Rules of Thumb 3

 And four from me. That is, four rules of thumb that work for me.

• Sit quietly and wait for something to come up. (Something always does.)

• Same time, same place, every day. (It’s a date with myself. I’m just thinking, making notes. Sitting at a keyboard comes later.)

• You can talk about it or you can write about it. (I’m one of those who can’t do both.)

• It’s done when you are satisfied you can’t make it better.

And one footnote in the way of an explanation about one of William Maxwell’s rules of thumb:

• The first-person narrator is a character, not a narration device.

Maxwell was talking about fiction. The narrator of a short story or novel has to have a resume, a past, a story he tells himself about his past, quirks, foibles, even a wardrobe. Even if you don’t use the information, you should know whether your narrator was invited to join the Lions Club or the Rotary Club.

It’s not the same thing, but people who write columns for newspapers should think about that advice. A columnist who cultivates a kindly, folksy persona and then, before the election, turns combative and begins to call people stupid, might be making a mistake. In some sense, readers see a columnist as character, rather than a human being.

Rules of Thumb 2

 A few more rules of thumb — this batch from Erskine Caldwell.

• “I was not a writer to begin with; I was a listener.” (Oral storytelling is the basis of fiction. You learn by hearing.)

• “I’m not interested in plots. I’m interested only in the characterization of people and what they do.” (Worry about a plot if you’re writing a mystery.)

• Produce then revise: Rewrite it six to 12 times. Don’t add much. Fat spoils lean.

• “To me short-story writing is the essence of writing.” (His terms: 1-50 pages. He says he wrote 150 stories and quit.)

• Routine: 6-10 a.m. and 4-7 p.m. Or even and odd days. Or bus trips. Or boat trips.

• Projects: One thing at a time.

• Aging: When you’re young you have no judgment. Everything is good. As we age, “good” gets harder.

Rules of Thumb 1

 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the essayist, claimed to have worked out a fundamental formula: “that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.”

I’m a kindred spirit. I like a lot of things better than theories, including tips, rules of thumb, shortcuts and maps.

I’ve kept a list, on and off, of rules of thumb that other writer’s have found helpful. Here a few from William Maxwell:

• Forget outlines. Each story has a natural form. The writer’s work is to discover it.

• Instead of an outline, a one-page statement of what you intend to write sometimes helps.

• Save the oracles, the good sentences. Try them in different contexts.

• A complete scene early shuts too many doors. Cut material and use it later. “It is the death of a novel to write chapters that are really short stories.”

• The first-person narrator is a character, not a narration device.

The ancient art of flogging experts

 Even before it became home to the Know Nothing Party, the United States had a long history of distrusting and discrediting experts.

The tradition continues today. People will take cattle worming meds that are recommended by talk-show hosts who couldn’t pass a chemistry course to save their lives. But they won’t listen to people who’ve gone to medical school and who conduct research on viruses.

Discrediting and punishing people who know more than we do is an ancient tradition. Montaigne told a story about Publius Crassus, a Roman consul who called on a Greek engineer. Publius told the engineer to send him the larger of two masts in the harbor for use in a siege machine. The engineer sent the smaller mast, knowing it would work better.

It did work better.

But Publius had the engineer flogged, thinking the interests of discipline outweighed the interests of building a working machine.

It makes you wonder why we humans ever bother to ask an expert.

It's the holidays, and a book of poems is by my chair

 I was ganged up on — a convergence of four memories or thoughts, all on grief.

• When I was a newspaperman, my boss Dolph Tillotson used to write an annual column saying it was OK to be a little blue during the holidays. It’s natural. You can’t think of past holidays without thinking of loved ones who are gone. As you age, the list of the missing gets longer. You have friends who have become fragile and others who are battling threatening diseases.

• Wittgenstein, that astonishing thinker, asked about the effects art has on us: “You could select either of two poems to remind you of death, say. But suppose you had read a poem and admired it, could you say: ‘Oh read the other — it will do the same’?"

Of course, you wouldn’t say that. If a poem moved you, you would go back to it. And that gets to Wittgenstein’s point: we use poetry.

• One of the poems I have used is “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou. When great trees fall you can be stunned out of your senses. And so, too, when great souls die. I especially like these lines:

And when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly. 

When I first heard the lines — and I heard them spoken before I read them — I imagined they were from a prayer book that I didn’t know. I was, I thought, in the middle of a wonderful new rite.

