Please note: The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.
To me thoughts are things. They have shapes, colors, and movement, and they can morph, and even emit sounds and flavors in unique and sometimes quite fascinating ways. This is perhaps strange to say, but it is not original on my part. Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater wrote about this in a little illustrated book, now over a century old, entitled Thought-forms. When I saw the illustrations of various thoughts as Besant and Leadbeater had perceived them on the astral plane, I recognized them instantly. Perhaps you will, too.
A helpful thought. (Screenshot from the archive.org edition of Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms.)Radiating affection. (Screenshot from the archive.org edition of Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms)Music by Mendelssohn (Screenshot from the archive.org edition of Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms)
For me, as a literary artist (I write poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction), creativity is all about thoughts, corralling, arranging, refining them. And when thoughts appear in my mind that I would describe as shapeless, colorless, silent, still— or moving only in tight, repetitive fashion— the writing has about as much life as a robotic owl in quicksand. On the other hand, when my thoughts have a more fluid, dance-like quality, and shapes and colors that arrange themselves into some form of beauty, the writing is so much easier and fun. (Beauty, by the way, is not necessarily all sweetness, light, rainbows & Kumbaya; there can be intense beauty— and artistic power— in what the poet Federico García Lorca termed duende.)
How to nurture more beautiful and interesting thoughts in service of creative writing? A few reflections:
Firstly, music helps, for thoughts tend to entrain to and emerge from music. In my personal experience, there is no music more nurturing for creativity than Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D Minor.
Do yourself a favor, grab an hour and twenty minutes, and just listen:
Secondly, when it comes to what I read, I find it helpful, on occasion, to give my ego a metaphorical cookie break. My ego sees Yours Truly as the sort of highly cultured and discerning person who reads Willa Cather novels. Well, after having read My Ántonia, O Pioneers! The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and most recently, Shadows on the Rock, I pronounce Willa Cather one of the greatest literary artists who ever lived! Reading Cather’s novels has been a wondrous and luxurious experience, and invaluable inspiration for me as a writer. For my ego, a pat on the head and a chocolate cookie!
But hey now, how about that kooky Californian, P. K. Dick? Nobody I hang out with reads Dick. Sci-fi from the 60s?! my ego would have sneered, had it not been off nibbling its cookie. Just as soon as I finished Cather’s exquisite novel of old Quebec, Shadows on the Rock, I grabbed a copy of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and, zowie! quadruple-charged my batteries.
One of the greatest of all American novels. Best consumed with a large box of hot tamale candies.
(And now I see Mr. Dick sprawled barefoot on the cabbage-roses sofa in Miss Cather’s New York living room, scribbling something mega-duende about a robotic owl in quicksand. “Edith,” she trills, “did you let this person in?”)
Thirdly, I find it useful to rethink the concept of “vacation.” Do I want a status-enhancing signaling opportunity with trophy-photos? Or do I actually want a change of scene / rest / adventure that recharges my creativity? These are not necessarily, nor even probably, same thing. In my experience, the vacations that best nurture my creativity tend to illicit confusion, even disdain, in other people. (Which is so interesting!)
Fourthly, I take long, meditative daily walks, leaving the smartphone at home. When I don’t take walks, I find that thoughts slow and take on a greyish tinge.
Fifthly, laughter, not the fake social stuff, but any genuine confetti burst of it, dislodges creative bottlenecks. There are many different types of humor, but people who lack a sense of one altogether or, infinitely worse, who straight-jacket the God-given one they do have, can be dangerous to themselves and others, including children, helpless elders, and pets.
This is easy to evaluate: check their Twitter. If they lack a Twitter, I assign them a flashing turquoise brownie point on the jumbotron in my mind, and in such case, this meme makes for an excellent litmus test:
More anon.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
One of Ours by Willa Cather Brilliant and profound, One of Ours is the American novel about that episode of madness known as the First World War that will ring through the centuries. It has been a few years now that I’ve been working through Cather’s oeuvre (so far: The Professor’s House, O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop); my main wonder is why I didn’t start sooner. (For those whose children attend high schools which faculty have seen fit to remove Cather from the English class syllabi, I point to Jonathan Leer’s Radical Hope, listed below.)
