Reading list - adding in the books I forgot to

In the interest of proving to myself that I have completed over half Francine Prose’s list of “Books to be Read Immediately”, I’m adding here the ones I forgot to earlier… To justify this patchwork blog post, there is Carl Jung, the answer to my query for “quote about completists” with the following: “Life calls not for perfection but for completeness.”

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Reading this book during the pandemic felt like a bit of vicarious travel… It was nice! Three quotes:

All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office.
Up-stairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning's work. At eleven o'clock I went over to the Quai d'Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign-office mouthpiece, a young Nouvelle Revue Française diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions asked by news service men who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d'Orsay with Woolsey and Krum. (p 36)

“No, I don't believe it. And I'm fond of him, too. And I'd like to have children. I always thought we'd have children.”
She looked at me very brightly. “I never liked children much, but I don't want to think I'll never have them. I always thought I'd have them and then like them.” (p 47)

I had coffee out on the terrasse with the team manager of one of the big bicycle manufacturers. He said it had been a very pleasant race, and would have been worth watching if Bottechia had not abandoned it at Pamplona. The dust had been bad, but in Spain the roads were better than in France. Bicycle road-racing was the only sport in the world, he said. Had I ever followed the Tour de France? Only in the papers. The Tour de France was the greatest sporting event in the world. Following and organizing the road races had made him know France. Few people know France. All spring and all summer and all fall he spent on the road with bicycle road-racers. Look at the number of motor-cars now that followed the riders from town to town in a road race. It was a rich country and more sportif every year. It would be the most sportif country in the world. It was bicycle road-racing did it. That and football. He knew France. La France Sportive. He knew road-racing. We had a cognac. After all, though, it wasn't bad to get back to Paris. There is only one Paname. In all the world, that is. Paris is the town the most sportif in the world. Did I know the Chope de Negre? Did I not. I would see him there some time. I certainly would. We would drink another fine together. We certainly would. Would I be up for the depart? I would certainly try to. Would I like him to call me? It was very interesting. I would leave a call at the desk. He would not mind calling me. I could not let him take the trouble. I would leave a call at the desk. We said good-bye until the next morning.
In the morning when I awoke the bicycle-riders and their following cars had been on the road for three hours. (p 236-7)

The Trial by Franz Kafka

I read The Trial in 2015 and appreciated Kafka’s talent more in retrospect than when I was reading his books. The story is frustrating, but, that was the point. A few sentences I liked:

Through the open window he had another glimpse of the old woman, who with truly senile inquisitiveness had moved along to the window exactly opposite, in order to go on seeing all that could be seen. (p 3).

[…] less loud indeed than he had threatened, but with such explosive force that it hung in the air a moment before gradually spreading through the room. (p 30)

Many seemed convinced that it was highly important for K. to find the joiner Lanz, they took a long time to think it over, suggested some joined who, however, was not called Lanz, or a name which had some quite distant resemblance to Lanz, or enquired of their neighbours, or escorted K. To a door some considerable distance away, where they fancied such a man might be living as a lodger, or where there was someone who could give better information than they could. […] He now regretted his plan, which at first had seemed so practical. (p 40)

Selected Stories by Alice Munro.

Since this author’s death, her reputation and legacy have been revisited. I read the collection in July of 2013, because in a journal I’d kept, I write “This afternoon I read Alice Munro. Francine [Prose] points out the simple, spare language.” In fact, Prose writes, “Alice Munro writes with the simplicity and beauty of a Shaker box. Everything about her style is meant to attract no notice, to make you not pay attention. But if you read her work closely, every word challenges you to think of a more direct, less fussy or tarted-up way to say what she is saying.” (p 23 in Reading Like a Writer) 

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

This is a series of sketches of life as a soldier during the Vietnam War. I liked his description of the small town where he grew up: 

The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie - the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over water.

It was a graceful, good-sized lake. [….] Then, there had not been a war. But there had always been the lake, which was the town’s first cause of existence, a place for immigrant settlers to put down their loads. Before the settlers were the Sioux, and before the Sioux were the vast open prairies, and before the prairies there was only ice. The lake bed had been dug out by the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glacier. Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment. Still, it was the only important body of water within forty miles, a source of pride, nice to look at on bright summer days, and later that evening it would color up with fireworks. Now, in the late afternoon, it lay calm and smooth, a good audience for silence, a seven-mile circumference that could be traveled by slow car in twenty-five minutes. (p 157)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor; Wise Blood, Collected Stories

I liked “A Good Man is Hard to Find”… it’s such a perfectly contained story that it’s hard to extract a quote. But here is one:

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.

