Learning to Create

One of the rules of good parenting seems to be to allow oneself to be interrupted.  I am not, of course, talking about permitting older children to blatantly interpose their questions and comments into the middle of adult conversations; rather, I am thinking of those moments in the day when one is in the middle of some household task—washing, weeding, folding, cleaning, cooking—and is asked to “Build somefing” or “Draw somefing.”  Sometimes it may be good for a child to learn to wait; but sometimes it is good to be a child with the child.

I recently realized, though, that while these requests are frequently vague invitations to companionship (make “somfing”), I rarely succumb to producing an offering of my own brain.  I do not, in other words, offer to draw a train, a car, or an airplane, or indeed any specific thing.  Rather, I say, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it.”

I suppose the impulse was born of the tired creativity of a creative writer who needs some part of life to be mere direction-following.  It was certainly not intended to be a way of ensuring that the budding young artiste gets exactly what he or she wants.  But I realized recently that it had an unintended side effect.  Oftentimes, after hearing the magic words (“Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it”), Young Monet will stand and contemplate for as long as a minute.  What does he want?  Then, usually, eventually he comes up with it, and it is drawn, to be further embellished with strokes from his own marker or chalk.

~~~

It struck me the other day that this is The Problem with higher education.  (I know it is as riddled with The Problems as a Swiss cheese with holes, but hear me out.)  For two years I taught Freshman composition at a moderately-sized university attended by above-average students.  My job was to teach them how to write.  Their job at the university, as far as they were concerned, was to get a diploma so they could get a job.  Usually after a day or so I had managed to convince the doubtful that learning to write was an important part of their twofold goal, so they were at least willing to try to succeed in my class.

Most of them didn’t.  I was not an exceptionally difficult instructor.  Nor am I willing to blame our materials, for though there were certain base level requirements that instructors were supposed to follow, we had a fair amount of leeway to tailor the class to our ideas of what would work.  Nothing did.  Oh, we all had splendid successes with a student here or there, and frequently small successes with the majority of our students.  But they could hardly be said, upon leaving the one-semester course, to be writers, let alone good writers.

Without a doubt, the single greatest issue was their inability to come up with stuff.  They simply had no ideas.  No matter how creative the prompt or assignment given to them, and no matter how interested they were in it, it failed to spark material of their own.  (The sole exception in my experience was a paper I gave instructing the students to write about some change in their childhood, such as moving, and explain the causes for it.  Well over a third of my students went with “moving,” and the cause was “divorce.”  Those papers could tell a sad story all of their own.)

Nor was the students’ inability to come up with ideas merely a benign problem.  All sorts of things are blamed for plagiarism: lack of time, lack of understanding of what constitutes academic dishonesty, lack of moral fiber.  In my experience—and, I think, that of most of the instructors I knew, including instructors in other subjects—the greatest cause is the student’s inability to have an idea of his own.  Lack of time may sometimes be the immediate cause, but even when that is the pressure-builder, it is usually not because the student cannot physically write the paper fast enough to turn something in, but because he cannot conceive of himself creating ideas fast enough.

Creating ideas is hard.  Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it.

…

…

…

“A mowble home.”

“A mobile home?”

“OK.”

So we draw a mobile home.

Of course, Young Monet only knows about those from books or parents anyway: it is not as if he is creating the concept of “mobile home” de novo.  But he is creating an idea in the moment of what he wants to draw right now, by searching through his memories and deciding what should be produced from this blue chalk on this patch of concrete this morning … All creativity is combining what we already know.  The magic lies in the combinations.

But to learn to make those combinations, to tap what we know so as to make something quasi de novo, is a long and difficult process.  And I can only guess that most students, at least the students I saw as college Freshman, aren’t being put through the process often enough or early enough or consistently enough.

Maybe the fault is not enough free play, and too much structured learning.  Maybe it’s helicopter parents and teachers.  Maybe it’s video games and social media.  Maybe it’s an all-of-the-above cocktail.  Regardless, the solution seems clear.

Let the kids (at least partly) figure it out.  Let them be a little bored.  Don’t abandon them to their picture-less fate, of course (not if you want them to grow up human, anyway).  But do let them figure out how to fill the somefing-hole in their brains.  If they aren’t learning how to do it at two, how on earth will they learn to do it at twenty?

