Tag Archives: journaling

How to read a post from my journals or pocket pages

Posted on September 11, 2016 | Leave a comment

Revised (because when quality matters, time doesn’t.)

If you read texts selected from my journals and pocket pages expecting there to be a “take-away,” a clear message or story, you may be disappointed. But if you read these to get a sense of the presence of my mind (my voice, my sensibility) from these texts, you may find these valuable.

Before I realized this distinction in ways of reading, I looked at my journal texts and judged them inadequate, because they weren’t already in the form of polished narratives or essays. For years, I wondered whether I should go back and craft these raw freewritings into publishable articles, rewriting them as needed until they fit the familiar forms. But this approach didn’t feel right. I usually wrote about my experiences by describing my thoughts and feelings afterwards, rather than writing these as moment-by-moment, show-don’t-tell descriptions. Doing that seemed artificial — I don’t live by narrating everything that happens; I write only after experiences have been had. I write for myself, and not for others, who weren’t there, to understand and empathize with me. I preferred writing down whatever I thought at that time, writing honestly for myself, rather than shaping my words so that I’d be perceived favorably by some unknown reader.

I finally realized that these honest-to-the-moment journal writings had value if the purpose of reading were redefined. I thought about how reading poetry can be different from reading prose. With prose, whether novels, journalism, memoir, etc., readers tend to look for meaning — plot, story, lesson, etc. But with poetry, readers can enjoy other aspects, including the sounds of words, rhythms of lines, images-as-images, etc. I sometimes read poems, such as haiku and Richard Brautigan’s short poems, just to get a sense of mood or a sense of the writer’s voice, his or her particular sensibility. So, too, I have found value with my journal texts, and you may as well.

You can dive in anywhere, even in the middle of a post of journal text, and treat each sentence or section like its own poem, reading just for the experience of reading, of communing with another mind. You don’t have to read the whole post or all the posts. There’s no index of topics, and there will be no overarching message. I don’t wanna write as if I’m some wise person who’s figured stuff out and is ready to teach others. Maybe some text-bits are wise, but some aren’t. Some bits might be funny, and others will be serious. My journals don’t have a consistent tone because, of course, lived experience doesn’t have a single tone. My writing is more a part of my living than it is something I do to make a career or advocate an ideal.

My journals will never have an ending — they’ll just stop when I die — but because they’re not intended to become anything else, they’re also already whole, complete, fulfilled. As a writer, I am fulfilled just by filling the journal pages. And a reader can take an analogous perspective.

By the way, these journals will not be posted here in a systematic way — just the thought of that exhausts me — and that’s OK because systematic is not necessary. These journal texts are as accurate as I can make them (because I can’t always even read my handwriting!), but they are not the entirety of the journals — I’ve tried to include only the parts I think are the most interesting.

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Posted in From the journals, From the pocket pages, Nonfiction, Transcribed from life

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Radical openness, part 2: Weds. 30 Dec. 2015 journal

Posted on July 27, 2016 | Leave a comment

Continued from previous post.

In essence, there is nothing that I have to say to others. There’s nothing I need to say, and what texts I’ve created, these don’t need to be published. These are not vital info for others, not all that informative nor all that entertaining. Yet, maybe I’ll publish them anyway. Maybe I put up a few things on my blog, things whose value isn’t argued for or explained. Yeah, I may look a little weird doing that, but I want to know what these other forms would look like — can these be done?

The value for me is in the act of publishing is in the doing (if someone likes what I’ve done, that’s just an ego stroke for me). I don’t learn much or have new ideas from having others read my work (though I guess it’s possible someone could read my work and give me a deep analysis from which I could get insights).

(These lines make some sense to me now, but I recognize that this text may not make sense to me later, once the ideas are gone from my mind. The ideas are in my mind now, so they do seem normal now.)

If you are to retain open-mindedness, you just gotta trust that new learnings, new experiences, will come. You can’t know/predict what these are, or else it wouldn’t be new learning. You gotta have faith in the process of letting go, having an open mind!

I may publish a text that isn’t clearly trying to communicate, but is conveying the message, “I’m alive, here’s something from my mind.” It’s not what I say that matters, but only my voice — that I’m writing — that matters? My experience of writing and editing? Of course, these don’t matter to others. But new ways to be, to write, can indirectly communicate, but this doesn’t need to matter to others — a near paradox.

I’ve written for a couple hours, and I may not have said anything of interest to anyone but me. But the point is, I like to write! I like spending time that way! Any value for others in my texts is nice but incidental.

2:55 p.m. — An implication of radical openness: I may just remain silent. I may not have anything to say! I will likely try publishing things. I won’t take “radical openness” as a restriction. Don’t take this idea too seriously, either!

I don’t want to have to put on a persona, do a performance, as most writings and art made for others are. there’s writerly ego there in making the performance pleasing to others.

When a nonfiction writer dramatizes his role as an observer or participant, that’s a layer of fakeness, because one can’t live (do things other than writing) and write at the same time. [see another example here] To pretend in an article to do so is to make artifice. Writing is done after the experience. Why not be more natural, less self-aware, self-dramatizing, portraying self-as-character? To be less aware of writing to/for others might be more authentic.

