We hear “do what you love” so often from those few people who it did work for, for whom the stars aligned, and from them it sounds like good advice. They’re successful, aren’t they? If we follow their advice, we’ll be successful, too! […] We rarely hear the advice of the person who did what they loved and stayed poor or was horribly injured for it. Professional gamblers, stuntmen, washed up cartoonists like myself: we don’t give speeches at corporate events. We aren’t paid to go to the World Domination Summit and make people feel bad. We don’t land book deals or speak on Good Morning America.
Mixed [martial] artist Ronda Rousey was overseeing a group of fighters during a training session. One fighter, who was heavily favored to win was slacking off. Rousey approached the fighter and said that she wasn’t training to be the best in the next fight, she was training to be the best on her worst day.
A physical book is difficult. If you haven’t made one, it’s tough to imagine just how difficult it is. Every detail requires deliberation. There are many details. I will spare you an enumeration. But believe me when I say, if you think about them all before you start, you will never start. The rabbit hole is deep. The truth of any craft.
A book with proper margins says a number of things. It says, we care about the page. It says, we care about the words. We care so much that we’re going to ensure the words and the page fall into harmony. We’re not going to squish the text to save money. Oh, no, we will not not rush and tuck words too far into the gutter.
A book with proper margins says, We respect you, Dear Reader, and also you, Dear Author, and you, too, Dear Book.
via Hilobrow
“Among the creative professions, it’s very, very common,” says comedy producer and performer John Lloyd, who made the TV series QI and Blackadder.
“There’s a very, very high incidence of bipolar disorder. It’s because stable people think the world’s fine as it is. They don’t see any particular need to change it.
"Creative people don’t feel like that. People who want to change the world tend to suffer a lot for it.”
And for me, at this point, I think it much more interesting for me to look at something and know that I can play it, but not know how, rather than to look at something and go, ‘Ah, I can do that.’ And then just do it.
“I once read about a scientific institute which had studied the male erection,” Davies said. “It divided the hard-on into four categories, from soft to hard.
"One, tofu. Two, peeled banana. Three, banana. And four, cucumber. Right there and then I knew I had my drama.”
The novelist Robin Sloan offers a wise middle way, borrowing a concept from share trading, which he applies to writing, but which seems relevant for many modern careers. Think about your work, he suggests, as divided into “stock” and “flow”. Flow is day-to-day, high-visibility stuff: putting yourself out there, networking at conferences, Twitter and LinkedIn, reminding the world you exist. Stock is substantive, long-term work that lasts – in Sloan’s case, his books. “I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast,” he writes. “But flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein.”
The biggest mistake we make is trying to square the way we feel about something today with the way we felt about it yesterday. You shouldn’t even bother doing it. You should just figure out the way you feel today and if it happens to comply with what you thought before, fine. If it contradicts it, whatever. Life goes on.
The famous basketball coach John Wooden used to always say: “Be quick but don’t hurry.” Which is perfect writing advice.
Kindle links: Kindle Unlimited, reading experience
The new Kindle Unlimited campaign is smoking out new opinions on Amazon's strategy [1]. I liked this comparison of the Kindle to the iPod's early days, and the evolution from buying single songs to streaming music services (Songza is my favorite). The lack of privacy is of concern to the writer, though buying a Kindle or even having an Amazon account means you have opted for convenience over privacy. The local public library (funded by your tax dollars) may offer a little more in the way of privacy and choice (thanks to librarians, not the government) -- some observers are not all that excited by the books on offer via the Kindle lending library or Kindle Unlimited. Of course, paying with cash at your local new or used bookstore may circumvent privacy and choice concerns.
Austin Kleon (via his marvelous weekly mailing) pointed me to this critique of the Kindle by a new reader. Pierce makes some sharp observations about the Kindle, especially how the designers chose to glorify the device over the book you're reading. He also has reservations about the shared-passages feature of Kindle e-books; it's as if someone is reading over your shoulder and turns what has traditionally been a private experience into an unasked-for shared one.
And I also have the sense he describes of the Kindle separating me from the traditional reading experience. Many books on my shelves double as physical objects I formed a relationship with -- they're signed by the authors, I read this one during that long week in Anaheim, I read this one when I was unemployed and it led me to read these other books, etc. The reading experience is different on a Kindle; my memories of a book will now be associated to a device rather than a book. Instead of forming a relationship to the book I'm devising a relationship to the device.
For example, if I'm going on a trip and I only have room to carry two books in my bag, then I'm making a commitment to give these books a chance. There are physical consequences of weight and comfort to consider, but I'm also promising myself that I will put in the time to read them. With the Kindle, though, I have maybe 50 or so books and collections I've downloaded. Which do I read first, which do I commit to? Does it really matter, since I can choose to flip in a moment from this essay collection to that novel to that e-book written by a friend? No one book will have my full committed attention unless I delete all the others from the device, because it's the device I've committed to, rather than the e-book.