Child of the Sun by Lonn Taylor Historian Lonn Taylor’s last book, a beautiful and moving memoir of his childhood in the Philippines. P.S. You can listen in to my interview with Taylor about Far West Texas here.
The City of Hermes: Articles and Essays on Occultismand The King in Orange by John Michael Greer It was during and after writing my own work, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, that I came to appreciate how rare and excellent a scholar of the history of metaphysical religion and of the occult we have in John Michael Greer.
In most of the manuscripts I’ve seen in writers workshops, the characters… sort of… ummm… float kinda sorta in space? When they do appear more concretely, their bodies, gestures, physical interactions with other bodies and things tend to be generic, e.g., the tall black man stood; the short blonde woman was sitting; the Asian man nodded. She looked. He shrugged.
It gets kind cardboard-cutout-y.
Oh, and these characters also do a lot of taking sips of drinks.
Well, OK, sometimes a character’s black or Asian or blonde or whatever, and he or she or zhe’s gotta stand and/or nod and/or shrug and/or take a sip. But it isn’t gain-of-function research to grab a floccule more oomph from the Vividness Department. Take just a moment to dig around there in your imagination—and this could, literally, cost you less than 20 seconds in some instances— and then, with your thoughtfully selected detail (or two or three), you can guide your reader to see your characters and the scene with more specificity, that is to say, more vividly.
(But what about clutter? You might hasten to ask. I do the whack-a-mole on clutter here. )
How to come up with vivid detail? One of the best ways to get click-your-fingers fast with vivid detail is to read as a writer. Reading as writer is not the same as reading passively, for entertainment. Nor is it reading to bag some trophy-worthy-theme as for your PhD thesis on race, class, gender & intersectionality, but rather, simply, when you spot something you—you the fellow literary artist— think an author does especially well, take note. I would suggest that you check it or circle it or underline it (or all three) with your pencil and, should you feel so moved, copy it out in your notebook. Then, perhaps take another moment to try some permutation exercises.
Recently I was reading Bernard DeVoto’s The Western Paradox when this struck me:
“We headed toward Flagstaff from Bakersfield. In August the lower end of the San Joaquin Valley is wrapped in a brown heat-haze which I have never fully understood, for assuredly there is no water vapor in it. A reek of crude oil goes with it; the sky is a steel-white; one does not rest a forearm on the car door.“ —Bernard DeVoto, The Western Paradox (p. 195)
Rest a forearm on the car door—Bingo! Dear writerly reader, is this not by a league more vivid in your mind than, say, “it was a really hot day”? We’re no longer kinda sorta floating around; we are in a body— a body with a forearm that avoids resting on the car door!
As I went on to read Willa Cather’s novels My Ántonia and O Pioneers! I kept an eye out for how she handles bodies— not only in how she makes the characters more vivid and/or grounds them in the scene, but has them relate physically to each other. (And I would wager that any author whose work you especially admire and enjoy reading is doing this splendidly well— else you wouldn’t be bothering to read them and so admiringly. So I would suggest that you go to your own bookshelf of books you have already read and loved, and reread one or two with an eye to how these authors handle detail relating to the body.)
Cather never disappoints.
“As Ántonia turned over the pictures the young Cuzaks stood behind her chair, looking over her shoulder with interested faces. Nina and Jan, after trying to see round the taller ones, quietly brought a chair, climbed up on it, ansd stood close together, looking. The little boy forgot his shyness and grinned delightedly when familiar faces came into view. In the group about Ántonia I was conscious of a kind of physical harmony. They leaned this way and that, and were not afraid to touch each other. ..” —Willa Cather, My Ántonia
“Three three pretty young Swedish girls who did Alexandra’s housework were cutting pies, refilling coffee cups, placing platters of bread and meat and potatoes upon the red tablecloth, and continually getting in each other’s way between the table and the stove.” —Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
“Frank went into the house and threw himself on the sofa, his face to the wall, his clenched fist on his hip. Marie, having seen her guests off, came in and put her hand coaxingly on his shoulder.” —Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
She put her hand on his arm. “I needed you terribly when it happened, Carl. I cried for you at night” …. Carl pressed her hand in silence. —Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
“Emil rubbed his knees thoughtfully” —Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
And from some random other reading:
“But it is true that a lot of work gets done over two-hour ceremonial luncheons, and more than once, after such an occasion, I wobbled out like a stunned ox, vowing to change jobs before I acquired gout and a faintly British accent.” — Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys
By the side of this fortress-door hung a heavy iron bell-pull, ending in a mermaid. When first Mrs. Lucas had that installed, it was a bell-pull in the sense that an extremely athletic man could, if he used both hands and planted both feet firmly, cause it to move, so that a huge bronze bell swung in the servants’ passage and eventually gave tongue (if the athlete continued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the whitewash from the ceiling fell down in flakes.” —E.F. Benson, Queen Lucia
*
A WEE WRITING EXERCISE
As one character is speaking, what else can another character do besides, say, “rub his knees thoughtfully”? Oh, plenty! Here goes:
Joe slowly rubbed his elbow.
