Here are some powerful ideas that can help us work and live with more vitality, clarity, and purpose:
1. On the door frame outside his workroom, [writer William Styron] tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it:
“Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
2. “A task left undone remains undone in two places - at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. They siphon off a little more of your personal power every time you delay. No need to be a perfectionist, that’s debilitating in an imperfect world, but it’s good to be a ‘completionist’. If you start it, finish it - or forget it.”
– Brahma Kumaris, quote courtesy of David Allen
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
A Note About Balance
Here is an email I got today from David Allen, who thinks deeply about Getting Things Done. See davidco.com
He says this:
[Balance is tough enough when you are aware of all your goals, values, projects, and commitments. But it’s impossible if you don’t revisit the whole game consistently.
"The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world." – James Fenimore Cooper]
So this reminds us to spend an hour or two each week--I do it on Friday or Saturday mornings usually--reviewing all of our projects.
This time is not spent DOING the projects. It is spent going over the project list, adding to or subtracting from the list, of what is important and what needs to get done in the short term, medium term, and long term. It is spent thinking about the discrete parts of the project and what are the Next Steps.
Keep a notepad, virtual or otherwise, close by. Your mind will remind of things undone. You can also keep a list of the items you can do in two minutes or less. And you can schedule a time to tackle a batch of those. It can be SO SATISFYING to complete quickly some of those tasks. Set a timer. See if you can finish some of them in two minutes. You will become more aware of what can be done quickly and what cannot. You will see how you may or may not misjudge time.
In the end, you will get more accomplished of what you want to accomplish.
If you have other ideas about how to get things done, share them with comments here, in class or with your small group.
BH
He says this:
[Balance is tough enough when you are aware of all your goals, values, projects, and commitments. But it’s impossible if you don’t revisit the whole game consistently.
"The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world." – James Fenimore Cooper]
So this reminds us to spend an hour or two each week--I do it on Friday or Saturday mornings usually--reviewing all of our projects.
This time is not spent DOING the projects. It is spent going over the project list, adding to or subtracting from the list, of what is important and what needs to get done in the short term, medium term, and long term. It is spent thinking about the discrete parts of the project and what are the Next Steps.
Keep a notepad, virtual or otherwise, close by. Your mind will remind of things undone. You can also keep a list of the items you can do in two minutes or less. And you can schedule a time to tackle a batch of those. It can be SO SATISFYING to complete quickly some of those tasks. Set a timer. See if you can finish some of them in two minutes. You will become more aware of what can be done quickly and what cannot. You will see how you may or may not misjudge time.
In the end, you will get more accomplished of what you want to accomplish.
If you have other ideas about how to get things done, share them with comments here, in class or with your small group.
BH
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Profile of a Man Near This Life's End
This Feb. 28, 2009 narrative profile in the Los Angeles Times by Thomas Curwen has many remarkable qualities. Those of you serious about reporting and writing profiles will read it and study it. You may not be able to access the story now because it has been archived and you need to register for LAT, subscribe or pay for the story. Or you probably can access it through a Mizzou database.
In the meantime, you can read the top here:
HEADLINE:
Waiting for death, alone and unafraid
Edwin Shneidman knows what the end will be: You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops.
By Thomas Curwen
February 28, 2009
The silence of night never lasts long. It ends somewhere in the 5 o'clock hour with the purring of the heater and distant strains of Sam Cooke.
Edwin Shneidman looks at the clock -- an hour and a half since turning off the TV and closing his eyes.
"Mrs. Wiggles," he shouts. He knows that that's not her name, but he likes the joke.
Sitting in another room, Pauline Dupuy turns down the CD player and puts her Bible and crossword aside. She stands and walks down the hall into his room.
"My knee hurts."
"Would you like a pain pill?"
"Yes."
"Tramadol or Vicodin?"
"I don't care."
He lies on the side of the bed, sleepy, unshaven, his hair mussed. He never asked to live to be 90, to see the breadth of his life diminished, the allure of the world fallen further out of reach. He is ready to die.
All his life he has studied this moment -- from those who killed themselves and those who tried, from philosophers and colleagues, students and intimates -- and its lessons hold no real surprise.
Today will be the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow, every day a waiting and a hoping for a good death, a death without suffering.
He lives alone but for the company of caregivers in the house that he and his wife bought more than 50 years ago, alone to consider the meaning of his life and the niche he has secured for himself in the memory of the world.
"Good morning."
He looks up. Vernette Elijio greets him with a smile and rubs the top of his head. It's 7 a.m., the changing of the guard. She will be with him for the next 12 hours. Dressed in a long white sleep shirt, he looks like a character from Dickens. She helps him on with his plaid robe, and he shuffles to the chair at the side of the bed.
