Attention is a form of love

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

In response to my post about ignorance and curiosity, my friend Jason Kottke pointed to a scene in the movie Lady Bird, summarized by critic A.O. Scott:

Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the principal, has read Lady Bird’s college application essay. “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah remarks. This comes as a surprise, both to Lady Bird and the viewer, who is by now aware of Lady Bird’s frustration with her hometown. “I guess I pay attention,” she says, not wanting to be contrary.

“Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the wise sister asks.

The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight.

Which made me think of a line by John Tarrant I quoted in Keep Going: “Attention is the most basic form of love.”

The soothing (or not-so-soothing) effect of geologic time

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

From the Dept. of No Coincidences: I was flipping through John McPhee’s Basin and Range and Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, two books which inspired passages in Kevin Huizenga’s The River at Night, when I opened up the Sunday NYTimes magazine and found Yohanca Delgado’s letter of recommendation for thinking about geologic time.

Delgado has A.D.H.D. and a kind of “time blindness” that makes it hard for her to keep track of the passing of time. She praises Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World:

[O]ur solar system has a 10-billion-year life span; it will end when the sun enters its red-giant phase and begins engulfing its orbiting planets, including Earth. In that context, Bjornerud writes, mountains are “ephemeral.” Much of what we once believed to be eternal and unchanging about our planet is vital and dynamic, constantly shifting around us. We are still deciphering parts of the planet’s geologic history, in hopes of anticipating future, potentially cataclysmic, events.

“For me,” Delgado writes, “holding time in a much larger perspective eases the day-to-day anxieties of living.”

A page from Kevin Huizenga’s zine companion to *The River at Night*

In The River at Night, the main character, Glenn Ganges, has trouble sleeping and spends most of the book thinking about the nature of time. Comics is a medium well-suited to exploring time, as explained in this interview with Art Spiegelman:

in a comic you have various panels. Those panels are each units of time. You see them simultaneously. So you have various moments in time simultaneously made present in space. And that is what Maus is about. It is about the past and present intertwining irrevocably and permanently.

A great example is R. Crumb’s “A Short History of America.”

Maybe one of the most impressive examples is Richard McGuire’s Here.

In 1989, Mr. McGuire, then an aspiring New York artist better known for playing bass in the postpunk band Liquid Liquid, published a 36-panel comic that hopped backward and forward through millions of years without leaving the confines of a suburban living room, thanks to the use of pop-up frames-within-frames inspired by the relatively new Microsoft Windows… now he has popped up through a wormhole of his own, with a full-color, book-length version of “Here” that once again transforms a corner of his childhood living room in New Jersey into a staging ground for all of earthly history.

Each two-page spread features a fixed view of the room in a certain year, with pop-up windows giving glimpses of what might have been visible in exactly that spot at various moments in the past and future: from the tail of a passing dinosaur to a 1960s children’s birthday party to a quiet late-21st-century fireside chat.

Richard McGuire’s original 6-page comic “Here,” 1989

A rare color version of “Here” from 2000

The irony of comics being such a great medium for depicting and thinking about time is that comics take forever to make.

“The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it,” Banksy supposedly once said. For cartoonists, the ratio of time spent drawing to time spent reading is enormously skewed towards the labor of drawing.

I’ve gotten away from myself, here, and lost track of time, as one often does when thinking about time.

Picturing “deep time” can keep things in perspective, just as picturing “deep space” can keep things in perspective.

But the opposite, of course, is always possible. Thinking of one’s insignificance can spend you spiraling, as it did Sally Draper, a character on Mad Men:

When I think about forever I get upset. Like the Land O’Lakes butter has that Indian girl, sitting holding a box, and it has a picture of her on it, holding a box, with a picture of her holding a box. Have you ever noticed that?

(She’s describing the Droste Effect.)

Tales of marginalia

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Here is Elvis’s annotated copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

Presley loved The Prophet, reading it so often that he memorized it; he gave annotated copies to several friends. This particular copy was given to Ed Parker, founder of American Kenpo Karate, who became Presley’s close friend, sparring partner and occasional bodyguard after Presley introduced himself during a karate demonstration Parker was leading in 1960.

I am one of the many writers who extol the benefits of reading with a pencil, but rarely do we emphasize the unique opportunity of marginalia as a medium of communication, not just with ourselves or the author, but with another reader, should we pass on the book we’ve made marks in.

A thread went viral on Twitter this week when Melissa Turkington shared marginalia in a used Charles Bukowski book “from a woman who clearly was having none of this shit.” (In a fabulous twist, the original marginalia-ist showed up on TikTok.)

Marginalia is somewhere in between reading and writing, and several writers have realized its creative potential to become a whole new work.

Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno.

J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus.

The book Platitudes in the Making is probably my favorite example of marginalia becoming a new work:

In 1911, author Holbrook Jackson published a small book of aphorisms under the (mildly pretentious) title Platitudes in the Making: Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk and gave a copy to his friend G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, it seems, sat down with the book – and a green pencil – and wrote a response to each saying in the book. Presumably he then set the book down, and somehow, someway, it turned up in a San Francisco book shop in 1955, where it was purchased by a certain Dr. Alfred Kessler, an admirer of Chesterton. Every book collector dreams of such a find. Rather than keep the book to himself, however, Dr. Kessler and Ignatius Press have produced a facsimile edition. Remove the dust jacket, and you have a reproduction, in every particular, of that 1911 volume, together with all of Chesterton’s remarks. It’s a remarkable project, and a real treat for readers of Chesterton.

