A well-named character is important in fiction. We remember Babbitt not only because of what Sinclair Lewis wrote about him, but because George Babbitt is the perfect name for the character.
Some novelists make up names that are right for the character but also funny, outrageous. Charles Dickens was a master of this. For the perplexing complexity of our time, the contemporary master is acknowledged to be Thomas Pynchon, though Kurt Vonnegut played a little, Don DeLillo has indulged, particularly in one of his least loved novels, Ratner's Star (Elux Troxl, Mimsy Mope Grimmer, Desilu Espy and the punning U.F.O.Schwarz and Bhang Pao) as has Jonathan Lethem in Chronic City.
But as Philip Roth famously wrote, nobody could make up Richard Nixon, and reality is currently impinging on this wonderland of names. What fictionist could come up with a chair of the Republican National Commitee named Reince Priebus? Or the head of SpaceX, the billionaire Elon Musk? (Well, Elux Troxl is awfully close.) Or another billionaire, who funds green energy initiatives, an Indian businessman named Ratan Tata?
I'm not saying we should laugh at those names (not that anyone is going to laugh at the name of a billionaire.) But they do seem like the kind of names these outrageous fictionists would invent. Now they don't have to. I'm not sure I'm reassured by that.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Today's Prayer
"It occurred to me that lots of people have to sit through meetings every day, and I said a prayer for them as you would for those lost at sea."
Tim Kreider, one of many sadly funny lines in an illuminating testimony in the NYTimes to the cognitive dissonance of writing v. publishing a book in this new Youtubian Twitterverse.
Tim Kreider, one of many sadly funny lines in an illuminating testimony in the NYTimes to the cognitive dissonance of writing v. publishing a book in this new Youtubian Twitterverse.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
What's the Story?
When I grow up I still want to be a novelist. And a playwright. But the kind of storytelling I've mostly done--journalistic storytelling-- remains a satisfying form. I've realized that in a few ways recently.
One of the primary ways we think we know things is through the findings of science. While much of that is accurate in a practical sense, a lot of it pretends to be sure of more than it actually can be sure of. This is most evident in the lesser sciences such as economics and psychology, at least as they are practiced today. Through narrow and dubiously designed experiments, psychologists pretend to be able to say all sorts of things about human behavior, human nature and how brains work. These assertions get these folks tenured positions, books and TV interviews in which they purport to know a lot more than they do. Their arrogance is amazing. Especially since they must ignore the limitations of their experiments that have been defined repeatedly, most recently in a book I've just started reading by Jerome Kagan, called Psychology's Ghosts.
But I don't need to refer to this thoughtful and eminent authority--these limitations are maddeningly clear to me. For one thing, they purport to say universal things based on "experiments" involving the behaviors and responses of mostly North American university undergraduates who volunteer to be subjects, perhaps for small amounts of money. But there are broader objections. I think especially of a panel discussion in Seattle I believe, but carried on C-Span, involving Jane Jacobs, who to my mind was one of the great minds of the 20th century, upon the publication of her final and prophetic book, Dark Age Ahead. The friendly host made an offhand comment, saying something to the effect that although much of her evidence was "anecdotal," it was nevertheless intriguing. It was not long before he was sorry he'd said it. She honed in on this point with great precision.
Because it's a common charge: the only true evidence is scientific observation, especially from experiment, or statistical. Other sources such as "anecdotal" or self-reporting (introspective) is less reliable. Jane Jacobs strongly disagreed, and she was so eloquent that I went back and transcribed what she said:
“Our science began comparing two things to each other, [to find things like] the temperature needed to melt water. That was science for centuries. It’s easy to compare two things, it’s much more difficult to compare 3 or more. It’s “bivariant comparison”—it's very reductive, you have to leave out everything but 2 things, and real life is not like that. Real life attaches anything to everything else. We have begun to learn that in biology...In due course along came ‘disorganized complexity,’ like insurance actuarial tables, or marks a child gets in school—anything that is explained in a graph with a bell shape, or seems to be explained by statistics. Things belonging in this class are based on the law of averages. So many important things are left out in these comparisons, too. They are not really very clarifying in most cases, and are actually counterproductive in a good many others.
How has the human race been getting along all these centuries and millennia, sufficiently well with such bad inputs from the real world? I think we have been doing it with stories. Stories are a means of showing how everything is attached to everything else. Our stories on based on these multiple attachments, and what they mean. We love stories, as human beings. It’s the way we understand the world, very largely. One trouble is, instead of respecting our own intuitions about these things and our own abilities to analyze them and appreciate them, we have only? as some kind of second class intellectual operation. Scientists themselves despise anecdotal evidence, and everything that is a story is called anecdotal evidence, and not valued, and yet you can’t understand the world without anecdotal evidence. Scientists may think a.e. is not important enough to occupy their time, but I think a.e. is important enough to occupy anybody’s time, beginning with very ancient poetry and up to film documentaries, which we’re learning to value more than we used to.”
