Pictured below, three birds with one stone, as it were, my writing assistant Uliberto Quetzalpugtl demonstrates Rattner’s science-based technique #25 “Sleep” and #26 “Nap” and #28 “Lie down or recline.”
#1 “Designate a creative space.” This winter 2020 my designated create space–I call it my office–is a room separated by a sliding door from the dining room. Plan B is my local coffee shop. In the past I have used a spare bedroom; a foyer (…that was challenging…); and a converted breakfast room. It is certainly possible to use a corner of the dining table; a breakfast table; a lap desk (taken to a sofa, chair, or bed); a table in a coffee shop; a carrel in a library… and so on. The point is, don’t be vague about where you’re going to do your writing. Designate it.
However, lovely as it may be for writer to have a large, totally private, and well-appointed office, it is by no means necessary. My advice would be, do your best to designate a creative space, whatever that best option may be for you at the moment, and then, get to the writing.
Yes, I find that does help, as Rattner says science confirms, to go to the same place each time you intend to write. But that isn’t necessary, either.
Here (below) my writing assistant models the big, sloppy Ikea sofa we use for lying down and, Rattner’s science-based technique #12 Choose curved over straight— the curved typing table; and #9 Be flexible–“Get the most creative bang for the buck by choosing furnishings and objects that move, change shape, or perform multiple functions”– note that the typing table has a drop-leaf, and note also, on the sofa under the plaid blanket, my lap desk. (Read more about the lap desk here.)
Yep, that’s a typewriter, a 1967 Hermes 3000. Read more about my typewriters here and here.
And my assistant also models #15 Get with your pet. “Studies indicate that having an animal friend nearby improves mood and mental dexterity.” (Uliberto Quetzalpugtl says, BARK BARK!)
“Studies indicate that having an animal friend nearby improves mood and mental dexterity.”
Here, below, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl models scientific technique #16 Make it beautiful. (Is my folded scarf used as the typewriter’s dust cover not beautiful?) And, simultaneously, #2 Look at something blue. Rattner writes: “Who would have thought that merely being exposed to certain colors could subliminally improve creative performance? Yet that’s precisely what researchers concluded after conducting several laboratory experiments measuring the impact of color on cognitive processing.”
The color blue improves creative performance! Whodathunk?
More of Rattner’s techniques for sparking creativity that were new for me included:
#24 Pick up the scent— I’ll try rosemary or anise tea. (What might work for you?)
#29 Make a fire. Or look at a picture of one. I googled “YouTube virtual fireplace” and this came up:
Très eco-eco (economical & ecological)– if you don’t take into account the server farm!
In sum, I found this a fun and thought-provoking book, and I expect I’ll be going through it many a time again.
BUT A CAVEAT
While there is a wealth of practical and easily affordable advice to glean from Rattner’s book, don’t let the slick photos of high-end design intimidate you into accepting another reason to procrastinate. (My creative space doesn’t look like that, so…) No creative space is ever perfectly perfect, and indeed, some of the most wonderful literature we have was produced in godawful conditions.
If you want to have written something, you just have to sit down (or stand) and do the work. Last I checked, the Muse may whisper an idea or three, but magic elves don’t get it done for you in the wee hours of the morning. I would suggest that improving your creative space best goes into the category not of writing time but quality leisure time, the importance of which I and some others have more to say here.
Madam Mayo blog’s “madmimi” email sign-up is finally working, over there on the sidebar. Subscribe and each Monday you will receive the latest post (and nothing else– no spam). Mexico, poetry, rare books, Texas, translation, the typosphere, occasional pug-sightings– if these tickle your fancy this is the blog for you! Second Mondays are for my workshop students and anyone else interested in creating writing; fourth Mondays are for a Q & A with another writer.
My holiday reading was Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, which I found at once disturbing and a revelation. A revelation because Smith’s writing is so poetic, and so engagingly and vividly evokes some of the raunchy subcultures of 1970s New York City; yet disturbing because I have always rejected, and upon reflection after having read Just Kids, the more so, this notion so many young and not-so-young artists have that being a True Artist excuses, or even calls for, wantonly destructive behavior towards oneself and others. (Count me as more Flaubert than Rimbaud.) Reading Patti Smith is definitely outside my comfort zone— which means I’ll be doing more of it in 2020.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, for an age I’ve been working on a book about Far West Texas. It’s impossible to consider Texas without taking into account so many Texans’ rock-solid belief in their state’s exceptionalism, which is not one and the same, but closely tied to the idea of American Exceptionalism. As one who was born in Texas, raised in California, and then spent some 30 years living outside the United States (and so immersed in a radically different cultural perspective), I can attest that this sense of exceptionalism is at once powerfully ingrained in American and Texan culture and well, kinda weird. I’ve been trying to get my mind around it for a while now.
In Global West, American Frontier : Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depressionhistorian David M. Wrobel brings this question of exceptionalism into focus by way of travel writing. He delves back to the 19th century when American and European artists and writers first began traveling through the West and writing about it as it was then, not yet “the frontier West as the heart and soul of America” (p.26) but “a global West.”
Wrobel’s focus here is on idea of the West in the works of such travel writers of originality and literary merit as Isabella Bird, Richard Francis Burton, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Ida Pfeiffer, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Unlike so many post-WWII literary portraits of the West, in these, “travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many and considering the United States as a colonizing power.” (p.22) The French were then in Africa and Indochina, the British in India, Germans in Namibia, and so on. The American West was not yet, in our post- WWII sense, “a unique place, a place apart from the world, rather than a part of it.” (p.27).
“travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many”
(As a travel writer myself the higher qualities and role of travel writing is something that especially interests me. My own travel memoir is Miraculous Air, about Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, and the heart of it recounts my travels following the Jesuit conquest from the late 17th century until the expulsion in 1767. “Spanish padres,” these Jesuit missionaries are often called, but in fact, many were Italian, or German, or French. One was Honduran; another Scottish. And one key factor behind their authorized conquest of California– what we today call Baja California– was that the Spanish King, and therefore his viceroy in Mexico City, were concerned about British and French expansion in the Americas, and they most especially wanted to check Russian expansion– fueled by the fur trade with China– down the Pacific coast. How’s that for global context!)
When came the turn away from “a broader and largely deexceptionalized global context” towards “searching for a distinctively American frontier, a place like nowhere else on earth”? (p.85) Wrobel argues that it came at the turn to twentieth century with writers such as Jack London and Theodore Roosevelt, both celebrity world travelers keen on seeking fresh frontiers of adventure. Then came the slew of automotive adventure memoirists battling flat tires and breakdowns while in search of “presumed regional authenticity” (p.135) — “a search for a distinctive American West, for last American frontiers” (p.135), for example, Mary Austin’s The Land of Journey’s Ending (1924); Hoffman Birney’s Roads to Roam (1928); Emily Post’s Motor to the Golden Gate (1916); Winifred Hawkridge’s Westward Hoboes: Ups and Downs of Frontier Motoring (1921); Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road (1925); C.K. Shepherd’s Across America by Motorcycle (1922); Hugo Taussig’s Retracing the Pioneers: From East to West in an Automobile (1910), and Frank Trego’s Boulevarded Old Trails in the Great Southwest (1929).
Also crucial in forging this conception of a unique American frontier– the West–were the New Deal state guidebooks, part of the Federal Writers Project (FWP). These state guidebooks included general background information (folkways, culture, history, economics, etc.); descriptions of cities and towns; and suggested tours by car. Writes Wrobel: across the West, “the guides generally emphasized the western frontier heritage and pioneering tradition. In that regard, they collectively amounted to a clear statement about where the West began and ended in the public consciousness and in the estimation of the guides’ writers in the 1930s.” (p.144). As for the Texas state guide, Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State (1940), that was “a veritable catalogue of Anglocentrism and Anglo-Saxonism, and of frontier-rooted state-level exceptionalism.” (p.151.) See for yourself in the copy now on archive.org.
In all, these memoirs and guides exemplified “how travel writing in the first four decades of the twentieth century constituted a movement inward, toward the national, and regional, and away from the global.” (p.180) So much may have been gained, yet so much lost. We became myopic.
For me, as both a reader and as a travel writer, Wrobel’s concluding chapter, “Enduring Roads,” was especially heartening. Yes, we live in this day of Tripadvisor.com and the heavily-marketed so-called “bucket lists,” nevertheless, I believe that good travel writing has and always will constitute a valuable contribution, both for individual readers (however dwindling their numbers) and the culture as a whole. Numbers of readers in the immediate aftermath of a book’s publication are not and have never necessarily been the best and only measure of its success. (More about the power of the book here.)
And I agree with Wrobel that the good and the true is not necessarily from some facile search for “authenticity.” Not that it’s often done, but it is possible to write brilliantly about a Disneyland ride or, for that matter, lazing in a hammock in one’s own backyard, surfing around Tripadvisor.
Writes Wrobel: “The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners… today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge… It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p. 187)
“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.”
And a final note from Wrobel’s Global West, mainly for myself: What’s been done to death is the search for “authenticity.” Yes, Virginia, there is a Walmart there on the highway by the ranch, and the ranch has wifi– and drone roundups, too. The hand-tooled wallet in the gift shop is made in China and the boots, probably, in India. What more interesting things can be said? Can we not compare parts of the Transpecos to the Tarim Basin (a fascinating exercise, by the way)? Or, say find the interweavings with the Middle Eastern trade traditions (there is a Lebanese trader’s grave down by the Rio Grande at Presidio– he was killed by Comanches, as I recall.) Why is there so little compare-and-contrast of the rock art of Lower California with that of the Lower Pecos? And what of visionary artists, immigrants from the east, such as Donald Judd? Or for that matter visionary oral historians? Or the pre-Texas Revolution history of the Alamo?
P.S. Speaking of Germans in Namibia, it quite strikes me how much the Erongo Mountains look like the Big Bend of Far West Texas:
Well, yeah, it is sort of ridiculously ridiculous to rate from 1 – 12 a batch of books published over a wide range of years and in genres as varied as stories in translation, poetry, history, historical fiction, travel writing, biography, and autobiography. But it works for me! I have been posting these always-eclectic annual top books read lists for Madam Mayo blog since 2006. Aside from serving as a reading diary for myself, it is my gift to you, dear writerly reader: If you are not familiar with any given book on this list, should it appeal to you to try it, may you find it as wondrously enriching a read as I did.
(1) The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams By Jove and by Jupiter, whyever did I not read this sooner?! Every chapter a chocolate truffle, The Education of Henry Adams is a fundamental text for comprehending the culture and overall development of the United States.
P.S. Michael Lindgrin has more to say about ye tome, “this strange and beautiful journey of a book,” over at The Millions.
Reading Cather is a joy. Both of these Cather novels are well-deserved American literary classics. Over the past couple of years I have been turtling my way through Cather’s oeuvre. So far: The Professor’s House (top books read list for 2017) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (top books read list for 2018).
“You don’t need to take a book off the shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.”