4:10 p.m. — Writings — texts — do not represent life or physical reality or experience. We may try to represent these in words, but it doesn’t work well. Writing is writing, representing only itself. The mind uses language — that’s it! Experiencing and writing are two different things — it’s inauthentic to both to elide that distinction.

The way we teach students to write — say, the Personal Narrative, the Research Paper — is filling in a form, learning to put info in a format that others people can easily recognize. This teaching has students learning to do a specific type of thinking and language use, but it’s not a type of writing that reflects authentic, spontaneous language use, as a freewrite can.

The criticism that certain narratives aren’t realistic doesn’t make a lot of sense from this perspective (that writing doesn’t represent reality). All stories use language — there’s no way to compare language to reality.

I seem to be making a claim here, though I don’t want to, because my larger point about radical openness is that I don’t need to make points. Claims are made as compared to some sense of reality — that’s one definition of truth: something is true if it matches or adequately explains some aspect of reality. My point here is that there is no truth, there’s just language, and looking for truth in language may not be possible or even useful. Of course, the trap here is that I’m making yet another claim about reality. An expression of language is just an expression of language.

6:30 p.m. — I think what I want to say is that this idea (that writing represents itself, language use, not physical reality or experience) can be interesting, useful — but that my point in writing isn’t to make claims but just to write because I like to write. There’s no point where I will or could be done. There’s no idea/claim argument endpoint. What I was writing earlier in today’s journal is that a topic or point, to communicate that is to communicate, when that’s kinda flawed. (Why? because of reasons I gave earlier today, which I can’t quite recall …)

9:12 p.m. — well, because of radical openness! Because nothing I can say will be as cool as what might be said next — and because whatever I’ve already said in the pile of writings isn’t as important as what I might learn from the next editing session! Old thoughts are old, existing thoughts are old, but the experience of reading old texts is new!

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Freeing myself to write honestly by not publishing now

Posted on February 15, 2015 | Leave a comment
Cover of a journal, most likely one that contains content that would be unflattering to me.

Cover of a journal, most likely one that contains content that would be unflattering to me.

When I write nonfiction, such as this text I am writing now, I become a character in the text. What the narrator “I” says here in this text are things that Matt Hagemann himself means. What I write and mean takes on a power, a legitimacy, because I, Matt, a living person of (hopefully) respectable reputation, said it.

However, everything I say or write also may change what you, the reader, think of me as a writer and also as a person. If I say outrageous or inflammatory things, you may think poorly of me (and you may even seek to discredit me or get me fired from my job, as has happened to some people).

Fiction writers and poets, by the way, have the “poetic license” to separate their creating selves from their narrating selves. This frees these writers to say terrible things in their characters’ voices and not have this necessarily reflect on the writers themselves, but also, what these characters say does not have the force of a claim made by a real person.

So, when I publish a text that I claim to be nonfiction, I am aware that I’m tying this text to my reputation. So the safest thing would be to say nothing at all. I could be a consummate professional and never say anything controversial.

And, really, I’m starting to think that that’s not all that bad of a way of living. I have written before about how I’m learning to not express my opinions in certain situations. And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how what I have to say, at any particular moment, may not be all that valuable or useful. I have moments of wisdom, but also moments of arrogance, egotism, and worse. The world may be a better place if it wasn’t so easy to express ourselves to, essentially, a world-wide audience via the Interwebs.

And perhaps this is a rather obvious sort of insight, but I’ve long felt that my opinions were valid and useful and interesting to others. (This may be a personality flaw encouraged by my liberal arts education and by my family’s practice of frequent debates, and also by my self-confidence encouraged by my male-privilege!) For a while after college, I thought that the ideal writing job for me would be as a news columnist, where I would get paid to tell others what my opinions were.

Now I’m glad that I didn’t overexpose myself in that way. After all, it’s very easy to say or write things in the present that I would later come to regret. I’ve been noticing in myself lately how, when I read something that questions or criticizes something I believe or value, I’ll react almost instinctively with a self-righteous urge to defend or promote my own views.

But I am holding myself back more lately from actually responding. I’m getting better at seeing criticisms as merely alternate views, views that are not necessarily any more correct than my views, and that my views are not necessarily correct, either. The world may be ultimately unknowable, and so all ideas may be inadequate. Thus, I can let go of conflicts I’d start by opposing others’ ideas.

I remember reading something about the Buddhist idea of “nonattachment to views,” that one did not need to hold onto certain ideas or attitudes, because the holding on made one suffer. But lately I’m also thinking that it’s not just that I’m attaching to views, but that views are attaching to me, and I don’t want to define myself by my views.