Elmira dabbed a finger under eye, as if to remove a fleck of mascara that wasn’t there.
Patsy slipped both hands, palms out, into her back pockets.
Lou took up his cup of tea and then, with a nearly inaudible sigh, leaned sideways into the pillows.
A wee exercise: To this list, add 5 more examples of your own and use the names Puddleton, Jamilla and Fred (because I say so). Absolut Verboten: nodding, sitting, standing, looking, shrugging and sipping.
Well, yeah, it is sort of ridiculously ridiculous to rate from 1 – 12 a batch of books published over a wide range of years and in genres as varied as stories in translation, poetry, history, historical fiction, travel writing, biography, and autobiography. But it works for me! I have been posting these always-eclectic annual top books read lists for Madam Mayo blog since 2006. Aside from serving as a reading diary for myself, it is my gift to you, dear writerly reader: If you are not familiar with any given book on this list, should it appeal to you to try it, may you find it as wondrously enriching a read as I did.
(1) The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams By Jove and by Jupiter, whyever did I not read this sooner?! Every chapter a chocolate truffle, The Education of Henry Adams is a fundamental text for comprehending the culture and overall development of the United States.
P.S. Michael Lindgrin has more to say about ye tome, “this strange and beautiful journey of a book,” over at The Millions.
Reading Cather is a joy. Both of these Cather novels are well-deserved American literary classics. Over the past couple of years I have been turtling my way through Cather’s oeuvre. So far: The Professor’s House (top books read list for 2017) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (top books read list for 2018).
“You don’t need to take a book off the shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.”
(4) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell I read this novel only because my book club picked it– lucky me. It’s wickedly funny, and, curiously, and most elegantly, written in crots. (I was unaware of Connell’s work when I wrote one of my own early short stories, also in crots, also published in the Paris Review. Well, howdy there, Mr. C! If you were still alive it sure would be fun to talk to you about crots!)
P.S. See Gerald Shapiro’s profile of Evan S. Connell in Ploughshares.
(5)Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton Yet another work I wish I had read years earlier. Culiano was the author of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. His life ended early, and not well, alas. I never met Culiano but I was at University of Chicago for several years just before he arrived, so I knew the super-charged intellectual ambiance well– and I think Anton captures it quite accurately. Recently occultist John Michael Greer has been making noises about Culiano’s understanding of cacomagic, and this the unnamed subject of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which is what prompted me to finally pick up this biography, which had been long languishing in my “to read” pile. (If you’re a metaphysics nerd and cacomagic is what you’re interested in specifically, however, Anton’s biography, otherwise excellent, will disappoint.)
(6) Tie:
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner Stegner is always a rare pleasure to read. I came away with immense admiration for John Wesley Powell’s many and visionary achievements. And the whole problem of water in the West thing!! Obvious as that may be, but I grew up in the West and it was not so obvious to me, nor to most people I knew at the time, and this book goes a long way towards explaining why. (Illuminating indeed to pair this work with a Cather novel… see above…)
A Desert Harvest by Bruce Berger This splendid anthology collects selected essays from Bruce Berger’s masterwork of a desert trilogy, The Telling Distance, Almost an Island, and There Was a River. P.S. Read my Q & A with Bruce Berger here.
The Western Paradox by Benard DeVoto Edited by David Brinkley and Patricia Nelson Limerick with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Crunchy! (I still have all my teeth, though!)
(7) Tie:
Lone Star Mind by Ty Cashion Professor Cashion articulates the kooky contradictions and tectonic shifts in both popular and academic versions of Texas history. A landmark work in Texas historiography.
Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film by Don Graham I will be writing about this work at some length in my book on Far West Texas. At first glance, for the splashy photos of the stars on its cover, it might appear to be the usual intellectually nutritious-as-a-Ding Dong film history book. But no! Graham knew Texas like almost no one else, and for Texas, Giant, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, was a film of profound cultural importance.
(13) The Chrysalids by John Wyndham I’m not a fan of sci-fi novels; I read this one about post-nuclear apocalypse Canada only because my book club chose it. I found it to be a page-turner with splendid prose throughout (although I did some eyerolling at the end when it did get a little “inner most cave-y” and “Deus-ex-Machine-y”). I can appreciate why it remains in print, and beloved by many, more than six decades after it was first published in 1955.
P.S. I can also warmly recommend the books by authors featured in my monthly Q & As.
My distraction free smartphone (DFS) stays in this zippered bag within the bag–unless I have a fully conscious, well-considered reason to take it out and use it. My smartphone, a garden-variety iPhone, is not shown because I used it to take this photo. What’s the little rectangle with the picture? I explain below.
As a writer your foremost resource is your creativity applied by the sustained power of your attentional focus.
Your foremost writerly resource is your creativity applied by the sustained power of your attentional focus. The Muse can gift you with a zillion ideas every minute of the day, but if you cannot plant yourself in your chair and stay focused on your writing, your book will ever and always remain an unfulfilled wish, a ghost of your imagination.
Most people have forfeited a more than generous portion of their attentional focus to their smartphones– to checking and scrolling through text messages, social media feeds, games, shopping, news, YouTube videos & etc. Ergo, I would suggest that if you want to get some writing done, don’t be like most people: consider your smartphone use. Very carefully.
And honestly. Yes, smartphones are gee-whiz useful. But when you consider how much of your time and attention they can so easily suck up, day after day after day, you can recognize how exceedingly dangerous they are to you as a writer.
And it’s not a one-for-one tradeoff: The more time you spend diddling with a smartphone, the more likely you are to suffer from what Nicholas Carr terms “the shallows,” making it increasingly difficult to focus for long on anything. In other words, if you’ve got the shallows, with an hour to work on your book, you no longer actually have an hour because you cannot focus on the page for that long.
There are 24 hours in each day. About a third of them are spent sleeping. Once those 24 hours are gone, they’re gone. If you want to fit in the hours and mental energy it takes to write a book, you have to make some choices.
Most people do not write books, and that includes most of the people who say they want to write a book. As if enchanted, they spend a many hours of their every day in a sort trance, looking at screens. I don’t know about most people, but I did not sign up for a stint on the Learning Planet to spend it, as it were, in Plato’s cave doing the watching-puppets-making-shadows-on-the-wall thing.
Of course, everyone’s life is unique in its joys, challenges, and responsibilities. I cannot claim that what works for mine will work for any one else’s. I share my strategies with the smartphone here not in the presumption that they are the only or the universal best, but simply in the hope that, because they have taken me no small trouble to formulate and refine, and they work very well for me, they might prove in some way useful to you as you consider your own strategies with your smartphone, should you be inclined to do so.
Everyone’s life is unique in its joys, challenges, and responsibilities. I cannot claim that what works for mine will work for yours.
Back in January of this year 2019 I posted on my distraction free smartphone (DFS) and in March on reclaiming “quality leisure,” to use Cal Newport’s term, as vital for enhancing not only quality of life, but creative energy. For me, these ideas clap together because, among other things, for “quality leisure” I have my reading, and I now make a habit of carrying a lightweight paperback for when I might otherwise succumb to checkin’-‘n-peckin’ the smartphone.
As I explained in the above-mentioned post, getting a smartphone to “distraction free” is not about simply going into “airplane mode.” Nor is it about rejecting the smartphone. I do use my smartphone; I am grateful to have such a miraculously powerful and convenient communications device and multi-tool. But, made distraction free, my smartphone serves me, I do not serve it– or rather, I do not serve the attention and data-harvesting corporations behind those cannily designed-to-addict apps. (They don’t call the father of captology B.J. Fogg “the Millionaire Maker” for nothing. See for example Ian Leslie’s reporting in The Economist.)