• Robert Bly was a poet who spent years trying to show people, men especially, that they need poetry and need to learn how to use it. He died this week at 94.

• Sources: Wittgenstein’s comment comes from Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Maya Angelou’s poem can be found here: https://africa.si.edu/2014/05/when-great-trees-fall%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8-by-maya-angelou/

A vision of the virtual end of reading

 The essayist E.B. White told of a college president who had predicted that in 50 years only 5 percent of the people would be reading.

White’s piece was collected in a book, The Second Tree from the Corner, published in 1954, the year before I was born. The college president’s prediction obviously was off the mark.

It was the dawn of the audio-visual age. Educators were worried that reading would be undone by television, movies, filmstrips and slide shows. No one had thought of PowerPoint, much less the Internet.

White shared the president’s concerns about substitutes or shortcuts for reading. Everyone wants to be informed and educated. Fewer people want to put in the work, what White called the “discipline of the mind.”

I marked two sentences in White's essay:

• “Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions finally produces a sort of ecstasy.” He’s talking about the communication between a writer and a reader. A reader has to work to absorb and digest what the writer has to say. As the writer Eric Hoffer used to say, the grass becomes cow, not the other way around. The reader eventually owns the idea.

• “Readers and writers are scarce, as are publishers and reporters.” White was skeptical of reporters who didn’t bother to go to the scene of the accident themselves, who reported on others’ reports. Good readers and good writers, good publishers and good reporters have always been scarce. Things of real value are always scarce.

Becoming a reader with a method

 Yesterday’s note was about the Committee on College Reading’s recommendations, which I picked up as a guide to my own reading almost 50 years ago.

It struck me how simple and straightforward the committee’s recommendations are for becoming a methodical reader. By the time my edition of Good Reading was published, the pamphlet had grown to a paperback with about 2,000 recommended books.

J. Sherwood Weber, the editor recommended this:

• Look over a section or two that interest you — I started with ancient Greece, philosophy and biological sciences — and put a checkmark by the books you’d like to read.

• Convert the checks into Xs as you finish a book.

• Set a goal. Weber recommended a book a week, although he said a well-read person would read more. This would be in addition to the required reading in college. (Bless him, he said this also would be in addition to a daily newspaper and several periodicals. I will never quite get over coming out of a building at a medical school in the company of a scientist whose research was widely recognize and hearing her ask, “Is there an election today?” Her work was and is important, but so is the beloved democracy.)

Basically, start with your interests. At some point, you will realize that you don’t know much about another field, and that ignorance will bother you. As a reader, you know what to do.

The award for most borrowed book goes to ...

The most frequently borrowed book from my library is Good Reading, an annotated list of good books.

It’s not close. I can’t tell you how many copies of this little paperback have been lost to friends who had every intention of returning it. My policy is to buy every copy I see in used bookstores.

The book was compiled by the Committee on College Reading and edited by J. Sherwood Weber. The edition I have been able to hang onto is the 35th edition, copyright 1969.

Good Reading started as a pamphlet in 1932. It was to be a “modest guide to supplementary reading” for college students. Taken as a whole, the collection of recommendations is one view of what an educated person should know.

These lists or canons are out of fashion. The problem, of course, is that “one view” part. Who’s view? And who gets to decide? And why is the prevailing view always white, male, Protestant, privileged … and so on?

I was aware of the controversy when I went to college decades ago and tried to find other voices, other perspectives. Whatever its limits as a canon, Good Reading was a place to start.

All this comes to mind because, it seems to me, we don’t have quite enough reading materials that we hold in common. I’m thinking of things that might count as secular scriptures — texts that could start a conversation, if only people on two sides of an argument had read them.

A report from the creek

 It was a cool, clear day, and a big red-tail hawk made lazy circles over the upper end of Elmendorf Lake.

It’s been cool and clear for about a week: temperatures might drop into the 40s at night and rise into the 70s during the afternoon. On clear days, from below, red-tails look tan. But when the sun hits just right, the red on the tail explodes like a firecracker.

This big bird was fishing, I think, but I didn’t see him dive. He gradually worked his way up the creek, past Commerce Street, out of sight.

He reminded me that I haven’t given a report on the creek in a while. I have been waiting for the shovelers to arrive for a month. (You can see a note about them on Oct. 12.) A few finally arrived in the past couple of days. The winter coots arrived first. We have a few that stay on the creek all year, but I’ve seen a few more than usual since mid-October.

