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02 September 2002
The Good

This WorldCon report is, like Gaul (or gall), divided into three parts. This year's WorldCon, like all other WorldCons, was a mixed bag. I suppose that I could choose to begin with the negative and move toward the positive, rather as in traditional comedy. However, the tragic aspect is both more appealling to my cynical sense of reality and, sadly, a more accurate representation of the convention—the tragedy of what it could have been with very little additional effort.

But that is far from an accusation that everything was bad. For it was not. Some of the positive aspects included:

• The company was wonderful: the celestrial Lori Ann White and her sidekick "Shocking" Gary Shockley; HRH Princess Jae; the absolutely fabulous Lara Wells and her worthy-of-a-Merchant-and-Ivory-film Victorian costume; the respectful and amusing Tad Williams; the not-so-evil-as-they-might-otherwise-be publishing people from DAW, Tor, and NAL; the elegantly lovely Lindsey Johnson; the charming and adventurous Ashley and Caroline Grayson; the funloving Kent and Victoria Brewster; the radiant Christy Hardin Smith; the various Food Amoeba… well, you get the idea, particularly that Jaws and I (and even Mini-Jaws) had plenty of scenery to enjoy.
• Some of the parties were quite successful, including Eggplant Productions' chocolate party and the Tor Books gig. That others were not is, in some cases, a matter of taste; in two cases later on, though, it will be clear that it was more than mere taste.
• Several of the panels went quite well. There was almost a "Jaws Legal Track" from Thursday afternoon through Sunday morning, about half of which accomplished their respective missions with a minimum of fuss. That not all were so successful is as much a function of timing as anything else.
• The human sacrifice at the SFWA Meeting was, if anything, more (deservedly) violent than I expected. I did not witness it; I had a nontrivial role in instigating it, however.

Of course, there was more than this that was good; much of that is privileged, though, and this is just a thumbnail impression being written on the plane back.

03 September 2002
The Bad

Of course, not everything goes well at any convention. Parties, for example, were generally remarkable for their cluelessness in advertising themselves. At most cons, there is a central board in the lobby of the party hotel with a directory of public parties; not here. But that's largely an administrative thingy.

• Along with the good company must come the bad. Boys—and I do mean "boys," even those of you in your mid-40s, grabbing lovely ladies with your eyeballs and visibly/virtually undressing them only validates the public's perception of fen as Übergeeken. Actually grabbing with your hands or tentacles is even less appropriate. And stalking is right out (you know exactly who you are, and if you even come close I'll feed you your own gonads).
• The programming could have been much better balanced. There was very little programming for or about children, whether activities or panels. There was no academic track. At least there was some variety in the composition of the legal-issues panels; sad to say, there was no such variety among the electronic publishing or writing panels. Basically, there just was not adequate diversity in programming. Similarly, although I understand the financial constraints, the Green Room was a disgrace.
• The pricing in the art show was unrealistic. Although the art show itself was much better done than at MilPhilCon (frankly, so was the art show in my younger son's third-grade class last spring, at least from the standpoint of organization and presentation), artists are pricing themselves out of the market. I have no problem with expensive originals; expensive prints, particularly when not clearly limited editions, though, are not appropriate.

06 September 2002
The Ugly

Sadly, there are always preventable disasters at any convention. The following are the preventable disasters that were worse than just bad, but display incompetence, apathy, or both that reflect badly upon the WSFS and diminished the convention for those affected.

• Although I'm not a dancer, many of my friends are. The dance availability was virtually zero. For example, Saturday night had a "techno dance" session in which the floor was literally empty, until one of my friends brought her own CDs down. The DJ was particularly clueless. And why wasn't the Regency dance on Saturday night, coordinated with the Masquerade? I may not dance, but I do enjoy watching the variety of people and costumes one finds at a con out on the dance floor.
• The film sessions were in an inaccessible place, and were poorly attended due to a paucity of offerings (with lots and lots of unused time) and the absence of many traditional offerings. What kind of con has no RHPS showing?
• The people who prepared the "local guides" obviously had no idea of how to get around without a car. The "recommended" party supply store, for example, turned out to be an expensive cab ride away. Similarly, the restaurant guide showed little sensitivity toward those with even moderate disabilities.

