Dissertation: Foot in Mouth

Do you know who Jason Richwine is? If not, an easy internet search will show many have labeled him a racist. Why? Because of what he co-authored and authored. Until recently, he worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation. There, he co-authored a study that forecasted a $6.3 trillion dollar burden [...]]]>

Dissertation: Foot in Mouth

Do you know who Jason Richwine is? If not, an easy internet search will show many have labeled him a racist. Why? Because of what he co-authored and authored. Until recently, he worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation. There, he co-authored a study that forecasted a $6.3 trillion dollar burden on U. S. taxpayers if legal amnesty is given to all the current undocumented individuals residing in the U.S.

Another example of politics angling for a knee-jerk reaction by hitting a common nerve in public policy: the Tax Payer’s wallet.

But it wasn’t this study that caused him to resign from the Heritage Foundation. It was his 2009 dissertation titled: IQ and Immigration policy.

His proposed statement. His systemic explanation of principles of certain subjects.

His speculative, analytic, interpretations on selected themes.

His dissertation discusses immigrants and IQ, specifically, he establishes that (mainly Hispanic) immigrants in the U. S. today don’t have “the same cognitive abilities as natives.” Richwine goes on to state that the average IQ of immigrants is substantially lower than “the native white average.”

However, Richwine’s data did show that IQ scores did go up, “slightly,” in the second generation. Whew, I was worried. But  “scores” of Hispanics will “remain well below those of whites, and the differences persist over several generation.” Ouch.

Richwine attributes low IQ as the reason for a Hispanic underclass. His reasoning simple. Hispanics have “the inability to succeed at the same level,” therefore they have no choice but to “disengage from the cultural mainstream.” To be intelligent, complete assimilation is required. Who knew?

To be clear, Jason Richwine is not a racist against Hispanics because Hispanic is not a race. It’s a demographic—a group of multicultural and/or multi-ethnic people who have common Spanish and/or Latin American roots. A disengagement of the cultural mainstream may actually be an integration of multiple mainstream cultures.

He is, however, naïve, tactless, discriminatory, and socially oblivious to what it means to be part of a community, especially when this dissertation allowed him to achieve a Doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard.

Richwine’s dissertation is full of speculation, referencing cherry-picked citations from outdated sources. Sources include George J. Borjas, the chair on the Committee of Public Policy at Harvard—one of three who signed off on his dissertation. Borjas has also been in hot water over his views on immigration, even though he’s an immigrant from Cuba.

However, after the fallout of Richwine’s resignation, Borjas commented:

“In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I’ve long believed this, I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related, and IQ only measures one kind of ability. I’ve been lucky to meet many high-IQ people in academia who are total losers, and many smart, but not super-smart people, who are incredibly successful because of persistence, motivation, etc. So I just think that, on the whole, the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.”

Another member of the committee who signed off was Richard J. Zeckhauser. He has this to say:

“Jason’s empirical work was careful. Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis [if] his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.”

No kidding.

IQ tests are, as Richwine has said in his dissertation, approximations. Yet, he continued to draw conclusions on dated material that may not have been up to speed with how accessible information has become. This can be a pitfall for those in research. Piecemealed sources of info are crystalized and frozen in time, while the world moves forward. New information comes to light on a daily basis. And the reductive methodology for finding a comprehensive formula of intelligence is constantly being revised. Per Richwine, IQ tests a basic common thread of intelligence, mainly scholastic levels. But there’s no test that can predict or determine an individual’s complete skill set, capabilities, and potential for increasing intelligence if given ample resources, let alone determining the complete average group of people. Small control groups and live environment can differ too radically. The best anyone can hope for is an approximation. And even then, results may be short-lived. This doesn’t even account for the creativity factor.

Did he really think his research wasn’t going to be used by opportunists who wanted ammunition against immigration reform as well? The Heritage Foundation has now distanced itself from Richwine, and he can’t legally discuss the conditions of his departure. He’s now become a scapegoat. Other’s now call him a cautionary tale. But he has inadvertently drawn attention back to topics that still need to be addressed: education, the continued and active dialogue about immigration reform, how more current information is needed when extrapolating conclusions, and most importantly, he’s shown that reductive science my not apply. As a silver lining, he may have even prompted a surge of even more future Hispanic Scholars, to further debunk his findings. However, that’s probably more credit than he deserves.

