What I’ve Learned So Far

Once upon a time I wrote a column of poetry criticism for a few months before it became clear to me that I wasn’t a poetry critic, by outlook or makeup. But I do still read poetry now and again — which is to say, more than most people.

Frank Bidart has just published a great poem, “To the Republic,” in The New Yorker magazine. It centers on Gettysburg, but speaks to the current affairs of the U.S. It made me angrier than anything I’ve read in a long, long time about the current mismanagement of the common weal.

I won’t spoil the poem for you. Go find the April 24 issue of The New Yorker (the poem isn’t available online, I’m sorry to report) and read it for yourself.

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Update, 17 January 2007: I have found a copy of the poem online, here.

I’m not the world’s biggest audiophile, but I do like good music — and I love good design.  This thing looks like a winner.

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
–Albert Einstein

(This is one of the hardest things for any writer or scholar to do, in my experience, and it expresses a key problem at the heart of mass politics as well.  If you can crack this nut, you’ve really done something.)

In the 2006 Runner’s Log, Marty Jerome has a short essay that talks about the different modes of physical growth in the new (or returning) runner. Your leg muscles start to grow after the first run, and your wind will start to improve within a couple of weeks, but it takes months for the capillary network in your legs to expand. Those extra capillaries are what allow veteran runners, cyclists, and so on to go harder for longer and to recover more quickly.

The same thing applies in writing. When I’m writing every day, everything is easier. My ideas turn into finished paragraphs faster and better. I can write for longer at a sitting. I’m far more likely to take a draft to completion, then redraft it into a polished, finished state. But it takes a lot of doing to burn in these circuits. You don’t get there in a day or a week; you have to give it months to set in.

My knowledge of neurobiology is thin, but I don’t think you’re growing new capillaries in your brain during this process. But you are burning new neural pathways that are better able to cope with the demands of steady, incessant production. It’s like grooving a tennis backhand or learning arpeggios on the violin.

I’ve had this same experience in other new mental endeavors. Some years ago, I held a job in a call center for several months. It took many weeks before I got used to the demands of talking on the phone for eight hours per day.  (I never did get used to the emotional burden of listening to complaints for eight hours per day.)

If you want to be a happy runner–one who doesn’t get sore anew with every run–you have to stay at it consistently.  That’s when you can come to enjoy long runs.  The same holds for writing.

“If I had to write a book to communicate what I have already thought, I’d never have the courage to begin it. I write precisely because I don’t know yet what to think about a subject that attracts my interest. . . .  As a consequence, each new work profoundly changes the terms of thinking which I had reached with the previous work.  In this sense I consider myself more an ‘experimenter’ than a theorist; I don’t develop deductive systems to apply uniformly in different fields of research.  When I write, I do it above all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before.”

–Michel Foucault

Well, I think I’m getting things set up well here. I like having the blog living on my own site, though now I begin to see more improvements to be made than I have time to make them. Please bear with me as I make the site better and more useful.

And by all means, if you have suggestions for how I can make the site or the blog better, please let me have them.

“The terribile law of the artist, the law of fructification, of fertilization. The old, old lesson of the art of meditation.  To woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation.”

–Henry James

As she so often does, Kathy Sierra opens up all kinds of interesting avenues of thought with this great post:

Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain

It makes sense that, if you're around musicians all the time, you'll talk more about music, possibly play more music, meet even more musicians, and so on. Between themselves, doctors talk way more than the average person about medicine, therapies, issues of medical policy, and so on. Angry or unhappy people talk about what makes them angry; they express their dissatisfaction with everything; they attempt to share their frustrations; they want you to join them in anger or unhappiness — or they just try to inflict their anger and unhappiness on you.

Sometimes these people are unavoidable — when we're related to them, for example. But in most cases we have the ability to avoid people like this, and I argue that we should. Personally, I have too many important, positive things to contribute to the world to give my limited resources to other people's anger, especially when it may cultivate anger in me as well.

