Alma: Coffee or tea?
Reynolds Woodcock: Do you have Lapsang? I’ll have a pot of Lapsang. please.
Enjoy.
Tag: craft
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Learn a craft is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well. It is wise reject utterly as a piece of bourgeois propaganda the oppressive aphorism ‘jack of all trades and master of none’. No: you can do lots of things. You can chop wood and carry water and write poems. You can combine small holding with software design. One Idler reader is a classical tuba player who is also a trained plasterer. He loves both and both earn him an income. Why limit yourself to one small field?
Encouraging words to all the jack of all trades out there. But I’ve found great satisfaction in focusing on one discipline deeply, for an extended amount of time. How else can one become a classical tuba player or trained plasterer?
Hodgkinson, Tom. The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste. United States: HarperCollins, 2013. pg47
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Of course there are, occasionally, clever antitheses, antitheses that draw fine distinctions or tell you something that you did not know already. Oscar Wilde was the master of these, with lines like, ‘The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves’. But we can’t all be Oscar Wilde, and it would be interminably dull if we were. The world would degenerate into one permanent epigram.
Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence is eloquent and full of surprise. The world degenerating into one permanent epigram isn’t a phrase I’d expect to see in a “writing” book.
Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. United Kingdom, Icon Books, Limited, 2014. pg. 19
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“The easiest way to catch the knuckleball is to wait for it to stop rolling and then pick it up.”
– Bob Uecker
Further proof magic exists.
Posnanski, Joe. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2023. pg 17, 18
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“There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works.”
– Charley Lau
More proof magic exists.
Posnanski, Joe. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2023. pg 17
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Ah, the knuckleball. Nothing in the whole world like it. Willie Stargell called the knuckleball a butterfly with hiccups. Bobby Mercer said hitting one is like eating Jell-O with chopsticks. Tim McCarver said catching one is like trying to seize a moth with tweezers.
– Joe Posnanski
The knuckleball is proof magic exists.
Posnanski, Joe. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2023. pg 17
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Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, “as good a place as any in the church,” thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer. He described the Parliament lined up to the right side of the choir, robed in scarlet and black, the Chambre des Comptes on the left, in robes of black and white; the bishops arriving two by two, “a purple kind of mantle over their shoulders,” the Archbishop of Paris, “a mitre upon his head,” and finally the arrival of the King.
John Quincy Adams heeding his father’s advice to observe the world around him.
Or as Teju Cole begs: observe, observe, observe.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 327
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What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?
Shooting a basketball. I’ve done that for the longest, outside of eating and breathing. I’m just not very good at it.
I started doing it when I was about eight. We moved close to a house with a hoop, and all the other kids would gather there and play. It was a social thing, and I started doing it. I kept it going in all the different places I’ve lived. The only country I couldn’t keep the habit going was Germany. But when I was living in New Zealand, I made a special point of it. It’s good exercise, it’s relaxing, you get to be outside. It’s a little cold today, but I did it yesterday, and I’ll do it tomorrow.
It’s important to repeatedly do something you’re not that good at. Most successful people are good at what they do, but if that’s all they do, they lose humility. They find it harder to understand a big chunk of the world that doesn’t have their talent or is simply mediocre. It helps you keep things in perspective.
I’m not terrible at it. I have gotten better, even recently. But no one would say I’m really good.
– Tyler Cowen
From the Modern Meditations blog.
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This is Bruce fuckin’ Springsteen saying that he was not a natural genius and he would have to work hard. And let me tell you something right here: no one is a natural genius. We have talents to a lesser or greater degree, but it is a waste unless we work hard at the small things.
When Virat Kohli first started batting in the nets, well before he had started shaving, he had to focus on the small things to get better. Sure, he probably got there with great hand-eye coordination, but now he had to cultivate all the good habits that have to be reflexive in a great batsman. He had to work on his footwork, the angle of the elbow while moving into a drive, the movement of the shoulder into the line, the balance of the body, the stillness of the head. And only after hours and days and weeks and months and years of consicious practice could some of those become internalised to the point that an onlooker could say, ‘Genius!’
Genius?
Maybe not for all of us. But excellence, certainly, is achievable by working hard on the small things.
More encouraging words from Amit Varma’s India Uncut Newsletter.
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I happen to like drawing. I draw all the time. Wasn’t it Degas who said, I’m just a man who likes to draw.’ That’s me, I’m just a man who likes to draw. I think an awful lot of people like to draw. I’m always meeting people who draw a bit crudely, and I point out that what’s needed is a bit of practice. You need things pointed out to you: how to see in a clearer way. You can teach the craft; the poetry, you can’t teach.
David HockneyThe poetry comes from what you can’t draw. The lines you can’t make. The lines you wobble with.
Certainly, do all you can to master the craft, but your style will emerge from those wobbles…
Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp83
Floodlights and Goalposts 