Thoreau’s birthday

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Here’s a quick birthday drawing of one of my favorite writers, Henry David Thoreau, born July 12, 1817.

Thoreau is one of those writers everybody thinks they know already without actually reading any of his work.

As a great Indoorsman, I stayed away from him for ages until I fell in love with his journal and spent a few years reading the entries every day. (He was a huge influence on my book Keep Going.)

My “Thoreau” tag on this blog is now 35+ posts deep.

Some highlights:

If you’ve never read him before, try downloading the “Walking” zine from Keri Smith’s Wander Society pocket library.

Then go for a long walk and come back and write about it.

I don’t read a lot of long biographies — I usually hate anyone after about 250 pages — so it is remarkable that yesterday I finished my month-long project of reading Robert D. Richardson’s trilogy: Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.

Richardson originally set out to write about William James, but he didn’t feel like he had the intellectual firepower, so he decided to do Thoreau first. It took him ten years, as did all 3 books: his method was to “read everything his subjects had read, in the sequence in which they read it, tracing their intellectual development.”

One of his mentors, Walter Jackson Bate, taught him his 100 chapters of 5 pages each method of composition:

I had a wonderful teacher at Harvard, W.J. Bate, who wrote very great biographies of Keats and then of Johnson, and his advice to me when he discovered that I was daring to write a biography was to write in short takes; if at all possible, to write in short pieces so that the reader feels that he or she is getting somewhere. I mean, that’s a big, heavy book. And people have busy lives and they have lots else to do, and if you can sit down and read four or five pages and feel like you’re getting somewhere instead of these big 30 or 40-page or 50-page chapters, it makes a book readable that might not otherwise seem so.

He passed that advice — be kind to your readers and respect their time — on to his students and other biographers: Write 100 pieces of one to two thousand words on the parts of the life you care about the most, and don’t worry about what order they’re in until you have the pieces.

Now, imagine writing a book so good that Annie Dillard sends you a fan letter, and after “two lunches and three handshakes,” you get married and spend over 3 decades together. (Richardson died last year of complications after a fall. A posthumous book comes out next year.)

Emerson is dedicated to her, and, I could be making this up, but there are several sentences sprinkled here and there that I swear are him showing off for her. (Or, you know, just being really good.)

Here’s his answer to how being married to Annie Dillard changed his writing:

What changed? Everything. I could write a book, but I won’t. I learned from her that you have to go all out every day, every piece. Hold nothing back, the well will refill. She gave me the key to Emerson in one word: Wild. Emerson is wild. I also learned you don’t have to write every day, but you have to go in the room with the piece every day. She told me she looked at submissions from her students for any two words together that she’d never seen together. And finally, I learned I needed to read more. I read maybe 50 books a year that are not part of what I’m writing. She reads many times that. Most days, I’m not even good enough to get into one of her classes.

Adorably, he wrote a short biography of her, too: “She is, like Thoreau, a close observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocket-maker.”

If you haven’t read any of his books, before tackling one of these bad boys, I might start with his slim but dense volume of Emerson on the creative process, one of the better books about writing I’ve read, whose title also sums up his method: First We Read, Then We Write.

Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you have

Thursday, May 20, 2021

John Locke’s system for indexing commonplace books

“A good idea is not of any use if you can’t find it.”
—Logan Heftel

When I was working on Keep Going, I wrote about “the importance of revisiting notebooks,” detailing the notebook method I’d learned from the Two Davids — David Thoreau and David Sedaris — how to get down daily thoughts and mine them for material for larger pieces. At the end of the piece, I wrote:

I have no index for the notebooks (unless you count my logbook), and no way, really, of knowing what’s in them, a condition worsened by my terrible memory, and the fact that one of the reasons I like keeping a diary, as Henry Jones, Sr., said, is because I don’t have to remember what’s in it. I plan on starting an index in the coming weeks, and updating it for each new notebook.

Reader, I… never started that index. And four years later, here I am, my dumb ass, trying to write another book, staring at a crate of notebooks, literally thousands of pages, with no idea what’s in them, really:

a stack of my notebooks in a crate

I have filled pages, but I have missed a crucial step: indexing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks. He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.

Emerson called his notebooks his “savings bank,” and over four decades, he spent an enormous amount of time in the vault, not just writing, but re-reading what he’d written and indexing.

The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and give him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that interested him throughout his life.

As time went on, it took Emerson longer and longer to put lectures and essays together, simply because he had this vast trove to work with. He had no typewriter, no word processor, no computer. Everything was done with ink and paper. His indexes were massive, running hundreds and hundreds of pages. “These indexes themselves, never printed—with one exception—represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.” He wound up with 263 volumes on his shelf.

It could be dreary work, doing all this indexing, but it was crucial as he worked up to a new work. (Emerson’s creative process is so fascinating, Richardson wrote a wonderful slim volume about it, called First We Read, Then We Write.)

I am fascinated by the notebook and filing systems of other writers. In my experience, it’s very easy to write every day and get ideas down, but it’s not so easy to keep track of it all.

