Search Results for: log book

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

My July pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

Tove Jansson, the writer and artist best known for creating the Moomins, spent her summers on an island in the gulf of Finland with her lifelong partner, Tuulikki Pietila. She wrote most of her books there, and she wrote The Summer Book, about a girl and her grandmother living on an island, at the age of sixty, after losing her mother. I love this book because it’s what I wish all my summers would feel like, deep and just a little dark and surrounded by the sea…

The timing couldn’t be better: a new festival is starting in the UK called The Woman Who Fell in Love with An Island. (Inspired by a letter she wrote to Tooti in 1963, asking her partner if she’d read the D.H. Lawrence story, “The Man Who Loved Islands”: “How about ‘The Woman Who Fell in Love with an Island’?”)

The Guardian recently published “How Tove Jansson’s love of nature shaped the world of the Moomins,” with more about their life on the island, including this passage about their “hut” and routine:

Like the lighthouse that the author hymned in Moominpappa at Sea, the hut’s one room had windows facing in all directions so that Tove and Pietilä could watch the horizon from 360 degrees, and see the winds and storms coming and going. Seated at separate desks (in Helsinki they lived in separate apartments joined by an attic corridor), they “got a lot into the day”. While Jansson wrote, Pietilä drew, or filmed with her 8mm camera. Occasionally they had a joint project, constructing scenes from the Moomin books, with Pietilä making the 3D models and Jansson painting them: “That was their play time.”

Back in April, I watched a (rare) documentary made up of footage Tooti shot on 8mm: Haru, Island of the Solitary.

Jansson wrote a piece called “The Island” that is, according to translator Hernan Diaz, “at once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem,” which “reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book (published eleven years later) and a vignette of Klovharu, the island where Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner, built a summerhouse in the mid-60’s.”

It begins: “There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island.”

I am one of them!

Sign up for the club to join the discussion.

Nobody wants to read a book

Tuesday, May 4, 2021

“It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy. Nobody wants to read your shit.”
—Steven Pressfield

I posted this innocuous photo of our living room bookshelves the other day and people started asking me all kinds of questions, like, “How do you organize your books?” (I don’t) and “What’s the book you gift the most?”

Sacrilegious for someone of my profession to say, maybe, but I don’t like giving people books unless they’re 1) books they’ve asked for 2) really nice editions of books they already love. Otherwise, it feels like giving someone work. “Did you read that book I gave you yet?!?” (You, though, you should buy lots of my books and gift them indiscriminately. Ha!)

Reading a book requires, by today’s dismal standards, an enormous investment of time and attention, and the writer either honors that investment or suffers the consequences. (As Vonnegut told us, a writer has to be “a good date.”)

In the first major interview with legendary comedy writer John Swartzwelder, “sage of The Simpsons,” he says:

Nobody wants to read a book. You’ve got to catch their eye with something exciting in the first paragraph, while they’re in the process of throwing the book away. If it’s exciting enough, they’ll stop and read it. Then you’ve got to put something even more exciting in the second paragraph, to suck them in further. And so on. It’s exhausting for everybody, but it’s got to be done.

I posted this photo and people asked me where I got the chair

But if you know you have to honor the reader’s time and attention with “good” work, how do you ever get the guts to sit down and write?

You have to be willing to be bad, first, and write a shitty first draft.

That is the whole trouble.

Swartzwelder suggests working with time, and the overnight magic of put it in the drawer, and walk out the door:

I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

As the interviewer, Mike Sacks, summarized the method: “Create an imperfect world and then improve it.”

(Sacks has published two collections of interviews with comedy writers worth your time: Poking a Dead Frog and And Here’s The Kicker. And Swartzwelder’s novels are here.)

Okay, now I’m off to make something bad that I will fix later!

A book of words

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Nick Cave handwritten dictionary — Nick Cave’s handwritten dictionary

In his latest newsletter, my friend Alan Jacobs notes that Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is now fully online, and points to his 2006 piece, “Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges: Dr. Johnson and his Dictionary,” in which he recounts much of Johnson’s struggle putting together his book of words. (I was particularly sympathetic to Johnson’s disgust at his own “idleness” while holding a firm conviction that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I do love a man who contains multitudes… especially multitudes who hate each other.)

At the very end of the piece, Alan writes about the magic of paper dictionaries (emphasis mine):

Surely every user of dictionaries or encyclopedias can recall many serendipitous discoveries: as we flip through pages in search of some particular chunk of information, our eyes are snagged by some oddity, some word or phrase or person or place, unlooked-for but all the more irresistible for that. On my way to “serendipity” I trip over “solleret,” and discover that those weird, broad metal shoes that I’ve seen on the feet of armored knights have a name. But this sort of thing never happens to me when I look up a word in an online dictionary. The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you’re not looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need books.

Fifteen years later, this is no less true: the magic of a paper dictionary is the magic of finding things you didn’t know you were looking for. It’s a magic that electronic texts, for all their usefulness and convenience, still haven’t touched.

The supposed “shortcomings” of paper are what, in fact, make it such a wonderful technology. Here’s Alan, again (with emphasis mine, again):

George Landow has written that “the linear habits of thought associated with print technology often force us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization, and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment.” But it turns out that, when it comes to dictionaries anyway, it’s hypertext that narrows and impoverishes. The simple fact that I cannot pick up a dictionary and turn to the precise page I wish, or, even if I could do that, focus my eyes only on the one definition I was looking for — the very crudity, as it were, of the technology is what enriches me and opens my world to possibilities.

Get your paper dictionary today! You shan’t regret it.