Ten Rules for Writers, or, We're All a Little Mad Here

Jonathan Franzen (whom, true confession, I had never heard of before a few days ago) apparently just got himself in trouble for producing a list of ten rules for aspiring novelists.  Without having the foggiest whether Franzen’s work is any good, much less anything I’d enjoy, the furor strikes me as amusing.  One expects writers to be a bit pretentious about their writing (who, me, what? moving right along here …), and Franzen’s list is that.  One expects writers to be quirky, and his list is that too.  And as for his anti-internet rule(s) (two by my count), I suspect he is hyperbolically stating what all writers know deep in their souls to be true: that the internet is a foe of productivity, even as it is a friend of research.  This is not new information.

The truly funny thing about the resentment Franzen has sparked is that the internet is ALIVE with people offering advice on writing, and not infrequently in the “ten rules” format.  It is ubiquitous.  I don’t have time to read them all, but I suspect that between Marion Harmon, Sarah Waters, Elmore Leonard, Denis Lehane, Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Monica Ali, Janet Fitch, various and sundry asked by the Guardian, and LifeHack, … someone has produced a list that is even more offensive than Franzen’s.

Just for fun (and maybe it will help you write better) here are two sterling prose compositors speaking from their podia (that’s on their feet, which is probably Greek for “off the cuff”), offering their take on how to produce a bestseller.

Mark Twain:
1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.
12. An author should say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.

P.S.  You will notice that these are actually eighteen rules, not ten.  Despite the fact that some on the internet have deigned to abridge Mark Twain, I see no particular reason to fit so sprawling and ingenious a writer into a box.

Nietzche (source):
1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.
6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

For a bonus, here’s a digest of a Rex Stout interview in which he explains the difference between himself and Dostoyevsky (which, as an admirer of both, I found fascinating).

I can’t really top that, and maybe I shouldn’t try, but reading Franzen’s list did make me think about my top rules.  And maybe that’s the good thing about the proliferation of pseudo-advice on the internet: it has the potential to produce some self-examination that may lead to the development of best practices.

Now excuse me while I go wash my mouth out of contemporary jargon.  Here, without further ado, is The Girl Who Is Saturday’s Ten Rules for Writers, which comes with no guarantees whatsoever attached.

1. When you sit down to write, set a double timer to ring once in three minutes, and once in thirty-three.  The first bell ensures that you actually start writing, and the second that you have written a good deal before you stop.
2. Spend your good ideas; do not hoard them.  The best way to have more good ideas is to let the ones you have get out and play.
3. Outline down to the scene.  Be pleased rather than chagrinned when your scene turns out to have a good deal more occurring in it than your outline let on.
4. Read what you enjoy, and then forget about it.  Your subconscious will remember the bits worth stealing.
5. Write what makes you happy, whether that’s “what will sell,” or “what I like to read,” or “what I think is important and worthy.”  Writing is hard enough without making yourself miserable with the produce.
6. Don’t be afraid to sound pretentious.  Make sure to ask truthful and wise people if you actually do sound pretentious.
7. Give all your characters arcs.
8. Don’t forget the trail mix.
9. Keep it to one swig every half page.
10. Unless you’re drinking cocoa, in which case the sky is the limit.

And finally, because I don’t like boxes either, but also lastly, because I’m not Mark Twain …

11. Pick up the phone when it cries and the baby when it rings.  Real people are always more important (and you’ll write better for acting on that fact).

The King of Blah

There are worse hymns than “The King of Love my Shepherd Is,” a text based closely on Psalm 23 (or 22? the DRV has ruined my sense of psalm numbering for life).  The old text is indeed a gem:

1 The King of love my shepherd is,
whose goodness faileth never.
I nothing lack if I am his,
and he is mine forever.
2 Where streams of living water flow,
my ransomed soul he leadeth;
and where the verdant pastures grow,
with food celestial feedeth.
3 Perverse and foolish, oft I strayed,
but yet in love he sought me;
and on his shoulder gently laid,
and home, rejoicing, brought me.
4 In death's dark vale I fear no ill,
with thee, dear Lord, beside me;
thy rod and staff my comfort still,
thy cross before to guide me.
5 Thou spreadst a table in my sight;
thy unction grace bestoweth;
and oh, what transport of delight
from thy pure chalice floweth!
6 And so through all the length of days,
thy goodness faileth never;
Good Shepherd, may I sing thy praise
within thy house forever.

