we buy balloons

writing, not about

2012-01-21T15:33:00.000-08:00

okay, so here is what i don't get. i'm at a cafe, drinking coffee (shocker, i know!), checking email every two seconds, googling random MTV VJs from the 80s, etc...whatever...and all around me people are doing the same thing—except with one difference: on their table is like a half-eaten muffin or bagel resting undisturbed on a plate. i have a plate on my table, too, but i've long since wolfed down my food in a sort of first-meal-after-being-lost-in-the-desert kind of flurry (even though my last meal wasn't but an hour ago). i mean, how does a person order a peanut-butter brownie and just sort of pick at it...just sort of take a few bites before taking one of those slow, knowing sips of coffee while gazing peacefully into their book....while that delicious goddamn brownie just sits there, barely tasted, just waiting to be scarfed down in a self-loathing fit of this-is-so-fucking-good-i-can't-even-be-bothered-to-chew?

i mean, there is this girl who is always at the cafe i go to and she will literally sit there for like two hours, periodically nibbling at her oversized white chocolate macadamia nut cookie...ignoring it for 10 minutes here, forty minutes there. and when she's ready to leave, she'll simply reapply the saran wrap to it and place the cookie in her purse. did i mention this girl is 17! i mean, fuck me! a teenager has more self-discipline than i do? really? i mean, it's a bona fide miracle if i can simply make it from the cafe's counter to my table with at least one bite left of whatever piece of sugar-crack i just ordered. and, really, is there anything more pathetic than being that guy? the dude who walks to his table...not 15 seconds after ordering...a coffee in one hand, empty plate in the other...his face blanching from pink to red to fuck-head as tries to choke down the cinnamon roll he just inhaled. his eyes watering. his cheeks stretched out like a goddamn chipmunk's.

oh, and you should see me on the days i'm not on a diet.

words, big

2012-01-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

i love words. i've always been interested in learning and expanding my vocabulary. it would seem to follow, then, that my writing, my discourse would be infused with lots of impressive lexical utterances. but that doesn't follow because, while yes i heart words, i also love THE LANGUAGE OF NATURAL THOUGHT. and, thus, i only use grad-school-y type of words when they fit naturally within the sentence, when they serve the broader goal of clarity and force and concision. my advice for young writers is this: develop your vocabulary, but not at the expense of your prose's readability. a big word is awesome, but only because it trims the fat: the bigger the word, the more little words and modifiers it "sums" up/contains/embodies. this is somewhat of a tricky point to grasp, so let it linger in your mind before giving it a final "yeah, he is TOTALLY right (or wrong!)!" for now (jesus, how condescending do i sound right now?!?), just try and notice how the fancier the word, the less it has a one-to-one synonym with another word (EXCEPTIONS GRANTED). and that's the kicker: we use big words to preserve a forward flow, to (paradoxically) heed the less-is-more principle. instead of lots of little words that accrete into a big idea, we can use a big word that operates as verbal container for all those little words. (now for some aspirin.)

self-efficacy

2012-01-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

In his self-efficacy theory, Bandura distinguishes between outcome expectations and efficacy expectations, a distinction which may have important bearing on understanding how students learn to write. He suggests that individuals will perform a task successfully if they know what behaviors will produce desired outcomes and if they evaluate themselves as capable of performing the necessary behaviors.

Peter Elbow on writing

2012-01-02T15:46:00.000-08:00

The best writing has voice: the life and rhythms of speech. Unless we actively train our students to speak onto paper, they will write the kind of dead, limp, nominalized prose we hate--or say we hate. We see the difference most clearly in extreme cases: experienced teachers learn that when they get a student who writes prose that is so tied in knots that it is impenetrable they need only ask the student to say what she was getting at and the student will almost invariably speak the thought in syntax which is perfectly clear and lively, even if sometimes inelegantly colloquial. If the student had known enough to "speak the thought onto paper" and then simply cleaned up the syntax, the writing would have been much better than her best "essay writing."

good writing

2011-12-30T08:13:00.001-08:00

invites reading

some stuff to remember

2011-12-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

as a writing teacher, i too often lose track of the "big picture." too often i get sidetracked from what the essential over-arching goals are for my class. hopefully, this semester, i can remember that it all comes down to what the students learned and what they are able to do.

if i can't speak directly to those outcomes, i am wasting everyone's time.

ADAPT (OR DIE)

2011-12-29T19:27:00.000-08:00

one of the most powerful things a strong writer does is ADAPT to his or her "communicative situation." (perhaps this is some version of "proper words in proper places.") all i know is that any discussion about what makes a certain writer effective must include the ability to adapt to the situation at hand. yes, i mean audience, but i also mean so much more than audience.

simply put, the key to effective writing is an ability to adapt to context, to the forces motivating the writer to speak.

bad thinking can never lead to good writing.

2011-12-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

without good thinking, good writing is impossible.

heuristics are

2011-12-21T21:35:00.001-08:00

explicit strategies for effective guessing

more notes

2011-12-20T20:20:00.000-08:00

the process of writing is inductive. the presentation of writing is deductive.

Luanne Kowalke writes in Methods That Matter,

2011-12-17T23:51:00.000-08:00

“To make sure that children become intelligent, insightful, educated human beings, we educators must help them become conscious of their own learning and thought process. Instead of teaching students what to think, we need to teach them how to think, and how to think for themselves" (234).

leading discussions

2011-12-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

Leading Discussions

Heather Holleman
Penn State University

How to Lead a Discussion: Engage a Text, Launch a Question, Model Feedback
“Do not teach about a text. Teach your experience with a text.”

In any given class, you’ll be talking about writing. What sorts of things might you talk about?
How do you get a discussion going? Finally, what happens when you have to give feedback
(verbal or written)?

1. What to Do with a Text:
With any text, an essay, a short story, a textbook chapter, a sample essay, etc., you can ask students to do
four things. During class, students can report back what they experienced with the text.

1. Resonance, Resistance: Have students mark down places of resonance (what I like, what
seemed true and right, what I agree with) or resistance (what I dislike, what seemed wrong,
manipulative or deceptive, what I disagree with).
2. What question is this text asking me?: Have students think about questions that came to
mind as they read a text. What question does the text frame?
3. Places of great writing: Have students share what they thought was good writing.
4. Rhetorical appeals: How does this text “work” on me as a reader? Have students mark
places where they identified ethos, pathos, and logos.

2. How to Launch a Discussion Question:
Closed questions ask for one word answers without debate. Open questions invite multiple answers. If
students still don’t talk, have them write down their answers first.

Closed Open
1. Who is the author? What did you discover about the author?
2. Where did you see pathos? How did this text use appeals to emotion?
3. Did you like this text? What do you remember about this text?
4. Is this good writing? What did you learn that helps your writing?

To keep discussion going, try using this phrase:
Tell me more.

3. Giving Feedback in a Discussion
1. Celebrate strengths
2. Point out a growth area / common themes
3. Instruct how they might improve
4. Dialogue with students. Feedback is not a monologue.
5. Make a plan for development. What’s the student’s next step?

the process

2011-12-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

great video below.
the process of revision is the process of rethinking.
http://composition.la.psu.edu/media/heather-adams-discusses-process-oriented-pedagogy/view

revising

2011-12-14T12:27:00.001-08:00

The value of redrafting and revising our writing is that we get the chance to listen as closely as possible to what we've said—and then make choices as a result of what we hear. But we'll never hear anything (that is, our work will never speak to us) if we haven't sincerely spoken in the first place.

You can't hear an echo—no matter how well positioned in the canyon—if you aren't willing to call out.

video, cool

2011-12-13T20:04:00.000-08:00

No One Writes Alone: Peer Review in the Classroom, A Guide For Students

the value of reading

2011-12-13T06:36:00.000-08:00

the value of reading, of engaging closely with both texts and their authors, is that we see how and when they leave the descriptions and observations for us to complete, and when they know they must be as thoroughgoing as possible for the picture to emerge and complete itself.

this, this thing writers do, this degree of development, of sufficiency, of anticipation—it's where the art happens.

reflect, learning to

2011-12-12T19:16:00.000-08:00

Learning to write is the most direct way of learning to reflect; it is not the content, but the process of the liberal arts. Nowhere does such critical and creative engagement happen with more intensity, both individually and socially, than in an open-topic, research-driven, process-oriented, small-group-centered, portfolio-assessed class of student writers.

--Toby Fulwiler "Teaching Writing as a Liberal Art: Ideas That Made A Difference"

...listening

2011-12-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

yes, all writing is rhetoric. but that doesn't mean audience is the first place to start

when teaching the craft of composition.

writing begins to take shape first through a conversation with self.

you have to listen closely to what you're trying to say.

because if you're not listening,

if you're not paying total attention,

why should anyone else?

forward, great leap

2011-12-10T19:10:00.000-08:00

some hurried notes about writing (in no particular order and with a heavy emphasis on "notes")

it can't be taught. writing can't be taught. and i say this as a teacher of writing--

someone who earns a living teaching students to write in school.

yes, of course, people can be taught how to write. but Writing--

with all the rich and multiple meanings associated with phrasing it that way--cannot be taught.

do i mean voice? perhaps.

perhaps that's what can't be taught.

or maybe i mean a word close to voice, but not voice exactly.

i'm not sure.

i only mean this:

the great leap forward--the thing that can't be taught--is when we finally let go of "being wrong in words" and instead begin to look around with our writing, using our print to learn, explore, relax, create, share.

that's what can't be taught.

and it's the only thing we should be teaching:

by which, i mean...it's the thing we should finally free the students to learn.

writing is...

2011-11-05T23:17:00.000-07:00

writing is a conversation that you have with yourself, over and over again, until youre ready let the world in on your mind.

coherence, a willful entrapment of footnotes within footnotes or: some thoughts on cohesion and

2011-07-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

i have my favorite authors (Gladwell, Krakauer, Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Lewis, Hunter Thompson--feel free to stop me anytime), yet i'm not always certain why i love their work. is it their style? sure, but, what about their style do i find so effective? what's the operative ingredient at play in their prose? and is that even a valid question?

who knows. all i can say is that it's a valid question for people still looking to make the Great Leap Forward in their writing. we (correctly?) assume our favorite writers have discovered that special something which elevates language into art--and we hope by pinpointing that rare and elusive flame, we might ignite our own candles by their fire.

and i guess that's what separates mere "reading" from the more self-reflective "reading like writer": the former suggests an activity that's information and entertainment based, whereas the latter involves being less a consumer of the text and more a kind of "scout" or "researcher" (or even "borrower") of technique. and, come to think of it, that's what i love about the work of Gladwell, Krakauer, et al.: the feeling that--somehow, someway--i'm being transformed by their prose. and just as a writer. but also as a person.

here's all i know: we will never unearth the exact magic that runs through the Great Works of literature. yet we most certainly can grasp (and apply) some of the lesser (but still radically important) features of good writing.

with that in mind, i want to share what i've been focusing on lately: cohesion and coherence. for cohesion, the writer wants to make sure the sentences and paragraphs contain proper thematic ties (words and phrases that logically link and unify ideas). for coherence, an author seeks to strike a kind of pragmatic balance among the three points of the rhetorical triangle (writer, reader, text). for coherence, moreover, the author gives greater consideration to his or her audience, gives greater consideration to the purpose and exigence of the work.

we might even say, moreover, that coherence operates at the macro level: a zone where the author seeks (by the final draft, anyway) to present a cogent structure that unfolds not by simple free association but through a system suited to an underlying purpose. cohesion, on the other hand, operates at the more micro level: a space where the author seeks to unify his or her sentences using grammatical, syntactical, and mechanical (punctuation) ties.

now i personally find cohesion in writing much easier to achieve (after all, there are innumerable handbooks out there that--if you don't follow their rules too rigidly--can prove immensely helpful). coherence, however, can be much more challenging. i am not always sure whether i’ve chosen the correct structure to best unfold my ideas, the pattern that's the most helpful, most logical, most effective. yet i remain encouraged because, well, i enjoy the trial-and-error aspect of questing toward coherence, of trying out different structures in an effort to unfurl my ideas as sincerely and clearly and naturally as possible.

coda: for all my talk of cohesion and coherence, it might seem a bit counter-intuitive that my all-time favorite book is American Psycho, a novel of such unwieldy digressions and unreliability that some of the more tame moments occur when, say, the protagonist--the unforgettable Patrick Bateman--takes page after page after page to properly adumbrate the true "meaning" of Phil Collins.

and it also may not seem obvious why David Foster Wallace--whose style can be rightly labeled as a sort of willful entrapment of footnotes within footnotes--remains my favorite author of non-fiction.

to both, here's why: Ellis and Wallace are such deft masters of both cohesion and coherence that they intentionally fracture their narrative structures, consciously disturbing the text's linearity in an effort to mirror the thematic ends their work seeks to probe. click here to watch Wallace briefly explain this idea on Charlie Rose.

hope that helps.

writing, some more notes on

2011-07-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

i selected the below paragraph because it foregrounds two effective writing techniques--alliteration and word precision. as you most likely know, alliteration is when neighboring words share the same "starting sound," and thus create (among other effects) a kind of sonic repetition. word precision needs no explanation--though i can't stress enough its important. (consider the differing effects between writing, say, "the test was hard," vs. "the test was difficult," and you begin to see what i mean.)

in this excerpt from the film review in this week's New Yorker, i've highlighted all the moments that (for me, anyway) are working either formally or informally as alliteration.

The educator who matters in “Terri” is Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), an assistant principal with a problem. His problem is Terri Thompson (Jacob Wysocki), a mountain in his mid-teens, with a penchant for wearing pajamas to school. Add the soft, unhurried waddle of the lad’s gait, plus the seconds that tick by as he ponders the answer to a simple inquiry, and you start to wonder if Terri is less of a student than a sleepwalker. It is Mr. Fitzgerald’s chosen task to awaken Terri to the world, along with other worrisome cases—Chad (Bridger Zadina), say, who claws at his scalp as if trying to get at the itchy thoughts inside.

now writer Anthony Lane's use of alliteration here might seem excessive, but only because i've drawn such attention to its salience; the repeating Ps and Ts and Ws would be invisible to a reader who hadn't been tipped off to their presence ahead of time. (though, it needs to be mentioned, the "invisibility" of alliteration does not mean the effect is lost; rather, what gives most literary devices their power is precisely their ability to subconsciously stir us without our knowledge.)

now let's take another sweep through the text, this time coding for word precision. my findings are highlighted.