So what I’ve realized lately is that I am less interested in expressing my views in public. I still have ideas, opinions, judgments, etc., but by writing them in my journal rather than blogging about them, I am able to keep from attaching these views to me. I would prefer to be seen as someone who doesn’t have strong opinions — I’d prefer to be seen as just a person — rather than being seen as “that liberal” or “the radical teacher” or “that crazy son of a bitch.” (Maybe there is some wisdom in that old Disney line, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”)

But I do still express myself in my journals. And sometimes these journals are interesting. But I don’t want to publish things that I feel strongly about now, because I might not feel strongly about them later. If what I write is valuable in a timeless sense (and I hope it is, because I’m not interested in writing news or news analysis or in being the first person on the Internet to make a certain clever joke), then it’ll still be valuable weeks or years from now, and I can write down my ideas now and edit them later. Letting time lapse is a great way of knowing what it is that I really WANT to publish.

And even if an idea seems interesting to me once the urgency of its newness has passed, I don’t necessarily want to defend or promote the idea. I’m not trying to sell something here. The idea should speak for itself, and so I don’t really want these ideas written by a Then-Me to be associated with Now-Me.

Of course, that’s not fully possible, but one idea I’ve had is that the separation in time between the writing and the editing not only gives me the perspective I need in order to edit, it also creates separation for the reader. What I wrote 20 years ago is clearly not the product of who I am today. This allows me to edit and publish my nonfiction with a little bit of the distance that the fiction writers enjoy. I can treat my old writings as those of the Then-Me character (who doesn’t need to be as suave and wise as I’d like to think I am now!), and those writings don’t directly reflect on Now-Me.

If I were to write and publish as Now-Me (as I’m writing and publishing this post), I would feel a need to present myself as a reasonable, intelligent, well-spoken, professional sort of person. This presentation of self is basically the creation of a persona of me, not the full me. It’s basically impossible to reveal the fullness of my expression, and I’m not sure anyone really wants or needs that (for example, how interesting are most people’s self-presentations on various social-media platforms?). While some artists are praised for revealing themselves, for being “honest” or “raw,” I’m not sure most people can really live like that — I feel that I’d be less honest if I were publishing in real time). If I wrote my daily journals on a blog, I’d be self-censoring to a great extent. I gotta have privacy in order to be free, and then I can later edit my writings for the benefit of my readers — while protecting the professional career I need now to keep myself fed, warm, and writing!

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‘Boyhood’ and Nonfiction Across Time

Posted on July 23, 2014 | 8 comments
My notebooks: 20-plus years of texts writing in the present

My notebooks: 20-plus years of texts written in the present

Last night on “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart interviewed Richard Linklater about his new movie “Boyhood,” which was shot over a period of 12 years. Thus, the three-hour film contains footage of all the actors at yearly intervals.

In the interview, this passage caught my attention:

Jon Stewart: “Philosophically, did the act of being observed, for the younger actors, change their behavior? Were they conscious …”

Richard Linklater: “I don’t think so …[but] I guess it [the film] was pretty mind-blowing to them [the younger actors] when they finally saw it.”

JS: “What did they, what was their reaction?”

RL: “I gave a DVD to [actor] Ellar and I said, I suggest you watch this alone. Um, you know, build up some kind of relation with this crazy thing. And I didn’t hear from him for a while , so I was worried, but, ah, yeah, I think they’re still processing.”

JS: “Right. It’s an awful lot to take in.”

RL: “Yeah, yeah.”

JS: “What’s very interesting is, it’s hard not to watch it and process your own life within it, which is how art works that way.”

RL: “Yeah, you have to.”

Some of the movie’s reviewers have also responded to the images-through-time/time compression aspects of this movie. This article at Time concludes with:

We now know that cinema can depict the passage of time convincingly in a way we never thought possible before. Here time is real. We watch it accumulate on the actors’ faces and understand the toll it takes on adults and on mothers specifically.

Of course, this movie is not trying to prove that time is real; what this writer intends, I think, is that watching this movie prompts viewers to think about their own relationships to time.

I have yet to see “Boyhood,” but the method of filming a movie across so much time highlights some aspects of artistic creation that are otherwise easy to overlook. For example, Anthony Lane makes a point about how a plot-driven work can obscure character, which is revealed in

those episodes which seem dim and dull at the time, and only later shine in memory’s cave. A haircut, in short, matters more than a Quidditch match. We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process

Lane generalizes from the movie’s structure to claim that the meanings we find in our own lives — the stories we tell about what has mattered to us, what has shaped us — depend on “memory’s cave.” Lane also writes, “that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone,” which editing metaphor also implies that our memories may themselves be artistic products.

An individual’s memories, along with most of our culture’s stories (both fictional and non-), are structured as events from the past that are recounted in the (storyteller’s) present. We can’t tell a story — in fact, we may not even have a complete, satisfying story — if we don’t know how it turns out. Even if a writer starts off telling a story that she doesn’t know how to end, it will end before she finishes the book, and she would be able, before publishing the book, to go back and revise the early parts of the story to better fit the ending, once she knows the ending. (Stephen King writes — if my memory is accurate here —  in “On Writing” that it’s after the later drafts of his novels that he plays up the symbols that appear almost unintentionally in the first draft.)

