Annotated Bibliography update

Time flies. 

Two more publications to add to the annotated bibliography:

• “Ocarinas.” Pottery Making Illustrated (November/December 2024)
• I already mentioned this public-service article here, but I forgot to add it to the annotated bibliography.

And this:

• "Laundry." Cover image. The Sun Magazine (September 2026).
• I sent a bunch of photos to The Sun Magazine for consideration this past winter, and in March they accepted two. In June, I learned that they'd decided "the right place" for one of them was the September cover. What a thrill!

My knees, S's knees, and the bees' knees

• "Laundry." Cover image. The Sun Magazine (September 2026)

• “Ocarinas.” Pottery Making Illustrated (November/December 2024)

• Goldstine, S., Paley, E., and Segerman, H. “Ars Mathemalchemica: From Art to Math and Back Again.” Notices of the American Mathematical Society. August 2022.

• “Light and Shadow.” Pottery Making Illustrated (November/December 2021). 

• “Raiding the Kitchen.” Pottery Making Illustrated (July/August 2021). 

• “Worship.” The Sun Magazine, Readers Write (October 2019), name withheld. 
• Can you find me? Hint: I'm the church musician who's destroying the world.

• “Thinking like a Pianist/Mathematician/Potter-Designer: Strategies for Tuning Ocarinas.” Proceedings of Bridges 2015: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture (2015), 559–562.
• Want to learn how to make an ocarina on which you can play a diatonic scale? This mathy article is for you.

• “Schumann’s Dramatic Choral and Stage Works.” In The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 2007.
• This is the article about which a well-meaning colleague advised, "you know, to get tenure, you can't just publish in popular venues--you have to do solid research." While I'm sure many people have a copy of this popular book on their shelf--I do, don't you?--the suggestion that my research would be more valuable if it appealed to fewer people was one more reason to quit academia. I think the chapter is both solid and an interesting read--reviewers thought it was too--and I still stand by my reasoning for excluding Schumann's Szenen aus Goethes Faust.

• A series on leaving academia for The Chronicle of Higher Education under the pseudonym Catherine Evans:
•  “Giving Up a Good Thing,” 4 April 2003, http://chronicle.com/article/Giving-Up-a-Good-Thing/45138/
• “So Why Are You Really Leaving?” 6 May 2003, http://chronicle.com/article/So-Why-Are-You-Really-Leaving-/45203/
• “Cappuccino Dreams,” 19 September 2003, http://chronicle.com/article/Cappuccino-Dreams/45308/

• An advice columnist at the Chronicle named me Catherine Evans; I had written to her asking how to politely quit. Oh, what a young thang I was, trying not to burn bridges. She also turned me from a Music Theorist into an Art Historian. I was nonetheless still worried about being recognized, so I downplayed certain issues that, in retrospect, I shouldn't have downplayed. Or maybe I should have. I'll just note here that five years after I changed careers, I ran into a grad student who inquired whether I "worked outside the home," and fifteen years after changing careers, I ran into a colleague who bemoaned that yet another of his very few female colleagues had just up and quit, "and she doesn't even have a husband to support her like you did." What's wrong with women, eh? 

• “Zwischenreden für Zwischenakte: Egmont and the Melodramatic Supplement.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 2005.
• Derrida's "logic of the supplement" has stuck with me all the way into pottery, so that's something.

• “The Power of No.” Big Apple Parent, August 2003, p. 117.
• I wrote a lot of stories about E when he was wee, and I got this one published. Of course, I told no one about it, since it would have counted against tenure, and I have no idea if anyone even in New York read it.

• “‘The Voice Which Was My Music’: Narrative and Nonnarrative Musical Discourse in Schumann’s Manfred.” 19th-Century Music 24/1 (Summer 2000): 3-20.
• My first article post grad school, published in one of my favorite journals. Schumann's music for Manfred is some of the creepiest music ever. I used to play the music for the conjuration of Manfred's deceased beloved Astarte on the organ with all of the lights off except the ones in the organ loft, and it was pretty trippy.

• “Narratives of ‘Incidental’ Music in German Romantic Theater.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1998.