The educator who matters in “Terri” is Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), an assistant principal with a problem. His problem is Terri Thompson (Jacob Wysocki), a mountain in his mid-teens, with a penchant for wearing pajamas to school. Add the soft, unhurried waddle of the lad’s gait, plus the seconds that tick by as he ponders the answer to a simple inquiry, and you start to wonder if Terri is less of a student than a sleepwalker. It is Mr. Fitzgerald’s chosen task to awaken Terri to the world, along with other worrisome cases—Chad (Bridger Zadina), say, who claws at his scalp as if trying to get at the itchy thoughts inside.

each of the words Lane selected--and i which i've highlighted--conveys something their more general counterpart does not.

gait v. walk.
tick v. go by(?)
ponders v. thinks about
inquiry v. question
scalp v. head

i could go into a detailed analysis of each of these examples--drawing attention to, say, the onomatopoeic resonance of "tick" over something dry and pallid like "go by" (or "pass")--but i won't. i think the logic behind Lane's choices are self-evident.

okay, so that's it. i hope i've shown that alliteration should be subtle but powerful. and our diction should be precise without being overly technical or awkward.

voice, compose in an authentic

2011-06-30T17:52:00.000-07:00

in writing, some of the most obvious and helpful tips can also be some of the most under-appreciated. take, for example, the suggestion for writers to compose in an authentic voice, to let their human feel for language shine through. yet how often do we abandon our own easy gift for words when circumstances require us to write? how often do we let our syntax suddenly stiffen, calcifying into rigid and unnatural blocks of text? why does this happen?

i'm not sure. and i'm not sure i care enough to truly probe the question. what does interest me, though, are the ways we can write with a natural cadence, an organic gait that feels (in the positive sense) conversational.

a helpful way i've found to give my prose the color of conversation is to remember that all writing operates at the level of dialogue--and that's true whether i'm engaging an audience that's public or private, large or small, or (as is so often the case) limited solely to myself.

when i write from this place--from the persona of both Speaker and Listener--i'm reminded to establish exigence--an invaluable rhetorical tool that often gives writing that loose but logical voice. exigence (despite the forbidding name) simply means the "circumstances that necessitate communication"; or, put another way, exigence asks us to invoke the "timing" of our work, the circumstances that make "now" the right moment to hold forth.

writing is meant to be read, which means it's also destined to be performed (in whatever fashion that may take). as result, we should all want our work to feel as readable and honest and syntactically effective as possible. and, as i've hoped to make clear, establishing the exigency for a given article or essay or blog post (or really almost anything?) can help us remember that, while yes we are writing, we are also (in a very real way) speaking--and therefore word choice and sentence patterns must hit the natural beats and bounces of speech.

here are two strong examples of what i mean.

the first is from Scott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. (note: Marvin Gay's "What's Going On?" plays softly in the background during the feature.)

SIMON: Music is a way many of us mark time in our lives or even of history.

(soundbite of song)

SIMON: Forty years ago today, Marvin Gaye's album "What's Going On?" was released. It was sweet, sad and had bite. Without being explicit or obvious, it seemed to sing at the era of marching in the streets and mourning for those who died, both overseas and in the struggle for civil rights at home. The song seemed to catch the wave of history, became a huge hit.

for me, this is perfect. the intro engages the audience in a conversation--and does so by both its exigency ("Forty years ago today...") and its mix of elevated and colloquial expressions.

the second example is from a New York Times Magazine article that i think is destined for many journalists' end-of-year top ten lists. notice how the article's exigency--Derek Jeter's 37th birthday--informs the author's tone and style.

rules, breaking the

2011-06-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

on one level, i always feel a bit self-conscious (okay, embarrassed) when i draw attention to how professional writers use punctuation; i mean, a close reading of punctuation--what could be more dreary? but i also see punctuation as an intrinsic part of our language, not simply something we "do" to our words. punctuation is not something we invented after the creation of written language; rather, it is something innate to language itself, to discourse patterns, to verbal expression. if that sounds crazy, consider how naturally and even unconsciously we inflect our words when speaking (a stress here, a pause for effect there). inflection in speech, then, is punctuation in print.

here's good example of how professional writers use punctuation to expertly inflect their words. the sentences below are excerpted from a Stephen M. North book review.

"I floundered around a long time seeking just the right way to introduce this review of Louise Wetherbee Phelps’ Composition as a Human Science. The truth is, I really like this book, with emphasis on that present tense; I find myself rereading it, pondering it, defending it, attacking it, recommending it to my students."

North places a comma after the word "is" (something our teachers told us never, ever to do) because he wants to create suspense for whatever his truth-claim will be. perhaps a lesser writer might have chosen the more traditional, blind-obedience-to-the-rules approach, and written:

"The truth is that I really like this book, with emphasis on that present tense;"

in the reworked version, the suspense (the pause) is lost; the reader is halfway through the sentence before he or she realizes its point. North solves this problem by substituting a comma for the word "that." (which is an important point, since it highlights my broader thesis that punctuation and words are not discrete entities, even though we may speak of them as such.)

next, lets very briefly examine why North places a comma after the word "book."

"The truth is, I really like this book, with emphasis on that present tense;"

we've, rightly so, learned not to attach a comma to a dependent clause (bolded below) when it follows an independent clause (e.g., "my dog wags his tail when he's happy," and not "my dog wags his tail, when he's happy.") so why does North break this rule? because he knows that the only rule to follow in writing is the one that helps achieve clarity of expression. or, put another way, if grammar or punctuation rules hinder clarity, ignore them. we don't write to appease robots; we write to express and connect and explain and emote. and we want to do so with as much clarity as we can.

and that's why North places a comma where normally he wouldn't. he wants to make sure the reader understands that the word "with" refers to his "liking." (otherwise, without the comma, readers might unwittingly read "this book with emphasis..." as possessing the same semantic relationship as, say, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (emphases mine).

moving on. read the sentence again, and ask yourself, why does North break the common-sense rule of placing a coordinating conjunction ("and," "or") just before the final item in a list of three or more items.

"The truth is, I really like this book, with emphasis on that present tense; I find myself rereading it, pondering it, defending it, attacking it, recommending it to my students."

North is signalling that his list is non-exhaustive. in other words, when you omit the final "and," you are telling the reader that your list includes only the most salient items. (example: "my grandmother was always baking something sweet--muffins, pastries, cakes." omitting the final "and" lets the reader know that the grandmother baked many more sweets than the three listed.)*

one final point.

North puts Composition as a Human Science in italics. as a writing teacher, i am frequently asked whether book titles get underlined, italicized, or put in quotes? the short answer: book titles should be italicized. that's the conventional standard. end of story. the long answer is that, well, it depends. when writing by hand, for example, we underline book titles, since we can't--at least not systematically--italicize our handwriting. also, a few publications (The New Yorker magazine, comes to mind) put book titles in quotes. it doesn't really matter which method you adopt--italics, underline, or quotation marks. what matters is that you understand why we inflect book titles (or any titles, for that matter) in the first place: clarity.

hope all that helps.

* "asyndeton" is the technical term for this.

comma chameleon

2011-06-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

my relationship with punctuation has progressed through at least three separate stages.

the first--the "Golden Ticket" stage--began when my third-grade teacher, ms. shannon, told me to forget about the rules and just place commas wherever i naturally paused when reading. her advice didn't seem possible and, in some sort of weird act of misplaced rebellion, i put her advice to the test. i grabbed my textbook and felt sure i could breeze across sentences, riding the zephyr of my own reading rhythms, unconcerned by the commas that tried to jump in my way. try as i might, though, my breath would regroup for that split second whenever i reached a comma. it was almost supernatural--as if the author knew precisely where i would need a quick sip of air, and thus sprinkled specks of punctuation to show me it was okay. god, how i remember feeling like i was witnessing a kind of magic, and how quickly i felt myself falling in love with this idea--the freedom to punctuate not by a set of obscure and clumsy edicts, but by the most instinctual part of ourselves: the breath.

stage two--which we'll call "Drill and Kill"--began in grad school when i started teaching freshman composition classes. early in that first semester, i had happily shared ms. shannon's punctuation tip with the students. i remember deciding how grateful the students would be to receive such an intuitive and "cool" non-rule rule. the first batch of essays they turned in, however, were littered with commas in all the wrong spots, strewn in places that suggested speed, and absent in nooks that begged for breaks. (the essays were also plagued by a number of larger and more important issues--most of which we addressed as the semester rolled along. some we didn't.)

i felt capable, perhaps even uniquely qualified, to help my students compose with a greater sense of thematic coherence and purpose. but what i didn't possess was an empirical and scientific answer for the students who, say, asked why the sentence "since he was so hungry, jerry felt like ordering two of everything on the menu" needs a comma, but "jerry felt like ordering two of everything on the menu since he was so hungry" does not. or why "my sister studied in paris, france, while in college" necessitates a comma after the word france.

luckily (if that's the right word), an intro to college grammar class was being held just down the hall from where i taught. and so the next morning, i spoke with the professor and she graciously allowed me to audit her class. thus began my systematic plunge into the science behind comma usage in specific, punctuation in particular, and grammar in general.

the third stage--and the era in which i currently reside--goes by a rather banal-sounding name: the "Signal" stage. simply stated, commas (and this goes for all other punctuation, too) are signals. as writers, we use them when mere words alone can't (or shouldn't) do the job. but you already knew that. perhaps, though, what you've haven't fully appreciated is that punctuation--when considered as a system of signals--means we are given a sort of second Golden Ticket. and this ticket is good for something much more creative and, ultimately, life-affirming than the original. what i am talking about here is punctuation in service of personal taste. when i sit down to write, i let personal taste dictate where my thoughts do and don't benefit from "signals." i use punctuation to help my words achieve (hopefully) the highest level of flow, clarity, precision, (insert other effect i may be working toward at any given moment). and there is no rulebook--which i know of, anyway--that has already divined the punctuation needs of sentences i have yet to write.

and that's the very advice i'd give to anyone who writes, wants to write, or even hates to write. punctuation, if you so desire, can come with a user's manual (a very, very helpful user's manual); but punctuation can also bend to personal taste--as long as you are crystal clear about what you mean by personal taste. for me, as i've said, i seek a kind of conversational ease, but with all the coherence and lucidity i can possibly muster. i want my writing to achieve what the thoughts swirling in my mind lack--namely, organization and concision and (dare to dream) elegance. and so when i've sketched my sentence as far as i can without punctuation and something still feels maddeningly "off," that's when i use punctuation to turn "on" what mere words cannot.

of course, the broader and more meaningful point i want to make here has very little to do with punctuation--either rule-based or otherwise. the deeper point is that personal taste isn't everything in writing, nor is it the only thing. but it's damn close. the only way a writer will ever get his or her sentences to flow forward--to gently role down the slope of smooth syntax--is through harnessing the power of personal taste. which, yes, is easier said than done, because personal taste often involves catering to (or at least being aware of) the preferences of the audience, the reader, the public. yet, the truth remains: we must develop the ability to look at our sentences and ask whether or not we've expressed ourselves in the best way. and then we must gather the courage to shape and reshape our thoughts into their highest form. and that requires a deep confidence--not in the rules--but our rules.

symmetry, structuring the pattern of your words to create balance and

2011-06-14T22:06:00.000-07:00

artist: metamorfize

so today i came across the below paragraph, and i think it offers us a really easy chance to brush-up on the idea of parallelism: a term that (in grammar circles) means structuring the pattern of your words to create balance and symmetry.

here's the paragraph (note the words i've bolded).

"The book is modernity’s quintessential technology—“a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If itisn ’t—if we choose to replace the book—what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?"

at its most basic, parallelism uses the same word structure to create balance--example: "i like hiking, jogging, and kayaking." okay, that sentence works. but now imagine I wrote, "i like hiking, jogging, and to kayak." um, yeah, not so much.

easy stuff. so let's move toward the more advanced level, which goes something like this: if you pay attention to professional writers, you'll see them employ parallelism to preserve the flow and clarity of their more intricate and involved sentences. in the words, the longer and more intricate a sentence becomes, the more it craves a balanced pattern--because it's that balance, after all, which keeps the sentence smooth and rhythmic.

look again at the sentence.

"But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must [...]."

"the-rustle-of-the-book's-turning-page"

which grammatically translate* as "article-noun-preposition-article-noun-adjective-noun."

and the words "the flicker of the screen's twitching pixel" are an exact grammatical match: "article-noun-preposition-article-noun=adjective-noun."

that's how it's done.

now as some sort of pedantic refresher course on parallelism, this post means absolutely nothing. which is fine, because i'm only really really this point: just as math freaks can "see" The Math, visually watching numbers zip and zoom into their most natural answer, the same is true for professional writers. they can see the syntax often before they even see the words.

for us mere mortals, however, we've only briefly tasted such a gift. but taste it we have. i'd bet that anyone reading this blog has, at some point, seen the syntax line itself up, and just slid the words into their most natural slots.

ah, to live!

and what we'd pay for another chance.

which is part of the reason we read, read, read. and while we do, noting parallelism as we go. lingering over its particular math. before dipping back into the text--knowing that our reading is slowly revolutionizing our writing.

*i'm blindly guessing as to the proper way to grammatically parse those words. i doubt i got exactly it right. but i got it right enough to preserve my point.

caption, disjunctive

2011-06-11T22:22:00.001-07:00

The uninhabited island was named for a marooned eighteenth-century adventurer who likely inspired the first English novel. I thought I’d strand myself there and read it. --Jonathan Franzen, "Farther Away."
---------
so Franzen's darkly amusing caption offers students of craft a valuable lesson--which is, writing that's directed toward the public, that seeks an audience, should feel conversational. that doesn't mean, though, the word choice must be informal. not at all. it's a common misconception that "conversational" and "informal" mean one in the same. they don't.

a conversation can and often does include many different ways of speaking, of using language--from the common and colloquial to the highly polished and performative. simply stated, the term "conversational" describes language that feels as though it is or could be spoken. (thus, we consider the style of, say, Jared Diamond--author of non-fiction bestsellers Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse, et al.--to be "conversational," since he writes as though he's lecturing to an eager class of students, almost pausing here and there in the text to take up questions from the many raised hands. Diamond remains conversational throughout his books, but never informal.)

now all professional writers, not just Diamond, know they are engaging in a conversation whenever they write something they wish to see published, which is why they infuse their prose (to the desired level) with rhetorical cues that acknowledge someone else has a rightful seat at the table: and that person, of course, is the reader. bottom line: if you want your writing to sing, to move with a kind of dynamism, you must ask yourself two things:
1. what question (either implicitly or explicitly) am i answering in my work?*
2. can my writing be read aloud? (which is another way of asking, is it conversational?)

and Franzen, for all his erudition, never elevates his prose past the point where it no longer sings when spoken. (a few years after reading The Corrections, i bought a used copy on cassette. i must have listened to the book at least twice. if anything, Franzen's style works even better when spoken.) but what does any of this have to do with the caption for "Farther Away"?

well, look at the particular way in which the caption plays to the notion that all writing is form of conversation and thus needs to engage the audience in a type of back-and-forth, question-and-answer.