Unfortunately, the text they gave us on Sunday was … well, not bowdlerized or demasculinized but certainly dumbed down.

1 The king of love my shepherd is,
whose goodness fails me never;
I nothing lack if I am his
and he is mine for ever.
2 Where streams of living water flow
a ransomed soul, he leads me;
and where the fertile pastures grow,
with food from heaven feeds me.
3 Perverse and foolish I have strayed,
but in his love he sought me;
and on his shoulder gently laid,
and home, rejoicing, brought me.
4 In death's dark vale I fear no ill
with you, dear Lord, beside me;
your rod and staff my comfort still,
your cross before to guide me.
5 You spread a banquet in my sight
of grace beyond all knowing;
and, oh, the wonder and delight
from your pure chalice flowing!
6 And so through all the length of days
your goodness fails me never:
Good Shepherd, may I sing your praise
within your house for ever!

Is it really so difficult for modern churchgoers to understand words like “celestial” or phrases like “transports of delight”?  Does the occasional “thee” or “-eth” burn the ears of our modern Puritans?  (Indeed, I’m astonished that the word “perverse” escaped the censor’s snip.)  Oh, those old fashioned words wouldn’t be relatable.  Pardon me.  That’s why we read two-year-olds books with only a two-year-old’s vocabulary and grammatical structure: so the toddlers can “relate” to their entertainment.

All sarcasm aside, here is a lovely polyphonic setting of the psalm by Bach.  And if Bach isn’t quite to your taste, CPDL has a setting by Hassler, if only some kind soul would record it!  I think the words are appropriate enough for Thanksgiving, no?  And also for funerals.  Thus we hit all the end-of-November stops.  You may thank me when we meet … later.

Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt, BWV 112 (Johann Sebastian Bach)

A Lesson for Homilists

Every now and then—any parent with children will testify—the state of family affairs at Mass becomes so—familial—that very little of the homily hits home.  Still, there are usually tidbits here and there that make it through, and hopefully provide fodder for meditation later in the day or even during the rest of the week.

Pity, O Priest, the condition of the parent who (in between snatches of crying and sushing and darting in and out of the vestibule in attempts to cordon off the offending infants from the larger congregation) obtained from your homily the following edifying theological and spiritual insights:

1.     You grew up at this parish.

2.     You belong to [order redacted].

3.     You were nervous about your first assignment.

4.     Your superiors assigned you to Ohio rather than to Latin America.

5.     Decades later, you are happy to be visiting your home parish.

6.     It’s interesting—they were getting rid of Latin when you entered seminary, and now they’re doing the Novus Ordo in Latin.  Interesting.  Huh.

7.     Your stole, based upon the colors contained in it, could make shift for any liturgical season and was probably borrowed from a community theater production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.*

*Technically not a part of the homily, but noticeably present during its delivery nonetheless.

In sum, if there was something substantive, these parents didn’t catch it.

And the moral of the story, good priests everywhere, is …

Secondhand Temptation

In an examination of Guardians of the Galaxy II, one of the Marvel franchise’s more recent movies, I spent some time discussing the movie’s failure to portray a convincing villain, a failure which damaged the story as a whole.  If the villain in Guardians had been able to more effectively sell his masterplan to the hero (instead having to resort to hypnosis), it could have been a much better film.  A hero who has to make good intellectual and moral choices using his full capacities is a more interesting and on some level a nobler character than one who acts merely instinctively.  A villain who can almost convince a sound man to follow him is more interesting and on some level more useful character than one who is easily refuted.

Since the screenwriters had time in this case to make the villain more effective (they had only to change a rhetorically weak speech for a strong one), I assumed that the screenwriters were simply unable to write convincingly villainous rhetoric.  Upon further consideration, however, I wonder if that was the only thing, or even the main thing, holding them back.  It is at least conceivable that some of them had ethical scruples about portraying a villain whose tempting is nearly effective.

The problem with a good, solid temptation scene is that it operates differently upon different viewers or readers.  Even the story of the Fall in Genesis has this imperfection: I’ve known non-Christians to genuinely feel that God’s test is tremendously unfair to Adam and Eve.  In the Gospels, Christ refers to that sort of spiritual blindness using Old Testament references to those who lack “eyes to see, and ears to hear.”  Nor is the blindness always spiritual: during the latency period of childhood, which lasts from about age five to twelve, there is generally a diminished ability to comprehend and process certain adult knowledge (a diminished ability which, incidentally, ought to be respected).  And of course, there is always the question of intelligence pure and simple: the annals of history are full of evil men who rose to prominence in part because people were simple enough to believe them.

