So I'm working on a book. It's a collection of essays called "Practical Classics: Rereading your Favorite Books from High School English Class" 50 essays, each one arguing for why a book from high school can be useful to you as a grownup. It'll be published by Prometheus Books and will be available in early 2013. I'm to hand the thing in on June 1.
I've finished 16 essays which means a) I'm 32% done and b) I have a heckuva lot left to go. And not much time left to do it.
Of course I could turn in the book late (my friend Katie actually said "You'd be the first writer to hand in a manuscript on time. Probably ever." But "Practical Classics" is my first book where every word is written by me. I hope to write about a dozen more before I die and I'd like to set good habbits now. The thought of being 60 and still approaching writing with the dread of an eighth grader completing an essay on "Lord of The Flies" horrifies me.
I know its going to take me a long time to feel comfortable producing words as regularly as brushing my teeth. I'd like to start now.
I fear this means a lot of long days, nights in and work on the weekends between now and June. I hate this idea. But I don't really see another way. At least from where I stand, about 16 miles from the finish line.
Between now and then, I'm slated to be a writer-in-residence at two separate programs--The Ragdale Colony in Lake Forrest, Illinois (for 1 week) and the Vermont Studio Center in just-outside-of-Beijing, Vermont (for 1 month). I leave for Ragdale tomorrow (!) and am scheduled to spent April in Vermont. I figure I'll see how well I do at Ragdale and decide on Vermont when I get home in February.
I am not someone who sees Middle-of-Nowhere as an artistic blessing. Not sleeping in my own bed, not going to the office each morning, being far from wife and friends, scares me. I know it allows me time to just focus on my writing. That's probably what scares me. I've never had that kind of mandate-from-fate to just write before.
But a blessing it is. There's about 3 perks you get when working on a book and this is one (the other two? Eh, bragging rights and, something I haven't found). It's up to me to take the opportunity and sprint.
So I won't be on the social media channels much for the rest of this month. I'll be here...
Wherein we measure the earliest hours of the day by the list of figures found on the inside flap of a Trapper Keeper.
4 smooth sheets to an Oversleep
2 cold hands to a FanOn
When speaking of stomachs, 1 LateSnack is said to equal 9 stone.
Laundry as obstacle is only considered such when it can be measured in cubic feet like a snow drift or landfill. Otherwise, please refer to as “a hillock of laundry”
Trips to the bathroom may be measured in feet (bare or socked), yards (hopefully not back or front) but only rods or gallons if you’re being really gross.
The number of pints input is directly proportional to number of Regrets (Chemical Symbol OhNo) output.
Good Intentions (Gis) decrease as Snooze Bars (Sbs) increase. A dozen or more Sbs is commonly referred to as a Pathetic.
8 hours = 1 Success
7 hours = 3/4 of an Adequate
6 hours = 1 basket case
5 hours = 1 bushel (i.e. 2) bakset cases.
In olden times a “Sundown” was equal to a null set of Work. All that has changed.
I am terribly sad today. Which on the face of it makes very little sense as I did not know Steve Jobs, enjoyed but did not worship his company's products. He wasn't even a very nice person and I have little patience or time for not-nice people.
But Steve Jobs represented much of what I value most in the world, much that I try my own life upon--innovation, creativity, usefulness and the power of dreams. He also was an incredible showman in an industry that believed that aesthetics, flair, hell even joy were afterthoughts. Computers were supposed to work, to do things, to solve problems. They were not supposed to be fun.
Heck with that, said Steve Jobs. He loved computers, loved technology, and saw their potential in all of our lives, not just those who went to MIT or could program. He wanted to share that love with all of us. Yes, he wanted to make a pile of money too but that never seemed to interest him that much. He wore the same clothes everyday, bought two giant fancy houses and never moved into them. He was worth nearly $8 billion but how many times did you read about his hot air balloon races, his antique car collections or other wild excesses?
Never. There weren't any. Mr. Jobs wanted everyone in the world to have great technology. Business is the fastest most efficient way to make that happen.
I'm an Apple enthusiast as I sumply haven't found a better alternative to living as a citizen of the 21st century than with the iPhone, iPod and Macbook Pro. Those are the tools of my trade. And yes, someone could design better ones someday. But they haven't and probably won't. As magnetic as Steve Jobs is, his competetitors simply don't believe that values like fun, humor, and beauty belong to technology. They are wrong.
My favorite Steve Jobs moment is the video above. it's 1984 and he is announcing the Apple Macintosh. He is not quite 30 and the computer he's about to unveil will change the world. But he's already done it once with its predeccesor, the Apple II.
He will flip our lives over at least 5 more times in the course of his, with the Laptop, iPod, Pixar, iPhone, and iPad. He will bring the world's attention to Northern California as the center of innovation and entrepreneurship. He will also do it after getting booted out of Apple then returning, as perhaps the greatest second chapter in the history of American business.