In the meantime, you can read the top here:
HEADLINE:
Waiting for death, alone and unafraid
Edwin Shneidman knows what the end will be: You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops.
By Thomas Curwen
February 28, 2009
The silence of night never lasts long. It ends somewhere in the 5 o'clock hour with the purring of the heater and distant strains of Sam Cooke.
Edwin Shneidman looks at the clock -- an hour and a half since turning off the TV and closing his eyes.
"Mrs. Wiggles," he shouts. He knows that that's not her name, but he likes the joke.
Sitting in another room, Pauline Dupuy turns down the CD player and puts her Bible and crossword aside. She stands and walks down the hall into his room.
"My knee hurts."
"Would you like a pain pill?"
"Yes."
"Tramadol or Vicodin?"
"I don't care."
He lies on the side of the bed, sleepy, unshaven, his hair mussed. He never asked to live to be 90, to see the breadth of his life diminished, the allure of the world fallen further out of reach. He is ready to die.
All his life he has studied this moment -- from those who killed themselves and those who tried, from philosophers and colleagues, students and intimates -- and its lessons hold no real surprise.
Today will be the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow, every day a waiting and a hoping for a good death, a death without suffering.
He lives alone but for the company of caregivers in the house that he and his wife bought more than 50 years ago, alone to consider the meaning of his life and the niche he has secured for himself in the memory of the world.
"Good morning."
He looks up. Vernette Elijio greets him with a smile and rubs the top of his head. It's 7 a.m., the changing of the guard. She will be with him for the next 12 hours. Dressed in a long white sleep shirt, he looks like a character from Dickens. She helps him on with his plaid robe, and he shuffles to the chair at the side of the bed.
Monday, March 9, 2009
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Chapter excerpt from The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb (P 327)
I entered my consulting-room and found a gentleman seated by the table. He was quietly dressed in a suit of heather tweed, with a soft cloth cap which he had laid down upon my books. Round one of his hands he had a handkerchief wrapped, which was mottled all over the bloodstains. He was young, not more than five-and-twenty, I should say, with a strong, masculine face; but he was exceedingly pale and gave me the impression of a man who was suffering from some strong agitation, which it took all his strength of mind to control.
"I am sorry to knock you up so early, Doctor," said he, "but I have had a very serious accident during the night. I came in by train this morning, and on inquiring at Paddington as to where I might find a doctor, a worthy fellow very kindly escorted me here. I gave the maid a card, but I see that she has left it upon the side-table."
I took it up and glanced at it. "Mr. Victor Hatherley, hydraulic engineer, 16A, Victoria Street (3d floor)." That was the name, style, and abode of my morning visitor. "I regret that I have kept you waiting," said I, sitting down in my library-chair. "You are fresh from a night journey, I understand, which is in itself a monotonous occupation."
"Oh, my night could not be called monotonous," said he, and laughed. He laughed very heartily, with a high, ringing note, leaning back in his chair and shaking his sides. All my medical instincts rose up against that laugh.
"Stop it!" I cried; "pull yourself together!" and I poured out some water from a carafe.
It was useless, however. He was off in one of those hysterical outbursts which come upon a strong nature when some great crisis is over and gone. Presently he came to himself once more, very weary and pale-looking.
"I have been making a fool of myself," he gasped.
"Not at all. Drink this." I dashed some brandy into the water, and the colour began to come back to his bloodless cheeks.
"That's better!" said he. "And now, Doctor, perhaps you would kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to be."
He unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even my hardened nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four protruding fingers and a horrid red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or torn right out from the roots.
"Good heavens!" I cried, "this is a terrible injury. It must have bled considerably."
Chapter excerpt from The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb (P 327)
I entered my consulting-room and found a gentleman seated by the table. He was quietly dressed in a suit of heather tweed, with a soft cloth cap which he had laid down upon my books. Round one of his hands he had a handkerchief wrapped, which was mottled all over the bloodstains. He was young, not more than five-and-twenty, I should say, with a strong, masculine face; but he was exceedingly pale and gave me the impression of a man who was suffering from some strong agitation, which it took all his strength of mind to control.
"I am sorry to knock you up so early, Doctor," said he, "but I have had a very serious accident during the night. I came in by train this morning, and on inquiring at Paddington as to where I might find a doctor, a worthy fellow very kindly escorted me here. I gave the maid a card, but I see that she has left it upon the side-table."
I took it up and glanced at it. "Mr. Victor Hatherley, hydraulic engineer, 16A, Victoria Street (3d floor)." That was the name, style, and abode of my morning visitor. "I regret that I have kept you waiting," said I, sitting down in my library-chair. "You are fresh from a night journey, I understand, which is in itself a monotonous occupation."