Novels and other forms of fiction employ storytelling often without reference to facts derived from science (experiment, statistics, etc.), those these may be implied (and in some genres, like science fiction, employed directly though perhaps extended beyond the current science.) But these "scientific" forms disdain story (although not in explaining themselves, when they most often employ metaphor.) Journalistic storytelling combines "scientific" fact and anecdotal information.
Further, journalistic storytelling depends on testing both kinds of information. For instance I might ask experts (and often, different kinds of experts) the same question and see how many sets of facts I get. When the facts--the numbers, the interpretations--start to converge, or at least the disagreement among them sharpens--then I know how to evaluate and use these facts. The facts are also tested by what people say, by anecdotal and introspective evidence, which in turn are tested by the facts. The interplay of all of them is part of the story, and sometimes the story itself.
From the experience of high school debate as much as the anticipation of being caught out in print, I learned to be skeptical of facts and how they were ascertained. From reading and writing fiction and plays, I learned elements of storytelling. These combinations make this a form that is somehow more comprehensive. Journalistic storytelling may not have the depth or resonance or provide the aesthetic pleasure of great novels or great drama. But it does have an aesthetic that I've found pleasing to work with.
When I grow up I still want to be a novelist. And a playwright. But the kind of storytelling I've mostly done--journalistic storytelling-- remains a satisfying form. I've realized that in a few ways recently.
One of the primary ways we think we know things is through the findings of science. While much of that is accurate in a practical sense, a lot of it pretends to be sure of more than it actually can be sure of. This is most evident in the lesser sciences such as economics and psychology, at least as they are practiced today. Through narrow and dubiously designed experiments, psychologists pretend to be able to say all sorts of things about human behavior, human nature and how brains work. These assertions get these folks tenured positions, books and TV interviews in which they purport to know a lot more than they do. Their arrogance is amazing. Especially since they must ignore the limitations of their experiments that have been defined repeatedly, most recently in a book I've just started reading by Jerome Kagan, called Psychology's Ghosts.
But I don't need to refer to this thoughtful and eminent authority--these limitations are maddeningly clear to me. For one thing, they purport to say universal things based on "experiments" involving the behaviors and responses of mostly North American university undergraduates who volunteer to be subjects, perhaps for small amounts of money. But there are broader objections. I think especially of a panel discussion in Seattle I believe, but carried on C-Span, involving Jane Jacobs, who to my mind was one of the great minds of the 20th century, upon the publication of her final and prophetic book, Dark Age Ahead. The friendly host made an offhand comment, saying something to the effect that although much of her evidence was "anecdotal," it was nevertheless intriguing. It was not long before he was sorry he'd said it. She honed in on this point with great precision.
Because it's a common charge: the only true evidence is scientific observation, especially from experiment, or statistical. Other sources such as "anecdotal" or self-reporting (introspective) is less reliable. Jane Jacobs strongly disagreed, and she was so eloquent that I went back and transcribed what she said:
“Our science began comparing two things to each other, [to find things like] the temperature needed to melt water. That was science for centuries. It’s easy to compare two things, it’s much more difficult to compare 3 or more. It’s “bivariant comparison”—it's very reductive, you have to leave out everything but 2 things, and real life is not like that. Real life attaches anything to everything else. We have begun to learn that in biology...In due course along came ‘disorganized complexity,’ like insurance actuarial tables, or marks a child gets in school—anything that is explained in a graph with a bell shape, or seems to be explained by statistics. Things belonging in this class are based on the law of averages. So many important things are left out in these comparisons, too. They are not really very clarifying in most cases, and are actually counterproductive in a good many others.
How has the human race been getting along all these centuries and millennia, sufficiently well with such bad inputs from the real world? I think we have been doing it with stories. Stories are a means of showing how everything is attached to everything else. Our stories on based on these multiple attachments, and what they mean. We love stories, as human beings. It’s the way we understand the world, very largely. One trouble is, instead of respecting our own intuitions about these things and our own abilities to analyze them and appreciate them, we have only? as some kind of second class intellectual operation. Scientists themselves despise anecdotal evidence, and everything that is a story is called anecdotal evidence, and not valued, and yet you can’t understand the world without anecdotal evidence. Scientists may think a.e. is not important enough to occupy their time, but I think a.e. is important enough to occupy anybody’s time, beginning with very ancient poetry and up to film documentaries, which we’re learning to value more than we used to.”