The uninhabited island was named for a marooned eighteenth-century adventurer who likely inspired the first English novel. I thought I’d strand myself there and read it.

Franzen is smashing two disparate ideas together: a decidedly inhospitable place, and his choice to take residence there. this disjunction opens a crater-sized lacuna in our minds, a gap caused by what we'd assumed given the content of the first sentence and what was actually revealed in the second. the only way to resolve this cognitive dissonance, then, is to ask, why would anyone willfully strand him or herself on an uninhabited island?

and thus we waltz, as if on cue, right into Franzen's essay, which is nothing if not the answer (the bridge, the missing information) to the question the disjunctive caption sets up.

the real value in looking so closely at Franzen's technique, we know, is that one way to improve our own work is to study (not the thematic meaning of literature but) the parts that go into its production. as an exercise, then, i thought it might be useful to come up with our own disjunctive captions. remember, though, the test of its success (using Franzen's as the gold standard) hinges on whether or not your caption seems to play on opposites, on reversal.

here is my attempt:

Jens Lekman, a thirty-year-old singer-songwriter from Gothenburg, Sweden, is largely unknown outside certain indie pop circles. his music will change your life.

(my hope is that readers will then read the article to discover why such extreme disunity exists between Lekman's talent and his name-recognition.)

add your attempt at a disjunctive caption in the comment section.
----
* in a future post, i will offer a detailed guide on the way professional writers establish a conversational tone by framing their work as a response to an either implicit or explicit question.

franzen, some notes on the first paragraph of a 12,000-word essay written by jonathan

2011-06-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

the idea behind these posts is to help you "read like a writer"--that is, to help you examine a professional work of prose and identify not just what the text is doing, but also how it is doing it. the value in such an endeavour, i believe, is that we can radically improve our own writing through understanding the choices an author makes at both the micro (word choice) and macro (thematic organization) level.

consider the opening paragraph from "Farther Away," Jonathan Franzen 's 12,000-word essay in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

"In the South Pacific Ocean, five hundred miles off the coast of central Chile, is a forbiddingly vertical volcanic island, seven miles long and four miles wide, that is populated by millions of seabirds and thousands of fur seals but is devoid of people, except in the warmer months, when a handful of fishermen come out to catch lobsters. To reach the island, which is officially called Alejandro Selkirk, you fly from Santiago in an eight-seater that makes twice-weekly flights to an island a hundred miles to the east. Then you have to travel in a small open boat from the airstrip to the archipelago’s only village, wait around for a ride on one of the launches that occasionally make the twelve-hour outward voyage, and then, often, wait further, sometimes for days, for weather conducive to landing on the rocky shore. In the nineteen-sixties, Chilean tourism officials renamed the island for Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish adventurer whose tale of solitary living in the archipelago was probably the basis for Daniel Defoe’s novel "Robinson Crusoe," but the locals still use its original name, Masafuera: Farther Away."

What does the first sentence achieve? bracketing aside its style and skill, the first sentence establishes "the what" and "the where" (the "setting," if you like). yet we can also tell that the writer wants to personify this place as a kind of "who," that the island will function as a sort of character in the essay--otherwise why go to such pains to describe the place in such style-rich prose ("forbiddingly vertical volcanic island")?

note also the way in which Franzen sequences the island's animal life population: "millions of seabirds," "thousands of fur seals," "handful of fisherman." Franzen organizes from greatest to least (and not vice versa) because he wants the syntax to both structurally and semantically create a sense of isolation and rapid disappearance (a motif that runs throughout the essay).

the paragraph then makes a subtle turn toward gallows humor as Franzen explains the antiquated system of air travel involved in just starting to head in the island's vicinity. and things only become more and more rustic, because once deplaned,

"you have to travel in a small open boat from the airstrip to the archipelago’s only village, wait around for a ride on one of the launches that occasionally make the twelve-hour outward voyage, and then, often, wait further, sometimes for days, for weather conducive to landing on the rocky shore."

i'm not sure i'll ever come across another sentence so ready-made for this point: wordiness is not a function of how many words are in a sentence, but rather a value judgment regarding word economy and precision. in other words, a lengthy sentence is not automatically a wordy sentence. or, in opposite terms, even short sentence can still be quite wordy. if you go back and reread Franzen's sentence, which clocks in at 52 words (conventional wisdom suggests an average sentence should contain roughly 15-20 words), you'll notice how sturdy, how taut, how forward-flowing (and thus, how "clear") it nevertheless remains. the sentence--despite its length--never sags nor seems inefficient. and isn't inefficiency, after all, what we mean by wordiness? isn't wordiness when the purpose and content of a sentence seem somehow inefficiently paired, when the idea of the sentence wilted (rather than bloomed) under the weight of the writer's word choice?

a more interesting idea than wordiness, however, is at play in this same sentence--viz., the matching of form to purpose. it's an idea originally introduced to me by no less than Hamlet when he gives acting advice to one of his players. he implores the actor to "suit the action to the word, [and the] the word to the action." and that tip applies equally well in writing since, after all, what is writing other than a play that the reader silently performs in his or her head. which is why Franzen keeps extending and extending that particular sentence: he's suiting the action of traveling to the island (protracted, lengthy, seemingly endless) to the word count (also lengthy and seemingly endless) needed to recount the journey. simply put, the reader gets to feel how long it takes to travel to that island by getting to feel how long it takes to travel to the end of that sentence.

but, again, for all its length, it's not a wordy sentence, as evidenced clearly in Franzen's expert use of the "conducive." Franzen writes "[you often have to wait] for weather CONDUCIVE to landing on the rocky shore." (emphasis mine.) now suppose the word "conducive" did not exist. how would we still convey the same meaning? most likely, we would write something like "[you often have to wait] for weather THAT IS FAVORABLE to landing on the rocky shore." or maybe "THAT IS HELPFUL FOR SAFELY LANDING on the rocky shore." sure, both of my attempts kind of work, but they seem poor substitutes. the point is, conducive is the right word because it's the most economical.

Franzen, for all his style and structure, is not perfect here. indeed, i believe the writer makes a mistake when he decides to "name" the island twice in the opener. To wit: Franzen tells us in the second sentence that the island in question is "officially called Alejandro Selkirk" and then circles back in the last sentence to this idea but with the added information that the name stems from "Alexander Selkirk," the adventurer who most likely inspired the book "Robinson Crusoe."

my question is, why not tell us both things at once: the name of the island and where it came from? in my opinion, Franzen should have omitted naming the island in the second sentence (after all, what difference does it make if we know the official name of the island so soon? the real point is what kind of island it is) and, instead, included its name (and naming) as an organic entry into the significance of who it was named for. that being said, the paragraph does arrive exactly where Franzen has been leading it: to the words "Farther Away," which works to perfectly bookend the opening paragraph as a kind of self-contained work of art--given that the article itself is entitled "Farther Away."

perhaps the real genius of this work, though, is how the title's subhead plants a question in the reader's mind that then the essay waltzes in to answer. it's quite stunning. so stunning in fact that it deserves its own post, which i will get to this week. (oh, and in that forthcoming post, i'll very briefly offer a note on Franzen's ability to write in a voice that weaves together both formal and informal language. it's an important skill, so it seems right to save it for next time.)

sequencing, logical

2011-06-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

the most under-examined idea in writing is the life-or-death importance of logical sequencing. (note: if you are not, for whatever reason, immediately nodding along with me here, sort of saying to yourself, "toooooootally," then this may not be the post for you. not to worry, however, as i will furnish an "introductory post to the life-or-death importance of logical sequencing" at some point this or next month.)

so read this short paragraph (published recently in The Atlantic). pay particular attention to how each sentence does or doesn't foreshadow (prefigure, if you like) the sentence next to arrive. can you follow the idea as it threads forward? what about knots--see any of them?

"The summer movie season hit full mast less than a week ago, when millions of viewers took to the theaters for the highest-grossing Memorial Day weekend box office ever. I was one of those viewers. Something separated me from the rest, though. Along with most everyone, I love movies for what they have to offer: Namely, the chance to watch awesome stuff, like good-looking people blowing things up. But as I scanned the crowd in my theater, I noticed that I was alone--in that I'd come alone."

now most likely you rolled easily from the opening lines to the third sentence ("Something separated me from the rest, though"). But with the advent of the next sentence, a brick wall emerged.

so here's what went wrong and why: the forward threading became tangled in itself, reemerging further down the paragraph, but by which time it was too late). or, simply put, writing works when it allows the reader to anticipate the coming sentence even before it arrives. if words, however, show up that confuse our predictions (and, importantly, when the confusion doesn't seem "intentional"), the thread is lost, the ball is dropped, the line goes slack.

let's look at that exact moment.

"Something separated me from the rest, though."

so we want to know what that "something" is? our brains see the writer "priming the pump" for a Big Reveal, and damn it we're going to miss out. but then (sound of needle pulled across vinyl) this sentence arrives: "Along with most everyone, I love movies for what they have to offer: Namely, the chance to watch awesome stuff, like good-looking people blowing things up."

what does that have to do with how the author is separate from moviegoers? it doesn't. in fact, the sentence tells us what is the same about the author and moviegoers. and that, no matter how post-modern you may be, is poor sequencing. because, yes, while the author does come around to telling us that he both arrived and intends to view this movies alone (loner!), the paragraph's natural logic has been hurt. in short, the logic failed to find the best path forward. and in writing, the best path forward is most always modifying forward (very, very few exceptions granted).

if you want, spend a fruitful 90 seconds rearranging the paragraph and then post your reworked version (in its more natural sequence) in the comment section.

profusion, word

2011-06-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

this we know: as writers, our craft depends largely on our ability to harness an authentic voice, the part of ourselves that is real and genuine and sincere. this we also know: as writers, our craft depends largely on our ability to harness an authentic relationship with the reader, a real and genuine and sincere connection with the audience. this paradox is at the heart of what makes writing and reading so interconnected, so circular--and, yes, so maddening. professionals in this field, then, are those scribes among us who've mastered "writing like a reader," and "reading like a writer." one (mundane but useful) way writers accomplish this art is by scanning their work for something i call "word profusion," that is, the overuse (usually unintentional) of a given word in a sentence or paragraph.

here's a real-world example (from a text we've previously looked at, though for different reasons).

"In 1900, Josiah Flynt Willard, writer, amateur sociologist, and sometime hobo, published Notes of an Itinerant Policeman. In the book, he describes the often-unsavory world of fin de siècle American tramps: their begging strategies, their caste systems and codes, their hot tempers and underdeveloped intellects, their reasons for becoming tramps in the first place (number one: liquor). One of the book’s more compelling chapters is entitled What Tramps Read. This is one facet of tramp life one might not immediately think of, but its inclusion in the book makes a lot of sense." (emphasis mine.)

so the writing here is beautiful, clear, linear. just one problem, though: an over-reliance on the word "one." to be fair, however, the writer does use the word "one" in a couple different ways, so that mitigates the profusion (though it's still a tad distracting).

for our purposes, let's think about how to replace a few of those "one's." here's what i'd do.

"[...] their reasons for becoming tramps in the first place (chief cause: liquor). One of the book’s more compelling chapters is entitled What Tramps Read. This is a facet of tramp life one might not immediately think of, but its inclusion in the book makes a lot of sense."

i didn't change the second "one" because its usage denotes "the reader," rather than (strictly speaking) a number.

by the way, i recommend only doing this sort of scan when you're near the publishing/sharing zone. peccadilloes such as these don't matter a wit when we are still in the drafting process. in fact, focusing on this sort of stuff while still in the early-to-middle stages will stifle your flow. it's like ironing a garment before its all been stitched together.

part two, punctuation as word(s)

2011-06-05T21:04:00.000-07:00

so in an earlier post, i drew attention to the art of using punctuation to stand in for actual words. this post is similarly positioned, though with one notable exception: rather than looking at a winning example of this technique, we will look at an attempt that feels decidedly less successful. yeah, but why spend time looking at flawed writing? because understanding why certain things in writing don't work can be just as edifying as understanding why certain things in writing do work.

to wit: The New Yorker's News Desk just recently published an online piece about an incredible time-lapse video of manhattan. let's look at the word choice and punctuation in the third sentence (emphasis mine).

"More than fifty thousand time-lapse videos have been posted to Vimeo, the online art house to YouTube’s multiplex, and many of them are beautiful. But on Tuesday evening, Josh Owens posted one that struck us as more ambitious and impressive than most. Maybe it’s because much of it was shot from hotel windows in Times Square, where we have our offices: at ground level, in real time, it can be a dispiriting neighborhood, but Owens reminded us that it’s also a glorious one, at least when it’s sped up around seven hundred and twenty times. (The interval between frames as Owens shot them was anywhere from five seconds to a full minute.)"

so what words (or connection) is the writer trying to convey with the colon use? one way find out is by mentally removing the colon and then asking yourself what words you would employ to make the relationship clear between the two independent clauses. give it a go.

okay, what words did you insert? let me guess, you couldn't do it? and that's fine, because it can't really be done. there is no "natural" segue that our minds mentally insert in order to bridge the idea directly before the colon to the idea immediately after it. and when that's the case, the colon is helpless. yes, the colon is an extremely pliant punctuation mark, but the above example mishandles the usage. it requires too much of a leap. and thus the direction--that is, the forward propulsion of the sentence--gets dropped. and it doesn't get picked back up again until it's too late. and that's the take-home lesson here: professional writers are expert idea threaders. they weave words,* and the result is what we call Flow.

so without spending more than five seconds thinking about this, here is how i would fix the situation. you decide which one has more flow; and flow, after all, is the only reason to examine this sort of minutia in such detail.

original:

"Maybe it’s because much of it was shot from hotel windows in Times Square, where we have our offices: at ground level, in real time, it can be a dispiriting neighborhood, but Owens reminded us that it’s also a glorious one, at least when it’s sped up around seven hundred and twenty times.

mine:

"Maybe it’s because much of it was shot from hotel windows in Times Square, where we have our offices. This neighborhood, experienced at ground level and in real time, can be particularly dispiriting, yet Owens reminded us that it’s also a glorious tableau, at least when sped up around seven hundred and twenty times.

