C.M. MAYO: How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
Down with social media!
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ: “I avoid social media as much as possible—I think it is destroying critical thinking, as well as print journalism. A lot of it is simply garbage. I do like email, though I miss getting personal letters in the mail.” —From Q & A with Lynne Sharon Schwartz About Crossing Borders, Madam Mayo blog, August 23, 2021
MATTHEW PENNOCK: “I am not particularly prolific. I do not write every day, and I’m often distracted by all the shows I can stream, and podcasts I can listen to. Social media has never really appealed to me, so I am okay there, but other than that, someone needs to give me some tips about how to get a little more done.” —From Q & A with Poet Matthew Pennock on The Miracle Machine Madam Mayo blog, November 23, 2020
ALVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: “While I am writing, I minimize interruptions, including turning off my cellphone and notifications. I only turn it back on when I am having a break. In general, I try to use social media as little as possible. What I do is to log in, scroll down a few posts, and, if I have to post something, I do it and then log off. The truth is that, when we are on social media, we easily loose ownership of our time, which we put for free at the disposal of these companies. We become their workers. I prefer to use my time for other things.” —From Q & A with Álvaro Santana-Acuña on Writing Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic, Madam Mayo blog, December 28, 2020
It depends…
CHRISTINA THOMPSON: “I think this depends on what stage one is at in the writing process. When you’re actually writing a book, all this stuff is a distraction and you have to be very careful not to waste too much time on it. But once your book is published, it becomes a lifeline to your readership, and the more you participate the better. So, I think it’s really a matter of making all these opportunities work for and not against you, and that takes a certain amount of discipline.” —From Q & A with Christina Thompson on Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, Madam Mayo blog, January 25, 2021
Balance
JAN CLEERE: “While digital sources have made a writer’s job more efficient when it comes to finding pertinent sources, it has also taken away that spontaneous delight of uncovering a long lost letter or hidden journal that has not yet been digitized. I try to focus on the business of writing separate from the hours I spend actually writing. Not always possible but I have found by trying to compartmentalize the creative from the business end of writing, I am more productive. The trick is to balance these activities so that by the end of the day, you feel you have put out all the fires as well as progressed with your writing.” —From Q & A with Jan Cleere on Military Wives in Arizona Territory: A History of Women Who Shaped the Frontier, March 22, 2021
No problemo!
SOLVEIG EGGERZ: “Actually I love writing on the computer. I am not one to long for life in a cabin on a mountaintop where I write on a yellow pad free of technology. I don’t like to be surprised by “emergencies” days after they occur. I resolve the issue of disturbances by keeping my phone next to me, so I can glance at a message without shutting down my story. Maybe I am exaggerating my equanimity!” —From Q & A with Solveig Eggerz on Sigga of Reykjavik, February 22, 2021
KARREN ALENIER: “I’m used to being interrupted. I grew up in house of six children. I was eldest. The point is when I am working, I am able to ignore the lure of online wonders like YouTube, blogs and newspapers. However, I like to work in silence and know that listening to radio, TV, or music is too distracting. Yes, my smart phone is an interrupter. Still I don’t turn that off because someone important to me might reach out and need me. Some of my friends get annoyed that I don’t read their Facebook pages except occasionally. The best way for me to get something done is to put it on my list of things to do. I take great pleasure in ticking off those items.” —From Q & A with Karren Alenier on her New Book How We Hold On, the Word Works, Paul Bowles & More, Madam Mayo blog, September 27, 2021
DAVID O. STEWART: “For a lot of years, I was a trial and appellate lawyer with a dozen or more active cases at a time. I used to describe my work as a life of interruptions. Clients called. Colleagues dropped by (remember offices?). Opposing lawyers called. Dumb firm meetings. Interviewing job applicants. I was constantly dropping one subject to pick up another. I tried to be in my office by seven a.m. to get some uninterrupted time. So these days, working at home by myself, I actually get antsy if I don’t have a few interruptions. I’m used to working for a stretch, taking a few minutes off to do something stupid (see social media) or annoying (see call health insurer), and then getting back to work. It’s normal.” —From Q & A with Biographer David O. Stewart on the Stunning Fact of George Washington, Madam Mayo blog, June 28, 2021
Go into another world…
SUSAN J. TWEIT: “When I am writing, I am in another world. I turn off notifications on my phone and computer, so that I’m not distracted by the bing of email coming in or the ding of texts or news alerts. My daily routine is pretty simple: I post a haiku and photo on social media every morning (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), and answer any comments on my posts. After half an hour on social media—I set a timer—I read the news online. When I’ve finished with the news—which is research time for me, as news stories, especially those about science, are raw material for my writing—I write until the well runs dry. And then, usually at two or three in the afternoon, I allow myself to go back to social media, answer other comments, check the news. Then I close my laptop and go outside into the real world and walk for a mile or two on the trails around my neighborhood to clear my head. Getting outside into the “near-wild” of the greenbelt trails in my high-desert neighborhood keeps me sane in turbulent times, and refills my creative well. Nature is my medicine, inspiration, and my solace.” —From Q & A with Susan J. Tweit on Her Memoir, Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying, April 26, 2021
KATHLEEN ALCALA: “All of this is terrible. I am so easily distracted. I will start laundry, open a file, take notes by hand, and forget what I had planned to do that day. For me, the best strategy is still the writing residency, away from home, where I don’t have any excuses and fewer distractions. This is especially needed when I am trying to organize large blocks of writing, such as the chapters in a novel.” —From Q & A with Kathleen Alcalá on Spirits of the Ordinary, Madam Mayo blog, May 24, 2021
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My Own Logbook and Stopwatch for Work on Madam Mayo Blog
The ever-increasing and OMG-so-many siren calls to the Internet—as a writer, it’s something I’ve been struggling with and pondering on for the past many years. I’ve had some continuing frustrations, but also some successes, and I’ve blogged about the latter (see my writing workshop archive). Tips & Tricks for Coping with Digital Distractions, that’s a book I’m not going to write because I’m already writing another book, with two others contemplated after that, in addition to hosting this blog. Enough already!
But I will offer a word on my strategy for fitting Madam Mayo blog into my week. This blog has been ongoing since 2006, and since 2019, on a regular schedule of posting on Mondays. Although for years I resisted establishing a regular schedule, to my surprise, it has made the blog far easier to manage.
One of the biggest challenges to the sort of blogging I do is that because there’s no editor, no paying subscribers, it’s easy to have the whole show just ooze on out into who-knows-what-who-knows-when.
If you enjoy writing, watch out, blogging can take over your writing life!
Blogging then, for me, is what behavior modification expert B.J. Fogg, in his book Tiny Habits, terms a “downhill habit,” that is, a habit “that is easy to maintain but difficult to stop.” (Of course, on the other hand, for many people, blogging is, as per B.J. Fogg, an “uphill habit,” that is, one that requires ongoing attention to maintain but is easy to stop.)
Starting in January of 2021, I have been attending to the tiny habit of logging the time I spend on Madam Mayo blog, aiming for about two hours per week, never more than an hour a day, and also aiming for putting my attention on it (including dispatching any related emails) only on Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays. When I sit down to work on Madam Mayo blog, I open a digital stopwatch app. When I’m done, I note the date and time spent in the logbook. Was it as scheduled, and within the time limit? If so, I give the entry a check mark and do the B.J. Fogg prescribed “celebration.” Yes, it’s kind of nerdy, but I have been finding this system, or rather, set of tiny habits, balancing, energizing, efficient and, hey, just fun.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
We have never met, but I feel as if we have. I think this is always true when one has read another’s such wonderful writing. But I did “meet” Diana Anhalt, in a matter of speaking, when years ago, she sent me a selection from her powerful and fascinating history / memoir of growing up in Mexico City, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. When, sometime later, I read the entirety of that beautifully written book itself–which I admiringly recommend to anyone with an interest in Mexico–I wrote to her, and we have kept in touch ever since. Apart from writing poetry and essay, we have this common: a lifetime, it seems, of living in Mexico City, and married to a Mexican. By the time we found each other’s work, however, Diana and her husband Mauricio had left “the endless city” for Atlanta, Georgia. (But ojalá, we will meet one day outside of cyberspace soon!)
Her latest, just out from Kelsay Books, is Walking Backward. From her publisher’s website, her author bio:
“Diana Anhalt left Mexico over nine years ago following close to a lifetime in that country but claims her writing sometimes digs in its heels and refuses to budge. She continues to write about Mexico. Many of her essays, short stories, and book reviews have appeared in both English and Spanish along with her book, A Gathering of Fugitives:American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. Since she first arrived in Atlanta, two of her chapbooks, Second Skin, (Future Cycle Press), Lives of Straw, (Finishing Line Press), and one short collection, Because There Is No Return, (Passager Books), have been published. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in “Nimrod,” “Concho River Review,” “The Connecticut River Review,” “The Atlanta Review,” and “Spillway,” among many others. She believes this is the first time her work has started to lose its Mexican accent.” Source: Kelsay Books
Writes Dan Veach, founding editor of Atlanta Review, author of Elephant Water and Lunchboxes:
“The best way to visit any country is with someone who knows and loves it intimately. In Walking Backward, Diana Anhalt welcomes us graciously into the very heart of her family and her Mexico. With deep empathy and quiet courage, and always with a saving grace of humor, she shows us how to deal with love and loss, both on a personal and an artistic level.”
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C.M. MAYO:What inspired you to write Walking Backward?
DIANA ANHALT: I wanted to put together a collection—this is my fifth—which would include, for the first time, some of what I’d written following my husband’s death three years ago, but it couldn’t just be a book about death so I settled on including, as well, work focused on the family, on the past.
MISSING by Diana Anhalt
I walk my unwritten poems down La Reforma, stop to buy La Prensa, scan the Want Ads. Missing bilingual parrot Inglés/Español, answers to the name of Palomitas.
Se Busca María Felix look-alike for chachacha-ing on Saturday nights. Extraviado/Lost guitar case filled with woman’s shoes and toothpaste samples.
In Search Of instructions on how to read divining bones. Reward Offered for information leading to whereabouts of Gabi Escobedo, missing since September.
Attención Mauricio—You’ve been dead long enough. It’s time to come home.
C.M. MAYO:If a reader were to read one poem in this collection, which one would you suggest, and why?
DIANA ANHALT: The logical choice would be Walking Backward, the title poem and the first in the book. After Mauricio and I left Mexico and the home where we had lived for many years, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen or the bathroom only to discover my feet walking in the direction they would have taken in my Mexican home, not here in Atlanta. The title’s suggestion of walking and residing in the past was what I was aiming for.
[SCROLL DOWN TO THE END OF THIS POST READ THE POEM, “WALKING BACKWARD”]
C.M. MAYO:Can you talk about which poets and writers have been the most important influences for you?
DIANA ANHALT: It’s changed, of course, over the years, but more recently I was very fortunate to belong to a group which worked closely with the head of the Georgia Tech poetry program, the late Tom Lux, who became a mentor and friend. Tom facilitated our interaction with the poets Ginger Murchinson and Laure Ann Bosselar. Richard Blanco and a number of wonderful poets in our Poetry Workshop and others writing here in Atlanta have also influenced my poetry. C.M. MAYO:Which poets / writers are you reading now?
DIANA ANHALT:Here: Poems for the Planet, a recent anthology, edited by poet Elizabeth Coleman, Jo Harjo, our new U.S. poet laureate, and Land of Fire by Mario Chard.I’ve also been reading Jennifer Clement’s Gun Love and Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us.
C.M. MAYO:You have been a productive poet and writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
DIANA ANHALT: You’ve expressed it well. It has been challenging to stay focused and I’m afraid that, as of now, I’m still incapable of using it fully to my advantage—I don’t use social media— but I do find the Internet extraordinarily helpful at times in establishing contacts, finding venues and staying in touch.
C.M. MAYO:Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
DIANA ANHALT: I had always worked on paper but once I began to write on the computer I found the ability to make changes and save the many versions necessary in producing a poem very helpful. I still keep a notebook, transfer the notes to the computer, and do the actual writing on the computer. C.M. MAYO:What’s next for you as a writer / poet?
DIANA ANHALT: Now that Walking Backward is out I will continue to produce for our monthly poetry workshop meetings, send my work out, enter a contest or two but I do hope to get back and revise my now outdated computer files for A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. (Although I must admit that I’ve been promising myself to do that for years. Still haven’t.)
Use ‘heel’ and ‘toe’ as verbs
WALKING BACKWARD By Diana Anhalt
Late each night I rose, woozy with sleep and my bare feet traveled blind—knew one room from the next through cracks in the wood, space between floorboards,
sensed their width, breadth, girth… For forty years I called that same place home— Left it, yet it resides in me. The feet are last to follow. They fumble the unfamiliar,
reject the waxed surface of a new life, are the last to forgive my leaving, long to return me to the old home—wet wash pinned to a line in the courtyard, scent of chili
and cilantro wafting from the kitchen. At night they lurch backwards into the past, tread the dream halls where faces linger in mirrors, Spanish echoes down corridors
into a past I thought I’d left behind— And there you are. You wait in the doorway, lean against the door frame and ask: Como te fue? How did it go? Red wine or white?