I would go a step further to say that we owe it to ourselves to avoid angry or unhappy situations or places when we can. If you work in an unhappy workplace, get out as soon as you can. They don't deserve you. Or, if you're in charge, see to it that you make it a less unhappy place, starting now. There's no sense in propagating anger; the world has enough problems without you and me adding to the load.

I’ve read plenty of advice over the years that suggests specialization as a key way to get ahead in one’s career. Since I’m an intellectual magpie with an attention span approaching nil, I have resisted this advice; while I still preach the virtue of broad learning and broad exposure to many parts of human experience, more and more I grasp the advantage of diving deep.

The issue isn’t whether you can handle more than one subject — many smart people can, and indeed you see gifted folks who excel in more than one area. The example that springs to mind is David Halberstam, who would be known primarily as one of our most intelligent commentators on sports if he weren’t already known as one of our most intelligent explainers of recent history and policy. And then you’ve got the multi-talents like Bill Buckley or Bill Bradley, who may simply not be the best models to follow. Not everybody gets to be Willie Mays.

But even the men I’ve mentioned have allowed themselves to get “Talmudic” in something. Halberstam is a reporter deluxe — endlessly interviewing and drafting in support of his books. Buckley is a controversialist deluxe, and he immerses himself in public policy and the like to make his points. Bradley spent many years obsessively (happily) immersing himself in basketball, and then many more doing the same for things like tax policy.

The point is that each of them found his own piece of ground and proceeded to explore it, scout it, stake it out, sleep on it, dig around in it, climb the trees on it, wallow in it. Warren Buffett does the same when he follows his obsession — finding value in companies. Oprah Winfrey does the same when she explains the world to her audience. Richard Feynman did the same when he cracked some of the great secrets of the physical world. Joseph DeRisi does the same thing cracking open viruses at his UCSF lab. Mozart, music. Et cetera.

In my own lifetime I have been Talmudic about baseball scores, comic books, and a few other things. Mostly I let myself do this when I was a kid, or say up through the college level (that’s when my baseball obsession was at its peak). It makes your mind better, I think, to wallow in a subject like that. But despite my constant engagement with interesting ideas from business, history, and policy, I haven’t yet wallowed in a field during my professional career.

Bear with me here, because I’m figuring this out as I go. As I think through it, I realize that it’s been years since I’ve let myself dive that deep into anything. I write a lot, but not with that level of obsession. I read a lot, but not with that kind of intent.

This led me to dig up a quote about Bill Belicheck, the subject of a recent Halberstam book and by any measure the best coach in the NFL right now.

“Perhaps his most unheralded virtue, but one that explains plenty to me, is his innate curiosity,” Ingraham wrote in an e-mail message. “Bill wants to know what makes things tick, and when applied to his passion for football, this extends to every facet of the game: ‘What makes this blitz work? How do you counter this blitz? How can you disguise this blitz? How can we vary this blitz? Who can I call tonight to talk blitzes with?’

“You get the picture,” Ingraham added. “No stone goes unturned because his curiosity drives him to learn everything he can, which he then absorbs, thinks about, mixes into the boiling pot with the other ingredients and ultimately prepares to dish out on some poor unsuspecting sap. It’s been said that he’s not Mr. X’s and O’s, but rather Mr. A to Z, the complete package. I believe that his curiosity has been the catalyst in bringing all this together. Not unlike some other accomplished gents throughout history!” (NYTimes, George Vecsey, January 30, 2005)

(Thanks to NOSE.)

That’s the kind of “Talmudic” immersion I’m talking about.

I heard something on KUT today about Doug's House, a hospice for people with AIDS. The folks who run the hospice help the residents with various things, whether it's bathing, cooking meals, or what have you. They also help residents to achieve "end-of-life goals" — the things these AIDS patients want to do before they check out.

By no means would I compare my everyday — ridiculously healthy — existence with that of a late-stage AIDS patient. But the truth is that we are all terminal patients. The radio piece got me thinking about what my own end-of-life goals are.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine that you are diagnosed with an incurable disease that will have no ill effects on you until 30 months from today — but that on that day it will kill you. You have a zero percent chance of survival on 901st day from today, but you'll enjoy rude health until then.

What would you do with yourself?

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
—Mary Oliver