I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written-in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a mathematical problem.
– William Zinsser in Writing to Learn
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There is a new widget on the blog, a current reading one. For those who noticed I’ve already moved one current reading book to the finished pile, Stop Acting Rich
One interesting point is his strong discussion on socialization throughout the book. Specifically, he likes to discuss people he calls the glittering rick and aspirationals, those who aspire to be like the glittering rich. Yet at one point he calls them the beautiful people and that crystallized something for me.
While I have always enjoyed, and learned from, Dr. Stanley’s work his discussions about premium and luxury consumer goods and those who buy them when not rich have confused me. They do no longer. I was a geek in high school and learned early I could never be one of the beautiful people. I think, in the long run, it immunized me against being an aspirational.
After learning to play D&D what benefit of being a geek ranks so high?
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One of the ways you can identify someone who has read Tweet this!
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Back in 1984 I engaged in the ritual many American high school students do, applying for college. I applied to four private universities and one public one. I got into two private and one public. I went to my fifth choice (one of the private schools) mainly because of money.
You might be wondering how a private school could be cheaper than a public school. Obviously, the public school was at worst my fourth choice of five if the private school was fifth. The truth is the public school was sixth.
I never even applied to my first choice. My parents pretty much talked me out of it. That I didn’t even apply is a regret I carry to this day.
My first choice was Saint Johns College.
As much as we might want to we cannot change the past. I cannot go to Saint Johns at 18 and I’m much too old to go as a freshman today.
What I can do is the reading. While I can’t attend the seminars to discuss with peers the works in question I can write.
So that is the goal. Starting this month, August 2010, I will follow the reading from the Santa Fe Campus for each seminar period. Instead of joining a seminar there I will write on what I have read here. While in general I’m not a huge fan of word counts to do the reading justice I would say I’m shooting for the 700-1000 word range.
This is far from my first attempt at this. It is at least my third, including an attempted group on LJ. That doesn’t include all the years I thought “I meant to do that” or the year I tried to start late with Plato. I have no real reason to promise I will make any progress this time. That said, in the skills needed to do something like this that I have been lacking: planning, organization, focus, and determination, I have made considerable progress since my last attempt several years ago.
Of course, comments are more than welcome but strongly desired. It might not be the seminar of Saint Johns, but a healthy back and forth would certainly aid my understanding and hopefully that of the commenters as well.
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Two years before I was born the US Congress passed the Civil Rights act of 1964. An aggressive move to end what was, in the states of the old Confederacy, an American Apartheid, it represents the high point of American unity. Ever since we’ve been engaged in an ugly divorce from each other: blacks from whites, Hispanics from non-Hispanics, women from men, the religious from the agnostic, and so on.
Today I’m listening to Tori Amos and Silent All These Years comes up. Of all of Tori’s compositions it speaks to me the most. It speaks to me nearly every time I write. It especially speaks to me on the kind of material that makes up this blog. The second part of the chorus that end in the title, “Hey but I don’t care/Cause sometimes/I said sometimes/I hear my voice/And it’s been here/Silent All These Years”, are what writing is. Any writer who is growing and learning the craft will hear out of their words every now and then their voice and every time they hear it, it will be as if it was silent until that moment.
Because if you ever hear your voice in all you write and it sings through in every word you will have become one with the Tao and I do not believe there is a way to do that short of death.
But Tori’s words aren’t what I really want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is why, to many people, I’m not allowed to be inspired by them. To many Tori is a feminist artist and for a man to lay any claim to a woman’s expression of being silenced is ridiculous at best. This regardless of what Tori has said about the song or her intention. The tribe has claimed her and the rest of us are alone.
For a time nearly any book recognizably by a black person was shelved in the African-American section of Barnes & Noble. A Thomas Sowell book on economics andBlack Boy by Richard Wright were reduced to equivalence by tribe. Eminem couldn’t be a rapper and In Living Color couldn’t be a rock band because that was for blacks and whites respectively.
Modern tribalism is nothing more than a way to dis-empower us from two ends. Not only does it steal the power to be inspired by those not like us but it steal our power to inspire those not like us. Instead it forces us to engage the power of inspiration only through approved sub-group role models. For straight, white males it might seem empowering as they have the broadest visibility across our culture. However, that is only true if empowering means the least restricted. It is most damaging to the poor, non-whites whose circle of inspiration is drawn with curtains of dependency and a peephole into paradise that is an opiate Marx couldn’t have even conjured in his nightmares.
More importantly, modern tribalism encourages us to live our lives on the terms of the approved spokesmen for our group and not our own terms.