An odd claim about human goodness

 Take a look at two assertions about virtue:

Humility is to the various virtues what the chain is in a Rosary. Take away the chain, and the beads are scattered; remove humility, and all virtues vanish. ― St. John Vianney

 

Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest. 
— Maya Angelou

 

St. John Vianney asserts that humility is the primary virtue. Maya Angelou asserts it’s courage. In my reading, Angelou speaks for the majority party. I’ve read more advocates of courage than of humility.

What’s interesting to me is not the disagreement, but the common claim behind the disagreement. Vianney and Angelou both think there is a principle virtue that makes other virtues possible.

Is that true? Is that the right way to look at virtue, at our efforts to cultivate virtues that make us better?

I’m not denying that there’s an internal logic in the language of virtues. That internal logic is everywhere in language.

But something about this notion seems odd, and I think it’s this:

The scientific model of thinking has enormous prestige and influence. The model includes organizing principles for the various sciences. A science of biology that organizes the world’s vast number of life forms based on the principle of heredity is far more helpful than one organized on the principle of animals and plants that have similar colors or similar sizes.

We would like to have principles that show organizing relationships among virtues or values just as we have organizing principles that show organizing relationships between plants and animals. But virtues and values aren’t the same kind of thing.

Remember the Concord

 I like Thanksgiving but am less fond of the tales about the pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620.

I always think the pioneers who arrived on the Concord 18 years earlier.

They sailed from Falmouth in 1602 under Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold. He was determined to explore what was then called the area north of Virginia or northern Virginia. There were 32 on board, including 20 who proposed to stay in a new colony.

Gosnold found Massachusetts, enjoyed the natural harbor at Provincetown and named Martha’s Vineyard after his daughter, who had died young. The pioneers looked over the Massachusetts coast carefully, quarreled vigorously and headed back to England.

The pilgrims were not the first. The first looked it over and had second thoughts.

He who praises brevity should make it snappy

 A friend who noticed a note on the virtues of brevity (Nov. 3) suggested that I could use a dose of my own medicine.

That’s fair and just — but it’s also an excuse to add some footnotes:

• Montesquieu, somewhere or another, jokingly suggested that human knowledge would fit in 12 pages, duodecimo.

• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. contended that any two philosophers could tell each other all they know in two hours.

• When buffalo roamed the Texas Plains and I was a newspaper editor, I suggested that reporters should write three times as many items as they in fact do but keep each item to a-third of the usual length. I was a fan of what was then called a “brief.” The notion is similar to Mike Crittenden’s suggestion that the average person should write five times as many things as he or she actually does, and that each item should be five times shorter than it actually is.

Crittenden’s suggestions can be found here: https://critter.blog/2020/10/02/write-5x-more-but-write-5x-less/?utm_campaign=Recomendo&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter

 

The pleasures of old-fashioned letters

 My friend Melvyn and I have exchanged letters recently. This is not an exchange of email. These are letters delivered by the postal service.

Melvyn, who is 90 and still practicing medicine, doesn’t have a computer at home. He’s not afraid of technology. He has a computer at work, and that is enough, he says.

When people talk about letters now, they are apt to talk about the joy of having something you can hold in your hand, like a present on your birthday. But I’ve noticed a change in me — in the way I sense time.

Melvyn and I are discussing ideas, rather than the news of the day. I wrote him because I wanted to know what he thought about an idea I’d been toying with. He wrote back, and I was still thinking about the problem when his letter arrived a week or two later. What he had to say struck me as important, not merely urgent.

With me at least, email is not like that. Each email is a minor emergency that must be returned promptly, preferably within 24 hours, regardless how superficial the reply. Somehow, with paper and ink, that kind of urgency is just not there.

It’s all right to let a letter sit by my easy chair for a day or a week. I can think it through before replying.

But I’ve just replied and had the pleasure of seeing the postman take the letter away. So now, I have that other great pleasure of letter writing: the knowledge that I am owed a letter.

Maybe it's just a case of curiosity

 I saw Peter Taylor’s name in the paper the other day and went off on a long train of thought. When I posted a note the other day, I started to say: I’m apparently at the age when a certain detail, even just a name, can derail me. 

In other words, I started to blame it on my age.

In reality, I think I’ve always been this way.

