The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience-but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are.
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne, In one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Sarah Bakewell. Chapter 2 Pay Attention, pg 37.
This could be a productive writing exercise. 200 words describing the closest object near you.
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
The most important thing to understand about Smiles is that he worked for his whole life. When he wasn’t in the office, he was pursuing his education or writing articles. This doesn’t mean he was succeeding. Often he was simply reading and learning for the sake of it. The successful books he published were the eventual result of decades of accreted labour. He studied because he wanted to. For a long time, the returns were zero.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part I, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
That last sentence though, a pile driver – “For a long time, the returns were zero.” Writer Samuel Smiles was a model of persistence. He is what Henry Oliver calls an opsimath, or a late bloomer. (You know a word is good when the spellchecker redlines it). Smiles persisted with his dream project – a biography of the father of railroads George Stephenson. Smiles persevered with the book despite discouragement from Stephenson’s son, and day jobs sapping his writing time. The George Stephenson project began for Smiles in 1849. It was finally published in 1857.
Failure and rejection be damned. A side hustle is for life — and the sheer hell of it. He was a walking writer. And he began to benefit from his accumulated experiences. One trait of late bloomers is their ability to turn their experiences, however incoherent, however seemingly irrelevant, to their advantage as they persist in their interests.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part II, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
Samuel Smiles’ determined path reminds me of Brooklyn Nets guard Seth Curry, who went undrafted and didn’t sign his first guaranteed contract until age twenty five. And the “exceptional case” Athletic Bilbao striker Aritz Aduriz. An athletic polymath who found success at the top level of Spanish football during the latter stages of his career. Scoring 66% percent of his career first division goals after age thirty and then retiring at thirty nine.
Read Henry Oliver’s full profiles on Samuel Smiles here: pt.1, pt.2.
And do subscribe to The Common Reader. It’s one of the brightest lights on the internet.
Sometimes I read straight on without going back, but often, when I learn one word, it explains the meaning of other words that came just before it, so I look back, and, one by one, each newly acquired word gives me the clue to the next one. Knowing Tom had gotten onto his knees before climbing into bed gave me the answer to another word: rezar = pray. And another, later: arrodillarse had to mean “kneel.” Reading a sentence several times over is often enough to teach me most of the mysterious words.
Lydia Davis, Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer, pg 93, Essays Two
The essay Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer makes owning Essays Two entirely worth it. Lydia Davis’ passion for translation and foreign language led her to read a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer by Sara Gomez. In the essay, Davis describes the little games she devised to bolster her understanding of Spanish. One game was, she decided to not look up any word in the dictionary while reading through the book. The idea being, to learn words from context only.
Lydia again reminds us of the power rereading a sentence. Here though, it’s to reveal the meaning of “mysterious” Spanish words. My guess is, not only did the rereading reveal the meaning, but it would likely have embedded the meaning into her memory.
Along the way I learned a number of lessons. Life is neither linear nor predictable. A career is not something that you put on like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step-by-step, choice-by-choice, and experience-by-experience. Everything adds up. No work is beneath you. Nothing is a waste of time unless you make it so. An elderly cab driver in Bogota may well have as much to teach you as a wandering sadhu in India or a mystic saint in the Sahara. There were tens of thousands of teachers out there that I did not even know I had.
Wade Davis – Explorers’ Sketchbooks The Art of Discovery & Adventure
Anthropologist Wade Davis (a real life Indian Jones?) reminds us of the unpredictability of life and career.
Work hard, pursue an education, but be open to the surprising teachers along the way.
You have to stop thinking about anything other than what happened when you were a little kid, and you laid on the floor, and you drew. And you lost yourself in that drawing. And in the end, you absolutely loved that drawing because you made it yourself. And the drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everybody loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?
Jeff Tweedy‘s book, How to Write One Song, applies to anyone who makes things. Music is the medium he reflects on, but when you read the book, swap the word “song” with anything you make – paintings, birdhouses, stock cars, stained glass windows.
Pete Doctor is Pixar’s chief creative officer. Recently he sat down for an interview with economist Steven Levitt. On his People I (Mostly) Admire podcast, Steve asked Pete one of my favorite, but ridiculous interview questions. What live advice would you give the 20 year old Pete Doctor, knowing what you know now?
