Whole words, whole sight

I’m teaching a course on essay-writing this semester at New York University, and so naturally I assign short essays to my students. One essay I got back was interesting in part because it was so incoherent: it started off about a specific event, but thereafter devolved into a series of disconnected descriptions - almost if the writer had tried a free-writing exercise before giving up. And yet I knew the student in question was too diligent for that to be the explanation.

When I got in touch with him, he abashedly confirmed that indeed, he hadn’t wanted to write a straight account of the event in question: what he was after was an “allegory,” in which actions and consequences would seem so unimportant that their details could be discarded. His inspiration, he added, had been a Hemingway short story and a related commentary by the late novelist and literary critic, John Gardner.

Quelle mésaventure littéraire! I realized that what had happened to my student had happened many years ago to me, back when I too was a budding writer. (I’m not sure whether I’m still budding - let us get a little further into spring and I’ll tell you).

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I had been playing poker with Martha Frankel and her crew up in the Woodstock area for well over a year before I learned she was semi-secretly writing a memoir about, among other things, poker. For a while after that, I didn’t hear anything more. Martha was an extremely experienced magazine journalist, but I knew how hard writing a book can be - especially your first book, and a memoir to boot (something I’ve never dared). And I knew too how long the odds can be against getting published.

But Martha landed an agent - and then a deal. And when Hats and Eyeglasses, as the memoir is called, came out in hardcover last year, it got loving reviews.

Now it’s out in paperback. I rarely read memoirs, but I’ve read this one and recommend it. Am I biased? Sure. Is it good anyway? Yes. Is it about poker? Yes - sort of. It’s more about family and about sticking together, even under the worst of circumstances. I won’t say too much more except to give you just a paragraph from one of my favorite scenes in the book. Martha has traveled to Ft. Lauderdale to visit her cousin Keith, who (a) is a cook, and (b) is going to teach her poker.

P.S. If you’re the cautious type and want to know a bit more about Martha before investing your $14.95, you can check out this profile in The New York Times.

In my classes and with clients, I teach the conscious development of craft, with an eye toward making the processes of reading and writing more explicit. However, there is an additional route - and that is to read as much as possible of the genres you enjoy, so that nonconsciously you absorb the forms and expectations and pleasures of these genres as if through the pores of your skin. After which writing in those genres becomes not so much easier as more natural.

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I was a reporter for many years, and I have to confess I wasn’t the best. I was a far better writer than nearly all of my colleagues, but the goal of journalism is news - and for all my pretty words I wasn’t hard-nosed or streetwise enough to get the best and toughest stories. I was a decent feature writer and a decent depth reporter - but even there, no more than decent. And one of the reasons for this was that I was not as good at interviewing as I should have been.

My faults as an interviewer were not mine alone; many reporters have them. One was talking too much, filling in the silences rather than letting them stretch out to see what the other person would finally say. The other was asking too many leading questions.

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Not book reviews, just quick notes -

Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics, by David Grossman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008; 144 pages, $18). Grossman is an Israeli who writes essays, commentary, and occasionally journalism - but mostly novels. I’ve never read his fiction but his essays are wonderful. The title piece in this collection was first delivered in 2007 as an address at the Pen American Center. Like much good writing it seems artless at first, almost shapeless - think of Montaigne or “The Golden Notebook” - and yet at the same time utterly assured. In this and the other essays, Grossman gropes his way through the dark to celebrate the triumph of private language over the debasement of words by governments and interest groups at war with each other. Grossman writes from a country at war, and yet what he has to say is quite pertinent to the U.S. , a country busy conducting not one but two wars out of the immediate sight of its citizens.

Other Colors, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage paperback reprint, 2008, 464 pages, $15.95). I’m actually reading the 2007 hardcover edition, which I picked up a couple of weeks ago at The Strand over on Broadway and 12th Street in Manhattan. I enjoyed though never finished an earlier memoir by this Nobel prize winner, Istanbul: Memories and the City - hmm, I’ll have to get back to that one at some point. What I like about Pamuk is his slow style, abhorrence of confession for its own sake, masculine sentimentality, and willingness to muse about meaning rather than merely present a string of scenes. A nice change from the relentlessly present-tense memoirs churned out in this country.