Walking Backward
Late each night you rose, woozy with sleep, the space your familiar, and your bare feet traveled it blind—knew one room from the next through cracks in the wood, space between floorboards, splinters, sensed their width, breadth girth.
For forty years you called the same place home— Leave it, yet it resides in you. The feet are last to follow. They fumble the unfamiliar, reject the waxed surface of a new life, are the last to forgive your leaving, long to return you to the old home—wet wash pinned to a line in the courtyard, scent of chili and cilantro wafting from the kitchen.
At night they lurch backwards into the past, tread dream halls where faces linger in mirrors, Spanish echoes down corridors into a past you thought you’d left behind—
And there you are. You wait in the doorway, lean against the door frame and ask: “Como te fue?” How did it go? Red wine or white?
They cleave to familiar roadways. The late night path between bed and bathroom. Your feet are the last to forgive you. The feet are the last to forgive your leaving murky Leading you down a hall you left behind. (no longer there) You alongside
(forgive)
(home) in the cracks between boards. (where your Spanish song)
(And when you leave) The feet are the last to forgive your leaving home
Footsteps lurk in the past. My feet tread the past. Your feet are the last to forgive you. (to forgive your wandering.) You abandon your past
My feet still know a past when…. Tide erases footsteps on the sand.
Bare feet, it’s time to get used to this, this unknown space, a floor less friendly, rougher on your soles, less familiar with your tread, colder, tile not wood
The tug of familiar surfaces
Today after a deep sleep my feet walk me Toward the door I left behind down a hallway I left behind. No longer there.
Xxxxxxxxxxxx Late each night you rise, woozy with sleep,the space your familiar, and your bare feet travel it blind—tread those same midnight floorboards sense their width, breadth girth, know one room from another through cracks in the wood, They tread the past.
Lingered behind in the familiar Who thought to warn them? I forgot to warn them.(you)
Late at night, woozy with (from) sleep I forget to tread the slippery smoothness of new floors (I forget and tread the old floors) through hallways silenced by sleep, dizzy with sleep
Foothold, heel and toe My body owns (keeps, retains) the compass, (encompasses) Maps (traces) the floors I left behind. My footsteps tread past.
retrace ones steps (If you) live in the same place for 40 years. (Call one place home) tread the same midnight floorboards That place resides in you. (When) You rise at night, the floor is your familiar and your bare feet travel it—feel it’s width, breadth girth, Know one space from another by the cracks in the wood, a shaky floorboard,
(After years treading the same midnight floorboards)
Today, late at night, woozy with (from) sleep
After years of treading darkened halls feet knewthose floors and follow them. They seek the familiar groundwork of the past, late to discover it’s disappeared. (no longer there.)
I argue with my feet (An argument with my feet) Earlier notes
I walk away from forty years of my life
Awakened to darkness, late at night my feet refuse to travel, walk the dark, down the hall you left behind Remind me that I never thought to tell them:
For forty years you call the same place home and each night, woozy with sleep, your feet tread those same midnight floorboards until
My feet still remember a past when
your feet tread those same midnight floorboards until that place resides in you
Awakened from a deep Nudged into the past Nudge words into meaning
When I left I forgot to tell (warn) my feet. They stayed Behind entrenched in the familiar streets of home
Go through the process of leaving
I forgot to tell you. (them) (warn them) When I left I forgot to tell (warn) my feet. they linger behind
Behind
Highways, biways. At home on bicycle pedals. My feet, unlike the rest of me, refuse to take the lead (to follow my lead) Highways, biways. At home on bicycle pedals. My feet, unlike the rest of me, refuse to take the lead (to follow my lead) When I rise from bed late at night in this new place fuzzy (heavy) with sleep Feet speak a language of their own
The scurry, scrape against the floor New territory (territorial)
I try to reason with my feet.
Abandon home after forty years, last to follow are the feet. They fumble the unfamiliar, reject the waxed surface of new floors. (newness)
They reject the slippery smoothness of new floors They forget to tread the slippery smoothness of new floors And fumble in the unfamiliar (I forget and tread the old floors) through hallways silenced by sleep, dizzy with sleep When you abandon (leave) home after 60 years. the feet are the last to follow. Mine, at home in the past, learned (memorized) the floors—width, breadth, girth Today, in this new place, they move (walk) (grope) backwards into (retrieving) the past late at night, woozy with sleep, reject the slippery smoothness of new floors forget to tread the slippery smoothness of new floors fumble with the unfamiliar The late night path (track another word-meaning destination?) between bed and bathroom. You abandon your past
You could leave it hanging in the tree in the backyard… not what I am recommending, however. Photo courtesy of MorgueFile.
SMOMBIE: It’s a word that popped up in Germany only in 2015. It’s hard to imagine now, but a decade ago, a scene, typical today, of smombies shuffling along city streets would have been but a cliché in a sci fi novel. But here we are.
When we lack the words to precisely describe something, it becomes difficult to recognize it, never mind debate and discuss it. Albeit some decades ago, the Digital Revolution burst upon us all, a series of tsunamis of such dizzying celerity that our vocabulary is still catching up. Only a few years ago a much-needed term was coined by Jake Knapp: “Distraction Free iPhone.” I came across the term when I read Knapp’s recent update on his experience here.
DISTRACTION FREE SMARTPHONE = DFS = defis
I’ll switch that last word from “iPhone” to “smartphone” to make it Distraction Free Smartphone, DFS for short. I did not think of my smartphone as distraction free until now, but for the past several years, that’s precisely what I have been moving towards, a DFS. Hmm, that sounds a mite snappier!
And I hereby tweak DFS to “defis,” which, I note, is the plural of “defi” which means “challenge” or “defiance.” Indeed, using a distraction-free smartphone is an act of defiance towards smombiedom.
BEYOND PRO OR CON
The magic is, this new word, DFS, or defis, nudges us beyond the rigid ping-pong of pro or anti-smartphone; forward-looking or old fogey. As I wrote in a recent post:
“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 a 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 1998, blog 2006, podcast and Youtube channel 2009, bought a first generation iPad, Twitter 2008, 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 ‘onwards and upwards’; neither does rejecting a given digital technology necessarily equate with backwardness. I so often hear that ‘there is no choice.’ There is in fact 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 these, and the courage to act accordingly.”
Of course, when it comes to using digital technologies, different people have different needs, different talents, goals, obligations, opportunities, and vulnerabilities. A responsible mother with young children will probably want to use Whatsapp with the babysitter; a real estate agent who wants to stay in business needs to be available to clients, whether by phone, email or text– and so on. Some people slip into the vortex of addiction to social media or gaming far more easily than others…
My aim here is not to judge other people (although I’ll admit to some eye-rolling at smombies slapping themselves into streetlamps), but to examine the nature of digital technology and my own use of it. I am not a mother with young children, nor a real estate agent. Games bore me, always have. I am a writer of books. I blog about digital technology because first, it’s my way of grokking it; and second, I trust that what I’ve learned may be of interest to my readers– for I know that many of you are also writers.
We writers are hardly alone in the need for uninterrupted chunks of time. Brain surgeons, composers, painters, historians, statisticians, sculptors, software engineers… many people, in a wide variety of professions and vocations need, to quote Cal Newport, “the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task,” that is to say, engage in what he terms “deep work.”
“Literary travel writing is about first perceiving in wider and sharper focus than normal; then, in the act of composition, shaping and exploring these perceptions so that, as with fiction, it may evoke in a reader’s mind emotions, thoughts, and pictures. It’s not meant to be practical, to serve up, say, the top ten deals on rental cars, or a low-down on the newest ‘hot spas.’ Literary travel writing, at its best, provides the reader the sense of actually traveling with the writer, so that she smells the tortillas heating on the comal, tastes the almond-laced hot chocolate, sees the lights in the distant houses brightening yellow in the twilight, and, after the put-put of a motorcycle, that sudden swirl of dust over the road.”
Writers have always battled distractions, but with the ubiquity of smartphones, and increasingly sophisticated app designs and algorithms to lure us and trap us into “the machine zone,” we’re at a new level of the game– or the war, as Steven Pressfield would have it.
Whatever might or might not be an optimal use of digital technology for you, I know this:
A book that can claim a thoughtful person’s time and attention is not going to be written by someone who is pinged by & poking at their smartphone all the live-long day.
“OUT IN THE WORLD”
Some writers have outright rejected smartphones– but so few, in fact, that only two come to mind: John Michael Greer, a prolific blogger and author whose stance on modern conveniences is, as he titled a collection of essays on his vision of the post-industrial future, Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush; and journalist Sebastian Junger. As Junger said on the Joe Rogan podcast:
“when I’m out, I want to be out in the world. If you’re looking at your phone, you’re not in the world… I just look around at this– and I’m an anthropologist, and I’m interested in human behavior– and I look at the behavior, like literally, the physical behavior of people with smartphones and… it looks anti-social and unhappy and anxious, and I don’t want to look like that, and I don’t want to feel like how I think those people feel.”
While I say a quadruple “AMEN” to Junger’s comment, I decided to keep my smartphone because I value having the emergency information-access and communication backups enough to pay for the smartphone for that alone; plus, I much prefer using the smartphone’s camera and dictation app to having to carry separate appliances, and I use these often in my work.
For me, the question was never whether or not a smartphone is useful. For me, obviously it is. The question is rather:
How can I maximize the benefits of this sleekly convenient multi-tool / communications device, while blocking its djinn-like demands, and so with sharpest powers of observation and consciously directed concentration, stay awake in this world?
I had answered this question by turning my smartphone into a distraction free smartphone, as I realized when I read Jake Knapp’s post.
Knapp’s version of “distraction free” turned out to be different than mine– he deleted his smartphone’s Mail and browser apps, which I kept. And when I Googled around a bit to find other writers who had tried to convert their smartphone to distraction free– and they were astonishingly few– I found that each had a different version of distraction free. Some recommended using grayscale, which I did not find helpful– but you might. Again, no surprise, what works for one writer may not work for another.
And that got me noodling… over the year-end holidays, instead of going to the movies, I stayed home and made my App Evaluation Flowchart for a Custom Distraction Free Smartphone, which you will find at the end of this post.
THIS WRITER’S DISTRACTION FREE SMARTPHONE (DFS or “defis”)
In early 2019, here’s where I stand, comfortable at last, with my smartphone. My defis, as it were. In order of importance, I use my smartphone as / for a:
Camera (for stills and video)
Audioplayer (various apps for audio books, podcasts, and music, which I usually listen to when flying or driving, never when walking or on public transport)
Emergency Mail
Recorder (dictation app for interviews)
Google translator
Emergency telephone
Emergency Google Maps
Emergency Safari
Calculator
Flashlight
In essence, I use my smartphone only when I decide it will serve me for a specific purpose, e.g., to take a photo, make a call, record an interview. Otherwise, it stays in the charging station at home or zipped into its felt bag in my backpack, wifi off, roaming off. I do not allow it to beep, rill, cheep, chirp, ding, ping or vibrate.
Other than the above-mentioned apps, I have deleted all apps (except the ones Apple will not allow me to delete; those I corralled into a folder I labeled “NOPE.” Do not ask me what they are, I do not remember.)
No social media apps, no Whatsapp, no news, no games.
All– all– notifications are off.
About the smartphone as a phone: I make a call from the smartphone maybe two or three times a month. I never check voicemail. Ever. I don’t know how to check voicemail and don’t tell me its easy because I don’t want to know how.
If you leap to conclude that I’m living the life of a Luddite you’d be wrong. I do make and receive plenty of phone calls– except for emergencies, on a landline. I Skype. I spend hours galore on email– but at my desk, on a laptop. On the laptop I also manage my website and blog. I podcast, too, editing the audio with GarageBand (listen in anytime here). And I film and edit short videos for my YouTube and Vimeo channels.
When I first got an iPhone nearly a decade ago, oh, did I fiddle with apps, apps for this and apps for that and apps that would confect a fairy’s hat! I was becharmed by apps! Ingenious things, apps are.
I was on FB, too, until 2015.
But I am a writer of books, and this smartphone rabbit-hole-orama, it wasn’t working for me.
THE TWO MAIN PULLS
For me, the two main pulls to pick up the smartphone have been:
(1) to see any messages from people and/or about matters I care about; (2) to have something convenient to read / look at when I’m away from my desk and feel bored.
Once I had this clear, I could formulate a more effective strategy than vaguely “finding a healthy balance” or blanging down the anvil of will power.
