30 Monday Dec 2013
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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,300 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 55 trips to carry that many people.
20 Friday Dec 2013
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“Strange as it may seem, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the sun far better than we understand the interior of the earth.”
– Richard Feynman
The battle royal between Science & Spirit was called years ago, Science was declared the winner, and Spirit declared vanquish. Now the champions of Science predict that we shall march boldly foward, ever further into a glorious Utopian society, in peace, and harmony, ruled by science and reason, all supersticious nonsense and religion and spirituality, and anything that can’t be measured by a man in a white lab coat will one day be eradicated to humanity’s forgetten dustbin . . . and perhaps then we shall finally have flying cars and nutrituois meals that can be stored in the form of a pill. Sure, pal.
At first glance it might appear foolish for me to announce that it is time for Science and Spirit to go another round in the ring. And foolisher still to be rooting for Spirit, but that is exactly what I intend to do here. This seems like madness right? After all science is never wrong, right? I mean a fact is a fact. Science is proven. We can’t argue with science! And spirituality is said to be just a bunch of baloney believed by the ignorant and the uneducated . . . what will I be saying next, that we should avoid education and champion ignorance as well?
I can see this is going to be a tricky, and delicate line to walk. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-science at all. In fact I even taught high school science for a while. I think that science literacy is very important, it is a building block of democracy, something to be pursued by anyone with a curious mind, and of profound importance. However, I don’t think that we need to allow the scientist in his white lab coat from some Ivy league research center dictate to us the nature of reality. Science is a body of thought continuously in motion, continuously being added to and adjusted, it is not THE TRUTH, it is the pursuit of THE TRUTH. The first thing that the genuine student of science learns is that science is fallible. I remember this came as a bit of a shock to a lot of my students. But it is that same idea, that oh people had to figure this stuff out, it’s not just a bunch of facts that you memorize out of books—that is what makes science fun and engaging.
To be fair, I don’t really have a bone to pick with science so much as the mechanistic worldview that it paints . . . because science is ipso facto incapable of grasping the non-physical. Another way of putting that is that science can only grasp he objective nature of existence, it cannot touch the subjective experience. One has only to sit still in a chair for 5 minutes with eyes closed to notice that the existence is as much subjective as objective.
The fanatics of science, it’s modern day prophets, writers like Richard Dawkins crusade against the modern heresy of superstitions, magic, ESP, crytopzoololgy etc. like In a way science is inherently a lot less reliable than subjective experience. You know what you feel, no body can tell you otherwise. Science, historically speaking, has an almost hundred percent track record of being wrong. That’s the point really, a theory is only true as long as it can’t be disproved. Our scientific beliefs are constantly evolving, they have changed before in the past and you can be damn well certain they will continue to change and evolve in the future. So to view science as dogmatic fact is the wrong idea.
Let me give you some examples. It seems every day science changes its mind about some fact, jus this week i was announced ha muli-viamins actually don’ do a thing for you and ani-bacerial soap is bad for you. Bu I hough science gave us these good things? Yeah, and remember margarine?
One of the biggest— we used to be quite certain that the sun revolved around the earth. We even had the specifics of how everything moved about on a bunch of crystalline spheres. When Ernst Chladni, the first physicist to suggest that meteorites were actually rocks from outer space published his work in 1794 wikipedia tells us “The scientific community of the time responded with resistance and mockery.”
Scientists didn’t beleive in the fact that the continents were moving around (plate tectonics) until the 1950’s! One of the first guys to look through a microscope Nicolaas Hartsoecker was convinced he saw “tiny preformed men” in sperm cells. For a long time after that people believed that humans were just much larger version of these little “homunculi”. The first scientists to argue that glaciers moved on their own, and were responsible for shaping land, were met with hostility, mockery, and a lot of resistance by their peers. Even though peasants, uncontaminated by scientific orthodoxy had long known that glaciers could move boulders.
Hmm, mockery, hostility, resistance, sound familiar? I bet it does to any open minded person who has tried to study the supernatural, the unknown, the subjective and the metaphysical. My point is simply that we need not let science bully us into the sterile, purely mechanistic, soulless world view. While some would like you to believe that science has prey much found all of he answers, and is just mopping up a few small details that is far from true. The amount about life, the world, the universe, and existence that we don’t know the answer scientific answers to is vast, and I believe always will be. Science is a bit of a hydra, the answer to every question only raises more questions. We discover everything is made out of atoms. Bu what are those made out of? We discover atoms are made out of electrons , ok what are those electrons made out of? Oh, we figured out electrons are made from quarks. Fine . . . but what are those made from? Super-string?
