Perpetual Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Weird times we’re living in, but there’s plenty to be thankful for. My son Owen and I made something for y’all that we hope you’ll share with your loved ones. Download and print it here [PDF]

Here’s what Henry David Thoreau said 160 years ago, 12/6/1856, in a letter to his friend, Harrison Blake:

I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite…. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague, indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

Happy Thanksgiving. Hope it is perpetual.

No expert, no guru

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Call me an “expert,” and I will correct you. Call me a “guru,” and I might throw up on you.

Re: “expert”: My books are the by-products of the process of trying to figure out how to be a writer and an artist. When I write, when I publish, when I speak, it is in the spirit of being a fellow student. I am simply sharing the things that I am learning. I not only do not consider myself an expert, being an expert seems unbelievably boring to me. Becoming an expert, to me, seems like a kind of spiritual death. A kind of creative petrification. (As my friend Mike Monteiro recently put it, “the secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”)

Re: “guru”: What reasonable human being would actually want to be a guru? (Again: answers are boring. Questions are interesting.) The people in American culture who position themselves as gurus seem to all have either what the comedian Bill Hicks called “a fevered ego,” or they seem to have some extreme character deficiency. More than that, from what I’ve seen, the more you’re considered a “guru,” the harder it is to tell what it is that you actually do. (My nightmare is becoming someone who talks about making art more than actually making art.)

On top of all that, I am starting to feel that the best teacher is the one who refuses you as a student. I’ll end with this parable from John Cage’s Silence:

How to survive Thanksgiving

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Thanksgiving approaches. The supermarkets are jam packed with people who behave as if they have never shopped for groceries before, and Twitter is full of people who behave as if they’ve never had a meal with someone who doesn’t share their political views.

Regarding the meal, @poniewozik tweeted: “A thing I love about this country is it invented a holiday where millions of amateur cooks have to prepare a freakishly large bird. Like, the same country where people buy pre-made PBJ sandwiches, ONE TIME a year they have to figure out how to roast basically a dinosaur.”

Regarding the company, my friend @erika, the author of Just Enough Research, has it nailed: “Heading out to see your family this week? Don’t fight with them. Study them!” She suggests, if the conversation starts to head south, this magical phrase: “Tell me more about that.”

Say nothing else. Do not argue. Keep quietly sipping your beverage… All the research shows that facts are powerless in the face of contradictory beliefs. You will not win the argument. You have a better chance that Second Cousin Rick will talk himself out of his own theory if he talks long enough.

In the words of Oliver Sacks, pretend you’re an anthropologist on Mars.

Perhaps this perspective comes easiest for writers. (Czeslaw Milosz: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”) In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner write that the “anthropological perspective” is exactly what a good education is supposed to provide you. “[It] allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it. One views the activities of his own group as would an anthropologist, observing its tribal rituals, its fears, its conceits…”

But the anthropological perspective is not just for surviving Thanksgiving! It’s a way of surviving all sorts of situations involving people who are being assholes. Here’s a trick for cultivating the proper detachment the perspective requires, from Bob Sutton, author of The Asshole Survival Guide:

I’ve got this colleague who does this astounding thing: He pretends when he’s in a meeting and there’s a really nasty person, what he does to detach is he pretends he’s a Doctor of Assholeism. And he says to himself, instead of getting upset, “I’m so lucky to have this fabulous specimen! To be so close up! I just can’t believe it!”

Good luck, my fellow anthropologists! I’ll be at home in my pajamas.

A few notes on daily blogging

Monday, November 20, 2017

I’ve been wanting to write about the habit of daily blogging I’ve taken up since Oct. 1st this year, but I’ve avoided it, because 1) there are so many other interesting things to blog about 2) I’ve worried that blogging about blogging is too recursive and it will open up some sort of evil dimension or will just jinx the good mojo I got workin’. Still, I want to give it a (hopefully quick) spin.

The idea started out from my anxiety about “stock and flow.” As Robin Sloan wrote seven years ago: flow is the feed (“It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.”) and stock is the durable stuff (“It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.”)

In Show Your Work!, I wrote that it was always my M.O. to turn flow into stock: tweets become blog posts that become book chapters that become books. Trouble is, I had failed to heed Robin’s warning:

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

Not only was I not turning flow into stock, I became acutely aware that due to the slow (or fast?) decay of social media and algorithm tinkering, the flow wasn’t even doing what it used to do —“remind people you exist”— and worse, my bits were just getting sucked into a void, an archive that I could download, maybe, but probably never go back and mine for any gold. Turning flow into stock isn’t all that hard, but it gets exponentially harder the more flow you have to go back and sift through.