Over the past several years, trying to figure this out, backsliding, and trying again (and again) to figure this out, what I have found actually works is to remove or minimize temptations to even look at, never mind pick up, the smartphone when it is not in my fully conscious and decided interest to do so; and crucially, I have replaced those “pulls” to look at the smartphone with what are, for me, either superior or at least realistically acceptable alternatives.
B.J. FOGG
B.J. Fogg of Stanford University’s Behavior Design Lab has been an influence in my thinking about the smartphone. His basic equation for inducing a behavior is Motivation + Ability + Prompt (all three simultaneous), or B = MAP.
You can read more about Fogg’s behavior model here.
He’s all very sunny and even uses puppets when talking about his behavior model and how it can help people improve their lives, and I for one sincerely appreciate this. But I suspect that people with darker designs (oh I dunno, like those starry eyed newbies with VC in Silicon Valley who would launch a platform / app that, with maximum speed and efficiency, sucks the life-hours, money, and data out of you) also look to professor Fogg as a guru.
What I’m saying is, more likely than not, you are being very, very cannily manipulated by any one of a number of apps to pick up and remain focused on your smartphone despite what you know perfectly well are your better interests.
And understanding the way in is to understand the way out.
THIS WRITER’S STRATEGIES
I don’t pretend that my strategies will work for other writers. This section is not meant to be a series of recommendations but an example: what works for me, a working writer. (If you want to go direct to the App Evaluation Flowchart for a Custom Distraction Free Smartphone, just scroll on down to the bottom of this post.)
(1) Focus digital communications on email, and always at the desk, on the laptop
This is, to-the-moon-and-back, the most powerful strategy for me. (Read about my game-changing 10-point email protocol here.) I take email very seriously. However, with rare, emergency-level exceptions, I check email only on my laptop, only after 3 PM, and I batch it. I thereby establish the boundaries I need to be able to do my work, and I can truthfully say, “I welcome email,” and “the best way to reach me is by email.” And if not perfect, I am ever better about responding to email in a timely manner– since I have relatively fewer distractions!
Many people have told me that they would prefer to communicate with me on FB or Whatsapp, but… too bad! I am a writer who writes books, which means that I need to funnel communication into specific times, not allowing interruptions to leech my attention willynilly throughout the day. If someone cannot summon the empathy to appreciate that, well, like I said. (Anyway, I love you guys.)
This strategy allows me to keep the smartphone silent and in the closet (its charging station) or zipped in its bag inside my backpack. In B.J. Fogg’s terminology, I have hereby eliminated the motivation, the ability, and the prompts to pick up the smartphone. So I don’t.
(2) When out and about, if there’s a chance of having to wait a spell, carry a paperback
Recent Reading: J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands Ye, verily, of the time before Instagram and TripAdvisor (A classic of travel writing and the Irish Renaissance, and a reading cure for “the shallows”) weighing in at about the same as a potato
This is the second most powerful strategy for me, and simple and old-fashioned as it is, it took what seems to me now an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.
I’ve always been an avid reader of books and magazines, but when I got an iPhone, suddenly, in spare moments, such as waiting at the dentist, in line at the grocery store, waiting for a friend in a coffee shop, I found myself pecking at it. I was reading, but… it was, in fact, more often skimming, watching, and surfing.
As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, reading a book and clicking & scrolling on a smartphone (from, say, website to website, to Twitter to FB to Whatsapp to YouTube to Instagram feeds x, then y, then z), do two very different things to one’s brain. The latter literally retrains your brain, resulting in what Carr calls “the shallows,” and once you’re in the shallows, tasks requiring sustained cognitive focus– such as writing a book– become ants-in-the-pants-nigh-impossible.
Don’t tell me I could use a Kindle app to read ebooks on my smartphone; I don’t and I won’t because, again, my goal is to remove as many siren calls to the smartphone as possible, relying on acceptable or superior alternatives. For me, a paperback provides a superior reading experience to an ebook; and if it’s not too heavy, I don’t mind tucking a real book in my bag.
But, by the way, I do read Kindles on occasion, using the Kindle app on my iPad, as a last resort only, when a paper copy is unavailable. I also use my iPad for reading news (which I inevitably regret), a select few favorite blogs, and for listening to audiobooks and podcasts in the kitchen. (If not in its charging station, or with me as I am doing something like say, folding laundry, my iPad remains parked on the kitchen counter.)
In B.J. Fogg’s terminology, with this strategy, I have reduced the motivation to pick up the smartphone. Also in his terminology, I build a tiny habit: when tempted to take out the smartphone to surf, take out the paperback. (You can watch Fogg’s TEDx talk on tiny habits here.)
(3) For a calendar, “to do” lists, and selected contacts, use a Filofax
This strategy is an old one for me, tried and true. As Getting Things Done guru David Allen says, “low-tech is oftentimes better because it is in your face.” The Filofax is a century-old British system designed for engineers that is so efficient it still has legions of devotees, among them myself, for over 30 years now. My lovely and ridiculously sturdy cherry-red leather Filofax normally stays next to my laptop on my desk; I can, but I rarely carry it with me.
As for contacts, I keep the addresses and telephone numbers I need at-hand in the Filofax and the rest in a separate system, but not on the smartphone because, again, I aim to focus my communications on email, and always on the laptop. (My smartphone does have emergency contacts.)
In B.J. Foggese: For my to dos and calendar, I have no motivation nor prompts to pick up the smartphone.
(4) For an alarm clock use an alarm clock (and for a watch use a watch)
Back in the days of my starry-eyed wonderfest with apps, I downloaded three different alarm clock apps. The cornucopia of “alarms,” from harps to waterfalls to drums to roosters yodeling, that was fun. But I deleted them all and instead use a little plastic alarm clock powered by two AA batteries. It weighs almost nothing, cost less than ten bucks, and works just fine– so I can keep the volume on the smartphone on mute. Don’t tell me I could adjust the volume on the alarm clock app because I don’t want to touch the smartphone if I don’t have to, and certainly not as the last thing at night and first thing in the morning. And I don’t want the smartphone parked anywhere near where I sleep.
This strategy might sound silly. How is the alarm clock app different than say, the calculator or the flashlight or the camera or diction app? The answer is, by definition an alarm clock distracts, it prompts me to pick it up to turn it off– and that is precisely what I do not want my distraction free smartphone to do.
This is not trivial.
In B.J. Foggese: another motivation, ability, and prompt to pick up the smartphone eliminated.
(5) Use paper maps
You read that right. People laugh at me. I laugh back! Sometimes I use a store-bought map but more often, before I go out, I’ve Googled on my laptop and printed out or sketched the directions. I do make use of Google Maps on the laptop and on my smartphone in emergencies– this is one of the reasons for which I keep a smartphone. But by relying primarily on paper, rather than GPS via the smartphone in realtime, I have removed yet another reason to pick up and start poking at the smartphone.
An added benefit, crucial for me as a travel writer, is that my sense of space, direction, and the lay of any given landscape have remained sharper.
(If you love the planet and believe everything paper should be digital, I would invite you to Google a bit to learn about the energy realities of server farms and what precisely goes into smartphone batteries.)
(6) Always carry a pen and small a notebook
Another opportunity to not pick up the smartphone.
(7) Make it a habit to keep the smartphone zipped inside its bag
I don’t make a habit of holding my smartphone in my hand, carrying it in a back pocket, or setting it down on the desk or table next to me. Unless it’s an emergency, or I have an excellent, fully conscious reason to take it out and use it, the smartphone stays dead quiet and out of sight in its bag inside the bag.
In B.J. Foggese, I thereby reduce my motivation, ability, and prompts to touch it.
IN CONCLUSION
My smartphone is now simply (albeit miraculously!!) a lightweight selected multi-tool (camera / recorder / audio player / caculator / flashlight) and emergency information-access and communications device which I carry when I go out of the house, unless it is to walk the dogs. (I never take it when I walk the dogs because when I walk the dogs, I walk the dogs.)
My smartphone does have Mail, Safari, and Googlemaps buttons, but because I rely on my laptop for email and other Internet access, and paper for out-and-about navigation, I no longer feel that pesky tug to pick up and peck at the smartphone– but I do have these apps available to me should I need them. And sometimes I do need them.
Ditto the telephone.
Again, and of course, what works for me may not necessarily work for you. But may this new term, Distraction Free Smartphone, or as I would suggest, DFS, or defis, serve you in thinking through your own concerns and strategies for your own smartphone and your own writing.
DFS MODE
I’ll add one more term: “DFS mode.” A smartphone need not be distraction free almost all the time, as mine is. Let’s say one needs to be available on Whatsapp, voicemail, email or to use some other app for family or work that may ping, ring or ding-ding you at random intervals, and so be it; then, for the time alloted for writing (or other deep work), one’s smartphone could be put into DFS mode. As I hope I have made abundantly clear, this would not necessarily be the same as “airplane mode.”
P.S. Cal Newport’sDigital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World will be out next month. From what I’ve read of his other books and blog, this promises to be a pathbreaking book. If nothing else, the term “digital minimalism” adds depth and nuance to our thinking about digital technology and our use of it.
Reading poetry in translation can be like wafting through a door into an eerily beautiful palace. The tiles glow in new colors, shapes are peaked or oval when you expect square, juxtapositions startle, and the cats don’t meow but miau or nya or, as in Norwegian, mjau…
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe, in just a sentence or two, the ideal reader for this book?
ROGER GREENWALD: These
poems are accessible but deep, and they reflect an unusual sensibility, so
anyone who is open to a new experience in poetry is an ideal reader. My
introduction explores why this poetry that is easy to “get” is so hard to
discuss critically; the essay will be of special interest to people concerned
with our relation to the natural world and with ecocriticism.
CMM:What inspired you to translate this work?
RG: Tarjei Vesaas was and is a
famous novelist, but his poetry was like a secret shared among other writers
and a small number of readers. When I first read his poems, I realized that the
best of them were unlike any I had ever read. In addition to his special
sensibility, he has a distinctive voice, pace, and turn of phrase, as well as a
very fine ear for the music of language. And by the time of his death in 1970,
almost none of his poetry was available in English, never mind in versions that
did it justice. In some ways it is very difficult to translate. Twenty years
passed before I had translated a selection to my satisfaction, and then it took
me another eight years (eight drafts) to write my introduction.
CMM: How did you learn the language?
RG: This apparently simple
question poses a problem at once: Which language is “the language”?! I first
learned Norwegian on my own from a textbook. But Norwegian has two official
written norms, and the textbook was about Bokmål, which ultimately derives from
Danish and reflects Norway’s urban dialects. Tarjei Vesaas wrote in Nynorsk,
which ultimately derives from Old Norse via Norway’s rural dialects. I advanced
my knowledge of Bokmål by living in Norway at various times, by doing more
reading, and by bothering my friends with a million questions. Dealing with
Nynorsk required further study, and I cannot claim to have mastered it even as
a reader, so I need more advice and feedback when translating from it than when
translating from Bokmål.
CMM: What was the most important challenge for you in this translation?
RG: Vesaas has certain characteristically odd turns of phrase that are difficult or impossible to render in English. They stretch Norwegian but are not un-Norwegian, so they require creative equivalents that stretch English but are not un-English. And of course English cannot be stretched in exactly the same was as Norwegian can be. But the greatest challenge lay in the responsibility I felt to introduce English-speaking readers to this poetry in a way that would help them to see that it was modern even though it was not urban, and that its relation to the natural world was profound and not a throwback to the English Romantic poets.
CMM: Has his work been an influence for your work as a poet?
RG: I think Vesaas’s poetry
hasn’t exerted as great an influence on my own poetry as has the work of some
other Scandinavian poets, but in one of my poems (“The Milky Way. Big and
Beautiful”) I refer to him and quote three lines; and I’d say that in another
(“The Voice”), the deliberate pace and the way silence creeps into the stanza
breaks probably owe something to Vesaas.
CMM:You have been a consistently productive poet and writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
RG: I started using computers in
the early 1970s to produce files for the literary annual I edited, WRIT Magazine.
Coach House Press, where the journal was printed, was a test bed for
cutting-edge digital typesetting and layout. I learned enough about
computerized editing and typesetting on a UNIX system so that I could take
advantage of it for my own work for about twenty years before I acquired my
first Windows machine. This was an enormous benefit when it came to revision,
especially for translations, and it enabled me to get book manuscripts several
stages closer to publication than had been possible earlier. I felt that
computers trebled my productivity, not in the sense that I wrote more or
translated more, but insofar as they saved large amounts of time and encouraged
me to produce finished manuscripts and files that I knew could be used for
printing.
That was, you might say, the first digital
revolution, the second being that of the Internet and later the World Wide Web.
Online resources have made it much easier and faster to answer certain
questions that arise in writing and translating, whether these be about language
as such, about allusions in texts, or about what a certain landscape, building,
or object looks like. Email has greatly facilitated getting advice and feedback
from friends and colleagues in distant locations, consulting with authors I’ve
translated, and getting proofs from publishers. And the web has made it
possible for me to post descriptions of my books, sample poems, and ordering
links.