When something interests me, I follow that interest. And so I have to work longer hours to get things done — longer, that is, than those highly disciplined people who stick to the task and ignore the distractions.

I tend to pay attention to the distractions. And, if the distractions are interesting, I follow my curiosity out the window. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t that way.

I can complain about the many problems of advancing age. But I don’t think that’s one of them.

 

Peter Taylor again — and that other kind of writer

 A certain detail, even just a name, can derail me. Whatever train of thought I was following is lost, and I’m off on a new track.

Sunday’s note mentioned a name and a phrase. I’m still stuck on them.

The name was Peter Taylor’s. He was a writer of short stories.

I remember reading “A Wife of Nashville,” a story about the cruelty of indifference, of how little value we place on the feelings of other people.

Many stories about the South are about the spectacular kind of violence that created the terror of Jim Crow. Taylor’s stories get to the costs of the soul-killing indifference that can separate neighbors from neighbors and husbands from wives.

The phrase that has stuck in my mind is “the kind of writer one discovers by overhearing better-known writers talk about writers.”

I’ve little to say about Shakespeare. But I’ve had real pleasure from reading less famous writers I heard about when other writers were talking shop.

Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Browne, Bernard Darwin. I’m trying to remember how I heard about William Trevor.

Montaigne is justly famous, but I didn’t hear about him in a classroom. I started reading Montaigne because another writer, Eric Hoffer, was crazy about him.

Noted statesmen contemplate race theory

 You might have noticed that the state of Texas is trying to discourage, even ban, the teaching of critical race theory.

Larry Hufford, a professor at St. Mary’s University here in San Antonio, wrote a piece for the local paper day explaining why he teaches a theory, even thought it infuriates the state’s top political leaders.

He said he’d been teaching a course called the Practice of Citizenship for a decade. “Responsible citizenship encourages students to learn, among other things, systemic causes of racism,” he said.

Before critical race theory came to the attention of anyone in state government, the Catholic Church had a long history of teaching against systemic racism and the duty to pursue social justice.

Hufford cited this line from Pope Paul VI in 1971: “Men rightly consider unjustifiable and reject as inadmissible the tendency to maintain or introduce legislation or behavior systematically inspired by racialist prejudice.”

In his Practice of Citizenship course, Hufford teaches students how to use the tools of critical race theory and Catholic social teaching to try to improve society. It’s a duty — what people of faith are supposed to do.

It’s not clear how the statesmen in Austin think they are going to stamp all this out. Perhaps they have a theory that uprooting centuries of Christian teaching would make Texas a better place to live. Perhaps they could tap the state’s rainy day fund to build a coliseum and buy some lions … you know, to handle the Catholic professors who refuse to recant.

The good news is that this nonsense is not likely to go far. The bad news is that is has been going on forever — at least as long as I can remember.

In Texas, the learning curve for state government is a flat line. 

• Source: Larry Hufford, “Let’s not be so critical of race theory,” San Antonio Express-News, Nov. 12, 2021, p. A14.

The kind of writer better-known writers talk about

 Christian Lorentzen, reviewing Padgett Powell’s new book “Indigo” for The New York Times, posed this question: “Is Powell, like another of his heroes, Peter Taylor, a genuine “Biggee’ of U.S. lit but ‘the kind of writer one discovers by overhearing better-known writers talk about writers”?

It had been a while since I’d thought of Peter Taylor, who, like my father and his father before him, was from Trenton, Tenn.

Trenton had a population of about 4,000 when I was growing up. You’d think I could claim some kinship to a “genuine ‘Biggee’” of American literature. But the town had two distinct families of Taylors. I come from the non-literary line.

If you want to get to why some writers talk about Peter Taylor, take a look at his story “Dean of Men.”

The narrator, a dean, talks to his son, Jack, questioning the length of his hair and whether a long-haired man can play “the male role” in a marriage. Peter Taylor doesn’t tell you the story is set on a college campus in the 1960s. He just shows you the ’60s.

The narrator, aside from casually demeaning his son, is mainly offering Jack a long explanation for the divorce from Jack’s mother. It all began with a quarrel with an academic committee about faculty housing.

The narrator, as father’s do, tells his son that you have to go on living — you have to make sacrifices to live fully.