Or such is my current improvised line of thinking on this sunny and beautiful Sunday afternoon, where I am skimming web pages and writing blog posts rather than sitting down to read a book.
[1] I do not plan to sign up for the service at this time. I already have more books than I can eat on my Kindle. And I have more movies in my Netflix queue than I could see if I had a week off. ^
Once upon a time, 12 years ago to be precise, David Bowie said something very perceptive. “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he told a New York Times reporter. “So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”
I’ve begun reading Kenny Moore’s biography Bowerman and the Men of Oregon and have repeatedly been struck by the activity — physical and mental — of Bill Bowerman, his family, and just about everybody else mentioned. People go canoeing; they work long hours to pay their tuition bills; they teach, raise kids, and build houses. When they go to a track meet, they shriek and cheer for the home team. In stark contrast to modern life, nobody seems to sit passively in front of a TV set.
It reminds me of an observation in David Mamet’s movie State and Main:
Everybody makes their own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it isn’t fun. It’s entertainment.
Miss Marple
Before we left on our England trip, I loaded up the Kindle with a few hundredweight of e-books thinking, "Oho, eight hours on the flight over, eight hours on the flight back, three weeks of travel -- I'll certainly rip through more than a dozen books!" When I write up my lessons learned from the trip, we'll talk more about the grand foolishness of that master plan (and the foolishness of master plans in general).
But I did in fact read a couple of e-books, one of which gave me mild but very real pleasure -- namely, Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories, which Amazon helpfully priced at about $2 or $3 just before the trip. I remembered the old BBC series fondly and thought I'd give the old girl a whirl.
I am not up to date or even well read in the classic country-house English mystery genre. Christie's books, and the Marple stories and novels in particular, are referred to, I believe, as "cozies" -- an established set of characters who form the suspects and allies, a rather hermetic and contrived environment, and, my golly, lots of exposition and talking heads. No chasing bad guys through the bog or fisticuffs on a pitched roof. No, the primary action in a Miss Marple short story is of the women knitting or the men drinking and smoking cigars.
Nowadays, I expect an author would create a backstory for Miss Jane Marple that would explain all: was she always solving mysteries? Had she ever been in love? What did she do during the wars? Does she navigate the thorny politics of planning church fêtes as easily as she does a murder investigation?
Part of a detective story's fun is that the detective is himself the central mystery: what is the alchemical mix that makes them who we see in the story? I found myself reading the Marple stories for clues to her character, since I found her easily the most fascinating and unsolved mystery in the entire book.
As I read the stories, I kept hearing Joan Hickson, who played Miss Marple in the 1980s-era BBC series that dramatized the novels. I watched them all on Netflix over the last month. As with the stories, the most interesting bits are where Miss Marple talks about the past and her memories, yet without giving away any personal details. There are tender moments in some of the episodes where she commiserates with other old ladies; the gravity and weight of their age, and their invisibility in this strange modern world, are brought to gnawing life by the elderly character actresses.
The antiqueness of the Marple plots and the settings was in cases matched by the slow pace and staid staging of the episodes. The series was praised in its time for hewing closely to the novels and not substantially changing them (a claim recent series based on the Marple mysteries cannot make, so I hear), and I believe the novels mostly consist of people being questioned. Still, I couldn't quite believe how amateurishly filmed and staged was "A Murder is Announced," even though it has some of my favorite Marple dialogues and observations.
The acting is also variable, though one can catch a few young actors on their way up, such as Tom Wilkinson, who even in his younger days looked like an old member of the Establishment. Throughout though, is Hickson's busybodyish, soft-spoken, observant, and shrewd Miss Marple. There is a stillness to Hickson's Marple that arrests me; she is an old lady sitting in a chair by the fire, listening to the radio, her mind wandering who knows where, who will suddenly rouse herself to ask a pointed question that no one had thought to ask before. It's a dear and charming performance.
I thought the strongest stories of the series were "A Pocketful of Rye," "Sleeping Murder," and "Nemesis." And a wonderful little bonus for me: in "Nemesis," Chipping Campden serves as the setting for the village Miss Marple visits to investigate a case, with several scenes set in and around St. James Church, where we had been only a few weeks before.
I once made a TV show about an installation by the artist Spencer Tunick, who makes his work out of the naked flesh of human beings. Above the sparkling Tyne, 1,700 people stripped off at dusk and lay across the Millennium Bridge between Gateshead and Newcastle. It was a beautiful and affecting sight. Milling around before and after the installation took place, chatting to the participants, I learned two things: 1) Nudity is completely unsexy when you are surrounded by it; and 2) Never interview a man who is sitting bare-arsed on a bar stool live on television. His squashed-up devil’s bagpipes will be right in your eyeline and it will be terribly distracting.
Reading Proust in prison
Daniel Genis spent ten years in prison and read over one thousand books:
He read “In Search of Lost Time” alongside two academic guidebooks, full of notations in French, and a dictionary. He said that no other novel gave him as much appreciation for his time in prison. “Of course, we are…
Reading Proust in prison