"Oh, my night could not be called monotonous," said he, and laughed. He laughed very heartily, with a high, ringing note, leaning back in his chair and shaking his sides. All my medical instincts rose up against that laugh.
"Stop it!" I cried; "pull yourself together!" and I poured out some water from a carafe.
It was useless, however. He was off in one of those hysterical outbursts which come upon a strong nature when some great crisis is over and gone. Presently he came to himself once more, very weary and pale-looking.
"I have been making a fool of myself," he gasped.
"Not at all. Drink this." I dashed some brandy into the water, and the colour began to come back to his bloodless cheeks.
"That's better!" said he. "And now, Doctor, perhaps you would kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to be."
He unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even my hardened nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four protruding fingers and a horrid red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or torn right out from the roots.
"Good heavens!" I cried, "this is a terrible injury. It must have bled considerably."
Writing about Writers: Flannery O'Connor
By Joy Williams
FLANNERY A Life of Flannery O'Connor. By Brad Gooch. Illustrated. 448 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.
In Sunday, March 1, 2009, NYT Book Review, writer Joy Williams writes about the new book on the quirky and amazing Flannery O'Connor.
Here is the lead. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After Kennedy’s assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist.
Here is the ending. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. When asked why she wrote, she replied, “Because I’m good at it.” She found sickness “more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” She was buried the day after she died. Robert Giroux sent a copy of “Wise Blood” to Evelyn Waugh hoping for a blurb, and Waugh replied, “The best I can say is: ‘If this really is the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ ” One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions. She was an anagogical writer, of that there is no doubt. The civil rights movement interested her not at all. When she received a request to stage one of her stories, she wrote, “The only thing I would positively object to would be somebody turning one of my colored idiots into a hero.” Her kinship, she believed, was with Hawthorne. She also described herself as being “13th-century.” She is reported to have had beautiful blue eyes.
FLANNERY A Life of Flannery O'Connor. By Brad Gooch. Illustrated. 448 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.
In Sunday, March 1, 2009, NYT Book Review, writer Joy Williams writes about the new book on the quirky and amazing Flannery O'Connor.
Here is the lead. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After Kennedy’s assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist.
Here is the ending. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. When asked why she wrote, she replied, “Because I’m good at it.” She found sickness “more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” She was buried the day after she died. Robert Giroux sent a copy of “Wise Blood” to Evelyn Waugh hoping for a blurb, and Waugh replied, “The best I can say is: ‘If this really is the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ ” One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions. She was an anagogical writer, of that there is no doubt. The civil rights movement interested her not at all. When she received a request to stage one of her stories, she wrote, “The only thing I would positively object to would be somebody turning one of my colored idiots into a hero.” Her kinship, she believed, was with Hawthorne. She also described herself as being “13th-century.” She is reported to have had beautiful blue eyes.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
CheckPoints
By John McPhee
The New Yorker (p. 56)
February 9, 2009
(Excerpt)
ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s experiences with fact-checking. Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer’s called “The Curve of Binding Energy” received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.” The writer describes a paragraph from his sixty-thousand-word piece—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might do with it—which presented Sara with a certain degree of difficulty. Physicist John A. Wheeler had told the writer about a Japanese weapon balloon landing on a nuclear reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works, in the winter of 1944 or 45. If Wheeler’s story were true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. Sara’s telephone calls ricocheted all over the U.S. Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t know about it. Sara finally located a site manager who confirmed that the balloon had landed on a high-tension line carrying power to the reactor. The fix was made and the piece ran. Sometimes a mistake is introduced during the checking process. This has happened to the writer only once—and nearly thirty years ago. The piece, called “Basin and Range,” was the first in a series of long pieces on geology. Mentions current fact-checker Joshua Hersh. Sara, who checked the “Basin” piece, told the writer that he was wrong about the Adriatic Plate, that it is not moving north but southwest. Eldridge Moores had apparently confirmed it. After the piece was published, the writer called Moores, who said that it was in fact the Aegean Plate, not the Adriatic, that was moving southwest. Any error is everlasting. Mentions Time and Atlantic. After an error gets into The New Yorker, heat-seeking missiles rise off the earth and home in on the author, the fact-checker, and the editor. In the comfortable knowledge that the fact-checking department is going to sweep up behind him, the writer likes to guess at certain names and numbers early on. Mentions Willy Bemis and the Illinois River. Describes the process of fact-checking a piece the writer wrote in 2003 about tracing John and Henry Thoreau’s upstream journey. Mentions Henry Moore’s “Oval with Points.” The writer describes checking parts of a book he was writing in 2002. The task took him three months. Mentions William Penn, Cotton Mather, and Joseph Seccombe.