But, of course, Linklater could not have gone back after Year 12 of shooting to film something from Year 2. He could re-edit what he had, yes, but he could not have gone back with the same actors. Even if, say, Linklater could have fabricated — because it IS fiction, and there are options such as stand-ins and CGI — a new Year 2 scene in Year 12, Linklater would himself be a different artist than he was earlier. As a review in The A.V. Club states it,

Because of how it was filmed, in piecemeal from 2002 until 2013, Boyhood exists in a constant present tense, providing a snapshot of recent history as it unfolds. Conversations about Obama and Bush were written and delivered without the hindsight the audience now possesses, as was an unexpectedly funny moment of Mason and his father discussing the possibility of more Star Wars sequels. (Ah, the innocence of 2008.) The movie also functions as a chronicle of its creator’s artistic evolution: The filmmaking becomes more confident and relaxed as Mason gets older, Linklater increasingly letting go of his plot aspirations in favor of a loose, conversational hang-out vibe. He, too, seems to blossom before our eyes, gestating incrementally into the director he is today.

What intrigues me about “Boyhood” is that its “constant present tense” describes how most of my nonfiction writing is done. Rather than telling memoir-type stories about my long-ago experiences, I mostly write journals about previous-day events and present-day impressions, and I write down my real-life observations and my thoughts within moments of having them in mind.

I don’t often tell stories about my past, but I do tell some, and I’ve become skeptical of telling these stories because the versions of these stories that exists in my memory doesn’t always match the versions that I wrote on paper soon after the event. For a few years, I warned my high school senior students not to drink when they go to college because I remembered seeing a person have his stomach pumped outside my dorm on the first Friday night of my freshman year of college. Not too long ago, I found the journal entry where I’d written about this, and it happened on the fourth, not the first, weekend of that year. This new setting doesn’t invalidate the story as an anti-example, but it bothered me that I’d remembered it wrong (and in a way that heightened the student’s foolishness, and thus, the anti-example lesson). It made me less confident in trusting my memory, particularly when I have these texts written more closely in time to the actual experiences.

In fact, I’ve also noticed that some of the things I remember from college didn’t get written down in my journals, and that what’s in the journals, I don’t always remember having lived through. It’s actually sorta disturbing to feel this disconnect between what I wrote (which reflected who I was) in the past, and how I now remember these things (as the person I am now). Maybe this disconnect is part of what Stewart and Linklater were referring to when they said that watching “Boyhood” required the actors to process their experience.

I value having my writings going back 20-plus years now, and I’m not so interested in present-day telling of stories of my past. I mean, sure, I can go back now and re-interpret my remembered experiences of years past, and this can be a diverting pastime, but it doesn’t draw my attention to the current moment, and how to live in the current moment, which seems to me to be the most interesting part of my writing.

I don’t want to overly define myself and my writing, but it’s valuable for me to understand who I am and what I do, and I think that what motivates most of my writing is a drive to understand — to form concepts of who I am, what I should do, how I should act toward others, why others do what they do, how I should think about my job, my writing, etc. These concepts, of course, I am willing to revise over time, which thinking and revising feel like the most interesting, even necessary (in the way that I get out-of-sorts when I don’t have enough time to write) processes of my being alive. Others may have a need to run marathons (maybe they do — it’s hard to understand others except by analogizing their needs to my own) while I feel I need to write, and specifically, to write about myself and my experiences.

So I’ve got these 20 years of texts, mostly journals and notes, and I used to wonder how I’d make these interesting to other readers. I felt that I needed to do that, if I were ever to become a Famous Author, and yet, I didn’t find myself naturally writing things that would appeal to others. What I had were my journal writings, and I thought for a long time about how these writings could be made interesting to others. I still don’t have a final answer, and now I don’t expect to find one, but I have come to think that there’s value in the texts written as they were at the times they were written.

Like Linklater’s movie, these texts present the problem of time: when I wrote about my college years, I was in college. I could write now about about my college times, but that’s 18 years after the events. So at the time of the journal-writing, I had lots of particulars but no distant perspective; now I have perspective, but that it’s the perspective of a 40-year-old.

And this is kind of a basic problem with writing (and it’s the basic problems that interest me the most): Everything one writes must be written from a perspective; writing is a product of a consciousness, and every consciousness is always already situated in time. I’m a better writer now than I was at age 20, but I’m no longer the person I was at age 20. I can see the changes when I read “between the lines,” as it were, in my texts written when I was different ages. I’m a different person. Yet, I’m not an entirely different person, which may be the point Lane was making in his quote above.

So if I want to be honest to the perspective I have now, I could write only about now, with the knowledge that whatever I say now will be superseded by what I write later. Or, maybe not — maybe one’s later nonfiction writings don’t supersede one’s past writings; maybe they’re just completely different and shouldn’t be compared?

