Good and short

 I’m a fan of Kay Ryan. I also think her book The Niagara River is a model for writers.

It’s my favorite answer to a question that comes up when writers talk shop: How long should a book be?

One of the biases of this collection of notes is for one-night reads, books that can be read in a free evening. But I’ve had writers tell me that a novel should be at least 75,000 words. I’ve heard serious people talk about cheating and short-changing the reader.

The Niagara River is 72 pages long. It has 64 poems. Most are 50 to 100 words. Eight are 2-pagers. I’d be surprised if there are 6,000 words between the covers.

I do not feel cheated.

I’ve mentioned that I’m trying to commit one poem, “Carrying a Ladder,” to memory. Rather than reading the whole book in an evening, I’m more apt to read a page a day, trying to absorb it in some way. (Eric Hoffer liked the metaphor of digestion.)

When I was young, I would listen to an album of music carefully, learning each song, memorizing my favorite lyrics. Reading Ryan’s book is like that.

• Sources: Kay Ryan, The Niagara River; New York: Grove Press, 2005.

Ryan: ‘Carrying a Ladder’

Recently, I had a couple of notes on lines that could be held in memory. I’ve decided to see if I can get some new poems by heart.

It’s a fun thing to do in grade school and a funny — as in sadly humorous — thing to do at 67.

The first poem on my list is Kay Ryan’s poem “Carrying a Ladder.” It captures, in five sentences, a sense of human nature: our baffling ability to do damage to our fellow creatures and our drunken optimism about what’s within our grasp.

I’ve been carrying around this line — given here without the line breaks — in memory:

 

As though one had a way to climb out of the damage and apology.

 

Of course we don’t have a way. Wanting a way, pretending we have a way, is what makes human beings.

The poem strikes me is as scripture. It’s time to see if I can get it the whole thing into my head and heart.

• Sources: Kay Ryan, The Niagara River; New York: Grove Press, 2005, p. 3. You can find the poem at The Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/42132/carrying-a-ladder

Joe Murray

 Every once in a while, a small newspaper wins the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. It’s the prize to win. If you love newspapers, you really love the ones that are tenacious about serving the public.

The big papers have advantages, and they dominate the competition. But you can find newspapers, still, in small towns across the country, and some of them are good. A few occasionally flirt with excellence.

Joe Murray was editor of The Lufkin Daily News in East Texas when it won the Pulitzer. The series was written by Ken Herman, who went on to a career with the Associated Press.

As a young reporter, I worked for Joe and his managing editor, Phil Latham. The newspaper that Joe edited made mistakes, but it didn’t just flirt with excellence, either.

Joe thought his hometown in East Texas needed a lot of things to become a better place to live, including a good newspaper. I wish the world had a few more people like him.

Joe died at 82.

Sources: The obituary is here:

https://lufkindailynews.com/news/community/former-lufkin-daily-news-editor-publisher-joe-murray-dies-at-82/article_2715c37d-ae0a-56ca-a620-d6468c3316d6.html

Late June at the mountains

 American beautyberry, Callicarpa americana, is just putting out flowers, little garlands around the stem. The famous purple berries will come in the fall. The flowers are pink — but the anthers are so loaded with golden pollen that you pink and yellow, which is lovely.

At Arabia Mountain, I was surprised to see goldenrods in full bloom, not just yellowish green, but gold. It seems early. I can tell you the genus, Solidago, but someone who is less prone to hay fever is going to have to check on the species.

The native Georgians are talking about what a strange year it’s been. The peach crop was mostly lost when the trees bloomed during the warm winter and then were hit by a late frost.

I’m so new to the area I don’t have a sense of what’s normal. My old home of San Antonio is in the news because of the heat — day after day above 100. At Stone Mountain, temperatures are still in the 60s when The Enormous Dog wants his walk in the morning. Still sweatshirt weather for me.

The dog found an Eastern Box Turtle, Terrapene carolina carolina, in the woods south of Stone Mountain. No harm was done, but the turtle did not enjoy being discovered.

