Nearly perfect.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.
William Lyon Phelps (via riseriserise)
I work via slow accretions of often seemingly unrelated stuff. When I complete that unwieldy, puzzling first draft, I spread it out on the desk like a soothsayer viewing entrails, and try to find patterns. If asked, I might pretty up my process and call it bricolage or intellectual scrapbooking, but it really is merely the result of a magpie mind/brain, one that flits from one shiny thing to another. While I still work in my plodding way, the ever renewing bits of information in my Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds provide endless fodder, like going shell collecting on the beach on a normal day versus the day after a hurricane when the ocean has burped up every interesting bit of stuff imaginable.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Wow. This may be the perfect lapdesk. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iskelter/slate-mobile-airdesk
#
Monday, November 25, 2013
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Good Enough
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On a rare sleepless night earlier this week, I layed in bed for two hours, staring at the ceiling, wide-eyed. Realizing I wasn’t going to get any sleep, I decided to start a project I’d always wanted to start: I would install Arch Linux on my laptop. I’ve run Linux as my primary OS for some six years now, but I’ve run the easy version that does all the heavy lifting for you: Ubuntu. I wanted to dig deeper into my system to learn what makes it tick.
Arch Linux was perfect for that. For the unfamiliar, Ubuntu and Arch Linux are two vastly different variations of Linux. Putting Ubuntu on a PC is like taking your used car to a mechanic and telling him to replace everything: engine, seats, radio. You’ll be back in a week to pick up your reinvigorated ride.
Arch Linux, however, is like building the entire damn car from scratch. You have a shell (the car’s frame), but that’s it. The installation process is difficult enough (took me three tries- thanks, UEFI) but even after you get it installed, there’s no window manager, no desktop environment, no network or file manager, no nothing. You build it all.
One particular environment I had always wanted to try out was Openbox, a ridiculously minimal and lightweight window manager that can also be run as a standalone window manager (meaning there’s no need for a full-fledged desktop environment). There are no effects, no panels, no compositing, no launcher, no application menu. Openbox is about as minimal as it gets.
For three days, I experimented with different setups: I added compositing, installed a dock, tweaked the workspace setup, tested different browsers. I did a lot of this.
On Friday, I realized with a bit of guilt that I hadn’t done much work in the three days since I’d started tweaking my setup. But I had such a great setup!
Frustrated with that realization, I took a small break, ate some lunch, and worked out, deciding I needed to come back and look at the situation with clear eyes (knowing full well what would happen when I came back to the screen).
When I sat back down at my desk two hours later, I confirmed my fear: I’d wasted the better part of three days. None of this had been necessary. I didn’t even want to tweak any more- I just wanted to get some work done. So, I installed Gnome 3, a fully-functional setup from the start, and got to work. And it felt good. The system wasn’t precisely to my liking, but it was damn good. It was good enough.
My daughter, now nine years old, is going through some growing pains with schoolwork, thanks to a more strenuous workload. Not long ago, we finished her first big project. By the time we’d finished, I was terrified of the results. She’d worked hard on the project, but she’d cut corners. I tried to explain how to take good notes: jot down key words and concepts-never full sentences-and reconstruct them later.
All week, she ignored my advice, and copied full sentences directly from Wikipedia. She wrote without even taking notes, in fact, forming full paragraphs after merely skimming the Wikipedia entry.
The result, in my mind, was that she didn’t know enough of the material. She hadn’t been forced to recreate her research in her own words; she was merely transferring them from the screen to the page bypassing her own mind altogether. Because of that, I worried about her final grade (not the grade itself, mind you, but the impact a poor grade would have on her psyche).
She got a perfect score.
I’d been worried for nothing. In the process of worrying, of pushing her to nail the process of research, I’d forgotten that she’s nine years old. It’s one of my greatest shortcomings as a father. I have a lifehacker mentality: I want to improve things. All the things. Even myself.
I wake up every day wondering how to make myself better, how to make my system better, how to make my workflow better.