____________
*re: the importance of threading and weaving one's words, look up the etymology of "text" next time your bored.

Video: Manhattan Accelerando

W's, the five

2011-06-05T15:23:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite strategies for opening any piece of writing is the seemingly conservative Five W's approach--the right-off-the-bat establishment of who, what, when, where, and why (and sometimes how).

this technique is so venerable and journalistic-y that many writers, wary of being labeled dry and flat, avoid opening with such overt exposition. in its place, they will often open with an anecdote or some other non-traditional "lead."

all well and good. who doesn't love a good hook? that said, there is something so intensely beautiful about an opening sentence that, right from the very start, clearly grounds the reader on all points of the expository compass. it's clarity at its purest. and perhaps this above all: there's a stark immediacy about such a sentence.

example, you say? let's look at Robert Ito's "An Occasional Hobo," a piece which ran in The Believer's June 2011 issue.

The piece opens thus:

In 1900, Josiah Flynt Willard, writer, amateur sociologist, and sometime hobo, published Notes of an Itinerant Policeman. In the book, he describes the often-unsavory world of fin de siècle American tramps: their begging strategies, their caste systems and codes, their hot tempers and underdeveloped intellects, their reasons for becoming tramps in the first place (number one: liquor).

great opener. and yet look at how reliant it is upon the 5W's.

When? "1900."

Who? "Josiah Flynt Willard, writer, amateur sociologist, and sometime hobo."

What? "published Notes of an Itinerant Policeman."
Where? [the where the book probes is] "the often-unsavory world of fin de siècle [fancy way of saying end of a century--usually, but not always, the 1800's] American tramps."

Why? [the why is not yet revealed, but, as readers, we know it will be developed as the article unfolds. hence, we have something to read for--namely, to discover why Willard wrote this book and (since writing about hobos presents all sorts of challenges) how he gained the needed access.]

give me a piece that opens with such immediacy and clarity, and i'm all in. i trust such a writer. i can commit to this person, the article, the prose. i feel in good, careful hands.

and that's what cogent openers can do. they orient the reader. and from this secure foothold, the article is free to fly (within reason, of course).

now it goes without saying (then why am i saying it?) that an opener which simply uses the 5W's for 5W's sake runs the risk of seeming Composition 101-y. is there anything worse? which is why i want to stress that i am NOT endorsing this technique as a ready-made device that works independent of a writer's particular style. what i am saying, however, is give it a go; see if this strategy works for a given piece--if only in the drafting stage (it's a great clarifying tool). maybe you only need to use three or four of the 5W's. or maybe you use two sentences, as Ito does, to unfurl them. there are no rules. none. make it work for you. play around and develop an organic feel for this technique. it will serve you and your audience well.

in my next post, i will return to Ito's piece. my focus will be on his diction (word choice) and the polishes a more careful editor might have suggested.

word(s), punctuation as

2011-06-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

i'm interested in prose; that is, how WRITTEN words mean. concomitantly, i'm interested in how we teach prose, read prose, learn prose, school prose.

one day, yes, i hope to (self?) publish a (verrrrrrry meta) book on how lingering over certain examples of prose can make us better writers...if not necessarily make us write better (and there is a difference); for now, however, i will confine myself to this blog, the classroom, and the parenthetical asides which continue to metastasize with every post.

okay, so here is something that caught my eye:

in last week's new yorker magazine, rachel aviv wrote, God Knows Where I Am, a stunning narrative-based mental health piece.

I thought the below sentence would be interesting to consider for the purposes of "reading as a writer," which, for me, means reading not only for WHAT the text says, but also for HOW the text says it.

aviv writes:

"The hospital's crowded wards resembled those studied in Erving Goffman's 1961 book, 'Asylums,' which showed how, through years of institutional life, people lost their identities and learned to be perfect mental patients--dull, unmotivated, and helpless."

when you see the dash near the end of the sentence, what words are you tacitly filling in? take a second. reread the sentence, and imagine that you have been told to remove the dash and replace it with actual words. what did you insert? most likely, it was something like this: "that is, if you consider the 'perfect patient' to be...."

in effect, the rewritten sentences reads: "The hospital's crowded wards resembled those studied in Erving Goffman's 1961 book, 'Asylums,' which showed how, through years of institutional life, people lost their identities and learned to be perfect mental patients, that is, if you consider the 'perfect patient' to be dull, unmotivated, and helpless."

jeez. how heavy does this sentence suddenly become when we actually insert the words for which the dash was standing in?

and that's what i love about aviv's use of punctuation here. she's able to employ the dash so as to let the reader co-author a critique of the "perfect patient."

it's an elegant style and requires (from the author) a deep confidence in both the reader and the clarity of the sentence.

i should also note that this maneuver of using punctuation to replace words is hardly new nor difficult. we do it all the time--example: "Netflix just sent me Amélie, Y Tu Mamá También, and City of God." the commas are replacing the word "and," just as the comma is replacing the word "but" in "he was an important, now forgotten artist."

in using punctuation in place of word(s), aviv's use of the dash is not some radical difference in "kind," but rather in "degree." and something i admire when done well, and, of course, want to encourage (though very sparingly and with great prudence) in my own writing and my students.

a shape left in trees and other poems

2011-03-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

(55)
how can i be sure i'm on the right path?
i can't.

my path is not something that waits to be revealed.
not something i find once the map is mine.

my path is a shape left in trees,
a branch bouncing back
a bird now in flight.

(56)
at some point, i will die.
that's the single truth i know.

lately, though, i'm not so sure.

yes, of course, i will die.
but until it is my time,
the only fact i can confidently prove
is that i am alive.

(57)
when i was younger,
i drank deep dents into bottles of booze.
i believed alcohol could unlatch the true me
and send him into the world, into action.

i just had this hunch, this bet, that there was someone
pure, angelic, and good at my core.
yet could only get out through the portal of booze.

eventually
i drank so much
and for so many years
that something seemed to die inside.
or maybe outside.
either way,
i no longer felt something sacred in my spirit,
no longer believed it could be conjured
through the alchemy
of vodka and ice and lime.

and without an inner me to drink for,
i lost the desire to drink at all.

but now, maybe five years later, the light's returned.
i feel my highest self still there after all.
i feel a pure essence asking again to emerge.

how will i try to set you free this time?
through nothing more intoxicating than wholehearted love.
this is the gift i will give.
over and over and over.
until the person who receives it is me.

sometime soon and other poems

2011-03-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

(52)
i want nothing more than to live wholeheartedly.
yet it seems i do nothing but help my anxieties and fears
build walls whenever they ask.

sometime soon, though, i must make
the change i know is inevitable.
i must give my life over to love.
i must throw myself into this world
and practice compassion and connection
wherever i can.

still something holds me back.
i haven't harnessed the courage to rise above ego.
i still look for security in image and status and persona.
i still fear defeat and rejection.

and so i limit almost everything i do.
scared i might make mistakes,
scared i might lose.

yes, i can continue like this.
playing the odds,
and picking my spots.
here, living my most authentic self.
there, letting insecurity block out the light.

or i can remember that life's only real when lived through love.

---
(53)
if i believe i am different from you,
i will only notice the difference.

if i trust i am whole,
i'm invited to see
how we connect and unite
into this one.

---
(54)
on days i feel i'm not good enough,
that i deserve to be ignored,
i slip away from unconditional love.

but i need only to awaken to this world,
to all that brings stillness and space,
to the soft sway of trees in wind.

i only need to explore the unknown
and let my heart repeat, "where am i right now?"
until i see the answer is here.

birth and being and other poems

2011-03-08T18:28:00.000-08:00

(51)
what does it mean to make something of one's self?
the answer depends on who's asking.

if i let someone else pose the question,
it appears i've failed to find my fortune.
that i don't even try.

but when i have the courage to ask,
i see the question itself is wrong.

i don't devote my life to this or that,
as part of some plan to make myself into someone new.

i am just trying to shed all i am not,
so i can experience all of who i am.
i am simply living from the one space i am whole.
my heart.

---
(52)
i've sacrificed so much time to comparing,
to judging, to wondering about self-worth.
someone seems to have it all,
and i wish i did, too.

in these moments,
i see myself split off from others, disconnected.

i want so badly to feel i have what they have.
that i am not alone.

but i do have what they have.
i am birth and being and soul.

only when i chose to obsess over the garments of division,
status and image, power and possessions,
do i miss what we all have, what unites everyone one of us:
the infinite gift of love.

how we share this power
gives life so much meaning.

poem: (50)

2011-03-06T14:46:00.000-08:00

(50)
i fear there are some unforgivable faults in me
that, if i am not careful, people will notice
and use to dismiss my self-worth.
but in trying to conceal my failures,
i must take them everywhere i go.

too often, my mind gets caught up in what others have that i do not.
how much more important their lives must be.
how much power and influence and talent they must wield.
the friends and cars and trips abroad.

only when i spend an afternoon in the park playing frisbee
or an evening with yoga.
only when i wash my dish right after it's used.
only when i enter a thought i try never to finish, to keep open,
free of judgment and labels.
only when i remember deep, deep down we all are the same
and therefore all need the same.
only when i see beauty that doesn't require words.
only when i give myself unconditional love.
only when i give you unconditional love.
only when i see the inner light in me.
only when i see the inner light in you.

as i practice the growth of soul,
i see nothing is sacred but soul.
my fear i am not good enough,
have not done enough,
will never be enough,
all of this begins to fade
when i remember
true prosperity
exists within.

let me always be poor,
the most impoverished person alive,
if i try to measure true wealth through
who has more than me.
let envy and jealousy bring me to grief.

because the moment i remember
the same spirit spins
in me as spins in you,
i instantly return
to the unity and wholeness and connection
called life, called peace, called love.

made of things and other poems

2011-03-05T19:53:00.000-08:00

(46)
last night, on the sidewalk,
i jogged by someone sprawled under a storefront awning.
i only glimpsed him for a second,
but he looked like the pure expression of suffering, of hell.

never before had i seen someone seem so crazed, so intensely broken.
everything filthy and mangled about him looked permanent.

at a different time in my life,
perhaps this wouldn't have wrecked me so.
but it did.
that is a human being,
i just kept repeating to myself.
a human being.
a family of which you are a member.

how are you willing
to let one of your own
rot?

---
(47)
if i don't bow and salute the life-force in you,
no matter who you are,
i am not sincerely recognizing and honoring it me.

what i am,
what i truly am,
is the rare recipient of energy that could
have gone anywhere but here.

when i see it in you,
i see my closest kin.

---
(48)
if i am brave enough to give myself unconditional love,
it doesn't mean i have defeated my fears.
but it does show who is stronger.

---
(49)
slowly i am coming to understand
the difference between
the inexpressible and the unexpressed.

the former leaves me speechless. amazed.
while the latter tricks me into believing i know the answer,
but without the words to prove it.

as i find little moments throughout my day
to let my mind sit still,
i see what a farce i've made of things.
i don't know the answer.
and i don't have the words.

yet what kinder friend is there
than one that teaches
to keep the question alive.

poems: the deuce

2011-03-04T15:12:00.000-08:00

(44)
when i remember to ask myself
what it is i truly want,
the answer is always the same.

when i forget to ask myself this question,
the answer is always different.

***
(45)
i don't need to write like i talk,
but my writing must feel natural to speak

before lifting his folded coat and other poems

2011-03-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

(39)
on some afternoons,
i picture a professor out there.
in a small town.
eating carefully and quietly
the lunch his wife packed.
a sandwich. an apple. yogurt.
he will then plug the electric kettle
into the hard-to-reach socket and wait for the water to boil.
his office is small but tidy,
and the faculty, no matter how many times they visit,
still marvel how he's found a place for so many books.

i see him moving down the page, with a stub pencil,
lightly leaving marks in the margins.
a trail for himself.
he wears a tie,
though class doesn't meet again
till next week.

a soft sun slants through the window.
he makes a final note and smiles over something
before closing the book,
before lifting his folded coat and heading out to walk
among the rust-colored leaves of autumn.

***
(40)
how truly sacred is art.
a photograph, a performance, a theory, a lyric,
a piece of beauty placed perfectly in the world.
countless are the moments when i've fallen
so intoxicatingly in love with a work that my only choice seemed
to devote my entire life toward producing something just like it.

but perhaps, at root, i just wanted be the person
responsible for bringing more magic into the world,
perhaps i was just trying to recruit society's love
through the medium of an object, a thing.

if ever i am to create my highest work,
i must finally abandon the artist in me who beckons the world,
look, look at what i made.

***
(41)
i am beginning to trust that i am more
than language, more than thought.

when i let go of words,
when i let go of names,
i begin to notice someone here
other than just the thinker.

***
(42)
today i noticed the potential for a disagreement.
a friend offered an opinion
that differed drastically from my own.
a part of me wanted to jump in and argue,
to correct,
to tell him he was wrong.
but i didn't.
i felt secure in my own feelings,
and thus felt no need to mount a defense.

first week of march: three poems

2011-03-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

(36)
each morning, if not each second, offers a renewed chance
to explore the courage i need to live my true self.

yet, here i am, still afraid
that the love in my soul might not be enough.
and so i drop my cheerfulness
the second something gets in its way.

when, if not now, will i finally learn
anger and judgment are the great impostors.
they pretend to possess power, to fight in my name,
but they serve only themselves.

it's tempting to judge others as
selfish and self-centered, disrespectful and greedy.

thing is,
i can't hear my whisper
when i am shouting inside.

***
(37)
life is so precious
that to waste even a drop
should be my last choice.

yet, how often do i offer myself over to frustration,
how often to do i find myself complaining,
squirming with impatience,
judging this or that?

true, my mood may darken for only the briefest of moments,
for only the briefest of thoughts,
but missing even an instant
feels like i have just squandered a fortune.

