So this morning with my first cup of coffee I caught the end of CBS’s Sunday Morning news magazine and learned about how the public library in Brooklyn has set up a way for people who want to be fashion designers can get their start. Most, but not all, are women of color, several of whom have spent half a lifetime already in some other field. But this is what they always wanted to do or try out, fashion design. And I am hooked into watching this the moment we learn that the women at the library who put this project together on a shoestring contacted a famous designer (the guy who used to be on a television program called Project Runway, I think) to help these folks. Once he learned how sincere they all were, he made sure to get involved and offer his professional guidance.
I know zip about fashion and fashion design. I know what bell bottom jeans are because I was a young man in the 1970s. I know about A-line dresses (think of the mid 1950s) because (1) I came across reference to them in an Encyclopedia Britannica article about the history of clothing and (2) I knew about the clothes Grace Kelly and the other actresses wore in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. But here’s the thing: with this episode about learning fashion design in Brooklyn, I was watching people invest themselves in personal goals they had long desired to experience, and they were doing it under the guidance of a professional. What entranced me is that behind-the-scenes glimpse of the professionalism involved in this field.
This was catnip for me. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing–for example, videos online of how musicians hold jam sessions and go back and forth with their ideas about chords or notes or melodies. I know zip about music, too (although I do like a variety of different kinds). But listening in on why certain blues musicians use certain chords or progressions or notes, whatever they may be—well, I feel as if I’m in a sanctum sanctorum and observing the initiation rites of some ancient sacred mystery.
Myself, I like to feel that I operate on some level of professionalism. I still have warm memories of my years at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons when I was the managing editor of that organization’s monthly peer-reviewed journal. I worked with a first-rate staff of copy editors dedicated every day to maintaining exactness with every term, syllable, sentence, and paragraph we dealt with on the page, making it our protocol to review each manuscript repeatedly.
(This level of perfectionism is now lost at most medical journals, which are produced by publishing behemoths whose primary dedication is to getting studies through a meat grinder and online as quickly as possible. The expertise comes from the doctors who perform peer review; after that, factota do what they can to review and polish as quickly as possible. I failed miserably a few years ago when I signed on to do some freelance copy editing for one of the largest medical publishers in the world. Their protocol, now commonplace at most of these journals, is to hire persons with some experience in medical editing and have them push through 10 manuscript pages an hour. To do that, only the most superficial review is possible: Are the figures cited in order? Do we even need this particular figure? Is dilation or dilatation meant here? A reference citation number is missing: Author, please advise. My cat could do it. There is no time to double check whether the percentages in a table add up to 100, and certainly no time to ascertain whether this section needs a B head or a C head or even a D head. Just…GWA, as I learned from the brilliant Anne Rossi who trained me when I started my career at Neurology: Go With Author.)
Now I pay attention to any opportunity I find to sit in on professionals engaged in shoptalk, even if it’s performative. For instance, I really enjoy watching the FBI shows on CBS (or did, back when they had three different titles) and NCIS. And the reruns of shows on Story Television and the History Channel: who came up with the idea for boxed chocolate chip recipes? for example, or the history of steam power. Hell, I watch Ancient Aliens just to observe brainy, imaginative people gather around a table and discuss the aerial machine described in the Book of Ezekiel or how certain ancient megaliths are clearly the leftover remnants of some temple of the Anunnaki. I am indiscriminate. Again, catnip.
But, why cop shows? At first I watched them because they’re reliable, disposable, relaxing pulp fiction, following a certain structure of set-up, development, and resolution with a cast of characters we come to care about. But that gets old fast. Now I realize that what gets to me is the fact that we have a group of bright professionals standing around talking about how to solve a problem or address a concern. It echoes what I felt when I was in the Publications department at the Academy and my staff and I had to figure out how to solve some procedural glitch or other, intelligent people coming together to deal with some professional-level issue. I felt the same way when I found a documentary online about the musicians in the Wrecking Crew. Or whenever I come across a show about the development of our space program. Find Failure Is Not an Option, either the book or documentary, and tell me you aren’t riveted every minute you spend with it. And when a group of us local writers and poets used to meet once a month at the now-gone Top Shelf Books here in Palatine, Illinois, to read our work and discuss it with other writers—heaven. I was with my own kind, I guess, and for a few hours not alone at the keyboard and inside my own head.
Professionalism. Expertise. Exactitude. These are the qualities that have allowed us to build the best systems we’re capable of in this country and around the world. It pains me to look at the ass clowns now running our government—arrogant ineptitude in action, grievance rather than fairness, posturing and lies instead of personal integrity and honor, adolescent attitude rather than probity, conscientiousness, and the thrill of dedication to something bigger and better than oneself. Where’s their self-respect and dignity? Those should still mean something, whatever labels we throw at each other. I am ashamed for them.
We are all the less for it when we fail to come together on common ground as we used to, agreeing to assist each other in the American project as best we can, at levels of professionalism learned through steady education and application.