In a way, I’ve been trying to make my daughter better, too. Isn’t that the point of being a parent? To teach your child how to live? To prepare them for life to the fullest extent possible?
Well, no, not really. That’s part of it, of course, but it’s the tomorrow part. For a guy that claims to have such a zen-like focus on the present, I was certainly spending a lot of time ignoring today. The truth is, today is good enough. My setup is good enough. And, there can be no question, my daughter is good enough. She’s not one of my projects; she’s a person who’s learning to navigate her reality, not mine.
Good enough gets a bad rap. It implies a lesser quality, has a whiff of inferiority about it.
The truth is, though, everything is good enough. The spatula you want to replace is good enough to make eggs. The weather is good enough to toss a ball around with your son. Your coffee and your garden and your waistline are good enough. Your setup is good enough to get some work done. You are good enough.
And existence is good enough. Hell, we live, quite literally, in the most bountiful place in the most bountiful time that we aware of. The vastness that limits that awareness only serves to bolster the sense of wonder we must feel when we ponder our reality. And that reality contains many grains of sand and many great truths, all of which are good enough.
And yet, all is flawed, and that’s okay, because good enough doesn’t speak to the quality of the thing it’s directly referring to; it speaks to the quality of the thing you can be doing, to the quality of life you can be living once you accept things as good enough. It’s a recognition of the inherent fallibility of life, of the imperfect nature of things. Good enough is the vehicle through which we make great things: books and poems and meals and moments. In one of the greatest ironies, once “good enough” is good enough, the world will reveal its greatness.
You have more traveling ahead, but remember your main reasons for going. Not to escape or cross things off lists but to learn to be more open, more okay with uncertainty. To feel to your core how big the world is, and how narrow your own empire. Remember that no matter where you go, you always end up alone with your thoughts. This is your true home and its landscape is vast and much uncharted. You can travel there at any time, and the flights aren’t nearly as expensive.
A Letter — Jack Cheng to himself on his thirtieth birthday (via stewartmccoy)
Saturday, November 23, 2013
But writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.
William Stafford, ”A Way of Writing”, in Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall (via litverve)
Yesterday when a friend was all, “Oh my God, have you seen the Kanye video?” I was like, no, I don’t care about the Kanye video and I feel as if it is one of the few signal achievements in my career, if we want to call it that, that I have somehow gotten myself into a position where I don’t need to have an opinion about the Kanye video, and, more importantly, no one really needs to have an opinion about the Kanye video, the fact that you are going to watch something that is widely acknowledged to be terrible—the fact that you are going to watch something and hope while you watch that it is exactly as terrible as widely acknowledged—so that you can be a part of the “conversation,” which is just an empty and ridiculous exchange of self-important jack-offs trying to speak as loudly as possible so that they can drown out the inner voice that tells them just how shockingly bereft of value their own lives are as they careen towards oblivion, is a remarkable indictment of the vacuous, hollow pit we confuse with culture these days. You don’t have to watch ANYTHING, and the less you say about something the smarter you are. Good Lord, people, listen to yourselves, if you can even stand it, it’s horrifying. (I had switched to the second person plural at this point because my friend, having heard so many variations of this monologue already, had long since wandered off.) Anyway, that was before I saw this Bob Dylan video, which is really something. And I say this as someone who doesn’t go in for the concept of “interactive” at all. It’s pretty neat!
No great hand reached down from the sky and made me a writer. I made myself one, by writing.
Act Two: A Young Playwright Grows Up (and don’t miss Part Two in the series, either)
Friday, November 22, 2013
"When looked at from this perspective, personal development can actually be quite scientific. The hypotheses are our beliefs. Our actions and behaviors are the experiments. The resulting internal emotions and thought patterns are our data. We can then take those and compare them to our original beliefs and then integrate them into our overall understanding of our needs and emotional make-up for the future.”
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.