***
(38)
how tempting to believe that my mind and i are the same.
that my thoughts are who i really am.

yet the particular way in which i think
is not my essence, my center.

my true core is the space in which the universe moves.
and as many times as i have doubted,
i belong on this planet.
so let me accept myself as worthy of unconditional love.
not because i necessarily understand exactly why it should be so.
but because i know i can receive whatever i give.

poems: from here to eleven

2011-02-28T16:06:00.000-08:00

(25)
i still struggle.
i convince myself that love is an outcome.
a result.

i forget who i am,
what i will always be,
is a lantern.
a soft hum of light.
traveling easily wherever it is taken.

yet even on those days, those times,
where i seek my self-worth
in achievements and externals,

the truth is,
i am just happy to be here.
i do not take this for granted.
and i just want to say,

thank you.

***
(26)
what do i want to learn today?
better to ask,
what will i allow to count as a lesson.

---
(27)
i only know how rich i am
when i begin to give.

what i own,
what i hoard,
means nothing
if it impoverishes my soul.

whenever i feel truly poor,
it's always some worry over losing this or that.

conversely, i never feel as rich
as when i'm able to give all of who i am.

how can this be?
how can giving show me
how little i actually need?
perhaps i am learning
that to give is to discover
one's own infinite abundance.

---
(28)
the question, "why am i worthy of my own unconditional love?
is the same as, "what is the meaning of life?"

neither has a fixed answer that already exists.

in giving myself unconditional love,
in trusting that there is some sacred meaning to life,
i create my answer through pursuing the question.

---
(29)
my poems are right where they should be.
as my path become more clear, so will these lines.

sometimes my poems
lack the language of poetry.
i can't get the lift just right.
a word stumbles out water-logged, a wingless bird.

and that is okay.
i don't write in this or that voice.
i just pour myself into life,
and then pour that life into words.

my syntax, my diction
can't miss a target for which i have not aimed.
whatever and wherever these poems are,
that's where they belong.
as my path deepens and clarifies and sings,
so will this art.

---
(30)
i will never become someone else.
i will only become that which reveals
who i already am.

---
(31)
i always catch myself
creating a game out of all this.

if i sense i can win,
i try and grab as much attention as possible.

if i see i am beat,
i try and conform with the herd
and hope to blend in.

my life shuttles between narcissism and anonymity.
ostentation and obscurity.

i spend my days searching for some ultimate victory,
while hoping to hide out amongst the crowd.

i'll do anything to avoid letting my loss be public.
anything except opting out of the game.

---
(32)
each day
i am trying to loosen
my image, my ego, my identification with form.
i want to move beyond what i may or may not signify,
what i may or may not mean.

my true identity is not given greater reason
to exist from winning the respect of others.
nor is my true self suddenly worthless
when i seem to come in last.

my self-worth is not my job.
it is not my thoughts.
nor is it my power.
nor my influence.
my home.
my gadgets.
my clothes.
my likes.
my dislikes.
my friends.
my accomplishments.
my disappointments.
my goals.
my regrets.
all of these are just stories.
and they may even be my identity.
but my identity is a persona, a mask.
something that hides and conceals,
rather than heralds.

it seems some people can live with masks,
without mistaking them for anything beyond
a playful and perhaps even useful fiction.
they don't mistake the mask for their true self.

where did i get the idea that my mask and my soul were the same?
and now that i know they are not, what next?
for now, trust what's true.
the heat of my heart.
the more masks i throw into its fire,
the larger the flame will grow.

---
(33)
everyday, i face disappointment.
something happens--big or small--that hurts.

it hurts to feel anger.
it hurts to feel pain.
it hurts to feel envy.
loss.
grief.
fear.
they all hurt.
not getting what i want.
hurt.
things not going as planned.
hurt.

when i face disappointment,
i need to ask myself what's going on,
what is really happening.
and can i handle it without getting angry?

if not, can i simply witness it from a higher place?
can i be aware of my anger without being
the emotion, the feeling, the thought?

or maybe i can use anger
as a lesson in opposites.

when i feel pain,
give joy.

when i feel envy,
give gratitude.

when i feel loss,
give love.

when i feel grief,
give hope.

when i feel fear,
give courage.

or maybe i will breathe,
deep as i can.
first drawing the universe against my back.
then inhaling all this pain through my heart
and into this infinite space.
which welcomes the hurt.
which takes whatever i bring.
that only asks i slowly exhale.

inhale hurt.
exhale love.

inhale hurt.
the thing i thought i couldn't take.
exhale love.
the thing i thought i couldn't give.

---
(34)
a candle, lit and alive,
burns within me
night and day,
rain or shine.

this flame may flare and flicker.
yet something tells me i can't be sure.

perhaps it's only when
i seek warmth someplace else
that my candle seems to fade.

when i trust my light,
this love catches fire.

---
(35)
as i move through the world,
as my mind swings through,
i seem to rise and fall
and live and die.

i want to live with more light.
i want to open when fear says close.

the dark has its place, too.
at night,
i cry at the sight of stars.

in a shaft of sun

2011-02-21T18:40:00.000-08:00

(24)
there's a part of me
who still seeks fame.
who still, in a flash,
would trade everything
to fall asleep obscure
and wake up famous.

the crush of unworthiness i've let build in here
seems solved only through the world's adoration.

instead of prizing fame,
let me tend to this small seed of peace.

let me give it space and light and love.

let me live quietly, anonymously, invisibly.
let me be the cloud
surrendering another shape.
or the silver glint in a shaft of sun.

nothing i love asks for an audience.

even my own heart,
which continues to beat, to play, to whisper, to dance.

how i'm tempted to greet this love
as my old friend who has finally returned.

but my heart has always remained right here,
waiting without worry.

it knew there would come a day.

poems: new and selected.

2011-02-19T12:58:00.000-08:00

(12)
if i sense i don't belong somewhere,
suddenly it's as though i don't belong anywhere.

i must learn to trust my place in this book,
without craving a spot on every page.

***
(13)
today i walked down the sidewalk,
the road messy with an earlier rain.

i felt the vastness of the universe.
i said aloud the word space.

i come from planets. stars. air and time.

whenever i begin to imagine all that's carried me here,
and all the ways it might have been otherwise,
i can hardly believe i've been given this chance.

***
(14)
i've always cared what people think of me.
at times more than others.
with certain groups more than others.

this game has gone on long enough.
this hunger for respect and admiration.

fine. i seek approval. belonging. acceptance.
i'm sure we all do.
but i must begin to take the journey inward.
it is only there i will discover i was loved all along.

***
(15)
my life seem to exist on the rim of discovery.
each day brings a new petal with fresh color and design and dew.
sometimes i can't take it.
i want to live with the flower i found yesterday.
yet what is wisdom if not gratitude for growth in the garden.

***
(16)
i am still unable to authentically connect.
if i live and speak and love from my truest self,
i fear people will reject what i treasure most dearly.

so i keep it sealed off, hidden, protected.
but in hiding my heart from others,
i too lose track of where it is.

***
(17)
i can accept my flaws, my imperfections, my failures.
but only if i accept my talents and gifts and accomplishments
as equally irrelevant to the amount of worthiness
i must experience at any given moment.

***
(18)
a slow jog this evening,
mid-february.
i move through quiet streets
under a dark and thickening sky.

and as though i had stepped on a hidden switch,
the street lamps--antique, european--suddenly pulse awake.

the block now a landing strip,
a necklace of light guiding me in.

and later
down a different street,
a group of kids at the skirt of a driveway.
a football moving among them.
i open my arms, flash my palms.
the boy with the ball sends it my way.

yet another gift.

***
(19)
when i strive toward being my best,
i only seem to notice flaws and shortcomings.
this doesn't mean, however, i am moving in the wrong direction.

***
(20)
what to make of those days when everything seems out of alignment?
--when i feel cut off from who i am, from the world?

i must shed the garments i use as protection.
true, this shield doesn't let pain in,
but it also doesn't let love out.

today, i will let myself get lost.
only through this losing can i remember
what already is found.

how much longer will i help my image and ego find the food they crave?

let me dine on a different meal today.
or rather, let bloom what patiently waits inside me.
let bloom what is already there.
it doesn't need a thing to flourish.
it only asks i open the door.

***
(21)
the past few days, i've let discouragement back in my life.
i didn't know i'd offered an invitation, but here it is just the same.

my job now is to tend to my other guests
--the one's that flow from my soul--
and trust they'll crowd this feeling out.

or perhaps i can summon the courage to remember
that discouragement can take any room in this house, but still
i am worthy of everything that makes this heart whole.

***
(22)
i have to remember to avoid the fantasy of becoming something i am not already.
yes, i want to experience greater peace, deeper joy, broader connection.
but these shifts will not come through inhabiting a new costume, a new me.

let me follow the path in, not out.
transformation begins there.
let me implode so i can start with whatever remains.
that which can't be destroyed is who i truly am.

***
(23)
i've spent my life in uncertainty and doubt.
the promise of an answer, of a solution always seemed possible.

yet, here i am. carrying the same set of questions.

it is time to begin a second journey.
but for a different reason.

this time i am not looking for safety.
this time i am not looking for confirmation, for glory, for acceptance.
this time i am not looking for envy.

i only ask to give up control of my story, to release and surrender.

how else can i walk toward mystery, chance, spontaneity.
how else can i head from the uncertain to the unknown.

the bird that tried to race the rain

2011-02-19T12:41:00.000-08:00

(11)
i've never fallen in love with a word.
to me, music is all in the combination.
the arrangement of sound and spirit and image.

when the mixture is just right,
leave things just as they are.
refuse to add even a single note.
then cut fat from the front.

yes, trim and nudge and slash both sides
until all that remains is a quiet, infinite gesture.
until all that remains is

the bird that tried to race the rain.

where rain is and is not

2011-02-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

(10)
as a boy in a car going over a bridge,
the sky stretches blue overhead.
below and soon, san francisco.
in the rain.

i watch it, the rain.
i've never seen it this way.
from this place.
from where it isn't raining to where it is.

i've always wanted the reverse, though.
to look out from within the rain
and see where it is not.

first day on earth, part two (of three)

2011-02-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

last week i wrote (and posted) a treatise on open-mindedness. I'd hoped setting my thoughts on paper would offer me clarity on the subject, would finally give (once and for all) the insight i need to live a life of greater tolerance. and yet the more i foreground open-mindedness as part of my daily intention, the more i notice how compulsively i label, judge, rank.

on a more sanguine note, however, awareness can sometimes lead to changes in behavior. and thus lately i have also found myself exploring more for exploration's sake, moving through the world with less judgment, less ego.

god, what freedom: to simply explore life--allowing consciousnesss to flow with blissful absorption in the Now. allowing life to exist on its own terms, free of any value or name. free of my intrusion.

but perhaps the strongest epiphany i've experienced is this: being open-minded is, essentially, tolerance to change.

yes, tolerance to change.

like most anybody, i have certain preferences for my day. i'd like to bike to work free of parked cars suddenly swinging their doors open. i'd also like motorists and myself to share the road, as i imagine different fish pleasantly share the same ocean current. at my job, i have a whole new set of of desires and expectations and assumptions. and after work? my list resets again.

and even though the particulars of my list vary with context, the common denominators remain the same: i seek pleasure, happiness, meaning, depth, love.

consequently, i try to avoid pain, sadness, vacuity, superficiality, hate.

on the face of it, my plan seems healthy, perhaps even logical. but what happens when i find what i do not seek (pain where i sought pleasure, hate where i wanted love)?

well, here's what happens. i grow frustrated, discouraged, entitled, weirdly self-righteous.

and defeat seems everywhere.

of course, once i gain some distance from the defeat, i can usually see the problem wasn't that something unexpected doomed my plan, nor was it a flaw in the plan itself (idealistic as it may be). the problem was...me. or, more specifically, how i chose to react to change.

instead of tolerating change, i fought change. and like most fights, i'm left belligerent and bruised. and whatever Oneness i've managed to experience in the world is suddenly absent. and, worst of all, when i let anger and frustration predominate, i'm no longer willing to give love--and thus unable to receive it. (the two could not be more connected. i cannot live from the heart, if i feel unable to openly receive kindness and compassion.)

which is why i now take the next vow in my pledge to live a more open-minded life.

i will tolerate change.

when things clash with my expectations, when i get X where i sought Y, when i feel ignored where i hoped to be heard, when that webpage takes (what feels like) my whole afternoon to load, when someone answers his cell phone behind me at the movies, or when i forget to unsubscribe or renew or return, when i lose the second pair of sunglasses i bought this month, or spend an eternity on hold with customer service, when i am late because someone else was late, when i notice i look older than i used to...i will attempt to tolerate change. i will try to keep from shutting down, from closing off. i will try to keep my mind--in a word--open.

poetry, stuff i am not sure what to call so i'll call it

2011-02-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

(1)
i used to think courage was something i needed in order to risk death.
now i think courage is something i need in order to truly live.

***
(2)
these poems are directions.
nothing else can tell me where i've been, where i am, and where i still must go.

***
(3)
the only guarantee is everything is uncertain.

***
(4)
do i want happiness?
yes.
yet there are things in life,
a sad movie,
a poignant song,
a photograph of something all alone,
that bring what i also need.

enjoyment.

***
(5)
why is it so hard to see through the layers i've let build up around myself?
and why do i keep mistaking the armor of others for anything other than armor?

too often i let myself feel disconnected from the those on the street, at work, in traffic, at the store.
i tell myself they are selfish, compassionless, gruff--and, of course, wrong.
and i, logically, must be the opposite.
i must be altrusitc, loving, gentle.
i must be right.

where do i create such fiction?

i must remember that we all need, every single one of us, the same nourishment.
we need love in our hearts. we need music in the soul.
we need to know that we belong, that life is a gift of which we are worthy.

when i remember that all humans depend upon the same core needs,
the same essential light, i see through your armor because i've taken off mine.

***
(6)
what keeps me from sharing the best part of who i am?
perhaps i no longer trust the power of my own heart.
a pity.
its strength is limitless.

***
(7)
i now begin to join anyone who has ever decided to wage peace.

strange, though, how it feels like i am stepping off a cliff.

if only somebody else could take the first step for me.
if only there were someone here to help.
i am so close to the edge, i'd only need to be touched.

i close my eyes. the mind stills. there is more i must let go.
only then will i float on this shy breeze.

***
(8)
there is a kindness in me i continue to protect.
if i let it move freely,
it won't know the rules and someone will step on its dance.
any wonder i no longer hear music.