All in all, it was a fun convention, despite my grumbling. And, despite the con crud and other issues that won't appear here, I had a good time. The disappointment is that it could have been so much better with a little more foresight and better attention to problems of previous cons—and better use of the expertise available from the folks who run Baycon right in that area. But this would require fen swallowing their pride and admitting to shortcomings, which is just about as likely as John Ashcroft admitting that he is attempting to impose his fundamentalist doctrine on America.

11 September 2002
Requiem

One year ago today, a small group of radical fundamentalist Muslims made another war in the Persian Gulf inevitible. Their fundamentalism, in all relevant respects, was identical to that revealed by General Ashcroft: to hell with the sacred text, I'm gonna kill somebody.

If their objective was to feed some war demon, they did well. Both the immediate and later reaction, however, have demonstrated something that should have been learned based upon the Japanese experience sixty years ago: In the long run, pissing off Americans with a sneak attack isn't worth it. Whether I like it or not—and mostly I don't, because I still go in for that "rule of law" thing, and I've actually read de Groot (also called Grotius) and his successors on the foundations of international law—the US currently feels justified in committing actions that, while apparently pointed at what appear to be legitimate military targets, fail to comply with the requirements of the law of war to minimize collateral damage and civilian casualties. Dammit, if you can't tell the difference, choose a different *&&(%^(*$! target.

The less said here about the administration's contempt for the Constitution, the better.

I've been out of direct contact with the nitty-gritty of Southwest Asia and CT work for the better part of a decade now. Nonetheless, it's extremely difficult to avoid feeling some responsibility. CT must be perfect or it is viewed as a failure. Somewhat over three thousand failures this time.

12 September 2002
Closing an American Mind?

The same asshole as last year has again pissed me off. Again, I will not give him the satisfaction of an indexable reference. Think of someone who also pontificates on baseball and hates anything he can manage to label "liberal;" we'll call him "MiniGeorge." I'm just going to take apart some of his bigoted diatribe. Some of it; the rest doesn't require even this much explication.

MiniGeorge loves to argue against labels. For example, he tends to blame everything wrong in morals on something that he calls "relativism"—but it bears little resemblance to what those of us who deny rigidity believe. He said:

The cultural relativism that gives rise to the fetish of multiculturalism—"It is mere ethnocentric arrogance to say one culture is superior to any other"—was incinerated by burning jet fuel. Reductionism—the realism of people blind to reality—holds that individuals are just soups of chemical reactions, that all motives are banal and tawdry, that the best biographies are pathographies, piercing the veil of human greatness to reveal grounds for diminishment. Thus is mind, and hence valor, drained from history.

Of course, this is arguing against a straw-man position. "Relativism" is not "absolute"; multiculturalism seeks to celebrate the best of differing cultures in an attempt to understand, not to evaluate. A proper statement of what cultural relativism means would look something like this:

It is mere ethnocentric and egocentric arrogance to say that one culture is superior to another in all respects.

As counterexamples to the absolutist evaluation of cultures, consider the Crusades, Wounded Knee, Jim Crow, William Calley, and Andersonville on the one hand, and Black September, the Taliban and Islamic treatment of women, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Abu Nidal, and the destruction of the library in Alexandria on the other. In other words, both sets of "opposed cultures"—and they need not be so, particularly as one realizes that this is not about religion as much as it is about naked attempts to seize absolute power—have shameful events in their past and present. (Of course, MiniGeorge might accuse me of taking his statement out of context. But that is exactly my point: it is as inappropriate to take a culture, or cultural clash, out of context as it is to take a phrase out of context. In any event, the rest of his little screed makes clear that this is not out of context.)

Perhaps the best illustration of the necessity for at least some flexibility is the old "snake and murderer" dilemma. You've come across someone who has been bitten by a venomous snake. You have two minutes to treat him or he'll die. Fortunately, you have both the expertise and equipment to do so. Unfortunately, you also know—beyond a reasonable doubt—that this individual will, within a few short years, become a serial killer. So, then, is it right to treat him, knowing of the future deaths, or is it right to refuse to treat him and cause his immediate death? This level of inaction is murder as surely as driving a knife into his femoral artery would be.