Is he apologetic? No. He “regrets” that he didn’t give more thought to how “the average lay person would perceive things, as opposed to an academic audience.”

He claims he’s not naïve. His stilted statement claims otherwise.

My, What A Pretty Qua You’re Wearing

Reimagining Heidegger (The Thing), Bishop, and Gibran in the Digital Age

Sophie Gimbel, have you been watching?

All these years as all distances in time and space are shrinking.

The art of losing is stuck in my head. I’d always renounced

 Forbidden Fruit (remix)

Chorus (SoSoon)

What am I supposed to do, when I can’t get close to you,
when the world won’t let me be alone with you,
and all I really want to do is be holding you. 

I stared at an [...]]]>

 Forbidden Fruit (remix)

Chorus (SoSoon)

What am I supposed to do, when I can’t get close to you,
when the world won’t let me be alone with you,
and all I really want to do is be holding you. 

I stared at an orchid with diamond petals
standing alone in a Harlem hallway.

Spoken words turned into white noise
as I studied each blossom

Eyes. Cheekbones. Lips. Smile.

“Hello” an instant paralysis

I imagine our bodies
as frescos on a bedroom canvass.

We danced palm in palm outside of time to pulse’s drum,
made tides play double-dutch with the sun.

Don’t want to sweat her,
place myself in the arms of other women

in an attempt to lesser
attachment but no action can make me forget her.

What am I supposed to do, when I can’t get close to you,
when the world won’t let me be alone with you,
and all I really want to do is be holding you.

]]> http://www.12thstreetonline.com/2013/05/14/forbidden-fruit-remix/feed/ 0 http://www.12thstreetonline.com/2013/05/08/who-is-your-audience-a-profile-of-ethan-bello/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=who-is-your-audience-a-profile-of-ethan-bello http://www.12thstreetonline.com/2013/05/08/who-is-your-audience-a-profile-of-ethan-bello/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 13:19:20 +0000 Ethan Dante Bello http://www.12thstreetonline.com/?p=4208

Writing for a Child.

          I took a class last semester called “Writers on Writing,” with Sigrid Nunez. The class focused on the literary lifestyle and what it means to be a writer from a writer’s perspective. Nunez proposed a question during one [...]]]>

Writing for a Child.

          I took a class last semester called “Writers on Writing,” with Sigrid Nunez. The class focused on the literary lifestyle and what it means to be a writer from a writer’s perspective. Nunez proposed a question during one of the classes: who is your ideal audience? I sat quietly in the corner, trying to formulate an answer while everyone else responded. Then, Nunez caught me off guard by asking me. At the time, I was scrolling through the people I cared about: family members, oddballs, misfits and the other misunderstood souls who, like me, constantly turn to stories for comfort and guidance. However involuntarily, the words came from my mouth: “I write for myself as a child.” It was one of the most honest things I have ever said.

            I was a very imaginative kid. I struggled to play with my classmates in elementary school, because I found the stories they were creating to be boring. When I played, my kitchenette would become a glorious world; the cabinets would be mountains, the tiles would be an endless field of purple and red grass through which my characters would venture.

            If I strip away the layers of my adult life, rid myself of my stresses, anxieties, daily plans and obligations, underneath it all, I am still that boy. When I write something he doesn’t like, it fails. When I ignore him, he gets angry. He is my imagination. I often picture him on the top bunk in the dingy apartment where I was raised, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, waiting to hear a story. The part of me that knows there is nothing else I should be doing except recreating those whimsical worlds on paper is that little boy, who’s imagination was always easier to understand than the real world.

]]> http://www.12thstreetonline.com/2013/05/08/who-is-your-audience-a-profile-of-ethan-bello/feed/ 1 http://www.12thstreetonline.com/2013/05/01/review-giorgio-griffa-fragments-1968-2012/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=review-giorgio-griffa-fragments-1968-2012 http://www.12thstreetonline.com/2013/05/01/review-giorgio-griffa-fragments-1968-2012/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 22:29:10 +0000 Maureen Chung http://www.12thstreetonline.com/?p=4190

Fragments 1968-2012 at the Casey Kaplan gallery is prominent Italian artist, Giorgio Griffa’s, first New York solo show since 1970. The exhibition, an exploration of the quiet act of painting, presents a selection of large-scale, un-stretched canvas and linen works as a return to painting’s more elemental form. For the past forty years, Griffa [...]]]>

Fragments 1968-2012 at the Casey Kaplan gallery is prominent Italian artist, Giorgio Griffa’s, first New York solo show since 1970. The exhibition, an exploration of the quiet act of painting, presents a selection of large-scale, un-stretched canvas and linen works as a return to painting’s more elemental form. For the past forty years, Griffa has painted on raw canvas of different textures and then neatly folded each piece to file away. The folds in the canvas are clearly visible in each of his works, physically emphasizing the span of the lives they spent tucked away, categorically catalogued.

