What I’ve Learned So Far

If you find yourself using a wood chisel for an odd job around the house — say, I don’t know, to shave down the top of a door that sticks in its jamb — be sure your non-tool-wielding hand is even farther from the business end of the chisel than you think is reasonably necessary.

Then move it even farther away.

That is all.

Starting ten years ago now, I worked for 18 months in the School of Architecture at UT. During that time, I dug out all kinds of interesting books from the UT library, some of which I was even able to read at my desk during lulls in the day. When I look back over the ledger where I write down the titles of books I read, I’m pleased to see what a varied diet I had in those days.

All of this comes to mind because I rediscovered a photocopy I made of the first two essays in W. H. Auden’s prose collection, The Dyer’s Hand. The pieces are titled “Reading” and “Writing,” and while they contain a few bits of nonsense along the way, they’re full of provocative observations about literature and the roles of poet and critic in the society.

Both essays are composed using freestanding paragraphs, many of them quite short, to express Auden’s judgments on many facets of reading and writing. Not all of these deserve quoting, but Auden’s acuity and the structure of the pieces mean that the essays are full of little gems.

From “READING”:

As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say — “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” — than to say — “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.”

The one thing I most emphatically do not ask of a critic is that he tell me what I *ought* to approve of or condemn. I have no objection to his telling me what works and authors he likes and dislikes; indeed, it is useful to know this for, from his expressed preferences about works which I have read, I learn how likely I am to agree or disagree with his verdicts on works which I have not. But let him not dare to lay down the law to me. The responsibility for what I choose to read is mine, and nobody else on earth can do it for me.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit, and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

There is one evil that concerns literature which should never be passed over in silence but be continually publicly attacked, and that is corruption of the language, for writers cannot invent their own language and are dependent upon the language they inherit so that, if it be corrupt, they must be corrupted.

From “WRITING”:

When some obvious booby tells me he has liked a poem of mine, I feel as if I had picked his pocket.

In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook.

What makes it difficult for a poet not to tell lies is that, in poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.

The integrity of a writer is more threatened by appeals to his social conscience, his political or religious convictions, than by appeals to his cupidity. It is morally less confusing to be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but, unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.

Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.

“The unacknowledged legislators of the world” describes the secret police, not the poets.

As for the nonsense mentioned above, I note this:

Literary gatherings, cocktail parties and the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no “shop” to talk. Lawyers and doctors can entertain each other with stories about interesting cases, about experiences, that is to say, related to their professional interests but yet impersonal and outside themselves. Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.

The last clause of this paragraph is true, but the rest is not merely inaccurate but ridiculous. I don’t know Auden’s biography well enough to say whether he personally was awkward in social settings, but as a group writers are notorious for talking shop. True, they don’t sit around unpacking all the details of their latest literary efforts; most writers view this as an ideal way to gum up their productive works. But put two writers together at a cocktail party and watch them go on about what things of theirs are coming to press, what they’re working on now, and what they just signed a contract to write; impossible or ideal editors and agents; the horror story or stroke of luck lately experienced by an absent writer; their own desire someday to finally write X; and so on. While they don’t usually lay out the chapter or stanza structure of their current efforts, you can barely shut them up about the profession of writing, and I have no idea what would have led Auden to think otherwise.

~

(Image via Wordcarving.)

Why, a book to which I contributed, that’s what.

Celebrate with me, friends. Yesterday I received a box with this two-volume beauty in it:

The first volume contains my Cold War-esque thoughts on George H. W. Bush and on Computer Technology. For writing those two articles — and my wife was impressed to see that they were long entries, not little tidbits — I got a free copy of the encyclopedia to fondle lovingly and bring out at cocktail parties.

Now, I understand that at $475 it’s not likely to be a big beach read, so I’m not going to tell you to go out and buy your own copy. Heck, I wouldn’t make a penny off of it if you did get that crazy notion. But maybe, someday, when you’re stuck in an out-of-the-way university library waiting for your rendezvous with your spy handler, you can flip open the ol’ Encyclopedia of the Cold War and look for the entries authored by one T. E. Walker.

Universcale, presented by Nikon.