(4) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell I read this novel only because my book club picked it– lucky me. It’s wickedly funny, and, curiously, and most elegantly, written in crots. (I was unaware of Connell’s work when I wrote one of my own early short stories, also in crots, also published in the Paris Review. Well, howdy there, Mr. C! If you were still alive it sure would be fun to talk to you about crots!)
P.S. See Gerald Shapiro’s profile of Evan S. Connell in Ploughshares.
(5)Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton Yet another work I wish I had read years earlier. Culiano was the author of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. His life ended early, and not well, alas. I never met Culiano but I was at University of Chicago for several years just before he arrived, so I knew the super-charged intellectual ambiance well– and I think Anton captures it quite accurately. Recently occultist John Michael Greer has been making noises about Culiano’s understanding of cacomagic, and this the unnamed subject of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which is what prompted me to finally pick up this biography, which had been long languishing in my “to read” pile. (If you’re a metaphysics nerd and cacomagic is what you’re interested in specifically, however, Anton’s biography, otherwise excellent, will disappoint.)
(6) Tie:
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner Stegner is always a rare pleasure to read. I came away with immense admiration for John Wesley Powell’s many and visionary achievements. And the whole problem of water in the West thing!! Obvious as that may be, but I grew up in the West and it was not so obvious to me, nor to most people I knew at the time, and this book goes a long way towards explaining why. (Illuminating indeed to pair this work with a Cather novel… see above…)
A Desert Harvest by Bruce Berger This splendid anthology collects selected essays from Bruce Berger’s masterwork of a desert trilogy, The Telling Distance, Almost an Island, and There Was a River. P.S. Read my Q & A with Bruce Berger here.
The Western Paradox by Benard DeVoto Edited by David Brinkley and Patricia Nelson Limerick with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Crunchy! (I still have all my teeth, though!)
(7) Tie:
Lone Star Mind by Ty Cashion Professor Cashion articulates the kooky contradictions and tectonic shifts in both popular and academic versions of Texas history. A landmark work in Texas historiography.
Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film by Don Graham I will be writing about this work at some length in my book on Far West Texas. At first glance, for the splashy photos of the stars on its cover, it might appear to be the usual intellectually nutritious-as-a-Ding Dong film history book. But no! Graham knew Texas like almost no one else, and for Texas, Giant, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, was a film of profound cultural importance.
(13) The Chrysalids by John Wyndham I’m not a fan of sci-fi novels; I read this one about post-nuclear apocalypse Canada only because my book club chose it. I found it to be a page-turner with splendid prose throughout (although I did some eyerolling at the end when it did get a little “inner most cave-y” and “Deus-ex-Machine-y”). I can appreciate why it remains in print, and beloved by many, more than six decades after it was first published in 1955.
P.S. I can also warmly recommend the books by authors featured in my monthly Q & As.
Ring-a-ling to Dr. Jung! I happened to get my hands on Turner’s memoir just before a trip to Paris in which, not having heard of his book, I had planned to visit St. Sulpice and so, by happenstance, on the very day I finished the book, which concludes in St. Sulpice, there I was, looking at the very same Eugène Delacroix murals. That was wiggy.
I regret that I do not have the time this week to give In the Land of the Temple Caves the thoughtful review it deserves. Suffice to say, it came out over a decade ago, and I am astonished that I had not heard of it earlier. It deserves to be considered a classic of American, and indeed English language, literary travel memoir.
REST: My writing assistant demonstrates the concept. With snoring.
Do not be deceived! Rest, this cool-blue paperback featuring a beach chair, may look like your garden variety “self-helpie,” the sort of reading I think of as Airport-Bookshop-Fluffo. I confess to slumming in this genre when, on long flights, I feel almost brain-dead enough to sink to watching the in-flight movie or even… People Magazine. (….Nooooo!!!! Wylie Coyote scream wisps into the abyss…)
But seriously, Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a PhD in the history and sociology of science, is another level. To my surprise, I found myself reading Rest with a highlighter. And then I read it again. ASAP it will appear on the recommended reading list for my writing workshop.
The take home point is that, strange as this may sound, rest is a skill that can be cultivated. And, that for a richly creative and satisfying life, we need to treat rest as of equal importance to work itself.
Plus, Pang quotes Salvador Dalí, which I found enchantingly hilarious.
What’s a Texas pecan pie for dieters? It’s the same as the normal pie– loads of pecans, butter, and sugar– but it’s a tiny pie. And I happen to have the perfect tiny Texas pie dish for it– a work of art by Alpine, Texas-based ceramic artist Judy Howell Freeman. It’s one of the loveliest pie dishes I have ever seen. My photo does not do it justice.
C.M. MAYO’S TEXAS PECAN PIE FOR DIETERS (For a standard-sized pie, double this recipe)
Butter Crust: 1 1/4 cup flour 1 tablespoon sugar dash of salt 1/2 cup butter cut into itty bits 3 tablespoons ice water >>Mix it all up! Squoosh it and roll it until it forms a ball; then roll it flat (like a thick little frisbee); then wrap it in plastic or pastry paper and park it in the fridge for at least an hour.
Pie Filling: 2 eggs, beaten 1/4 cup sugar pat of butter (about what you would use to generously butter a roll) 1/2 cup honey (raw– otherwise don’t bother, just get the corn syrup) 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper (YES DO IT!) dash of salt a couple of handfuls of pecans >>Mix it all up, except for the pecans
>>Roll out the dough and fit to a greased tiny pie pan. Do not leave extra crust around the rim; this is a diet pie! >>Fill ‘er up. Drop the pecans on top. Arrange pecan pieces artistically if you feel so moved. >>Bake pie @ 350 F = (approximately 175 C) for about 45 minutes >>Then cover the pie pan with a lid or foil, and continue baking until a toothpick comes out clean of the pie’s center (takes probably another 30 to 45 minutes). >>Remove from oven and let it set for about 45 minutes. >>To slice, use an extra sharp knife.