But if you read the story as I did, you’re appalled by what the narrator sacrificed for a career. It’s easy to roll your eyes at primitive societies that still make use of the sacrificial knife. But we sophisticated folks make sacrifices every day. And, like Father Abraham, we sometimes find our children on the altar.

A poet looks at ambition

I was thinking again of David Budbill, who explored the question of ambition.

Is it better to be a known poet or a wild poet-monk on the mountain?

                        What if I wrote my poems

            only on walls or scraps of paper

            and gave them away to strangers?

Don’t all writers want success — fame, a big publishing contract?

Budbill’s answer was that to seek fame is to put other people at the center of your life. Fame is just the reaction of other people. Do you need that?

The lines are from “Wild Monk Or?”

The day Wittgenstein blew up a bad idea

 Jared Marcel Pollen has an interesting article in the Los Angeles Review of Books reminding us that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is 100 years old.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in 1921. But, like many things involving Wittgenstein, that fact comes with an asterisk or two.

The book started before World War I, when Wittgenstein built a “hutte” at the end of a branch of Sogne Fjord in Norway. He was trying to escape, not so much from people, as from the society of Cambridge and of Vienna. He thought he needed quiet to work.

But he wrote most of the Tractatus while he was a soldier in the Austrian-Hungarian Army. Key parts were written during major campaigns. Wittgenstein could work with less quiet than he imagined.

The book was essentially done by 1918. But he spent months in an Italian camp for prisoners of war. He continued to fiddle with it in camp.

The book, less than 100 pages long, is on the logic of language. It offers a theory of what can be expressed in language — and therefore a theory of what can be thought.

If you are not interested in philosophy but are wondering what Wittgenstein is about, I can give you an example of how his thought can influence people.

I went to college at 17, having dropped out of high school. I suppose some people are geniuses at 17, but I was not. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I had the idea that I could learn something of the “laws of beauty” by studying the philosophy of art. Maybe not get to the actual laws themselves, which seemed mysterious and profound. But I hoped to get near enough to improve my writing, to make it more substantial, perhaps even beautiful.

With hindsight, I can see the bad metaphor. Aesthetics is not a science, and so the “laws” I had in mind are not like the causal laws that govern the natural sciences.

If you raise the temperature of water to 100 degrees centigrade, it will boil.

Can you imagine what the laws of aesthetics would look like if we tried to study them scientifically — that is, by assuming there are causal connections?

Picture the musicians of an orchestra sitting down in front of their music stands, which hold musical scores. Can you imagine what the causal laws would look like? Would the notes seize control of the players, causing them to play the notes? Would the science of aesthetics then amount to us judging how close the performance was to the score? Would a causal science of aesthetics even permit musicians to make mistakes?

Music doesn’t work that way. Art in general doesn’t work that way, and neither do a great many important human activities.

The musicians entered the concert hall because they wanted to play music, not because they were under some mechanistic force. Our intentions — and our wants, our thinking and a great deal more — simply don’t follow causal laws in the way that elements in a chemistry lab do.

I began my adult life with an idea that blew up on me when it came in contact with Wittgenstein’s thought. I was astonished and bewildered as only a boy of 17 can be.

I kept reading to see what would happen next.

• Jared Marcel Pollen’s “The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle: Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ at 100,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2021, is here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-way-out-of-the-fly-bottle-wittgensteins-tractatus-at-100/

The brief wonders of David Budbill

One more note on brevity:

David Budbill, a remarkable poet, was an advocate of brevity. Here’s a clue:

Pare Everything Down to Almost Nothing

then cut the rest,

and you’ve got

the poem

I’m trying to write.

Budbill’s poems are spiritually aware with — in the words of an inspired obituary writer for The New York Times — a “streak of cussedness.”

I can vouch for that. When Budbill’s book While We’ve Still Got Feet was published in 2005, Copper Canyon Press sent the newspaper a review copy. I picked it up on a coffee break and spent a couple of evenings with it.

I was so delighted I called him at his homestead in Vermont. The conversation ranged over Zen influences and a book called Four Huts. Ancient Chinese and Japanese sages used to go the woods, as Thoreau would do centuries later. They wrote “huts,” as Thoreau wrote Walden. They’d build places — most simple, but a few palatial — to be away from the city and society and close to quiet and nature.

Some of the Budbill’s poems followed the life of the Chinese poet-monk who built a hut on Cold Mountain. The monk watched nature and seemed determined to confront something essential about himself.