That Linklater’s film was filmed over 12 years interests the commenters above because it uses real actors. If the film were made of, say, animated characters rather than human actors, the movie could’ve been made over 12 years without the characters’ appearances changing, as “The Simpsons” characters haven’t changed much over 25 years of TV episodes. (Although the characters were drawn differently in their first appearances on “The Tracy Ullman Show“.) Of course, what Linklater did is maybe not all that different from looking at how the actors of M*A*S*H change over 11 years of the show (which was weird, too, as the show was set during a war that took only 3 years).

And I suppose I could put together a document that contained my writings across the years, like an overview anthology of any author’s work, but then the main impact of such a document might be to show the change in the author’s voice over the years (which might overshadow any thematic concerns of the particular works anthologized). Linklater’s film may show the cinematic equivalent of that, but it also coheres as a single story. I’m still not sure how this would work with nonfiction.

But perhaps this problem requires a format of writing and/or of publishing that’s broader than any one book or other single-themed work.

P.S.: See related thoughts on writing in/through time here.

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I write for myself (mostly)

Posted on October 27, 2013 | Leave a comment

In an op-ed in The New York Times titled “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!”, Tim Kreider explains his frustration with being asked to do artwork for free:

So I’m writing this not only in the hope that everyone will cross me off the list of writers to hit up for free content but, more important, to make a plea to my younger colleagues. As an older, more accomplished, equally unsuccessful artist, I beseech you, don’t give it away. As a matter of principle. Do it for your colleagues, your fellow artists, because if we all consistently say no they might, eventually, take the hint. It shouldn’t be professionally or socially acceptable — it isn’t right — for people to tell us, over and over, that our vocation is worthless.

I also like this point:

The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it’s the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called “art” — writing, music, film, photography, illustration — to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads. Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again.

I don’t write to make a profit (though I also don’t write to help others make a profit, excepting whatever WordPress might make from the wonderfully few ads on this blog). I write because I want and need to write. I write journals each morning to clear from my mind the recent memories and ideas and reactions that accumulate there, and I write at this blog out of a need to tell, to share, to teach, to entertain. I struggled for a few years with feeling that I ought to be sharing the ideas that I came up with in my journal writing, and then I realized that the journals need to be kept secret. I’ve gotta have a private place where I can write without the fear of what a reader might think of me.

But I also want to share some writing, and so, two years ago, I started this blog and have since been figuring out what of my writings I want to share with others. That’s an ongoing question–I don’t want to repeat myself, and I want to test conceptual boundaries.

But I don’t always make my blog posts easy to read, and while I appreciate readers who appreciate (some of) what I’m trying to do, I don’t necessarily need readers. My writings might at times be described as “self-indulgent,” but this hardly feels like a criticism, since, yeah, it is exactly my self that I am indulging by doing all of my writing. As a younger writer, I wondered what parts of my writing I had that would interest other people; now I’m more interested in writing whatever interests me, and if that interests others, cool, but if not, eh.

In the transition phase between these two positions, I recall reading Stephen King’s “On Writing,” and thinking that King was lucky in that, somehow, what he wanted to write was also something that would sell. Maybe my perception isn’t what King would say; maybe he intended to write commercial works, and at any rate, his memoir clearly points out that his life was not without stress even once he began publishing.

But for me, the best things in my life — my relationships, my jobs, my abilities, and even my ideas — have come to me without me trying to force them. When I’ve tried to force things in my life, things haven’t gone so well. So now, too, I’m letting my writing come out and see what arrives.

And lately I’m understanding my writings as the written, shared interpretations of my experience, of my mind’s voice chatting. The texts I write can be seen as entities separate from my mind, but I’m looking at the connection between the two. I’m taking the perspective that my writings are how I react to and explain the experiences I have subjectively, and which can’t be shared directly with others. (I feel like there may be more to post on this at a later time.)

I know that some people do want to get paid for what they write, and I know that that’s a different purpose for writing than the one I’ve just described. It took me years to learn about myself that I would not be satisfied with writing only or mainly for commercial reasons. I make my money as a teacher, which itself is a satisfying, rewarding profession (and also gives me things to write about), and which allows me the freedom to write whatever I want. This freedom is more important to me than making money from my writing is.

So, perhaps Kreider is correct when he writes that “content” is devalued at this historical moment. (By the way, no one is a “slave,” to use Kreider’s term, if one has the choice not to do work.) But to see one’s art merely as for sale also seems a limited way to think of what art does for us.

UPDATE/SUMMARY (now that I’ve written all this, my point becomes clear to me): Writing for other people, like doing any work for them, means that one gives other what the others want. I want to write what I want, what I’m interested in, and for that freedom, I don’t need to be paid. Perhaps some writers do only what they themselves want to do, and some readers respond to that, but as a writer, I’m gonna do what I want to do whether others care or not — I see Emily Dickenson’s life of not-publishing as a legitimate life for a writer.

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Writer’s High: Are Writers Having Enough Fun?

Posted on July 2, 2013 | 2 comments

I’m gonna stake the claim: Writing, the act of doing the writing, is fun, and writers who aren’t having fun may be doing it wrong.