Apart from that story, I find O’Connor hard to read. This is one assignment I didn’t complete. By contrast, I find her letters fascinating…

Freedomland by Richard Price

This is one of the few novels from the list adjacent to the mystery genre. The quotes I recorded are all ones that made me smile:

Danny stared at him. Then, without a word, he turned and marched over to Bobby McDonald, who stood on the paved side of the tape, hands in pockets, squinting up at the trees as if attempting to count the number of pairs of sneakers thrown up there bolo-style and left to dangle like rubberized fruit. (p 93)

But McCoy’s… The air conditioning gave off Legionnaires’ disease, and although there was some kind of grudging, nominal menu, the geriatric cook had TB and it took twenty minutes for him to dismount from his bar stool, the resulting hamburger on white bread, with a side of potato chips, finally showing up something like six drinks after it had been ordered. (p 245)

“What do you self-help people with?”
“Happiness.” He gave her a shrug. “Aspects of happiness.” Then as if reading her mind, he added, “I’m happier than I look.” (p 253)

Swan’s Way by Marcel Proust

Reading Proust was magical. His long sentences that stretched like spider silk, weaving an ethereal architecture of thought that held me in awe. I read it in the original French, and here are a few favourite quotes: 

Elle me faisait luis dire le sujet des poèmes que j’avais l’intention de composer. Et ces rêves m’avertissaient que puisque je voulais un jour être un écrivain, il était temps de savoir ce que je comptais écrire. Mais dès que je me le demandais, tâchant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une signification philosophique infinie, mon esprit s’arrêtait de fonctionner, je ne voyais plus que le vide en face de mon attention, je sentais que je n’avais pas de génie ou peut-être une maladie cérébrale l’empêchait de naître. (p 170)

Les intérêts de notre vie sont si multiples qu’il n’est pas rare que dans une même circonstance les jalons d’un bonheur qui n’existe pas encore soient posés à côté de l’aggravation d’un chagrin dont nous souffrons. (p 375)

Et encore, même à ce point de vue de simple quantité, dans notre vie les jours ne sont pas égaux. Pour parcourir les jours, les natures un peu nerveuses, comme était la mienne, disposent, comme les voitures automobiles, de “vitesses” différentes. Il y a des jours montueux et malaisés qu’on met un temps infini à gravir et des jours en pente qui se laissent descendre à fond de train en chantant. (p 383)

Proust can be intimidating to begin, but I was encouraged by Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life. In it Botton uses Proust to reflect on suffering, language, and friendship, but a passage that is pertinent to this reading list project is the following:

Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he [Proust] argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves. (p 178)

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

This is a short read. From it, a few short quotes…

Franny’s ministering to a pet goldfish:

She was still stroking Bloomberg, still succoring him, forcibly, into the subtle and difficult world outside warm afghans. (p 133)

The description of an outfit, (the reefer is a peacoat, the tam a hat similar to a beret):

She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey’s vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of paint. (p 150-1)

The nose-blowing that makes me wince:

Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate-appearing an organ. (p 151)

The Elements of Style by by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr.

I read The Elements of Style as a university student. I had trouble being concise when writing essays and this book transformed my writing in the middle of a course on literature. The professor noticed, and I kept a copy of the essay I’d handed in (“Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers”) and professor Doug Reimer’s response to a note I’d added, fretting over my writing. He wrote: “White’s Elements cannot be bettered, never, today, or next millennium. Your new ‘simplicity’ of style is exactly the right approach for you to take.”

The book had made such an impact, that it was always the first thing I recommended, when asked, as a writing tutor, some years later. Here, from the introduction, a little taste of William Strunk’s advice:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky 

“He’s not a man, he’s a machine, and a wicked machine when he gets angry,” she added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich in all the details of his figure, manner of speaking and character, holding him guilty for everything bad she could find in him and forgiving him nothing, on account of the terrible fault for which she stood guilty before him. (p 189)

Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. For him words took away the beauty of what he saw. (p 241)

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is. (p 302)

Fools of Fortune by William Trevor

I read this book but took note of only four sentences, two because they were funny:

The girl’s face had a woebegone look that was not much lightened by a display of darkened teeth when she smiled. (p 97)

and

You’re the laziest man God ever put eyes in. (p 133).

The two others denote the novel’s mood…

The consideration for our mourning implied that it rendered us delicate: people had stood aside from our path, a woman had crossed herself, men touched their caps or hats. “The Irish are like that,” my mother had explained. (p 107)

and

I stood with the nun in the hall of St. Fina’s, a huge expanse of brown and cream tiles, freshly washed, still smelling of Jeyes Fluid. (p 138)

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

I recently re-read this short essay, reviving my appreciation for Woolf’s talent. Nevermind this quote I like… you can read it here and see if you find something you like too. 

