Thursday, July 19, 2012
Sweet and Lowdown
A couple of months ago, I posted about having high cholesterol and how my doctor was prescribing a new medication for me. I've been on Simvastatin since then and had some bloodwork done last week to see how it was working. Apparently, it's just the thing I needed. My bad cholesterol went from somewhere in the mid 200s to 165. Holy cow, right? It's remarkable that one little pill has finally moved a number that has stayed essentially the same for a decade. So yay for me. Now I'm slightly less at risk for having my fat-riddled heart explode while weeding the garden. I'm glad something finally did the trick because Heaven knows it wasn't going to happen through eating oatmeal and running.
I finished rereading Ender's Game last night and was struck again by what a great book it really is. And I mean great as in Great, as in Great American novel that will last forever. I've become disenchanted with Orson Scott Card over the years -- but this one book is something that is powerful, beautiful, and important. He made something that will last far beyond himself. That's cool.
One evening last week, Suzy and I watched This Means War, the action/rom com/bromance flick from the ridiculously named director McG. The next day, we took the girls (all three!) to a matinee of Pixar's Brave. The difference between the two is profound - not just because one was aimed at cynical, leering 16 year olds and the other was aimed at children - but because one is beautiful and meaningful and expertly crafted and the other is lazy, sloppy, undercooked, and dumb. If you're going to spend years and millions developing something, shouldn't it be something worth all that time and money?
I finished rereading Ender's Game last night and was struck again by what a great book it really is. And I mean great as in Great, as in Great American novel that will last forever. I've become disenchanted with Orson Scott Card over the years -- but this one book is something that is powerful, beautiful, and important. He made something that will last far beyond himself. That's cool.
One evening last week, Suzy and I watched This Means War, the action/rom com/bromance flick from the ridiculously named director McG. The next day, we took the girls (all three!) to a matinee of Pixar's Brave. The difference between the two is profound - not just because one was aimed at cynical, leering 16 year olds and the other was aimed at children - but because one is beautiful and meaningful and expertly crafted and the other is lazy, sloppy, undercooked, and dumb. If you're going to spend years and millions developing something, shouldn't it be something worth all that time and money?
Saturday, July 7, 2012
7-7-12
sunflower seeds
chocolate covered peanuts
lilacs
purple irises
Robert Redford
BLT sandwiches
The Beach Boys
BYU football
Springville, Utah
Mount Timpanogas
Chris Geddes
Irene Watson
John Bidwell
The Kirkham building
The Spori building (the original)
Handibank
soft, chewy peppermints
flavor and sugar water refills at the Ice Castle
fried tortilla shell tacos
stroganoff
migraines
fancy stationery
calligraphy pens and nibs
stacks of scrapbooking paper
sliced cucumbers in vinegar with salt and pepper
Friday popcorn in her office
pins and brooches
the 4th of July
holding her arm
Porter's Bookstore
The Springville Art Museum
phone calls just to check in
bacon, cheese, and asparagus sandwiches
her Young Women
Abbotts
The Playmill
Glenn Miller's "In The Mood"
the smell after rain
Olive Garden
The Wuzza
lunch with her sisters
Hostess cupcakes
Mormon Bridge
The Munchkin Mandible
Chieko Okazaki
"Everything's connected"
and a million other things.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
The Last Three Books
The last three books I've finished for pleasure made kind of an interesting progression in my mind.
First, I read Annie E. Proulx's The Shipping News. Years ago, my friend Tony that I. Had. To. Read. It! He sang its praises and waxed rhapsodic about how much I would love it if I gave it a chance. For whatever reason, I never got around to it but always had it sitting on my mental bookshelf, ready to give it a try when the opportunity came. Well, I came across a used copy for a quarter at Goodwill a couple of months ago and figured I wasn't going to get it any cheaper than that. Taking it home, I read the whole thing, dutifully, patiently, waiting for the chapter or passage or plot twist that would ignite my inevitable love for the book.
I'm still waiting.
Honestly, I am not sure why in the world that book was a big deal to anyone. It won the Pulitzer Prize when it came out, was made into a Hollywood movie with Kevin Spacey, and was loved by many, including Tony who told me to read it in the first place. The language and syntax were unusual and idiosyncratic and I guess there's a certain pleasure to be had in that -- reading things that are said in a different way that what you're used to -- but overall, my thought was, "So what?" Nothing really happens. No one event really leads to any other event. For a book called The Shipping News, the story is remarkably rudderless. Maybe the news is that there's no plot. Anyway, I felt, in the end, that is was a waste of time. I felt nothing, learned nothing, and never felt that spark that I read books for. It was like finishing a really bland meal just because you've already paid for it and because you don't have anywhere else to be for an hour.