Exhausting dialogue and conversational shortcuts

Monday, April 5, 2021

In a pre-pandemic post, “What to say when you don’t know what to say,” I made a big list of some of my favorite conversational shortcuts that I like to drop to keep conversations from being needlessly confrontational or boring.

Stuff like:

“It wasn’t for me” when somebody asks you what you thought of something you hated that they might’ve potentially liked
“You may be right” when somebody criticizes you and “go to hell” wouldn’t be prudent
“Thank you for saying so” when somebody gives you a compliment

And so forth.

The pandemic just amplifies everything, of course, so now that I barely speak to anyone, I rely on these conversational shortcuts more than ever.

One of my favorite jokes of the pandemic is how bad it is to start a conversation with “How are you?” (Daniel Johnston’s iconic mural seems almost unbearably existential these days.)

One needs to go looking for new alternatives, so I enjoyed this Kat Vellos post on Instagram:

“It’s good to hear your voice” or “I’ve been looking forward to talking to you” seem like good replacement options to me, and I plan on practicing them this week, as I have a rare string of daily phone calls coming up.

Looking at Vellos’ chart made me think of one of my favorite artifacts from my youth: the soundboard. Soundboards were Flash apps that you could pull up on your computer and use for prank calling people.

The funny thing about the Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboards is that in the original Terminator movie, the Terminator is shown actually picking his dialogue:

During radio tours, when I’d talk to maybe two dozen radio DJs on the day of a book release, I used to have fantasies of making my own soundboard by recording myself answering frequently asked questions and playing them back during interviews.

Conversational shortcuts are like having one of those old soundboards in your head. It makes conversation a kind of game, where you pick the best option to keep the conversation going.

dialogue options from one of the *Monkey Island* games

Which brings me to another favorite artifact from my youth: the dialogue screens in the LucasArts adventure games I spent endless hours playing.

Because the games were designed so you never actually lost or got a GAME OVER screen, you could spend a long time trying out all the different dialogue options, going down the dialogue tree, or “exhausting the dialogue,” to try to uncover funny jokes before advancing the story line. (Here’s more from legend Ron Gilbert on the dialog trees in the LucasArts games.)

example of a simple dialogue tree from Wikipedia

Conversations with other human beings are, of course, by nature more chaotic, and there are an infinite number of paths one can go down.

“The best conversationalists are people who are hoping to end up somewhere they didn’t expect,” goes a line of dialogue in The Chairs are Where The People Go. “It seems to me that the most pleasing thing you can find yourself saying in a conversation is something you haven’t said before.”

*Blondie* with *Garfield* dialogue (one of my remixed comics)

That thrill, that wondering what will be said next (by the other person or by you!) is the very thing that makes for great conversation. But it means that all parties involved must be given room to speak and finish their sentences. It also means that sometimes you have to throw out your little conversational shortcuts, your pre-recorded dialogue, and let go.

“I can’t help wondering what we might have said if we hadn’t been stopped,” wrote Steve Martin, of a time he was famously interrupted onstage. “Maybe we were just around the corner from something thrilling. Isn’t that the nature of a live conversation? It halts, it stutters, it doubles back, it soars. We might have found a small nugget, something off topic or unexpected.”

*Wizard of Id* with *Hagar the Horrible* dialogue

One possible danger of thinking of conversation as a game is that you don’t actually shut up and listen to the other person, because you’re busy pulling up a list of possible dialogue options, like the Terminator. You have to train yourself to really listen, to let the other person speak, and to let their last words echo for a bit, remaining comfortable with a bit of “dead air,” and only then coming back with a response. (Great options are: “Jeez, I don’t know!” or “Gosh, I’ll have to think about that!”)

Finally, it can be very hard to know how to end a conversation. (I always laugh at regional variations in how people try to end conversations, like the Midwesterner passive-aggressive penchant for saying, “Well, I’d better let you go!”)

I would like to end this particular ~~conversation~~ monologue with the secret of great interviewers and perhaps the most important conversational shortcut: silence.

Books that suck you in and books that spin you out

Monday, March 29, 2021

Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:

Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books.

Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.

Moby-Dick, for example, is a book whose force seems to me centripetal: after being pointed to it by other books, I found myself returning to it, again and again. It sucks me in.

The Writer’s Map, on the other hand, a glorious current read of mine, is a book whose force feels centrifugal: two chapters in, and I already have a long list of books and to chase down. It spins me out.

Both kinds of books can be extremely valuable to the reader, and I don’t think one kind is necessarily better than the other. I’m also not sure that these forces are objectively observed. One reader’s centripetal book could be another’s centrifugal, and vice versa. It’s also possible that a book can both suck you in and spin you out.

This, by the way, is not an original theory of mine. I first heard it from my friend Matt Thomas, over a decade ago. “Good movies, I find, are centrifugal,” he once tweeted. “That is, they spin you out—to other movies, ideas, art, people.” He’s also tweeted that he finds Facebook centripetal (it sucks you in) and Twitter centrifugal (it spins you out).

I asked Matt where he got this idea, of media with centripetal and centrifugal forces, and he pointed me to Susan Douglas’s book about radio, Listening In. I searched the whole book and only found this reference:

“Listening, argues one researcher on perception, “is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.”

(This passage speaks to Murray Schafer on sound, but that’s for another blog post.)

Again, I don’t want to place a value judgment on a book based on its centripetal or centrifugal force, but I do think that a centrifugal book can be of lesser quality and still retain its value, as its value is found in the things it spins you out to.

Matt suggested to me that there’s a third category of work: the work that doesn’t spin you at all, the work that doesn’t move you in any direction, the work that barely has any force to it.

These books are to be avoided.