Article and Photos
by Arthur E. Berman,
editor@hgs.org
From the Editor
March , 2005
The End of a Stage
by Arthur E. Berman
End of a Stage* is possibly the best short story ever written. I first read End of a Stage (Fin de Etapa) in the 1990s and life keeps returning me to it. In the story, Diana visits a provincial art museum in a sleepy town in Argentina. Here she encounters a series of paintings that hover somewhere between art and realism. The theme of all the works consists of scenes from inside a house with repetitive geometric patterns of tables, chairs, windows and an occasional distant person with back turned. The museum closes for lunch before Diana can see the final work, in a separate room by itself, considered special by the artist, according to the museum’s guard. After lunch she walks through the town and encounters an open door to a courtyard and, within, a deserted house also with an open door.. When she enters the house she realizes that this house and its various rooms are the source for the paintings she saw earlier in the day in the museum.. As End of a Stage builds to a climax that involves discovering her destiny, Diana finds herself racing back and forth between the museum and the house, trying to determine what is real and what is a reflection and representation of life.
HGS 2005 Budget Deficit
Like Diana in Cortázar’s short story, the Houston Geological Society Bulletin has reached the end of a stage. The HGS’s projected budget deficit for 2005 is between $85,000 and $128,000. About 40% of the deficit is due to payroll and the next biggest component is the Bulletin. Membership is down to about 3800 from nearly 5000 a few years ago. Advertising income for the Bulletin is down; this is, in part, is counteracted by advertising income on the Website. Attendance at technical meetings (HGS General Luncheon and Dinner meetings, International and North American Explorationists meetings, Northsiders meeting) is down, especially luncheon meetings.
The HGS receives a major infusion of income whenever it hosts the AAPG annual meeting—nearly $200,000 from the last meeting in Houston in 2002. It will be two more years before income from the 2006 meeting begins to flow and, ideally, alleviate the deficit we have. The amount of the AAPG influx is not certain. In the meantime, changes must be made to cut costs, and the Bulletin is the largest segment of the deficit where costs can be controlled.
“Are we in financial danger?” asks HGS Treasurer Ken Nemeth.
“This year, no. Despite the deficit, we have funds that we can withdraw from Schwab (our savings reserve account). We were fortunate to have had that big influx from AAPG [in 2002] to get us in to the Private Clients section [a preferred level of investment return from Schwab]. However, we have taken out $55,000 since June 1 [2004] and will probably take another $30,000 out by the end of the fiscal year. Can we ‘refill’ the account? Only if we get another $200K from the next convention [AAPG 2006 Annual Meeting].”
The HGS Bulletin currently costs approximately $16,000 per issue. Advertising covers about 2/3 of the cost and membership dues help some, though not very much. The magazine’s cost is a function of the number of pages we design and print so the obvious way to reduce Bulletin cost is to reduce the number of pages in each issue.
The March of Technology
I have written every month about the role of technology and the necessary but uncomfortable change that it brings. Last month I suggested that the World Wide Web really began in 1883, when news of Krakatoa’s eruption brought geology and the restless Earth to the forefront of everyone’s consciousness. A new network of submarine telegraph cables changed the pace of information in the world forever.
For the past eight years, the HGS’s own piece of the World Wide Web, the HGS Website, has quietly grown, thanks largely to the vision and persistence of Bill Osten and with the help of many members. For at least the last two years, with a major revision and update of the Website and hiring Dave Crane as Webmaster, the HGS Website has become increasingly important in the life of our Society. The Bulletin and the Website have become more closely integrated and intertwined. Members have come to see both as sources of information about, and interaction with, the organization.
Like Diana in End of a Stage, we find ourselves going back and forth between the Bulletin and the Website searching for destiny or perhaps just trying to figure out how to register for the next HGS event that interests us. We are unquestionably at the end of a stage in which the print and electronic voices of the HGS were separate.
The Next Stage for the Bulletin
Last month we tried an experiment. We put the entire Bulletin on the HGS Website a few days before members received the print version in the mail. What appeared at the end of January at http://www.hgs.org/2005/February was a fully interactive Bulletin. It combined sites already developed by Webmaster Dave Crane to give information about technical talks and other HGS events, with PDF extractions of the features and columns in the February Bulletin. My February “From the Editor” column was presented with full-color figures (unlike the print version) that Dave made “clickable” so they could be zoomed and copied at high resolution. This was really exciting!
The March 2005 Bulletin has a new format that is different from previous issues.