It was exciting to get an e-mail the other day from Robert Plotkin, the Boston-based patent attorney whose book manuscript I helped with back a couple of years ago. Robert is an expert in software patents, and his book is about how the patent system must evolve to cope with a new order of software - “genies” capable of replacing human engineers in the design of products ranging from cars to toothbrushes to pretty much anything.

Like most expert authors I’ve worked with, Robert is not only deeply knowledgeable but inherently a good writer. Most of my critiquing had to do with introducing him to the conventions of book-length nonfiction and helping him develop a writing voice that was clear and relaxed, yet authoritative. Needless to say this was a lot of fun.

At any rate, Robert’s email was to let me know the pub date is in April. Edit: Since this post was put up, the pub date has been moved to May 1. If you’ve got any interest in software, patents, or the future of business in a world increasingly dependent on genie-style technology, check out Robert’s blog, Automating Invention: Computers, Invention, and the Law. You can preorder from Amazon, too. Beyond that I hope to do an interview with Robert shortly and post it here - stay tuned.

Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, September 2008

Just before a stand of mountain trees is logged, the loggers mark those trees to be felled with strips of blue paint around their trunks. These trees are always the very best: loveliest to look at, and capable of producing the finest veneers when run through a sawmill. This is a story about hundreds of such trees crowding a remote Catskills mountainside. The trees were carefully shepherded by the owners of that mountainside for more than a century, up until just a year or so ago - only to be finally marked with blue paint.

That should have been the end, yet it wasn’t. Thanks to a highly unusual agreement between an old Catskills clan and an enterprising conservation program, the loggers have had to look elsewhere. The trees will stand tall on that mountainside for hundreds of years to come -in human terms, forever.

To read more, download the PDF.

Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, August 2007

One of the most beautiful, yet frightening, short stories I’ve ever read is just a few pages long. “House Taken Over,” by the Mexican writer Julio Cortázar, tells of a brother and sister living together peacefully in their home after their parents die - and then the house is taken over by unknown and angry spirits. We never see the spirits, but the brother evidently knows just how dangerous they are.

One by one, rooms are rendered off-limits as the spirits spread, until at the end, brother and sister flee altogether, with the brother locking the front door and throwing away the key - not to guard what’s no longer their property except in name only, but to protect any poor fool of a burglar from being tempted to enter a seemingly empty house.

I was thinking of the story the other day when I considered how thoroughly creatures other than us take over our cabin each summer, here on a wooded hillside in Woodstock.

To read more, download the PDF.

You can also listen to an MP3 audio recording of this article.

Working Identity, by Herminia Ibarra (Harvard Business School Press, 2004, 199 pages, $16.95)

Countless self-help guides to switching jobs or careers assume you’ve got just one true identity in life, and therefore, just one true purpose. Your task is to look so deep inside yourself that you discover this purpose. It’s a little like the old notion of a soulmate - that out of all the billions of people on this planet, only one can be our true love. You plow through these sorts of books doing endless exercises, ranging from the conventional (Briggs-Meyers) to the unconventional (list your top 10 most enjoyable memories). Once you nail your personality type, or your “genius,” or whatever it is that supposedly makes you unique, you’re home free - or so the books assert.

“Working Identity” is refreshingly different; one might even say refreshingly adult. Ibarra, formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School and now a professor at INSEAD, a business school in France, notes that the real way most of us change careers isn’t through introspection, but experimentation: going back to school part-time, for example, or slowly building a freelance practice on the side, or hanging out with people in the line of work we’re interested in to see what it feels like. This sort of dabbling and detouring, says Ibarra, is a healthy reaction to our possessing not a single “true” self, but many selves, among which we’re constantly choosing:

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Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, March 2007

Last summer, I read an article in a local paper that described how, in March 2005, filmmakers had descended on a series of locales in Orange and Ulster counties and used them as stand-ins for rural Wisconsin.

These locations included the Sky Top Motel in Kingston, the Reservoir Dairy Deli in Shokan, and the Phoenicia Diner. This seemed both magical and bizarre to me. How, I wondered, could an ordinary diner, whose pancakes and sausages I was intimately familiar with, be transplanted to a Midwestern state I’ve never even visited? And why had the filmmakers picked the Valley for their sleight of hand? This demanded investigation.

To read more, download the PDF.