And yet here, all of that is yet to come. He is young, handsome, a bit cocky and yet at heart, still a nerd. The "Chariots of Fire" theme he used was 2 year past its sell date by then. And yet it works as it implied speed, triumph, going for it, despite obstacles, despite it seeming crazy. It means tomorrow, as F. Scott Fitzgerald called tomorrow.
"Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms faurther..."
Fitzgerald also said most American lives have no second acts. He died in his early 40s having drunk himself into the grave, convinced he was a failure. Steve Jobs spent the last 10 years of life with a terrible illnes and pushed on anyway. He figured he had one of two more revolutions left in him so why not? And then he changed the world with the iPhone. And again with the iPad.
Steve Jobs had a second act, then a third then several more. He was lucky enough to know what he wanted to do early in life and he then pushed it and pushed it again for all it was worth. Most of us are not so lucky and fall into rather than know our life's mission. But when we find it, go for it, Mr. Jobs said. Run faster, stretch out your arms further.
Your heart and your intuition already know what you are supposed to become.
Yesterday and today, there are flowers, candles, tributes being left in front of Apple Stores around the world. One I saw had a cardboard sign, attached to a storebought boquet. The sign read "Keep Thinking Different".
For a CEO, a businessman. Normally we see these commemorations for artists and heads of state. But it would be wrong to see this as strange.
We do this for our heroes. For people that inspire us to be more than we thought we could. Who saw the world as bigger than we did.
When Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, his funeral procession drove through the streets of Brooklyn where he was born. A group of construction workers stopped working, removed their hard hats and waved. "Goodbye Lenny", they said.
Maybe they said it because they thought Bernstein one of them. Maybe they were classical music fans or maybe Bernstein had converted them. I think they related to him, as the son of small businessmen who accomplished something great. But they thought him one of their own because he shared the thing he created. He didn't horde away the thing he loved. He devoted his life to making it more fun, to filling it with joy.
Steve Jobs did that with wires and microchips. He helped the entire world believe that the future was coming, maybe already here and it would be wondrous, exciting, creative. Fun.
And it belong to each of us. Each of us with dreams and the willingness to chase them. Chase them fast.
I heard the news of Steve Jobs's passing and sat down to write. Its the only kind of creativity I know. And I do not have time to waste not working at it.
That you for our future, Mr.Jobs. We will do our best with it.
Location isn't usually important in film comedies the way say, Los Angels is vital to dramas like Chinatown or Chicago to action-thrillers like The Fugitive. Comedies trade in laughs and laughs come from people and situations and animals with digestive ailments. Places don't crack us up.
Then why do I never forget that one of my favorite comedies--Trading Places (1983)--takes place in Philadelphia? We can thank its unforgettable opening flipbook of the city's icons next to images of ordinary people going to work and the city's poor not having any. The montage is set to Mozart's 'Overture to the Mariage of Figarro,' which we've heard a million times but never quite like this--as an argument for the artistry of comedy rather than an affirmation of its frivolity. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter. But in Trading Places, Director John Landis and his composer (the legendary Elmer Bernstein) use Mozart as a shorthand reminder that comedies need not make you dumber either.
The plot of Trading Places has been called a modern update of Mark Twain's "Prince and the Pauper." A rich stuffed shirt (Dan Aykroyd) and a street hustler (Eddie Murphy) are made to switch social places by Ackroyd's conniving uncles who like to conduct social experiments of such things. When the two uncover the uncles' sneaky plan to game the commodities market, they strike first, beating them at their own scam and getting rich in the process. It being the early 1980s, defeating old, inherited money through fleet footed stock trading was seen as the rebellion of youth, blows against the empire, a victory for tweed over eh, tweed.
Trading Places did great with critics and has endured mostly because its a fantastic silly comedy (SNL veterans Ackroyd and Murphy and a sequence with a horny gorilla made sure of that) that doesn't scrimp on the fundamentals. The supporting cast bench--Jamie Lee Curtis, Ralph Bellmany, Don Ameche and Denholm Elliott--is embarrassingly deep. The script has nary a wasted line. And hiring Elmer Bernstein to score a summer comedy is like hiring Steve Jobs to oversee the launch of a lemonade stand.
It's in his choice of Mozart to open the film that we see that Landis is up to more than talent overkill. Once you've seen the film (and have a modest knowledge of opera) the choice of 'Overture' is a cheap gold star for the viewer. 'Figarro' is a comic morality play about a servant outwitting an aristocrat, a nod at Trading Places's gentle theme of money not equalling intelligence or even refinement. But one level deeper is Landis's bigger goal: an unsmiling reminder that comedy has as gloried a cultural history as classical music and the grandparents of Trading Places are not pratfall artists and music hall crass but great cinematic comedians like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch from a generation before.