MiniGeorge then refutes his own argument with this:

The reflex was wrong. Our enemies attacked us not for what we have done but for what we are. And because of the attacks, we are even more intensely what we are, a nation defined by our unum, not our pluribus. The nation's great seal, proclaiming e pluribus unum, was adopted in 1782, five years before the Constitution was written and six years after the Declaration of Independence, with its declaration of equality of rights, made us, as Lincoln was to say at Gettysburg, a nation dedicated to a proposition. [emphasis in original]

Leaving aside the dubious factual predicates—for starters, MiniGeorge, I bet you've never read the Q'ran, even in an English translation—you've carefully neglected a critical bit of context that showed up in the Constitution and puts the lie to your assumption that this nation was founded on equality of rights: "three-fifths of all others." In other words, this history "lesson" is merely wishful thinking, of the same sort as used by everyone from the far right to the far left in adopting George Orwell as "one of us" in the 1950s through 1990s, and no doubt further into this century.

The nicest thing I can say about MiniGeorge is that he's intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt. I have some much nastier things I could say about him, but he's not worth the electrons.

14 September 2002
Department of Miscellaneous

As in any effort, there are always several nags about this journal. For example, my bank account asks, why aren't you using the time spent on this journal for something that brings in a few bucks (primarily, because I'm a writer by nature—I have to write, and this is a way to do so that doesn't exacerbate everything else).

I suppose that one of the first questions that comes up is a simple, "Internet-cultural" one: Why don't I call this a "blog," or use online journaling/blogging software? I suppose that the simplest answer is that it isn't. It is a "journal," in the same sense as was George Orwell's "As I Please" column for Time and Tide back in the 1940s. It appears at irregular intervals because it has to fit around everything else (such as, for example, Certain Litigation, which is the primary reason that I've reviewed so little over the last two years). It does not confine itself to any particular subject, although it often takes a somewhat legalistic view of things. Sometimes my ranting extends over several days, which is difficult or impossible to do in a true blog. I have nothing against blogs, or bloggers, particularly given the demise of true alternate opinions in the various news media; this just isn't a blog, and I'm not a blogger.

That also informs my decision not to use third-party software. Leaving aside the intellectual property issues presented by such software use, the most-popular versions, such as LiveJournal, are just plain ugly, hard for the visually impaired (like me) to read, and harder to use than the simple HTML templates. This site is powered by EditPad, a plain-text editor. I hand-code tables, and everything else. (Perhaps I find that simple because I first learned to program computers using machine language back in the 1970s, and everything else after calculating conditional JMP results seems easy.) Further, use of SSI instructions actually makes assembling this thing a snap. It takes about 45 minutes to set up the entire year's journals in advance, and it's flexible enough that I can incrementally revise the design if necessary with immediate effect.

And pretending that someone is actually reading these things is a good way to feel less ignored, for a few moments anyway.

18 September 2002
TV Dinners for Stouffer

Nancy Stouffer, that is. Not that I'm a big fan of Warner Brothers, or Scholastic Books, or anything like that. However, neither am I a big fan of rights-squatters, and that's what Stouffer was/is. (If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you may wish to read my last comments on the matter, or even my initial outrage. Or not.) In any event, she's not going to be engaging in any fine dining in the near future; instead, she's going to be limited to cheap TV dinners. Judge Schwartz ruled on her claims that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books infringe on Stouffer's trademark in the term "muggles." He was not gentle, and he shouldn't have been.

In the general sense, Judge Schwartz's opinion of this week is fairly unassailable. Identity of a mark is not sufficient to create a trademark action; instead, there must be some commercial injury. Typically, the commercial injury is measured by whether an unsophisticated consumer could be confused as to the origin or quality of the infringing product or service and assume that the infringing product or service is in fact authorized by the mark-holder. For example, in the St. Louis/Clayton area, calling an apartment management service Washington University Apartment Services would infringe the university's mark, because an unsophisticated consumer might believe that there was some affiliation. In this matter, though, Ms. Stouffer would have had to prove that Ms. Rowling's use of the word "muggle" as an adjective describing humans would (or could) somehow have led an unsophisticated consumer to believe that her books were produced and/or authorized by Ms. Stouffer, due to Ms. Stouffer's previous registration of the mark as designating nonhuman somethingorothers. Judge Schwartz properly found that no reasonable jury could find so, and issued judgment against Ms. Stouffer.