I asked Budbill if he was a model for the wise, yet cantankerous, monk. Budbill never gave me direct answer. But he was a good conversationalist, wise and cantankerous at the same time.

He died five years ago.

He and his wife, Lois Eby, were teaching at Lincoln University in 1968. They planned to build a little place to store their stuff — books mostly — and then go wandering.

What they discovered was a place and a sense of place. They called it Judevine, after a neighborhood mountain. They found it endlessly fascinating.

Budbill’s poems often are about paying attention. When you are doing the dishes, you shouldn’t be contemplating the meaning of life. You should just be doing the dishes.

Part of your life is to wash the dishes — but also to watch the moon rise and listen to the wind blow. Part of your life, he said. Not part of your job. Not something you have to do. Something perhaps you should want to do.

The kind of thing the President wanted to know

Several of these notes have been about brevity in writing. Virginia Woolf was a master at getting to the heart of the matter.

Theodore Roosevelt was a complicated character, but Woolf caught him, in a paragraph of fewer than 100 words:

When he was President of the United States a cowboy came up to him and said, “Mr. President, I have been in jail a year for killing a gentleman.” “How did you do it?” asked the President, meaning to inquire as to the circumstances. “Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,” replied the man, thinking that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted to know with what kind of tool the trick was done. No other President, it is said, from Washington to Wilson would have drawn that answer.

To know that anecdote is to know Roosevelt. It’s from Woolf’s essay “Body and Brain.”

Another case for a great book

 Paula Marantz Cohen, dean of the honors program at Drexel, once made a case for one-credit classes, as opposed to the usual three-credit courses.

Instead of rushing through David Copperfield as part of a larger course, students just read one great book.

I wished I’d saved the citation for Cohen’s article. But I remember her main point: Great books inspire people, including teachers. Inspiration is a good thing to have in education.

I can see other advantages. I remember one course where the required reading list had 20 books, more than one a week. We had to be familiar with them all when we took the final exam. They were important books. But the experience didn’t do much to cultivate the joy of reading.

One credit isn’t going to mean much in a degree plan. But the possibility of finding one good book that you can come back to, time and again … I wish I’d had that opportunity decades ago.

Now that I’m retired, I have that opportunity. I’m not missing it.

A writer's first lesson

 Between the world wars, A. J. Cronin, a British doctor practicing in London, was diagnosed with an ulcer. The treatment at the time was six months of complete rest on a milk diet.

The place of exile, as he called it, was Fyne Farm, in the Scottish Highlands. He and his wife boarded with the farmer and his family.

After a week, the doctor was going crazy. He was under orders not to do any physical work. Cronin had always thought he might want to write a novel.

So he bought some composition books and started. He worked hard and was delighted to find that the more wrote the more he could write.

Then — as all writers do — he reached the point of despair. On a drizzly day, he dumped the novel in the trash bin and went for a furious walk. He bumped into the farmer in the nearby bog.

Cronin told the farmer the novel was in the bin, getting wet.

And then Cronin read the man’s expression. It was all in the eyes and the face.

Many Scots, farmers as well as university professors, take pride in the country’s contribution to letters. The farmer had been proud when the doctor told him he was writing a book. Cronin had read that pride in the man’s face then. He could read the disgust in the man’s face when he learned the book was in the bin.

The farmer was ditching the bog. The farmer said his father had seen a pasture where the bog was and had begun to dig. The farmer himself had seen that same vision — a fine pasture one day where there was only bog now — and had continued to dig. If you dig enough, a pasture could be made here, he said.

Cronin, shamed and furious, dug the novel out of the bin and dried it in the oven. After a lot more digging in the bog, a book called The Hatter’s Castle emerged.

It was a best seller, was translated into many languages and was turned into a Hollywood film. It was so successful that Cronin left medicine for fiction.

Cronin told this story for would-be writers. The first lesson for writers is perseverance. That’s what Cronin called it, and that’s what it’s usually called. I like to think of it as self-control.

If you read his essay, you can find a second lesson. The moment of despair came when Cronin had some of his early chapters typed. He stopped writing and read them.

What we call writing is more than one process. And two important processes are incompatible. Writing a narrative is a creative process. When you start it, don’t interrupt it by editing, which is a critical process. When you’re writing a draft, don’t pause to fix typos or restructure paragraphs. Don’t stop for anything. Above all, don’t stop to read the early chapters with a critical eye. Editing is a different process. There will be time for that when the first draft is done.