Lamentation for mowing machines

 Aldo Leopold used to mark the arrival of Silphium blossoms every July. Silphium looks a bit like a sunflower. It was found on the prairies when settlers arrived in Wisconsin.

Leopold watched for it to bloom in a cemetery dating to the 1840s. One year, the highway crews moved the cemetery fence so they could mow. Leopold knew that the plants like Silphium would survive the mowing once or twice and then simply die.

Leopold told how 100,000 motorists a year passed that spot. Many of them had taken a course in botany. He wondered that so few people would look or would care.

All that came to mind when I discovered the mowers had been through a lot where I’d found dewberries, nightshade, spiderworts and tall grasses.

• Source: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, pp. 48-50.

A small domestic drama

The Wise Woman screamed. I came running. A fledgling mockingbird was cowering at the front door.

The Wise Woman was afraid to shut the door, afraid the tiny bird's foot would be crushed. I moved the fledgling gently with a broom. It cowered in a corner of the porch. The Wise Woman put down food and water.

The next day, I noticed it flitting — skittering along the ground, legs and wings pumping. I suspected its mother was feeding him.

By Day 2, he had moved to the bush near the driveway. That's where he was on Day 3 when the big dog and I, on our way for a walk, startled him. 

The fledgling left the bush and flew across the street. The flight of perhaps 40 yards was wobbly, but still flight. The little bird barely has tail feathers. It must be hard going without a rudder. 

Mary Oliver on what we remember

 Yesterday’s note was about prose sentences that can be held in memory. The poet Mary Oliver made the same point about poetry:

People are more apt to remember a poem, and therefore feel they own it and can speak it to themselves as you might a prayer, than they can remember a chapter and quote it. And that’s very important, because then it belongs to you. You have it when you need it.

She also pointed out that poetry is close to singing, and of course we know songs by heart.

• Source: Krista Tippett interview “Mary Oliver: I got saved by the beauty of the world”;  On Being, Feb. 5, 2015.

Copying sentences

 I think I mentioned that I have been copying some of Aldo Leopold’s sentences into my notebook.

If a young writer asked for advice, I think that’s what I’d say: Find a writer you admire and copy a few sentences. Just try it.

One thing you’ll notice while copying: If the sentence is short, you can hold it in memory from printed page to notebook page. Here’s an example from Leopold:

 

The wielder of an ax has as many biases as there are species of trees on his farm.

 

Those 18 words got from book to notebook without any back and forth. It says a lot — that bias involves something you do, rather than simply think. If you love pine, you’ll cut other trees for firewood.

I’m a great admirer of Sir Thomas Browne, but I can’t remember his sentences. The great opening sentence of Religio Medici is 212 words, if my faulty memory serves. It’s an anthem, rather than a sentence.

This might not mean anything to you. But it’s part of my aesthetics. Things that can be held in memory, including sentences, have an advantage.

• Source: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, p. 75. If all this sounds familiar, see my father’s advice on writing, “A very short conversation,” Aug. 1, 2022.

Leopold: ‘A Smoky Gold’

 If you ask me, the best essay in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is “Smoky Gold.” It’s about hunting grouse amid the tamaracks, which turn gold in October in Wisconsin.

The essay shows you what it’s like to be a naturalist on a walk. Leopold is supposed to be hunting grouse. His dog knows more about where the grouse are than he does. But Leopold keeps coming across interesting things, like an abandoned farm.

Many people go on hunts or walks. When a naturalist walks, he or she is swamped by questions.

 

I try to read, from the age of the young jackpines marching across an old field, how long ago the luckless farmer found out that sand plains were meant to grow solitude, not corn. Jackpines tell tall tales to the unwary, for they put on several whorls of branches each year, instead of only one. I find a better chronometer in an elm seedling that now blocks the barn door. Its rings date back to the drouth of 1930. Since that year no man has carried milk out of this barn.

 

He keeps getting sidetracked by interesting questions.

 

It’s hard on such a day to keep one’s mind on grouse, for there are many distractions. I cross a buck track in the sand, and follow in idle curiosity. The track leads straight from one Jersey tea bush to another, with nipped twigs showing why.