Kurt Vonnegut, Playboy Interview, 1973 (via kateoplis)
Monday, November 18, 2013
Perhaps counterintuively, I feel less distracted when reading articles on ReadQuick than I often do when reading normally, likely because R.S.V.P. demands a higher baseline level of concentration. When using the app on the subway (and no doubt getting confused glances from my neighbors), I don’t look up at each stop, or switch back and forth between windows, and my mind doesn’t wander as it often does when I’m reading in public places.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
For Chin, “fair use” applies because Google allows readers to discover books they might not normally be able to find, but only allows them to read a small portion of these books—as opposed to, say, Napster, which made entire songs and albums available for free, Google merely whets consumers’ appetites. ”Google Books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and others find books,” he wrote. “Google Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool to be used to read books. For Chin, this service isn’t just a service to publishers, it’s a service for humanity at large: ”In my view, Google Books provide significant public benefits. Indeed, all society benefits.”According to Chin, Google also benefits the books themselves by giving “new life” to “out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries,” which is a gross.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.
(via deannajodouglass)
I don’t know the exact reasons, and I’m not sure I need to know, since I’m convinced that the joy of fiction stems from its ambiguities and contradictions, its questions and suggestions more than its assertions, the way it completes a circle without telling you how or why.
Justin Kramon, “Staring into the Darkness: On Reading Thrillers and Writing One” (via millionsmillions)
The Medium of Connection
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Last weekend, I published a very personal piece on this site that I was very reluctant to call a “piece.” After I posted it to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, it got a bit of praise, and had touched more than a few people (for which I’m grateful).
I had trouble accepting praise for this one, though, for the same reason I hesitated to call it a piece: it wasn’t edited, wasn’t structured, and there was no goal. I didn’t, like in other pieces, write with the intention of informing, of educating, of entertaining, even. I didn’t write what was in my head; I wrote what was in my heart. For that reason, many commented on the courage it took to write the piece, how brave I was for making myself so vulnerable.
The thing is, I didn’t feel vulnerable. I certainly didn’t feel courageous. Perhaps that’s because I’d done this before, so it wasn’t new territory, wasn’t my first rodeo, as they say. I’d put myself out there before, had revealed pieces of myself that I never thought would be lain bare. Ironically, these are things that I don’t talk about, even with those I love. Most people who know me will tell you that I listen far more than I talk, and when I talk, it’s rare that I delve into the vulnerable parts of me that, lately, have been making their way into the wide world through this very medium.
That, initially, struck me as odd. Why would I reveal more to the general public than to those closest to me?
Part of the answer lies in the simple fact that I’m a writer, and so the best parts of me will come out as written words- the lesser parts of me are what’s left for those around me (sorry about that).
While that answer begins to tell the story, it doesn’t tell it all. A complete answer would have to explore the medium that entices me into bearing all, the medium on which you’re reading these words. Last week’s “piece” felt and read much more like a journal entry than a blog post, and before the internet, that’s the way it would’ve been written: on a piece of actual paper in a notebook or a journal, never to be seen by anyone.
The web, though, is changing us. It’s changing me. Like so many other significant cultural shifts, it’s happening so slowly that we barely recognize it, even while it’s being talked about incessantly. When we back up and take a look at the aggregate data, patterns emerge, but it’s infinitely harder to see the underlying currents of that change that are happening somewhere deep inside of our very selves.
That current is shifting towards the new normal, towards a world of increasing vulnerability. Part of the shift is due to the undeniable anonymity the web affords us, even when we use outlets that our name and identity are attached to: it’s much easier to be vulnerable in a tweet or blog post than to reveal ourselves face-to-face, even—especially—to those we’re closest to.
That’s human nature, and if life has taught me anything, it’s to work with, not against, human nature.
Even Facebook, normally an outlet so filled with meaningless memes, outright falsehoods, and utter garbage that I cringe every time I open my newsfeed, is beginning to facilitate this change. Yesterday, I saw a post at the top of my feed in which a friend declared her “number,” then listed a series of things which no one knew about her. The list was candid, truthful, a bit vulnerable, and a bit beautiful. Others followed, and, as far as I know, this “quiz” is still making the rounds on Facebook. To reiterate: there is a beautiful thing happening on Facebook.