Of John Landis's first 10 films (1977-1988) 6 can fairly be called classics. One (National Lampoon's Animal House) is in the Library of Congress, an honor also held by his contemporary Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day). Throw in the best work of Ivan Reitman from that time (Stripes, Ghostbusters) and you have a body of comedy movies that not only crack you up but used legendary composers who created memorable themes, made room for 40-year veterans in the supporting cast and had stars that later were nominated for Oscars and had 20-30-year careers ahead of them.
This was broad comedy given the time, care and resources of high art. I've no idea if in hindsight we'll regard contemporary laugh factories like the work of Judd Apatow and the Frat Pack the same. I tend to doubt it.
Musically speaking Trading Places starts big with an iconic Mozart piece. Afterward, Bernstein's score is restrained and sober. There's no lining the atmosphere with pop songs that would dominate the later years of the decade and few memorable musical passages beyond the opening. Mozart is what we're supposed to remember, its inclusion a wink without a smile. Its as though opening a comedy with more than enough fart jokes and gratuitious nudity with the ultimate icon of high culture was a way of saying "Pay attention. What we're doing here has the same craftmansmenship and dedication as when young Wolfgang sat down at the piano."
I'm a big fan of the What I Read series at The Atlantic Wire (this weeks guest is Moby). Since I don't know if I'll ever be famous enough to be asked to write my own, I decided to up and do it anyway.
What I Read:
I've always had a weird relationship with current events and topicality. In theory I know that being well informed about what the world is up to is both good conversation lubricant and smart planning in the case of a military coup. In practice, keeping up with the news gives me a headache. We toss information over our shoulder so quickly that the constant falling-in-love-with-then-breaking-up-with stories leaves me craving permanence, substance, stillness instead of hurry. Our age seems to view being well informed as both competitve sport and the steroids you need to compete in it. If you've ever constantly hit refresh at say the Huffington Post just to feed your outrage and later puke that outrage over your dinner table companions, you know what I mean.
So I'm okay with looking confused when a neighbor clicks their tongue at me, says "Debt Ceiling" and expects a follow-up. I probably don't have one. Or at least not one that adds anything to their lives.
Maybe it seems wrong then that I spend much of my day on Twitter (I've got 65,000 followers who now expect me to show up and share something) which is a steady flicker of here-then-gone messages. I like the format but rarely use it for news or comments on current events. Instead my daily tweeted conversation is a gumbo of factoids, quips and journalism on issues on bigger picture issues (I'm weak in the presence of famous-artist profiles and anything that contains "The Future Of" in the headline). I find most of them on a quick sweep on my iPad through Flipboard, Zite, Byliner (where I used to work), Reddit and my Google Reader. I've got them all set to feed me stories on music, books, entertainment, business and food, my off-the-shelf areas of interest.
I've still got a thing for print magazines as they are safer to take in the bathtub (where I do much of my weekend reading) and lighter in the knapsack. My wife and I share a subscription to the New Yorker and I also get Bomb, The Atlantic and Lapham's Quarterly. Usually while reading, I'll dog ear corners of stories and oddities I intend to tweet later. Without fail, I turn first to the table of contents and make quick decisions about what I'll read and won't. I know this approach seems to throw water over serendipity. I also know that people who believe ardently in serendipity do not suffer paralysis from not knowing what to do next. Being someone who enjoyed feeling lost about as much as I enjoy feeling infirmed, I like to set up my reading slot machines in favor of the house.
I am the house. I place bets on sure things.
For my kind of non-topical timeless reading, Instapaper, Longreads and Longform have been godsends. As have Arts Journal, FARK, and AL Daily. I know aggregation is supposed to be some sort of enemy of quality journalism but I wouldn't know most quality journalism existed without it.
My ritual is to use a half-dozen aggregation tools to assemble a quick list of topics that interest me (books, movies, music, art, American History, product design, the 1980s), sort what they feed me into "do I tweet this?" or "would I like to read this?" or both. The reading stuff goes to Instapaper where I then either print it to read at night or read directly from my iPad. If I'm no longer interested in an article when that time comes or can't remember why I saved it, I hit delete.
I'm working on a book now all about books so a fair about of my book reading happens during office hours, typically in the afternoon. A friend of mine mentioned once that for pleasure, he likes to read one novel, one nonfiction book and one graphic novel at once. I'm trying this strategy, usually before bed, and liking it.
I've accepted that, at base, I'm a common whore for information, factoids, learning things. And I'm terribly prone to oversharing. I know we are going to miss almost everything. But I love that the era we live in makes the search so much fun, so unceasingly rewarding, and to the benefit of getting smarter but accepting how little we know at the same time.
HI, I'M KEVIN SMOKLER. I'm a writer and public speaker based in San Francisco. I've been tapping out thoughts online since 2001 (RSS feed). Here's the easiest way to get in touch with me.
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles edited and compiled by Jeff Martin. Essay by me on page 45.