This reminds me of my own lunch, but before I get it pulled from my game pocket, I see a circling hawk, high skyward, needing identification. I wait till he banks and shows his red tail.

 

That’s what it’s like. That rings true to me.

• Source: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, pp. 61-2.

Reading 'A Sand County Almanac'

 I was copying some of Aldo Leopold’s sentences into my notebook and thinking about his most famous book, A Sand County Almanac.

Let me just give you a couple of examples of those sentences.

On the upland plover:

Whoever invented the word “grace” must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.”

On the indigo bunting:

He does not claim, but I think he implies, the right to out-blue all bluebirds, and all spiderworts that have turned their faces to the sun.

I do not think that everyone should be a naturalist, any more than I think that everyone should be a baseball fan or a jazz fan. But if you write about nature, you ought to get your sentences on top of the things that make natural history interesting and exciting.

Leopold does. At least his sentences get to my excitement in being outdoors. The spiderworts are blooming in the Georgia Piedmont now, and they are blue. But not as blue as the indigo buntings I used to see on Zarzamora Creek in Texas.

Years ago, I read an essay about knitting, that gave me a clue as to what it was about, although I’m not, and will never be, a knitter. The writer told of the repetitive motion, and of how it helped her to let mind wander and then gradually empty of thoughts. Being a knitter was a bit like being a Zen master drifting off into meditation.

I finally had a clue why people who knit and crochet are serious about it.

I also admire the form of A Sand County Almanac.

My copy is in an edition of 295 pages. But edition collects many of Leopold’s essays.

The Almanac is 98 pages. I’m guessing it’s less than 30,000 words, on the border of being a one-night read.

The short book is divided into 22 essays, grouped under the 12 months. Some months have a single essay. One month has four.

This book strikes me as a model for the kind of book I like to read.

• Source: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, pp. 37 and 45.

The little dramas of nature

 These notes are full of little dramas, odd things about nature that I just don’t understand. 

The latest involve different species of ants here in the Piedmont whose territories overlap. From what I can tell, they don’t compete for food and simply ignore each other. But I know so little about ants that I don’t know where to start.

I’ll savor the questions while looking for information.

Here’s Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, on the puzzles that a naturalist encounters:

It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas in the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any of them.

He was writing about the sky dance of the woodcock, an elaborate set of courting behaviors involving dancing on bare ground, flying loops and peenting. Leopold, a scientist as well as a writer, said the show started, at daybreak and dusk, when the light was at 0.05 foot candles. 

That requirement was so precise that that the daily show at Leopold’s farm started in April and occurred one minute later each evening as the days lengthened. 

Like Leopold, I can’t fathom why a bird would have such an accurate light meter in its genes. Also like Leopold, I savor the question.

• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, p. 35.

If you’ve never heard the peenting of a woodcock, here’s a recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rp3WQtB6Eo

Happy Juneteenth

 Today’s the day that slavery finally ended in the United States.

There are many ways to look at Juneteenth, but that, to me, is the crux of it. I spent decades in Galveston, Texas, where this bit of history played out on June 19, 1865. For years, I was one of those lobbying for a day of commemoration.

A longer, but still brief, explanation of the history behind this day, is here:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/9154939295927029866/1316142138298882450

Black cohosh

 The white flower spikes of black cohosh, Actaea racemosa, are beautiful. The spikes are called racemes. They are full of little flowers — thick and long. The shape reminded me of a fox’s tail.

Actaea racemosa is a plant of the East and so is new to me. I’m sure of the identification only because volunteers were planting some native plants south of Stone Mountain, and I had to ask. 

I admire the volunteers and the work they’re doing. But I can’t help smiling when people with shovels are talking about native species. The concepts of “native” and “invasive” make sense only if we presume the existence of humans with gardening tools. 

But I am sympathetic: One volunteer said black cohosh will grow where hostas grow. She was trying to replace the hostas in her garden with natives. I’ll see if I can find black cohosh when we go to the nursery.

Smoke

 Some folks who live half a mile down the road have been burning brush. I have been watching.

The first two days the wind was still — or so I thought. Not a leaf was moving, even in the tallest trees.