I find something enjoyable, fulfilling, satisfying — in other words, fun — about the act of letting my brain-words flow out onto the paper. Sometimes even editing and rewriting can be fun — fun not in the light sense of how eating ice cream is fun, but fun in the sense that being engaged in writing can completely absorb my attention and help me forget my worries (including any ego-worries about whether anyone will read what I write).

The reason I write is because I like to write. I write because it’s fun. Of course, not every single thing I write is fun; sometimes a person has to create a text to match an assignment or to fulfill a purpose in having an effect on a reader. But when I am writing on my own, I feel no need to write for anybody but myself.

Perhaps, Dear Reader, you’ve read enough of my posts to have already sensed that I had this priority. While I do appreciate knowing that readers have found what I wrote interesting or valuable, I don’t primarily write to appeal to readers. I don’t want to think about others when I write. (Richard Hugo writes: “Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing,
glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page.”) I want to think about what I find interesting. I want to be free to go wherever my writing and my thinking lead me. If that also interests others, OK.

And writing whatever I want to write is glorious. The things I write — journals, notes, blog posts, etc. — help clear my mind of extraneous concerns and concepts, but they also teach me new things — I have insights, epiphanies, that help me see the familiar world in new ways. It’s pretty terrific — it’s actually heart-poundingly exciting at times. I’ve had writing experiences (not yet with this blog post!) that feel transformative, transcendent, experiences that are beyond my normal daily mindset. Perhaps this is like “runner’s high” for those who use our minds rather than our legs.

I knew I liked to write but I got some insight into why after reading this essay by Alan Shapiro, in which he talks about the value of having one’s attention fully absorbed into one’s writing.

I recently posted a three-year-old piece I had written about fame, and I knew the desire for fame was juvenile. But since posting that, I’ve realized that fame may be actually the last thing I want if I just want to write. Publishing and promoting a book, giving readings, trying to make more money from writing — these are all things that actually take away time from my writing. If what I actually love is just the writing, I may not want to be famous, or even publish my work in any form more complex than this blog. Here are my words; I don’t need to have to do anything more.

It’s possible that some of my desire to be a Famous Writer comes from having taken literature classes where the teachers revered the Wise Writer and we read his (almost always it was “his”) writings that were canonical, revered (another attitude I had to get over was thinking that these earlier writers were special, were doing something truly Great. But there’s no need to think of them that way. They were just writers, putting words on paper, as I do. Some of their works are highly valued by others; some weren’t. I recall reading somewhere Whitman’s opinion that his frequently anthologized “O Captain! My Captain!” wasn’t his favorite work of his poems). In wanting fame, I must be partly thinking that if I become famous, my works would live on (to be assigned to students who’d rather be choosing their own reading materials).

But of course, worrying about one’s legacy is complete bullshit. What will I care whether people read my works when I’m dead — I’ll be dead! My time for writing is while I’m alive, and writing is one way in which I love spending the life-time that is allotted to me.

There’s a famous quote by Sam Johnson — “No man but a blockhead every wrote, except for money” — but this makes sense only if one doesn’t actually like writing. I love it enough to do it for free. I’m not saying I wouldn’t accept a hefty advance from any publishers reading this blog who find it brilliant beyond belief, but I’m saying that an advance is not my goal.

But I can’t control that. What I can do is use what free time I have to get the deepest satisfaction I can from writing, and that satisfaction comes from just doing it.

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At Mick Donald’s: Arm Tatts, Beardy McTankTop, the Pretenders, and me

Posted on June 27, 2013 | 1 comment

Today, at Oregon, Ill. McDonald’s Restaurant, 9:04 a.m., I sat down with a coffee and wrote stuff down, including:

The old white man I held the door for got out his change purse to get the two extra cents — it was “24,” not “22,” the clerk corrected his earlier pile of bills and change. A gray-haired lady at nearby table has butterfly tattoo on her upper left arm. Rod Stewart’s “if you want my body” plays on the overhead speaker. At another table, a dude with two kids has forearm tattoos, and also words tattooed on his neck.

Where I’m sitting, I get to see the drive-thru drivers [“Rocket man, burning through the tree tops, everyone” (maybe?)] post-food reception, as they’re throwing out garbage and/or peeling straws. [“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.”]

“The older I get, the better I was!!” [2 exclamation points included] states the back of a t-shirt worn by an adult (40-ish?) woman. Sleeves have been severed from the gray shirt, and lettering’s in red.

“I’m free this afternoon,” said one older lady to Butterfly Tatt, who’s just leaving a table of women drinking coffee. “Well, call if you go out for coffee,” said B.Tat., who was throwing out her current coffee cup.

Arm-Tatts has tattooes on his left calf and on both forearms, crossed Texas flags, it looks like, on left forearm. And now I’m nervous he’ll read this writing. [“Sweet dreams are made of these” is done, onto “ch-ch-ch-changes” from speaker broadcasting a local oldies station.] Arm Tatts points out, “there’s a dog! In the car” to his kids. I see what could be a Golden-doodle in the back seat of a lime green new-Beetle convertible.

“C’mon, baby, sit right,” Arm Tatts says to his little (3-year-old?) girl. They’re done eating but still sitting — waiting for someone to arrive?