Embrace what you will for inspiration and solace. Don’t let the fact it was written by someone with a different eye shape or fiddly bit stop you. Sing Maybe I’m Amazed for whoever you damned well like with the lyrics intact. Your inspiration is yours alone and your voice, although silent to you, might be heard by the person you least suspect when you are true to which speaks to you.
It might even inspire her to hear her own voice.
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Until January of this year I did local, volunteer radio. This was my second stint doing radio. The original Dark Etiquette ran over the summer of 2002 and was the period where Miss Gothic Manners went from a funny nickname to alter ego. In fact, this blog is as much hers as mine. Perhaps a better way to explain it is she is a vehicle I’ve used to access the parts of me I’m trying to express more directly now.
Anyway, in the wilds of local, volunteer radio, a dying breed to be sure, there is one show that is everything I wanted Dark Etiquette to be, both in the show itself and its influence. That show is The Clockwork Cabaret hosted by Emmett and Klaude Davenport from the bridge of their airship The Calpurnia.
It is also a twice a month ball in their homeport of Raleigh, NC. And that, along with regular podcast versions of the show, is where they achieved what I failed to do. They have taken a dream, a fantasy and made it part of the real world.
The Davenport sisters are living it. Don’t confuse doing it on your own terms with grand things that have celebrity. Hosting a local steampunk ball and making it work are worth a hundred compromised mentions on CNN (something Tim Ferris is missing, IMHO). Seth Godin’s latest book is about linchpins but so far is focused on work. Yet, he talks about art, connection, and inspiration and those go well beyond the world of work.
Which in North Carolina two sisters are doing like clockwork.
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In the tradition of asking for what you want my first itty bitty personal ad. Please forgive I’m not good at asking for things or even knowing what it is I want.
What it is:
I want to write and I want to write interesting stuff people want to read. The fact is my writing sucks and this fact tears at me with each line I type which stops me from writing. The irony is the only way for it not to suck is to write decreasingly sucky material for 10,000 hours or so.
Possible mechanics:
An accountability partner: Someone who expects a certain amount of writing on a regular cycle and is agreeing to call me on it if they don’t get it. Criticism could be provided or not on the writing itself but a coherent (or semi-coherent) draft on fixed intervals and them calling me on it.
Being someone’s first reader: Someone who needs a first reader to just read their drafts where I can see the start and finish of their polished writing.
Something else: Some other trick or system you’ve found to keep yourself doing something badly until you do it well.
Fueling the system:
I will write at least 500 words of fiction or essay drafts a day.
I will fight my tendancy to believe everything is permenant and believe that by writing my writing won’t suck one day.
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Last Saturday I bought a Suzanne Vega album. Purchasing Close-Up Vol 1, Love Songs should be unremarkable. I enjoy Suzanne Vega’s work and buy her albums as they came out. My favorite has long been Nine Objects of Desire for both the songs included and for the level of production which hits a sweet spot for Vega’s compositions.
After the Led Zeppelin 2007 reunion concert Robert Plant was caught remarking that they had become a cover band covering their own stuff. The sentiment was picked up by Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA to explain why they would never perform again. He said, “[W]e would like people to remember us as we were. Young, exuberant, full of energy and ambition.” This was also echoing Plant who told NME, “[T]hat was basically fired by youth and a different kind of exuberance to now, its very hard to go back and meet that head on and do it justice.”
I couldn’t help but think of those comments as I put the new Vega album in. It is the first of a projected four albums to reinterpret her older works. I listened to Vega’s re-recording of some of my favorite songs including Stocking, Gypsy, and my absolute favorite Vega song Carmel I did not hear a cover band. Why is it Suzanne Vega can capture the magic of songs some of which date to the early 80s. Why secret does she wield that greats like Robert Plant and Björn Ulvaeus do not.
They all wield the same secret. Plant is doing interesting and creative work with Allison Krauss, among others. Björn Ulvaeus has written several successful musicals with his ABBA partner Benny Andersson. Vega has continued to produce the occassional bit of new material and tour. What each has is artistic engagement. Note, I said engagement and not integrity. Artist integrity is a loaded phrase that makes us think about money and either selling out for it or giving it up for purity. That’s not what is going on here. What is going on is that each artist is taking on works that engage their passions. Whatever muse speaks to each one she is speaking to the material each of them is engaged in now. The disappointment that Plant and Ulvaeus fear if they reunite their old bands is less their audience’s disappointment than their own. Vega’s muse still sits up late at night looking at Marlene’s picture and dreaming of caramel.