But to return to the invalid. “I am in bed with influenza,” he says, and actually complains that he gets no sympathy. “I am in bed with influenza”—but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea, and he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—the experience cannot be imparted and, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends' minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry out, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

In a blog post in 2022, I wrote about appreciating the contrast of writers’ styles when reading more than one book at a time. I illustrated it then with a quote from Yates here. In addition are the following that I also liked.

A landscape I have seen:

At first their rehearsals had been held on Saturdays - always, it seemed, on the kind of windless February or March afternoon when the sky is white, the trees are black, and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender between curds of shrivelled snow. (p 5)

A calm feeling:

The rain had stopped but it was still a wet, gray day and good to be indoors. The radio was dimly playing Mozart and a gentle, sherry-scented repose settled over the kitchen. This was the way he had often wished his marriage could always be - unexcited, companionable, a mutual tenderness touched with romance - and as they sat there quietly talking, waiting for the sight of the Givingses’ station wagon to appear through the dripping trees, he shivered pleasurably once or twice as a man who has been out since before dawn will shiver at the feel of the first faint warmth of sun on his neck. He felt himself at peace; and by theme the car did come, he was ready for it. (p 182)

The incongruity of death:

Shep, respectfully keeping his distance, allowed the inner voice to assure him that she couldn’t possibly be dying. People didn’t die this way, at the end of a drowsing corridor, like this in the middle of the afternoon. Why, hell, if she was dying that janitor wouldn’t be pushing his mop so peacefully across the linoleum. And he certainly wouldn’t be humming, nor would they let the radio play so loud in the ward a few doors away. If April Wheeler was dying they certainly wouldn’t have this bulletin board here on the wall, with its mimeographed announcement of a staff dance (“Fun! Refreshments!”) and they wouldn’t have these wicker chairs arranged this way, with this table and this neat display of magazines. (p 317)

As I re-read these quotes, I’m reminded of the pleasure of discovering these sentences and the authors who penned them. Prose writes: “They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.”

Happy reading!

Dedication

This book dedication, from Claire M. Strom’s book Profiting from the Plains, encapsulates research and motherhood:

This book is dedicated to my daughter,
Phoebe Helga Margaret Strom
She was not yet born when I started my research and will be eleven by the time it is published. She has, therefore, through no fault or choice of her own, lived with James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway all her life. I thank her for that, and for the joy and grace she has brought to my life.

James J. Hill was a decent man, and he kept a diary. His biographer Martin Albro writes:

Like many another diarist, James J. Hill began the new year with the best of intentions, but quickly found that it was an onerous task to live a full, energetic, exciting life and note it all down in a book as well.

Here’s to exciting days!

A podcast episode I liked

A few weeks ago now, the Ezra Klein Show interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the release of her latest book. I want to hold on to three things she said, one about beauty:

I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered.

And the idea of a “mind schooled to good attention”:

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.

But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.

We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well.

And her thoughts on God as she’s studied his portrayal in the book of Genesis:

[About the Ten Commandments] The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.

[About the ways in which the ‘chosen people’ in Genesis fail] In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.

I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are, in their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.

And then Robinson, in the interview, goes on to talk about how forgiveness is demonstrated in Genesis, with the story of Joseph, and how it contrasts to previous literature, like The Odyssey, in which the hero comes home and kills the strangers who’ve taken over his house. I love her concluding remarks on this:

It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.

I find Robinson’s voice and thoughts very calming to listen to. The episode can be found here.

Biographies

While I'm writing my thesis, I like checking people's names, to see if they have interesting biographies. 

Consider Adrien-Gabriel Morice. He wrote three volumes on church history in the West in which Aubigny's name is linked with vicomte Jacques d'Aubigny. But he was an insufferable man. He joined the Oblates but could not obey superiors. He was sent to a mission where there was one other priest, a Fr. Georges Blanchet. And this is what happened:

he made life so difficult for Blanchet, a gentle man much loved by the Carrier, that later that year the priest begged to be transferred before Morice’s perpetual disagreements drove him mad. That year Blanchet ceded supervision of the mission to Morice to avoid further conflict, but he would remain there, building churches and doing housework, until his retirement ten years later. A succession of priests, finding Morice impossible to work and live with, and refusing to become his servant, chose to leave.

What a character!

On another day, I checked this railroad contractor's name to discover that his daughter was more renowned than he was... Charlotte Whitehead Ross was the first female doctor in Montreal, having taken her medical education at Woman’s Medical College at Philadelphia in 1870, while also bearing children. She came to Manitoba in 1881 where she continued to practice medicine. Her biographer, Vera K. Fast, writes: 

After assisting at a birth she would often scrub the cabin floor and do the washing, the cooking, and the baking to help the mother and family. Her daughters looked after the Ross home in her absence, although she always did the baking, which she enjoyed, as she did embroidery, knitting, and music, especially the piano. 