It’s an essentially an update of Powers of Ten. Worth checking out and showing to any inquisitive children who happen to be hanging around.

One more New Yorker note as I clear off my desk: on the other side of the first page of Haruki Murakami’s essay on running and writing is a Tobias Wolff essay called “Winter Light.” The piece centers on the Ingmar Bergman film of the same name, which had a deep effect on Wolff when he first saw it as a twentysomething university student at Oxford.

This passage particularly caught my attention:

It is a harrowing experience, this film, shot starkly in the winter light of its title and filled with wintry silences, the camera often unmoving in its scrutiny of the human face in anguish, uncertainty, and yearning. When the movie ended, we all sat there as if stunned. I used the word “harrowing.” Truly I felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface.

To me, harrowing the minds of the audience is a fine goal for any creator — writer, filmmaker, painter, what have you. And harrowing yourself is a fine goal for any sort of devotion, be it spiritual, intellectual, psychological, or physical.

~

(Photo by Keith@Fibonacci.)

Objet de Carte via The Ampersand.

Speaking of things that I’m giving up, it’s time to say goodbye to Sudoku puzzles. I’ve always loved word and shape and number and logic puzzles, and for a long time I was a regular solver of New York Times crosswords.

If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you may recall that I gave up Sudokus a while back. I’m often a backslider when it comes to resolutions like that, and lately I’ve fallen back into the Sudoku trap. On the plane to and from Seattle this week, I worked the puzzles on the Sudoku page of the in-flight magazine. Or rather, I worked the “Gentle” and “Moderate” puzzles, and started in on the “Diabolical” one.

Just now, as I opened the book I’m in the middle of reading, I found that puzzle again, tucked between the pages. I started to look over Mr. Diabolical while I brewed another pot of coffee, making no real headway in 10 or 15 minutes of puzzling.

And then, thinking of what I just wrote about giving up The New Yorker, it hit me: Sudoku puzzles are a lovely way to pass the time, but I don’t have extra time that needs passing. They have nothing to do with writing, which must be the sole focus of my work these days, and I can’t really share them with anybody. So, while Sudokus are fun, and a neat thing in their own right, they’re not my way of making a contribution.

The sheet of puzzles: gone. My Sudoku bookmarks: gone.

Sayonara, Sudoku. It was nice knowing you.

The first time I ever bought a copy of The New Yorker, I was in Honolulu’s airport on my way to Tokyo. I had just turned 16, and was setting off on the main leg of the biggest traveling adventure of my youth: a two-month group study tour, without my parents, that included two weeks in Hawaii and six weeks in the People’s Republic of China. It was 1988 — one year before the Tiananmen Sqaure crackdown.

Memory won’t tell me what, exactly, was on the cover of that issue, but I remember that it was a cartoon in a pastel shade of green. It might have been by Saul Steinberg. But I loved it — the cover, the long stories inside, the cartoon, the typefaces, the Jazz Age/midcentury sensibility that has made this high-middlebrow magazine a standard for culture to generations of educated middle-class Americans.

It was also, of course, the perfect thing to read on a long plane flight: the variety of articles, especially when mixed in with cartoons, fiction, and poetry, held the attention. When you were done, you felt like you had learned something, while also getting a glimpse into a world that was considerably removed from the quiet slice of suburbia where I lived in West Texas. Regardless of what The New Yorker’s articles addressed, the magazine really represented that certain sensibility, slightly anachronistic but unquestionably more stylish than the way that most of its readers have lived.

More than a decade later, I did my first piece of grade-A commercial writing when I wrote a review (now lost, alas) of Ben Yagoda’s history of The New Yorker, About Town, for the late, great online magazine Blue Ear. It was the first time I had ever been given a free review copy of a book, and I worked like a dog to live up to what I thought of as a high honor. Later, I used that review as a writing sample for the Austin Chronicle’s books department, which led to more reviews and more writing samples that helped me land my job at Hoover’s, where I still work.

Along the way, The New Yorker has been an inconstant but welcome companion. I clearly recall the day of my undergraduate career when a friend showed me the very first issue of the magazine to include a photograph in its editorial pages. The picture was of Malcolm X, and its inclusion represented a “bold” departure by the then-editor, Tina Brown.