When it comes to literature, there are plenty of examples in which right and wrong portrayed subtly have led to confusion.  Evelyn Waugh’s masterful and very Catholic novel, Brideshead Revisited, is adored by numerous secular critics only because they fail to see its Catholicity.  Waugh, writing from the point of view of a narrator who is (for most of the story) not Catholic, is too subtle for his advocacy of the Faith to be grasped by many readers.  A still more grave example of this phenomenon is Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Milton asserts rather grandly near the beginning of his biblical epic that he intends “to justify the ways of God to man,” an intention which even a minute scholarly knowledge of Milton’s life and opinions supports.  But over the centuries since Milton wrote, scores if not hundreds of readers have felt (in the words of William Blake) that Milton was “of the Devil's party without knowing it.”  Milton has been rolling in his grave ever since.

This gives the writer a conundrum that is not faced by other creative artists.  If he is called, as some writers are, to write simple stories, stories that deal with good and evil on a level that a child can understand, then there is little or no danger that he will tempt readers beyond their strength.  But if he is called to produce anything more complex—if it is part of his secondary vocation to reproduce moral conundrums with anything like the complexity they sometimes have in real life—then there is always a danger, almost the inevitable danger, that some of his readers may (to paraphrase Blake) take the devil’s side without his intending it.

Read the rest at the Register.

In Which Good Screenwriting Just Makes Sense

It is a truth universally acknowledged by all who have the misfortune to know them that writers view movies with a jaundiced eye.  It’s not so much that we’re deliberately looking for what the screenwriters have done wrong, as that we’re on the lookout, even unconsciously so, for mistakes that we might make ourselves.

It will thus come as no surprise that I thought Guardians of the Galaxy II was less than stellar.  To be sure, this isn’t just a writer’s critique: friends also thought that Guardians I was generally better and specifically funnier.  Despite my hesitance to level that criticism from a distance of months, I’ll confess to having noticed more tastelessness this time around.  Possibly the tastelessness was there during the first round too, but I don’t remember it so vividly.

Likewise, the violence.  About halfway through I turned to my husband and said, “Does this even have the same rating as the last one?”  As with the humor, this installment of the series just felt rougher.  Once again, though, I’m not confident that the body count was higher, or the killing portrayed more lightly.

A third element of the film that made a definite difference in viewer comfort was the character of Groot.  Groot, an ancient tree in Guardians I, has been splintered into a baby shoot in Guardians II.  He’s undeniably cute.  Too cute.  Especially if you happen to be a female possessed of a baby or so, seeing anything bad happen to Baby Groot (even if he does look more like a pint-sized Ent than a human being) is incredibly painful.  The “mascot” scene was almost unwatchable.

None of these, of course, are critiques of the competence of the film’s writers, or not directly so.  But …

You knew this was coming.

Spoilers ahead.

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One of the good things about Guardians I, people said, was that it didn’t take itself too seriously; by comparison, some friends felt Guardians II took itself too seriously (ironically—see above point re humor).  The real problem for any movie, of course, is rarely its seriousness, but rather its failure to do serious well.  And on this count, I think Guardians II may indeed be guilty.

I said spoilers ahead, right?

You all read these captions, right?

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In its favor, the film is attempting to do something that its predecessor did not, in treating the theme of family ties and especially of fatherhood.  If the Yondu plot is the center of the fatherhood thread, then that is actually interesting.  But if the Ego plot is the center—and the amount of screen time rather seems to indicate that it is, even though the film ends with Yondu—then the film fails.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, here’s the basic setup.  Peter Quill, a.k.a “Starlord,” is the son of a human being from earth and a hitherto unidentified extraterrestrial.  Early in Guardians II his life is saved by a mysterious being who soon identifies himself as Peter’s father, and who turns out to be a “celestial” (think minor Greek god) going under the moniker Ego (hmmm …).  Ego warmly invites Peter to his home planet and, with varying degrees of suspicion, Peter and two companions go.

Once on his home planet, Ego reveals his masterplan to his new-found son Peter.  For—centuries? millenia?—he has deposited bits of his planetary magical stuff …

It’s blue and glows; what more do you need to know?