• Source: A.J. Cronin, “The Turning Point of My Career,” The Reader’s Digest, May 1941.

Fascinating thinker, fascinating personality

 My interest in Wittgenstein is in his approach to philosophy. To me, a philosopher is a kind of concept mechanic — a person who tinkers with the intellectual machinery.

The old Chevy pickup you inherited from your grandfather is apt to need not only a tune-up but an overhaul. You need to be able to tinker with the engine if you expect it to work.

But Wittgenstein would make for a remarkable character in fiction. Before World War I, he went to Skjolden, Norway, where he lived in a hutte — more of a farmhouse than a hut — above the fjord. He was working on problems in logic that would later be published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Here’s his description of his routine: “My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.”

He could whistle entire movements of symphonies and concertos. Brahms’s St. Anthony Variations was his throw-down piece.

He held the view, at least for most of his life, that sexual feelings interfered with love. But he was prone to loneliness. When he returned to Norway in the 1930s, again to work on philosophy, he found the hutte was too isolated and lonely so he lodged with Anna Rebni, a retired English teacher and farmer. It was almost as if they were husband and wife; their quarrels amused the neighbors.

Capturing Wittgenstein’s thought in clear prose is a test of a writer’s ability. But capture his character in fiction — I’d love to see that.

Leacock's idea of a college

 Stephen Leacock, a wonderful essayist, wrote this about education:

“If I were founding a university — and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable, I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory, then after that, or more properly with that, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some textbooks.”

I copied that sentence into a notebook when I was a college student. I think it appeared originally in 1920 in The New York Times as “The Need for Dormitories at McGill.” I read a version of it in a collection of Leacock’s familiar essays.

Leacock’s theme was that a student learns from his environment, by talking with other students or interested faculty members. What student read and what they hear in the lecture hall is important. But it’s the discussion, the conversation, that’s vital. From those conversations new questions emerge, and learners find new interests to pursue.

Of course, the idea of a smoking room is gone now, replaced by coffee house. But the point is that we all need a place for conversation. College is just a place where collegiality takes place. And a college without that atmosphere isn’t a place of learning. 

I copied that paragraph into a notebook because I had discovered that what I wanted most was to be a lifelong learner. I didn’t plan an academic career, which meant that I would have to cultivate a good environment myself. It wouldn’t come ready made.

Yesterday’s post about a running conversation was one example of a learning environment.

A good coffee shop is another.

For years, as a newspaper editor in Galveston, I made it a point to start my day at the Mod Coffeehouse on Postoffice Street. I’d meet different people, learn about different things, hear different points of view.

The value of a running conversation

 For years, I had a weekly entry called “The Philosophers” on my calendar. It was a lunch date with three other fellows: a tradesman who specialized in hardwood floors, a professor at the medical school, and a philosophy professor who was also a psychotherapist.

Being old guys, there had to be rules: No talking — well, not much — about our aches and pains. As the hardwood floor guy put it, a man should quit talking about his health about the time he gets his first colonoscopy. We also banned the topic of national and state politics. We live in Texas, where the politics are unspeakable. Talking politics would have turned us into angry old men for an hour each week.

And so, we came together to talk about books and ideas. We talked about the biological concepts of E.O. Wilson. The philosophical ideas of Plato and Wittgenstein. Ideas on neuroscience from Christof Koch and Walter Glannon.

Some days, we’d talk about literature or music. The professor of medicine was a perceptive critic of fiction and opera.

That running conversation was one of the best things I ever did for myself.

Today, our culture is “health-conscious.” We are bombarded with information about the value of regular exercise and a low-fat, high-fiber diet, but we hear less about the habits that keep our minds healthy and fit.

That sustained conversation was a good habit. You could, occasionally, skate through a session without bringing anything to the table. But if you coasted for more than a week, the other guys would call you out.

And so, week after week, I found myself bringing ideas that interested me to see what the other guys would say. I remember reading a newspaper article about crows in urban environments and then reading scientific articles and books by John Marzluff, a specialist in corvids. I discovered scientific papers written by Alex Taylor on the use of tools by Caledonian crows. I remember a lively discussion about what we mean by “intention” and “cognition.”

When we started meeting, I was editor of a daily newspaper. I didn’t have time for that kind of thing. Neither did the other guys. They all had full lives too.