Resisting distraction is really a question of
psychology, work habits, and time management. We tend to forget that it was
almost as easy to be distracted and to waste time before the Internet existed
as it is now. One could read magazines and watch TV for hours a day. Those
were, though, less fragmented activities than online distractions can be now,
and were less likely to interrupt constantly. I made an early decision to stay
off all social media, mainly because of concerns about privacy and distrust of
the motives and methods of people like Mr. Green T-shirt. That decision has
meant being uninformed about a few events now and then, and it has perhaps
reduced my ability to promote my work (how many people would really have
followed a Facebook page that posted new material only a few times a year?).
But it has prevented most of the woes we all associate with social media,
including invasion of privacy, online harassment, and the expense of countless
hours on reading and posting.
CMM: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
RG: In my formative years, my
choice was between handwriting on paper and writing on an electric typewriter.
I always used paper then for any work that required real thought and much
revision during the writing process. Later I got to the point where I could
write letters and reports on the typewriter, and sometimes even fiction when it
was driven by a type of nervous energy that was in tune with the hum of the
typewriter. Even after decades of using computers, I still write poetry by
hand, and I tend to translate poetry by hand also. I can write a first draft of
fiction or translated fiction on a computer. Handwritten drafts make it easier
to see all the choices one has tried and then crossed out.
CMM: What’s next for you as a poet and as a translator?
RG: I have more or less
withdrawn from translation to focus on my own work (there is one more large
translation project that I may or may not get to someday). But I do what I can
for my previously published translations, like the Tarjei Vesaas book, which was
first published in 2000 and was out of print for many years. Finding a
publisher for a new edition enabled me to make revisions – the second time I
have been able to revise and/or expand a major selection (on the other occasion
the gap was from 1985 to 2002, when the University of Chicago Press issued North in the
World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen). Don’t ask me whether
such opportunities are translators’ dreams or nightmares!
My first book of poems was published in 1993, my
second (Slow Mountain
Train) in 2015. Now I am hoping to get out my third and fourth
books in the next two years. I have manuscripts beyond those and will be
working on getting them into near-final form. So get off Facebook and watch my
website: www.rogergreenwald.org !
Starting this year, every fourth Monday I run a Q & A with a fellow writer. This fourth Monday features Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, the author of Prodigal Children in the House of G-d: Stories (2018) and six books of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). Preparing to Dance: New Yiddish Songs, a CD of nine of his Yiddish poems set to music by Michał Gorczyński, was released in 2014. Taub was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of New York’s best emerging Jewish artists and has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net award. With Ellen Cassedy, he is the recipient of the 2012 Yiddish Book Center Translation Prize for Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (2016). His short stories have appeared in such publications as Hamilton Stone Review, Jewish Fiction .net, The Jewish Literary Journal, Jewrotica, Penshaft: New Yiddish Writing, and Second Hand Stories Podcast.
C.M. MAYO: You are co-translator (with Ellen Cassedy) from the Yiddish of Blume Lempel’s extraordinary short stories, Oedipus in Brooklyn. Would you say that Lempel’s work has been an influence on your own fiction? Can you talk a bit about some of your influences, and your favorite writers?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Blume Lempel is certainly a source of personal inspiration, and working with Ellen Cassedy on that project was and continues to be a great joy. Despite suffering enormous familial loss in the Holocaust and years of creative block, Lempel built a career as a Yiddish writer with single-minded focus and commitment. She created an authorial voice that was uniquely her own and a prose rich in poetry, experimentation in time and voice, and empathy. She looked at characters at the margins of society and at themes still considered taboo, including abortion, prostitution, and incest. I was drawn to Lempel’s work for all of these reasons and in researching her autobiography, came to be inspired also by the example of her courage in life and art. Our work overlaps somewhat in our interest in life at the margins and blurring the line between poetry and prose, although I think much of Lempel’s work is more firmly anchored than mine in the realm of the experimental and avant-garde. I do see Lempel as a kindred literary spirit.
I have been reading voraciously and widely since childhood. It’s difficult to pinpoint specific literary influences. I prefer to think of texts whose effects remain with me. Even if I don’t recall particular plots, the authors’ themes and concerns, and overall sensibilities remain. I am interested in writers who take risks, who go against the grain, who can create a marriage of emotional impact and beauty of language, who write with psychological acuity and care.
A partial list of favorite English-language fictional texts, in alphabetical order of author’s last name, include:
Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Michelle Cliff, Abeng Marian Engel, Bear Janet Hobhouse, The Furies F.M. Mayor, The Rector’s Daughter Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House: a Romance Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place Joyce Carol Oates, Where is Here? James Purdy, 69: Dream Palace and Other Stories Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Home, and Lila Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House Elizabeth Taylor, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
If we include non-fiction, poetry, and Yiddish literature and world literature in translation, there would be many more titles to add.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer and poet for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: The digital revolution has helped bring about a dynamic international literary culture. Poems and stories can now be read by anyone with computer access. Blogs such as yours also support the work of writers and connect writers and readers. Before appearing in book form, much of my work has appeared in online publications. In the digital age, it is more affordable to publish literary ‘zines, although maintaining the availability of defunct journals remains an issue of concern for literary publishers, writers, and readers. Facebook is useful for sending out announcements of new work and seeing what colleagues and friends have been doing. I also enjoy the travel, food, and family photos that people post! I started on Facebook fairly recently. I thought it would take more of my time that it actually has. I am not on Twitter or other social media.
There’s only a limited amount of time in the day. I like to set aside time for daily translation, reading, and/or writing or writing-related business, as well. The proliferation of media in the digital age offers tempting distractions from writing. There are now so many offerings in television and film, many of them quite literary and demanding extensive viewing time.
Still, I always return to the written word. And I prefer to read in hard copy. Nothing has replaced words on a paper—the joy that comes from concentration on those words, turning the page, the touch of paper, the heft of a book in one’s hand or one’s lap. The poems “Eavesdropping” and “Luddite’s Exhortation” in my fourth collection Prayers of a Heretic explore the pleasures—cerebral, sensual, and otherwise—of books and reading from books. The key to productivity is tuning out all of the distractions to draw on the creativity that emerges from focus and quiet, or perhaps more aptly put, quietude. One can be sitting in a noisy cafe and still be in a place of internal quiet.
But, of course, there are many ways to live and work as a writer. Find what works for you and honor that process.
C.M. MAYO: Are you in a writing group? If so, can you talk about the members, the process, and the value for you?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: When I lived in New York, I was in the Yugntruf Yiddish writers’ circle for many years. Attendees brought in a poem or a story and shared it with the group. It was a great way for me to get feedback on my Yiddish writing and to encounter new Yiddish creativity. That group continues to meet. I have attended two sessions of a poetry group here in Washington, D.C. I’m not sure if that qualifies as being “in a writing group.” Here too, folks distribute the poems, read it aloud, and then provide comments. The feedback was quite rigorous and helpful, and I enjoyed the gatherings. However, I’ve only attended two sessions since my recent focus has been on writing prose and on translating from the Yiddish.
C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing these stories, and if so, how did you break through them?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Fortunately, I did not experience writer’s block while writing these stories. As I note in the book, I wrote Prodigal Children in the House of G-d while on an artist’s residency at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (Eureka Springs, Arkansas). Having three weeks to concentrate solely on writing enabled my turn from poetry to fiction. TWCDH was a magical experience — a great studio, friendly staff and writers in residence, and the ideal setting that combined natural beauty and a charming, historical small town. During the afternoons, I took walks and worked through ideas for the writing I was doing in the studio. Sometimes, I took walks with other writers in residence.
C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question At what point, if any, were you working on paper for these stories? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: My writing life as an adult has largely been conducted on the computer. Of course, the digital revolution has made it easier to submit work to literary magazines. Instead of having to print out hard copies, write and include a self-addressed stamped envelope, and go to the mailbox or post office, one can now submit work electronically. Writing on the computer also allows for extensive revision. In my childhood and youth, I wrote by hand. In college, I sometimes submitted papers typed on a typewriter. So I remember well the challenges in the revision process back then.
C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: I welcome feedback from readers. I prefer e-mail over other forms of communication. I sometimes go for long periods of time without checking Facebook. I rarely use snail mail. I try to answer all letters. Giving readings, particularly ones that include a Q & A, is another great way to connect with readers.
I happened upon the website of novelist Nancy Peacock in, of all places, the comments section of computer science professor Cal Newport’s blog. Newport is the author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Novelist Nancy Peacock’s comments there echoed my own on the topic of social media; moreover, as I am writing about the Seminole Scouts and the Indian Wars in Far West Texas, an undeservedly obscure subject, I was intrigued to learn about her latest novel, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.
From the catalog copy:
“For fans of Cold Mountain and The Invention of Wings comes a tour de force of historical fiction (Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain) that follows the epic journey of a slave-turned-Comanche warrior who travels from the brutality of a New Orleans sugar cane plantation to the indomitable frontier of an untamed Texas, searching not only for the woman he loves but so too for his own identity.
I have been to hangings before, but never my own.
Sitting in a jail cell on the eve of his hanging, April 1, 1875, freedman Persimmon Persy Wilson wants nothing more than to leave some record of the truth his truth. He may be guilty, but not of what he stands accused: the kidnapping and rape of his former master’s wife.
In 1860, Persy had been sold to Sweetmore, a Louisiana sugar plantation, alongside a striking, light-skinned house slave named Chloe. Their deep and instant connection fueled a love affair and inspired plans to escape their owner, Master Wilson, who claimed Chloe as his concubine. But on the eve of the Union Army s attack on New Orleans, Wilson shot Persy, leaving him for dead, and fled with Chloe and his other slaves to Texas. So began Persy’s journey across the frontier, determined to reunite with his lost love. Along the way, he would be captured by the Comanche, his only chance of survival to prove himself fierce and unbreakable enough to become a warrior. His odyssey of warfare, heartbreak, unlikely friendships, and newfound family would change the very core of his identity and teach him the meaning and the price of freedom.
From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Life Without Water, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson is a sweeping love story that is as deeply moving and exciting an American saga as has ever been penned –Lee Smith, author of Dimestore.”
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive literary writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
NANCY PEACOCK: My biggest experience with the digital revolution has been with Facebook. After much cajoling from an agent and the culture, I finally opened a Facebook account. That’s what we’re supposed to do, as writers, right? We’re supposed to promote our work every possible way. I was surprised to find things that mattered to me on Facebook, and then, as those things dwindled, I became addicted to searching for them. In the end, my mind became fractured, and I was unable to focus on what I needed to focus on: the writing. I deleted my FB account. I did not disable it. I deleted it, and I feel my mind healing. It was like coming off a drug.
I’m a very private person, and my writing grows from that. I need spaciousness to pull it all together, and spaciousness is coming to be seen a bit like the horse and buggy. Quaint and picturesque, but impractical. But I needed it. Not having it is a deal breaker to me.
I also spend a lot of time on research. Writing any novel requires keeping a lot of plates in the air. Writing a historical novel requires keeping those plates from colliding and breaking against facts and dates. It takes focus. I couldn’t focus because social media had splintered my ability to do so.
I think writers, and publishers (maybe especially publishers) need to start taking a bigger picture of what literature means, and what it has to offer that other forms of storytelling, namely movies and television, do not. Writing and reading are ways to slow down. I wish the industry would embrace that, and stop whipping the more, more, more horse.
For me it really came down to either being a writer or presenting as a writer. I chose the former.
C.M. MAYO: Are you in a writing group? If so, can you talk about the members, the process, and the value for you?
NANCY PEACOCK: I am in a writer’s group. The group grew from a women’s writers group which I led for years, and for income. Over time the members became very solid with each other, and I kept looking in from the position of leader thinking I want to join. I thought that for years. Finally I asked if they would accept me as a member, and they said yes. So I lost some income because I no longer lead the group, but I gained an incredible group. These women are sharp, funny, great listeners and exceptional responders to the written word. We have three novelists (one needs to finish her novel – she knows who she is!), a poet, and an essayist, short story writer, and poet combined into one amazing person, who also bakes great cakes! We’ve seen each other through life events, sickness, raising children, publication, struggling with the work (although it is mostly me who struggles and crashes with the work) and much more.
I think the format of a writing group is very important, and that not enough people pay attention to that. I don’t think just any comment goes. You need an agreement among the members on how to respond. For instance, I once brought in a piece to a different writing group. The piece mentioned being in therapy, and one of the members response was to say she was glad I was still in therapy. She said it again and again, and it was personal, a judgement on my sanity, and had nothing to do with the writing or the story I was telling. This was not OK at all and I tried to discuss it with them and got shot down for it. One of the reasons my current group works so well and has lasted so long is because we follow guidelines that were established at the very beginning.