The New Yorker (p. 56)
February 9, 2009
(Excerpt)
ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s experiences with fact-checking. Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer’s called “The Curve of Binding Energy” received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.” The writer describes a paragraph from his sixty-thousand-word piece—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might do with it—which presented Sara with a certain degree of difficulty. Physicist John A. Wheeler had told the writer about a Japanese weapon balloon landing on a nuclear reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works, in the winter of 1944 or 45. If Wheeler’s story were true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. Sara’s telephone calls ricocheted all over the U.S. Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t know about it. Sara finally located a site manager who confirmed that the balloon had landed on a high-tension line carrying power to the reactor. The fix was made and the piece ran. Sometimes a mistake is introduced during the checking process. This has happened to the writer only once—and nearly thirty years ago. The piece, called “Basin and Range,” was the first in a series of long pieces on geology. Mentions current fact-checker Joshua Hersh. Sara, who checked the “Basin” piece, told the writer that he was wrong about the Adriatic Plate, that it is not moving north but southwest. Eldridge Moores had apparently confirmed it. After the piece was published, the writer called Moores, who said that it was in fact the Aegean Plate, not the Adriatic, that was moving southwest. Any error is everlasting. Mentions Time and Atlantic. After an error gets into The New Yorker, heat-seeking missiles rise off the earth and home in on the author, the fact-checker, and the editor. In the comfortable knowledge that the fact-checking department is going to sweep up behind him, the writer likes to guess at certain names and numbers early on. Mentions Willy Bemis and the Illinois River. Describes the process of fact-checking a piece the writer wrote in 2003 about tracing John and Henry Thoreau’s upstream journey. Mentions Henry Moore’s “Oval with Points.” The writer describes checking parts of a book he was writing in 2002. The task took him three months. Mentions William Penn, Cotton Mather, and Joseph Seccombe.
The Power of an Artist's Notebook, Memories
Meditating on modernism
By Pierre Bonnard
The Economist
February 7, 2009
(Excerpt)
Much of the work on view was produced after 1926, when Bonnard and his model, muse and wife, Marthe, moved into "Le Bosguet," an unimposing villa above Cannes. But the many bowls and baskets of luscious-looking peaches and cherries, the plates of cakes and the roses in jugs are not the careful arrangements one would expect a still-life artist to create. The reason for this is that Bonnard did not paint from life. What we see are his memories. To help him recall images that captivated him, the artist always carried a small pocket diary. On its ruled pages he made pencil sketches. Whether his inspiration was a person, an animal, plants or the corner of a room, though, light was his main prey. To help him capture it, he jotted down notes about weather and colours. In one of the four notebooks on display, for example, the words pluvieux froid (rainy, cold) are scrawled across the top of a page.
There was nothing of the romantic arists in a garret about Bonnard. He appeared to live a bourgeois life. His studio was a smallish upstairs bedroom; it didn't even have an easel. He would just cut off lengths of canvas and tack them to the wall. When a picture was finished, he cropped off any remaining blank canvas.
By Pierre Bonnard
The Economist
February 7, 2009
(Excerpt)
Much of the work on view was produced after 1926, when Bonnard and his model, muse and wife, Marthe, moved into "Le Bosguet," an unimposing villa above Cannes. But the many bowls and baskets of luscious-looking peaches and cherries, the plates of cakes and the roses in jugs are not the careful arrangements one would expect a still-life artist to create. The reason for this is that Bonnard did not paint from life. What we see are his memories. To help him recall images that captivated him, the artist always carried a small pocket diary. On its ruled pages he made pencil sketches. Whether his inspiration was a person, an animal, plants or the corner of a room, though, light was his main prey. To help him capture it, he jotted down notes about weather and colours. In one of the four notebooks on display, for example, the words pluvieux froid (rainy, cold) are scrawled across the top of a page.
There was nothing of the romantic arists in a garret about Bonnard. He appeared to live a bourgeois life. His studio was a smallish upstairs bedroom; it didn't even have an easel. He would just cut off lengths of canvas and tack them to the wall. When a picture was finished, he cropped off any remaining blank canvas.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Michael Lewis as Your Reporting and Writing Teacher
Cover story in NYT Sunday Magazine by Michael Lewis can teach you much, including about story structure and story selection. In the same way that Lewis looked at the anonymous left tackle from Ole Miss, he now considers NBA player Shane Battier, the undervalued star of the Houston Rockets and former stand-out at Duke University.
BH
BH
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