Great . . . just one more question . . .
Science is the kid in the back of the car forever asking “Why is the Sky blue?” and every answer given is met with another “but why?” Spirit is the kid in the back of the car who looks at the blue sky with wide open eyes, and enjoys the sky simply for being what it is. All I am saying is that they can be the same kid. It doesn’t have to be a boxing match, it can be a dance. We can honestly and intelligently ask why about everything and follow science, and think critically, we can also learn where science is unable to read, and o go some places in the human mind, the human experience science isn’t enough, but we shouldn’t let scientists, or he detractors of spirit mock or nay-say our ability to experience the spiritual, the profound, the subjective, the numinous, for reality is all of these things and more.
19 Thursday Dec 2013
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The best books I have read on how to be a writer are the memoirs of Haruki Murakami, and Stephen King.
Here, jumbled together, are my notes on how to write, gathered from King’s “On Writing” and Murakami’s “What I talk about when I talk about Running”. These are not high-falutin’ puffed-up pieces about the noble art of the craft. They are roll up your sleeves, this is actually what you gotta do, declarations. They are the sort of notes a plumber might leave to his son before passing along the family business. If you are serious about writing follow the advice of these two masters and you can’t fail. (These quotes are taped on the wall next to my desk. Just memorize and apply these words of wisdom, young grasshopper, and you won’t need to spend $40,000 on an MFA. You’re welcome.)
Murakami’s Schedule
I got up before 5 a.m. and went to bed before ten p.m. People are at their best during different times of the day, but I’m definitely a morning person. That’s when I can focus and finish up important work I have to do. Afterward I work out or do other errands that don’t take much concentration. At the end of the day I relax and don’t do anymore work. I read, listen to music, take it easy, and try to go to bed early. this is the pattern I’ve mostly followed up till today
Stephen King’s routine
My own schedule is pretty clear-cut. Mornings belong to whatever is new—the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically morning is my prime time for writing.
Quotes: (See if you can tell who said what.)
“I came to feel strongly that a story is not something you create. It is something that you pull out of yourself. The story is already there, inside you.”
“I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them of course). . . stories are like found things, like fossils in the ground.”
“Stoked on cup after cup of tea, I drank it by the gallon when I wrote.”
“A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot, which is fine with me. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What -if question.”
“Whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or husband) I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. ”
“If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all else: read a lot and write a lot.”
“I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season. Any longer and—for me, at least—the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public affairs.”
“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot.”
“The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary. I began learning my lessons in this regard by reading Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald.”
“The structure of A Wild Sheep Chase was deeply influenced by Raymond Chandler. I am an avid reader of his books and have read some of them many times. I wanted to use his plot structure in my new novel.”
“Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated.”
“You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point.
“Basically I agree with the view that writing novels is an unhealthy type of work. To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible.”
“The sort of work second drafts were made for are symbolism and theme.”
“Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity.”
“Now let’s talk about revising the work—how much and how many drafts? For me the answer has always been two drafts and a polish.”
“2cnd Draft=1st Draft minus 10%”
“Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.”
“If there is one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects.”
“On some days those 10 pages come easily and I’m up and out doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst.”
“When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.”
“Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.”
“Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole.”
“I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.”
“Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.”
“I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep going, you have to keep up a rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.”
18 Wednesday Dec 2013
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A lot of what I post here is stuff that is meant to be helpful to other writers, and artists. And sometimes I get into the nitty gritty little details, like yesterday I wrote about the benefits of investing in good paper and pencils. Admittedly that is paying attention to the details. This got me thinking that I hadn’t said anything yet about the single most important way to gather ideas, creativity, and skill if you are an aspiring writer. It is so obvious it gets over looked sometimes. The most important thing a writer can do to be a better writer is to read a lot of good books. It is that simple.
Books expose you to the best ideas and voices available throughout all of humanity. They are a time machine. They are a ticket to go and sit down and have coffee and an intellectual discussion with the greatest geniuses of the past few thousand years. They are an invitation to have a heart to heart with the all of the great teachers and sages of human history. They are also more entertaining, and filled with better stories than all that crap streaming on Netflix right now.