She was never licenced in Manitoba, and a bill to authorize her to practice in 1888 was withdrawn. I like how Fast writes:  

Undeterred, Charlotte continued on her busy rounds by horse, sleigh, canoe, and train, not defiantly, for she was no social or political activist, but simply because there was a need.

Biographies are inspiring!

Happy Friday!

Listening

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and this is my favourite part… a fictional broadcast excerpt:

(And then he enthuses about coal.) "Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it children. That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fir or a reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe ten million or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light it could and transformed the sun's energy into itself, into bark, twigs, stems, because plants eat light in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years, eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like a stone and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight, sunlight one hundred million years old is heating your home tonight. [...] Open your eyes (concludes the man) and see what you can with them, before they close forever."

Eating

I’ve enjoyed making each one of the menus I’ve tried from Amy Theilen’s book Company. So far, they’ve been three: one Christmas-themed, with turkey, one called “More Time Than Money” kind of meal, with chicken, and one for Easter, featuring ham.

I like how when I pick a menu from this book, I’m surrendering my menu-planning decisions and letting her be the expert. I learn so much and the meal’s success turns out to be such a reward.

To use the leftover ham this week, I made this Ham and Tomato Penne, which sounds fancier in its original Italian: Penne al Baffo.

Reluctantly, I must sign off and get back to the real work… I leave you my dog as snack supplicant:

Like buying a house

Since hearing this podcast episode several weeks ago, Derek Thompson’s comparison has stuck in my mind as an encapsulation of how I feel writing this thesis. Here’s the quote, lightly edited:

One thing I learned writing my first book [...] is that writing changes so much as the length of the work changes; that in a way, blogging is pure writing and by the time you get to a book, writing a book is actually not entirely writing, it's almost more organizing, than it is writing. One way that I thought of it is like if you're writing an article, it's almost like shopping for one shirt. I'm just looking for one data set about Americans hanging out less. And once I find that data set, I've found my shirt, I can write the article. Writing a column sometimes, like a 3000 word column, is more like buying furniture for a room. It's a lot of buying stuff and when you buy it, you have to lay it out and once you've laid it out, you're like ok, now the room is together. Writing a book is like buying a new house and outfitting it with furniture. I mean, yes, it is about buying stuff, but the biggest job for a new house is figuring out where all the damn stuff goes. And that's the major challenge with a book, so that's how I think about it at a conceptual level.

A word on the word community

I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes a single word will plunk itself down amid the furniture in my brain, and just like any new thing, it’ll grab my attention and I’ll notice it each time I walk by. For the last little while, it’s been the word “community”. Did it start with Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart? Maybe… See, she talks about belonging:

Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He [John Cacioppo] explains, "To grow into an adulthood for a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it's to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favour their outcome." Of course we're a social species. That's why connection matters. It's why shame is so painful and debilitating. It's why we're wired for belonging. (p. 179)

Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History just finished a season with a series of episodes on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and the final episode (The Mennonite National Anthem) makes a poignant point about a person’s sense of community and how it can be disrupted by the denial of a basic need:

[About Lester Glick:] "He is just one of the kindest most gracious people but as he writes about his experience, he writes about getting really angry, angry with the officials in charge because they've taken away his allotment of bread, you know, he's no longer getting the two slices he thought he was going to get because he's not losing weight fast enough." Back when Lester Glick was working at the state mental hospital in Michigan, he wrote with pride about the connections he made with patients who could not speak. He loved to work with patients and help them. But now in his hunger, he was becoming isolated, anti-social. He started to dislike the company of his fellow guinea pigs.  "And so there is this separation that starts to take place, this breakdown in relations that is not at all in keeping with the real Lester Glick, but was the new malnourished Lester Glick who was separated from all the people around him." He understands that what it means to be hungry is not a momentary physiological deficit; it is a profound and overwhelming deprivation on every level. "Yeah. It's a deep isolation and an isolation that goes against the building up of community that he's been a part of since childhood, that church community, the family community that shaped who he was in the most basic ways."

Having read that, does it seem like an obvious conclusion? Maybe. But the thing with a word that stands out, is that you start to notice it in different contexts. Oh look, you say (to yourself), there it is over there! It looks different in that place!

This is from the podcast Invisibilia, on an episode called Power Tools, where the guest, Peter Belmi, discusses a class he attended where the professor taught Machiavellian-type tactics for gaining power in the work place and how it conflicted with his upbringing:

"In a working-class environment, where there's lots of threats, lots of uncertainty, everybody has to coordinate because doing so helps us survive as a group. And so people learn in those contexts that what it means to be a good person is to be sensitive to the needs of other people, to see yourself as connected to others." This tracks with social science that shows that by contrast, people from wealthier backgrounds are taught to value focusing on themselves. "We don't need others as much in order to survive, and so what it means to be a good person is to pursue your own identity, to figure out how you're unique compared to others.”