Griffa sees this act of folding and documenting each work as an expression of continuity; the paint demonstrates this sentiment as well. Pretty pastel lines end randomly, as if interrupted by life’s events, and semi-circles end as quarter-circles. Despite the unfinished nature and discernible brushstrokes of Griffa’s works, his pieces never feel sloppy. Each suspended canvas or linen feels purposeful and intentional – particularly in Linee orizzontali, 1973, a 15-foot long acrylic on canvas piece that hangs in the center of the main gallery room. Its thin lines at the uppermost sixteenth of the canvas leave the rest of the piece mostly blank, but closer inspection reveals the lines unsteadily painted, but carefully delineated, each pale line separated painstakingly from the one above and below it. This is Griffa at his most skillful – an organic, basic, and meticulous artist.

As a retrospective of Griffa’s development of craft and theories, Fragments 1968-2012 is particularly revealing. His foray into the use of sponges, finger-painting, and other tools, begins after he experiences moderate and critical success in Italy. As a participant in the exhibition, Abstract, held in the respectable, Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Palazzo Forti, as well as a headliner of an extensive retrospective at the Pinacoteca Comunale di Ravenna, Griffa was heralded as a skilled abstract painter capable of marrying concept and artistry. It is a bit after his Italian success in the late 1980s-early 1990s, however, that there is a clear shift “from ordered marks towards a broad range of gestures.” His “practice evolved to include expressive forms and brighter tones,” an evolution that, ultimately, feels both hollow and shallow.

Though his line paintings exemplify Griffa’s idea that he “doesn’t portray anything, [he] paints”[1], the conviction is not so evident in Griffa’s more geometrically experimental pieces. Polittico con tredici colori, 1998, for example, a six-canvas installation with swirls, shapes, and randomly implanted numbers, is amateur in its self-discovery. Its myriad of colors and curving lines feels excessively calculated for Griffa’s more natural style – trying too hard to emphasize the continuous nature of painting, and thereby of life, it falls comparatively flat amidst other pieces that are more inherently eternal. His 2010 piece SEZIONE AUREA – SEGNI VERTICALI – FINALE 482, for example, lacks depth and substance. Though impressively large, it loses the quiet contemplation and care that characterized Griffa’s earlier pieces. It no longer feels naturally unfinished – instead, its sharp lines and brighter colors exude an air of mockery and challenge, as if the viewer is forced to question its deliberate interruptions in a purely mechanical way.

It is intentional, then, that the Casey Kaplan gallery closes the exhibition with Quasi dipinto, 1968, the last canvas you see as you exit the space. With simple off-white acrylic on a dark beige canvas, it reminds its viewer of Griffa’s less obstinate works. Splatters of paint and thick lines that again, barely touch, refresh the memory of Griffa’s insistence to engage with the “concrete act of mark-making”[2] and explore painting for painting’s sake. Without this simplistic and beautiful principle, Griffa’s works lose the consistency, structure, and essence of his nurtured earlier works. With it, Griffa accomplishes what he’s set out to accomplish all along: to portray the constant and never finished nature of pure painting.

In the summer of 1999, my brother bought a pair of camouflage, old skool Vans from a skate shop in Pennsylvania not far from where my aunt and uncle have a house. He was very excited when he got them, but only wore them sporadically for the months that followed, and he eventually [...]]]>

In the summer of 1999, my brother bought a pair of camouflage, old skool Vans from a skate shop in Pennsylvania not far from where my aunt and uncle have a house. He was very excited when he got them, but only wore them sporadically for the months that followed, and he eventually forgot about them completely.

