If not, learn them

Not everyone is born with skills

One of the most useful apps to me on my iPad is Flipboard. With not too much trouble, it opens up the words behind various feeds, such as twitter and rss. With a modicum of curation, vast amounts of writing can be available. For instance, noticing that Ken likes to push articles from a particular source, I can add a section to my Flipboard that gets me reading from the same source. Flipboard isn’t as public a commitment as following a direct twitter feed, and it also provides some dampening to the noise of that would otherwise keep a high volume publisher out of my twitter feed.

Not being tethered

In my wandering, I came across the feed of the Paris Book review. I think it first came to me via a link Tufte put out there: it was to an interview with an author who liked to write only with a wireless keyboard. The author did not like the feeling of being tethered to a machine. I have since pondered that a lot… For so many of my colleagues, the work day involves staring at a rectangle of glass to which they are essentially tied. How dissimilar is this to the feeling of waste that I felt watching old people tethered to the poker machines, feeding it money, with the anticipation of a sensory reward. How different are we, when tethered to a rectangle of glass, from a pack of Pavlov’s dogs when it comes to seeking the next email update? What’s the socially redeeming quality of being sedentary and good at looking at a piece of glass?

I also have a strong memory of reading Paris Review interview with Kurt Vonnegut, a man who I don’t think I read in my youth. My earliest association was in the college humour movie Back To School, in which the hero hired Kurt Vonnegut to write the paper on the topic of Vonnegut. Vonnegut was a Hoosier, and I met someone who had actually crossed his path. The story was something along the lines of a book review needed to be written, and my colleague Greg drew the short straw: chosen to knock on the door. I don’t remember the outcome, but I do remember how scared Greg was at the encounter.

I subsequently read some Vonnegut novels. I still cannot believe the intensity of Dresden: the jelly bombing that melted a city, and his dumb luck to be someone that lived through it. At the time of the interview, he was also able to put a dollar value on the life of everyone who was killed in that firestorm. It wasn’t very much per head, but he was fully aware of how horrible it was. Calming thoughts still come to me of Galapagos. Amazing how in the mid seventies there was a fictional device that had the answers to all the questions, and in my life time our phones do most of that!

Is it bad to claim such a small number of hops to these stories on such a tenuous thread?

In procrastination, I then went back to The Paris Review and read a sixty year old review of a Capote interview. I don’t think I have read any Capote.

The title of this article is straight from the interview. In response to the question of how he developed as a writer, he put it out there that writing is like music or art : there are skills and rules to the craft, and only a very small subset of people are born with them. If you are not born with them, the answer is easy: learn them.

Reading that’s was the reward to my procrastination: the message came through loud and clear that to be a better writer, and sharer of ideas, one has to keep working at it.

I haven’t written much of late — let’s see how this upcoming semester goes, and how much more writing I can get done — from this starting point.