A lot has been said about how soaking in the writing of others is important to learning, if you want to write. So I won’t dwell on it too much. I think we writers are lucky, we all have access to the same tools, the same letters, the same language. So when you read a sentence by Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy, or whoever you admire, you can plainly see what they are working with, and as soon as you have that a-ha moment—”oh, I see what they did there” then you can try to recreate it in your own work. It is easy for a writer to learn tricks of the trade from other writers because it is all there in plain sight. In other words it is easy to steal. And that is a good thing. I believe that every hour a writer spends reading is just as good for his/her craft, as practicing writing itself.
In fact rather then write more on the subject of reading, let me just outright steal two great quotes on reading, from books I read.
The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s paper’s and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-concsciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
– Stephen King
But I read and read anyway, sometimes so fast that even I was surprised, and sometimes very slowly, as if each sentence or word were something good for my whole body, not just my brain. And I could read like that for hours, not caring whether I was tired and not dwelling on the inarguable fact that I was in prison because I had stood up for my brothers, most of whom couldn’t care less whether I rotted or not.I knew I was doing something useful. That was all that counted. I was doing something useful as the guards marched back and forth or greeted each other at the change of the shift with friendly words that sounded like obscenities to my ear and that, thinking about it now, might actually have been obscene. I was doing something useful. Something useful no matter how you look at it. Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
— The character Barry Seaman, in Roberto Bolano’s novel 2666.
17 Tuesday Dec 2013
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OK, now I’m going to tell you something that is probably contrary to what you have heard elsewhere. Whatever your skill, craft, or art is, I think you should go out and buy the finest tools for that art that you can afford. A lot of people disagree. I have heard people say if you are a writer you should just use cheap pens and cheap notebooks. That if you invest in a fancy notebook it will make you feel nervous to write in it, because it is so fancy. Humbug! If you are so timid that you quake to write in a fancy notebook, then you probably shouldn’t be writing in the first place. I am not saying you have to spend hundreds of dollars on gear and equipment in order to get things done. I am saying that you should respect the tools of your trade and get the best ones that you can find. A musician needs a good instrument, a painter needs good paints, and so on.
I buy the best pencils and paper I can find. I order a box of a dozen Palomino Blackwings every few months and I refuse to write with anything else. They cost a bit more than a regular pencil, about $1.50 each I think, but it’s worth it. The line is nice and dark, easy to read, and yet somehow easy to erase if need be. Something about the lead in these pencils makes writing with them smooth, almost buttery, like the pencil has been well-oiled. The great thing about the Palomino Blackwing is that it is pretty much the nicest writing pencil in the world, but you can afford it on minimum wage. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos can’t buy a better, more functional pencil. (They could get like a diamond encrusted pencil or something, but that’s just stupid.) At the end of the day, it is still just a pencil. The black 602 Palimino is the classic and looks the coolest, but the lead in the white Blackwing is the best for writing.
Paper: I have yet to find the perfect notebook. The giant, rigid Moleskines seem a bit much. There is a difference between using something of good quality and being ostentatious about it. I do like the small Moleskines notebooks for jotting ideas while taking walks, but for my day-to-day writing I need a large notebook with plenty of elbow room. Lately I have been using the Clairfontaine spirals and they are great. A bit larger than most notebooks, they give you space to stretch out. They are nice and sturdy, I can fill a notebook completely up without it becoming tattered and dogeared like a cheap spiral often does. The papery is velvety, buttery, but still crisply legible and it doesn’t smear at all. Lovely! They go for $12 bucks a pop which is a lot more than a cheap notebook, but since it takes many days to fill a notebook up completely I think it’s worth it.
I also really like these german made brass pencil sharpeners. Again they are a little bit more than a cheapie version of the same thing, but hey it’s like 5 bucks. I want one for every pocket and desk drawer I have.
I am also thinking about investing in one of these fancy little leather pencil cases . . . which I know is getting a bit fetishistic about it. But that’s kind of the point.
Of course you should tailor your fine tools to match your endeavour. If you prefer to type then get the best typewriter, or keyboard you can. If you a painter get nice brushes, a carpenter get a good hammer et cetera. Whatever your craft is, you want to do it as well as you can, you want to master it, so why not use the best tools available? When you work with tools that are well crafted, it reminds you to take your art seriously, and it makes the pursuit of your enjoyable on a tactile and aesthetic level, rather than just an intellectual level.