(If you do not allow it to cool and if you use a dull knife it will end up on the plate looking like a slobby cobbler.)
Eat this whole pie and you can shovel snow in Siberia in your birthday suit for about two hours! It is meant to serve 4 to 6 people, a tiny slice each. Do not add ice cream!
#
Back in January of this year (2019) I started migrating selected posts from the old blogger platform to this page, www.madam-mayo.com, which is self-hosted WordPress. So far, so swimmingly, as I continue work on the Far West Texas book and related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project. You can now find not all but a generous number of the Texas posts here, among them, this review of James McWilliams’ The Pecan.
BOOK REVIEW by C.M. Mayo Originally published on Madam Mayo blog, July 5, 2015
Crisply entertaining and chock-full of crunchy
research by a food historian, this apparently delicious little book on
America’s native nut— (and isn’t the cover charming?)— is a horror
story.
It opens, as the darkest do, with a sunny scene of innocence.
Clustered along river bottoms in what would one day become Texas, groves
of pecan trees rained down their bounty for wildlife and indigenous
peoples. For centuries, pecans were their superfood, dense with calories
and nutrition. In the 16th century, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the
conquistador who shipwrecked en route to Florida and wandered
west, found the Guadalupe River “a river of nuts”— although he had no
word for them but “walnut.” The name “pecan” dates from the late 18th
century.
Those are not pecan trees at Monticello.
The pecan did not do well further north. Thomas Jefferson planted
some 200 pecan trees in Monticello; none survive. Where nuts were
wanted, European walnut varieties proved more popular and versatile, so
the pecan was left to do what it had always done, thrive in its wild
state along river bottoms, mainly in what is today Texas. Notes
McWilliams, “unlike any other fruit-bearing tree in the age of
cultivation, the pecan managed to evade the cultivating hand of man for
centuries after humans began exploiting it for food.”
Yum!
In the nineteenth century, as ranching and cash crops such as cotton,
corn and wheat spread across the South and Midwest, many pecan trees
disappeared; nonetheless, a large number of pecan groves survived,
especially in Texas, because they clung to riverbanks and bottoms, and
proved able to survive a flood other crops could not.
Farmers found wild pecans not only delicious as snacks for
themselves, but good pig feed, and bags of them, easily gathered, could
be sold in new markets in San Antonio, Galveston, and New Orleans. In
the second half of the 19th century, Texas took the lead in pecan
production, but not from formal orchards; for the most part, farmers
gathered wild pecans.
How to sell more pecans? The market wanted uniformity, thin shells,
and dense nut meats. Even the most magnificent pecan tree’s seed,
however, would not “come true,” that is, bring forth a tree producing
equivalent quality nuts. The solution was grafting. As early as 1822 one
Abner Landrum detailed his own successful experiments with pecan
grafting in the American Farmer. It seems no farmer bothered to
emulate that experiment. The market for pecans was still marginal and,
as McWilliams ventures, “it was simply more macho to run a ranch with
cattle than to turn that land over to pecans.”
The Big House at Oak Alley Plantation
In the mid-century 19th century, in the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana,
a slave gardener named Antoine successfully grafted an orchard of more
than 100 fabulously productive pecan trees. Decades later, the
plantation’s new German owner, Herbert Bonzano, brought the nuts of
those grafted pecans to Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition. And
thus, like so many other fruits before it, the pecan was at last, if
slowly, on the road to industrial production— a road, like that to Hell,
paved with good intentions.
the pecan was at last, if slowly, on the road to industrial production— a road, like that to Hell, paved with good intentions.
For a time, farmers relied on wild pecans, resisting experts’ advice
to graft pecans, perhaps out of innate conservatism and a reluctance to
becoming dependent on nurserymen. Attitudes soon changed. After a series
of insect plagues in the last three decades of the 19th century
decimated major cash crops, the USDA championed chemical insecticides
that, “lo and behold, worked.” Writes McWilliams, “The USDA was no
oracle, but as pecan farmers recognized, history showed it could make
life much easier for those who tilled the soil for a living. So long as
they would listen.” Listen they did.
The 20th century brought increasing industrialization in pecan
production. After World War I, writes McWilliams, “pecan trees were
becoming carefully managed commodities rather than natural aspects of
the southern landscape.” As for shelling, an important source of
employment in San Antonio in the 30s, after some labor unrest, this was
given over to machines.
In World War II the U.S. government gave the pecan industry a push,
promoting the nuts as nutritious replacements for meat; and after
imposing price ceilings to help promote consumer demand, buying up
millions of pounds of surplus pecans (many fed to schoolchildren). By
the late 1940s, pecans were no longer holiday treats or just for
pralines, they were in everything from cakes to cookies to pies, even
salads. McWilliams: “The aristocrat of nuts had become a commoner.”
McWilliams brings the pecan through the rest of its 20th century
history with mail order, frozen foods, processed foods, chain
restaurants, granola, and ice cream; its oil extracted for lubricants in
clocks and guns, its wood milled for basketball court flooring, its
shells collected for mulch, barbecue chips, plywood, pesticides, and
more. By 2011, when the author tours a Texan pecan farm, he is stuck
with dark wonder:
“First, the entire
operation is a streamlined model of mechanization. Vehicles designed to
fit snugly between seemingly endless rows of perfectly aligned pecan
trees spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides; they lay mulch,
prune trees, apply fertilizer, and harvest nuts. Other machines disk the
soil and smooth the turf between the trees so that fallen nuts do not
elude harvest. At times helicopters are even brought in for the purpose
of keeping frost from icing the nuts. Propane cannons are on hand to
scare off crows. It occurred to me as we drove from orchard to orchard
that there was nothing ‘natural’ about a contemporary pecan orchard.I was looking at a factory in the field.”
