Dear Friends:
The other night I was standing in a darkening room, just after sundown (the sun sets over the ocean now, just for another week or so), where the only light other than the windows’ gloaming came from our lit-up Christmas tree. My skin looked amazing, and so many past moments conflated into a feeling that was strong and almost unbearable. How many years have I spent in a room lit only by the golden glow of a Christmas tree, full of anticipation and joy? How rarely am I able to tap into such old feelings?
These are unsavory thoughts to have as late as the second week of January. January is for looking ahead, leaving yesteryear behind. I get that; I’m a devoted maker of yearlong goals each January: exactly two, no more no less, both buffeted by an ordered set of steps toward the eventual achievement of the goal. What are mine for 2024?
GOAL 1: Agree that my health is excellent for my age.
GOAL 2: Achieve a relationship to writing that adds a pleasure to my life I can’t get elsewhere, particularly in teaching.
I am, like you are, looking forward to 2024. But I’m also typing this is in the glow of one of our Christmas trees. Why are they still up? I think I’m proud that, after all this, I have no answer to the question.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Glen Canyon Park
For 8 years, N. and I lived across the street from Golden Gate Park, which you’ve likely heard of. Enormous, bountifully resourced; it’s hard to come up with anything you can’t do there. (Except sleep or have sex or drive on the road that was built to alleviate traffic.) In Glen Canyon, you can’t do much of anything but walk, but what makes it so endorsable is how remote it feels despite your being almost exactly in the center of San Francisco. As a canyon, its walls are steep, and the trails are tight and dense with vegetation, and they curve with enough switchbacks to get you up to the top, where on certain mornings of sun and fog you can enjoy views like these:
Plus there’s a creek you’ll hear more on below. I try to go every Saturday morning, before the dogwalkers arrive1. I think of it like church: it is quiet and beautiful there, and I leave with something hard to describe in me restored.
2. Typing Literature Out Word for Word
Before I even knew I wanted to try to write for a living, I read that Joan Didion typed out the stories of Ernest Hemingway when she was young, ‘to get a feel for the sentences.’ It was a common practice, as was confirmed for me in Namwali Serpell’s really great essay in a recent NY Review of Books on ‘women’s style’, such as it exists. Ralph Ellison also typed out Hemingway. Hemingway himself typed out hunting magazines (naturally). ‘This isn’t plagiarism,’ Serpell writes. ‘It’s imitatio or pastiche, neither of which is an exact reflection. Rather, this is repetition with a swerve.’ For a while I made this an assignment in my workshops: find an essay you wish you’d written and type it out word for word. Students, naturally, hated it, likely because there was no way to get feedback on what they’d done well. But the experience for the student of writing is a lot like the difference between learning a neighborhood by studying a map (or worse: its Yelp offerings) and learning it by walking its streets. Per Goal 2 above, it’s a practice I plan to return to—starting, perhaps, with Serpell’s essay itself, which includes this memorable bit:
Style’s imitation games, like gender’s, are beset with mistakes, misfires, slippages. Repeating or translating another style or another language is how you find its rhythm. But it is also—with a twitch or a typo or a fruitful failure—how you find your own. Wherever you find yourself straying or tripping out of the groove? That’s where whatever makes your style yours springs into being. What a lovely thought. We become who we are when we fail to become whomever we were trying to be.
New Year, Old Ideas
Standing on the planet, or sitting on it, or sitting on a chair on a floor in a building on the planet, you’re moving at around 800 mph, given Earth’s rotation at whatever latitude you call home. That’s faster than the speed of sound, somehow.
Add to this fact another one: our planet is flying around the sun at 67,000 mph, which is like getting to Los Angeles from New York City in just over two minutes. It’s unfathomably fast, and no matter what we do, no matter where we are, we can’t stop.
It’s no more profound an idea than any other, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I waver between two ways of looking at it.
Stillness is the antidote to all that inadvertent rapidness, a way to balance a speedy way of life that is fully outside our control.
Earth has always moved this rapidly, and thus speed is in the very root of our nature, so we are at our most human when we are zooming through space.
Which idea feels right to you, and what does that mean?
I’ve long been afraid of banal ideas, because longstanding insecurities bred in me taught me that banal ideas meant that I was a banal person (itself a banal idea), and like what could be worse. But I’m attracted to ideas, so they’ve often seemed like a kind of currency to spend in a social/intellectual marketplace. To have commerce, I felt I needed to keep my ideas fresh.