That thing is happening for the same reason it’s beautiful: it strikes at and speaks to the core of who we are and what we want. We want to be more vulnerable. We want to reveal more about ourselves. That’s the only way real connection happens, after all. It’s why literature, and perhaps anything that can be called art, exists. No meaningful relationship between two or a hundred people ever came about as a result of closing ourselves off, and that’s the thing we strive for: meaningful connection. It’s at the heart of nearly ever desire. It’s no surprise, then, that a medium that facilitates that desire has so completely permeated our culture. The web may have begun as a way to share academic documents, and it may sometimes resemble a cesspool of trolling and kittens and linkbait, but its evolution is marching steadily towards reconciling itself with the thing humans most strive for: vulnerability and connection.
Readers and friends alike have emailed me to ask about whether or not they should write. Of course, they wouldn’t be asking if they didn’t want to, so they were essentially seeking justification from a “writer” to begin writing. And to all those, here is my answer:
Write. Start with a secret journal or a private online blog. It truly doesn’t matter what you write about; write about any damn thing you please, or, better yet, write about nothing at all. The point is simply to erect a bridge between your mind and a medium (the paper or the keyboard). Do so often enough and your thoughts will travel that bridge often, will get a chance to stretch their legs, to leave the dark confines of your mind for a few minutes.
Then, when you’re comfortable (not before), start writing in public. Let us into those dark corners, because we want to know your fears, your reservations, your absurd dreams. It’s those things that we can connect with, and, as I said, all we want is connection.
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
Brene Brown (via modernhepburn)
The written word has long been held to be close to the sacred. Milton thought that books made better receptacles for human souls than bodies. Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages refused to throw out any texts, lest they inadvertently destroy the name of God. Perhaps the purest expression of the idea that books are a form of life comes in the story told by the Mandeans, an Iraqi people who practice a gnostic religion. One of the Mandeans’ great sages was a creature named Dinanukht, who was half-book and half-man. He sat by the waters between worlds, reading himself until the end of time.
Friday, November 15, 2013
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Thursday, November 14, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
The West is both a great thirst and a dry, weatherless curiosity. In California, the mad, deep breath of deserts is never far away. The sky above San Francisco is often so dazzling a blue that it merits the overripe description of cerulean, or comparison to lapis lazuli. Its clouds are sea-born and formed in the odd depths of its mysterious bay, where the fog moves inland in a billion-celled, mindless creature, amoeba-shaped and poisonous, like a stillborn member of the nightshade family.
Pat Conroy (in South of Broad)
Monday, November 11, 2013
Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise, you will only know how to be lonely.
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (via wilde4words)
Sunday, November 10, 2013
"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important."
-Gary Provost (I think)
Me: OH MY GOD my career is over isn’t it? It’s over. You can tell me. Just tell me straight. I’ll never get another idea. Never never never. Well it was good while it lasted. OH NO this means I’ll have to get a job. Who would be stupid enough to give me a job? My entire skill set revolves around making stuff up. What kind of job is that for a grown up? I’m unemployable. I have a mortgage. I need to eat. My life is over. Publisher: That’s what you said after your first book. My guess is, you’ll say this after every book. Me: No no no I’ve never said this before and even if I have this is different I am doomed doomed. Publisher: Can you speak up? I can hardly hear you. Me: I’m in a cupboard. I don’t know when I’m coming out.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
What my friends don’t know is how to measure any of this on the only scale most of us have. You know, the one the I.R.S. uses. And to be honest, I’m not sure how to answer the question either. How successful is Max’s music career? What is a tattoo on the forearm of a 20-something in a medium-size Midwestern state worth? The Eskimos have all those words for snow, and it seems the only language we have for expressing success is numeric. It may be a universal language, but it’s an impoverished one. Maybe we need a word for “never having to sit in a meeting where someone reads long power point slides out loud.” Maybe we should have an expression that captures the level of success you’ve achieved when you do exactly what you love every day.