How nice, you might think, how charming… But wait! Here is the idea of community again, but this time, in the concrete functioning of society! It’s Roman Mars, (episode 508 here) explaining to former President Bill Clinton why not being able to pop the hood and fix your own car isn’t such a bad thing…

There's also a beauty in other people doing it better and you just kind of trusting in that. That is how we build a society. So the world […] has to be an ecosystem of things we know and control and there's individual agency and liberty and things like this and then you have to like, fall into the warm embrace of a designed world that people have thought of and their expertise is present and maybe you don't understand it and hopefully we're engaged enough in the civic society that you trust those things. And I think that that's super inspiring, like I love the things we create together, collectively.

And then, there’s this last quote, which isn’t exactly about community, really, but it’s this touching idea about the small human action it takes to foster this usually-grandiose ideal. It’s an action so small it can be overlooked and dismissed… it doesn’t win prizes, it’s not the kind of generosity journalists look to profile. And yet, its small size betrays the effort it took, and takes, and will take, to build and maintain this kind of goodness. It comes at the end of a piece by the Guardian, read on their podcast The Audio Long Read, titled “‘Farmed’: why were so many Black children fostered by white families in the UK?”.

I have to accept my parents for who they are (...) my mom has been gone for awhile now, but I still speak to my dad. He's 90, has other wives and other children, so I need to take away my prejudices about that, forgive and just deal with him as he is. He's an old man, so I'm going to do what I can for him and I'm not going to have any malice about it because that means I haven't truly let go.

Isn’t that amazing? I can’t help but feel in awe of that person’s example. Mason Currey in his latest newsletter included a quote from Virgina Woolf which seems to capture the sentiment I feel reading this.

I’m thinking here of a favorite Virginia Woolf line, in which she praised the Irish novelist George Moore for “eking out a delicate gift laboriously.”

Quotes

I like writing advice and the latest book I’ve read on the subject is Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. My favourite quote is this one:

You may need to write for yourself for awhile,
And listen only to the language.
That’s okay.
The first person who need to be persuaded of your authority
Is you. [p. 132]

Quotes on planning

I just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. What he writes about planning reminds me of Ellen Hendrikson’s comments about the various forms social anxiety can take (in this post over here). What Oliver Burkeman writes about planning is a larger observation:

[…] we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have. Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time - our culture’s ideal is that you should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want - because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships. [page 31]

Further on in the book he writes:

But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaning full life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is - all it could ever possibly be - is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

It’s easy to argue that this isn’t a new idea. The New Testament’s letter from St James reads:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. [Chap 4: 13-16]

When I tutor students, I send them links to a resource that can help with a recurring problem they have with their writing. I try to encourage them to look at the link by making it specific. I take it for granted that they might not have the inclination to read through much information, but I also hope that the nudge might lead them to finding it useful. You never know if maybe, the way the information is presented just makes sense, if you haven’t just helped them have their own lightbulb moment.

And so, people talking about planning… Look at this lovely variety and the different aspects they highlight! A quote from C.S. Lewis that Oliver Burkeman included in his December 9th newsletter, The Imperfectionist, blesses even interruptions:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own', or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Over-preparing

I used to think being prepared was a good quality to have. Someone’s kids would be unhappy and I would shake my head (inwardly only of course) and think… they didn’t prepare enough. ‘Cause, I confess, I was pretty good at being prepared with kids: snacks, drinks, entertainment, favourable time of day, amount of stimulation, after-activity plans.

I used to think this sort of planning was brilliant! But then, two people have made cases to the contrary: first, Ellen Hendriksen on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, who, 25 minutes into the episode talks about three aspects of social anxiety - perfectionism, attention as a spotlight, and safety behaviours. The safety behaviours “essentially what that is, is its any action that we take to try to “save ourselves”. It’s like a life preserver that actually holds us underwater. We think it’s going to save us, but really, it sinks us. So these are all the actions we take to compensate when we feel anxious. So we might over-explain, if we think we offended someone, we might write a nine paragraph explanatory e-mail saying what we really meant. We might over-prepare! If we’re feeling anxious about a presentation, we might rehearse it 25 times. We might be overly-friendly and put triple exclamation points at the end of sentences in our e-mails. (…) We might point out flaws.” (This last one is about using self-deprecation in order to elicit a reassuring response.)

She argues that safety behaviours “get the credit for the worst-case scenario not happening.” And scary as it might be, dropping these safety behaviours leads to a feeling of ease and freedom.

