital obscurity?

I've worked with a number of publishers over the years, and even as an inconsequential writer of little-known books, I received assistance in promotion and book design. Most beneficial by far has been the editing. My editor at Emerson & Church, who will publish my latest book in March, spent months emailing back and forth with me, going through every sentence in the book several times. When he and I had finished our energetic exchange, he sent the book to an outside editor. And when she had done her edits, the book went to a copy editor.

The ideas and words in my book are mine, but there is no doubt your experience reading The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Winning Foundation Grants will be much better as a result of the publisher's expertise.

Some of the 99 cent self-published books I've downloaded from Amazon are so poorly written I've angrily deleted them from my Kindle. And many are so badly copy edited I can't stand to read them. I know you can point to mistakes and typos in my blog, even though I re-read every post many times before I hit the "Publish" button. But the lack of rudimentary quality control in whole books, even from well-known authors, is alarming.

I think technology is slowly decreasing the difficulty of finding new e-books, although this area of book distribution has a long way to go before it can compare with the experience of browsing in a good bookstore. I fear for the integrity of our language - for the fragile framework on which we hang conveyance of our culture. Far too many e-books peddle sloppy prose to a variously educated public.

Howl was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Light Bookshop in 1956. Ginsberg's extraordinary poem was immediately hauled into court under the obscenity laws of the time and exonerated in 1957. So this part of Sam's question leads us to the second concern I have about the emerging e-book era. I don't know a way to create and distribute an e-book without intimately interacting with huge distant corporations - I use a computer form Apple, an internet connection controlled by Time Warner, and my last book was sold among other places on Amazon. This is not exactly mom and pop literature.

What if I go against the grain more than is acceptable to these giants? What if I write a book about the splendors of on-line censorship that offends them? In the old days I ran into people on street corners in San Francisco and London selling what they had written. Once 40 years ago I emerged from the Paris Metro to be greeted by a lovely woman who handed me her poetry and invited me to discuss her work on the spot.

You can't hand out electrons on street corners. High tech books require interaction with high tech providers, whose agendas may diverge so much from yours that you're silenced entirely. I agree with the various internet-oriented companies who yesterday "went dark" over the SOPA/PIPA internet censorship bills (even though Wikipedia's protest was easily bypassed by putting "m." in front of their address to access the mobile site). The SOPA protest included billionaire companies fretting about legislation that would hurt their business. I'll be more impressed when they go dark over mass starvation or torture. Perhaps inadvertently, they showed us they're willing to stop the public's access to the resource they own, when they are displeased.

Let's return to books. The good news, Sam, is I don't have to rely on the race/class/gender/financial biases of editors at Little, Brown to gain access to reading material. Almost anyone can publish now, and it will only get easier: the cheap instant availability of knowledge via e-books may become a substantial advance for the human race.

Yet I'll also be buying e-books that are sometimes poorly written and shoddily produced, and I will have no way of knowing what is being censored or changed by companies a lot bigger and more difficult to argue with than Little, Brown - companies revealing this week that they do have political agendas.

And they will not hesitate to bar our access to seemingly public tools when it suits their purposes.



The Little, Brown and Company site:

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/publishing_little-brown-and-company.aspx


Wikipedia's mobile site, for the next time they get their knickers in a bunch:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


City Lights Bookstore:

http://www.citylights.com/

Wednesday Politics

There’s nobody who can’t serve. Nobody who can’t help somebody else.

President Obama, January 16, 2012

I’ve been complaining loud and long in this blog about the especially poor quality of political reporting this season. I mentioned how the roll of political blogs I’m tracking this year had shrunk to a handful:

Talking Points Memo

Five Thirty Eight

Daily Kos

Frontloading HQ

Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball

Today I’d like to add a few more. The students in USC's Annenberg School of Journalism demonstrate daily that predictions of the end of journalism are premature. They have a broad, smart blog called Neon Tommy. The blog covers politics and everything else you’d expect in a good daily newspaper, with the snappy tone of young people living in LA: Neon Tommy

Vote Smart is an encyclopedia of detail about current politics, covering state-level and national people and issues. It’s a great place to look up a voting record or find out how someone measures up on current topics and controversies. The background of the blog is bipartisan, but I’d characterize it as mildly progressive in bias: Vote Smart

Dirigo is Maine's state motto: Latin for "My kiester is cold."