The World Swallower is the unhinged cousin of the old-school omniscient author-narrator (the one who used to say “dear reader”). He stretches (or obliterates) the boundaries of what a character might be able to know. Whether deployed to illuminate the scope of human imagination or to bring under one flimsy umbrella the whole of experience, the World Swallower is the ultimate stand-in for an author who has devoted himself or herself to their art.
Pieces of You
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Author's note: I didn't edit this; didn't even proofread it, because this is not an essay; these are simply words that needed to be put to paper, that needed to escape my mind.
You died sixteen years ago today. What I felt that day I can only liken to someone reaching into my chest and rearranging the things that I consist of. My heart, my lungs, the air I breathe, felt as if they weren’t in the right place, as if they were trying to escape me somehow. It physically hurt, and I kept clutching at my chest all day, as if I was trying to keep in the things that so desperately wanted out.
Each hour, day, month, year since, that pain has evolved. I’m no longer terrified of it, nor have I tamed it. I’ve simply acknowledged its existence, its place in the natural order of things.
For years, I blamed the pain. Still, I think, I have a right to do so, but I long ago realized the futility of that blame. When you died, I lost myself. I stopped doing schoolwork, and when the time came to apply for college, I didn’t even try, didn’t fill out a single college application. It took some time to realize how great that mistake was, but when I did, I tried to correct it by enlisting, foregoing the enlistment bonus in favor of the college fund. That plus the G.I. Bill would’ve given me $90,000 for school. I started classes while I was still enlisted to get a headstart.
Then I screwed up again, and I was kicked out. I lost every last cent of the tuition money, and became a new father at the same time. I found what work I could (which wasn’t much), and have been fighting an uphill battle ever since.
While all this was happening, while all this life was passing me by, refusing to take me along with it, I carried the pain. I used it, even, as a reminder that I could trace everything back to the day you died, that my demise began that day.
As I said, though, the pain evolved. I watched it grow, as a parent watches a child grow. That cold November morning, it was an infant: kicking and screaming and raging against the world we’d placed it in. Soon, it began to develop its features. It softened, matured. Today, I no longer carry the pain as I did in its infancy. Instead, it walks beside me, neither weighing me down, nor holding me back. It is my equal—a friend, even—that I can turn to in times of need. It comforts me, reminding me that it is not all I have left of you.
Do you remember the time she carved your initials in the bridge on Front Street?
Do you remember her words after you kissed her for the first time?
Do you remember how she got upset when she couldn’t make you jealous?
Remember the Browns T-shirt she bought you for your fifteenth birthday?
Remember the bemused look on her face when you told her you didn’t like the way she dressed?
I remember, I say, and I smile.
I’ve no idea what you would think of who I’ve become. Certainly, I’m no longer the boy you knew, but I wonder if you’d recognize how much you, nearly two decades later, have shaped the man I am. Your life and your death played equal parts in my growth, and for that, I can’t thank you enough.
You taught me what love was, though you could hardly recognize it yourself. You taught me that it enveloped everything, that love became the atmosphere in the midst of which everything else lived. It made important things trivial, and it made unimportant things crucial. You taught me that the tightness in my chest that came out of nowhere every time I saw your face was life itself, or at least was what life aspires to be.
You taught me how excruciating pain can be, how a harsh word from someone you love can cut. You taught me the unimaginable frustration of having to inhabit two separate bodies, when clearly we were meant to be closer than physical reality allows. You taught me the value of the self- of yours, of mine, of the child on the swing in the park, of the hungry man on the corner, of the nemesis you’re supposed to hate.
Some of these things you taught me before you left me, and some you taught me by leaving pieces of yourself behind for me to find along the way. It’s been sixteen years, and I still carry pieces of you with me.
Nothing that comes and goes is you. ‘I am bored.’ Who knows this? ‘I am angry, sad, afraid.’ Who knows this? You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.
Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (via yoga9vipassana)
"Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetic justice to your soul and simply experience yourself."
Happy birthday, Albert Camus.
Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.
Rick Warren (via psych-facts)
Friday, November 8, 2013
My students have confessed to both these behaviors, admitting that they fear “falling out of the loop” if they don’t respond to friends’ messages immediately, regardless of the hour. This is a generation so consumed with surface connection they will do anything to appear connected, including pretending to text when alone so they don’t look, as one student said, “like a total loser without friends.”
If eros is a force that shapes the philosopher, then rhetoric is the art by which the philosopher persuades the non-philosopher to assume philosophical eros, to incline their soul towards truth. But to do this does not entail abandoning the art of rhetoric or indeed sophistry, which teaches that art, although it does so falsely. Philosophy uses true rhetoric against false rhetoric.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
Anne Herbert (via aberminimal)
Monday, November 4, 2013
kateoplis: War Machine and the Joneses
Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people… – Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The term “keeping up with the Joneses” originated with Rebecca and Mary Jones (old money of 19th century New York’s high society and aunts of novelist Edith Wharton). In 1868 they ordered the…
kateoplis: War Machine and the Joneses
me at the bookstore
me: no
me: i can't have you
me: stop staring at me
me: i have five books at home i need to read
me: you're beautiful but i can't
me: don't do this to me
me: stop
book: but baby i want you
me: ....
me: *buys ten books*
me: i can't have you
me: stop staring at me
me: i have five books at home i need to read
me: you're beautiful but i can't
me: don't do this to me
me: stop
book: but baby i want you
me: ....
me: *buys ten books*
Turns out you need not possess a Nobel Prize in Literature to appreciate the creative confines of a dark room. Psychologists Anna Steidel and Lioba Werth recently conducted a series of clever experiments designed to measure how creativity responded to various lighting schemes. In a paper published last month, Steidel and Werth reported some of the first evidence for what creative masters know by nature: when the lights switch off, something in the brain switches on.
"Apparently, darkness triggers a chain of interrelated processes, including a cognitive processing style, which is beneficial to creativity"
Sunday, November 3, 2013
The problem is that, even if we know what someone is thinking about, or what they are likely to do, we still don’t know what it’s like to be that person. Hemodynamic changes in your prefrontal cortex might tell me that you are looking at a painting of sunflowers, but then, if I thwacked your shin with a hammer, your screams would tell me you were in pain. Neither lets me know what pain or sunflowers feel like for you, or how those feelings come about. In fact, they don’t even tell us whether you really have feelings at all. One can imagine a creature behaving exactly like a human — walking, talking, running away from danger, mating and telling jokes — with absolutely no internal mental life. Such a creature would be, in the philosophical jargon, a zombie.
Social life was the locus of our third set of differences. As you might expect, connections to other people turned out to be important both for meaning and for happiness. Being alone in the world is linked to low levels of happiness and meaningfulness, as is feeling lonely. Nevertheless, it was the particular character of one’s social connections that determined which state they helped to bring about. Simply put, meaningfulness comes from contributing to other people, whereas happiness comes from what they contribute to you. This runs counter to some conventional wisdom: it is widely assumed that helping other people makes you happy. Well, to the extent that it does, the effect depends entirely on the overlap between meaning and happiness. Helping others had a big positive contribution to meaningfulness independent of happiness, but there was no sign that it boosted happiness independently of meaning. If anything, the effect was in the opposite direction: once we correct for the boost it gives to meaning, helping others can actually detract from one’s own happiness.
I suspect it is the techniques of fiction, also often used by nonfiction writers, that are especially valuable now. I say this because it’s possible that we as a culture suffer from a particularly debilitating case of thinking we know much more than we know… .
This false sense of knowing — not a new problem, but perhaps a newly pressing one — has been made worse by the ease with which we find Web sites devoted to telling us what we already want to hear and already suspect is true. There are even algorithms for this; confirmation bias has never been more pervasive or insidious. We inhabit fanciful castles of facts.