On the first day, the smoke rose straight above the tree line and then moved glacially toward the southeast. On the second day, the smoke rose straight above the tree line and then drifted toward the northwest.

I could detect no breeze either day. I’m not sure what forces were at work on the smoke. I’m guessing just a slight difference in atmospheric pressure between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain to the south.

The little puzzle made me think of my grandfather, who was like other old cowhands I met as a boy. When my grandfather would light a cigarette, he’d always watch the smoke and note what it was doing. Always.

He was always a bit skeptical of book learning. He learned by observation. Observing the world around him was such a fundamental part of his personality, I’m not sure he believed there was any other way to learn.

The 3- to 4-hour rule

 Oliver Burkeman, a British journalist and author of Four Thousand Weeks, says there might be one hard rule for managing time when doing creative work: The limit seems to be three or four hours a day.

He’s not talking about heroic efforts. He’s talking about what people can do consistently.

Part of me wants to quibble. What if I’m editing a draft of a book, as opposed to writing a first draft? Both writing and editing are creative, but I’d say that first draft required more from the creative reserves. Put another way: I can edit longer than I can compose, especially on a first draft.

I don’t think you ever get a firm boundary between what’s creative and what’s mechanical in writing. And editing seems to me to be a fundamental part of the writing process. So I’m not sure I’m convinced this thinking — and this rule — is solid.

But another part of me wants it to be.

Three to four hours is all I can do. It’s comforting to think I’m not alone. 

• Source: Burkman publishes letter by email, The Imperfectionist, twice a month. His article on the rule for getting creative work done is here: 

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourhours

A critical blind spot, perhaps

My view of Cormac McCarthy: exasperating.

All the Pretty Horses was a wonder. I thought McCarthy was among the stars in the American sky.

No Country for Old Men was unreadable.

I start a lot of books that I don’t finish. Many books are not for me — no harm, no foul.

But it’s unusual for there to be so much promise in a book that I read it almost to the end and give up with the finish line in sight.

On that quirky scale, No Country for Old Men holds a record. I’ve never read further into a novel before  deciding that my response was not good or bad or awful, but simply no.

A little note on geography

 Errors in obituaries are not often interesting, but the one in Cormac McCarthy’s obituary that placed El Paso in New Mexico, rather than in Texas, was fascinating.

It’s interesting that news organizations that claim to produce national products, rather than local products of the East Coast, would make that error.

But the more interesting thing about this “error” is that it’s arguably more true than false. You can, if you spend time in the Southwest, hear people in cafes and courthouses arguing about whether El Paso is properly a part of New Mexico or Texas.

Are the cultural ties of most people in El Paso stronger with the government in Santa Fe or in Austin?

I’d say Santa Fe.

McCarthy, who lived many years in El Paso, ended up in Santa Fe. He no doubt heard the argument many times.

Wondering about creativity

 We create art, not because it’s fun or because we’re sold on the notion of art for art’s sake, but because the activity of making art — the writing, the painting, the composing — changes our minds in some way.

That’s an old idea in the philosophy of art. I ran across it again in Patricia Highsmith’s diaries. She describes the change inside the creative person as psychological, a term that doesn’t help me. The best I can do is just say that I think creating is a way to reorganize your mind.

I look for a story when I see something perplexing, something I can’t deal with and certainly can’t explain. I think we make something new when we see something that doesn’t strike us as being quite right.

• Source: Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950, edited by Anna von Planta; New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023, p. 256.

Taking the longer view of breakfast

 Edward O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, pointed out that early hominids had digestive systems that evolved from C₃ photosynthesis to C₄, from the leaves of trees and shrubs to the seeds of savannah grasses.

That evolutionary shift explains why I eat McCann’s Irish oatmeal for breakfast, rather than oak leaves. It’s odd to think, as Wilson points out, that a lot of that ancient history is still part of the human genome. If a few genes were turned off and a few others turned on, my bowl of oatmeal wouldn’t look so hot and that stand of hardwoods behind the house would look like a buffet line.