Second, I read A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Like The Shipping News, it too won the Pulitzer when it came out and was also made into a less-than-successful Hollywood film. As you probably know, it is a modern version of Shakespeare's King Lear told from the perspective of the daughters. It's a dark book to be sure, not a feel-good read by any means. But the prose is confident and lovely, and the story itself shoots along, moving lower and lower as these people are taken over by greed, jealousy, lust, fear, and their own past. It's a good book the way Schindler's List is a good movie. It's powerful and well-made but dark and hard to find traditional enjoyment in at times. But still, it was big step up from TSN.
Three or four days ago, I finished Stephen King's 11/22/63, a time-travel fantasy in which an everyday joe goes back in time to prevent the assassination of JFK. Size-wise, the book is a monster at 850 pages, and yet I flew through it much faster than I made it through The Sleeping News. Suzy can attest that, if I had even a spare moment, I had it open. The characters were distinct, the dialogue was authentic, and the story just propelled me right through to the end. I cared about the characters, I cared about the outcome. The story and the people in it mattered to me.
These days, Stephen King is getting a lot of respect and accolades for his work and I'm glad. For a long time, he had a bad rep as just a twisted ghoul who happened to be able to crank out really big books. But now even some of the snootiest critics have acknowledged his 30+ year career. He's won some nice lifetime achievement type awards but it's a safe bet nothing he writes will ever win a Pulitzer or Nobel. And yet, I am struck by how much more I enjoyed his book over Proulx's or even Smiley's.If TSN was granola, 11/22/63 was a really fatty, carb-laden steak dinner. It may not have been as literarily healthy for me but it was a heck of a lot more satisfying and enjoyable. Shouldn't that be what matters when we read stories?
First, I read Annie E. Proulx's The Shipping News. Years ago, my friend Tony that I. Had. To. Read. It! He sang its praises and waxed rhapsodic about how much I would love it if I gave it a chance. For whatever reason, I never got around to it but always had it sitting on my mental bookshelf, ready to give it a try when the opportunity came. Well, I came across a used copy for a quarter at Goodwill a couple of months ago and figured I wasn't going to get it any cheaper than that. Taking it home, I read the whole thing, dutifully, patiently, waiting for the chapter or passage or plot twist that would ignite my inevitable love for the book.
I'm still waiting.
Honestly, I am not sure why in the world that book was a big deal to anyone. It won the Pulitzer Prize when it came out, was made into a Hollywood movie with Kevin Spacey, and was loved by many, including Tony who told me to read it in the first place. The language and syntax were unusual and idiosyncratic and I guess there's a certain pleasure to be had in that -- reading things that are said in a different way that what you're used to -- but overall, my thought was, "So what?" Nothing really happens. No one event really leads to any other event. For a book called The Shipping News, the story is remarkably rudderless. Maybe the news is that there's no plot. Anyway, I felt, in the end, that is was a waste of time. I felt nothing, learned nothing, and never felt that spark that I read books for. It was like finishing a really bland meal just because you've already paid for it and because you don't have anywhere else to be for an hour.
Second, I read A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Like The Shipping News, it too won the Pulitzer when it came out and was also made into a less-than-successful Hollywood film. As you probably know, it is a modern version of Shakespeare's King Lear told from the perspective of the daughters. It's a dark book to be sure, not a feel-good read by any means. But the prose is confident and lovely, and the story itself shoots along, moving lower and lower as these people are taken over by greed, jealousy, lust, fear, and their own past. It's a good book the way Schindler's List is a good movie. It's powerful and well-made but dark and hard to find traditional enjoyment in at times. But still, it was big step up from TSN.
Three or four days ago, I finished Stephen King's 11/22/63, a time-travel fantasy in which an everyday joe goes back in time to prevent the assassination of JFK. Size-wise, the book is a monster at 850 pages, and yet I flew through it much faster than I made it through The Sleeping News. Suzy can attest that, if I had even a spare moment, I had it open. The characters were distinct, the dialogue was authentic, and the story just propelled me right through to the end. I cared about the characters, I cared about the outcome. The story and the people in it mattered to me.
These days, Stephen King is getting a lot of respect and accolades for his work and I'm glad. For a long time, he had a bad rep as just a twisted ghoul who happened to be able to crank out really big books. But now even some of the snootiest critics have acknowledged his 30+ year career. He's won some nice lifetime achievement type awards but it's a safe bet nothing he writes will ever win a Pulitzer or Nobel. And yet, I am struck by how much more I enjoyed his book over Proulx's or even Smiley's.If TSN was granola, 11/22/63 was a really fatty, carb-laden steak dinner. It may not have been as literarily healthy for me but it was a heck of a lot more satisfying and enjoyable. Shouldn't that be what matters when we read stories?
More On Being Busy
I realize it's probably not cool to cut and paste an entire article from the New York Times. But I'm not cool so I'm not going to worry about it. A friend posted a link to this article on Facebook today and I thought it nicely dovetailed with the post I wrote about business a few months ago. (By "dovetail" I mean, he says it better and more articulately than me but I said it first.)
Anyway, enjoy!
The 'Busy' Trap
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.
Anyway, enjoy!
The 'Busy' Trap
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.
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