In most cases, that would have been the end of the matter, at least until the appeals court got ahold of it. Not here. Judge Schwartz was displeased not just with the substance of Ms. Stouffer's complaint, but with her litigation conduct. He found, as a fact based on clear and convincing evidence, that some of the evidence she provided to the court was fabricated. For example, he determined (relying upon testimony from experts in printing technology) that certain of the trademark exemplars—books, particularly their covers—provided by Ms. Stouffer had been either fabricated in toto, or modified, because the particular presentation could not have been done with pre-1993 printing technology. He also found other problems with her documentation, and issued a sanction against her for $50,000 to be paid to Rowling, Warner, and Scholastic in partial compensation for their attorneys' fees. (No attorneys' fee motion has yet been filed under the Lanham Act's fee-shifting provisions, although Judge Schwartz invited such a motion; I expect one to be filed, but it may be meaningless, because all indications are that Ms. Stouffer is judgment-proof.)

One must wonder at the adequacy of the prefiling investigation performed by Ms. Stouffer's former counsel. Presuming, as I must, that the judge's findings of fact are indeed the truth, one of two things must have happened: either the former counsel knew of and participated in a fraud on the court, or they accepted at face value documents that did not match the Library of Congress records as being correct. In either event, they've got some explaining to do. It is entirely possible that there is an innocent explanation, based upon the necessity to file something before expiration of the Statute of Limitations—but that is actually quite unlikely, as the matter was filed by the publishers as a declaratory judgment action.

Anyone who wants to read the opinion in slip form (that is, looks like a book manuscript, not a nicely printed opinion) can retrieve it from FindLaw's archive (PDF file). The juicy bits are sort of spread out, but the critical discussion of sanctions is in the last six pages. Warning: this is a big file.

22 September 2002
Parts and Wholes, Part I

In the Fall 2002 SFWA Bulletin, Andrew Burt has an article¹ that tries to analyze fiction for one characteristic of "quality." It's an interesting article, but I'm afraid that it falls prey to several logic problems that are all too familiar to serious (that is, academically serious) readers of literature.

Before going there, though, I must admit that I'm surprised and pleased that someone with a better grasp of literary theory than the individual who did the last "lit'rature" article for the Bulletin has stepped forward. That utter piece of garbage purported to discuss a major area of literature—in a context, I might add, that my previous academic work required familiarity (and contempt)—and made a complete hash of it. Theory does matter, for precisely the reasons that Dr. Burt wrote his article: theory can show us why certain things work, and others do not.

Initially, one must note that Dr. Burt is attempting to apply statistical and mathematical methods to literature. Whether this is even possible, let alone advisable, is at best dubious; simply running Shakespeare through any grammar-checker should convince one of that. Word 2000, for example, said that Romeo and Juliet—by far the "simplest" of the commonly studied plays—has a "reading ease" equivalent to a college-level or above textbook, and contained several thousand grammatical errors. I hate to think of what it would do to Riddley Walker or A Clockwork Orange or anything by Faulkner! Of course, there are other statistical methods that might be more valid than these, but they should give one pause.

Dr. Burt's method is to statistically study works for the prevalence and quality of their passages on what he calls "interpersonal relationships:"

Non-genre stories seem, on analysis, to contain lots of (drum roll)… Sentences about relationships of the characters to the people in their lives who matter. Spouses, parents, children, cousins, friends, co-workers, neighbors, strangers. Marriages, get-togethers, incidents, longings, angsts. Lots and lots of sentences about interpersonal relationships. Paragraphs. Scenes. Even whole stories.²

For the moment, let's indulge Dr. Burt and see where he's going. The specific method he advocates is as follows:

Pick about ten random places in the book, and read three paragraphs on each…. On each of those pages, read those three paragraphs, and rate them on a scale of 0 to 10 for how strongly filled with interpersonal relationships you feel they are—0 is none at all, 10 is pure. Add up the points. If you picked 10 places, that's your score.³