Oh, but it gets stranger. The money isn’t so much in the pecans as it is in shipping trees from the nursery to China. In 2001, Chinese did not have a word for pecan. Today pecans are a popular health food in China, available everywhere from airports to gas stations. It seems a question of time before the Chinese outstrip the U.S. in pecan production.
The future of the pecan, a “chemically saturated activity,” whether in the U.S. or China or elsewhere, looks grim. Arsenals of insecticides are increasingly necessary to combat aphids, beetles, weevils and more. These chemicals also threaten bees and other pollinators (and without them, our food supply as we know it may collapse). Plant diseases are also becoming increasingly resistant to chemical assault. The soil degrades. At some point— perhaps when China has become the top producer; perhaps when some insect or fungus has wiped out enough orchards; or in the wake of some ecological or economic jolt— it may become unprofitable to continue producing pecans in the U.S., the grafted and chemically attended ones for the mass market, that is.
What then will have become of the now few stands of wild pecans? The good intentions of many decades—ye olde single-minded “economic development”— have brought this once thriving wild nut tree to a state of such fragility that, concludes McWilliams, “we may well lose yet another natural thread to the past.”
Those of you who follow me here know that I am fascinated by attentional management and the creative process. Of late I have posted here on my advances in email management; finding time for writing (gimungous swaths of it!); and most recently, my distraction-free smartphone (which post includes an app evaluation flowchart to tailor-make your own, should you feel so inclined).
That last post about the smartphone appeared on the eve of the publication of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. Because I am a fan of Newport’s books, especially Deep Work, which I recommend as vital reading for writers, of any age and any level of experience, I expected Digital Minimalism to be good. As I noted in that post, if nothing else, in broadening our ability to think about the technology we use, Newport’s term “digital minimalism” is an important contribution in itself.
Reader, Digital Minimalism is beyond superb. It is a healing book, on many and profound levels, and I believe that it is not only vital reading for writers, but for anyone who finds themselves staring at a screen more often and for longer than they know is good for them– and, alas, these days, that would be just about everybody. (Including parents.)
In Digital Minimalism Newport says much of what I have said here at Madam Mayo (I found myself nodding, yes, yes, at almost every page), but he goes thirty miles higher and a loop-de-loop beyond.
And perhaps most importantly, for the general reader looking for something in the burgeoning self-help genre addressing the behavioral addictions of our Digital Age, as a tenured professor of Computer Science at an elite university, Cal Newport has authority rarer than an orchid in the Sahara.
My intention in this week’s post is not to provide a full review of Digital Minimalism, but rather to focus on one chapter, “Reclaim Lesiure,” and, more generally, the importance for writers of quality leisure.
QUALITY LEISURE
Writes Newport:
“The more I study this topic, the more it becomes clear to me that low-quality digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine. In recent years, as the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding, and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives …crucial for human happiness. This leaves a void that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored wih the help of digital noise. It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new–before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions–but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.” (p.168)
I think that bears repeating.
“Erecting barriers against the existential is not new–before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions–but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.” — Cal Newport
Newports recounts the experience of a writer who tried to go cold turkey from digital distractions. As that writer summed it up, it was “Torture.” Writes Newport:
“[He] felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.” (p.168)
Then:
“If you want to succeed with digital minimalism, you cannot ignore this reality… The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time–cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits… When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it.” (pp.168-169)
NOT THE DREAMTIME OF A CHARTREUSE MOON OR, THE PERILS OF PROCRASTINATION
As anyone who has taken on writing a book or three knows, only in the dreamtime of a chartreuse moon do they “write themselves.” It happens. But the experience is more often one of initial enthusiasm soon weighted down by one frustration and then twenty-nine others, delays for good reasons, for stupid reasons, more frustrations, distractions galore… and so, slowly, or quickly, a slide into the warmly inviting moist sand of procrastination.
Some books escape this trap. Most do not because the writer soon feels bad about having procrastinated–oh, very bad– and on top of this, in march the clanking, hammering, pounding round-n-round of woulda-coulda-shouldas… which makes the mere thought of the book so disagreeable that… eventually… it sinks deeper into the quicksand… and deeper…. And there it dies.
So how did I manage to write so many books, including the epic historical novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire? A novel, moreover, that deals with Mexico’s most complex transnational episode and recounts it by means of a Jamesian roving omniscient point of view? Whatever you may think of my novel, were you to read it, I am sure you could agree that it was not a modest undertaking. I won’t tote up all my challenges and frustrations over the eight years I needed to research and write it. For purposes of this blog post, the answer to the question is that, apart from a perhaps unusual streak of tenaciousness in my personality, when the going got really funky with The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I happened upon the lifesaver–I grabbed it!– of psychologist Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit.
And now here I am in the midst of another multi-year book project– multi-year by its nature–but also one that, alas, has been interrupted by two other books, a death in the family, and two household moves… I was starting to sense a bit of dampness there in the encroaching sand, as it were. But then, in one of the boxes I opened after my latest move, I found again my dog-eared copy of The Now Habit. I reread it, and I can report that Fiore’s advice is as consolingly golden as ever.
And then, after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, in the light and freshness of that, I sat down and went through The Now Habit yet again.
It was eerie to be reading Fiore’s The Now Habit in 2019, for it appeared in 1989, before anyone, outside a coterie of high-tech scientists and miltary people, had more than a notion, if that, of the Internet.