And without “itchy thumbs,” I can better attend to my writing.
I do use my smartphone; I am grateful to have such a miraculously powerful and convenient communications device and multi-tool. But, made distraction free, my smartphone serves me, I do not serve it.
A NOTE ON READING FOR QUALITY LEISURE
Like many writers, I read like a ravenous owl. For my work-in-progress I have been doing a good amount of reading, but alas, these books are generally too large or, in some cases, fragile to carry around; moreover, such reading requires sustained focus and note-taking. (Not a few of these I might term a three-coffee slog…) When I have no other option, I will read a Kindle, using the Kindle app on my iPad– not on my smartphone. Never on my smartphone!
For “quality leisure”/ smartphone substitute reading–that is, something appealing to me to do besides succumb to the siren call of the smartphone– I look for something not work-related that is physically lightweight, and, crucially, that I would, without hesitation, dip into in odd moments.
(Litmus test: would I find it appealing to read while waiting at the tram stop?)
This is the lineup for April: Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!; Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal; and John Muir’s The Mountains of California.
One at a time! An age ago I decided to make it a project to read Willa Cather’s oeuvre. So far: Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor’s House, My Ántonia, and as this posts, I have just finished O Pioneers! I can report that, as ever, Cather is sublime.
Since January of this year, so far so good (with the exception of one episode noted below): my smartphone, turned off and zipped in its bag within a bag, remains at once useful to me and distraction free. I do use my DFS for emergency communications –“emergency” being a necessarily elastic term– yeah, if I call it an emergency, then it is (ye olde “self-authority”)– and I also use a select few distraction-free apps such as a camera, calculator, and recorder.
For the full story and explanation of my distraction free smartphone (DFS), plus an app evaluation flowchart, should you be so inclined to consider making your own tailor-made DFS, see the original blog post, “It Can Be Done! This Writer’s Distraction Free Smartphone.”)
FOUR CHANGES SINCE JANUARY
(1) An Anti-Trigger for “the Gotta-Show-a-Photo” Trigger
I’ve become increasingly alert to how often an engaging conversation suddenly disintegrates because someone just has to take out their smartphone to show a photo– here’s my dog, here’s my kid being super cute, here’s me at this awesome place on vacation! The problem is, once taken out, there sits the smartphone on the table– to be picked up again in another moment to Google something, check something, show another something, text, check for texts, make or take a phone call… In short, there goes any coherent civilized conversation with those who are actually, I mean physically, present.
(Moreover, as we increasingly rely on visual media to communicate, we’re losing verbal skills.)
I cannot control other people’s itchy fingers for their smartphones, but certainly, I can address my own tendencies. Here’s my antidote for what I think of as the “gotta-show-the-photo” excuse / trigger for bringing out the smartphone: a little card I keep in the bag with my smartphone. It reminds me to keep the smartphone where it is– in the bag— and take the opportunity to exercise my skills with, you know, like, language.
These are my writing assistants, pugs Uli (right) and Washi (left). I keep this card with my smartphone to remind myself not to pick up the phone to show photos without a seriously considered and very good reason to do so. This little card with their photo, people can see that– plus see their not-so-secret Nahuatl names!
In our culture, my stance on the smartphone, not to mention my carrying this little card with my smartphone, might seem eccentric, even extreme. But I submit that it is our culture, in accepting widespread enthrallment to these djinn-like little screens as normal, that is extreme. As in freaky weird.
Why do I want to avoid showing photos on my smartphone to other people? Because I want to reduce the triggers to pick up my smartphone! Towards an effectively distraction free smartphone, this is not trivial.
In captology expert B.J. Fogg’s terminology, with this little card tucked in with the smartphone, I hereby provide a counter-trigger, should I have been triggered to pick up the smartphone to show some photos. For the full explanation of the DFS, and more about B.J. Fogg’s ideas, see my post, “It Can Be Done! This Writer’s Distraction Free Smartphone.”
(But OK… if I know you, and if I am really fond of you, and you are really fond of me, and you really, truly, truly, very truly really want to see my super cute dogs, I will take my smartphone out and show you photos of them, say, snoozing on the sofa, rolling on the grass, and/or holding the totally awesome squeaky squirrel toy! And even if I don’t know you all that well and you were to show me pictures on your smartphone of your dogs, or your kids, or your totally awesome vacation, I would be polite and say nice things because that would be sweet of you, and I accept, as I must to live happily in this world, that not everyone shares my ideas about what constitutes freaky weirdness.)