• Paley, E.S., Low, F.J., McGraw, J.T., Cutri, R., and Rix, H.-W. “An Infrared/Optical Investigation of 100 Micron ‘Cirrus.’” The Astrophysical Journal 376 (20 July 1991): 335–341.
• Interstellar gas and dust are cold.

Public service article

I recently wrote an article for Pottery Making Illustrated on troubleshooting tone-production pitfalls in ocarinas, because any potter who has ever been stymied by a malfunctioning fipple deserves help. It's available online here. It's acoustically and musically serious, while simultaneously including lots of googly eyes.

The article had a word limit that I was already exceeding, so I left out my number one rule of ocarina making: 

Fipple ain't broke, don't fix it.

There you have it. Now go forth and make music.

Annotated bibliography

Late last year into early this year, I co-wrote an article with two other Mathemalchemists, Susan Goldstine and Henry Segerman. A playful narrative romp through the Mathemalchemy project, Ars Mathemalchemica: From Math to Art and Back Again appears in the August 2022 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

My bibliography amuses me. I don't publish often, but I do get around.

• Goldstine, S., Paley, E., and Segerman, H. “Ars Mathemalchemica: From Art to Math and Back Again.” Notices of the American Mathematical Society. August 2022.

• “Light and Shadow.” Pottery Making Illustrated (November/December 2021). 

• “Raiding the Kitchen.” Pottery Making Illustrated (July/August 2021). 

• “Worship.” The Sun Magazine, Readers Write (October 2019), name withheld. 
• Can you find me? Hint: I'm the church musician who's destroying the world.

• “Thinking like a Pianist/Mathematician/Potter-Designer: Strategies for Tuning Ocarinas.” Proceedings of Bridges 2015: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture (2015), 559–562.
• Want to learn how to make an ocarina on which you can play a diatonic scale? This mathy article is for you.

• “Schumann’s Dramatic Choral and Stage Works.” In The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 2007.
• This is the article about which a well-meaning colleague advised, "you know, to get tenure, you can't just publish in popular venues--you have to do solid research." While I'm sure many people have a copy of this popular book on their shelf--I do, don't you?--the suggestion that my research would be more valuable if it appealed to fewer people was one more reason to quit academia. I think the chapter is both solid and an interesting read--reviewers thought it was too--and I still stand by my reasoning for excluding Schumann's Szenen aus Goethes Faust.

• A series on leaving academia for The Chronicle of Higher Education under the pseudonym Catherine Evans:
•  “Giving Up a Good Thing,” 4 April 2003, http://chronicle.com/article/Giving-Up-a-Good-Thing/45138/
• “So Why Are You Really Leaving?” 6 May 2003, http://chronicle.com/article/So-Why-Are-You-Really-Leaving-/45203/
• “Cappuccino Dreams,” 19 September 2003, http://chronicle.com/article/Cappuccino-Dreams/45308/

• An advice columnist at the Chronicle named me Catherine Evans; I had written to her asking how to politely quit. Oh, what a young thang I was, trying not to burn bridges. She also turned me from a Music Theorist into an Art Historian. I was nonetheless still worried about being recognized, so I downplayed certain issues that, in retrospect, I shouldn't have downplayed. Or maybe I should have. I'll just note here that five years after I changed careers, I ran into a grad student who inquired whether I "worked outside the home," and fifteen years after changing careers, I ran into a colleague who bemoaned that yet another of his very few female colleagues had just up and quit, "and she doesn't even have a husband to support her like you did." What's wrong with women, eh? 

• “Zwischenreden für Zwischenakte: Egmont and the Melodramatic Supplement.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 2005.
• Derrida's "logic of the supplement" has stuck with me all the way into pottery, so that's something.

• “The Power of No.” Big Apple Parent, August 2003, p. 117.
• I wrote a lot of stories about E when he was wee, and I got this one published. Of course, I told no one about it, since it would have counted against tenure, and I have no idea if anyone even in New York read it.