Second, George Saunders. At one point in A Swim In a Pond In The Rain, Saunders compares a writer who follows a pattern to someone who brings index cards on a date. “So, why the index cards on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer.
”Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.”

So yes, preparation is fine, but, with time, building confidence in yourself is better!

Reading and writing (forever!)

I must constantly trick myself into writing here, as if it were a high-wire act I was only performing for myself. I like getting to the end, having spent time fully concentrated in the act of balancing vague feelings and concrete words. I also like finding how other writers manage… top of list is Craig Mod’s recent interview for Every.to in which he says of his newsletters: “I think of them as my public sketchbooks.” Fantastic! Welcome now, to this here post, on this here blog, which happens to be, “my public sketchbook”!

Shall we discuss reading fiction? Lets! because recently, two books have mentioned it. There’s Claire Messud in Kant’s Little Prussian Heand and Other Reasons Why I Write (2020):

“We must struggle to change our institutions, but our resistance to the depravity and depletion of these times must go beyond that. It must also occur in our souls.” (p 108)

and

“Art has the power to alter our interior selves, and in so doing to inspire, exhilarate, provoke, connect, and rouse us. As we are changed, our souls are awakened to possibility - immeasurable, yes, and potentially infinite. If ever there was a time for art, it’s now.” (p 109)

And there’s George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in The Rain (2021):

“There’s a certain way of talking about stories that treats them as a kind of salvation, the answer to every problem; they are ‘what we live by,’ and so on. And, to an extent, as you can see by this book, I agree. But I also believe, especially as I get older, that we should keep our expectations humble. We shouldn’t overestimate or unduly glorify what fiction does. And actually, we should be wary of insisting that it do anything in particular.
(…)
“So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?
”Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know - it really does it. That change is finite but real.
”And that’s not nothing.
”It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.” (p 382-3)

Then, to this end, Saunders makes a little list of fiction-reading benefits:

“I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind.
”I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.
”I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa.
”My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.
”I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).
”I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.
”I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.
”So that’s all pretty good.” (p 387-8)

Ah… Saunders… this description is delectable. I’m sorry… my appreciation for this book borders on fandom, but I can’t help it. It’s like ordering a meal at a restaurant and being so perfectly satisfied, you’d kiss your fingers, because the chef was married and because this is an acceptable form of flattery in Europe, even if you’re Canadian.

But food is also fortifying. So let’s end on writing advice. There is plenty in Saunders’ book, but this one is at the end. Saunders quotes Robert Frost, who, after listening to a long and complicated question about writing, answered “Young man, don’t worry: WORK!”

Saunders writes: “I love this advice. It’s exactly true to my experience. We can decide only so much. The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.
”So, don’t worry, work, and have faith that all answers will be found there.” (p 387)

"What are you reading?"

Last time I talked to my mom she asked, “what are you reading?” twice during our conversation. Here’s the complete list, now, as I sit at my desk, having ridden my bike as dark came over Winnipeg…

I just finished Motherland by Elissa Altman. This evening I’ve been scrolling through the author’s Instagram, combing it for evidence of I don’t know what… love? survival?

I’m just about done A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, having cast aside (temporarily) Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution.

I picked up Wow No Thank You because I’d like to be funnier, but I’m not sure it’s working because serious books are taking over my desk, my time… Things like Homeland to Hinterland; The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century or The Genealogy of the First Metis or Canada Post Offices 1755-1895, I mean, take your pick, they’re all very serious.

Motherland has this quote by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

A final word on conspiracy theories

I really like this quote… it is lifted from the conclusion of a podcast mini-series by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “Wind of Change”. I wrote it down a year ago and came across it while looking for something else. I wrote it down before I could have guessed how many new conspiracy theories I would hear. It expresses why I feel so impatient with them.

That’s the nature of a conspiracy theory, it’s impossible to prove, but also impossible to disprove, so if you have the temperament and the time you can devote yourself to solving it for the rest of your life. But if you’re a person whose livelihood depends on the slow and steady accretion of provable facts then there’s a madness in chasing a story like this. And there’s something about the moment we’re living in when everyday the nature of truth is called into question that make me feel like the stakes of solving this slightly ridiculous story are greater somehow than the story itself. (…) The rabbit hole is beautiful but it is deep.

Two moments

This morning when I walked the dog, the river was like glass.

On the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I savoured what Christiane Wolfe had to say about anger and intention:

Forgiveness is a really hard one [emotion]. And forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight. Forgiveness is not something that we decide, just like “yeah that makes sense to forgive that person, or that situation, or myself.” But the thing is that anger will turn into bitterness, if we, over time, can’t let go of it. And that’s just like a yucky feeling. (…) We have agency over our intention. We don’t have agency, as I said, we can’t decide to forgive or we can’t decide to be compassionate or we can’t decide to love, right? But what we do, is we can set the intention and then we can keep inviting these qualities in, over and over and over and just trust basic neuroscience, right, that whatever we do repeatedly, that will change us.