C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing this novel, and if so, how did you break through them?
NANCY PEACOCK:The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson was the least blocked novel I have ever written. The opening line, “I have been to hangings before, but never my own,” arrived to me on a walk I took one morning to watch the sunrise. It literally was suddenly in my head. Out of nowhere. I went home and wrote it down, even though at the time I was very discouraged about writing and publishing and was thinking I might never write again. That evening I watched the documentary about The West by Ken Burns, and I idly wondered if there were any black Indians. I knew there were white Indians from having read The Captured by Scott Zesch years earlier. From these two things, the line in my head and the idea of a black Indian, the first chapter poured out of me.
With some books you labor hard to get to know the characters, and to gain their trust. With others you are possessed. This was a possession. I had to do a lot of research and shape the narrative around historical events, but Persy (Persimmon Wilson) was very willing to talk to me. I had a sense of urgency from him, just as if he was about to hang in a few days time, which at the opening of the novel, he is.
C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question. At what point, if any, were you working on paper for this novel? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
NANCY PEACOCK: I mostly compose on the computer. I don’t have trouble with it. I trained myself to do it with my first book. When it comes to anything but writing, I don’t like being on the screen. It’s the interaction between story and me that makes composing on the computer different from all other screen activity. If I get stuck on something, if a scene is not working, I turn to writing by hand. That usually makes something break through that wouldn’t come before. I also teach two prompt writing classes each week, during which I write with the students, and I sometimes use that time to work on a novel. I remember vividly writing the scene in which Persy is captured by the Comanche in my class, and reading it to them. It went almost verbatim into the book.
C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail?
NANCY PEACOCK: I am in active touch with a large group of local writers and readers because I’ve built a community around a free class that I teach once a month I’ve been doing this for fifteen years now, and hundreds of people have come through my workshop. Because of this community building, I’ve built a local fan base. National has proven more difficult, and I don’t really think social media helps. I think it’s spitting in the wind.
I have a website and occasionally hear from someone via the contact form. I always love hearing from anyone who’s read my book. I’ve found that if someone takes the time to contact me, it’s because they liked something in the book, so it’s (mostly) been a positive experience.
I’d like to encourage readers to contact writers whose work has impressed them. There’s so much competition to the printed page these days. I don’t even think publishing houses understand the unique value of the novel.
Another community building activity I hope to organize is a regular letter writing campaign to favorite authors. Real letters. Not email. Real letters (or postcards!) with stamps and handwritten words on them. I am extremely touched when I receive one of these, and I’d like to make a space for readers to reach out to writers. I’d like this to be a regular part of the reading experience. Another nod to the slowing down reading gives you. Nothing says love like snail mail!
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.”
> Talbott offers the entire text of The
Future Does Not Compute for free on his website at this link, along with an annotated table of contents. You
can also find a paperback edition from your go-to online bookseller.
From the catalog copy:
“Many pundits tell you that the computer is ushering us toward a new Golden Age of Information. A few tell you that the computer is destroying everything worthwhile in our culture. But almost no one tells you what Stephen L. Talbott shows in this surprising book: the intelligent machine gathers its menacing powers from hidden places within you and me. It does so, that is, as long as we gaze into our screens and tap on our keyboards while less than fully conscious of the subtle influences passing through the interface…
“The Net is the most powerful invitation to remain asleep we have ever faced. Contrary to the usual view, it dwarfs television in its power to induce passivity, to scatter our minds, to destroy our imaginations, and to make us forget our humanity. And yet — for these very reasons — the Net may also be an opportunity to enter into our fullest humanity with a self-awareness never yet achieved. But few even seem aware of the challenge, and without awareness we will certainly fail.”
For me Talbott’s work was a wondrous but belated
find, given my focus on the conundrums of technology in my book-in-progress on
Far West Texas (which also, on few occasions, ranges as far west as Silicon
Valley, for reasons which will be clear in the book itself).
NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT COMPUTE –BUT FIRST, OWEN BARFIELD
Owen Barfield: “Our destiny is to become conscious and free”
In his acknowledgements Talbott
writes that he is “indebted above all to a man I have met only though his
published writings: Owen Barfield.” Barfield (1898-1987) was an English philosopher,
author of Worlds Apart and Saving the Appearances, among many
other works, and part of the Oxford literary circle that included C.S.
Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkein. Writes Talbott:
“The core insights underlying all [Barfield’s] work remain among the most original scholarly achievements of this century. So original, in fact, that these insights are impossible to accept– even impossible to think.”
An important influence on Owen Barfield was the work of Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), most notably his book The Philosophy of Freedom. When he found Steiner’s works, Barfield had already independently come to many similar conclusions. In the documentary on Barfield cited above, “it was a case of like finding like.”
See the page on Rudolf Steiner here and an archive of his works here.
Caveat: Reading Steiner can get very strange very fast; not everyone has the stomach for reading about angelic channelings, epic battles in the supercelestial realms, etc. Steiner’s Anthroposophy is an offshoot of Theosophy, and as such, heavily influenced by many of the ideas of Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky. (Read a brief note about Madame Blavatsky, the monumental figure of modern esotercism, in the excerpt from my book about Francisco I. Madero here.)
But: keep your shoes on your feet and your helmet
buckled onto your coconut! Steiner was, among many other things, the founder of
the Waldorf Schools. Read about that influence in Silicon Valley here (New
York Times) and here (Business
Insider). There is also a video posted
in 2013 by the Waldorf School of the Peninsula which explains the
educational philosophy in some detail.
(I’m focusing on computers here, so I won’t get
into Steiner and Biodynamic Agriculture; do Google or Duckduckgo should you
feel so moved. P.S. Wikipedia, aka wiki-whenever-whomever-whatever, is likely
not your best source of information on this subject.)
“[This is] the most radical book that Steiner wrote, it is the foundation of all his thought… I think it is the only book that would have convinced me he had something important… to say… he is removing the blinkers from the Western mindset. He clarifies the act of knowing… he brings it down to the simplest possible elements and he shows you where, in your thinking, it’s possible that you might be free. He shows you, there’s a self-contained place in your thinking where it’s absolutely clear that you could be free…. If you build from that place, you can be sure that what you are thinking and feeling and willing is coming from a place that is not being determined by anybody or anything else… we can begin to know ourselves in the world, and that would be the true basis of freedom.”
BACK TO NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT
COMPUTE
Talbott:
“During most of [the] seventeen years I was working with computers, and it slowly became clear to me that the central issues bedeviling all of us who try to understand the relation between the human being and the computer are issues upon which Barfield began throwing light some seven decades ago. The Future Does Not Compute is my attempt to reflect a little of that light toward the reader.”
Talbott on awareness of self and awareness of the nature of machines:
“Machines become a threat when they embody our limitations without our being fully aware of those limitations. All reason shouts at us to approach every aspect of the computer with the greatest caution and reserve. But what incentive has our culture provided for the exercise of such caution and reserve? It’s more in our nature to let technology lead where it will, and to celebrate that leading as progress.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“On the one hand: the machine as an expression of the human being. On the other hand: the machine as an independent force that acts or reacts upon us. Which is it? I am convinced there is no hope for understanding the role of technology in today’s world without our first learning to hold both sides of the truth in our minds, flexibly and simultaneously. The relationship between human being and machine has become something like a complex symbiosis.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“If it is only through self-awareness and inner adjustment that I can restrict the hammer in my hands to its proper role, I must multiply the effort a millionfold when dealing with a vasty more complex technology– one expression in a much more insistent manner its own urgencies.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“understanding is the basis of freedom.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“the computer, one might almost say, was invented as an inevitable refinement of the corporation” Ch. 3 “The Future Does Not Compute”
“what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought… The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsability for them.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“another word for responsability is ‘dominion’– not the dominion of raw power, but of effective wisdom.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“We can no longer stop or even redirect the engine of technological change by brute, external force. Such force is the principle of the engine itself, and only strengthens it. We must tame technology by rising above it and reclaiming what it not mechanical in ourselves.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“But Mander does neglect one critical fact: what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought. Yes, our artifacts gain a life of their own, but it is, in a very real sense, our life. We too easily ignore the ways in which we infuse these artifacts with the finespun web of our own, largely subconscious habits of thought. The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsibility for them.
[Much of chapter 6 includes a scathing attack on
George Gilder’s ideas.]
“…the more complex and indirect the mechanisms through which human action come into expression, the more you and I must be masters of ourselves.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…one way or another, you are creating your future. Wake up before you find that the devils within you have done the creating.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the view that a technology can be ‘democratizing and leveling’ testifies to a radical alienation from everything that constitutes both the inner life and culture” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the telephone, automobile, radio, and television have all contributed to social fragmentation, personal isolation, and alienation from both self and other” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“What hope is there for peace and human rights when I conceive the barriers separating me from my fellows to be mere obstructions on a network technology diagram rather than the powers of darkness shadowing my own heart?” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
On freedom and power:
“The need is to recognize ourselves in our machines, and our machines in ourselves, and begin to raise ourselves above our machines.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“Freedom, you might say, is not a state, but a tension” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“The doing required of us is a refusal to continue seeing all problems as the result of a doing rather than a being, as technical rather than spiritual.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“…if we persist in the cultivation of a purely technical stance toward our work and our technology, we will find that, like the corporation, it takes on a life of its own, which is at the same time, our life–but out of control and less than fully conscious… this autonomous life may exercise a totalitarian suppression of the human spirit that will be all the more powerful for its diffuseness and invisibility” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
On the so-called “global village”:
“…could it be that what we so eagerly embrace, unawares, are the powers of dissolution themselves?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“…what concerns me is the likelihood of our expressing within a new social and technological landscape the same spiritual vacuity that gave rise to the old tyrannies” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“The global village is… a technological creation. Many would-be village architects are inspired by te endless potentials they discern in a satellite dish planted among thatched roof houses. This techno-romantic image calls up visions of information sharing and cooperation, grassroots power, and utopian social change. What it ignores is the monolithic and violently assimilative character of the resulting cultural bridges.” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On awareness and loss:
“The light of mathematics may have descended into our minds from the circling stars, but how many students of mathematics still look to the night sky with wonder?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On “helping” developing countries by bringing modern technology:
“the logic and assumptions of our technology can prove bitterly corrosive. Worse, the kind of community from which Western technical systems commonly arise is, for the most art, noncommunity–typified by the purely technical, one-dimenional, commercially motivated, and wholly rationalized environments of corporate research and development organizations.”
More:
“…human life can be sustained only within a sea of meaning, not a network of information” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
Heavvvvy….
“…our rush to wire the world will some day be seen to have spawned a suffering as great as that caused by this century’s most ruthless dictators”
On the corporation (corporation as machine):
“Is the corporation a human activity in the service of human needs, or not? It is remarkble how easily and subtly the human-centered view slips from our grasp. Indeed, just so far as the corporation is viewed as an enterprise designed to score a profit, rather than to serve worthwhile ends under the discipline of economic controls, to that extent the entire organization has already been cut loose from its human justification and reduced to something like a computational machine” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Nugget o’ wisdom:
“… every problem is a gift… [it] invites the production of new, human “capital.’ This is far different from seeing a problem merely as something to be gotten rid of by the most efficient means possible.” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Essence:
“It’s not the Net we’re talking about here; it’s you and me. And surely that’s the only place to begin. Neither liberation nor oppression can become living powers in any soil except that of the human heart” Ch 11
Yep:
“If we experience our machines as increasingly humanlike, then we are experiencing ourselves as increasingly machinelike.” Ch 11
“…we are strongly tempted to use our freedom in order to deny freedom, pursuing instead the mechanization of life and thought” Ch 11
“… what is directly at risk now–what the computer asks us to abdicate– are our independent powers of awareness. Yet these powers are the only means by which we can raise ourselves above the machine” Ch 11
“What if the human being to whom we so beautifully adapt the computer is the wrong sort of human being? What if our efforts really amount to a more effective adaptation of the human being to the machine, rather than the other way around?” Ch 11
“…we have learned to regard ourselves as ghosts in the machine… we have more and more become mere ghosts in the machine” Ch 11
Quotable:
“an electronic New Jerusalem, its streets paved with silicon” Ch. 24 “Electronic Mysticism”
More to ponder:
“ancient man, much more than we, experienced himself rather like an like an embryo within a surrounding, nourishing cosmos… a plenum of wisdom and potency”
“the mythic surround was engaged in weaving the ancient mind, as in a dream”
“From Tolkein’s storyteller– who originates and remains one with his own mind– they have descended to mechanican tinkerer… just so far as we forget our ancient descent from a cosmos of wisdom above us– we lose the basis of creative mastery, an offer ourselves to be remade by the mechanisms below us”
“we are pursuing an experiment every bit as momentous as the discovery of mind at the dawning of western civilization– what manner of god will we be?”