Mostly we read the nonfiction that suits our fancy, and tend to ignore that which does not. Not for aphoristic economy alone did Nietzsche observe that convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Because we are less sure of what fiction is “saying,” we are less pre-emptively defended against it or biased in its favor. We are inclined to let it past our fortifications. It’s merely a court jester, there to amuse us. We let in the brazen liar and his hidden, difficult truths.
A beautiful meditation by Rivka Galchen on how fiction breaks us free of our filter bubbles. Pair with Susan Sontag on literature and freedom. (via explore-blog)
An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: ‘For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.’
Roger Ebert (via amandaonwriting)
Literature was one of the chief means by which Mathewson promulgated his belief that baseball required equal parts brawn and brains. “Pitching in a Pinch,” which was recently reissued by Penguin Classics, is his most celebrated work, and for good reason. Mathewson called attention to the inner workings of the sport—the strategies and signals that teams developed to outmaneuver their opponents: bunts, stolen bases, defensive shifts. These proved particularly crucial during the dead-ball era in which Mathewson pitched, when deep fences and soft baseballs made game-altering home runs rare and pitchers’ duels the norm. A theme that Mathewson returns to throughout is the pinch—a pivotal, pressure-filled moment when the contest hangs in the balance. “It is in a pinch that the pitcher shows whether or not he is a Big Leaguer,” Mathewson writes. “He must have something besides curves then. He needs a head, and he has to use it.”
The story—from Rapunzel to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin (via rianvdm)
Saturday, November 2, 2013
In other words, a detective is a kind of priest. Throughout history, priestly castes have boasted a unique capacity to answer the great riddles of existence, and it is surely more than a coincidence that, during the detective fiction boom of the 1860s, intellectual developments in Britain were profoundly undermining the Church’s traditional monopoly on such matters. In 1859, after two decades of delay, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The theory of evolution did not emerge from nowhere; even before Darwin’s ideas went public, many were already moving away from the literal interpretation of the Bible stories. But no single event played such an important part in the shift from a religious to a secular society, and no other book did so much to shake the authority of clerics and their official answers. This left a cultural vacuum, and in a changing world full of new dangers and problems, the fictional detective stepped into the breach.
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“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
Illustrations: Harry Clarke for Edgar Allen Poe
Dear Younger Self,
INVEST FIFTY BUCKS IN THE STOCK MARKET EVERY MONTH!! You don’t need to eat out so much. Think of all that compound interest!
If they don’t have beards and aren’t clean-shaven either, they make good short-term but bad long-term boyfriends. Beware.
Stop worrying about making people happy or getting people’s approval.
Forget trends; go for the classics.
Don’t gossip; it makes you untrustworthy.
Condoms, condoms, condoms.
Kindness is everything.
Naomi Wolf, What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self (public library)
Kindness is everything.
(via kateoplis)
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Oh. Oh, my.
Hollow Book Safe and Hip Flask
Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery and Imagination by HollowBookCo
Oh. Oh, my.
Why would that be the case? It all comes back to that relative difference: if you are always bigger and smarter, you may be more likely to get bored, and to think that everything—learning included—should come easily. You don’t have to strive and overcome obstacles in the form of older, more developed kids. If, on the other hand, you’re on the younger end of the spectrum, you are constantly forced to reach for your limits. And unlike in sports, where physical size often plays an undeniable, difficult-to-circumvent role in your eventual success, in school a physical disadvantage can turn into an academic advantage: children may learn to compete where they can succeed, where their persistence and attention can accomplish what their physical size may not.
Friday, November 1, 2013
The Middle
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But answers are always disappointing for me. I love reading noir mysteries. And I hate getting to the ends of them, because there are no surprises—no twist is good enough. It’s money, sex, blackmail, greed: all the usual suspects. Even Chandler and Hammett books are wrapped up in the most preposterous ways, because no one cares about solving the mystery. If they did, they’d read the first chapter and then skip to the last page.