***
(9)
the mask never fit right.
perhaps it was just too small for the job.

or maybe the mask was too big.

the pain was nothing at first.
but it grew more and more each day.
it was fighting to fill the mask.

first day on earth, part one (of three)

2011-02-06T20:20:00.000-08:00

i am beginning to realize i don't know how to consciously be open-minded. i'm a tolerant enough guy, sure, the sort who welcomes diversity and embraces a range of creeds and lifestyles.

and yet i am not so sure that makes me open-minded. because isn't the crux of open-mindedness the suspension of snap-judgments, the challenging of facile assumptions, and a kind of meta-cognitive awareness of one's own biases?

given my own definition, can i really say i'm open-minded?

not a chance.

i'm constantly slapping labels on almost everything i encounter. i can't go ten seconds in public without assigning everyone around me into (what i divine to be) their proper caste.

and what troubles me even more is how my ranking system isn't really mine at all. to a large and important degree, my ranking system belongs to the society in which i find myself--a zeitgeist that assigns top value to its most materialistic, most egotistical, most self-centered, and most status-starved members.

i want out.

yet with each passing year, i seem to become more and more enslaved by this mentality. a near continuous monitoring of not only my size and importance in the world, but also the relative worth of those around me.

sure, i claim to be above the impoverished rubric of this particular period in western culture, but then why i am one of it most unwitting foot soldiers? why do i judge myself and others by the very same ranking system i decry as vacuous and life-crushing.

and, simply put, why i am ranking people at all?

something must change, because i hate the way i feel when i judge. it makes me feel small and alone. it makes me feel toxic and cynical.

that's not to say there aren't hours, even days, when i am at my best. when i feel a shared Oneness with those in my community, a true Social Network where i move among people living humbly and gently and for nothing more than the quiet growth of Soul.

it's just, well, i want more of those days. more loving, more openness, more connection to the grid of universal human experience.

i can no longer be the person who prizes (or at least claims to prize) open-mindedness, while also being the most critical person in the room.

i want to give my highest self more of what it savors. i want to meditate. muse. make.

i want to live with greater gratitude in my heart and say yes to the artisanal, the homemade, the modest.

and perhaps more than anything, i want to live the journey and the process for its own sake--not for some result or product, not for some reward or imagined glory.

i want the richness of connecting with the Now to be the most sacred part of day, my life.

if i am to make any real progress toward any of this i must liberate myself from assuming, a priori, i know how things i haven't tried will turn out. because i don't know how things will turn out. especially if i've never tried them. (and even if i have tried them, that guarantees nothing. absolutely nothing.)

here's what i will do: i will experience life--with all its choices and opportunities and possibilities, with all its tests and challenges, with all its creativity and wonder and imagination. i will engage it all with the wonder of child. not to decide if i like it or not. but simply to explore what it is.

and that's what it means to be open-minded: to explore.

to move through the world without the need to slather it with labels and opinions and names. i will free myself from the taxonomic impulse to classify everything into a hierarchy that, irony of all ironies, i feel enslaved by yet continue to perpetuate.

simply put, i take the vow to experience life. not as if it is my last day on earth. but as if it is my very first.

gift, make your life a

2011-01-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

1.
there is a line in ethan hawke's novel, the hottest state, where william, the protagonist, says he is afraid that he's becoming the person he'd pretended to be in high school. i first read that line in 1997, and have been thinking about its meaning ever since. because the line is a sort of paradox. i mean, how can you be afraid of becoming something you pretended to be? wouldn't becoming the person you pretended to be mean you succeeded and thus no longer need to pretend?

the answer, of course, is no. because william is no longer a self-absorbed teenager, and therefore no longer aspires toward a life of self-aggrandizement, status, image.

or does he? because despite all the ostensible changes and travels in william's life, he still retreats into fantasy when he can't find the strength to face reality. the novel, then, is partly about william's desire for authenticity while chronically relapsing into fantasy to flee the messiness of genuine human relations.

2.
i mention all of this because there are times when i feel my own adolescent/teenage persona cry out to be fed, to be given a larger slice of who i am. and i guess this is a problem because, at root, i see the purpose of my life in service of something far higher than does my "high-school" self (HS self). my HS self wants attention, fame, glory, plaudits. let's face it, my HS self wants to be god.

my true self (the person i believe i truly am), however, seeks to live modestly with a humble heart. my true self seeks stillness so as to better hear the song that's in my soul.

the weird thing, though, about stillness is i often experience it most fully while jogging or cycling or practicing yoga.

as counter-intuitive as may seem, i find stillness through movement.

but sometimes i get worried that all these activities are just there to feed my HS self. i sometimes sense he is secretly yanking these moving meditations toward the egotistical: how fast or long can run, how cool can i craft my urban cyclist persona, how perfect can i look in my asanas?

whatever the answers may be to these questions, they are not why i jog, pedal around LA, practice yoga.

i engage in the above activities because they are the best way i've found to connect peacefully, quietly, and viscerally with the world.

3.
perhaps we all battle with a divided self. i certainly do, which is why i was especially interested in what the yoga instructor said a few classes ago. she told the class to treat our practice as a gift for the people we love in our lives.

after class, i asked if she could further explain what she meant. she said the power you build in yoga (or insert your own passion) can be harnessed to help in the quest to serve others.

and so for the past few days i’ve really been working to channel the energy i generate in these moving meditation to become--not the person i pretended to be in high school--but a servant for stillness and peace and human flourishing.

go, where we are trying to

2011-01-05T21:33:00.000-08:00

the yoga instructor notices how many of us are struggling with some of the more advanced poses. and so he reminds us to be patient--that through patience, we will arrive where we are trying to go.

there is so much wisdom in what the instructor is saying. i find myself spending the rest of class rediscovering that word--patience--as i roll through one vinyasa after another.

after class, i still have so much to say to myself. so i head to a nearby coffee shop, find a stool by the window, and begin to write. pen and paper.

i wrote for maybe an hour. three or four pages filled with all sorts of ah-ha's, minor epiphanies, simple truths.

i had hoped to type up these notes this evening, and so began editing the piece while riding the bus across the bridge today.

and then...(wait for it)...i left the notepad on the bus.

so what follows is not a Take Two, an entry where i recreate the original.

no.

instead, i am just going to offer a very brief summary--and pray that somehow my call to the transit's Lost + Found will prove fruitful.

so here goes: an uber-compressed version of my recently created (and even more recently lost) treatise.
---

patience is such an undervalued tool. i think we often fail to grasp the full power of it because we are so aware of our finite lives and thus feel we must do as much as possible in the small amount of time we are alive. patience, if anything, seems like a luxury we can't afford.

and yet, the more patience i cultivate in both my world and mind, the more my life seems limitless, infinite. i think patience allows us to enter and exist fully in the present, the life that is happening at this moment.

ahh, those rare moments when i stop chasing some external goal, and instead find myself enjoying the inner trophy of being wide awake in the Now. in those moments, i am struck by how much of life there is all around me--and how little of it i actually need to feel utterly happy, at peace, free.

the inverse is also true. the more impatient i am (the more i demand things to bloom according to my own timelines--forcing my schedule and belief system on things), the less of life there seems to love, and the more frustration i feel throughout the day.

patience--letting things exist on their own terms--is ultimately about trust. a faith in the idea that when we do our best, we finally get to let go. because when we do our best, we will (eventually) get everything we need.

connect, only

2010-12-31T18:01:00.000-08:00

disclaimer (one): i am not sure i've ever--and i mean ever--followed through on a new year's resolution; that said, here is my vow for 2011.

i take yoga a few times a week, and always from the same instructor. donna teaches in a grassy park at the foot of Runyon Canyon, and her classes feel like an extension of the environs--open, relaxed, bright, powerful. she often closes class with a quote, a word, a piece of music performed live. sometimes donna ends class with the following line: how you treat others is a direct reflection of how you treat yourself.

disclaimer (two): i think that's the quote. it very well might be the reverse: how you treat yourself is a direct reflection of how you treat others.

no matter which direction the quote runs, however, i think the point remains the same. at least for me. but only recently did this aphorism make sense. the first dozen times i heard it, i simply smiled and trusted that some part of my inner-self grasped the quote's meaning, even if my cerebral side was left bereft.

lately, though, i seem to understand that quote. and i have decided it will be my new year's resolution.

the quote--to me--makes the point that since we all are human, since we all are alive and have hopes and fears and feel love and pain, and since that which binds us in common is far richer than that which can sometimes seem to separate us, and since we all have been given the divinity of life, well then the idea of a Self, a thing inside us that is only ours and therefore unconnected to anyone or anything is a fiction, an illusion.

rather, if we must speak of a Self, we will be better served by seeing it as the core part of who we are when we grasp the totality of interconnectedness among us, the power that animates all of our hearts, the qi that courses through all of our souls.

i think the quote is saying that you are everyone and everyone is you. you are both nothing (in the sense that your Self/ego does not really exist) and everything (you are a dynamic thread among innumerable threads in the great tapestry of Life).

i think the quote is saying if you treat others with respect and compassion, you will treat yourself with respect and compassion. why? because the more you see others as deserving of your heart, the more you notice that the line that separates them from you (and you from them) is artificial. and thus, you will begin to treat all people (which, as it happens, includes yourself) with as much regard and truth as you possibly can.

the reason this quote will be my 2011 new year's resolution? i don't treat others the way i treat myself. i treat others with kindness (at least i believe i do), but i don't always treat myself with the same honor and compassion. when i make mistakes, i scream at myself (using my inner voice); when i fail, i often mentally berate myself for my blunders; when i don't accomplish what i set out to, i heap blame upon myself and wallow in discouragement. and so on and so forth.

but i would never speak this way nor even think this way about a friend. so why do i speak and think this way to and about myself? i guess it's because--somewhere along the line--i started seeing myself, my Self, as separate from humanity, from the human condition, from the collective Soul which pulses through every human heart. and, as a result of this binary distinction, i no longer treated myself as a friend, a partner, a divine spirit worthy of respect and honor.

but if i am not--first and foremost--my own best friend, my own soul mate, then i will find it difficult to treat others as friends and fellow souls. or if somehow do manage to treat others with veneration and regard, but fail to extend the same respect to myself, then i am a planet orbiting a hollow star.

my job, my intention in 2011 is to fill that star. to love that star. to generate compassion for that star. to honor that star. to be that star.

to find the humble light inside and radiate with loving-kindness.

to glow.

to burn.

one modest candle. lit by a sea of flames.

"this is the first day of my life," by Bright Eyes

2010-12-20T22:14:00.000-08:00

this song came out around 2005. i've always loved this record, yet never had a moment where i stopped everything in my life, put my world on hold and said, i command you, ari, to feel every bit of the miracle of this music's existence.

today was that day.

somewhat frighteningly, the video might be better than the song.

either, the world isn't mean and you aren't

2010-12-19T22:38:00.001-08:00

[photo credit: Steven Harper]

today i attended a dharma talk at green gulch zen center.
norman fischer was the speaker.

he spoke for maybe an hour.

after a short break for tea and muffins, many returned to the Zendo (meditation hall) for Q + A.

i had the chance to ask the following question:

"when people are mean, my natural inclination is to be mean back to them...because i feel if i don't, i am only encouraging their meanness. and yet, i also know that my intention is to live life with a sense of kindness and mindfulness and compassion for everyone, and so i feel conflicted. and i don't know what to do."

best i can recall, here is some of what he said in response.

norman fischer:

a number of years ago i made the resolution to no longer act on aggression. i might feel and experience aggression--i can't control that; but i made the resolution to no longer act on it.

when people treat others meanly, they usually believe that the world is a mean place. and so they believe they must use their weapon of meanness to survive. and, thus, when you return their meanness, you teach them that, yes, they were right, the world is mean.

when we are treated meanly, we can choose to see what is really happening: someone's heart is broken. what we think of as meanness is really, at root, a broken heart, someone who believes that they must mistreat others before they are mistreated themselves.

and i think what you will find is that if you want to stop people from being mean, you should try and show them kindness. because, as mentioned, such a person is being mean out of the expectation that the world and the people in it are mean. what you can do is show that the world isn't mean. that you aren't mean. you can show this person that the world is kind. that you are kind. and in this way, you can help to heal a broken heart.

through, souls surging

2010-12-19T16:20:00.000-08:00

i am trying to bring more stillness into my life, trying to quiet my mind and search for the truth inside.

i am trying to listen to my soul.

for me, the soul is that place where i am pure and free and only want to bloom for the world.
where i become one with the force which beings peace to the planet.

but a lot of the time, i have no idea what the soul is.
i might feel it, sense its presence, yet it all seems so far away, distant, dim, impracticable.

how precious, then, are those moments when we feel our souls surging though us.
moments when we are not competing against anyone, assigning value judgements on anything, yearning for less or more, yesterday or tomorrow.
we stop guarding our flame and seek to share light with others.

we feel pristinely good-intentioned.

it is in these times, we feel patient, hopeful, grateful.
we notice the absence of criticism--for ourselves, for others.

we simply allow ourselves to be a force for good, for the practice of peaceful and humble flourishing.

that is our soul.

i find it an infrequent guest.
the more i invite it in, however, the longer it visits.

space, found in

2010-12-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

orbit your soul, as planets orbit their star.

anonymity, vapors of my own unwanted

2010-12-12T10:42:00.000-08:00

sunday.

i woke up late and sleepbiked to school. pedaling in a fog.
trying to make it on time for my tutoring session with a seventh grader.

on a side street between melrose and santa monica blvd, a cherry red ferrari thundered by. i peered in through the tinted glass, trying to glimpse the kind of person who drives such a thing, trying to confirm my own bias, my own preset archetype.

i felt a thud of something landing inside me. a math equation pointing to an answer i didnt like: winner vs. loser...good vs. bad...power vs. weakness...success vs. failure.

the driver might as well have been riding on a ocean of million dollar bills, and i might have been trickling along the vapors of my own unwanted anonymity.

and then i told myself...ari, what do you truly WANT, do you really WANT attention for owning a sports car...is that how you want to be read in the world?

the answer, of course, is no.

what i truly want, more than anything else, is to wage peace.
i want to strengthen my mind so it can accept--with equal enthusiasm--the ups and downs of life, the vagaries of being alive.

i want to begin each morning with a prayer for the gift of life, and spend my waking hours living that benediction.
and i know that it is only through a peaceful mind, a calm constitution that i can hear what nourishes my soul. everything else is the noise of ego. and the ego is never satisfied.

the soul doesn't need satisfaction. it only wants to be set free, to enjoy the art of living, the process of being alive.

my soul is art. not the thing we create on a canvas or something for a CV or museum.

my soul is art. and my life must be the artist. for the two to become one, i must get out of the way.

the click of a well-made box and other essays

2010-02-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

click here to listen.

