Working Harder Than I'd Like To
My Fellow Shennyer:
Greetings from Substack! You’re likely noticing the change in Shenny’s look this issue. I’d resisted Substack because it felt impersonal, another Big Internet Thing Everyone Adopted. I hoped that integrating this newsletter into my own site would give me more options and more intimacy.
Intimacy? Yes. I’m no longer able to address this letter to you personally, for instance. Now everyone gets the same salutation. But options? Well, I’ve kept my griping about the plugin I was using to a minimum, but please believe the road these past five months has been lousy with potholes and speedbumps. Substack, in contrast, is like an empty freeway with someone else doing all the driving.
Everything else of Shenny will stay the same: same 3 departments, same fortnightly schedule, same dubious relevance to anybody’s life. One difference: Substack allows comments. If you have thoughts, stories, counterarguments, or suggestions, I’d love to hear from you. They make it very easy, with buttons and everything:
Thank you for reading, and for being there with this newsletter as it grows up and finds its way.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Using Alter Egos at Food & Drink Counters
Coffee shops are noisy, maybe you’ve noticed. When I’m in that noise waiting for them to call my drink order, by the name they asked for and wrote on the cup, I can’t always tell whether ‘Latte for Mehdjvbm?’ is indeed the latte for Dave. When it comes to the brick wall of food-counter noise, some names are Kool-Aid Man, and mine is a light gust of wind. So about a year ago, I cast around for a name that (a) didn’t sound like any others and (b) would not need repeated. I landed on Jackie. It’s great because gender neutral, given Jackie Mason, given Jackie Collins, and what I like is what I feel when I say it. In the two minutes I’m Jackie, I’m something of a little brat, or a gal you can bum menthols from, or a short guy who never skips leg day, or a basket case, or the one twin who needed braces. Do you have an alter ego you use at food counters? Try Jackie on next time, see how they fit.
2. Natatoriums
Swimming in a pool is the only exercise I enjoy. I like its meditative rhythms, all the counting of laps and strokes between breaths, but swimming is as noisy as a coffee shop. With your head under the surface, your eardrums blocked from the water, your exhaling sounds like the roll of a low tympani signaling storms on the horizon. But once you’re out of the pool, in the high-vaulted natatorium, it’s suddenly quiet, with the errant squelches of other swimmers’ wakes sounding like waves plashing on a vacant stretch of beach. The chlorinated aroma, the bluey light. Backyard pools are a pleasure, but I love the civic beauty of a large public swimhall. I love just looking at pictures of them, like this beauty, the Alte Halle in Charlottenburg, Berlin:
We’re in a heat wave here in the Bay Area. Yesterday, the water in the natatorium I frequent, the Charles W. Dullea, S.J., Natatorium at the University of San Francisco, was 81.5°. At that temperature, sitting in my house with a fan blowing on me, I’m inert and miserable, but yesterday, in the water, I felt alive again, happy to be back in the world for a time.
Working Harder Than I’d Like To in the Revision Stage
Some writers I know (usually poets) are gifted in how they readily think in images. I am by nature an ideas guy, concepts-y. What makes this an occupational hazard is that I know my readers don't share my brain, so if I want to communicate anything, I'm going to have to heed the objective correlative and find some tangible object to render that can vicariously express my idea. Inevitably, then, I've got a stage in the revision process when I 'fix' my ideas into images.
Some days, that work goes more smoothly than others. Last week, in reading through the chapter of my memoir I’m currently revising, I came to this sentence:
Then again, all fantasies are troubling on some level, disrupting the norms and social mores of our IRL lives.
I wasn’t happy with ‘disrupting the norms and social mores’ in that it was too ideasy, and I knew somewhere I could find an image that would not only convey the same concept, but also render something of the bodily experience implied by ‘troubling’.
Every time I’m stuck, I open a new window and start typing arguments about why I’m stuck. Here—with the upfront admission that I was a bit hungover that morning—is the transcript of those notes:
Our IRL lives are: stable, or concrete, or mild-mannered, regimented, or procedural. Oh I gotta wake up. The point here is that our lives without fantasy are safe and predictable. Or they are acceptable, lived by social decree or agreement. We follow the rules, and fantasies show us images of ourselves breaking the rules. Compliant. So what’s the image of this being disrupted? Flipping a table over? Less angry.
Like students moving down the hall in single file. Let’s find more adult images. Clocking in to work on time. Obeying the speed limit, or traffic lights. Fantasies go the other way down a one way street. Cutting in line at the bank? It’s not like a cheat exactly.
What’s the cliched image that would work? Letting the cat out of the bag, or opening up Pandora’s box. A party crasher. Kanye at the VMAs with Taylor Swift. Roger Clinton. The unwelcome family member you’d prefer to keep locked in the basement coming up to spoil the nice party. So not crashing a party, because our IRL lives aren’t a party. They’re a meeting in a conference room. A poetry reading. A church service. All fantasies are troubling on some level, farts in the church of our IRL lives.
That’s dumb but let’s use it for now and move on. Well, not so fast. The trouble here is much less about social decorum and more about personal private comfort and stability. A fart in church is embarrassing, maybe shameful, but this trouble is deeper and upsetting. Vertigo? I almost wrote an unwanted spell of vertigo, but who ever wants vertigo?
Another cliche that would work: pulling the rug out from under us. Fantasies remove the sense of stable ground. Quaking the ground of our IRL lives? I don’t love quaking. But let’s use it for now and move on.
I really don’t love quaking, but this was 15 minutes of work on a sentence that felt something less than vital, and when it comes to the work of writing, I’m not Oscar Wilde, spending the morning putting in a comma and the whole afternoon taking it out. I know I've got another pass at this chapter before I show it to anybody, and next time I hit it, the span between what I wrote and what I’d love to write will look a little less wide.
I guess what I'm saying is that I didn't get the job done in full last week, and often I can beat myself up about that. Call myself lazy. But I'm trying to trust the slowness of my process, as frustrating as it is. I’d love to hear a suggestion for a better image in the comments. And if you’re struggling today to find the right line, in whatever you’re working on, here’s to trusting the process to slowly but surely get you what you need.
Thank you for teaching me the word "natatorium."
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