I believe there are two lessons here for those of us pursuing life on our own terms. The first, and most obvious, is that we must engage those things that speak to us. Our terms must be the terms of our muse; they cannot be simply desires. Desires, pursued, are often saited easily but passions pursued and aquired only increase our appetite. While not an uncommon revelation it is one that bears repeating. We too often confuse desire for passion.
The second, and rarer, revelation is one of span. Both Plant and Ulvaeus are engaging their art, their muse by doing things other than that which won them fame. Vega, instead, is walking over old ground with new shoes and new steps. Neither path is superior. If your muse is still singing songs of passions ignited by the tanned skin of an old friend and casting lovers into the movies of your life you have two choices. You can sing those songs with her or you can allow yourself to quietly empty of passion. By the same token if she wants to trade your quiet aucustic for screaming guitars (or vice versa) you have the same choices.
Starting to live life on your own terms may require you to move to a distant place and jam with entirely new people. It may also mean that you sit in the same quiet room and strum your same quitar. Play your old songs or play your new songs. It only matters that you play the songs that engage your soul.
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The first entry, beyond a playlist, I wrote for Dark Etiquette was about writing a list of your non-negotiables. One of mine is “I am a writer”. When I first wrote that it was just an aspiration. It is closer to reality every day.
I have my two blogs. What is prompting this post, however, is I just received galleys for my second piece to be published in a local paper. 979 Represent is a local arts and entertainment monthly that is an outgrowth of , a local blog of the same name. The paper came about when the local newspaper canceled its weekly arts and entertainment supplement.
Writing for the paper pays no more than either blog. In fact, it pays less because Places to Go, People to Be has made me a couple of bucks in credit at RPGNow. If I’m not really getting paid why do I believe I am a writer. Why do I consider them as fulfilling my aspiration to be a writer.
I have two primary reasons. The blogs and the writing in the paper are completing the writing loop. If one writes and keeps the manuscript in a box you can argue that you haven’t finished. Writing meant to be read by no one is a diary regardless of the format. While diaries and journals are of great value both to the person writing and to the historical record they are not what most people mean by writing. Writing is complete when someone reads it. Writing is most complete when someone in the target audience who we do not know reads it. Of my three outlets I know one, my gaming blog, is read by people I’ve never met because people have commented. I believe people I have no connection to have read this blog based on web logs. Finally, the paper has a reasonable presumption that others have read it. That said, complete reading loop is the lesser reason I believe I am moving from aspiration to being.
My attitude about all three is more important. You become something when you do it with intent and persistence You do not become something because you are paid for it. In fact, I know many people paid to do something that I wouldn’t give them title to it. I see it quite a bit in computer fields. I am serious both of these blogs. I have schedules and deadlines which, although I do slip, I’m serious about maintaining. I have invested time and effort in learning how to build a better blog in terms of writing, managing, and promoting. I do not post stream of thought consciousness writing as I do at my Live Journal. I have a list of topics and everything goes through at least one round of editing before seeing a post. The paper, as well, clearly has deadlines but ones externally imposed. I apply the other methods to it as well.
It is that internal change, that transition from doing something in a haphazard manner to doing it with seriousness and intent, that marks the beginning of becoming it. The second is repetition. You must string together consecutive instances of that seriousness and intent. When will I be a writer? When will I have enough pearls to make a necklace? That’s hard to answer. My answer will be different yours in many cases. I do have some markers. The goal is for both blogs to get new content every other day. I like a year as a span of time. Some people might think the three months it takes to create a habit are enough, but I see this as something with a larger scale. If I can look back over a year and see both blogs got at least three postings of substance a week that will constitute being a writer. The paper, with its infrequency, requires more than a year of straight monthly articles to mark the transition.
I don’t want to get caught up in metrics alone. I could post three articles every Sunday in a panic and theoretically meet those numbers. I could post every other day for a year expect one week when where I go four days between posts. That week would only have two articles. I’m sure you’ll agree the later scenario is one where I’ve met the span of time requirement while the former doesn’t.
I put this challenge to you. Find that aspiration on your list you want the most. Set up your favorite brainstorming conditions and take an hour to figure out what would mark seriousness and intent in doing it. Then you should decide on the span of time starting tomorrow that would mark the transition from doing it in spurts to doing it for real.
Tomorrow is my thirtieth day or so as a writer. Let tomorrow be your first as what you want to be.
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The Iron Lords by Andrew J. Offutt
Writing To Learn by William Zinsser
A Quest for Comments, March 2010
When you think gourmet pizza, what do you think about (pizzas, not restaurants)?
I’m on the quest for the perfect pie and looking for ideas to try.
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