I thought they were kind of cool, and just like so many other things that were filtered down to me after my brother lost interest, they eventually became mine. I didn’t ask him because I didn’t need to. He was so preoccupied with all the new stuff he got all the time that I was able to seamlessly appropriate his belongings without him ever really noticing.

My brother went off to college in the spring of 2004, and I was left with a roomful of the stuff he didn’t care to bring with him, including those camouflage shoes. I don’t remember ever being particularly excited to get them, but they were there, and they fit, and I needed shoes. The last pair of shoes that I had owned had fallen apart one day while I was walking home from school—the sole of the right shoe literally ripped off mid-step.

All was fine for a while. I had shoes to wear, and though they were ripped up along the sides, they did just fine and complemented my inch-high, blue-black, Mohawk hair, and the Black Flag and Minor Threat shirts that I wore nearly every day.

One weekend my brother came home. He arrived Friday night, and left Sunday morning. I don’t remember why he was there, but I do remember that afterward he and my mother took off on a bus back to Boston. I was left in the apartment alone and wanted to go to the store for some pizza. I had six dollars to spend. But when I went to look for my camouflage shoes, they were gone. I instantly realized what had happened: my brother had come back from school, noticed his shoes sitting by the door and said, “Oh, my camouflage Vans. I should take them with me,” packed the shoes in his luggage, and went off. The problem was, they were the only pair that I had. Not even winter boots. And you know what else?  The night before he left, it had snowed. There was a foot of snow covering the sidewalk.

I didn’t panic initially, but I knew I could do nothing, not even go to school the next day, if I didn’t figure out some sort of solution. So, I went to my computer, looked up local shoe shops and made some calls. Unfortunately, there weren’t any shoe shops around that carried shoes for only six dollars, except for one: The Salvation Army. It was embarrassing when, in my pubescent pitch-shifting voice, I had to ask the lady on the other end what the cheapest pair of shoes was.

They had a pair Converse knock-offs that were used and tattered, but they were in my size and they cost only five dollars. The other problem was getting there; the Salvation Army was nearly two miles away. I didn’t have enough to pay for a cab, and there was too much snow to bike it.

You may be asking a question: Why didn’t I call my mother and ask her to pick me up a pair of shoes on her way back from the city? They answer is: Since my mother and father got divorced, and she won custody of me, she and I had not been on good terms. After the divorce, she regressed into a wild teenage girl and went out every night, leaving me in a fly-infested apartment with nothing more than a few bucks to get pizza with. I was pissed at her for not being there, and because I had eaten nothing but pizza five nights a week for nearly a year. The last thing I wanted was to call her up and ask her for anything.

So, I made a silly decision. Considering how few my options were, the only thing I could think to do was to wrap my feet in tinfoil and then cover them with two jumbo Ziploc bags. I looked in the mirror at my feet, and I remember thinking, “How D.I.Y! The Punk Rock gods would be proud of my ingenuity!”

But that pride quickly disappeared when I stepped outside. I looked like an idiot, and I knew it. But what was I supposed to do? Go barefoot?

The first thing I noticed was how cold the ground was. The Ziploc bag and tinfoil did little to keep my feet warm, let alone dry. When I had to step into foot high snow, lots got into the Ziploc bags, seeped through the tinfoil, and soaked my socks.

I remember a group of old Russian men who didn’t wait until I walked past them to  start laughing at me, and a very pretty girl who stopped in her tracks and stood, jaw-dropped, at the sight of my feet. But I didn’t care. I felt invincible at that age, and knew wholeheartedly that sometimes I needed to make sacrifices in order to survive, especially in those unfortunate circumstances. Besides, I had already gone through much worse than a two-mile trek through snow.

But everything got worse around the midway point of my journey. The bags were falling apart and the tinfoil was slowly ripping. I picked up my pace by jogging lightly, and was able to make them last until I was only two blocks away, but then, the bags really ripped and the tinfoil practically disintegrated.

So there I was in my wet, floppy socks. I made one final run for it down those two long avenue blocks, and reached the front door of the Salvation Army just as my toes were becoming unbearably numb from the cold. As I flew inside, I saw the lady whom I had spoken to on the phone. She gave me a look of utter shock, looking first at my eyes, then at my feet. I remember hoping with every inch of my soul that the shoes were still there.

“You still have those five dollar shoes?” I asked.

“Um…” she was flustered, confused. “Yeah, we have them in the back.”