People who follow politics in Maine know about Dirigo Blue. Aside from detailing statewide politics from the Democratic viewpoint, it lists sources of good information about Maine politics. For those of you outside Maine (my condolences), Dirigo Blue’s national blogroll is concise and practical, one-stop shopping: Dirigo Blue

Snow Blue

Crisp quiet winter days in Maine are one of our hidden treasures.

Tough Love

Today's Photos By Jan

Our friend the Great Questioner, asked, is tough love inhumane? I've been challenged by this question in a particular way, because I had an instant answer that I figured needed some thought and even a little research. Having done my homework, I'm sticking with my original response.

Yes GQ, tough love is inhumane.

It's pertinent for a number of reasons to be thinking about this, because of how fashionable retro-politics has become, how acceptable it is in polite company to speak casually about imposing your beliefs on other people, and as we think about solutions to budget woes where tough love has been fashionable, like in schools.

The term tough love dates from the 1960's. At its core, if you read what various proponents have said over time, is the idea of inflicting current pain for future gain. You say, I know I'm being harsh now, but in the long run (a) this will help you or this is for your own good, and/or (b) some day you'll thank me.

Typically tough love is applied to younger people by parents or others in authority when the object of the toughness has failed to abide by limits. Nowadays you often read about tough love in association with acting out teenagers, especially around drugs or sex. Many of the authors and web sites that advocate some version of this practice seem to come from the Christian right wing.

Here are some problems with this approach.

1. An authoritarian approach relocates the taking of responsibility for actions from the individual to someone else. One aspect of tough love that isn't well accounted for is how removing responsibility for one's actions teaches one to behave responsibly. There's a logical flaw.

2. There has been some research trying to quantify the long term effects of this pattern of behavior towards others: does it work? Results seem to vary with who's conducting the research. I didn't find any convincing research from advocates of tough love.

3. The philosophy of hurt now for later gain itself flies in the face of all that we know about child development. People who are abused, whose autonomy is removed, and who are humiliated, do not grow up to be secure, compassionate and loving people. They may be terrified or even terrorized into stopping behaviors that are the subject of the attack, like various forms of juvenile delinquency. In that very short term sense, you could say that tough love works.

4. People who are addicted or acting out or committing crimes raise real problems for those around them, and parents who turn to tough love may well be suffering and desperate. Some people say, it's easy for you to question this method, you've never had to live with someone like little Johnny. I had no choice.

This is similar reasoning to what's used by other advocates of questionable practices - they pose an undeniably terrible problem and imply that their solution is the only solution. Thus genetically modified food is proposed as the only way to stop starvation, or the dictatorial sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona mistreats prisoners as the best solution to crime.

Even if tough love worked - and there is little evidence for this - it is clearly not the only and hardly the best way to deal with acting out children, prisoners, and others who are forced to become victims of authoritarian belligerence.

5. OK here's the bottom line, I want to go out on a limb here with an unequivocal proposition:

It's always better to love too much than to love too little.

It may well be that in raising our kids, my wife and I sometimes coddled them or "spoiled" them (although that's another fraught term), or didn't set good enough limits. But our kids grew up knowing that they were cherished, that they were safe with their parents and in their family, and in the larger sense they learned that the world is both scary and wonderful.

Every kid without exception has to overcome aspects of imperfect parenting. But I'm certain that dealing with being spoiled by shoddy limit setting is better in every respect than dealing with deep hurt, mistrust, and inability to connect with other people that results from authoritarian abuse.

One final more personal note. My wife was a fervent believer in unequivocal love of all our children as the best way to deal with misbehavior - in her case with both biological and step children. She was famous for quickly resorting to bribes instead of punishments - the kids loved that. While she wasn't perfect and had her own moments of temper, she was always vehement in her condemnation of tough love. And so she raised kids who weren't always easy to control nor respectful of authority. But she also raised kids who learned how to be loved and how to love with their whole hearts, without reservation or qualification.

Now that she is gone, I can continue to see the results of her philosophy every day as my grown children make their way in the world - loving many others and being loved by many. And yes, with a diminutive respect for authority.

A fair trade.