(2) Radio Swiss Classic
Another change is that, when traveling, I now use my smartphone for listening to music. (At home I use an iPad, usually parked in the kitchen, for that.) My go-to site is Radio Swiss Classic. No surfing around, no listening to podcasts, no social media, no YouTube, no people jabbering on (as on NPR), just Radio Swiss Classic– Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, endless free streams of it, 24/7.
Merci beaucoup and Danke schön, Swiss taxpayers.
(3) Uber
And another change is that on a recent trip where timely transportation was otherwise unavailable, I had to download and use the Uber app. Not a bad experience! (I know, I’m late to the parade on this one.)
(4) Texting (…Sigh…) When Required for Certain Financial Transactions and Emergencies
And yet one more, but alas, less felicitous, advent is that for certain online financial operations (and that would include booking a ride with Uber) one now must receive a texted code to confirm the login and/or transaction.
There are some work-arounds: for example, Go Go Grandparent allows you to book Uber rides without a smartphone, using a landline or flip-phone. For some other online financial transactions such as certain credit card purchases and transfers, you can call your bank and authorize skipping this step of a code sent by text message; however, they advise against it for security reasons.
Oh, how I hate texting.
My thumbs are allergic to texting!
Emergencies: I am thinking of, say, being buried in rubble after an earthquake– yes, that might be a good time to text. (Screaming could also help.)
A confession: On that same recent trip, which was to AWP, a ginormously gimungous writers conference held this year at the Oregon Convention Center, I texted with another writer to coordinate a meeting for coffee. I won’t say I regret the meeting– I was delighted to meet with an old friend. But of course, after my friend texted me that she would text me about getting together after the next panel concluded, I ended up checking for her next text. And checking again. And then checking. Just to meet for a 10 minute coffee between panels required multiple texts. I’m on the way. And Be there in 5. That sort of thing.
(On this note, this is one of the reasons I prefer smaller writers conferences where everyone has lunch and/or dinner in the same room, everyone meets in the bookfair or mingles in the hallways outside the panels– I can see everyone I want to see without having to arrange meetings.)
I have been holding the fort against texting and, in particular, Whatsapp, despite heavy pressure from family and friends. When I asked Cal Newport, author of the excellent Digital Minimalism, on his questions forum how he handles texting, he advised that one simply has to “train other people’s expectations.”
Hmmm… There’s a blog post I don’t think I’ll write.
Of course I can appreciate that in certain circumstances texting can be a very appealing and indeed the best method for timely communication. That said, texting can be minimized or eliminated by
(1) prior planning; (2) respecting those plans; and (3) trusting the universe that healthy relationships are possible and that no one will spontaneously combust without constant, tick-like messaging.
What I observe is that just about everyone is checking their smartphone all the livelong day, and expecting to be able to text and thereby expecting to leave everything last-minute flexible precisely because everybody else is checking their smartphone all the livelong day– and night.
Count me out. Apart from my wanting — and my need as a writer–to eliminate distractions from my smartphone, I do not want my relationships electronically intermediated by a corporation, at least to the extent that I can help it. When I’m in a writers conference I want to be in a writers conference, not off in the corner, or doing the smombie shuffle, checking my smartphone for the 157th time since breakfast.
As for communicating with and as disembodied consciousnesses– which is, effectively, what we do when we communicate with each other other than in person– there’s plenty of that going on already with email, the phone, print media and online media, and then, if you buy the idea, after this lifetime, bingo, there’s the whole of eternity for communicating with and as disembodied consciousnesses.
Like I said, what works for me may not work for you.
Just don’t try to text me.
LOOKING TOWARDS THE SECOND QUARTER OF 2019
So, since January, my DFS now has two additional apps, Radio Swiss Classic and Uber, both useful and welcome.
Yes, I will now send and receive text messages, however, only when obliged to do so for financial transactions, and for genuine emergencies– the latter being so rare that one has not yet happened for me whence texting appeared on the scene.
As I write this post, my distraction free smartphone (DFS) remains silently cozy in its zippered bag inside the bag– that bag, for now, in company with the paperback edition of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.