My body warmed with her words. I walked to the back of the store, found them. They were hideous: off-white, with brown laces. “Who would ever wear these,” I thought. But I put them on, and they fit. I paid upfront and thanked her, even though she really hadn’t done anything.

I remember wondering who had owned those off-white, off-brand, Converses before me. I know why they gave them away, because they were the ugliest shoes I had ever owned, ever seen. I remember thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if they knew how important it really was that they had donated them, how much it would actually affect the person buying them?”

With my last dollar I went to a corner store and bought a can of cream soda, and then I strolled home, very slowly.

Punchline

A guy walks into an elementary school. Sounds like the setup to a joke. Then he opens fire, killing a pack of babies, just three years out of the cradle, six years from puberty, and a good sixty some-odd years from the grave.

That’s [...]]]>

Punchline

A guy walks into an elementary school. Sounds like the setup to a joke. Then he opens fire, killing a pack of babies, just three years out of the cradle, six years from puberty, and a good sixty some-odd years from the grave.

That’s called a punch-line.

Blood mixed with finger paint, creating new and terrible colors. I won’t forget the colors, because I had to clean it all up. A war-time president with a nobel peace prize approaches a podium. He sheds some tears for those dead babies. Then he goes off to the secret underground war room and orders drone attacks on some tiny Middle Eastern Village. Brown kids are killed. Nobody cries.

That’s called irony.

They didn’t have any finger paint. Faithful tragedy junkies log onto the internet, and “like” memorial pages for all those dead babies. Then they like a page advocating gun control. They do all of this while sitting on their asses and managing a virtual farm.

That’s called multitasking.

Celebrities visit a small town where it all happened, like plastic angels descending from Heaven to provide comfort to the afflicted. Then they fuck back off to Hollywood until some other tragedy happens. That’s called charity. The world cries and mourns for all those dead babies. Then it forgets.

That’s called progress.

A man walks into a high school. It sounds like the set-up to a joke. He opens fire, and kills a pack of babies, only twelve years from the cradle and about fifty years from the grave.

That’s called a chorus, ’cause it keeps repeating.

Considering the  emergence of the blog and poster campaign, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, 12th Street thought it apropos to pose just that- in terms of writing. Here is what the preeminent author and New School faculty member had to say about  speaking to her audience.

At the beginning, when I started [...]]]>

Considering the  emergence of the blog and poster campaign, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, 12th Street thought it apropos to pose just that- in terms of writing. Here is what the preeminent author and New School faculty member had to say about  speaking to her audience.

At the beginning, when I started to show my writing to people, to give readings from it, I had no audience. No one has an audience at the start, because no one is waiting. Certainly not for your work. To think that would be delusional. There was no audience for my writing. To the extent that I have one now, it is because, over time, say, 25 years of my writing’s being published, people called readers have come upon a story or novel or essay of mine and thought, I’d like to read more. This amazing relationship — a reader finding a writer whom he or she would like to read — begins accidentally and might become a habit or practice. If I think about readers who look forward to my next novel, I feel inspired to finish it. Those readers are important to me, though I don’t write for them. I certainly don’t want to disappoint them with a poor book or story; but I don’t write for them. I’m encouraged by the thought of them. In a real sense, readers are more important than writers. There are too many of us anyway, and too many write books that are nothing more than words used poorly in sentences that don’t signify in novels or stories that are primarily thoughtless. But readers — all readers should exist!

Lynne Tillman

Novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her most recent book, her fourth collection of stories, isSomeday This Will Be Funny. Her most recent novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2006. Her other novels are Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease On Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Tillman is also Professor/Writer-in-Residence at the University at Albany.

All he cares about are the jets

Buh-buh-buh-buh

Pow! Pow!

Man Down!

Because he is a boy

He knows nothing

Of the dilemma

I imagine a way

To explain

History through fiction:

I consider a false tale

Of a grandfather who did sail,

A navy mechanic on [...]]]>

*Photo: Enrique Rivas

The Intrepid

All he cares about are the jets

Buh-buh-buh-buh

Pow! Pow!

Man Down!

Because he is a boy

He knows nothing

Of the dilemma

I imagine a way

To explain

History through fiction:

I consider a false tale

Of a grandfather who did sail,

A navy mechanic on the bench,

He saved flying Bombers with his Wrench.

He defended us from the Kamikazes

While others wrangled with the Nazis.