Pete’s response:
I’d probably tell myself draw more. Just get outside and draw, cause your draftsmanship skills are always handy. But more importantly I think, drawing for me, really connects me to stuff. It forces me to see things. I can walk past a house everyday, but then if I stop and draw it I suddenly notice details and things about it that I’d never payed attention to before. So I feel like drawing is a way to slow me down and really connect me to the world that I’m inhabiting that I’m not always fully paying attention to.
An excellent interview for all you drawers out there. Listen in full here.
To accomplish this he set himself a simple goal. Sit at the piano for three hours everyday. He didn’t have to write any music. But he couldn’t leave his piano bench either.
Those were the two options he gave himself. Do nothing. Or write music.
The discipline needed for composing was a different matter altogether and required more ingenuity. My first goal was to be able to sit at a piano or desk for three hours. I thought that was a reasonable amount of time and, once accomplished, could be easily extended as needed. I picked a period of time that would work most days, ten a.m. to one in the afternoon. This allowed for my music classes and also my part-time work at Yale Trucking.
The exercise was this: I set a clock on the piano, put some music paper on the table nearby, and sat at the piano from ten until one. It didn’t matter whether I composed a note of music or not. The other part of the exercise was that I didn’t write music at an other time of the day or night. The strategy was to tame my muse, encouraging it to be active at the time I had set and at no other times. A strange idea, perhaps, undertaken as an experiment. I had no idea whether it would work.
It’s encouraging to learn that one of the world’s foremost composers had to build up their discipline. Passion will get you sitting on the piano bench, but discipline will keep you there.
Glass is honest when describing his early method. The boredom beat him down.
The first week was painful-brutal, actually. At first I did nothing at all during those three hours. I sat like an idiot without any idea of what to do. When the three hours were up I bolted for the door and practically ran out into the street, so relieved was I to be away from the piano. Then, slowly, things began to change. I started writing music, just to have something to do. It didn’t really matter whether it was good, bad, boring , or interesting. And eventually, it was interesting. So I had tricked myself into composing…something.
Here Glass is an excellent example of independent thinking. Before the days of productivity coaches and time management blogs. Before the term “deliberate practice” was coined, Glass devised his own practice schedule to coax his muse into action.
How worthwhile could it be if we tried something similar? Instead of rushing to the internet for guidance we thought through what specific skill we were trying to learn and devised our own plans to execute?
They enroll in trade-school of course. At least, this is how Philip Glass described Juilliard.
He applied to Juilliard after graduating from the University of Chicago. He wanted the best music school in America. And he wanted New York.
But his path to Julliard was crooked. His parents still questioned his musical ambitions. He would need to spend one year in Stanley Wolfe‘s composition class, and then re-audition as a composition student. Oh, and he needed to pay for all this. So he’d work an overhead crane at the Bethlehem Steel nail mill.
Glass knew he wanted a life in music, but a chance encounter at a small diner near Eighty-Eighth Street confirmed composing music was his calling.
One night I noticed an older man, perhaps in his sixties, in another booth doing the same thing-writing music! He was often there when I arrived and remained when I left. I don’t think he ever noticed me, so absorbed was he in his own work. After a while my curiosity got the better of me and I quietly approached him, looking over his shoulder to see what he was writing. It was a piano quintet (piano plus string quartet) and, from my few quick glances, it looked very well thought out and “professional.” That was a most remarkable thing for me to stumble on-an older man composing in a coffee shop exactly as I was doing.
Now, here is perhaps the most remarkable part of the story, and something I didn’t understand until many years later: I wasn’t at all upset by this nonencounter. It never occurred to me that, perhaps, it was a harbinger of my own future. No, I didn’t think that way at all. My thought was that his presence confirmed that what I was doing was correct. Here was an example of an obviously mature composer pursuing his career in these unexpected surroundings. I never knew who he was. Perhaps he was there, escaping from noisy domestic scene-wife kids running around, too many guests at home. Or, like me, perhaps he was simply living alone in a single room. The main thing was that I didn’t find it worrisome. If anything I admired his resolve, his composure. It was inspiring.