FREEDOM APP, YES!
As for the laptop– where I do my email, wordprocessing, blog updates, and any Internet research– I recently installed the latest version of the Freedom app. I hadn’t been too impressed with the earlier version, but this new one is a ludic loop snipper par excellence. It’s curious how well it works.
I don’t need the Freedom app for my smartphone, but if you are struggling with reducing the pull to yours, the Freedom app might be something for you to consider.
Another year of unusually intensive reading, mainly for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, hence this list is extra crunchy with geology, dinosaurs, Westerns, guns, and technology (yet somehow, like a pair of strawberry puddings amongst the platters of BBQ, Emma and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie slipped in there…)
In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness by Jeremy Naydler The maintream mediasphere seems to be overlooking this book, and not surprisingly, for it has been published by a small press that specializes in esoteric subjects. If “esoteric” gives you the readerly “cooties,” well, chill, if you possibly can because Naydler’s In the Shadow of the Machine stands as major contribution to the history of both technology and consciousness. If you’re wading through any of the current best-sellers on the perils of too much screentime and AI and all that, fine and important as some of those works may be (more about Carr below), I would suggest that instead, for a more panoramic and penetrating view of the challenge, start with Naydler.
2. Tie:
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather Historical fiction closely based on New Mexico and Church history but in all a soaringly lyrical work of empathic imagination. Deservedly one of the grand classics of 20th century American literature.
Emma by Jane Austen Ye olde read-it-by-the-fireside-with-a-cup-of-tea romance. But it’s a more serious work of literary art than it might appear; as a writer of fiction myself I found much to admire in Austen’s Emma. On that note, dear writerly readers, you might find of interest this piece in the Guardian.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte Dino-out! Finally, the whole millions-upon-millions-upon-millions of years of dinosaurs falls into parade-like Ordnung! More fascinating stuff about T-Rex & Co. than I ever thought I would find fascinating! Super nerdy in the friendliest, most readable, and authoritative way. If you read one book on dinos, let it be this one.
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier If you know who Jaron Lanier is, you can understand why he, and probably only he can get away with such a title for a commercially published book, one that most people today, and that would include writers with books to promote, would consider hoot-out-loud humbug. But perhaps they would not if [continue reading]
Dense yet elegantly lucid, Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst was published by O’Reilly Associates in 1995, on the eve of the explosion of email, well before that of social media. Astonishingly, it delineates the nature of our now King Kong-sized challenges with technology, when those challenges were, so it now seems, but embryonic. And Talbott writes with unusual authority, grounded in both philosophy and his many years of writing and editing for O’Reilly Media, a prime mover in the economic / cultural juggernaut of a complex, increasingly dispersed from its origin in California’s Santa Clara Valley, that has become known as “Silicon Valley.” CONTINUE READING
I’m not where I want to be with my writing here at the end of 2018 and Carr’s works detail many of the reasons why. But I’m moving forward by having deactivated my FB, reduced Twitter to once-a-month-ish courtesy tweet for my Q & A with another writer; generally ignoring LinkedIn, and still– still! thumb cemented in the dike!– refusing to use Whatsapp.
But please know, dear writerly reader, that even
as I wend my way, I would not pretend to know what would be best for you. And
this the Matterhorn of the challenge of our time: digital technologies that
might be zest for one person can prove hazardous for another. One needs both the
fortitude and courage to evaluate one’s own path– taking into account one’s
own circumstances, talents, weaknesses, predilections, obligations, and goals–
then strategize, and restrategize as needed.
My sense is that, primed by Carr’s and others’ works
in this vein, our cultural paradigm will definitively shift this winter with
the publication of Cal Newport’s Digital
Minimalism. Never mind what Newport actually has to
say (though as a big fan of his Deep Work, I expect it will be
juicy); in simply coining the term
“digital minimalism” Newport helps us move towards richer
and more effective ways of thinking about how, given our personal and
professional goals and well-being, we can optimize our use (or nonuse) of
digital technologies.
As I write now in December 2018 the reigning
paradigm is the same one we’ve had since forever: if it’s digital and new it
must be better; those who resist are old fogeys. It’s a crude
paradigm, a cultural fiction. And it has lasted so long time in part because
those who resisted either were old fogeys and/or for the most part could not
articulate their objections beyond a vaguely whiney, “I don’t like
it.”