But somehow, we kept going. We somehow gave ourselves permission to pursue our own interests, to invest time in reading and thinking about things that had little to do with our professional lives, to hone ideas until we could present them to others and then listen to their response.

If I were going to give advice to a young person, I’d mention daily exercise and a sensible diet. But I’d plead for the idea that an ongoing conversation is even better.

A book I'd love to read

 One of the books I’d most like to read was never written.

In late 1929, Ludwig Wittgenstein felt the need to write his own biography. He dabbled with the idea, on and off, for a couple of years.

What he had in mind was something like Augustine’s Confessions. Wittgenstein’s word for excellence was “serious.” Confessions was perhaps the most serious book ever written.

What Wittgenstein had in mind was an examination of pivotal points in his own life. He would look at what actually happened. Then he would try to come to grips with what should have happened.

It was a spiritual exercise.

A lot of writing is like that.

  

One more note on brevity

 I’ve been thinking about length in literature — and especially about the virtue of brevity. Before leaving the topic, one last note:

Milan Kundera once observed that it takes 15 minutes to see that Henri Matisse was a great painter. But it takes weeks to form a judgment of Joseph Conrad. “The different arts reach our brains in different ways.” 

Painting is more immediate than the novel. But there also are variations within literature. The short story is more immediate than the novel. The essay is more immediate than the treatise.

I keep thinking there is a literature of short items that would make a good college course.

• Source: Milan Kundera, “Blacklists,” in Encounter, trans. By Linda Asher; New York: Harper, 2010.

One-night reads: Recommendations 5

 Today’s the last list. It covers several genres, each with just a couple of suggestions. The last list starts with drama, which is probably where the first list should have began. A play is, by definition, a one-night entertainment.

 

Drama

The possibilities are near endless, and, yes, I’m aware that Shakespeare, Moliere, Shaw and the gang are not on this list. 

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 

Sophocles, Oedipus

Euripides, Hippolytus

Ibsen, The Wild Duck

O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, My Dinner with Andre, a film that records a conversation over dinner.

 

Dialog

• Plato: Apology of Socrates

• Interviews. Dialogs have become interviews. If you are interested in writing, the interviews with writers published by The Paris Review are part of your education. 

 

Sayings and aphorisms

• Diogenes — A collection of his sayings is in 7 Greeks, translations by Guy Davenport.

• Antonio Porchia, Voices.

 

Letters

• Seneca, “On Noise,” “Scipio’s Villa”

• Roy Bedichek — all the letters by this neglected Texas writer are good, but try to find the one in which he gives directions for making a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.

• Charles Lamb — all are good, but try to find the letter in which he apologizes to a hostess for having enjoyed himself too much and having to be carried home.

• Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Part of a writer’s education.

 

Sports 

Bernard Darwin’s essays on golf and Eduardo Galeano’s essays on soccer are wonderful.

 

Others

• Ecclesiastes

• Jesus Ben Sirach, Ecclesiasticus

• Sufi Tales: “Little Fatima.” Idries Shah published several collections of these tales.

• Tao Te Ching

• Gilgamesh

• Kabir, Songs

One-night reads: Recommendations 4

 Today’s list is on short stories. It’s the only list I know of that doesn’t include a recommendation from Chekhov, Poe, Joyce or Twain. They wrote some wonderful stories. But this list is short, and I'm starting elsewhere.  

• Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” a story that convinced me that I wanted to be a writer.

• Leo Tolstoy, “What Men Live By,” a retelling of the gospel through the eyes of a poor shoemaker.

• Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River,” about healing after trauma.

• Truman Capote: “The Grass Harp,” a story of two old women who go off to live in a tree house, and how hearts break and mend. 

• J.D. Salinger, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” a story that occurs in a cab. 

• Roberto Bolaño, “Last Evenings on Earth.”

• Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I.”

• Hilary Mantel: “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.”

• William Carlos Williams: “The Use of Force.”

• D.H. Lawrence, “The Blind Man,” a story that contrasts temperaments.

• Alice Munro, “Dear Life,” about misperceptions and family lore, “Amundsen,” about the unfortunate ways we seek love, and “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” about an improbable friendship. 

• Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Speckled Band.” A literature that excludes Sherlock Holmes is of not for me.

I’ve enjoyed stories by William Trevor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Somerset Maugham and Tennessee Williams. But this list could easily get out of control.