Essential quote from Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute:
“…what we have today is in some respects a seriously disabled consciousness, and… our own infatuation with machines is both a symptom of our disability and a further contributor to it.”
eA bouquet of bienvenidos for new readers of this blog in 2018. And as you long-time readers know, I post here at “Madam Mayo” blog on Mondays. For 2018, Monday is still the magic day, and every fourth Monday of the month will feature either a post on cyberflanerie or a Q & A with another writer, poet, and/or literary translator.
This first Q & A for 2018 is with crackerjack literary novelist, short story writer, and essayist Leslie Pietrzyk who has a new novel out this month, which I cannot wait to read. Silver Girl is the title, and it has already been garnering outstanding reviews, including a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. (For the unititiated, a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly is a B-Freaking-D for which, lest you own a wine shop, you do not have enough champagne.)
C.M. MAYO:You have been a consistently productive literary writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
LELSIE PIETRZYK: Oh, yes, yes, yes…I’m a sucker for that siren song of the online world. I’m not sure I’ve come up with the answer for maintaining focus, but sometimes I’ll try setting timers (say, no Facebook until two hours have passed) or working late at night (fewer people online to chat with). I don’t answer email on the weekends.
But what works better for me (unless I’m kidding myself), is that I’ve become more open to working WITH social media and the wide world of Google available while I’m writing. Why knock myself out trying to imagine the color of nail polishes in 1982 when I can simply Google for an answer and see an array before me? Why berate myself for dipping into Facebook for five minutes? Why not just accept that distractions are part of our world now and try to retrain myself to write deeply amidst them?
CM: Are you in a writing group? If so, can you talk about the members, the process, and the value for you?*
LP: For many years I was in an incredible, high-level writing group of 6 women who shared novels-in-progress…dear Madam Mayo belonged to this group! I think I learned how to write a novel from these monthly meetings.
When the group dissipated after 10 years, I was—honestly—tired of having critical voices in my head. Plus, I was in the beginning phases of putting together a story collection that was linked unconventionally, by incident (in each story, a young husband dies suddenly; the book became This Angel on My Chest). Because what I was doing was so difficult, and because I didn’t know how on earth I was going to make this premise work, and because I didn’t want to hear one word about my flailing, I decided that it was time for a different kind of group.
I started my neighborhood prompt writing group, and we meet once a month and write for 30 minutes to open-ended, one-word prompts. We can read out loud or not, and there are no critiques, only admiration. We’ve been meeting for more than 5 years now, and chunks of Silver Girl emerged from these meetings.
CM: Did you experience any blocks while writing this novel, and if so, how did you break through them?
LP: My biggest block actually came right at the beginning. I had been writing character sketches and scenes in my prompt group for at least eighteen months before I started the book in earnest, so I had all this material. My two college girl characters were dark and edgy and complicated, and I’d teased out a ton of fascinating history to their relationship. When I finally finished This Angel on My Chest I thought it would be a simple glide right into the new book…but I realized immediately that my complicated, interesting characters had no plot! It was a humbling moment.
I started doing more research into the Tylenol murders in the early 80s (which is the backdrop for the book) and focused on brainstorming potential connections between my girls and that event. I won’t say I ended up with an outline per se, but eventually I found a path for the book’s events. (Nor will I say that anything about writing this book was a “simple glide”!)
CM: Back to a digital question. At what point, if any, were you working on paper for this novel? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
LP: I never thought I’d say this, but paper was very important! I’m usually all-computer-all-the-time, but I’ve found that writing to prompts on paper feels freeing and takes my mind to riskier, more interesting places. So I wrote about Jess and the unnamed narrator many, many times across several little notebooks. The problematic parts came in trying to locate scenes I was sure I’d remembered writing, and when I had to type into the computer, a task I despise. Perhaps even more problematic is the constant fear that I’ll lose one of my notebooks to carelessness or fire before I transcribe its contents!
CM: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, or some combination?
LP: I’m far too disorganized to send a newsletter. Also, I retain enough Midwestern upbringing to wonder, who wants to hear from me? An email from a reader is always a fun surprise or a tweet…but I’m still loyal to Facebook. I generally post publically so anyone can follow me. I’ve actually come to know many readers and writers through my FB scroll. And for real old-school types, I’ve still got my literary blog!** I used to be very reliable about posting and am erratic now, but I hope the site still retains a scrap of personal flair: www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Email access is on my website (along with some of my favorite recipes): www.lesliepietrzyk.com
*CM: I too left our writing group, and for similar reasons. (I was about half way into an epic and epically complex historical novel, and after I got rolling with that, receiving critiques from other writers who were, of necessity, reading 30 pages out of context, was turning into more trouble than it was worth to me– and, to further complicate matters, I was transitioning to living in Mexico City again.) Nontheless I remain immensely grateful for members’ critiques of the beginning drafts of this novel, as well as of several other short stories and literary essays. And I miss the comraderie of those meetings with such excellent friends and esteemed colleagues. Those years for me personally, and for my writing, were a rare blessing.
**CM: For anyone interested in writing and publishing literary fiction, Leslie Pietrzyk’s Work-in-Progress blog is a read well worth your while.
BIG FAT CAVEAT: If you have a job and/or family situation that oblige you to use your smartphone like a bodily appendage, dear reader, a shower of metaphorical lotus petals upon you, but this post is not for you. Perhaps you might enjoy reading this post from 2012 instead. See you next Monday.
The challenge in a pistachio shell: How to maximize the quality of one’s email, both incoming and outgoing, while minimizing the time and effort required to dispatch it— all the while maintaining the blocks of uninterrupted time necessary for one’s own writing?
What works for me may not work for you, dear reader, but I know that many of you are also writers, and a few of you are artists and/or scholars, so perhaps—and here’s hoping— my time-tested 10 point protocol for dealing with email will be of as much help to you as it has been to me.
A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON CONTEXT: EMAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!RRRRRRR
How is a writer to cope with this snake-headed conundrum-o-rama that just about everyone everywhere has been wrestling with since it first emerged out of the DARPA-depths of this rapacious fabulosity we call the Internet?
I’ve been slogging it out with email for more years than I care to count. It was sometime in the mid-1990s when I logged on to my first account; I but fuzzily recall the roboty-dialup-and-connection sounds and an inky screen with neon-green text. A few years after that, I was using this cutting-edge thing called an AOL account. (Whew, AOL, Paleolithic!) Now I use a nearly-as-ancient yahoo account plus a pair of gmail accounts all funneled into ye olde Outlook Express inbox, into which pour… pick your metaphor…
(a) Rains! (b) Niagaras! (c) Avalanches! (d) Gigazoodles of emails!
As anyone who remembers the late 1990s will attest, it seemed that overnight email blossomed into a hot-house monster—or, I should say, a Macy’s Parade of monsters— and for me, by 2009-2010, when I was on tour for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire at the same time that my father was in his last days, trying to cope with email, both professional and personal, had become a nightmare.
In 2011-2012 I was tempted to follow the example of “Swiss Miss” blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg after her three months of maternity leave: Declare email bankruptcy. Many a time I was also tempted to remove my email address from my website. Neither of those strategies appealed to me, however; I appreciated so many of those messages, and I also appreciated that, apart from spam and the occasional bit of nonsense, behind those messages were relationships that I sincerely valued, even cherished.
I also realized—and this is something I am writing about in my book on Far West Texas— that hyper-connectivity along with endless carousels of hyper-palatable distractions are now woven into the very fabric of modern life. As long as the electric grid continues functioning, I doubt these forces impinging on one’s experience of work, family, social life, politics, and travel, will diminish; on the contrary.
“hyper-connectivity along with endless carousels of hyper-palatable distractions are now woven into the very fabric of modern life.”
Over the past several years, chip by chip, I managed to whittle down that ghastly backlog (not to zero, but on some days it gets razor-close). More importantly, by trial, error, research, and mental muscle, I formulated a more workable strategy for dispatching the ongoing flow.
Again, that caveat: this post is not for those who need to be continually available to a boss, colleagues, clients, friends, or family.
IT STARTED WITH SOME ILLUMINATING READING… THEN THE FLOODLIGHTS SWITCHED ON WITH “THE MACHINE STOPS”
I gleaned many an insight and tip for managing email from:
For me the most enlightening reading of all, however, and strange to say, was a work of fiction from 1909: E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”Astonishingly, that short story written more than a century ago by an Edwardian Englishman best known for his novel A Passage to India, envisions email, texting, Facetime, and the like. It also seems Forster anticipated the American diet built around corn-syrup heavy fast food. The main character, cocooned in technology, has turned into a heartless, incurious, yet hyper-connected blob.
On reading this sci-fi horror, I realized that one needs to evaluate a technology not by its gee-whiz-what-would-Steve-Jobs-say factor, but by how it affects the body. I mean, by how it affects one’s human body, brains to toenails, now, here, on Planet Earth.
THE BODY AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THEATER OF SPACE-TIME
(1) Assuming one can afford it, does a given technology help one realize one’s conscious intentions born of free will?
(2) Does using said technology cause one to serve or to neglect the body?
(3) Is there a better available alternative?
These are the key questions to answer for a sense of the true and full (both monetary and nonmonetary) net cost / benefit of utilizing a given technology because if your body, which by the way, includes the brain, ends up not working the way it was meant to, well, in terms of going anywhere or doing anything or interacting with other people, that more than kind of sucks.
Some metaphysicians argue that we are not our bodies, but in essence,immortal pinpoints of consciousness. It seems to me that if they’re right, after we finish up here on Planet Earth, we have forever and eternity to do what immortal pinpoints of consciousness do; and if those metaphysicians are wrong, well, then they’re wrong, and we won’t be here anymore to argue with them about it anyway.
Either way, as I write this and you read this, we are conscious, each in our place in the Theater of Space-Time. We did not arrive here encased in technology, but in our human bodies, with all their pain and joy and bones and squishiness and awkwardness and grace. Why then would we want machines to do everything and our breathing for us— unless, of course one has the crap-awful luck to require an iron lung?
I want to utilize technology not to supplant but to enhance living this life— this human life on Planet Earth. Or, to use my new favorite metaphor, to enhance my experience of being here now in the Theater of Space-Time.
Technology is not bad per se, of course; it can help us survive and even thrive. But last I checked, a quality human life requires being able to breathe, walk, see, hear, exercise, sleep, eat nutritious food and drink adequate clean water, soak up some beauty, and interact in multitudinous ways with other people. What good is a technology that turns us into blobs staring at and fiddling with screens all day, even as we neglect our relationships? (Or walk into oncoming traffic?)
On the other hand, email, like pen-and-paper-correspondence of old, is one technology, a powerful one, that when properly employed can help us work with / get along with other people. And like pen-and-paper-correspondence of old, for a writer email can be a joy.
Dead-simple observations, I’ll grant you, gentle reader.
Another dead-simple observation: Email is like any other tool in that it can be used to good or bad purpose. For example, you could use a hammer to pound down a nail that might otherwise snag your sweater, or, say, pulp your neighbor’s pet goldfish (not recommended).
And on the scale of expertise, one can use email poorly, or with world-class finesse. Let’s say, my very Aristotelian aim has been to employ email reasonably well so that it may prove useful— and without the mental drag of noodathipious flooflemoofle!
DOWN WITH NOODATHIPIOUS FLOOFLEMOOFLE!
Finally, after years of frustration and experimentation… drum roll…. I am no longer overwhelmed by email. I have not arrived at “inbox zero” because….drum roll… I am not dead!
And knowing that I am not dead, other human beings in the Theater of Space-Time continually send me emails, and I, in turn, write them back. Ping, pong. And that Medusa’s hair of a conundrum-o-rama about pinging the pongs and pongings the pings, and which pings to pong, etc., is now wrestled down, at least in my own mind, to a pretty little pretzel.
YEAH, PUT SOME MUSTARD ON IT.
Now I can sincerely say that I welcome my correspondence (ahem, email). I love to hear from friends (lunch, yeah!), family (weddings, yay!), colleagues (congrats on your new book, lotus petals upon you!), and from readers, known to me or not, I always appreciate a kind and/or thoughtful word about my books / some subject of interest / relevant to my work. I even appreciate cat videos! (Just kidding about the cat videos. But cousin A., I don’t mind if you send me a cat video.)
Herewith:
1. SCHEDULED BATCHING
For me, of all the 10 points in my method, processing emails not one or two or three at a whim, but in scheduled batches was the game-changer.
I usually do 20 minutes of email processing with a stopwatch. It’s not that I am trying to hurry through my email, but rather, I am respecting the limits of my brain’s ability to effectively focus on it. I’m a speed-reader and I can type faster than lickety-split, but on most days I can deal with email for only about 20 minutes before my brain cells run low on glucose and I end up scrolling up and down the screen, dithering, feeling scattered— in short, procrastinating. (You might be able to do 10 minutes, or, say, an hour in one go— of course, not everyone’s energy to focus on their email is the same, or the same every day and in every circumstance. One can always set the stopwatch for a different amount of time.)