As an early adopter of digital technologies for
decades now (wordprocessing in 1987, email in 1996, website in 1998, blog in
2006, podcast and Youtube channel 2009, bought a first generation iPad and
first generation Kindle, self-pubbed Kindles in 2010, etc.), I have more than
earned the cred to say, no, my little grasshoppers, no, if it is digital and it
is new it might, actually, maybe, in many instances, be very bad for you.
In other words, adopting a given digital
technology does not necessarily equate with “progress”; neither does
not adopting a given digital technology necessarily equate with backwardness. I
so often hear that “there is no choice.” There is in fact is a
splendiferous array of choices, and each with a cascade of consequences. But we
have to have our eyes, ears, and minds open enough to perceive them, and the
courage to act accordingly.
I wish my wiser self could have time traveled to
tell my younger self, Be more alert to the ways you invest your time and
attention. Be aware that the digital can be, in some ways and sometimes, more
ephemeral than paper (and not necessarily ecologically so friendly, either).
Social media mavens are not reading the kinds of books you want to write
anyway, for they lack the time and the attention span. Social media
“friends” may be but are not necessarily your friends; and until you
try to communicate with and encounter them outside these networked public
spaces, e.g., in the real world, and via one-on-one private communication such
as snail mail, telephone, and email, you’re in a hall of mirrors. With almost
every app, every platform, some corporation is harvesting your attention and
data for shareholder value– and all the while conjuring up new ways to grab
even more. Life goes by, zip.
This has been a year of extra-intensive reading, the bulk of it for my book in-progress on Far West Texas. Specifically, I’ve had some catching up to do on the oil industry and New Mexico history (impossible to grok Far West Texas without those subjects). I say this every year but truly, this may have been my richest year of reading yet. I feel so lucky to have encountered these works; each and every one of these authors has my sincere admiration and immense gratitude.
1. The Professor’s House by Willa Cather A deeply weird and profoundly American novel. I had been meaning to read The Professor’s House for years, and I finally did– and by uncannily felicitous happenstance, just after visiting Acoma, Chaco Canyon, and Mesa Verde. (P.S. Whoever calls this book flawed I call a puddinghead.)
2. The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe A brilliant book that evokes the ghost of a lost book and the world it came out of so unfathomably long ago. This is one I look forward to savoring again.
For the past several years I have been reading intensively about Texas, and that includes its fraught ethnic relations, and with these two books about slavery– both recent and major scholarly contributions– by golly, the whole thang just gelled. For U.S. readers I recommend reading first Torget; then, without delay, Resendiz.
The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610 by Genaro M. Padilla It astonishes me that so few Americans or Mexicans have ever heard of the epic poem Historia de la Nueva Mexico– and that would include Yours Truly, until I found The Daring Flight of My Pen. Padilla’s book about Pérez de Villagrá’s book rearranged all the furniture in the way I think about the U.S., about the Southwest, and about Mexico– and waxed the floor and put in new curtains, too.
7. Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitri Orlov This book has an important and urgent message, but it also comes with a gamelan orchestra of super-freaky esoteric undertones. In other words, to appreciate the clanging in there, you have to be ready to appreciate it. Not for the pleasantly numbed of Smombiedom.
8. Resist Much, Obey Little: Remembering Edward Abbey Edited by James R. Hepworth and Gregory McNamee Its impossible to go far into reading about the American West without encountering Edward Abbey and his works, and in particular his iconic Desert Solitaire. Resist Much, Obey Little, an eclectic collection of essays and interviews, is at once a festschrift and an adventure in the funhouse of Abbey’s mind.
9. Big Batch re: The Oil Patch Having crunched through a library’s worth of reading on the oil industry, herewith a selection of some of the more worthy tomes:
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin This one won the Pulitzer Prize when it came out more than two decades ago, and most deservedly. It rewired my thinking about World War II, among many other episodes in the last century.
The Blood of the Earth: As Essay on Magic and Peak Oil John Michael Greer Reading Greer is akin to spooning up Swiss chocolate pudding: page after page of smoothly yumsie schoggi. Yes, even if it’s got crunchy stuff about oil and– keep your crash helmets on!– magic.