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… onto other planets, along with fathering lots of children on said planets.

I told you he was basically a minor Greek god.

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Ego’s masterplan is to grow himself over all these planets and turn the universe into—you guessed it—Ego!!!

But there’s a catch.  Ego isn’t powerful enough to do this on his own; he needs a second celestial to help him.  All of his children so far haven’t had enough god genes to be of any assistance, and so they’ve been painlessly euthanized.  (Nice guy, right?)  But Peter Quill, well … Peter has the god genes, as his handling of the Infinity Stones in Guardians I proved.

Of course, it would take a monster to listen to this recital unprotesting.  Since Our Hero Peter is instead a Very Nice Guy, the screenwriters evidently figured he needed some excuse for being tempted.  Thus, prior to the recital of the aforementioned Fiendish Scheme, Ego essentially hypnotizes Peter.

… whose eyes, of course, turn totally blue.  Paging Frank Herbert!

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Thus, Peter is able to listen to the recital, be genuinely tempted by the prospect of joining with Dear Old Dad, and only snaps out of it when he learns that Ego, as a minor element of the Fiendish Scheme, had to off Peter’s mother.  This breaks the spell numbing Peter, and enables the commencement of the Final Battle (which according to custom takes perhaps a quarter of the movie, with brief respites for character development and comic relief).

It’s not a terrible solution—it’s better than some alternatives, e.g., changing Peter’s character such that he petulantly considers Ego’s Fiendish Scheme because, say, he’s mad at his friends for some trivial or not so trivial reason.  Still, this would have been a much better movie all around if Peter had been genuinely tempted.  But would have required a better Ego.

Recall C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra.  If you read the speeches of Lewis’s tempter Weston, it’s actually very hard to detect surface ethical issues.  As a reader, you can almost approve some of his arguments for disobedience.  You can admit to yourself while reading, “Wow, maybe that’s wrong in this situation … but I dunno … Would it always be wrong?”  Of course, Lewis gives us enough external information to know that the Bad Dude is in fact a Bad Dude and ought not to be agreed with.  But it’s a strength of the novel that the Bad Dude is almost persuasive.  Lewis pulls a similar thing off with his narrator in Till We Have Faces, who is credible until near the end of her story.  Dostoyevsky’s Ivan is another excellent example of the character whose false arguments are powerful and all but irrefutable.  Similar things have been done in literature from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Milton’s Satan to (some say) Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert.  Unreliable narration, whether for a speech or for an entire book, is a basic tool in the writer’s kit.

Ethically speaking, I think unreliable narration is oftentimes to the good.  In a story where the readers or viewers are eventually disabused of their error, the awareness that they were tricked or tempted has a cautionary effect—“I shouldn’t judge people so harshly,” “I didn’t realize I could find power so attractive,” etc., etc.  And regardless of the ethical implications, it just plain makes for a better blasted story.

That is why Ego’s narrative in Guardians II is so terribly dissatisfying.  We the viewers don’t agree with him for a moment.  He isn’t interesting anymore.  And we can sit smugly in our couches and shake our heads in righteous scorn at Ego and roll our eyes at the stupid, drugged Peter, in a lively exercise of Better-Than-Thouism.  It is stultifying for the intellect and not much better for the soul.

What’s more, this story thread is paired with two other family-themed threads: the reconciliation of sisters Gamora and Nebula, and the emergence of Yondu as Peter’s true father-figure.  They’re worthy stories, but they suffer by being juxtaposed with Ego’s.  Yondu is a clear alternative to Ego—a flawed but ultimately loving character, who at one point tells Peter, in re Ego, “He may have been your father, but he wasn’t your Daddy.”  But Ego is so bad that, attractive exterior aside, he hardly works as a foil for Yondu: there really isn’t a choice between them.  It would be more interesting for the audience, and require more discernment on Peter’s part, to recognize Yondu’s virtues if Ego were less appalling.  As for the Gamora-Nebula story, the root of their quarrel is a father who played them off against each other (literally—as gladiators) from childhood.  Although their father, Thanos, is not obviously juxtaposed against Ego (he’s offscreen for this entire film), once again a subtler portrayal of Ego could potentially have led to more interesting considerations about Thanos.  (For example, how is Ego’s plan to use Peter for his Fiendish Scheme like and unlike Thanos’s desire to train his daughters for his own empire?)