Filed under: marginalia

Skip the boring parts

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Maud Newton, whose long-anticipated book Ancestor Trouble comes out next year, shared some excellent writing advice: “Don’t Write the Tedious Thing.”

“At times while working on my book over the years, I would become resentful of it.” She wrote that she would hit a certain point and think, “Ugh, now I have to write this boring part.”

Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind.

As Elmore Leonard told us, “Try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”

I try to do this. If there’s a part bogging me down, I try to leap over it, somehow, and see if the piece will work without it. (It usually does.)

* * *

Another friend of mine, Clive Thompson, says that with non-fiction writing, many times you think you have “writer’s block,” when what you really have is “reporter’s block.”

“If you’re stuck,” he says, “stop typing. Go hunt down some new useful facts. Then you’ll come back refreshed.”

You’re having trouble writing not because you can’t find the right words, but because you don’t know what you’re trying to say. You don’t have the right facts at hand.

So the solution is to gather more facts. You need to step away from the keyboard, stop trying to write, and do some more reporting: Make phone calls to some new sources, consult new experts, read a relevant book or article. Once you have the facts at hand, the words will come.

Or to put it another way, when you’re writing nonfiction, the words flow from the research. If the words aren’t flowing, usually the problem is the research isn’t there. To say something, you have to have something to say.

“Block” is a sign that you don’t have what you need and you should probably go somewhere else and do something else until you get what it is that you need.

Your “block” could just be boredom.

You’ve bored yourself.

You’ve become uninterested in writing.

The way to be interested in writing again is to find something interesting to write about.

Time to go out in the world and notice something.

“Is it possible to practice noticing?
I think so.
But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning
And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself.”
—Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing

The “suspension of yearning” is key.

Stop wanting to write long enough to find something worth writing about.

* * *

I love what Carole King said about handling writer’s block in Paul Zollo’s excellent Songwriters on Songwriting:

So, most of all, don’t worry. Go do something else. Come back later.

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.” ?
—Ursula K. Le Guin

Most of all, skip the boring parts.

Ignorant, but curious

Monday, July 26, 2021

“What if you played an ignorant guy who was actually curious?” is how the actor Jason Sudeikis explains his approach to his character, Ted Lasso.¹

It’s a method of acting, but it could be a method of life. (A method we’ve covered before: “Teach your tongue to say I don’t know” and “learn to play the fool.”)

The method is perhaps best summarized by Mike Monteiro: “The secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”

* * *

The “curious idiot” approach can serve you well if you can quiet your ego long enough to perform it.

A curious idiot is unafraid to ask stupid questions. Every stupid question you ask takes a teeny, tiny act of courage. Sometimes you have to muster the will to push the words out of your lips.

I’m currently at the tail end of one of the worst projects I’ve ever been involved in, and several failure points probably could’ve been avoided if I’d have had the guts to stuck my nose where it didn’t belong and ask the contractors stupid questions until I was satisfied with their answers.

I got so angry about it last week that I posted this tweet thread:

Lesson I have learned the hard way over the years: when working w/ a contractor or collaborating on a project, if you see a potential snag or just a nagging doubt DEAR GOD BRING IT UP and ASK QUESTIONS about how specific things will work. Do not assume anyone has it covered.

I have been burned so many times over the years imagining the worst that could happen at a specific step in a project, not saying it out loud, and then that thing, in fact, does happen. Don’t think, “Oh, I’m just a worrywart, it’ll be fine.” Trust the voice in your head!

Especially when you are working with “experts,” like, electricians or builders or designers or tech teams or whatever — ask them the stupid, obvious questions. The expert constantly misses things the outside observer catches, exactly because they’re not an expert.

If an expert dismisses your stupid question or doesn’t answer it in a way that’s acceptable to you, that is a huge red flag. You should either a) keep on them and ask them more questions b) find a new partner.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, always — and if it’s your project, and your ass that’s on the line, remember that nobody cares as much as you do, and nobody is paying as much attention as you are (care is a high form of attention)

That last point might be the most important: care is a form of attention, and unlike talent or expertise, it can be willed into being at any time.

If you care more than everybody else, you pay better attention, and you see things that others don’t see. To ask the questions that need to be asked, you have to care more than others about what happens, but care less about what others might think of you in the moment.

“Teach us to care and not to care,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Ash Wednesday.”

Or, as Karen McGrane put it so wonderfully and vulgarly, “Give a crap. Don’t give a f***.”

* * *

Footnotes

At the end of the first season, while playing a high stakes dart game, Ted Lasso quotes a line from Walt Whitman he says he saw on the side of his son’s school: “Be curious, not judgmental.” Not a bad line, and it’s been quoted by people all over, and Etsy-fied on mugs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers, but I’ve found no evidence that Whitman actually said it.
“Attention is the most basic form of love.”