Don’t believe me about batching? Check out the extra-crunchy research at MIT (PDF).
By processing email in 20 minute batches, when the sessions all add up over the arc of the day, I find that I accomplish more in, say, one hour of three separate 20 minute sessions than I would have had I plowed on for an hour straight.
When the stopwatch dings, I do not expect to have finished— “inbox zero” is a fata morgana! And that’s OK, because I have another email batch session already scheduled (a few hours later, or five minutes later. It’s important to take a break, at the very least stand up and stretch.)
Above all, because I am focussing on email at my convenience, on my schedule, my attention is no longer so fractured. I need not attempt to wrestle with each and every email as it comes in; and of course, some emails cannot or should not be answered immediately. I aim to dispatch the average daily inflow. In other words, if, net of spam, I receive an average of 30 emails per day, then I should be averaging 30 emails dispatched per day— they need not be one and the same emails. One day I might dispatch 50, and another day, 10.
The point is, there’s no there there, as long as my email account is working, barring volcanic explosions of a geological nature, I’m probably never in this lifetime going to get to inbox zero. What matters is maintaining a consistently adequate dispatching process.
The easiest way to keep track of the process is to keep a running tally of all undispatched emails as of the close of the last session of the day. (In Outlook Express, for each folder of undispatched email, select all, go to the main menu, click edit, select “Mark all unread,” and it will automatically generate a tally for that folder.)
(And by the way, when the batching session is done, I close my Outlook Express. I never, ever leave it open. And would I never, ever, use any alarm for new email.)
I used to download email into an undifferentiated inbox at random moments and, oftentimes, even as email was still downloading, start answering willynilly. How about that for an attention-fracking technique!
Now I begin each email session as I would with a haul of paper mail: first,by taking it all in; second, deleting the junk; and third, organizing the correspondence I want to look at and/or answer into precisely labeled files.
Files are easy to create and, when emptied of their contents, to delete, or rename or whatever— a powerful tool within a tool. And I cannot overemphasize how effective a simple and flexible filing system has been for helping me focus and more quickly dispatch my email.
Of course, just like a paper filing system, too many files can be counterproductive. For me, the best filing system is one that holds 15 or fewer emails per file. So if I have a bunch of files with one or two emails, I might consolidate those; if I have, say, 50 emails in one, I might to break that up into, say, two to four more files.
My filing system changes depending on what I’m working on or dealing with in my life. This week, nearing the holidays, it looks like this:
INBOX (this has whatever I’m going to tackle now, preferably never more than 11 emails)
BACKLOG: TEXAS (anything to do with my book in-progress) BACKLOG: FAMILY BACKLOG: FRIENDS & COLLEAGUES BACKLOG: FINANCIAL BACKLOG: OTHER
I do not respond to rude or certifiably ultra-weird messages, and as with businesses that spew spam,* I add those email addresses to my “block sender” list. Happily, there are not many of those, and happily, once I’ve blocked them, with lightning ease, I never see their emails again!
Out of sight, out of mind.
*(Phishers tend to use one-time only emails; those I just delete.)
Many of my writer friends agonize over emails (as well as social media comments) from trolls and nuts and spammers. I tell them as I tell you, dear reader, it really is this simple to make them all go away. The challenge is, your ego, prompted by its its arch sense of justice, might jump-up-and-down-insist on responding to them, but your ego, if it’s like most people’s, including mine, should not be in driver’s seat here. Surely you have better things to do with your time and attention than engage with emotionally stunted, social-skill-challenged, and possibly dangerously disturbed individuals. (If you lived in a big city, would you leave your kitchen’s back door open to the alleyway 24/7?)
If you relish unnecessary fights and pointless thrills, well, as they say in Mexico, dios los hace y ellos se juntan (God makes them and they get together.) I prefer the Polish saying, Not my circus, not my monkeys.
[ VIDEO ]
Viva Moti Nativ! (Seriously, I took Moti Nativ’s Feldenkrais workshop, it was a blast.)
4. PRIORITIZE & TACKLE
Stopwatch ticking, after having done the DDO, then I prioritize emails (and other related tasks as noted below), and then I tackle them.
There’s no magic formula here: I might think about it for a moment or three, then decide what should come first.
(Once dealt with, I archive each email by year. Some people just delete them; in my repeated experience, however, that is not a good idea.)
5. SWEEP OUT THE SPAM FOLDER ONCE PER DAY
I check the spam folder once per day because that is precisely about how often I find an important email in there. These days floods of spam are coming from phishers (easy to spot for many reasons, also because they vary their email addresses); those I don’t touch, I just delete them.
(I remain perplexed by correspondents who do not check their spam folders. On the other hand, checking too often wastes time—small amounts, but they add up.)
.
6. APPLY & ADJUST “SENDER FILTERS” AS NEEDED
I’m not talking about an app or programming or anything complicated. By “sender filter,” a concept I grokked an eon ago but a term I first encountered in Cal Newport’s Deep Work, I mean some specific information on one’s contact page that, ideally in a kind and generous spirit, encourages potential senders to not send email— so that, for the few emails that do squeeze through, I am able to respond quickly, politely, and thoughtfully.
My contact page includes a long lineup of sender filters: First, a newsletter signup (mainly for those who want to know when I will be teaching a workshop or post a new podcast); then it answers FAQs, such as “where can I find your books?” (I am ever-amazed by that question in this day of amazon and Google, but I do get such emails fairly often); for book club inquiries; the best way to reach me for media and speaking inquiries; answers to writerly questions (“how to find a publisher,” etc.); rights inquiries; press kits including high res images; and finally…
… (few indeed seem to have the attentional snorkel gear to arrive there at the bottom)….
… if someone still wants to email me, he will find my email address.
Like many other writers, back in pioneer days, once I had a live website showing my email address, I found myself receiving so many messages from people seeking my advice about / feedback on / encouragement of their writing, it would have been impossible to answer them all individually. As a solution, many authors have opted for what I think of as “The Wall of Silence”— no email address at all—and/or what seems to me a snotty-sounding third-person notice along the lines of “Wiggy Blip is so famous and busy being fabulously famous, he cannot possibly deign to acknowledge your email.”
Cal Newport’s various sender filters conclude as follows— I quote from his book, Deep Work: “If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, e-mail me at interesting (at) calnewport.com For the reasons stated above, I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.”
Of course, some emails, even from perfectly civilized and well-meaning people, do not merit a response— they presume too much, they’re eye-crossingly vague or, as in a few cases, they clearly neither expect nor invite a response. But as for myself, because my own sender filters work beautifully, my stance is that I will do my darnedest, most reasonable best to answer everyone, whether family, friends, students, literary colleague, or mysterious Albanian, who takes the trouble to write to me a civilized email.
On occasion a sender blazes past or perhaps never saw the relevant sender filter, so I reply with the link or paste-copy the text of my long-ago posted answer to their question. (For example, I am often asked by students, friends, relatives, neighbors and utter strangers if I will read their manuscript. Here’s my answer to that one.)
If you want to comment on this blog, which I sincerely welcome, click hereand what you’ll see the simplest of sender filters, stating that I read but do not usually publish comments. It works blazingly well. Trolls and their ilk took a hike, never to return! (As for my fierce-looking writing assistant, I assure you, dear reader, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl only bites cheese.)
P.S. Cal Newport’s take on some industrial-strength sender filters. Personally I would not want to use such forbidding sender filters, but for some writers, and some people, that might be the right strategy. In any event, a sender filter beats the daisies out of the Wiggyesque Wall of Silence.
UPDATE: For a good example of a strong but both friendly and polite sender filter, see publishing consultant and blogger Jane Friedman’s contact page.
FURTHER UPDATE: For a Groucho Marx-esque example of sender filters by someone whose religious ideas seem to attract trolls like bananas do fruit flies, see John Michael Greer’s page for his Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn.
7. FUNNEL IT ALL INTO MOOOOOOOOOOOORE EMAIL!
Over the past year and some I have freed up chunkoids of time and energy for email by deactivating my Facebook account, minimizing Twitter and LinkedIn (including turning off email notifications), and closing this blog to published comments.
In other words, I have reduced the number of channels for people to communicate with me, funneling as many communications as possible into ye olde email.
I tell everyone who asks, the best way to find me is by email.
Yes, I receive more email as a result, but interestingly, many of my “friends” who were so chatty & likey on Facebook rarely if ever trouble to send me email. I have also found that many of the younger generation do not respond to email. Hmmm, also interesting! (Have a nice life, kiddos!)
Well, at least we still have telephones. But sorry, don’t count on me to retrieve my voicemail, I am too busy answering email!
(What about texting and Whatsapp? Ask me again after I’ve lugged home my taxidermied hippopotamus.)
8. BE QUICK & CLEAR, MY DEAR, BUT ADD DETAIL TO CUT THE CLUTTER
The emails I send myself have a clear subject line and the text clearly calls for or implies expected action or inaction. For example, some of the younger generation in my family prefer to text rather than use email, and getting them to answer an email, such has been my experience, requires laser-like focus in this regard. Hence, subject lines like this:
Re: Super Quick URRRRRgent Question about X—
or, say:
Re: Confirming dinner at at 9 PM this Saturday
What do I mean by “add detail to cut the clutter?” Minimize the number of emails needed to arrange things by politely making specific actionable proposals and provide websites, addresses, phone numbers and any other information that your correspondent might need, and hence avoid further emails. For example, instead of blah blah blahing about when and where to maybe kind of sort of meet for coffee, go ahead and make a specific proposal, e.g., “How about if we meet for coffee at 4:30 PM this Tuesday or, if you would prefer, 5:30 next Wednesday at Café Thus-and-Such, 123 Avenue ABC.”
Cal Newport offers more detailed advice about this brain power-saving email tactic on his blog, Study Hacks and his book, Deep Work.
9. WHEN CALLED FOR, FOR HEAVENSSAKES, JUST APOLOGIZE (BRIEFLY)
10. AT THE END OF THE LAST EMAIL SESSION FOR THE DAY, REPEAT AFTER SCARLET…
[ VIDEO ]
It is a fact that for me, as well as for everyone who uses email, night falls in this Theater of Space-Time… and falls again, and again…. Funny how that happens once every 24 hours… until it doesn’t. I guess. In the meantime, some emails fall through the cracks of all good intentions.
Anyway, as Cal Newport writes in Deep Work,
“[I]n general, those with a minor public presence, such as authors, overestimate how much people really care about their replies to their messages.”
Newport’s bluntness may sound cruel. I don’t think it is; rather, he points to a cruel fact: that even when surrounded by other people, in fundamental ways we are each of us in this Theater of Space-Time alone. Writing is a technology that permits us to send thoughts from one axis of space-time to multiple others. And this is precisely why I write books— and why I read books, and why I welcome correspondence, albeit in electronic form.
And no, I am not worried that one day, should my one of my books be made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, or something, I might need to raise the Wall of Silence, or else bring on a bucket brigade of secretaries to cope with cannon-hoses of incoming emails.
Why am I not worried, pray tell?
(1) Because my 10 point system works splendidly well.
(2) Furthermore, should the need arise, it would be a simple matter to add more sender filters / templates, and perhaps, now and then, an autoresponder.
(3) Moreover, I need only note the numbers of smombies I see on city streets to conclude that, alas, the world of those of us who still have the cognitive focus to actually read the sorts of literary books I write and to engage in thoughtful correspondence is, and seems destined to remain, a cozy one.
And if I turn out to be wrong, so what? Then I will get a secretary! In the meantime, I shall make do with my writing assistants (although, alas, with emails, those two are all paws).
Photo by C.M. Mayo. Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site in Far West Texas. Confession: After I snapped this photo with my iPhone I checked my email, just to see if I could! Alas, I could.
The aim of literary travel writing was– and
remains– to bring the reader to deeply notice, that is, get out of her head
and into the world of specific sounds, smells, tastes, textures, colors, ideas,
histories, geographies, geologies… In the words of Kenneth Smith,
“You have to open space, and deepen place.”
Start with escape velocity: from wherever you
are, whoever you are in your known world, you rocket out, beyond the orbit
of ordinary life. You float around out there– there being your own
backyard or, for that matter, the island of Molokai– for a spell. Then, with a
story to tell, you splash back to earth.
Next step: craft the narrative, rendering your experience in and understanding of that time and place as vividly, as lyrically, and engagingly as possible. I’ve had plenty to say about the craft of literary travel writing; what I want to touch on here are some of the steps in the process and how they have or have not changed with the lure of digital technologies and the tsunami of the Internet.
