Books don’t just furnish a room. A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know.
– Michael Dirda in his farewell column for The American Scholar
In information parlance, the enemy is “noise”–a perfect word for all the random interferences with what man or nature is trying to say. Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page and the caption that doesn’t quite explain what’s happening in the picture. Noise is handwriting that’s hard to read. Noise is distortion on the TV screen. Noise is the lapse of memory, the slip of the tongue, the wrong neuron fired by the brain–anything that brings disorder to the intended order of a message.
William Zinsser in Writing to Learn, first published in 1988
The Fog Was No Joke
The fog was no joke this morning. While driving conditions were hampered, the opportunity for photos was not. I snapped these two with my iPhone before the weather cleared, although I’m kicking myself for using too much zoom on the deer.
Suck at Social Media
If the secret to social media is “be everywhere,” it’d sure be nice to consolidate that into one place. We could still call it Everywhere™.
Imagine you’re at a bar and an acquaintance asks, “Where can I connect with you on the internet?”
“Oh, I’m everywhere,” you respond, like some kind of omnipresent being.
Later, on the Everywhere instant messenger:
Acquaintance: Hey man, we met yesterday at [specific location]. I added you on Twitter, Facebook, and several other social media profiles, but I’d like to connect here, too.
You: BRB, gotta take my kid to school.
And like that your facade of ubiquity is exposed.
That’s a round about way of saying I’d like to be more present this year*, stop thinning my thoughts wondering what’s going on everywhere else, and just exist in the current moment.
——
*Meanwhile, on the Present™ instant messenger…
What I Really Want To Do…
Generally I don’t like to quote this much text at once, but the following paragraphs from Michael Dirda are too good to overlook. They get me to thinking about what I really want to do, and really isn’t that what good writing is about (the thinking part, I mean, not necessarily what you want to do)?
For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. My father would often intone on significant birthdays or anniversaries: “That which I did I ought not to have done, that which I did not do I ought to have done.” His pseudo-biblical lament unfortunately reduces the past to one long series of regrets, to the memory of foolish choices and rosy thoughts about what might have been.
That way, I suspect, madness lies. Also, the ire of one’s spouse and children—What about us? they might rightly complain. Are we chopped liver or something? After all, people do make good choices, often very good choices. But in recollection we inevitably tend to think about those mysterious and alluring roads not taken. Could I have become a novelist or a poet? Would I have loved living in New York or San Francisco? Might I have been happier as a small-town librarian—or a plumber? Did I use my small talents in the best possible way? Such dreamy speculations are, happily, of no real consequence. They make us thoughtful for a moment; then we sigh and get on with the day’s work. To those who do what lies within them, according to nominalist theology, God will not deny grace.
Like most people, at the beginning of a new year, I get revved up about what I want to accomplish in the coming 12 months. In 2013 I resolve to go to the gym every other day. I will lose 15 pounds and get back into what a friend used to call, when she was looking for a fresh boyfriend, “fighting trim.” I will write a short story and start a new book. I will travel more and see the world. I will fix up this dilapidated house, or sell it, and make a proper library for myself. I will … I resolve to … I must …
Some of these high-minded resolutions will almost certainly come to pass. (Hmm, I must be channeling my father’s biblical rhetoric.) But what I really want to do, if I were to follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell used to counsel us, is simultaneously modest and fanciful: to travel around North America in a van visiting second-hand bookstores. During my travels I’d also make occasional detours to spend a day or two with old friends, now too little seen—with my high school buddies who live in Houston and Missouri, my college chums in Maine and Chicago, my former book-collecting partner David Streitfeld, ensconced in the Bay Area, even some folks up in Toronto and British Columbia. Being a hero (and heroine) worshipper, I’d naturally take the time to genuflect at the final resting places of writers I admire. (Even now, two of my favorite photographs depict a reverent me at the tomb of Stendhal in Paris and the grave of Eudora Welty in Jackson, Mississippi.) Come lunchtime I would obviously eat in diners and always order pie for dessert, sometimes à la mode. During the evenings, sipping a local beer in some one-night cheap motel, I would examine the purchases of the day and fall asleep reading shabby, half-forgotten books.
“If you are interested at all, as I told you I was, in whether there are designs and shapes in the passage of events, then design is very important to you. It’s very important whether the design or shape or form of a series of events is really in the thing or whether it’s something that you, the artist, have manufactured. It’s important to me that there is a design and shape to quite a few things that we do in our life. So I’m very, very careful. I don’t want to be cheating; I want to get the design as exactly as I can, in itself, not from me.”
- I’m currently on a Norman Maclean kick (translation: more quotes forthcoming).
Notes of Interest: Texas Music and Active Verbs
- Bob Livingston provided an all-around fantastic read and first-hand insight to the creation of an iconic Texas album. If you have any interest at all in Texas Music, you should read it.
So, we played it a second time and the audience knew what was coming. You think “Redneck Mother” had a great crowd reaction? Well, when we got to the last choruses of “London Homesick Blues” that night, we just kept singing over and over “I want to go home with the Armadillos …” Everyone, singing along, over and over. Maybe 15 choruses, I don’t remember. The crowd wouldn’t let us stop. When “London Homesick” ended, the roar and urgency from the crowd was otherworldly and I wanted everyone, including whoever might be listening to the record later, to know that my friend, Gary Nunn, had sung it. So I screamed, “That was Gary P. Nunn!”
- If you have any interest at all in writing, you should read William Zinnser’s talk on the subject and follow his four principles of writing good English: Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity.
Remember: how you write is how you define yourself to people who meet you only through your writing. If your writing is pretentious, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no choice.
“Siri, remind me to start the crockpot at 9:30.” Marital harmony must be maintained.
Notes of Interest: The Get Off Your Ass and Do Something Volume
- Interesting thoughts from a report published by brand consultants Wolff Olins:
[...] products aren’t finite and they might never actually be finished. In fact, the product is less important than an experience of dealing with a company. Companies are only valuable if they prove themselves useful, time and again.
Just might be the inspiration you need to push your product out the door.
- Do things. Tell people.
[...] make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it’s the least useful thing you’ve ever made, if you can talk about it, make it.
- Stop talking. Start making. I enjoyed the brevity of the videos and the simple call to action.
- I sense a theme here. Do you sense a theme? There’s definitely a theme.
- Chase Happiness.
If you don’t wake up most mornings pumped to be alive, you’re doing it wrong.