A woman’s voice: “It’s nice to see the water-table level come up, but now it can stop? [her vocal inflection indicated interrogation, and she laughed.] Have a nice day, honey,” said cashier McKaren to a white dude in a Pioneer Seeds-logo golf-shirt. I’ve heard her called “Karen,” and since she works here, I shall append the “Mc” prefix to her name.

To some other customer, McKaren says, “Nothing, zero, zip. I didn’t move off the sofa. … ‘Top Chef.’ … I watched that … [I] didn’t budge. … pulled 10 weeds. No, no, no, no, I did not come to town.” [There were more words in that speech, but I put ellipses for the words I didn’t catch.]

Later, I think I heard Arm Tatts say to one of the kids, “Mommy’s coming.”

Now there’s a white-haired dude with a fixed-handle knife (bone- or antler-handle?) in his belt loop, in a sheath, but still, I’d probably not be able to react in time if he decided to stab me. That’s a fairly paranoid thought.

“You don’t like him? Oh, I love him,” said one of the coffee ladies. Another lady said “he ruined” something.

Arms, to his boy in high chair, “Eat!”

I guess I hadn’t realized before that there was a garbage can after the drive-thru. I don’t normally think about making space after getting food, though I can imagine the process that leads to that. Just as I wrote that sentence, a woman stopped at the can to throw away a straw wrapper crumpled in a napkin.

“…why he gives me a hard time …,” says one of the coffee ladies. Meanwhile, a ragged burrito hits the floor beneath baby-seat boy. “Minachur pinchur,” I hear from one of the coffee ladies. It sounded like that, but I’m assuming she’d prefer I’d spell it (if she knew I was transcribing it) as “miniature pinscher.” Then, two more of the ladies’ snippets come to my mind: “…it’s why they say don’t take a bath…” and “…people DO, but …”

Almost every one of the 30 or so times I’ve been to this McDonald’s in the last 4 years, I’ve seen a dude who consistently sports a beard and wears a tank-top, and I’ve named him Beardy McTanktop in my notes. (I mostly come here in the summer; I’m not sure if Beardy layers the tank-tops in cooler months.) I’ve told my wife about this guy, and she’s seen him — she can verify he exists — and she lately told me I should ask him just how often he eats McDonald’s. But this would perhaps be mocking him, and it would perhaps humanize him to me. He’s better as a character, a part of what we like to refer to as “Local Color.”

Anyway, I now note that Beardy was here when I got here, talking to some dudes in the parking lot, but now he is gone. And Mr. Bone Knife is leaving and I seem unstabbed.

McKaren told one of the coffee ladies that she dropped her phone, and Arms gets up and gets it for her (I think — I didn’t see the end of the interaction).

“Good seeing you again,” said Phone-Dropper lady. “You, too, you, too,” responded Tight Curls, whose permed hair seems her most descriptive characteristic. A lady with short, straight hair is still at the table, talking to Tight Curls.

A dude driving thru drive-thru had his head out his car window as he was leaning to his left, to put his wallet into his back-right pocket, maybe?

[Bob Seger: “Hollywood nights.” Sam and Dave: “Hold on. I’m comin.'”]

For a moment, the only ones here are the two remaining coffee ladies, Arm Tatts, and me, at our three nearby tables. I couldn’t tell if any customers were in the booths back by the restrooms. I start to wonder if this sitting at McD and writing, which seems so normal to me, isn’t kinda a strange thing to do — but before I can recall why it seems strange, I forget the reasoning I had just thought of.

[“If I was the king of the world, I tell you what I’d do … joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea.”]

Now there are two more people, plus McKaren’s taking her break at a table behind Arm Tatts. McKaren gets up at 4 a.m., she said.

[“A little ditty ’bout Jack and di-AH-ann” — I wrote most of that in anticipation, before the words were sung — “suckin’ on chilly dog, outside Taste-FREE-ease” — but I modified the “Diane” to three syllables after hearing how it’s sung.]

McKaren has her glasses on and her book open. Some white lady is talking to Karen about how hot it is. Karen still had her book open, but didn’t seem to mind the conversation.

“Oh! She hasn’t been home yet,” says T.C. (Tight Curls) into phone, as Straight Hair lady shakes a tilted cup, as if to get a piece of ice to chew. “Alright, honey, well, we’ll talk to you later, thanks. Buy,” said T.C. Perhaps “buy” was “bye” or “by”? We’ll never know.

“Where you wanna go? Wait, mommy’s coming. Where you wanna go, where?” says Arms to Lil’ Girl, who’s speaking so high-pitched, it’s like a whiny song, not unpleasant, like a sung note, or a wind-whine, almost.

Across the Route 2 road from Mick-Dee, a dude — white hat, belly, cuffed jeans — is carrying baskets of laundry from his car to a Laundromat . Again, THAT’s happening, it’s real, it exists.

[“Hold the line.” Guitar: whah-NAH-nah-NAH. “Love isn’t always on time.”]