People care about the 200 pages of mystery, in between. I like the idea that the suspended chord of those middle chapters can be the entire work. My favorite Hitchcock film is The Birds, because it starts in the middle and ends in the middle.
That's Miles Klee, pointing out the importance of the middle in fiction during an interview. I share Klee's disdain for clear-cut answers, for gift-wrapped endings in fiction. I can't count how many times I've gone to the movies, sat through two hours of drama or suspense, only to come to an ambiguous ending. And when I see the credits roll, cascading down the screen in the space where the answers should or would be, I smile. It's like a secret shared with the writer, a secret between just the two of us: I see what you did there, you sly dog.
And while I'm smiling, those around me are usually outraged, condemning the writer for leaving them in a state of limbo. That ending sucked. How can you just end it there?
At its most fundamental level, this is just another case of fiction as a way to navigate reality, as opposed to escaping it (an approach I've previously condemned, but of which I've come to recognize the relevance). Life is messy, and fiction, at its best, mirrors that chaos.
It also speaks to the capabilities of the reader or viewer, though.
Yes, there are spectators of fiction that are better at spectating than others. In fact, I'm convinced that that talent goes hand-in-hand with the quality of a writer: the better the reader, the better the writer. (I base that theory purely on the fact that those who are better writers than I are also better readers than I, without exception.) Everyone will see Pulp Fiction or read Infinite Jest differently, and some will take away things of much higher import than others. The only exception to my rule, as far as I can tell, is critics.
That is not to say that those who aren't good spectators should stop viewing or reading, of course; merely that, like anything else, they would be rewarded by working to become better viewers. If you’re watching (or reading) with the expectation of a big payoff in the final minutes or pages, you’ll be disappointed with any ending that doesn’t match the one you’ve been forming as the story unfolds (and trust me, your brain is forming the ending: that’s what it does, what it’s there for: to fill in the gaps when you’re presented with incomplete information, which, until you get to the ending, is precisely what a story is: incomplete). Eliminate your expectations by focusing on the story’s middle, and the ending will start to lose its importance. Eventually, you’ll even learn to embrace ambiguity.
The entire beginning/ middle/ end premise, also presents yet another way that fiction—good fiction, anyway— mirrors reality. No one sits through a bad movie with a good beginning and ending, and no one would want to endure a life that begins and ends well, but is filled with misery in-between. And what is life, after all, but a (seemingly) endless middle?
Right now, you're in the middle. You'll be in the middle tomorrow, too, but tomorrow, as they say, is the only day that never comes, so tomorrow is little more than a mirage. It's been said over and over, by people much smarter and more eloquent than I, that happiness is not the end game, but the process. It's the basis of the entire mindfulness movement, a movement that's seen a resurrection of late, but has as its roots some of the greatest philosophy in the history of our young world. It's important to note, though, that the movement has persisted for a reason. Mindfulness is not lying in a grassy meadow and staring at the clouds while you sip on a flowery green tea and ruminate on the preciousness of the stream that runs behind your house. Mindfulness is recognizing that your child wants to spend time with you right now and dancing across the living room to their favorite song. It's recognizing that the woman who just cut in front of you in the grocery store has a man at home who threatens to beat her if she doesn't get dinner made in time, and feeling compassion. It's taking pride in your work, whether you compose symphonies or serve fries. It's being self-aware enough to realize that you need to take a walk every once in awhile, when it feels like the swirling vortex of thoughts in your mind is beginning to take over.
Life is not fiction, but it can take a few cues from it. Like a good story, life is mostly middle. The beginning and end are merely bookends in your story, which, as it happens, is always going on right now- in the middle.
Honestly, I think the real trouble lies in that a writer doesn’t know how she does what she does. It’s not wise to admit that these days, when everyone is supposed to know everything, especially about the way they make their living. But it’s true. A writer can make herself sit at the desk and string words together, but she can’t make them be the right ones. She can try to think profound thoughts and have unparalleled insights, but trying will probably make the good stuff flee, like the soot sprites in Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro.
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