With so much to be gained by strengthening Ego’s character, why didn’t the screenwriters make him more interesting?  The usual answer, that character development takes too much time, won’t work here.  True, the film is, like all of its genre, devoted to providing an entertaining spectacle.  But it still takes time to outline at length Ego’s activities, past and future.  All the screenwriters needed to do was to substitute some plausible rhetoric for the dull pennyworth of  Nietzsche they used instead.  (E.g., Ego could have began by appealing to the corruption of fallen beings—wouldn’t it be better to wipe out certain planets, etc., etc.?)

I think the only possible reasons for failing to ante up Ego’s rhetorical skill are either (1) it didn’t even occur to the screenwriters that his rhetoric could be better, or (2) they realized it could be better, but didn’t know how to convincingly write such a speech.  Either possibility is a sad commentary on the state of their art, and the unfortunate result of their apparent incapacity an object lesson to the rest of us.

Boredom and the First Fifteen Minutes

This November has taught me a lot about productivity—not that this blog has much to show for it; the productivity has manifested elsewhere.  Among other things, I have been reminded yet again that deadlines and (still more) competition are excellent ways to make myself write more and better than I otherwise would.  And writing, like workouts and daily prayer, is beginning to share more and more of the characteristics of a habit: one of those things that grows easier with frequency, with the ease fading as the exercise of the habit lapses.

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Most of all, however, I have gained a greater appreciation for the fact that writing is one of those activities that are difficult for the first five, ten, or even fifteen minutes.  It is unlike movie watching or eating good food—activities that appeal immediately to the appetites, require little effort, and are almost universally described by human beings as “fun.”  Many people, indeed, would express outright disbelief that the word “fun” could possibly apply to so laborious a pastime.

And writing isn’t fun, in the sense that watching a movie is fun.  Perhaps “rewarding” would be a better word; but that too is inadequate.  There is a writer’s high, just as there is a runner’s high and a musician’s: a place you reach when the words come fluently and without difficulty, and the end product is none the worse for all that.  And nothing is more “fun” than reaching that state of “work.”  The effortless activities that we usually call fun cannot even compare.  We become sated and stuffed; we feel we have over-somethinged when we conclude them, and turn in disgust away from the screen or the plate, disgruntled by the thought of how much time we have wasted.  There are no such regrets, and no such feeling of overindulgence, from scaling a peak with writing or making music or exercise.  But of course, to be the sort of runner or writer or pianist who finds this wonderful and perilous place, once needs to be pretty good already: one needs to have achieved a state of fluency, rather than mere competency.

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I don’t mean that one needs to be playing late Beethoven sonatas

or writing War and Peace to enjoy this high.  One may achieve it

with Clementi and Nancy Drew fan fics.  But even in that case,

one needs to be fluent with the idioms concerned:

fluent in the twists and turns of Clementi and Carolyn Keene.

Even once one has achieved fluency in a certain idiom, however, there is still a dragon at the gate.  There are still the first five, or ten, or fifteen minutes.  The fifteen minutes, when the most fascinating project, if it requires but the slightest bit of effort, is dull.  The fifteen minutes when the internet, the couch, and even the dishes have more appeal.  The fifteen minutes when the only word for the thing you love is boring.

Children, it seems, don’t have this problem.  Because they are just discovering the world around them, they are endlessly fascinated by it.

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Or are they?  I can certainly remember plenty of late mornings and afternoons growing up when I felt bored.  I’ve seen one-year-olds, having exhausted what Mrs. Elton would call their “resources,” wandering about rooms and whining plaintively in search of something to entertain them.  No, the wonder with children is not that they don’t get bored.  The only wonder is that the things that catch their interest are mostly simpler than those that tantalize adults.

If anything, children are more in danger of being bored than adults are.  When you live in a state of wonder which is partly due to incomprehension, it is easy to grow used to being entertained by things that catch the eye.  Instant gratification oftentimes works, and with the simplest of objects; and so instant gratification becomes the rule, the constant desideratum.  Once a thing’s been handled a minute, dropped, licked, and stuffed into the available containers, it’s aged.  It’s become boring, and the incipient toddler is bored.  He hasn’t yet learned—nor could he comprehend an explanation—that with a little effort the boring block could become interesting again: could become part of a tower, a wall, a path, even (heaven help us) a projectile.  In other words, he hasn’t learned to play.  He needs an adult or an older child to teach him how to get past the first fifteen minutes (or, given the length of his attention span, the first two) to find that place where imagination and joy take over.