A dude at a table to the west of us all has a yellow pad of paper on which he’s writing.

Arm Tatts is patient.

“…lunch time and we’re still here, talkin’ ’bout it,” T.C. said. “…Gary likes watchin’…,” I hear, but gauge that the context is NASCAR.

[“Make you, make you notice me,” sing Pretenders.]

Karen uses a clothes pin in her book, pinning some pages together. That reminds me of the summer, 20 years ago now, I worked at a different small-town McDonald’s, and I’d bring Thomas More’s “Utopia” to read on my breaks, but I never read much of it, and partly I was being pretentious, or amusing myself by incongruously bringing lit(erature) to my McJob (nobody uses that term as much these days as I recall it being used in the ’90s.).

[“Baby, hold on to me. Whatever will be, will be. The future is ours to see. Baby, hold on to me.”]

Arms to little girl: “SIT DOWN. SIT DOWN.” [Cap letters there represent the gritting of the teeth I heard.] Now, girl is pushing around the little boy in his high chair. Arms: “Want me to hit you?” He swats her playfully with a rolled-up piece of paper. Then, “nah-TAHN-ya” is the name I think I hear him yell as the girl goes barefoot toward the bathrooms. Arms to boy: “Don’t start.” To a woman who has just entered: “Jeez, you’ve been gone two hours. Did you find someone?”

[Instrumental: “T.S.O.P.”]

“I guess it’s time to go back to work,” said McKaren to some old white guy with a cane. Karen took off her glasses. She has three books with her? I don’t think I was aware, 20 years ago, that it was ironic to be reading “Utopia” at a McD, either because [a wasp lands on the outside of the window frame] McD isn’t a perfect place, or more literally — “utopia” as “no-place” — McD is no place. On the other hand, it’s easy to mock McD, and I don’t know that I’d now see the irony there. It’s irony based only on a subjective interpretation — but maybe all irony requires a perspective to be from?

A dude in a “Duck Dynasty” t-shirt comes in — “hey,” said t-shirt on its front. “Hey,” said the man himself to somebody else, “how ya doin’?”

And now it’s 10:30 a.m. — end of breakfast season at McDonald’s.

What I’m writing doesn’t have to have much to do with what’s before me — but I’m not lying. But, OK, I’m just telling what I see. But maybe it’s weird also that I’m just making a text — I mean, it seems normal to me. Others look at me a little, now and then. They may suspect I’m writing about them, but I’m polite enough not to stare, and also not to narrate real life (which narrating of things as they happen gets weird, not to mention socially straining).

Now the wasp’s inside — my comment from earlier has become foreshadowing! But I see a wasp outside still, too. [“I’d like to be under the sea in an octopus’s garden in the shade”]

And how my life outside doesn’t change much from doing this writing. I’m not gonna go sell it and become famous. (Though I could post some of it, as an editing experience.) Karen, to someone: “Yep, you’re good, you don’t have to worry.”

And to the same, or a different, customer, McKaren says, “Me neither — I don’t move without air conditioning.”

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Link: Notebooks of artists

Posted on January 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

blog_journal166coverA link to an older post at Brainpickings showing some artists’ notebooks. I love the sense of seeing inside the mental-workings of artists and writers. Here’s another link to some samples inside of notebooks. And here’s a post highlighting the oft-anthologized Joan Didion essay about keeping a notebook.

One of the links above mentions Moleskine notebooks, but for quality and price, I prefer keeping my journals in Clairefontaine (wonderfully heavy and smooth ruled paper, well-bound) notebooks, Miquelrius notebooks, Strathmore hard-bound and spiral-bound sketchbooks, or other sketchbooks (as pictured above). (By the way, I have no financial interest in any of these companies; I’m recommending names here to give specific information that took me a while to find, and because it’s fun to talk about my journal-writing tools). Years ago, I wrote on mass-market notebook paper, but it tends to bleed through (with the pens I prefer, the easy-gliding Pilot Precise V7 pens) and the thinner paper just doesn’t feel as good to the touch. I remember reading someplace that a writer should have tools that feel good, and so I do.

I write 3 or more pages of journals every morning, by hand, and this has been the basis of my creative process. Writing by hand actually makes the writing faster (which is good when I’m trying to transcribe the word-stream coming from my inner-mental-voice) than typing; my handwriting is not easy to read, but I can discern my intent through bad handwriting better than I can when I make typing mistakes. By hand, I may misspell a word or make a letter that looks a little off, but when I type, I sometimes press keys that don’t have any relation to sense.

I sometimes add stickers (as shown above) to my journals to amuse myself, and more rarely, I sketch something — the unruled paper of the sketchbooks makes drawing seem tempting at times.

Also, the photo at top of this post I took when I photographed all the pages of that journal for the purpose of making a digital backup. I don’t have the time or interest to type up all the handwriting, and I don’t have a scanner that works fast enough, so I get a music stand and a light source and I photograph the completed journal. I’m paranoid enough about natural disasters that I don’t want to lose my words, even if I lost my notebooks.

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