She once valiantly ruled the Pacific,

Turned warm clear waves

With happy bright fishes,

Dark with the blood of Axis villains.

What a truly magnificent vessel.

But back to the saga:

My fictional granddad

Would meet a slender lad,

A petty officer above the rest

Whose camaraderie he loved the best

Until the day the sun empire

Ignited the lad’s funeral fire.

No. Too sad a story

To waste on a boy

Who cares nothing

About the dilemma.

Instead it should be sweet

And hetero-normative:

The lad will be in disguise

For actually she was no guy

But my Nanna, a woman with

A warrior’s code

Who wanted a chance to carry her

Country’s load.

Her breasts were bound

Until it was love that she found.

In the epic’s climax

Granddad, himself was about to—

A real World War II vet.

I better not.

This ancient, dying, once-soldier

Would know how impossible

My fiction really is

That my brain is the mush

Of romance novels

And cartoon women.

Now in the pizza establishment

I can see the truth:

She is shackled,

Surrounded by aluminum jellyfish

And seagulls fighting over paninis,

And no man, living or ghost soldier,

Will understand my dilemma.

Hudson River, you do not deserve her.

As part of our profile series on the Riggio: Writing and Democracy community, 12th Street asked John Reed, New School faculty member, “Who is Your Audience?” His response was both frank in content and compelling in form.  

Audience Equations for Myself (and/or anyone who is interested (in terms of a something [...]]]>

As part of our profile series on the Riggio: Writing and Democracy community, 12th Street asked John Reed, New School faculty member, “Who is Your Audience?” His response was both frank in content and compelling in form.  

Audience Equations for Myself (and/or anyone who is interested (in terms of a something intended for publication)):

Draft 0: Taking notes, not sure what it is, experimenting, etc.

Audience = self. (No rules, no boundaries, no structure, no worries. Not all projects have this draft; if you can, begin at “draft 1″)

Draft 1: A draft is defined as a whole unto itself: it can be read through and it more or less makes sense; a writer usually gets about five of these before the project loses focus.

Audience = self – meddling self. (Give yourself the freedom to do as you please: don’t rearrange the scenes before you have the draft; don’t revise your first chapter over and over again; don’t second guess yourself. Bukowski’s epitaph was, “Don’t try.”)

Draft 2: Scenes and Paragraphs.  Draft 1, you were concerned with getting the chapters in orders; now you’re managing scenes and paragraphs.

Audience = self – ego (cut material that isn’t working out, no matter how attached you are to it) + some rough sense of market and word count. (This is the draft where you can begin to think about length and demographic; to do so before this will very likely damage the work.)

Draft 3: Paragraphs and sentences. (If you get micro before this draft, you’ll likely be overly invested in stuff that will need to change; i.e., you spent three months on chapter three only to realize it’s actually set on Jupiter, not Io.)

Audience = self – ego + critical self (this is the time for some remove in order to line edit) + market/word count (continue to hedge in your chosen direction) + “ideal readers.” (If you have “readers,” this is the place to begin to think about them. That said, it’s a bad idea to write for one specific person, especially if that someone is (a) a friend or (b) a family member or (c) a lover, as they have undue influence and may or may not help move your project to publication—or whatever your end goal is.  An overly impactful edit at this time can: close off the project to future edits; give agents and editors the impression that the work is closed off to future edits, which it is; and forever take the project away from the author, who has given up his/her own vision. The best “reader” situation is a set of readers, and the best environment is somewhat impersonal, i.e., a workshop run by someone who knows what he/she is doing).

Draft 4: Sentences and words.

Audience = critical self (at this point, you should be line editing, and you as a force should be largely removed from the process) + agent/editor. (If you have an agent, this is where you listen to them. But be cautious: Unless an agent has direct market experience as an editor, he/she has a subjective experience of editorial.  If you guess what a specific agent might think, you’re very likely to mess up your manuscript; and likewise, if your agent guesses what a specific editor might think, you’re very likely to mess up your manuscript.  If you have a good editor at this point, you’re in the ideal situation; allow yourself to be challenged by your editor.)

Draft 5: Words, tiny glitches.

Audience = capricious copyeditor self (last chance, anything annoying must go) + copyeditor/factchecker. (You need a copyeditor and a factchecker; if you don’t have that arranged, arrange it).