David Shields, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

I put off reading this book because I couldn’t imagine it could get any better than the title.

Couple of things to know about me at this moment:

1. I’m a month or so away from turning 30.
2. I’ve been sort of obsessed with thinking about death ever since my son was born.
3. I caught a nasty cold this week, and when I have a cold I spend a lot of time on my back thinking about my body and its eventual demise.

So yeah, this book and me, we got along. Won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and Shields can be a little much when he turns inward instead of outward, but I found the collage style pretty damned propulsive…kept me turning pages.

Filed under: my reading year 2013

Roger Ebert, Life Itself

I bought this when it came out and couldn’t get past the first few chapters, which is a shame, because I was a devoted reader of Ebert’s blog. Here’s what I wrote in 2011:

I’ve always thought that what makes Ebert such a brilliant blogger is that he’s doing it wrong—in the age of reblogs and retweets and “short is more,” he’s writing long, writing hard, writing deep. Using his blog as a real way to connect with people. “On the web, my real voice finds expression.” Man loses voice and finds his voice. “When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.” Blogging because you need to blog—because it’s a matter of existing, being heard, or not existing…not being heard. It’s almost as if Ebert had to become that living metaphor to show us how it’s supposed to be done.

After he died, I decided I had to go back to it and push myself through, and I’m glad I did. (Since there are so many chapters, and many of them began as blog posts, it’s definitely a book you should feel free to read non-linearly.)

While Ebert recalled his childhood, I kept thinking of Joe Brainard’s wonderful book, I Remember, which makes sense: they were born just a year apart.

My favorite chapters were about Steak ‘n Shake, walking around London, and Robert Mitchum, the fact of which makes me think of this quote by Ander Monson:

We find ourselves not by turning inward toward what we imagine is inside us, but by the act of looking outward at the world. The self is nothing without what it looks at. On its own, it’s inert. Kick it. Poke it. It seems dead. But point it at something else…and it perks up. Thus a focus on our obsessions, however nerdy, creepy, lovely, allows the self to energy and live and blink a little in the bright light. In other words, the best way to write about ourselves is to write about something specific in the world.

A few passages I want to point out. The first, on the best writing tips he ever got:

“One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?” These rules saved me half a career’s worth of time and gained me a reputation as the fastest writer in town. I’m not faster. I spend less time not writing.

The second is a story that’s almost exactly the same as a story my dad told me about his dad:

My father refused to let me watch him doing any electrical wiring. Here he told me, “Boy, I don’t want you to become an electrician. I was working in the English Building today, and I saw those fellows with their feet up on their desks, smoking their pipes and reading their books. That’s the job for you.”

The last, on death:

My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’s theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting, and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

Filed under: Roger Ebert, my reading year 2013

Kio Stark, Don’t Go Back To School

I was really thrilled to read Kio’s book before it came out — if you follow my “you dont have to go to college” tag you know this is a subject near and dear to me. Here’s my blurb from the inside cover:

Not going to graduate school felt like a failure at the time, but wound up being the best choice I ever made. It set me out on a path of self-learning and discovery that led me to work I love, work that would’ve never flown in an academic setting. How I wish I’d had Kio’s book as a guide to help me along the way!

Over and over in the interviews with independent learners, what struck me was the importance of publicly sharing and teaching what you’re learning:

You need to create a feedback loop that confirms your work is worth it and keeps you moving forward. In school this is provided by advancing through the steps of the linear path within an individual class or a set curriculum, as well as from feedback in the form of grades and praise. Outside of school, people I talked to got their sense of competence from many sources. Many reported to me that they often turn around and teach what they’ve learned to others as soon as they’ve learned it. This gives them a sense of mastery and deepens their understanding. When their learning is structured around a specific project, successful completion and functioning of the project proves their progress. Projects can include making a computer program, constructing a book, making a film, writing about an unfamiliar topic, starting a business, or learning a skill. Projects give you a goal for learning skills and abstract information alike, and contribute to gaining a sense of mastery and competence as you complete them.  

For me, blogging was basically my graduate school.

You can get the eBook from Kio’s site.

Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

I really, really liked this novel — I’d never heard of Hamid before, but a friend rec’d it on Twitter:

the book’s structure mimics that of the cheap self-help books sold at sidewalk stands all over South Asia, alongside computer manuals and test-prep textbooks. Each chapter begins with a rule—“Work for Yourself,” “Don’t Fall in Love,” “Be Prepared to Use Violence”—and expertly evolves into a narrative.

The whole thing is written in second person, and none of the characters have names. It might sound gimmicky, but it’s not — the execution is pretty perfect, and really moving.

From chapter six, “Work For Yourself”:

Like all books, this self-help book is a cocreative project… when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It’s in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books…

…Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you’ll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading.

Recommended.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

I have drunk the meditation Kool-Aid. Been at it off and on for a month and a half. I don’t have a school or a teacher or anything, I just put my kid down for a nap, sit at the top of the stairs, set my iPhone timer for 10 mins, and close my eyes. That’s it, really.

It’s been a really positive experience. I feel less stressed, lighter. I’ve also had some really weird visions, which I doodle in my sketchbook.

I had this book on my shelf for years, but only read it recently. A lot of my favorite artists have Zen backgrounds, but it was really surprising to me how much of this book applies to creativity and art. (Of course, half of it makes no sense to me at all.)

For instance, here’s Suzuki:

When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something.

And here’s Andy Warhol:

As soon as you stop wanting something you get it.

This bit could illustrate the “what we are” vs. “what we want to be” illustration from Steal Like An Artist:

If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and his actual ability there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap, he will begin to despair.

Anyways, if you’ve ever been interested in meditation, here are a few (edited) tips my friend Sunni sent me that have really worked for me:

1. Don’t worry about doing it “right.” There is no “right” in meditation. There’s no “right” posture. There’s no “right” thing to visualize. Some days you’ll sit and feel calm. Other days you won’t. Just let it ride.
2. Don’t try to control your thoughts. For some reason, a lot of people think that the goal is to manage and change your thoughts somehow. It’s the complete opposite. The idea is to observe your thoughts, to let them make all the sound and fury they want and just sit with it. Think of it like shaking a snow globe and watching the flakes swirl and fall. No need to judge it or change it; just watch it.
3. Start with 10 minutes a day. Build from there.

Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

Re-read this the other night. Still nightmarish and hilarious. Every author who has a book in the self-help section should have to read this. Actually, you could compare it to The Freddie Stories in structure, as West conceived it as “a novel in the form of a comic strip”:

The chapters to be squares in which many things happen through one action. The speeches contained in the conventional balloons. I abandoned this idea, but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events. Violent acts are left almost bald.

Above is the original dustjacket by Alvin Lustig, which is so much better than all the subsequent covers, and will be available again in a new paperback edition.