THP's e-office: Technology, Productivity and Paradox

I'm a sap for technology.  Kirsten and I drove down to Torrey from Salt Lake this weekend for the first time in four or five weeks.  We keep a virtual office at both our Salt Lake place and Torrey place, made possible and more convenient, in part, by technology.  Torrey House Press has just closed our winter fiction contest with 49 entries to judge.  That's about the number I was hoping for and I'm gratified, but what I'm really delighted about is the number and quality of book manuscripts we have received to date.  Maybe I just like almost everything I read, but I have asked a half dozen of the submitting authors for their full manuscripts.  It's a fantastic job, but Kirsten and I, and our judges, need to read all of this stuff.

Thus technology comes to the rescue.  I would still rather read a printed book, but rationalizing that as publishers we need to know the technology, we bought both a basic Kindle and an iPad.  Kirsten is taking to the Kindle.  We can send the stories and manuscripts as Word documents straight to our Kindle e-mail address which uploads them wireless-ly to the Kindle where we then read them as automatically formatted Kindle e-books.   She likes the light weight of the Kindle and is happy with the format.  To my surprise as an old PC guy, I've cottoned to the iPad.  I've found the best way to read the manuscripts on the iPad is to send them from Word to my own email address as pdf files.  Then I open the attachment in the iPad from the iPad email app, which opens the document in the iPad's app Pages which in turns allows me to open the pdf document in iBooks and there, voila, is the now stored manuscript in easy to read book form.  Kirsten and I both still take notes on what we are reading the old fashioned way, by hand, in a notebook.  But I have my antenna up for higher-tech note taking solutions.  Suggestions welcome.

The third technology we are putting to use is "The Cloud" via Google Apps.  All of our contest entries are stored on Google Docs where all the reading judges can get to them easily, make notes and score them in a way we all can see.  Technology allows us to haul manuscripts and stories back and forth from Salt Lake to Torrey without having to carry a lot of stacks of paper around.

The paradox is in getting all the stuff to work and in all the time it takes to keep it working.  The first thing I did when I got to Torrey this trip is fiddle with the little weather station I have here and try to get it back up and working on the internet.  Then, I boxed up an old inkjet printer and simple scanner that have been abandoned by their manufacturers and are no longer supported by the current versions of Windows or even by current PC's.  When's the last time you saw a parallel printer port?  The machines are still functional but no longer useful and are going into the round file.  As a sap, I admit I have wasted enough time already trying to keep the old stuff going.  Next for Torrey, figure out if we can drop the phone line, switch to a wireless internet service instead of DSL, add maybe Vonage for a phone and see if I can make that work with the  house heater's telephone switch to get the heat on before we get here from Salt Lake in the winter.  I'm sure no time will be wasted in all that set up to get those productivity enhancement tools to be productive.  Right?

Fiction Contest Closes

The first Torrey House Press fiction contest closed last night with about 44 entries.  It is going to be interesting to see the quality of the writing that found THP in this first go around.  Writing was submitted from all over the country and nearly all have some part of the West in the story.  We have submissions from both professors and students, established writers and, of course, writers readers have yet to hear from.

We hope to publish the top entries in book and e-book journal form by the end of the year along with top submissions from our upcoming contests: Creative Literary Nonfiction, deadline: May 31, 2011 and Short Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, deadline: September 30, 2011.  See more here for contest information.  In addition we would like to give everyone a feel for our contestants' work by publishing a top tier entry every two weeks on www.torreyhouse.com.  

I'm eager to see the quality of what is out there with these submissions.  My expectation is there will be writers with real promise and we will be contacting them to see what else they have.  I'll keep you posted here.

Expressing the West

It's hard to say why it is worth putting time and energy into protecting and conserving the West.  It's not that there aren't a lot of good reasons, it is simply literally hard to express the concepts.  Ten years ago I was sitting down with my personal friend and adviser, Greig Veeder, as it happens in a bookstore, talking about what our next ventures might be.  I told him I might try to do something about preserving the delicate Colorado Plateau.  Greig asked why -- and I was stumped.  It seemed self evident, and that if it wasn't self evident then it seemed to me it couldn't be explained.  But, it can be.

On Thursday last we sent out an email from Torrey House Press asking our readers who their favorite writers of the West are.  I'll share some of the delightfully thoughtful and insightful responses in another blog.  But before I do, I want to speak to the purpose of Torrey House Press, a purpose that was brought into a little better focus, as it were, by a blog post that was sent to me by photographer Guy Tal in response to our email (here).  I find Guy to be a tough looking, highly sensitive and exquisitely good landscape photographer.  Photography is a long time casual hobby of mine and I knew of Guy before his studio gallery showed up in tiny Torrey.  My immediate reaction to seeing his store front was delight that our little town could attract his kind of world class talent.  As the Chinese proverb goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but as even photographers like Guy know, sometimes it takes words, too.  So Guy not only takes pictures to express himself, he is also an elegant and thoughtful writer. 

In his blog Guy writes about caring about something so much it demands expression.  Then, the question is how.  Guy explores his creative license to use his photography skills, both behind the camera and in the digital darkroom, to best express what he fully perceives while out on the land.  Plein-air painters do the same.  And what I decided to do, to express in words what I felt passionately about, was start Torrey House Press, and get down those passions  from writers of the land.  I hope before too long to be able to point to a growing catalog of books and thus answer Greig's question.

Give me the money, now get out of here . . .

