On Interestingness

Today I asked someone at my company what they were working on that was interesting, and he said nothing really. He listed a few things and said, but those aren't very interesting.

"Then why do you work here?" I asked him. "Why not go get a more interesting job?"

(Let me just say that I'm lucky to work at a company where people are supposed to like their job because it's interesting. I know the majority of people in the world work to put food on the table, not for intellectual fulfillment.)

It turned out that I should have said, "What are you working on that is interesting TO YOU, regardless of whether you think it is interesting to others." Many people think that they are uninteresting or that their thoughts are uninteresting. Many people equate the word interesting with glamorous. But if you are interested in something, then it becomes interesting to other people.

In half the romantic movies in the world, the main character falls in love when they see the love interest light up about something---their dog, orphans, making boats in their garage. Listen, no one cares about people making boats in their garage. People fall in love because they love seeing someone else intensely interested.

This is why we will read a whole John McPhee book on oranges, or a Mark Kurlansky book on salt, or an Anne Fadiman essay on ice cream. They are interested in this pedestrian topic and that interestedness is exciting to us.

Now Twitter and Facebook and many blogs have shown us that there are also many people who think they are interesting when they are not. You do have to be able to present your topic or point of view in an elegant way to pass your sense of interest to others. And you may also have read another post of mine where I say that you need to pick weird interesting things to write about, which may contradict what I'm saying here. Unusual details or perspective does help in making a piece of writing interesting, just like having the sentence-level skill of John McPhee helps. But just being interested in your subject will carry you an awfully long way. You will naturally find all the funny, noodley, interesting pieces in your topic because you view it with an interesting gaze, and because human nature is what it is, we the reader will follow that interested gaze down to its source.

Words I've Never Quite Understood

Random Post.

Here is a list of words I have never quite understood precisely what they mean:

godhead
hegemony
avatar (the pre-video game version)
liminal

Here is a list of words that I was never able to remember in the past, but have recently, after many encounters, got a handle on:

sartorial: having to do with tailoring or clothes
avuncular: uncle-like
peripatetic: itinerant, having to do with walking around

Now that I have them all written out, I notice that the second list of words are all more pedestrian than the ones that escape me. Which either says something about me and an inability to grasp abstract concepts, or about how the people using these terms haven't clearly nailed down the meanings or else use them in a very abstract way.

sidenote: Has anyone else seen a big rise in the use of "sartorial" lately? I think there's a trend happening.

Staying in the Moment

My favorite kind of writing to do is to stay in a moment, an iridescent, intensely imagistic moment, kind of like the ones Sari Fordham puts together (see my last post).

I haven't been writing much of my own stuff lately, and partly its because I'm busy at work, but I'm wondering if it's also because I haven't been experiencing many iridescent imagistic moments. I'm in New York, its hustly and exciting and hard to pause in; I'm racing around wearing out shoes and then shopping for replacements; there are so many friends to spend time with.

But I also deal with depression, and it's been pervasive lately, not enough to fell me or keep me from working at my job, but enough to put a thin film over everything. It takes away the intensity and momentousness of life, which, of course, affects the intensity of my moments.

If you're not sure what I mean, let's talk Twilight---the book series about teenagers and vampires. Twilight is so popular because brings back memories of those heady teenage days when hormones and looming adulthood and the newness of things made life tremendously intense; that time when if that boy would only touch my hand in the dark movie theater EVERYTHING WOULD BE PERFECT, and if he doesn't I'LL DIE, when everything mattered SO MUCH and NOTHING WOULD EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN.

I don't think I could handle feeling like that again(!), but I would like to inch towards it and feel some really good moments. And then I would like to capture them on paper. So here's to that happening very soon.

Sari Fordham: Ugandan Psalm

It's a bit more memoir than essay, but who's counting, eh? Here's a beautiful piece by Sari Fordham, another grad school colleague of mine, who can do with an image what Twyla Tharp does with a pair of legs.

http://www.cerisepress.com/02/05/ugandan-psalm

You'll see how Sari pauses in a moment and makes it so rich and deep and vivid. She's patient in her story telling. Let's look at the opening paragraph of the piece for technique:

Mornings we sit on the veranda, the three of us; for my father has long vanished into the reaching branches and tangle that surround our house, despite violent spats of slashing at the underbrush. He will reappear in the evening, a stack of papers under a looping arm. This is our world, this hill. It’s early, and the air is still cool. A breeze shifts the top branches of the bougainvillea. My mother looks outward, toward her tomato garden. There is a sole survivor, a pinkish fruit she has been thinking about plucking. Today or tomorrow, she is not sure, but she has been watching it ripen all week.

One of the big problems many writers have is their reliance on adjectives. A cluster of adjectives loses its meaning, and often you can suggest much more vividly by paring down. Sari uses adjectives, "reaching branches," "violent spats," "looping arm," but if you look again you'll see that she is much more focused on movement, both literal and temporal. They are sitting, then her father disappears, he slashes things, he reappears, the breeze is blowing. Sari doesn't tell you everything about this scene, she doesnt go into every plant, and color, and smell; she gives you the general idea, and she does it largely through action.

Other points to notice:

* Languid rhythm. Longer words, lots of comma usage, which mimics ebbing and flowing rather than full stops. I'm not 100% sure what a glottal stop is, but I'm guessing there aren't many here.