I’m a fan of Wilson’s. I’ve just gotten around to Genesis. He says that poets and seers in the world’s 4,000 or so religions have had a shot at creation stories, and it’s time to let the paleontologists, anthropologists, psychologists, biologists and neuroscientists to take a shot at it.

If you’re like me, this version of Genesis will make you think new thoughts.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies; New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019, p. 113.

A lesson on spiders

 When the Wise Woman hollered, I evicted a spider from the bathroom.

Although she does not like spiders, the Wise Woman insisted on a live capture. The intruder was released,  unharmed, to carry on in the garden.

The domestic drama reminded me of a remark by Edward O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, about another species of spider, Anelosimus studiosus, which lives throughout the Americas. Some live as individuals and others live in colonies, where they organize themselves into “personality castes.” That is, the docile spiders provide parental care while the aggressive spiders hunt for prey and defend the colony.

It's a peculiar notion to me. “Personality” is a difficult concept to grasp when talking about humans. When talking about spiders, it’s beyond difficult — at least to me.

But I do understand Wilson’s point: A lot of evolutionary history is still part of the human genome. The genetics that predispose living beings to act and organize themselves in certain ways are there, whether they are still used or not.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies; New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019, p. 95.

Stringy Stonecrop at Arabia Mountain

 At Arabia Mountain, I saw a little succulent with yellow flowers that seemed to be growing out of the rock. I wondered what native species had adapted to the microclimate around the monadnock.

But the plant was Stringy Stonecrop, Sedum sarmentosum, a native of China, Korea and Thailand. It’s lovely, and gardeners have spread it.

I understand and appreciate the idea of an “invasive species.” But it seems to me that if a plant can grow in a forbidding place, it’s got a claim on the earth, regardless of what we think.

Source: Missouri Botanical Gardens has photographs of Sedum sarmentosum here:

https://www.missouriplants.com/Sedum_sarmentosum_page.html

Stafford: ‘With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach’

 I think William Stafford is one of the best American poets and that one of his best poems is about being a parent.

A father takes his daughter to the beach. They climb a dune and watch the sea rage.

            “How far could you swim, Daddy,

            in such a storm?”

            “As far as was needed,” I said,

            and as I talked, I swam.

Being a parent is like that, and so it’s about parenting. Writing is like that sometimes, so I think it’s also about writing. In a lot of things we do, we don’t have answers. We don’t have skill. What we can bring to the task is endurance, determination in action.

• Source: William Stafford, The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems; Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998, p. 120.

A writer I know little about

 Yesterday’s note mentioned Patricia Highsmith, a writer I know little about. I picked up a copy of her early diaries and notebooks from the library and spent an hour with a tin of Book Darts at hand.

I was surprised by the number of passages I marked.

She wrote this before she was 30: 

… if my experience should be shut off now, sexually, emotionally (not intellectually), but mundanely, practically, I feel I should have enough. I have stretched an hour into an eternity. It is all within me.

That’s astonishing to me, and I wish I could ask her about that. It seems to me she was saying that she already had, in her 20s, all the experience she’d need for her fiction.

After graduation, she made a list of things she wanted to learn about. The list included math, with this comment: “ — persistent curiosity, at same time a begrudging of time spent on this branch of knowledge for which I haven’t the least aptitude.”

We all have subjects like that.

I only had an hour. When my time was up, I wanted to read more.

Alexander Pope held that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

I just don’t see it. My ignorance is vast, and my ignorance of Patricia Highsmith is still vast. But it’s not quite as vast as it was when the week began. That’s not good, but it is better.

Maybe I’ll try one of her novels.

• Source: Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950, edited by Anna von Planta; New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023, pp. 562-3 and 256.

Life on a schedule

 The novelist Patricia Highsmith, at 21, said she’d like to write music from 20 to 30, books from 30 to 40, sculpt from 40 to 50 and paint from 50 to 60.

It reminded me of William Osler’s remark about a medical career. Osler thought that all the really good work in science was done by young people. He proposed that a person ought to study until age 25 and then research and investigate until age 40. After that, you could teach until age 60.