Basketball Player Jalen Rose as a Paradigm for Certain Stuff like Enigma, Crossword Puzzles, Late-90's Film, Confusion, and Human Completeness

2010-02-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

what we talk about when we talk about jalen rose.

|| listen here.

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party

2009-10-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

i'm currently reading a compelling book about how the christian right and the modern-day republican party have become one in the same (so much for separation of church + state, right?). the book also provides a window into about a million other themes--freedom, authority, racism, religion, resentment, demagoguery, american history, party politics, etc.

above all else, the author's command of language is both humbling and deeply enchanting.

NOTE: listen to a wonderful interview with the author, max blumenthal here.

everything that happens will be from now on

2009-10-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

my life has always felt yanked by different impulses: on the one hand, i believe humans are here to explore a higher purpose--namely, something i'll call creativity and the authentic experience. and, thus, i've tried to devote my life toward this aim.

but there is another side, another impulse that draws me into its orbit. for lack of a better term, i'll call this my "social justice" impulse. this is the side that leaves me buried in documentaries, political podcasts, pbs specials, magazines subscriptions, newspapers and blogs, public radio, and (most virulent of all) piles and piles of non-fiction books on everything from environmental sustainability to world poverty to biographies on john stewart mill. i feel compelled to consume as much content as possible because, well, i want to better understand the forces that work to keep power in the hands of the few while denying opportunity to the many. my hope is that the better i understand these forces and their various manifestations, the better i can mobilize my life (and the few people i may have a modicum of influence with) to resist the crushing machine.

over the past few years, though, my social justice side has come to dominate more and more of my life. happily, i do feel as though i better understand why injustices continues to grow, even as we (ostensibly) become a more modernized, industrialized nation (if not world). but, here's the thing: i've never felt more creatively impotent as i do now. novels and music and movies make up less than five percent of the content i consume. (it used to take up, no joke, 100 percent.) yet, i can't seem to break out of my social justice streak and tip the scales back in favor of my creative pursuits--painting, writing, producing audio documentary. i do try, but always end up feeling compelled to put in just one more hour to fighting oppression and the oppressor. and then another hour. and then another.

yesterday, however, i took a long walk through a canyon in the hollywood hills. it was dusk and the clouds heralded a storm pushing its way down from the bay area. here and there, light slashed across the sky in messy ribbons. i could see clear across LA, all the way to the water. and farther still, i could see the horizon--a shelf of azure against a wall painted gold.

and i thought: maybe life is not about opposing hate, but rather about spreading love. (feel free to vomit at such a hackneyed pseudo-epiphany.) as i stood at the canyon's promontory, just sort of taking in the sweep of the land below, i felt i understood something (at least for me) profound: love begets love. and, therefore, any peaceful act in its name increases its amount in the world. it was all so obvious now. i'd been spending too much time fighting vader and not enough time communing with yoda and my inner yogi. in my effort to fight hate and greed and violence, i hadn't paused to realize that any and every act of love (which can be anything from playing guitar in the park to ten minutes of meditation to sharing a genuine smile with your local librarian) is a repudiation of evil and an endorsement of compassion. as i made my way back down the trail, i began thinking how to best boil my "aha" moment into a bite-sized, bumper sticker. then i realized such a slogan already exists: make love, not war.

coda:

we're all on this earth to fight the forces most ruinous for our survival. that is something i continue to believe. it's just that now i believe every step taken in peace promotes the very idea of peace. every act of love--no matter how small or seemingly obscure--begets another. instead of fighting an enemy, make a friend. instead of bringing something down, build something up. it's not that simple, of course, but a war on anything (even on evil) is never as effective as a party for peace.

the game can never be won, but it's the only way to win.

notes on camp

2009-10-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

we were somewhere in the bay area hills, tucked away from all the traffic and bridges and parents. I'd just turned 10 and was on my first overnight summer camp. i remember drinking endless cups of soda, soccer games on fields huge and green, and i remember making a kite and tying it with red yarn to my finger and i remember voices around a small fire, the smell of burning wood, the rawness of dawn, playing paddle ball with a girl with short blond hair, silver dust caught in clothes, a pool with two intertubes drifting along a corrugated surface.

but it's the last night i remember most. we'd begged our counselors to let us sleep outside the cabin, to let us take our sleeping bags out to a clearing just above camp. impossibly, they agreed. and so i lay on my back, in a field full of bodies, all of us silent and awake, the night air cool against our cheeks, clouds low and thickening in grey tufts, wandering overhead, backlit by stars too many to count.

i must have stayed up nearly the entire night. just watching the black dome above me, a single satellite hurtling somewhere, stars suggesting some faint form, some silhouette i recognized but couldn't quite name.

i heard everyone around me breathing in slow, even tones, asleep now against pillows damp and aglow under the moon. i turned on my flashlight and beamed it overhead. trying to add one more star to the sky. hours passed, entire universes appeared and scattered and appeared. my light somewhere among the riot.

and now, two decades later, i so badly want that night to be with me still.

because there are moments when i want to know what i was saying. my light caught something up there. i don't know what, but something. i need to know what it heard, what message i'd blown across stars, what story i tried to share.

whatever it was i knew then, i've lost. the only mark i've ever made was streaked into the sky that night.

while it stays alive, i'm alive.

everything that happens will happen today (or, an open letter to jeremy bates)

2009-09-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

a few years ago, i agreed to coach my local YMCA's youth flag football team. we were undersized, undermanned, and underskilled. our only hope was to out-think and out-strategize our opponent. (note: i dont mean to suggest that i introduced "trick" or "gimmick" plays. no, i simply mean that our offense would function as a highly creative unit--less houdini, more macgyver.) the playbook i designed made the opposition think we were doing one thing, when were really doing something else. i would have us line up in these esoteric formations (with tons of motion before the snap), only to run a jazz standard for our tight end (five yard button hook). it was short throws, simple sweeps. the key to our strategy was keeping the opposition off balance. and it worked. our efficacy was borne out of nothing more recondite than creativity and deception. in the two years i coached the greenpoint YMCA rebels, we won back-to-back championships. i still have the trophies.

..."so what?" you're asking.

well...last saturday my world ended. the usc trojans, my raison d'etre, wildly succeeded in their mission to lose to the washington huskies--perhaps the aught's most inept college football program. how you ask? by committing what i call the "conservative fallacy" (formerly called "the reason why bill callahan is an idiot"). the conservative fallacy suggests that the way david beats goliath is by (a) doing nothing and (b) praying the giant finds a way to self-immolate. i find such an approach (literally) self-defeating and anti-intellectual. (IQ is decidedly NOT a prerequisite for playing sports--mel hall, jose canseco, anyone?--but erudition is key for managerial success--larussa, dungy, phil jackson, et. al.)

all of which leads me to this: against the huskies, the trojans were forced to rely on a quarterback (aaron corp) who last started a football game when he was a 17-year-old teenager at Orange Lutheran High School. and instead of building a creative and intellectually superior offensive around him, they handed corp the most vanilla, most "callahan-ian," most conservative, most "risk averse" game plan possible. as i watched usc run its offense last weekend, i had the sneaking suspicion that one of the jonas brothers was on the loose and posing as jeremy bates--our offensive coordinator. note: i am a raging atheist, but i love gurus--not the spiritual kind, but the bill walsh kind, the "gurus of the game" kind. and, well, jeremy bates, you are no guru. you doubled down on a "play not to lose" strategy (less is more) where even a simple roll out play (on 3rd and six from the seven yard line) was beyond your ken. your staid playcalling showed a contempt for your players and product. is aaron corp so bad that the word "offensive" is both logical and ironic? yes. but thats why we have coaches: to find a way to do more with less, not less with more. and so as i hope my (admittedly lame) anecdote about coaching a talent-deficient flag football team reveals: when you have an inferior product (aaron corp as starting qb), you dont hunker down and draw in your horns. no, you summon your inner bill walsh and discover how to succeed using your mentality, your creativity, and your ingenuity. more than anything else, usc's 13-16 loss to the huskies was a failure of imagination.
beg to diifer? we were 0-10 on third down conversions.
have a nice day.

(slush) puppy love

2009-07-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

what were the things that animated your childhood?

...danielle connor gives us a glimpse.

listen here.

photo credit: markbarkaway

when you are engulfed in traffic

2009-07-15T01:11:00.001-07:00

we spend a lot of time in our cars. alone. sometimes the landscape blurs by in smeared streaks.
...and at other times, everything stands still.

listen here.

explosions in the sky

2009-07-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

to celebrate america's birthday, i headed down to the familiar outskirts of my alma mater in los angeles for a free community concert & fireworks extravaganza.

the event was hosted by, among others, A Better LA--founded by USC football head coach Pete Carroll.

listen here.

photo credit: Lewisha Jones

he's what you call an epiphany

2009-06-29T00:49:00.000-07:00

hours after michael jackson's death, fans celebrate the singer at his walk of fame star in hollywood.

listen here.

(for all the people who shared their stories, i am so thankful for your candor, warmth, and touching memories. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU...and as long as we remember the music, the man lives on.)

things that are left

2009-04-19T00:05:00.000-07:00

We know that we cant grasp everything about life, so we choose…everyday…what to learn and what to leave behind. What’s fascinating about this, though, is how each person does this differently.
--
I share the whole story here.

xoxo ari.

away from him

2009-03-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

as a young child, i experienced loss for the first time. i tell the story in a piece called "away from him."

listen here.

i just want to say one thing

2009-03-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

in this episode of SONGS I STILL LIKE i explore music from the Rocky oeuvre.

this show is not to be missed.

listen here.

as you were leaving

2009-02-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

SONGS I STILL LIKE is a weekly show about music--not the sonic ambrosia of the gods, but the Top 40 cheese of our "gym workout mix."

this week: (mariah carey) SONGS I STILL LIKE.

listen here.

trains go by

2009-02-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

...SONGS I STILL LIKE is a show about music--the kind of music most of us would sooner die than admit we secretly like. each episode, i cop affinity for three more songs sure to get me banned from anywhere Cool and Taste are required. in other words, this show should be called, NOTES ON BECOMING A PARIAH.

listen here.

secrets i held inside

2009-01-31T15:50:00.001-08:00

...notes on autotune:

artists are now recording whole albums in that "computerized voice" style (lil' wayne, t-pain, kanye west, et al.). in this episode of SONGS I STILL LIKE, i look at some of the early (and winning) expressions of the idiom.

click here to listen.

we have no past, we won't reach back

2009-01-25T12:51:00.000-08:00

here's the third episode of SONGS I STILL LIKE, my weekly tour through the top 40 songs that populate our life.

listen here.

obama’s inauguration

2009-01-21T16:45:00.000-08:00

i just finished the last edit on my audio postcard for Obama’s inauguration. i hope you can find time to take a listen.

i put my all into this.

click here to listen.

(for context, the "classical" music heard in this piece is taken from "Air and Simple Gifts" performed live just prior to Obama's swearing-in.)

p.s.

in a very real way, i feel as though i've been privately "making" this piece since i read a Frederick Douglass Golden Legacy Comic Book in the third grade.

guitar hero

2009-01-19T13:57:00.000-08:00

i finally made time to watch the ramones documentary End of Century. here are my notes...

The Ramones had but one gear, but few groups ever produced so much from so little. The sound was raw and repetitive, and their look fell somewhere between the Hells Angels and the Fonz gone goth. The group’s rise from the mid-70s East Village sleaze scene is chronicled in End of The Century, a decidedly unselfconscious bandography that hands over the narrative to the social actors who lived it. It’s Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy who unpack what heretofore was concealed behind the leather and the hair and the overwhelming surge of sound.

In the wrong hands, End of the Century could have been one of those bloated rock docs that toggle between music critics overexplaining the band’s historical legacy and an omniscient narrator who repeatedly shows up to snuff out any threat of ambiguity. Instead, End of the Century operates as a winning template for expository
documentary. The film weaves the band’s iconic songs over gritty photographs, underscores certain quotes by inserting them as written captions, and delivers just enough vintage footage to leave the viewer aroused rather than exhausted. Nothing, however, is more fun than watching the film build out a story through crosscut interviews that find the individual members finishing each other’s sentences.

The Ramones were a messy gang, and their candid reflections on their younger selves reveal an unalloyed portrait of self-destruction, freak genius, and everlasting bravado that has yet to succumb.

--Ari Zeiger

Image credit.

let me know if it can't be me

2009-01-18T10:38:00.000-08:00

here is the latest episode of Songs I Still Like, a weekly show where i discuss the relative import of three radio-friendly pop songs.

click here.

songs i still like

2009-01-11T15:11:00.000-08:00

i've been thinking about pop songs lately. the big, super catchy type. the songs we loved as kids or in college, but now secretly get smuggled into a playlist named "gym workout."

i want to pull out those songs, and look at them...and talk about what they mean and why they're important.

so I am producing a weekly podcast called SONGS I STILL LIKE.

each show will unpack three (lightweight) pop songs--i'll play snippets, talk about what works for me, etc...and maybe even make the case for why these songs might not just be pure pop drivel, but actually something substantive and real and human.

here's the maiden episode.

maybe give a listen.