(A wild example, I’ll let you click through to read: In his excellent memoir, My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt writes about his father’s elaborate system of notebooks that allowed him to write hundreds of erotic novels.)

Comedian Phyllis Diller had “gag file,” which is now housed at The Smithsonian:

Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag.

In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comedian showed off a similar “joke bank”:

For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she’s written (at this point she’s amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: “Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?”

These filing systems are all analog examples, but one of my heroes, George Carlin, embraced an analog/digital system:

I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder… When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it….[In my filing system there are files for all kinds of subjects] but then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles….It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it’s just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let’s see, if I say “asshole” and “minister,” I then can find what I want find.

“A lot of this,” Carlin said, “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”

No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.

On Twitter the other day I saw someone point out that the longer you listen to Song Exploder, the more you discover that the Voice Memos app on the iPhone has probably had more of an impact on songwriting than any other piece of software. But recording things in Voice Memos is just one step. The next is listening back to things, finding diamonds in the rough.

Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants, aka the lead singer and songwriter for The Presidents of the United States of America, says he dumps all his raw song ideas into an iTunes playlist and then puts it on shuffle while he’s washing dishes. (I read that Brian Eno does something similar: he makes a tremendous amount of music, and then hits shuffle when he’s answering email, etc., and whatever catches his ear, he investigates.)

Like William Blake said, you either create your own system or get enslaved by another’s. In some sense, this very blog is a system for me to find out what I have: I take material from my notebooks and turn it into blog posts, and the posts become tags, which become book chapters, etc.

But I have a ton of material that never makes it online, and I need to get it out of my notebooks and into an indexed and fully searchable system. I think this will be easiest if I do it as I go, and keep it simple: the minute I finish a notebook, go back and type the whole thing into a .txt file and save it. (And back it up.)

I suspect that rather than being totally dreary, this transcribing step can also be a creative step, and I will see patterns of thought, generate new ideas…

Wintering and dormancy

Tuesday, May 4, 2021

a blackout poem that reads don't die simply disappear a while — a blackout from *Show Your Work!*

I heard from so many readers about my post, “I’m not languishing, I’m dormant” — way too many to respond to everyone — and more than one pointed to Katherine May’s book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

May mines wintering lessons from the natural world, and how essential winter is to the process of living things:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

We often think of winter as a time of death and nothingness, but underneath it all, elements are coming together to make something new. (It’s a messy process inside the cocoon.)

Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered. In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us. A sharp wintering, sometimes, would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our life are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in.

Thoreau said he loved the “imprisonment” of winter because it “compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.”

May picks up Thoreau’s and many a great poet and physicist’s theme: that time is not linear, and life is made of seasons and cycles, and the sooner you accept this and live by it, the better off you’ll be:

We are (…) in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish, and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

“Live in each season as it passes,” wrote Thoreau, “and resign yourself to the influences of each.”

If this way of thinking appeals to you, there’s a whole chapter about creative seasons in my book, Keep Going:

(Thanks to @HennekeD for the last two blockquotes from Wintering.)

It ain’t Grand

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

“For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”
—Hedda Sterne

A few weeks ago, when the sun was shining and everything wasn’t covered in ice, my friend Marty Butler and his family masked up and came over to visit Coconut The Owl. We talked for a long time, the way people starved for conversation do, and eventually we got to the subject Texans can’t avoid: Texas. We were talking about Austin, in particular, and how the beauty of this place is subtle.

“Texas isn’t Grand,’’ Marty said. “If you want Grand, you need to go west to Colorado or Montana or something.”

The bright side of this, we agreed, was that here you learn to really pay attention, to track subtle changes in the environment, to fire up your eyebeams and search for beauty.

Yesterday I was reading an interview with one of my heroes, the cartoonist John Porcellino, and he said this, about the midwest:

“It’s not like the Rocky Mountains where it’s going to hit you over the head with, ‘Look how majestic I am,’” Porcellino says. “It’s Paw Paw, Illinois. That beauty is there and that majesty is there, but it’s a thing that you have to learn to recognize. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.”

This is something he learned from our shared hero, Henry David Thoreau, who taught us that we receive what we’re ready to receive, and that it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see.

Though I have lived in Texas for 14 years, I have never been an evangelist for the place. I came here by chance, and now I live here by choice. (Mostly because a woman I love loves it, and I’d rather live in her world…) But the place has been good to me, and in my own way, I have come to love it. (You know how Texan you are based on how mad you get when people badmouth Texas.)

Here is what I love most about Texas: It has taught me how to find beauty. How beautiful things grow out of shit.

An orange extension cord run to the end of a driveway, offering power to anyone who needs it.

How, without traffic, you can really hear your neighbor’s windchimes ringing in the frozen, silent air.

The icicles on Coconut’s house.

Even now, iced over and on our knees, I can still find beauty, because Texas has trained me to look for it.

It ain’t Grand.

It’s my home.