When I first read The Now Habit in the early 2000s, email had become a thing, but only a few writers had one of those newfangled things called “websites.” I did not yet know of a single one with a blog (I don’t think I’d yet heard of blogs). Cell phones were just phones. To get to school, we walked a mile in the snow without shoes (just kidding). For mindless procrastination there were trashy fiction, newspapers, magazines, and TV on tap, ever and always. In short, writers have always had to battle procrastination, albeit relatively low-octane stuff compared to the engineered-to-be-addictive apps of today.
But back to the question of quality leisure.
Of immense value for me in Fiore’s The Now Habit was the chapter “Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work.” Speaking to us from a time essentially free from “digital distractions,” Fiore says much the same thing as does Newport: for health, happiness, and productivity, we need quality leisure– or, as Fiore calls it, “guilt-free play.”
Writes Fiore:
“Attempting to skimp on holidays, rest, and exercise leads to suppression of the spirit and motivation as life begins to look like all spinach and no dessert… we need guilt-free play to provide us with periods of physical and mental renewal.”
It’s counterintuitive: when we seriously, urgently want and need to get work done, why first schedule play?!
Writes Fiore:
“Enjoying guilt-free play is part of a cycle that will lead you to higher levels of quality, creative work. The cycle follows a pattern that usually begins with guilt-free play, or at least the scheduling of it. That gives you a sense of freedom about your life that enables you to more easily settle into a short period of quality work. Having completed some quality work on your project, your feeling of self-control increases, as does your confidence in your ability to concentrate and to creatively resolve problems. In turn your capacity to enjoy quality, guilt-free play grows.” (p.82)
Play and work enhance one another in this cycle:
“…You are now well-rested, inspired, and ready for greater quality work. Guilt-free, creative play excites you with motivation to return to work.” (p.82)
I would urge anyone who wants to overcome procrastination to carefully read Fiore’s The Now Habit; he has much to say about the ways over-work can lead to procrastination, and the precise way to schedule guilt-free play with what he calls an “unschedule,” and how to overcome blocks to action. (Much of this good old-fashioned, yet oft overlooked, common sense, for example, what he calls “Grandma’s Principle,” that your scheduled guilt-free play should come after a good, solid half hour of quality work– “your ice cream always comes after you eat your spinach”.) My purpose here is not to review Fiore’s book however, but to focus on the counterintuitive importance for writers of quality leisure.
“GUILT FREE PLAY” AND “QUALITY LEISURE”
First, it should be triple-underlined that the “quality” of leisure is not necessarily related to its cost. Golf resorts, wide-screen TV manufacturers, purveyors of recreational vehicles, time-shares, sports equipment, Princess Cruises, et al would like you to imagine that what they’re selling is “quality leisure,” and the more expensive the upgrades the better!
But “quality leisure” could be an activity as pennywise as sitting in a chair in your livingroom and knitting a scarf from a ball of yarn that had been stashed in your closet for the past 20 years. Or, say, baking peanutbutter cookies; playing with your dog; walking out to the park and tossing around a frisbee with a friend. Biking to your public library to read War & Peace. Or playing baseball, curling, taking a yoga class, doing yoga on your own in your backyard, or on the beach at dawn! Scottish country dancing, baking bread, watching Casablanca at your local film school’s movie festival. Learning to play the guitar or the kazoo. Baking lasagne. Casting bronze sculpture! Or squishing together a super weird alien head the size of your fist out of papier mache!
In sum, “quality leisure” can be pretty much any activity that you truly enjoy doing and that you find energizing. (Hint: TV watching and pecking at the smartphone don’t count. Neither does bar-hopping or sitting around toking weed.) Newport has more to say about identifying and pursuing quality leisure. Before I return to that, a brief note about the “artist date.”
THE ARTIST’S WAY
By this point I imagine that many of you writerly readers may be thinking, didn’t Julia Cameron say something like this in The Artist’s Way?
Indeed she did. Cameron’s concept, a potent one, is what she calls “the artist date.” The idea is that this is scheduled quality leisure (to use Newport’s term) / guilt-free play (to use Fiore’s) but you go alone— absolutely not with someone else–and do something that nurtures your artist self. For me it might be something like a visit to a museum, reading a Willa Cather novel for an hour in a favorite coffee shop, or attending an organ concert. (In one of my most challenging moments in writing The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, one “artist date” I made for myself was to attend a planetarium show. Of all things.) Some people might like to get out the crayons or the Play-Dough. Of course, there’s no formula; what nurtures one artist, or writer, might not another.
So, advises Cameron, if you want to get some good writing done, go forth, by yourself, at a scheduled time, and do some fun and possibly wacky-nerdy thing!
Cameron’s The Artist’s Way was originally published in 1991, before the tsunami of digital technologies swept over our world, and yet like Fiore’s The Now Habit, it offers wise and timeless advice for writers. Cameron has a New Age spiritual slant, however, and that isn’t every Atheist’s slug of coffee. With that caveat, I warmly recommend The Artist’s Way.
CAL NEWPORT’S LEISURE LESSONS
Back to our computer professor and attentional focus expert Cal Newport and his latest, Digital Minimalism. In the chapter “Reclaim Lesiure,” Newport offers specific insights into which types of leisure are most effective for filling the void otherwise taken by low-quality digital distractions, and for enhancing well-being and productivity. These are those endeavors that:
(1) “prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption”;
(2) “use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world”; and
(3) tend to be those “that require real world, structured social interactions.”