Reading

I just finished listening to the audio version of How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I transcribed a few quotes where I felt I was learning something new:

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As president Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “you do not take a person who, for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say ‘you are free to compete with all the others’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978: “in order to get beyond racism we must first take account of race. There is no other way. In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.” (…) The construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans towards equity is reverse discrimination. (Chap. 1)

We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an anti-racist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination. Racist ideas have defined our societies since its beginning and can feel so natural and obvious as to be banal. But antiracist ideas remain difficult to comprehend in part because they go against the flow of this country’s history. (Chap. 1)

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: people are in our faces, policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. (Chap. 2)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 3)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 6)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 12)

Freedom to explore

Writers of non-fiction, like journalists, will sometimes leave reality behind and dip into the “freedom” of fiction. I’ve heard them use that word: freedom. Lucky so-and-so’s I’d think… I only wish I could feel freedom in inventing a story. In fact, I’m very much like Mary Karr who wrote: “I just have zero talent for making stuff up. While I adore the short story form, any time I tried penning one myself, everybody was either dead by page two, or morphed back into the person they’d actually evolved from in memory.” (The Art of Memoir, p. 21)

Lately, I’ve been reading Amy Tan’s memoir, Where the Past Begins. She describes her talent for realistic drawing, and I’m annoyed… here again, a writer who is an artist besides? Harrumph! Put a marker in my hand and I freeze the same way one becomes immediately self-conscious before their picture is taken. But Tan explains why she chose writing over being an artist and it has to do with her childhood trauma:

It has to do with what does not happen when I draw. I’ve never experienced a sudden shivery spine-to-brain revelation that what I have drawn is a record of who I am. I don’t mix water-colour paints and think about my changing amalgam of beliefs, confusion, and fears. I don’t do shading with thoughts about death and its growing shadow as the predicted number of actuarial years left to me grows smaller. When I view a bird from an angle instead of in profile, I don’t think of the mistaken views I have held. With practice, I will become better at drawing the eye of a bird or its feet, but I can’t practice having an unexpected reckoning of my soul. All that I have mentioned - what does not happen when I draw - does occur when I write. They occurred in the earliest short stories I wrote when I was thirty-three. Then, as now, they are revelations - ones that are painful, exhilarating, transformative, and lasting in their effects. In my writing, I recognize myself.

Discovering and being able to explain why one writes is fascinating! I enjoy collecting these writerly “raison d’être”s because it shows how in one profession, there is such interesting variety. It also highlights how expanding a talent is linked to personal development. I think that ideas about freedom, in fiction or in art, suppose a kind of ease. I immediately associate art with freedom, but that is not really the case… art in one form or another is exploration and it is work just the same. The method used for the exploration is irrelevant.

Masks

I used to think I could only read one book at a time, but have since become a promiscuous rifler of pages. Reading multiple books at once can lead to idea collages across genres. Take for example Amy Tan’s thoughts on photographs in Where the Past Begins:

I used to think photographs were more accurate than bare memory because they capture moments as they were, making them indisputable. They are like hard facts, whereas aging memory is impressionistic and selective in details, much like fiction is. But now, having gone through the archives, I realize that photos also distort what is really being captured. To get the best shot, the messiness is shoved to the side, the weedy yard is out of the shot. The images are also missing context: the reason why some are missing, what happened before and after, who likes or dislikes whom, if anyone is unhappy to be there. When they heard “cheese,” they uniformly stared at the camera’s mechanical eye, and put on the happy mask, leaving a viewer fifty years later to assume everyone had a grand time.

Now compare that to a similar idea in a completely different context… In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam is explaining how the communist regime changed its citizens’ lives. Here she describes how people had appear uniformly fine:

It was essential to smile – if you didn’t, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit – if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. (…) But while wearing your smiling mask, it was important not to laugh – this could look suspicious to the neighbors and make them think you were indulging in sacrilegious mockery. We have lost the capacity to be spontaneously cheerful, and it will never come back to us.

Look how both authors use the word “mask” - Tan, a “happy mask” and Mandelstam, a “smiling mask”. It’s funny how, now, in the pandemic, the use of a mask in public has both robbed me of the ability to smile reassuringly to strangers but also provided me with the convenience of not having to make the effort if I don’t feel like it.

Keeping a blog

Writers are constantly prey to self-doubt, I mean, dare I even count myself as one of the group? It takes little for this to flare up… This American Life ran a segment about an entertainer who daily learned and memorized a ballad, recorded and posted it to Youtube, a habit that has lead to there being more than 1000 videos posted to his account. The story felt deflating.