• “‘The Voice Which Was My Music’: Narrative and Nonnarrative Musical Discourse in Schumann’s Manfred.” 19th-Century Music 24/1 (Summer 2000): 3-20.
• My first article post grad school, published in one of my favorite journals. Schumann's music for Manfred is some of the creepiest music ever. I used to play the music for the conjuration of Manfred's deceased beloved Astarte on the organ with all of the lights off except the ones in the organ loft, and it was pretty trippy.

• “Narratives of ‘Incidental’ Music in German Romantic Theater.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1998.

• Paley, E.S., Low, F.J., McGraw, J.T., Cutri, R., and Rix, H.-W. “An Infrared/Optical Investigation of 100 Micron ‘Cirrus.’” The Astrophysical Journal 376 (20 July 1991): 335–341.
• Interstellar gas and dust are cold.

For the love of all that is good in the world, just use "we"

It's been a while since I've written anything about prose style, but I'm in the midst of providing feedback to a bunch of student science writers, and I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of beleaguered readers of English-language science writing. Yes, I'm talking to you, you more experienced, published science-writing professionals: set a good example for the grad students.

Just use we.

We.

And put it at the front of the sentence, so you can put a verb right after it.

We examine X.

We consider X.

We investigate X.

X can be simple; X can be complex. With "we [verb]" in front of it, X can throw pretty much anything at readers, and readers generally will handle X without getting annoyed. Or at least, without getting as annoyed as they would were X standing in front of a supremely boring passive-voice verb that doesn't show up until a mile further down the sentence road.

Generally, when I read students' science writing, I don't have to know much about the science to detect whether the prose makes sense. Sometimes, to tell whether my confusion is with the prose or my lack of scientific knowledge, I'll look up a term or phrase to see how more experienced authors use it.

Today, I Googled one such phrase. This led me several articles confirming the phrase's existence. One such article included this sentence:

Prospective applications of targeted compounds derived from display libraries in the discovery of targeted drugs and gene therapy vectors are discussed.

Dear readers, be honest: did you read the entire sentence from beginning to end? If so, did you understand it? If so, did you enjoy it?

Please, people, give in to temptation. I promise it's OK: use "we."

We discuss.

We discuss prospective applications of targeted compounds derived from display libraries in the discovery of targeted drugs and gene therapy vectors.

Readers might not adore the revision, but they won't want to bang their heads against a wall after reading it. Or at least they won't want to bang their heads quite so hard.

This has been a public service announcement. Feel free to complain in the comments.

Qwality literature

Whaddya know: I just found the journals I kept during my family's see-how-far-you-can-drive-in-how-little-time road trips in 1978 (Pennsylvania and the Colorado Rockies) and 1979 (Indiana Dunes and Mackinac Island). The journals are dusty. I haven't read them since I wrote them.

Perusing them now, I confirm what I've always known: my siblings and I fought a lot, and it's amazing that my parents never carried through on their threats to PULL THE CAR OVER RIGHT NOW and YOU CAN ALL #$@% WALK HOME. (I don't know that my parents ever said #$@%, but it was implied.)

Day 4, 5/31/78
My father is in a bad mood and wants to go back to Illinois tomorrow. I have the feeling he'll change his mind. Maybe.

Day 3, 7/7/79
Got up. Fought. Took down the tent. Fought. Left campsite. Made up.
Swedish bakery! Yummmmmmmmy!
We stopped at a winery. Mom and Dad say the wine stinks.

Providing the outline for the journals were, in theory, the great natural and historic sites that were our destinations ("We are now at the [Philadelphia] zoo. It's not the greatest zoo in the world."). However, the greater value of the texts is the insight they offer into road-tripping with tweens in the 1970s.

I meticulously recorded every encounter we had with sugar, whether candy corn, napoleon, Whitman's Sampler chocolate, eclair, ice cream, turnover, Hawaiian Punch, fudge, or soda:

Day 13, 8/18/78
Woke up, took a shower, ate breakfast, played outside. Bye!
Cokes.
Plains yesterday, hills today.
Cokes.
Stores.
Lunch.
Kansas City, Missouri.
Cokes.