Newport is not talking about eliminating digital technology, and in fact he points out ways in which websites, email, social media and more digital technologies can assist us in engaging in more and higher quality leisure. There is, Newport concedes, “a complex relationship between high-quality leisure and digital technology.” In my own case, I recently found out about and registered for a university extension course (which I attended in person) on a website. Many similar examples of how texting, social media, and YouTube, can assist and enhance real world meetings and activities no doubt pop into your mind. Newport stresses: “The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure.”
“The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure.” — Cal Newport
Newport concludes his chapter “Reclaim Leisure” with four practices, each amply explained, argued, and with illuminating examples:
Fix or build something every week;
Schedule your low-quality leisure;
Join something;
Follow leisure plans, both seasonal and weekly, stating both the objectives and the habits you aim to establish.
AND TO CONCLUDE WITH FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT
Here is an example of one writer’s quality leisure activity: Swiss writer, playwright and artist Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) painted the bathroom adjacent to his office. This is a partial view, of side wall, back wall, and ceiling. I decline to publish here the principal appurtenance.
Thanks to poet Joseph Hutchison, who recommended Dürrenmatt’s work to me, as I am temporarly living in the area, I made it, shall we say, one of my “quality leisure” activities to visit the house / museum, now the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel. (I would also call this visit “guilt-free play,” to use Neil Fiore’s term, but not an “artist’s date,” as Julia Cameron defines it, because I did not go alone.)
In the museum:
In English: “I can play with this world: that is my freedom as an artist.”– Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Here is the writer at his desk, as shown on the cover of this book (which I would translate as Dürrenmatt: His Life in Pictures):
Warmest wishes to you, dear writerly readers, for a fabulously felicitous and swirlingly creative 2019.
With the new year two brilliant titles have just been added to my list of recommended literary travel memoirs: J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus. The former is a classic of the Irish Renaissance published in 1907; the latter, the memoir / meditation of an extraordinary Polish international journalist of covering India, China, Africa and more in the 1950s and ’60s. Both of these memoirs were written well before the advent of smartphones and social media and in many ways reading them–and on paper– felt like… profound relief. I’ll have more to say about smartphones, social media, and literary travel writing in next Monday’s post.
Speaking of writing, I can scarcely believe it but in 2019 “Madam Mayo,” this veritable Methusela of blogdom, will celebrate its 13th year. And it has been blinking & beeping on my “to do” list for nearly all of these many years to take my own advice and get off of the Google platform onto self-hosted WordPress.
In the last days of 2018, I finally did it– but not exactly. Various research surfaris yielded the intelligence that blogger-to-Wordpress migrations oftentimes work smoothly but, perchance generate headache-inducing snafus. Moreover, there is a huff-and-puff of a learning curve for any new digital endeavor. Hence I plan to keep that ginormous olde blog parked right where it’s always been at https://madammayo.blogspot.com, while offering new posts (and reposting selected posts of yore, bit by bit as I see fit) at this WordPress self-hosted site, www.madam-mayo.com.
If you subscribe by email, I hope you’ll consider resubscribing from the new WordPress blog instead. (I think that button works over there on the sidebar; if not, it will soon.)
What can you expect from “Madam Mayo” in 2019?
Front and center, I’ll be bringing back the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project, finishing up podcasts 21-24, as I continue to work on my book on Far West Texas.
My book Meteor, which won the Gival Poetry Prize for publication in 2018, will, after all, be published early this year, so look for some posts on poetry as well.
In addition, as in 2018, the second Monday of each month will be dedicated to topics for my writing workshop, and the fourth to a Q & A with a fellow writer. Next up is the intrepid David A. Taylor, author of Cork Wars.
With México en las miradas de Estados Unidos (Editorial Las Animas, 2017), Mexican writer and historian José N. Iturriaga has edited an anthology that is at once a vital scholarly contribution towards the history of Mexican and of US-Mexico relations, and an “armchair read,” as I like to think of those box-of-chocolate tomes one can dip into here and there, on some quiet afternoon (perhaps with a bit of a birdsong and by a burbling fountain…) In short, this is a book I will keep on an eye-level shelf of my working library, but also return to time and again just for the fun of it. (For this reason furnishings for a proper working library include an upholstered armchair and ottoman!)
For those who can read Spanish and have even an
iota of interest in Mexico, México en las miradas de Estados Unidos is
a must-have. Over 130 American voices are represented here, and of an
astonishing variety, from the early 19th century to recent years, and of all
sensibilities. To quote [my translation] from Iturriaga’s introduction, they
are:
“traders and engineers, adventurers and sailors, explorers and historians, photographers and archaeologists, diplomats and journalists, novelists and miners, geographers and artists, poets and filmmakers, priests and planters, scientists, various soldiers, a comic and a president.”
That comic would be Groucho Marx, and the
president, James K. Polk.
Many of these authors will be familiar to those
who who have already read widely on Mexico in English: Fanny Chambers
Gooch, John Kenneth Turner, John Reed, Katherine Anne Porter, Alma Reed,
William Spratling, John Steinbeck, William Burroughs, John Womak.
And I was delighted to see so many of my personal
favorites, among them, pioneer trader and explorer Josiah Gregg, Princess Salm
Salm (suffice to say, had Andy Warhol been alive in 1866 they would have been amiguísimos),
Charles Macomb Flandrau, and my own dear amigo, the accomplished biographer and
historian Michael K.
Schuessler.
I am immensely honored to find my own work in
such company, with an excerpt from my novel based on the true story of Mexico’s
half-American prince, The Last Prince
of the Mexican Empire.