Yesterday the Salt Lake Tribune ran an article (here) on President Obama's proposed federal budget and the cutbacks proposed for the Central Utah Project.  After recently re-reading Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert I'm feeling more savvy to the extent of the pork and boondoggle that goes into public water projects.  (You can see my review of Cadillac Desert and an excerpt here.)  Public water projects usually amount to the federal government providing water to local agricultural interests for pennies on the taxpayers' dollar.  Federal spending needs to be cut, and the bloated water programs are a good place to start.  So what are our local angry Tea Party politicians doing about it?   Making sure the pork flows.  Senator Hatch said he helped to keep the cuts for CUP to only $9 million instead of a full $40 million.  And the Sagebrush Rebellion brothers, Mike Noel and Ralph Okerlund, even sponsored a resolution demanding the federal largess be fully restored, their argument being it didn't cost local taxpayers and farmers anything -- see it here.

What is it about blatant hypocrisy that stinks the joint up so much?

Water Worries

The Economist recently ran a piece on the Colorado River and the drying of the West.  We Westerners are generally aware of the rising bathtub ring on the reservoirs on the Colorado River as the result of a lengthy drought and a growing population.  But now our water woes are being noticed even by economic editors in London.  The fact that the river was over-allocated in the first place is interesting enough, but The Economist parses the problem into four clean dimensions of the physical, legal, political, and cultural.  The interest angle on the piece is that the problems have reached crises proportions: there's less water than generally acknowledged, and something has to be done.  By looking at the pieces dimension by dimension, solutions start to appear.  Do we really need to water so much grass they ask?

I'd mention to The Economist, if they asked me, that the grass we should be most worried about is not the residential lawns they bring up, but hay.  Some 80% of the water Westerners use is for agriculture, and in the Intermountain West, most of that water goes on hay.  There's where the cultural dimension gets interesting.  Why is the Utah hay farmer so determined to put water on his field for a subsidized $6 per acre foot when Las Vegas and Los Angeles would pay him and the state of Utah several thousands of dollars for the same water, and all the farmer has to do is turn off his sprinkler (taking care of the physical dimension)?

The Tragedy of the Commons

James Fallows of The Atlantic is a favorite writer of mine.  I first noticed him when he came out with his book More Like Us in the 80's regarding the Japan Inc. competitive scare.  Fallows' argument was that to compete with the Japanese globally America should act more like America and not try to be like Japan.  He was spot on and caught my eye as an up and coming public intellectual and superb big picture guy.

So I was a little surprised to see in a recent blog of his that he seemed to not quite understand his own argument about the workings of carbon credits -- until I realized Fallows is on book leave and hosting guest bloggers on his site.  Even though the guest blog, The Howling Wilderness of Carbon Credits, is slightly off tilt in its conclusion, I enjoyed running into the seminal essay there on The Tragedy of the Commons by environmentalist Garrett Hardin from Science in 1968.

As an investment manager in the 80's and 90's, I enjoyed the resurgence of free market policies and the enormous bull market they helped create.  I became a big fan of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," the idea, as Hardin explains, "that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote…the public interest." It's a complex concept stemming from Smith's 1759 work TheTheory of Moral Sentiments.  I was pretty sure back then that the invisible hand could do just about anything better than government could.  But, as Hardin explains, that hand reaches a door it cannot open by itself when it comes to "the tragedy of the commons."

The concept of the "The Tragedy of the Commons" underlies most of the economic and environmental policy regarding public land management.   I'm working on a longer piece for torreyhouse.com  on the subject but wanted to get it introduced in this blog.  Hardin's essay was the intellectual stimulus behind much of the productive work of the early environmental movement and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.  There is still more room for implementation of those ideas today on the Colorado Plateau. More coming up . . .

This Blog's Agenda

I started Torrey House Press (THP) with the goal of leaving more grass on the mountains and water in the streams when I am dead and gone (I hope I'm not in a big hurry!).  Their are plenty of able environmental conservation organizations already in existence working on that same goal.  It seems to me that what they need to get more done is a broader following, and the way to get a broader and more sympathetic following is to tell stories.  There are plenty of good writers out there whose work is flavored and informed by the western landscape they live in.  Our goal at THP is to get the best of that writing to the light of day.  For my writing part I'm going to pontificate on this blog about:

• Water and Western water rights, water economics and water resource management
• Grazing and promotion of the right for a rancher to sell and retire his grazing rights into conservation
• Mining and drilling that does more economical harm than good
• The resource that is the dark night skies of the Colorado Plateau
• The environmental economics of a natural and preserved landscape
• The theme of Old West and New West and particularly what the Old West legislators who predominate in Utah, such as Mike Noel, are doing to make Utahns' lives worse
• Special interest domination of the issues in the West, such as the Cattlemen's Association's lasso around the legislators
• Housing and development and its effect on the Plateau
• Sustainable building and living practices (my son's specialty)
• The activities and notable work of the local environmental agencies
• The rhetoric of the environmentalists and legislators

I also want to share some of what is going on at Torrey House Press including thoughts on:

• The people we are working with and what they are thinking about
• Small press publishing business and trends
• What I've been reading lately
• Transcendence-  one of my pet interests is consciousness and its quantum physics enigma.   I hope to chat a bit about how that enigma fits with the perception of nature espoused by Emerson and Thoreau, and with concepts like Emmanuel Kant's and Robert Persig's a priori knowledge.

I love this stuff.  I hope a few readers pitch in and share their thoughts and comments.