Over the years of our marriage, my wife and I have subscribed to The New Yorker for long runs, and when we lived in New York for a year in the 1990s, my wife discovered the great utility of a weekly magazine with so much editorial content (all those long stories). It was the perfect thing to read on the subway, and you could actually read the whole magazine every week. These days, I still love to see a new New Yorker on the coffee table, but often I leave it unread, or just flip through to look at the cartoons. (My father-in-law loves the cartoon-captioning contest that was introduced to the back page a few years ago; I have no taste for it.) Anything I do read from it I choose from the contents page, because I can’t afford to get mired in so much material every week. I’ve got a job to do — several, in fact — and this Ph.D. won’t finish itself, either.

Not that the choices are always easy. Sure, there are issues when very little in the magazine appeals to me specifically; those are the ones I set aside unread. Sometimes I find one piece that I know I want to read (like the Haruki Murakami essay from which I quoted in the prior entry); when that happens, I get in and out of the magazine like a commando, not stopping for any of its other temptations.

And then there are issues like the latest one to hit our mailbox (June 23, 2008), which reminds me of the downside of my intellectual omnivorosity. Let’s just pick some highlights, eh?

• Peter Boyer writes “One Angry Man: Keith Olbermann’s rants and ratings.” — Okay, I’d like to read this, because (a) I’ve been following Olbermann’s career since his SportsCenter days, (b) I’ve seen plenty of these rants and think that Olbermann plays a tonic role in today’s media discourse (such as it is) about politics, (c) Boyer’s a good writer, and (d) I’m especially interested in an old-media notable, in this case from television, who has such a strong presence (via YouTube etc.) on the Internet. On the other hand, (a) ALL of the writers for The New Yorker are good, to the point that it’s not even worth calling out, and (b) I’ve told myself that I’m not going to read any more politics this year. I know how I’m voting in November, I have no time or money to give to political activism this year, and I simply have more pressing things to do with my time.
• George Saunders writes a “Shouts & Murmurs” casual/humor piece called “Antiheroes.” — Saunders is the favorite living fiction writer of my pal Austin Kleon, as is borne out by Austin’s many blog posts about him. So I’d like to give this a read, even though I might not be drawn to read it otherwise.
• John Seabrook writes an “Annals of Technology” piece, “Hello, HAL: The batle to make computers understand.” — I used to be a technology writer for Hoover’s, and I see the development of information technology as an overlooked element in mainstream academic history writing, so I’m tempted to read this for my own enlightenment.
• Jon Lee Anderson writes “Fidel’s Heir: Hugo Chavez’s big ambitions.” — Have I mentioned that I’m getting a Ph.D. in the recent history of U.S. foreign relations and that it focuses on the worldwide oil business? This article would seem to be germane.
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes a fictional story, “The Headstrong Historian.” — First, I studied a fair amount of African history in my Ph.D. coursework. Second, I’ve been reading more short fiction lately as I try to work on stories of my own. Third, this one has “historian” in the title. I sigh.
• James Wood and John Updike write reviews of novels I probably will never read, but I want to know what they have to say about them — again because I’m working on my fiction chops.
• David Denby writes reviews of “The Incredible Hulk” and “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” — neither of which I’m likely to see. But I read the reviews anyway because I like Denby’s viewpoint.

A-a-a-and, next thing you know, you’ve read a third of a book’s worth of material, while the actual books that I actually must read — to finish my Ph.D., to finish other scholarly pieces, to review for my professional blog, etc. — still sit in stacks on the floor around my desk. That’s not to mention the books that fill an entire bookcase in my living room, or the scores of books that I want to read after my Ph.D., which I’ve boxed up and stored in the garage to keep them from tempting me.

Which brings me to my real topic: trying to strike a balance between the sort of omnivorous reading that has always fed my imagination, and the sort of targeted reading that feeds real expertise in a given field.