The terribly sad thing about modern life, of course, is that most adults have never learned not to be toddlers, or else have regressed to the toddler state.  (If you doubt me, consider briefly America’s two great addictions, one manifested in obesity and the other in private, usually solitary, vices.  The plate and the screen.)  We could blame the fact that schools don’t let children play, speak of “the hurried child,” suggest more Tiger Parenting, find fault with Baby Boomers or Millennials, and of course declare that Apple is to blame.

I don’t think any of those explanations are necessarily false, but they are negative—being mere diagnoses of the disease by which we reached our present state—rather than constructive.  The only real constructive solution, I think, begins with a personal dedication licking those first fifteen minutes in the interest of something worthwhile.  In other words, it would behoove each of us to learn again to play.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and see about those Thanksgiving leftovers, and maybe hit up a Black Friday sale or ten.

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St. Christina the Astonishingly Nasty

I cannot remember to which Facebook friend I owe my introduction to Kirstin Valdez Quade’s reimagining of St. Christina the Astonishing.  Published in The New Yorker, Quade’s longform story incorporates text from Christina’s thirteenth-century vita into a first-person narrative from the mouth of one of Christina’s sisters, covering many of the events recorded of Christina: her miraculous levitation; her report of having visited purgatory; her eccentric avoidance of people who carried the stench of sin; her extreme penances; the accusations of madness and possession; and, ultimately, her entrance of a convent.

Quade takes the outlines of Christina’s story and her penchant for “astonishing” behavior and weaves a disturbing tale.  I was reminded of The Toast’s epic transformation of “The Velveteen Rabbit” into a horror short—except that while The Toast keeps tongue firmly implanted in cheek, Quade appears to have intended her smackdown of Christina seriously.

Read the rest at the Register.

Further Considerations Regarding Anger and Appetite

After more consideration of my query regarding Trump’s putative Shakespearianforbearers—if he took my (imaginary) Buzzfeed-style, PaulCantor-authored quiz, would he be Antony (eros) or Coriolanus (thumos)?—I have come to the tentative conclusion that he would be Coriolanus.

So yes, this is properly not an Unanswered Question post—

consider it more of a Tentative Answer post.

Hear me out, mon frères, because I know you’re shaking your heads; and remember that this is a dichotomous query: there’s no third box for Trump, to elevate or debase him beyond the given options.  After all, what is the internet about if not oversimplification in the interests of entertainment?

Trump’s great flaw, most people agree, is his ego; speaking on the bright side, his self-confidence is his greatest asset.  More specifically, he is braggadocious.  He wants to be seen as huge.  This contrasts one aspect of Coriolanus’s character—after all, the desire not to show off, not to be praised, is pivotal in the plot of Shakespeare’s play (as it was in Shakespeare’s source: Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus).  But as anyone who knows the play well will recall, Coriolanus’s modesty is actually a form of humble bragging: he doesn’t want to show off before the plebs because he thinks himself above even their praise.

Now obviously, that’s not Trump’s issue.  He does not seem to see himself as above, or above wooing, those who voted him into office.  But the very way he courted them, in loud, expressive terms, along with his avowed tendency to fight back at anyone who resists him, is thumotic.  And recall too that the great scandal of the presidential race for Trump involved bragging about being able to do something, and in a scenario were such bragging would increase his reputation.  Even his eros has thumos.

In contrast, consider his erstwhile opponent, Mrs. Clinton, and her husband, the former president.  The accusations against them have usually involved coverups of one sort or another, and coverups generally designed to conceal acquisition: of money, oftentimes; and for the former president, of affairs as well.  Their tendency to grasp—again, I am flattening everything to fit this dichotomy—is, in the broad sense of the words used here, erotic.  Their gods live mostly in their bellies.  Trump’s lives mostly in his chest.

That’s not a judgment about the morality or immorality of either, or a comparison of who’s worse or which ring in Dante’s hell they would go to (or, please God and allowing for deathbed conversations and all that, what respective rings on Mount Purgatory they’d find themselves on).  It’s simply an observation by a writer who tries to see things schematically: who likes to get the big washes of color down before filling in the details of the portraits that make people interesting, and (for better and for worse) human.