Osler borrowed the title from this essay from Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period. Osler was leaving Johns Hopkins, where he’d taught medicine, at 55. The theme of his talk was that people should retire before they are useless.

He suggested, tongue in cheek, that when a person turns 60, he or she should be offered a year in college to reflect about the whole experience and then be offered chloroform.

I have endured many deadly dull speeches. Osler’s strikes me as interesting. But it created a furor. The aggrieved included Trollope fans, who complained that the novelist’s views were treated badly.

To me, all the fuss misses something interesting: the notion that life could be lived on a schedule.  

• Sources and notes: Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950, edited by Anna von Planta; New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023, p. 81.

Sir William Osler,  Aequanimitas; Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co., 1914. 

I’m looking for a copy of Trollope’s novel to see what, exactly, he said. On critic of Osler says Trollope didn’t mention chloroform and in his fictional country where euthanasia is required a person enters college at 67 and does not come out at 68. This would be my college year.

Why readers need friends

 What do you do with a library book if you’re the kind of reader that usually reads with a pencil in hand?

Years ago, I raised that question as a topic for discussion at a weekly lunch with good friends. We talked about notes and note-taking.

But the next week my friend Melvyn handed me a tin of book darts, metal clips that mark a spot without damaging the page.

I’ve been using them ever since. If you’re curious, they’re at bookdarts.com.

A zeta in the margin

 One more thing I learned from Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind: Medieval monks used the Greek letter zeta in the margin as shorthand for “Look it up!”

I’ve already confessed to this: I write in the margins of my books.

I would not dream of writing in yours, or in library books, which we own together. But I use my own books much as the medieval monks that Dr. Kreiner writes about used theirs.

I leave notes in the margins that help me see the logic of a book’s main arguments more clearly. 

I also use Greek letters:

• Lambda marks a word (logos) I want to look up or study.

• Theta marks a paragraph that makes a theme or an argument (thema) that’s central to the point of the book.

• Several letters and dingbats mark a quotation that should end up in a notebook.

Now there will be zetas.

• Sources: Jamie Kreiner, The Wandering Mind; New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2023. For the truly curious: See “A note in the margin,” Nov. 12, 2022, and “And also a symbol,” Nov. 13, 2022.

Trying out cognitive practices

 In her book The Wandering Mind, Dr. Jamie Kreiner tells of High of St. Victor’s Little Book about Constructing Noah’s Ark.

The Little Book was written between 1125 and 1130. The ark is a metaphor for a sheltered place of study, so it’s an account of how to build a monastery or a place of meditation. Hugh worked on the idea until it became more of a blueprint than an idea. He could reconstruct it — this outline of his faith and his creative workshop — from memory. Kreiner calls it a “virtuosic performance of mnemonic and meditational techniques.”

I think Kreiner’s book is important because I think cognitive habits and practices are important. I think that “artificial intelligence” is an unfortunate phrase. I think “intelligence” is biological, a feature of living beings. I also think that using the term to describe computer models creates the kind of self-inflicted philosophical problems that Wittgenstein lamented.

I’m glad that scholars are talking about our own cognitive practices. I wish I could take Dr. Kreiner’s freshman course at the University of Georgia. Here’s here description:

 

I teach a class for freshmen in which we try out different medieval cognitive practices to help students tackle their first year of college. Their favorite exercise, by far, is meditation in the mode of Hugh’s Little Book. They pick a concept from one of their classes that they think is worth exploring — a little piece of organic chemistry, say, or coding or poetry — and they set up an imaginary construction site for it. To start building, they have to start associating, asking themselves how that one piece relates to other pieces, whether the connection is strong or weak, whether there’s more to analyze and build. All that work basically amounts to high-level studying, but rather than being boring or intimidating, it’s adventurous and immersive. It’s also highly memorable — as students appreciate on exam days.

 

• Source: Jamie Kreiner, The Wandering Mind; New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2023, pp. 161-2.

Another physician, another small habit

 When Dr. Melvyn Schreiber offers advice, I listen. Melvyn, 92, is a professor of radiology who also writes essays. For years, I published some of them in a daily newspaper. He wrote others for medical journals.