When I write it down that way, the choice isn’t so hard, because my imagination is pretty well-fed already. More accurately, it’s morbidly obese, what with the hundreds of half-developed ideas for pieces — fiction, essays, scholarship, blog posts, magazine articles, poems, et cetera ad nauseam — that populate my world and my mind. When I’m honest with myself, the meter on my idea tank is pegged at More-than-Aplenty. I do need to keep up the pace of my reading, and even increase it, but not with the sort of miscellaneous matter that comes in each week’s New Yorker. Just looking at the reading material I have within arm’s reach, in fact, I’d be better served to spend my serendipitous browsing time with the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review, the latest issues of which — each with an unusual number of articles of interest to me — arrived in the mail this week.

Of course, it’s hard to tell the imagination-glutton that he can’t have his ice cream anymore. But — for now, at least — it’s true. Again, I sigh, but it’s for the best.

This, then, is not a final parting with my dear New Yorker, but merely au revoir. We will meet again . . . after I’ve gotten my imagination into fighting trim.

~

(Photo credits: Chrysler by Brain Toad; hotel by syvwlch; cat & magazine by aturkus.)

Murakami’s recent New Yorker essay offers a piece of wisdom that transcends watching one’s weight:

When I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight is perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don’t want to gain weight I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences. People who naturally keep the weight off don’t need to exercise or watch their diet. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. Those of us who have a tendency to gain weight should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible. Of course, it’s not always easy to see things this way.

I think this viewpoint applies as well to the job of the novelist. Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do — or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins. As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another. If people rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their source, they’re in trouble.

For me, the problem isn’t sources of creativity, and it isn’t (especially) the problem of putting on weight easily. It’s the problem of proliferating cruft easily.

If I want to achieve real progress in my work, I have to follow Murakami’s advice about working hard every day, watching my intake, and cutting down on my informational and obligational (?) indulgences.

Her wisdom comes from hard experience. Read what she has to say about choosing to raise her boys without giving in to her fears — or the fears of others:

Being alive — from my perspective as an American suburbanite not suffering through famine or war — is a lucky break, a privilege not to be pissed away on petty fears. […]

I bit back what I wanted to say [to another mother], which was that her fear was not my child’s problem, […] and that I think it’s a straight-up sin to instill a fear of the everyday in a child.

Rock on, Redneck Mother.

This is just a little idea I’m kicking around, so please bear with its molten-ness:

If you cared to, you could think of all of life through the lens of

• Opportunites and
• Opportunity costs.

Every single thing that presents itself to you is an opportunity. It could be an opportunity to do something good, like learn something or connect with a friend or earn some money. It could be something bad, like erode your health or waste your time or alienate someone you love.

But if everything were that easy to figure out, life would be much, much easier than most people find it to be. Much of what we deal with, instead of being clear-cut, is murky: eating a greasy cheeseburger with an old pal is good for me in the sense of human connection and so on, but it’s not good for my cholesterol level. Sometimes you spend down your savings (bad) in order to provide a special experience for your family (good). We’re constantly balancing.

But I think the opportunities-and-opportunity-costs model might be helpful as we try to work this balancing act.

When you’re presented with a choice, think about it in terms of what the opportunity is. Even if you’re encountering a crappy, depressing obligation . . . well, surely it’s an opportunity to do something good, right? What is that opportunity? Maybe you’ll help someone else in their own hard struggle? Maybe you’ll learn something? Maybe you’ll learn better discipline by discharging an obligation? Maybe you’ll serve a long-term objective, even though it’s boring / painful / cringe-making in the short run?

Or maybe it’s just not worth pursuing at all, which is where the opportunity cost part comes in. Recall from economics class that opportunity cost describes the goods you’re giving up by choosing what you choose.  If I put $10 in savings, I’m passing up the opportunity to spend that $10 on something else — and vice versa. Parsing through this also involves lots of gray areas, but that’s life.

Like I said, this is only a partially formed idea. But I’m trying to use it as I navigate through my day. For everything I could do with my time, I’m asking myself two questions:

• What’s the opportunity here?
• What’s the opportunity cost for doing this?

The answers, while not always comforting, certainly are illuminating.

What do you think?  I’ll let you know what sort of lessons I learn from this as I go along.