I’m attracted, also, to people, bodies, faces, and some people with bodies and faces have said they’re attracted to me for my face or body. When it comes to the physical part of being a person in the social world, I’ve always wanted to look and feel good, for me: do the kind of exercise I like to do as much as I want to do it, not the kind of exercise magazines tell me I should do if I want 8-pack abs.
What I’m saying is that I like being the sole arbiter of what makes me attractive physically, but when it comes to ideas, and being attractive intellectually, I worry. I imagine other, shadowy arbiters. I taste my ideas to see if they’re not already so stale.
What do I mean by banal ideas? I guess I mean tired ones, ideas that’ve been chewed over time and again. The effects of smartphones on attention and communication. Pop music as high art. Nearly everything said about the possibility of another Biden v. D. Trump election. The term ‘sportsball’.
They’re everywhere, banal ideas. I had one myself just the other morning, hiking in beloved / just-endorsed Glen Canyon. I came to the short flat footbridge they built over Islais Creek, and I saw water trickling under:
I stood there, looking, and then recording, and I thought This is good and I am happy. When the creek flows again at Glen Canyon, after months and months of being dry, I’m reminded that we’ve come around again to a different time of the year—that is, our speedy planet has returned to the sector of our solar system where it’s primed for letting the waters run in the creek. I’m reminded that bad times end and good times return, and vice versa.
Time is cyclical, goes the yawn-y idea.
Time is also speed when the latter divides distance, if you want to get mathematical about it.2 And I love speed. I wholly endorse idea #2 up there, that we are built as a species to go very fast, speed through life, packing as much as we can into the finite time we have.
You should see me drive (or not, if you ask N.). My imperative is to keep an eye out for any reason not to go forward, whereas most drivers—especially in San Francisco—are looking for any reason to slow down. I mumble because my mouth moves too slowly to keep up with my thoughts. I interrupt people with the apparent end of their sentence so’s to kick them a little faster toward it. Living in Alabama was difficult for a lot of reasons, but foremost was the patience it called for to listen.
to a native.
get.
to the end.
of their sentences.
These are not qualities that endear me to others, and yet, like searching for a mathematical explanation, they’re part of my nature. I accept it may be childish. Children run from place to place, just always fucking run, nearly every time you send them off somewhere. They get how intoxicating speed is, how hard it is to be patient, sit still.
The delusion that we’re ever sitting still. When I think about what I’m chasing by moving fast, I think it’s just the thrill of getting to go fast. Most of life moves slowly. It takes ages to get a non-banal idea across.3 But thus rises the question of what I’m missing by always running ahead.
I like Rachel Kushner’s definition of art, as she wrote about in a recent issue of Harpers: ‘Art is a secret that an artist possesses—something only she knows about the world and has figured out how to share.’ Another word for a thing we know about the world is ‘idea’, and so Kushner suggests that one thing we can do with our ideas is not just share them as they come to us, but use some process of translation to turn them into art.
Making ideas the seed for art throws the question of banal/fresh out the window. No need to worry whether other people have had this idea before, heard it like a joke everyone’s told at least once. Art calls for more subtle tasks; as Kushner says: ‘[S]ecrets only reveal themselves through paying attention, and not through erudition.’
Which reveals one of the more unsavory pleasures of going fast: your attention is spent on you, going your way; whatever exists of the world around you exists mostly as impediments to your speediness.4 And which is why art practice is good for a guy like me, a person of my nature. I want this memoir I’m writing to be done tomorrow, but how much of what I really want to say will be sped over?
The blank page. The blinking cursor. Barthelme once said that facing these every morning is what led him to drink. What worthwhile ideas to fill the emptiness with? It’s such a banal act on the surface, paying attention. Sitting still, looking, listening, watching, waiting. And all the while the world moving under us more swiftly than we could ever understand.
This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this framed banal idea about poetry:
And do the thing every dog owner on the planet does (yes, I mean you): presume that leash laws don’t apply to them, because their dog is somehow special and exempt, a sweetheart!
And I always do. I’ve got this likely unshakeable faith that restating any concept in math terms—e.g., forming a binomial equation, drawing a Cartesian graph—brings clarity. Or at least a new way to look at an idea that could itself bring clarity.
Which is why I love jokes, the best ones of which seem to warp time by how quickly they deliver the punchline, long before you see it coming.
This, ultimately, is the tragic flaw in Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, the hero of my favorite documentary, The Cruise.
I think that this has been my favorite Shenny thus far. You can add Hunter S. Thompson to the list of writers that typed out other writers' works. I believe he was particularly fond of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story, possibly apocryphal, is that he re-typed all of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. This is no different to me than musicians learning the parts of players they admire and then expanding on that repertoire to add their own voice.