The eternal sunshine of the perfect printed circuit

            Steve Jobs famously designed the inside of Apple computers to exacting aesthetic standards, even if repair technicians and recyclers were the only people who could relish the results. 

Most agree Jobs was a genius, and many also think he was nuts.  These afflictions often accompany each other, though I appreciate his impulse.   There’s a principle in sailing called good seamanship.  Examples might include coiling your dock lines in a neat circular fashion rather than simply draping them over a cleat.  Checking your position as you pass

through a channel you’ve traversed a thousand times.  Identifying yourself by the name of your craft, even when radioing a mate across the bay to come have a beer. None of these things are entirely necessary in the moment, but the ancient principle is to make proper practice a habit for those times when the mundane turns unexpectedly lethal.  Reflexively taking care of the little things extrapolates up into the significant; it becomes second nature, more a mood state than a procedure.

It seems there are a number of people for whom this is all too much bother.  It’s not the quality of the performance, they feel, only the end result.  I remember working around computer programmers who’d describe a string of code as elegant.  You could write an application that worked fine every time, but would be a tangled mess to the knowledgeable observer.  Or you could arrive there in a way that enlightened coders would find aesthetically pleasing.  My heart lies with the latter, if for no other reason than their applications would be more robust and adaptable to subsequent development.  And ultimately, far less expensive when fit into a massive project.

As an editor, I suspected any writer who disliked copyediting, or resisted fact checks.  It betrayed a recklessness of mind that put in doubt their broader artistic decisions.  Would that plot complication been solved with greater effort, would that character been better rendered with more respect for polish and precision?

        There are plenty of bestselling novelists whose work I’d describe as sloppy.  Often not with their first book, but as a series evolves, you get the feeling they aren’t really trying as hard.  The logic of these writers, and their editors and publishers, must be that if the books are selling, less care is required.  That might be true if your only criteria involves Book Scan.  There’s a market for poor quality, if a casual survey of your local Walmart is any guide, but for people like me, a well-crafted piece of fiction and a sturdy toaster elicits the same loyalty and regard.

A popular complaint is that quality just ain’t what it used to be.  Planned obsolescence is definitely a pervasive trend, though the big things, like cars and houses, are far better made now than they were when I was growing up.  Other important categories, such as power tools and crime novels, tend to ebb and flow.  The principal influence seems to be cultural disposition.  Poor quality appears to seep in when people are too pre-occupied to notice the decline, and then rally when a brand or genre starts securing appellationas like “cheap crap.”              

Mid-century pulp fiction has taken on a certain reverence by those who consider the form more authentic, unfairly denigrated in its time.  I doubt these admirers have read much of the real thing, since the product’s utility as actual pulp probably exceeded its literary merit.  I read a lot of it as a young person in search of elusive salacious content, without being particularly enriched or injured in the process.  Today, the odds are much better that any random mystery picked off the shelves will deliver a passing entertainment without the pleasure of atrocious plot structure and ersazt protagonists.

My favorite crime novels (also my favorite novels over all) were written a while ago, though I blame that more on my reading habits – and the moments in my life when these books caught my attention – than any deterioration of the form.  Getting a novel published these days is hardly a cakewalk, and those still achieving the task are closer to Steve Jobs than Mickey Spillaine.

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