Day 7, 8/12/78
...With supper we had Pepsi in a shatterproof bottle. When the Pepsi was gone, I tested the bottle, and boy is it shatterproof.
...Since I found my mom's tablecloth, she gave me a prize of 1/4 of a lb. candy corns. Boy are they sweet. Then we looked in stores, got Pepsis at a pizza place, and came back. I was so tired I couldn't sleep straight.

Reading this explains so much. So much.

Of course, we ate more than just sugar. I offered no-holds-barred assessments of the sub-par cuisine at Ho-Jo's and Stuckey's ("It was O.K."; "It wasn't the greatest, but it was O.K."). Few non-sugar foods warranted mention by name. Their relative value was measured in exclamation points, including Bacon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (17), Pizza!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (14), and Ham! (1).

I kept careful track of expenses, probably feeling a little like Laura Ingalls Wilder ("Gee, [the monorail] was expensive. 75¢ per child. My parents gave N and me each a quarter. We paid the rest.").

With a righteousness passed down to me by my father, I wrote often and sternly about "Nutty Drivers!!!!!!!!"

Day 5, 6/1/78
...This really rotten driver just went past us, going more than 60 mph! He was driving like this:

In ignorant bliss, we communed with nature by wreaking havoc on fragile ecosystems.

Day 10, 8/15/78
A tour of the Big Thompson Power Project. Boring! After the tour, we went around back, found peanuts, and gave some to marmots. There were billions of them.

...

My intent when I began this post was to toss the journals into the recycling bin when I was done, but instead maybe I'll hold onto them for another 37 years.

New areas in hole appreciation

I'm working on a paper on different ways to tune ocarinas and needed a symbol to distinguish the total area of all open holes, A_t, from the area of a single open hole. While tempting, somehow A_hole didn't look quite right.

Avoid Nominalizations

My series of writing workshops for engineering students ended this afternoon. If the enthusiastic writers who attended remember just one tidbit of information from our time together (other than how much fun we had, of course), I hope it is this: avoid nominalizations. Because it is such a great tidbit, I'm proselytizing to you too, gentle reader(s).

Avoid nominalizations.

Perhaps additional repetition will help you remember to avoid nominalizations.

I didn't learn the word nominalizations until 2004, some six years after I finished my doctoral dissertation, so it's not as though a person can't get through written life without avoiding them. (Another helpful writing tidbit is avoid double negatives; see the previous sentence if you need proof. But on an egregiousness scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is least egregious and 10 is most egregious, double negatives hover around 0.5, while excessive nominalizations score a hefty 11.6.)

A nominalization is an action that resides in a word other than a verb. Nominalization, for example, is a nominalization (a noun-ification) of the verb to nominalize (to noun-ify). Most (but not all) -tion and -sion words are nominalizations. Remediation, infatuation, solicitation, elucidation, radiation, multiplication--these are all actions that could be expressed as verbs (remediate, infatuate, solicit, elucidate, radiate, multiply) but are instead nouns. (Words like nation and sedition are a little trickier. They were perhaps verbs at one point, before settling into permanent English noundom. At the root of nation is the past participle of nāscī, "to be born"; and sedition comes from seditio, which combines the prefix se- [apart] with the verb ire [to go]. But I digress.) Many nominalizations skip happily past -tion/-sion suffixes altogether: the influence, the score, the report, the failure...you get the idea.

In English, we like our actions in verbs. We like verbs so much that when they are delayed by intervening words, we get antsy. That's why languages like German can throw native English speakers for a loop: German lets you postpone verbs for miles and miles. (For remarkable examples, see Mark Twain's essay, The Awful German Language.)

So we English speakers like actions in verbs, and we like our verbs up front. When an excessive number of actions appear in nouns, we get confused, annoyed, or both. Consider:

The cause of the impartment of obfuscation on meaning is the unnecessary placement of actions in nouns.

(Translation: We obscure meaning when we unnecessarily place actions in nouns.)

Hey, I hear all of you out there in internet space, saying to yourselves, "sure, the understanding of the cause of challenges from the putting of actions into nouns is important, but what about the influence of the ordering of words on the meaning of a sentence?" To which I would simply reply, "verbs and cohesion walk hand in hand. Put your actions into verbs, and you shall not regret it."