One of my favorites is “Letter to a New Resident.” It’s addressed to “Dear Junior Colleague” and is signed “Grizzled Veteran.” Melvyn is a serious scientist with a quiet but irrepressible sense of humor.

Much of Melvyn’s advice about what makes a good radiologist applies beyond the field of medicine. 

One of his favorite themes is that an expert must be a person before being an expert.

That means taking time for family and friends. It means taking time to read books outside your specialty.

Melvyn always finds time to audit college courses — literature and history, especially. He is suspicious of anyone who can’t hold a conversation outside a single area of expertise.

The bit of advice that I’ve found most useful was this: “Discipline yourself to read daily about disease processes that you encountered recently.” He was telling radiology residents that if they’d seen anything interesting in the day’s batch of X-rays and scans, they should head to the library and check the latest literature.

I’m no doctor. But if I notice an unfamiliar plant on my morning walk, I hear his voice: “Discipline yourself to read daily.”

I make a note and look it up.

• Source: Melvyn H. Schreiber, M.D., Footprints: A Collection of Essays; Self-published, 2001.

A physician talks of habits

 Physicians, like writers, talk about routines and habits. I’m a fan of Sir William Osler’s essays. His essay “Aequanimitas” describes something close to religion for me.

Osler, who taught medical students, shared all kinds of small habits and routines. He kept a small notebook in his pocket and never saw a patient without pulling it out. The small habit reminded the doctor that he was there to observe and listen. The habit told the patient that the doctor cared.

The basic bit of advice in “A Way of Life”: Live your life in 24-hour increments. You will have great triumphs and unspeakable lows. Bear the burdens of the day without too much celebration when things go splendidly or too much lamentation when things go disastrously. Above all, try not to let the elation or the gloom of one day leak into the next. Don’t let the past day steal from the day in front of you.

• Sources: Sir William Osler, Osler’s ‘A Way of Life’ & Other Addresses with Commentary & Annotations, edited by Shigeaki Hinoshara and Hisae Niki; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Osler’s Aequanimitas; Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co., 1914 is online here: 

https://ia600904.us.archive.org/8/items/2aequanimitaswit00osleuoft/2aequanimitaswit00osleuoft.pdf

Rules, routines and habits

 I’m interested in rules of life, writing routines and small habits that help people do better work.

Yesterday’s note on Jamie Kreiner’s wonderful book probably didn’t make this clear: I’m not so much interested in the medieval monk’s quest to build a better spiritual life. I’m interested in a better creative life or a better life of the mind.

I’m interested in the  idea that simple things like rules and schedules could be, as Kreiner puts it, “a technology for harnessing psychological power.”

I’ve talked to many writers who want to build a better creative life. I’ve read interviews and talked with writers about their routines and tools. And sometimes, like medieval monks, we all get obsessed with the details of our practices and habits. I can laugh at some of their superstitions. But then I always make sure I start the day with at least two Rolling Writer pens and a couple of Black Warrior pencils.

• Source: Jamie Kreiner, The Wandering Mind; New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2023.

Kreiner: ‘The Wandering Mind’

 Jamie Kreiner, a history professor at the University of Georgia, says medieval monks were obsessed by distraction as a feature of how our minds work.

Monks fled “the world,” a euphemism for human entanglements, and tried to set up rules of living designed to focus their minds.

The story of their experiments and arguments is fascinating. The anxiety about whether the world’s technology is distracting us from important, creative work sounds familiar.

Kreiner argues there’s a reason for that: “we modern persons are heirs to a set of cultural values surrounding cognition that are very specifically monastic, and, to an extent, specifically Christian.”

I love her book The Wandering Mind. Here’s a sample:

 

Augustine of Hippo said wistfully in his book The Work of Monks that he wished he knew how the apostle Paul had divided up his day. It would have offered monks clear and useful guidance.

But Paul hadn’t done that; monks were on their own. They avidly shared stories about successful monk’s routines — like how writers today want to know how other writers work and maintain their focus.

 

• Source: Jamie Kreiner, The Wandering Mind; New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2023, pp. 8 and 54.