"Never assume the obvious is true"

2008-12-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

and now

2008-12-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

into the wilderness

persona literally means mask, although it does not usually refer to a literal mask but to the social masks all humans supposedly wear

2008-12-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

The persona is also the mask or appearance one presents to the world. Importantly, the persona, used in this sense, is not a pose or some other intentional misrepresentation of the self to others. Rather, it is the self as self-construed, and may change according to situation and context.

hide out from adulthood for a few more years

2008-12-04T12:06:00.000-08:00

"Squabbles and footnotes aside, in the pages of history books and The FADER, New York rock in the 21st century began with the Strokes. Of course the Strokes always evoked New York rock of the 20th Century, but that was kind of the point. The band captured the city’s borrowed nostalgia for a time when young men wore tight jackets and let their hair fall into their faces, then wrote thrilling songs about the dejected glamour such lifestyle decisions would lead to. At the time of their arrival, downtown Manhattan was still stuck in the orange plastic/white vinyl hangover of lounge culture, but the Strokes were a band for dark bars where the bathroom door was always broken and you could sink into a booth and hide out from adulthood for a few more years. They were a great band for New York because no one could agree on them: they were either the best or the worst thing that could have happened. People would tell you they hated them and everything they stood for, then a couple of beers later they’d confide that they’d never actually heard them or that they secretly loved them. They were one more part of the city you could endlessly kvetch about, then take pride in because no other city had anything nearly as good."

see source here

Live the questions

2008-12-04T07:21:00.000-08:00

...try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

image: see source here

the mess we're in

2008-12-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

"So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so."

see source here.

the view from nowhere

2008-12-02T19:25:00.000-08:00

Clifford Geertz

it's easy to think big when you don't know what's involved

2008-12-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

what the free market costs

2008-12-01T20:21:00.000-08:00

"contracting is out of control and that the new president needs to do something about it."

listen.

the never ending story

2008-12-01T19:56:00.000-08:00

what you wish you could have back

six sounds that define you

things that were cool when you were a kid

what gives you the chills/shivers (in a good way)?

controlling undesirable behavior

2008-12-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

is sadness the same as depression?

or just a normal period of adjustment.

photo credit: Panda?

meet me anywhere

2008-12-01T10:31:00.000-08:00

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves." – Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel”

drawing by: Doug Boomhower

what would john kenneth galbraith say?

2008-11-30T20:21:00.000-08:00

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
John Kenneth Galbraith

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
John Kenneth Galbraith

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.
John Kenneth Galbraith

emily says

2008-11-30T18:27:00.000-08:00

"I like maps that aren't geographical."

the central and inevitable fact of human existence

2008-11-30T14:02:00.000-08:00

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
— Thomas Wolfe

epiphany number #86

2008-11-29T12:21:00.000-08:00

piece

"There is, with every question, the What, the So What?, and the Now What?"

be a weatherman on social trends

2008-11-29T12:07:00.000-08:00

I have never been able to take Rogert Ebert seriously as a film critic. He lost me for good when he gave, in 1996, the movie Michael a thumbs up. Yeah, Michael--a "movie" where John Travolta plays an angel who smells like fresh-baked cookies.

That said, Ebert sometimes comes out of nowhere with these great cultural editorials. The advice found below is great for anyone who wants to write for an audience bigger than his or herself.

"A newspaper film critic should encourage critical thinking, introduce new developments, consider the local scene, look beyond the weekend fanboy specials, be a weatherman on social trends, bring in a larger context, teach, inform, amuse, inspire, be heartened, be outraged."

read the piece in full?

a photograph from where i live

2008-10-08T20:15:00.001-07:00

photographer, claire houston.

the medium really IS the message; or, why republicans are more fanatical about politics than democrats

2008-10-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

I spent all yesterday thinking over the following question: why are republicans more politically fanatic, and therefore more active (voting, et. al) than democrats?

today, here's what i think.

it all comes down to "the base(s)." dems have not so much a base, but "ostensible bases." all these bases have their various identities and distinct reasons for political engagement. lets call them the "kitchen sink salad."

now lets consider the republicans. controlling for obvious exceptions to the rule, republicans are (comparatively) much more homogeneous...and therefore much less varied and disparate. lets call them "the stew." permit me to explain that moniker.

the GOP is (relative to dems) much more monolithic, it has a much more identifiable base: white middle class married christians. and this base has two core beliefs: being fiscally and socially conservative. so, according to my (fuzzy) math, a lot of micro/personal differences get set aside as the repubs fall line under the banner of fiscal/social conservatism. hence, "the stew." it all blends into one.

but so what? well...with such a monolithic base, it makes messaging up and down the party (often through, say, media mouthpieces fox news, ny post, boston herald, right wing radio...) so much more effective. the officials can pander so much more effectively, and they can also demagogue the Other (democrats) so much more forecfully.

in sum, it all comes down message and messagering. the "party line" travels easily through the closed circuit that is the GOP. whereas with the dems, the "party line" is not only "parties' lines," but also the messagering has to traverse such a heterogeneous circuit that, in the end, the message becomes (stay with me here) circuitous.

thats why fanaticism tends to be so much more conspicuous in the GOP. the message really is the medium.

please note: i do recognize that there are MANY fanatical democratic zealots, too. but they are the exception and very much not the rule.

: : ari.

post script:

i, too, have read whats the matter with kansas so please dont email me the opposing argument about poor white republicans. they make up a slice of the GOP, but they are far far from the base.

post post script:

i am most likely wrong about all this. i am either being overly reductive, or obstinately biased. but i am not wrong about republicans (in sum) being more fanatical about politics. i can name you 90 democrats off-the-top-of-my-head that hate "how things are in this country," but never vote. BUT TO THIS VERY DAY, i have yet to meet even one self-described republican who doesnt vote.

(of course, voting isnt the only way to be political. but not voting is still the surest abdication of political agency.)

ira | ari

2008-10-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

"I think that other people, they just accept that they're in.
They accept that this other person likes them and they don't have to
keep proving themselves, whereas for me it's entirely temporal. I'm
constantly judging the whole thing moment by moment and it could
always fall apart. For me, it never ends." - Ira Glass

the gonzo tapes

2008-10-01T04:02:00.000-07:00

...No other person has shaped my world quite as indelibly as Hunter S. Thompson. His gonzo spirit (while often self-destructive) is still the chief compass that guides my life. So it will not come as a surprise that the following news (which I recently stumbled across in Rolling Stone magazine) feels like a major world headline.

"The Gonzo Tapes, a five-disc set of unreleased recordings by Rolling Stone’s own Hunter S. Thompson, will be released on October 28th. Compiled while filmmakers were producing Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the audio on The Gonzo Tapes was recorded between 1965 and 1975, with Thompson using the tapes to capture his thoughts and descriptions of what was happening around him or to look back at what he experienced. Thompson’s widow granted permission to director Alex Gibney, producer Eva Orner and archivist Don Fleming to go through the tapes that were stored in boxes in the basement of Thompson’s Woody Creek, Colorado home. Disc 1 on the collection will feature Thompson’s year riding with the Hell’s Angels, Discs 2 and 3 both draw from his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Disc 4 covers Thompson’s exploits between 1973 and 1974 and the fifth disc features his 1975 trip to Saigon. The cover features original artwork by Ralph Steadman and the package will contain essays by Gibney and Thompson’s fellow foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins."

i heart libraries

2008-09-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

I Heart Libraries. And it always confounds me that people aren’t breaking down their doors, tripping over themselves to get at all that filthy lucre: novels, DVDs, CDs, newspapers and magazines, and audiobooks. Perhaps our libraries are so underutilized because Americans are so conditioned to shop, to buy, to populate their living spaces with things they own but rarely use. And that’s fine. Who I am to begrudge a nation its unsustainable and self-defeating consumption habits?

Long post short, I went to the local library here in Portland, Maine yesterday. I will be in town for the next 14 weeks so I need a card. As it turned out, the library was having a huge book sale in their basement: 5 cents for a paperback, 10 cents for the hard stuff. Lucky me.

The above image (photographed by Claire Houston) shows what what I bought. (Total cost: $2.20.)

The following is (1) a quick description of the various books, audiobooks, CDs, and DVDs pictured, and (2) the rational for my individual purchases.

Let us begin. Moving from left to right, and top to bottom.

Hooking Up Tom Wolfe

Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Ditto goes for Norman Mailer. And while this reality makes it hard for me to get out of bed some mornings, it might give Tom Wolfe a strange sort of comfort—as he’s now the reigning dean of new journalism. In Hooking Up, Wolfe gives us a good batch of essays and short stories and, I think, a novella.

Rufus Wainwright by Rufus Wainwright. This is his 1998 self-titled debut album. I have never heard any of it. I am hoping this is an overlooked gem.

Dreamgirls: Music From The Motion Picture [2-CD Deluxe Edition]

This movie was one of the best and worst films I have ever watched. Fact: The music was transcendent (e.g., "Listen," and "I am telling you, I am not leaving"). Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy deliver some of the best performances in recent memory. (I hate Eddie Murphy beyond description, but I have to admit he transfigures himself for this role, and I will watch the film over and over again simply to see him sing his "Jimmy's Rap.")

The History of the English Language (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) by Seth Lerer

How could I pass up this “course”? Twelve cassettes. One day at a time, Ari. One day at a time.

Here’s a blurb.

“Learn incredible and insightful facts on the language we use everyday of our lives from Professor Seth Lerer of Stanford University. This course is designed to touch on every corner of the English language, from its distant origins to different dialects spoken today.

This course is designed to help you appreciate and understand why this language has evolved the way it did. You will learn why we speak the way we do today, how to properly use a dictionary, what the difference is between the three major periods of English, how famous authors apply the language as their most important tool in their writing, how to distinguish between dialects of the language that we use today in America, and much more.”

Making It Big on Little Deals by John Schaub

Given the subprime chicanery and all things 700 billion bailout, I thought this book would make a nice historical artifact. By the way, I plan on reading it…for the archeological benefits.

Famous Financial Fiascos by John Train

My blindside is economics. Maybe this book will help.

Here’s a blurb about this book I found online.

“A classic study on different ways not to succeed. Everything from Mr. Ponzi, Tulipomania, the Kuwait Stock Exchange Explosion, Bernie Cornfeld, Ivan Krueger, and others. Shows the confusion of purpose, overgenerous investments, mistakes in timing and many other ways where investors have gone wrong. As Parkinson says, “It is better to learn from a book than to learn in a bankruptcy court.”

The Higher Self by Deepak Chopra

This two-cassette audiobook is organized around helping you discover and unearth your true self, the self that is boundless and unfettered by fear or judgment. I like that idea. And I’m open to giving it a shot. If anyone is in need of self-improvement, it’s me.

John Lennon Anthology

I was six when John Lennon was assassinated and I can remember exactly where I was when the news broke across the TV screen. I knew something was gone. And I have spent a lot of my life trying to get that something back. I’ve read a few different biographies on Lennon, watched some amazing documentaries (The U.S. vs. John Lennon is one of the best films ever made), and been an inveterate fan of his music and ethos. On the 25th anniversary of his assignation, I went to his Imagine monument in Central Park and held a candle and cried and sang and held hands with strangers. The vigil lasted all night. I left somewhere around midnight. I walked home, through the park, finally emerging on the Upper East Side, whispering Lennon’s lyrics, “Love is touch, touch is love. Love is reaching, reaching Love. Love is asking to be loved,” over and over to myself.

Regarding John Lennon Anthology, Wikipedia says it “is a box set of home demos, alternative studio outtakes and other unreleased material recorded by John Lennon over the course of his solo career from “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 up until the 1980 sessions for Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey. The anthology was divided by its compiler and co-producer, Yoko Ono, into four discs representing four eras in Lennon’s career: “Ascot”; “New York City”; “The Lost Weekend” and “Dakota.”

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

This is supposed to be another Scorsese masterpiece. I am humiliated to admit I haven't seen this 2005 documentary yet. I have, however, seen the 1967 Dylan documentary Dont Look Back at least four times. So that counts for something. Somewhere.

Farwell, My Subaru by Doug Fine

This audiobook caught my eye. Here’s a blurb about it.

“In this memoir of mishaps and lessons learned, Fine shares his yearlong trek to turn his newly bought New Mexico ranch into a green and sustainable environment with as little carbon fuel as possible. From using two very lovable goats for his organic food production to transitioning into a biofuel engine for his truck and even installing solar panels, Fine balances the troubling decisions Americans must consider while also revealing a host of unexpected benefits. He advocates that a gradual process, despite having to deal with moments of hypocrisy, is essential for it to work. Fine’s wry narration blends well with his often humorous and sarcastic tone. The energy and enthusiasm of his reading indicates that Fine not only relished the events but is happy to share his experience with listeners.”

Personal Meditations

This audiocassette contains four individual meditations. One per side.

Back Care: Yoga for Beginners

I have chronic back pain from an injury I suffered while bartending in 2002.

The Child and the Curriculum and The School and Society by John Dewey

John Dewey is the Michael Jordan of Education. He’s the Bill Gates of Pedagogy. The Albert Einstein of curriculum. I will buy anything with his name attached.

A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

This is the guy that wrote The Perfect Storm and all those amazing features in Vanity Fair. How could I not take it home?

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

…Many people have told me to read this book. These people are usually the type who see the public sector as something under assault by the private sector. Anyway, here’s a good description of this book.

“Conventional wisdom has it that John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society spawned the neoliberalism we see in Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and other world leaders. The economist’s prose, lofty but still easily manageable, laid down the gauntlet for the post-cold war class struggle that was still far in the future in 1958. Galbraith saw the widening gap between the richest and the poorest as an emergent threat to economic stability, and proposed significant investment in parks, transportation, education, and other public amenities—what we now call infrastructure—to ameliorate these differences and postpone depression and revolution indefinitely. Widely criticized by conservatives and libertarians wary of public expenditures or increased government influence, Galbraith still influences liberal and neoliberal thinking. He has acknowledged that his work, like that of most social scientists, contains flaws (like his dire prediction of an out-of-control unemployment and inflation spiral that petered out in the 1980’s), but much of it remains fresh and true even today. Four years before Silent Spring, he wrote about the consumerist blight that threatened our wild lands equally as much as our cities; his hoped-for increase in environmental awareness has grown significantly in recent years. Whether you support the political implementations of his views, experiencing his writing is important to put those views in context. More than this, though, it is an honest pleasure to read such original ideas so well expressed.” —Rob Lightne

The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

Before you make fun of me for being the one person alive who hasn’t read this book, let me confess something: I have read it. But I think the book is more not less relevant than when it came out a couple years back. And since I found it on CD, I can play it for a few minutes each morning and each night. I tend to disagree with Friedman on a lot of things, but he’s spot on regarding the energy crisis, a topic he takes on directly in his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico

I am always on the lookout for books on craft. This book seems to suggest that clustering can allow the right-side of your brain to help you put pen to paper.

Here’s a synopsis I found online.

“For those who yearn to write but falter at the sight of a blank page, the unique, student-proven techniques in Writing the Natural Way will help unlock natural writing style and storytelling abilities. First published in 1983, this popular classic has been revised with five completely new chapters and a wealth of field-tested exercises.”