Although I have been reading on Mexican history
for decades now, and in fact collect memoirs of Mexico in English, many of
Iturriaga’s selections were new to me, for example, General John E. Wool,
soldier Thomas Yates Lundie, traveler Maude Mason Austin, and more.
Read about José N. Iturriaga’s many works,
including the recent Saberes y delirios, his fine novel about the
incomparable 19th century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, here.
Another year of unusually intensive reading, mainly for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, hence this list is extra crunchy with geology, dinosaurs, Westerns, guns, and technology (yet somehow, like a pair of strawberry puddings amongst the platters of BBQ, Emma and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie slipped in there…)
In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness by Jeremy Naydler The maintream mediasphere seems to be overlooking this book, and not surprisingly, for it has been published by a small press that specializes in esoteric subjects. If “esoteric” gives you the readerly “cooties,” well, chill, if you possibly can because Naydler’s In the Shadow of the Machine stands as major contribution to the history of both technology and consciousness. If you’re wading through any of the current best-sellers on the perils of too much screentime and AI and all that, fine and important as some of those works may be (more about Carr below), I would suggest that instead, for a more panoramic and penetrating view of the challenge, start with Naydler.
2. Tie:
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather Historical fiction closely based on New Mexico and Church history but in all a soaringly lyrical work of empathic imagination. Deservedly one of the grand classics of 20th century American literature.
Emma by Jane Austen Ye olde read-it-by-the-fireside-with-a-cup-of-tea romance. But it’s a more serious work of literary art than it might appear; as a writer of fiction myself I found much to admire in Austen’s Emma. On that note, dear writerly readers, you might find of interest this piece in the Guardian.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte Dino-out! Finally, the whole millions-upon-millions-upon-millions of years of dinosaurs falls into parade-like Ordnung! More fascinating stuff about T-Rex & Co. than I ever thought I would find fascinating! Super nerdy in the friendliest, most readable, and authoritative way. If you read one book on dinos, let it be this one.
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier If you know who Jaron Lanier is, you can understand why he, and probably only he can get away with such a title for a commercially published book, one that most people today, and that would include writers with books to promote, would consider hoot-out-loud humbug. But perhaps they would not if [continue reading]
Dense yet elegantly lucid, Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst was published by O’Reilly Associates in 1995, on the eve of the explosion of email, well before that of social media. Astonishingly, it delineates the nature of our now King Kong-sized challenges with technology, when those challenges were, so it now seems, but embryonic. And Talbott writes with unusual authority, grounded in both philosophy and his many years of writing and editing for O’Reilly Media, a prime mover in the economic / cultural juggernaut of a complex, increasingly dispersed from its origin in California’s Santa Clara Valley, that has become known as “Silicon Valley.” CONTINUE READING
I’m not where I want to be with my writing here at the end of 2018 and Carr’s works detail many of the reasons why. But I’m moving forward by having deactivated my FB, reduced Twitter to once-a-month-ish courtesy tweet for my Q & A with another writer; generally ignoring LinkedIn, and still– still! thumb cemented in the dike!– refusing to use Whatsapp.
But please know, dear writerly reader, that even
as I wend my way, I would not pretend to know what would be best for you. And
this the Matterhorn of the challenge of our time: digital technologies that
might be zest for one person can prove hazardous for another. One needs both the
fortitude and courage to evaluate one’s own path– taking into account one’s
own circumstances, talents, weaknesses, predilections, obligations, and goals–
then strategize, and restrategize as needed.
My sense is that, primed by Carr’s and others’ works
in this vein, our cultural paradigm will definitively shift this winter with
the publication of Cal Newport’s Digital
Minimalism. Never mind what Newport actually has to
say (though as a big fan of his Deep Work, I expect it will be
juicy); in simply coining the term
“digital minimalism” Newport helps us move towards richer
and more effective ways of thinking about how, given our personal and
professional goals and well-being, we can optimize our use (or nonuse) of
digital technologies.
As I write now in December 2018 the reigning
paradigm is the same one we’ve had since forever: if it’s digital and new it
must be better; those who resist are old fogeys. It’s a crude
paradigm, a cultural fiction. And it has lasted so long time in part because
those who resisted either were old fogeys and/or for the most part could not
articulate their objections beyond a vaguely whiney, “I don’t like
it.”
As an early adopter of digital technologies for
decades now (wordprocessing in 1987, email in 1996, website in 1998, blog in
2006, podcast and Youtube channel 2009, bought a first generation iPad and
first generation Kindle, self-pubbed Kindles in 2010, etc.), I have more than
earned the cred to say, no, my little grasshoppers, no, if it is digital and it
is new it might, actually, maybe, in many instances, be very bad for you.
In other words, adopting a given digital
technology does not necessarily equate with “progress”; neither does
not adopting a given digital technology necessarily equate with backwardness. I
so often hear that “there is no choice.” There is in fact is a
splendiferous array of choices, and each with a cascade of consequences. But we
have to have our eyes, ears, and minds open enough to perceive them, and the
courage to act accordingly.
I wish my wiser self could have time traveled to
tell my younger self, Be more alert to the ways you invest your time and
attention. Be aware that the digital can be, in some ways and sometimes, more
ephemeral than paper (and not necessarily ecologically so friendly, either).
Social media mavens are not reading the kinds of books you want to write
anyway, for they lack the time and the attention span. Social media
“friends” may be but are not necessarily your friends; and until you
try to communicate with and encounter them outside these networked public
spaces, e.g., in the real world, and via one-on-one private communication such
as snail mail, telephone, and email, you’re in a hall of mirrors. With almost
every app, every platform, some corporation is harvesting your attention and
data for shareholder value– and all the while conjuring up new ways to grab
even more. Life goes by, zip.