Dr. Burt thus came up with a list of 68 works for analysis, including both "genre" and "non-genre" works (about which more anon). Leaving aside the accuracy problems inherent in this approach for the moment, he had some interesting results. The "top-scoring" "genre" work was Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (presumably the book-length version), which properly is not fiction at all—it is epistolary—with a score of 77.00. Continuing on down the list, some of the other "genre landmarks" include Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead at 61.00, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land at 34.83, Larry Niven's Ringworld at 28.97, J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit at 20.00, Connie Willis's Doomsday Book at 12.47, and Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation at 11.00. Highlights among the "non-genre" works included Toni Morrison's Beloved at 88.00, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man at 66.00, James Joyce's Dubliners at 60.50, James Clavell's Shogun at 24.57, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island at 20.17.⁴

That's enough for now. Dr. Burt's conclusions are for next time. Then the fun begins.

to be continued…

«««««««« notes »»»»»»»»»

1. Andrew Burt, "Having Relationships With Characters on the Road to Great Fiction," Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Fall 2002: 30–34. All quotations and adaptations of Dr. Burt's article are with his permission.
2. Ibid., 30 (ellipses in original).
3. Ibid., 32.
4. Ibid., 33. Joyce's Dubliners simply does not belong here; as discussed later on, it is a noncomparable form, consisting of a set of somewhat accidentally collected short stories and one novelette, rather than a single work of fiction. Similarly, Ellison's Invisible Man is a dubious inclusion, as it is not a work of fiction as much as a fictionalized polemic. For my purposes, that won't matter, but it might matter otherwise.

24 September 2002
Parts and Wholes, Part II

Dr. Burt's analysis reaches several conclusions. Leaving aside for the moment the validity of the warrants for these conclusions, particularly based on the data presented, he concludes that:

• "There is a measurable difference between Great SF and ordinary SF…. That difference is observable in terms of 'relationships.' 'Great' SF scored twice as high as ordinary SF." ¹
• "Not knowing a character's relationships—how he feels toward his family, significant others and former significant others, coworkers, friends, associations—"is almost a guarantee [the writer] is not likely to portray [the] character interacting in relationship with others, thus creating a flat character for readers." ²
• "True relationships will manifest themselves throughout [a work of fiction], since people important to a character will remain important." ³

Well, one out of three isn't bad. If this was baseball, we'd be doing a helluva lot better than is the average (or even above-average) author! Unfortunately, Dr. Burt's approach is fraught with problems. Their common roots are twofold: measurability and confusion of symptomology for cause.⁴

to be continued…

«««««««« notes »»»»»»»»»

1. Ibid., 32.
2. Ibid., 34.
3. Ibid.
4. Dr. Burt has placed a more complete discussion on the web. Unfortunately, although time and space here does not permit a complete analysis of that continuation, it shares the same problems as does the Bulletin article.

◊        ◊        ◊

It has taken until now to get a few pictures back from ConJose. The picture to the right is an excellent example of exactly why science fiction writers are considered a bit loopy. The celestial Lori Ann White is holding up a chicken cunningly formed in an origami-like manner from the table linen at an Italianesque restaurant near the San Jose Convention Center. (The demonstration by the Coalition Against Genetic Engineering of Unnatural Lifeforms passed right by, assuming no doubt that we were completely hopeless.)

I'll sprinkle a few more photographs here and there over the next few days—more's the pity.

30 September 2002
Parts and Wholes, Part III

Now, I'm afraid, we need to start seeing just where Dr. Burt has gone astray. We'll start with a couple of bad assumptions about structure inherent in his method, and then meander elsewhere.

The method Dr. Burt uses requires one to obtain counts with scattered three-paragraph readings throughout the book, but particularly including both the first three and the last three paragraphs.¹ This, I am afraid, begins to skew the data before one even takes it. The first three paragraphs of a work of speculative fiction bear a burden quite distinct from other categories of fiction: world-building. In most fiction, one can gradually introduce the fictional environment. For example, consider this opening passage:

   It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farrady's Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days. The idea of such a journey came about, I should point out, from a most kind suggestion put to me by Mr. Farraday himself one afternoon almost a fortnight ago, when I had been dusting the portraits in the library. In fact, as I recall, I was up on the step-ladder dusting the portrait of Viscount Wetherby when my employer had entered carrying a few volumes which he presumably wished returned to the shelves. On seeing my person, he took the opportunity to inform me that he had just that moment finalized plans to return to the Unites States for a period of five weeks between August and September. Having made this announcement, my employer put his volumes down on a table, seated himself on the chaise-longue, and stretched out his legs. It was then, gazing up at me, that he said:

   "You realize, Stevens, I don't expect you to be locked up here in this house all the time I'm away. Why don't you take the care and drive off somethere for a few days? You look like you could make good use of a break."