Then, on cue, to revive my drooping spirits, to make a case against the futility of effort, I read Cory Doctorow’s post, “The Memex Method” shared on Tyler Cowan’s blog. Here are five things I especially appreciated:

1. “The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. (…) Writing for a notional audience - particularly an audience of strangers - demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. (…) Writing for an audience keeps me honest.”

2. “Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research - it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or short story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet.” (This is mentioned by Austin Kleon too).

3. “(…) if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled. Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial - it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.”

4. “There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day.”

5. “As a blogger I’ve enjoyed the delirious freedom to write exactly the publication I’d want to read, which then attracts other people who feel the same way.”

Writing inspo

Excerpt from an interview with Jiayang Fan on the Longform Podcast:

I guess what I would want to encourage in aspiring writers who have scraped up against that self-doubt as a result of a life not lived, you know, for a career in journalism, is that, please write into your self-doubt; write into that sense that perhaps you are not deserving. There’s something authentic and pure in that voice and your investigations into yourself and the world deserves to know the quality of your uncertainty and there is something very, very edifying, I think, to the world to know about the really complicated barriers between a writer’s lack of sense of self and the self that emerges on the page. And that we need you - I’m speaking directly to those writers now - we need you more than ever because you give us something that writers from traditional backgrounds, in all their certainty and grace and eloquence, cannot, which is, you know, the truest exploration of how a self becomes a self and to those writers, please continue listening to podcasts like these ones and also to believe that you have something really worthy of being heard.

Marilynne Robinson wrote in her essay collection titled The Givenness of Things:

I hope I will not seem eccentric when I say that God’s love for the world is something it is also useful to ponder. Imagine humankind acting freely within the very broad limits of its gifts, its capacity for discerning the good and just and shaping the beautiful. If God has taken pleasure in his creation, there is every reason to assume that some part of his pleasure is in your best idea, your most generous impulse, your most disciplined thinking on whatever is true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, excellent, and worthy of praise. I am paraphrasing Paul, of course, but if you have read Cicero or The Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, you know that pre-Christians and pagans made art and literature and philosophy excellent and worthy of praise, out of love for the thought of all these things. (…) My point is simply that, from the time the first hominid looked up at the stars and was amazed by them, a sweet savor has been rising from this earth, every part of it - a silent music worthy of God’s pleasure. What we have expressed compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelmingly the lesser part. Loyalties and tenderness that we are scarcely aware of might seem, from a divine perspective, the most beautiful things in creation, even in their evanescence. Such things are universally human. They forbid the distinctions “us” and “them”.

Three little encouragements

Sometimes, just by chance, you are listening to something, like a routine podcast on your podcast feed, and something is explained in a meaningful way. Recently, for me, it happened when Chani Nichols was describing to Debbie Millman the paradox she felt of needing to write and the intense self-doubt it unleashed. (See here). About 37 minutes into the podcast, Debbie Millman had asked: “I understand that when you first started writing you would literally be doubled over in shame and pain and self-doubt, but it also felt like something you had to do. Where did that pain come from?” Nichols answers the following:

I think that (…) when there’s a lot of neglect or you feel invisibilized by family or culture that when you bring yourself into form by writing something or acting something or building something or making something that other people can see and that you’re giving it out to them, there’s a way all of a sudden for me, I become more real. I’m defining myself by writing these things and putting them out. For me being somebody that was so low on the priority list of the adults in my life, it just brings up the feeling of having been left and denied and betrayed and abandoned. And so it’s this weird thing, it’s like I’m actively trying to heal this and bring myself into form and bring myself into the world and yet my experience of being forgotten and invisibilized becomes more pronounced as I do that. So it is [an] experience that comes in tandem; there’s like this “yay, I put something out” and a feeling of releasing of creative spirit from myself or creative energy into the world and yet all of my survival mechanisms, “stay small, stay quiet, stay invisible so that you don’t get harassed or something bad doesn’t happen,” like there’s so much chaos in the world and my life that I just had to keep everything as small and still as possible. So it’s just all that – and trauma response I think of being more present in the world.

I’m also fascinated by the story of Robert Walser on This American Life. He was content with this simple motto: “to be small and to stay small.” (See here).

Indirectly, it relates to this little scene that Emily Carr relates in her autobiography Growing Pains. She writes:

We discussed Georgia O’Keefe’s work. I told of how I had met her in the gallery of Mr. Steiglitz.

I said, “Some of the things I think beautiful, but she herself does not seem happy when she speaks of her week.”

Miss Dreier made an impatient gesture.
“Georgia O’Keefe wants to be the greatest painter. Everyone can’t be that, but all can contribute. Does the bird in the woods care if he is the best singer? He sings because he is happy. It is the altogether-happiness which makes one grand, great chorus.”