* Sari is writing a memoir from childhood, and this always creates weird point of view issues. See how she gets in the head of her mother, even though she couldn't know what the mother thinks? And I think Sari is 6 or 7 here, but she doesnt talk like a little kid. I think both choices work fine because Sari is a careful writer otherwise.

Take home exercise

Next time you are describing something or telling a story, try to stay in the moment for a bit. Don't rely on adjectives, but pick interesting details---what was happening around you, what the weather was like, what you were thinking about, what you were wearing. Don't go overboard though---our brains will fill in what you leave out, the same way it can tell that "Helo m frnd" means "Hello my friend." Try also to incorporate movement (action). Try to mimic the mood with your rhythm.

I wish I didn't have to do that

I just went to the gym (where I ran into my very nice coworker Ray---hi Ray!) and now I have to take a shower. I am sitting here wishing that I didn't have to do that---that I could magically become clean and so get on to the other many things I have to do. I also have to do my dishes from dinner. I wish I didn't have to do that either. In fact there are many things in life that I wish I didn't have to do: get a haircut, mop my floors, shop for a dress. I like the outcome of those things but not the process.

Then I started thinking: what about my job? Do I wish I didn't have to do the things I do at my job? Some of them yes---the annoying but necessary bits. But in the main I do my job because I like to do it. I like to solve problems. I like to neaten up chaos and track down answers. I like to translate technical concepts into orderly, clear English.

Then I started thinking about my dad, a theoretical mathematician. He may be the quintessential example of liking the process rather than the outcome. If a mathematical problem is solved, if a chunk of the mathematical existosphere is ironed out, it may be attractive or even interesting, but it isn't what floats his boat. Forgive the analogy, but it's almost like the stereotypical woman you slept with who no longer interests you. Maybe a better analogy would be a crossword puzzle: a filled in crossword puzzle isn't interesting at all.

If you've read any other bits of the blog, you'll know where this is going. An essay is the solving of the puzzle. It's the figuring things out. It's not the conclusion (clean dishes) that readers want, it's the process. (Or if it is the conclusion they want, they are darn interested in how that conclusion was reached.) That's why a good essay often starts with an open question, and leads to unexpected places. That's why an essay can end with "I don't know" and still be a success.

Random Book Recommendation: Our Man in Havana

If you haven't read Our Man in Havana, I recommend it so much. It's by Graham Greene (The End of the Affair, The Quiet American) and it's both a spy novel and hilarious. There's a vacuum cleaner; that alone should make you want to read it.

Graham Greene marked some of his books including this one as "Entertainments" which means they are less serious than the others. But the writing is still beautiful and nuanced, there's still a lot to chew on, including Havana in the 1950s. Plus we can't always be reading about beautiful women who die of consumption.

Other random books I love and somehow mentally group with this one:

Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
Any P.G. Wodehouse (early 1900s lunatic British humor, the butler Jeeves, people named Gussie Fink-N0ttle that yell "what ho!")
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (So charming and somehow sad.)

These books are all big on plot

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (This dude sells his wife and child to a sailor in a bar in the opening pages! What more do you want in a plot?)
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (A little melodramatic and very anti-Semitic. Swashbuckling, though, and Robin Hood makes a guest appearance!)
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

And final random recommendation for the night:

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day which is fabulous, but his The Unconsoled is also super. It starts out very disorientingly but once you get the hang of it, you will be boggled at how he nails dream-logic, where you're in your kitchen and you open the door and you are at work, and your third grade teacher is sewing the hat that you will wear for the meeting with the president that you just remembered you had. But much more serious and moving than that.

Beautiful Writing is Rare

I was in a bookstore today (Three Lives & Company in the West Village) looking for something to read. I grabbed a bunch of books at random and flipped through them, and what it reminded me is that even though there are millions of competent, even graceful, writers out there, there are very few knock-your-socks off stellar ones. That's one reason why classics are nice---they have been winnowed out by time.

I think that's an interesting thing to think about. 1) If you are a literary writer, your competition is not as great as you thought, because it is REALLY HARD to write consistently beautiful prose without being melodramatic or obnoxiously in love with your own words. 2) Because it is REALLY HARD to write this well, you (meaning me really) are probably not doing it.

I want to be a brilliant sentence-level writer, and occasionally I am, but usually I'm not. That's something I am working on.

A few randomly selected people who are really masters of it in fiction and nonfiction are:

Writing today:
Kazuo Ishiguro
Annie Proulx
Andrew Aciman (his essay Lavender is my all-time favorite.)
Patricia Hampl (full-disclosure--she was my prof)
John McPhee (Also my prof! I have been lucky.)

Past writers:
Vladimir Nabokov (possibly the best sentence-level writer ever)
George Eliot
Lewis Carroll
Whoever wrote Song of Solomon in the Bible

Example

One author whose writing I think is exceptionally beautiful is C.S. Lewis. Here's an excerpt from the Chronicles of Narnia where the character Puddleglum has just stomped out a magical fire that was putting him and his comrades in a trance. I want to point out the quick rhythm that matches the intensity of the situation, the mix of colloquial and sophisticated language, the fact that it uses pretty basic and accessible language, and just how generally nice it sounds. Try reading it aloud to yourself.

. . .the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. . . "One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

BTW at the bookstore I ended up choosing, sort of at random, "A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living" which looks cute but not the Best Writing Ever, and a book of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories for the beautiful writing.