   Coming out of the blue as it did, I did not quite know how to reply to such a suggestion. I recall thanking him for his consideration, but quite probably I said nothing very definite, for my employer went on:

   "I'm serious, Stevens. I really think you should take a break. I'll foot the bill for the gas. You fellows, you're always locked up in these big houses helping out, how do you ever get to see around this beautiful country of yours?" ²

Notice that this passage says very little about the context; instead, the reader can draw his or her conclusions about the context from a few hints. Conversely, a work of speculative fiction—particularly one that is far removed in time or space from late-twentieth-century life—needs substantially more work on context at the very beginning of the novel.

   The Consul awoke with the peculiar headache, dry throat, and sense of having forgotten a thousand dreams which only periods in cryogenic fugue could bring. He blinked, sat upright on a low couch, and groggily pushed away the last sensor tapes clinging to his skin. There were two very short crew clones and one very tall, hooded Templar with him in the windowless ovoid of a room. One of the clones offered the Consul the traditional post-thaw glass of orange juice. He accepted it and drank greedily.

   "The Tree is two light-minutes and five hours of travle from Hyperion," said the Templar, and the Consul realized that he was being addressed by Het Masteen, captian of the Templar treeship and True Voice of the Tree. The Consul vaguely realized that it was a great honor to be awakened by the Captain, but he was too groggy and disoriented from fugue to appreciate it.

   "The others have been awake from some hours," said Het Masteen and gestured for the clones to leave them. "They have assembled on the foremost dining platform." ³

The contrast is difficult to avoid. Although both works feel right, and both include characters interacting, the weight of those interactions is substantially greater in the first example. This is primarily because the second example spends a great deal of its prose on worldbuilding details—well over 60% of the wordage is devoted to functions simply not present in the first passage. Had the references to cryogenic fugue been handled as offhandedly as were the references to the West Country, the reader would have emerged thoroughly confused. Instead, the author has painted a picture that allows us to place the Consul in some context. One can make similar observations about the last paragraph in each category of novel; for a series—something vastly more common in speculative fiction than in what Dr. Burt calls "IP" fiction—this is even more likely to present a profound structural contrast that bears little relevance to the intensity of interpersonal relationships portrayed in the work.

Thus, before one has even begun collecting data, 20% of the data is stacked against a high "IP rating" for the work of speculative fiction. That goes only to the particular ratings that Dr. Burt has presented, though, as it can be corrected by truly randomizing the location of the material examined and excluding inherently distinct functions from consideration.

Sadly, this is the least of the problems in this analytic method.

◊        ◊        ◊

No ConJose pictures today. On the literary scams front, however, there is one announcement. On Thursday, 26 September 2002, a federal search warrant was served and executed upon the office of Press-TIGE Publishing, Inc., and the residence of its proprietor Martha Ivery, near Albany, NY. Although Ms. Ivery was not arrested at the time, a substantial amount of records and other pieces of evidence was removed from the search locations for examination by the federal authorities. The FBI and United States Attorney make no further comment at this time. That's to be expected, and is in any event good—they might otherwise make snide remarks about sharks dancing looking like an epileptic seizure.

«««««««« notes »»»»»»»»»

1. Ibid., 32.
2. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber & Faber, 1989). In Dr. Burt's terms, this is an "IP" novel.
3. Dan Simmons, Hyperion (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1989). In Dr. Burt's terms, this is a straight "SF" novel. This passage is the beginning of the novel proper; the contrast is even more apparent with the prologue. Dr. Burt did not specify whether the "beginning" meant the prologue or "Chapter 1." Because so little noncategory work even has a prologue, I chose to exclude it from consideration here. The point remains valid either way.

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