THEN: In olden times of yore, I mean in the 1990s, when traveling in Baja California for my travel memoir Miraculous Air, I carried around a pen and bulky notebook, and a camera with so many lenses and dials that if I were to pick it up today I wouldn’t remember how to operate it. To get every raw thing down that I would need for my book, I had to scribble-scribble-scribble, and during interviews and/or at the end of a day’s driving and hiking or whatever, boy howdy, I felt like a squeezed-out sponge and my hand like an arthritic claw. Once home, I spent hours upon hours typing up my field notes. And neither film nor film processing was cheap. Such was the first step of the process.
Charlie Angell, expert guide, in the Solitario, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Far West Texas. Listen in anytime to my podcast interview with Angell here.
NOW:These days, for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I carry a pen and a slim Moleskine to jot down this-and-that, but my main tool is my iPhone. Rather than scribble my field notes and interview notes, I simply turn on my iPhone’s dictation app and press “record” — when finished, I have a digital file. I also take loads of photos and videos. Oh yes, this is infinitely easier on me as I am traveling, and as far as the pictures and video go, the cost is zip. Once home, however, transcribing the audio field notes takes me hours upon hours, and it is exhausting.[*]
[*]Yep, I have voice recognition software but it
doesn’t work well enough– in the time it would take me to correct the
gobbledygook I might as well transcribe from scratch. I expect this to change.
For some of my podcasts I have used a transcription service, but field notes
are another matter– too detailed, too personal. Furthermore, as tedious a job
as it may be, transcribing my field notes helps me hyper-focus, recall more
details, and gain further insight.
I am the first to admit, were I to do another
literary travel memoir, while I would dictate my notes, I would need a better
strategy for getting them transcribed. So I’m working on this mid-way. Ayyy.
ON UTILIZING / PROCESSING / PUBLISHING PHOTOS
& VIDEO
THEN: Photos stayed in a box. A few ended up in the book. (Several years after the book on Baja California was published I uploaded a few to my website. You can view those here.)
NOW:Photos and videos can be amply shared on this blog, the website, Twitter, etc. A few will end up in the book, I expect.
Is this aspect of the process really that different because of the Internet? A few years ago I would have said so– I got very excited about the multimedia possibilities in ebooks. But I now believe that while our culture is increasingly oriented towards visual media, as far as books go, not much has changed, nor will it because what readers want is text.
I’ll grant that some literary travel memoirs
might offer a few more images and color images than might have been
economically feasible before. I’ll grant that ebooks can include video or links
to video. And I’ll grant that a few people may find out about and read my book
because of a photo or video they Google up on my websites. A few. Most people
surfing around the Internet don’t read books, never mind literary travel
memoir. And there is nothing new about that.
ON FINDING BOOKS
THEN: To find books on Baja California, I scoured the shelves at John Cole’s in La Jolla, El Tecolote in Todos Santos, and a very few other bookstores and libraries, including the Bancroft at UC Berkeley. I thought the bibliography on Baja California was enormous, and I ended up owning a wall of books.
NOW: Amazon!!!! Although the other day I bought a rare book about the town of Toyah on www.abebooks.com. Over the past few years I have also bought a few books from bricks-and-mortar shops including the Marfa Book Company and Front Street Books in Alpine, and more from the bookstores in various state and national parks. And I go to the always fabulosaLibrería Madero in Mexico City for out-of-print Spanish language books. I have consulted a few archives and collections… But I get most of my books from amazon.*
*I hasten to add that for research purposes I am mainly buying paperbacks and used reading-quality books, the kind I’ll take a highlighter to, not rare books. Buying rare books from amazon is not the best idea for many reasons, one of them being that the multitudinous sellers of used books oftentimes describe a book as “new” when it is actually a stamped review copy, stained, or missing a dust jacket, and so on. For quality rare books from reputable sellers, I can recommend www.abebooks.com , www.abaa.com , and www.biblio.com.
(Why am I buying so many books? Because I need to
read and consult them and, alas, I do not live anywhere near a good English
language library. And I admit, I do have a thing for rare books, especially on
the Mexican Revolution, Baja California, Mexico’s Second Empire, or Far West
Texana. Uh oh, that’s a lot.)
Bottom line: Not only is it easier to find books
now, but the bibliography on Far West Texas and Texas makes that on Baja
California look puny. Um, I think I’m going to need a new house.
Is this aspect of the process of writing a
literary travel memoir really that different because of the Internet? It would
seem so, but I’m contrasting an apple and a Durian, as it were. Baja California
is a very different subject than Far West Texas. Many of the books I found
useful on Baja California are not easy to find online, even today, while, so it
seems to me now, if I sneeze someone hands me a book on the Great State of
Lonestarlandia.
I do miss ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstores.
But I do not miss being unable to find what I was looking for.
Anyway, not every travel memoir requires such
intensive reading.
And yet another consideration– and a topic for
another blog post– is that it’s always easy to under- or over-research any
given book.
ON THE INCONVENIENT LUXURY OF BEING
INCOMMUNICADO
THEN: Traveling in remote places on the peninsula I more often than not found myself incommunicado. (Back then, many small towns in Baja California did not yet have telephones.)
NOW: Few stretches of any highway, anywhere, including the most offbeat corners Far West Texas, are without cell phone reception. Many campgrounds and all hotels, properly so-called, have wifi. Digital distractions are legion. Or, another way to put it: the digital leash stays on– unless one is willing to confront friends, colleagues, and family. That takes energy. Or, another way to put it: that takes training.
While traveling, no, I do not text, no, I do not
email (except when I fall into temptation!), and no, I do not answer my cell
phone while I am driving or possibly fending off mountain lions! Sounds easy.
Sounds curmudgeony. But for the kind of travel writing I do, trying to immerse
my consciousness in an unfamiliar place, and come back with a vivid narrative,
very necessary.
Is it really that different? Not so much as it
might appear. It has always taken a strategy plus herculean effort against
formidable economic, physical, psychological, and social pressures to protect
uninterrupted stretches of time for deep work.
>> See Cal Newport’s Deep Work.
Highly recommended.
ON FINDING (NONBOOK) RESEARCH MATERIALS
THEN: If it wasn’t in a book or a paper file, usually, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.
NOW: Whatever, Google.* And the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas is a fabulously rich– and free- resource.
*Don’t get me started about the Maoist Muddle,
aka Wikipedia.
Is it really that different? Yes.
To take but one example, it is radically
different to be able to look at all the real estate on the Internet. I can be
sitting in Mexico City and with my iPad and surf around, looking at all these
places for sale in Far West Texas– whether a luxury ranch or a humble hunt box / trailer— I can see the
kitchen, the bedrooms, ayyy, the bathrooms… I hasten to add I am not looking
for anything in the Texas real estate market, but those listings, the
descriptions and photos, constitute a window onto a people and place– in the
not-so-distant past, this sort of at-hand detail was available only to licensed
local real estate agents.
ON ANONYMITY & KARMA
THEN: In the 90s in Baja California I talked to a lot of people who wouldn’t know me from a denizen of the fifth moon of Pluto and who would probably never learn about, never mind pick up and read my book. I found that very freeing.
Everyone will be famous for, like, 2 seconds, LOL
NOW: Still true in 2016 in Far West Texas, but almost everyone who feels moved to do so can whip out his or her smartphone and Google up my name for scads of links from my webpage to podcasts to this blog to academia.edu to LinkedIn, Twitter, blah blah blah, and all about my book on Baja California, my novel, my stories, and my book on the Mexican Revolution with the uber-crunchy title! I Google other people, too. I can follow the Twitter feed for the Food Shark in Marfa! I interview Lonn Taylor for my podcast! Lonn Taylor writes about me for the Big Bend Sentinel! Sometimes when I go out to Far West Texas I want to wear a wig and dark glasses a la Andy Warhol! But seriously, human nature hasn’t changed; most people respond very generously when asked sincere questions about their art, their business, their research, and/or their opinion, and I believe this will remain the case whether people know about my works and/or Google me or not. Moreover I expect that it will remain the case long into the future that the majority of Texans, and for that matter, denizens of the planet, will not be avidly reading literary travel memoir and couldn’t care a hula-whoop about the oeuvre of moi. (Oh well!)
Is it really that different because of the
Internet? Having published several books, one thing I do appreciate, although
my ego does not, is that books go out to a largely opaque response. You can
talk about sales numbers, “big data,” reviews, and prizes, and it
doesn’t change the fact that an author does not know when any given person is
actually reading or talking about or feeling one way or the other about his or
her book– and anyway, the readers of some books will be born long after their
authors have passed to the Great Beyond.
Still, I think it best to assume that there is
karma with a capital “K” — opaque as it may be. In other words, you
might not have to, but be prepared to live with the consequences of what you
have written. Translation: truth is beauty but cruelty is stupid.
ON DISTRACTIONS
THEN: The main distractions were the television and the telephone.
NOW: It’s the magnetic rabbit holes-o-rama of the Internet. In some ways this is more difficult for me as a writer because I use the same machine, the laptop, for writing as for research, for email, and for social media and surfing. (Oh, so that’s the problem! Well, at least I don’t watch television anymore.)
Is it really that different? Yes, because
technology really is taking us somewhere very strange,
and in some ways, for many people, smartphones are beginning to serve as an
actual appendage. But no, because since the dawn of written history we have
ample evidence that people have been tempted continually by hyper-palatable
distractions of one kind or another and have been taken advantage of by those
with the wherewithal to take advantage. Hmmmm…. religion…. slavery….
alcohol… opiates…. cigarettes…. casinos…. spectator sports…. mindless
shopping…. television… or even, as they did even back in the days of the
atl-atl, lolling around the campfire and indulging in idle & malicious
gossip…
THEN: As work progresses, I would publish an occasional article in a magazine or newspaper such as, say, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal— and I would actually get paid. I also published a number of longform essays in literary magazines. I got paid, a bit, and I treasure the beautiful copies.
NOW: Although I continue to publish in magazines, mainly I post digital media– articles on this blog, guest-blogs, and text, photos, videos and podcasts on my websites, plus I send out my emailed newsletter a few times a year. Downside: My short works make less money. Upside: publishing articles is quick, easy, and I retain control. Further upside: when people Google certain terms, they get me. For example, try “Sierra Madera Astrobleme.”
Is it really that different? Alas, yes. See Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.
I would tell any young writer getting started today that if you want the freedom to write things you will be proud of, first find a reliable alternative income source and from there, always living below your means, build and diversify your sources of income away from the labor market. (Getting an MFA so you can teach in a creative writing program? That might have made a smidge of sense two decades ago. Now you’d be better off starting a dog grooming business, and I am not joking.) Yes, if you are brilliant, hard-working and lucky, you might one day make a good living from your creative writing. But why squander your creative energy for your best work worrying about generating income from, specifically, writing? Quality and market response only occasionally coincide. Jaw-dropping mysteries abound.
FURTHER NOTES: WHAT ELSE HASN’T CHANGED
(MUCH)?
The Call to Dive Below the Surface
One might imagine that with all the firehoses of
information available to the average traveler, literary travel writing now
needs to offer something get-out-the-scuba-gear profound. But this has been
true for decades– long before the blogosphere and Tripadvisor.com & etc.
thundered upon us.
As V.S. Naipaul writes in A Turn in the
South– waaay back in 1989:
“The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler. One result was that no travel book (unless the writer was writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels. Such a book could have been written a hundred years ago… Such a book can still be written about certain countries in Africa, say. It is often enough for a traveler in that kind of country to say, more or less, ‘This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys…’ This kind of traveler is not really a discoverer.”
Organizational Challenges
Another thing that has not changed is the
need to keep things organized– whether digital or paper. When I sit down
to bang out a draft and then polish (and polish & polish & polish) a
literary travel narrative, I need to constantly refer to my field notes, books,
photos and videos, so it is vital that I have these resources where I can
easily find them– and when done for the day, or with that section, that I have
a place to easily put them back (and from where I can easily retrieve them as
need be). This might sound trivial. It is not.
Here’s what works for me:
BOOKS: Shelve by category, e.g., Texas history, geology; regional; rock art, etc, using big, easy-to-read labels on the shelves;
PAPERS: File in hanging folders in a cabinet, e.g., travels by date, editorial correspondence, other alphabetical correspondence, people (as subjects), places;
PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).
TRANSCRIBED FIELD NOTES AND INTERVIEWS: Store in three-ring binders;
DIGITAL FILES: Save in folders on the laptop, e.g., audio by date and place, photos and video by date and place;
WEBSITES, PODCASTS, VIDEOS: For websites and etc, I often use posts on this very searchable blog as a way of filing notes that I can easily retrieve (here’s an example and here’s another and another and another and another);
Notes on Peyote, for example.
PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).
Sounds like I know what I’m doing! The truth is, no matter how often I declutter, books and papers tend to mushroom into unwieldy piles and ooze over any and all horizontal expanses. Piles make it easier to procrastinate. And procrastination is the Devil. I have been struggling mightily with getting my field notes transcribed. All that said, a book gets written as an elephant gets eaten– bit by bit. It’s happening. Stay tuned.