Also, quite frankly, Twitter turned into a cesspool almost overnight. My friend Alan Jacobs was very vocal about his split from Twitter, and after reading his vibrant blog and new book, How To Think, I just decided to give daily blogging a go again, and this time, to do it on my URL, on my old-school WordPress blog, like the old days, when blogging actually meant something to me.

So how’d it go? Well, so far, even better than I expected.

1) I had no idea how badly my writing muscles had atrophied. After a couple of weeks, I could feel the sentences coming easier.

2) After struggling to come up with a new book idea for so long, I could start to see all the connections between posts, the patterns, the idea planets I keep orbiting. Because it’s all in one place, hyperlinked together, I can see my own obsessions in a way that is much harder elsewhere. (Also: I’m owning my turf. This place has been around for a dozen years. Longer than Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram, and if I had to bet, I’d guess it will outlast them.)

3) I had forgotten how wonderful blogging is as a mode of thinking. Blogging is, for me, more about discovering what I have to say, and tweeting more about having a thought, then saying it the right way. It’s also great to be able to go as long or as short as you want to go.

4) Maybe most surprising, is that my posts have gotten, in my opinion, much deeper and more interesting. I used to scramble on Thursdays, trying to come up with a good blog post so I could post it at the top of Friday’s newsletter. Often I would cop out, write something quick and pat, and move on. Once I started daily blogging, not only did I have more to link to, it’s actually better stuff — some weeks I have a tough time deciding which post gets top billing in my list of 10. (I hope you’ll subscribe, btw, if you haven’t already.)

There’s a story about perfectionism in David Bayles and Ted Orland’s excellent book, Art & Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

With blogging, I’m not so sure it’s about quantity as much as it’s about frequency: for me, there’s something kind of magical about posting once a day. Good things happen. Something small every day leads to something big. (Seth Godin has championed daily blogging for years—he just passed his 7000th post.)

5) Maybe I’m weird, but it just feels good. It feels good to reclaim my turf. It feels good to have a spot to think out loud in public where people aren’t spitting and shitting all over the place.

Anyways, I hope I can keep it up for as long as possible. Thanks for reading.

I wanna dance with (or without) somebody

Sunday, November 19, 2017

I was born in ’83, so I have a soft spot for 80s pop, especially the kind of stuff they played on 94.7 in Columbus, Ohio, “Sunny 95” (a rounding up that always confused me), which my mom listened to non-stop at the pool and in her ’86 Honda LX-I. (“Playing the 70s, 80s, and today!”)

A pop pinnacle of those days, for me, is Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” a song that’s so perky (and also a steal from Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) but also has this tinge of sadness beneath it — a bit of lyrical dissonance — which, when you think about it, pop music has always been full of, but there were lots of my favorite cases from that era: Prince’s “1999” (nuclear war), Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” (about Vietnam vets) and “Dancing in the Dark” (a song about writer’s block!), Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” (teenage runaways), etc. Those are the kinds of songs I really love: sad songs with a beat.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion is like Sunny 95 in a blender, and her song, “When I Needed You,” pulls off that 80s blend of lyrical dissonance really well. “The song sounds really happy now,” she says in an episode of Song Exploder, “but it’s a really sad demo.” She said it was nice to hide to the original emotion (inspired by a messy break-up) underneath a dance track, so it wasn’t so “all out there.”

I’ve been listening to so much Jepsen lately, but nobody else in my house wants to hear her. I’m reminded, again, of Whitney Houston, but for another reason: I once read a New York Times article from 1994 about her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” which chronicled how sick everyone was of the song, so much so that it had inspired various criminal acts, like when a mother of two threw her upstairs neighbors’ stereo out the window:

“It was driving us all up the wall,” Ms. Hall told a local newspaper at the time. “I had just had enough.” The incident, in fact, became one in a series of several — all, oddly enough, in England — at the height of the song’s popularity. In October, a 20-year-old woman from Middlebrough County was reportedly sentenced to seven days in jail after she played “I Will Always Love You” so loudly and so often that her neighbors complained of psychological torture and the police charged her with noise pollution.

We all want to dance with somebody, but, it seems, sometimes we must dance alone… with headphones.