Novels and other forms of fiction employ storytelling often without reference to facts derived from science (experiment, statistics, etc.), those these may be implied (and in some genres, like science fiction, employed directly though perhaps extended beyond the current science.) But these "scientific" forms disdain story (although not in explaining themselves, when they most often employ metaphor.) Journalistic storytelling combines "scientific" fact and anecdotal information.
Further, journalistic storytelling depends on testing both kinds of information. For instance I might ask experts (and often, different kinds of experts) the same question and see how many sets of facts I get. When the facts--the numbers, the interpretations--start to converge, or at least the disagreement among them sharpens--then I know how to evaluate and use these facts. The facts are also tested by what people say, by anecdotal and introspective evidence, which in turn are tested by the facts. The interplay of all of them is part of the story, and sometimes the story itself.
From the experience of high school debate as much as the anticipation of being caught out in print, I learned to be skeptical of facts and how they were ascertained. From reading and writing fiction and plays, I learned elements of storytelling. These combinations make this a form that is somehow more comprehensive. Journalistic storytelling may not have the depth or resonance or provide the aesthetic pleasure of great novels or great drama. But it does have an aesthetic that I've found pleasing to work with.
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Write to Life
Reviewing a biography of Kurt Vonnegut has prompted more thinking about the difficulties if not impossibility of writing to the highest standards while being a decent human being who is fair to others. Vonnegut's biography is one of several literary exposes recently (of Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, and Hemingway again) that emphasize how bad they were at life. Hemingway as a phony macho, a self-promoting liar, etc. Heller as a bad father, and Vonnegut as a sad and bitter man, who betrayed friends, abused one wife (and was abused by another), and scared children. He, like the others, was not like his public image. That's the big revelation supposedly.
(I should say immediately that there is plenty of counterevidence in this biography of Vonnegut's kindnesses, loyalty, etc. But on the whole it seems to emphasize the flaws.)
Vonnegut brings this topic to me in a peculiarly personal way. I was in precisely the generation of young readers in the late 60s that made him famous, and my admiration was as a writer as well as a reader. Vonnegut had taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop just a few years before I entered there. My fiction teacher in my senior year of college had been one of his students. So the evocation of that place and that time in this biography has particular resonance.
Those years turned out to be the tail end of an era--roughly Hemingway to Vonnegut and Heller--in which the novelist was an important and influential figure. This was also a time that people drank a lot, especially writers. And they smoked a lot, especially writers. It was during the sexual revolution so-called, and before the consciousness-raising--and that's what it was--prompted by the womens movement. But even within the context where drinking, smoking and philandering was common--and even more expected among writers-- there was behavior that stood out as troubling, awful, even scary. So even before Iowa (at a few writing conferences, or on campus during writers visits) I had seen professional writers behaving badly. I saw writers who were abusive drinkers, sexual predators, liars and cowards. What I didn't see I heard, because writers could also be vicious gossips.
So even as I saw some of these writers as role models, I was troubled. The drinking and smoking was just exhausting and debilitating, though it was a long time before I gave it up, as it could occasionally lead to some memorably wild evenings, as when I found myself playing blues piano with novelist Vance Bourjaily on slide trombone. But patterns of deceit bothered me, and cruelty repulsed me, and frightened me. I didn't want to become that. Then there were the questions of irresponsibility.
Some of this behavior made me lose respect for these writers, and question the validity of their work. I think that's inevitable, even at a distance-- when you read that writers were cruel, it casts a pall over the writing. But as a reader, it's ultimately the words on the page that make the difference in our lives. As a writer, a beginning writer, it raises questions of identity, and what kind of a life is possible.
For even though character flaws are involved, the necessities of writing itself come into play. I also learned from writing how hard it is to maintain a balance. The world being created on the page is a very different world from the one populated by real people, in which actions have actual consequences that can't be corrected in the next draft. I know a writer now, with several very well-respected novels, who said he gave up writing novels because it was too hard on his family and his relationships. The sensitivity required of a writer writing leaves a painful vulnerability to reality, while the discipline and standards of writing so intensely can feed a monstrous impatience with the world, for its imperfections and shoddy standards, as well as its conspiracy designed to destroy your concentration.
Despite my call-me-irresponsible bravado, that question of responsibility, and doubts that I could be a writer and also responsible, was a major reason I never married. Mostly it was my inability to be financially responsible while still pursuing a vocation as a writer, but that alone was so hard that it became overwhelming to consider adding house and children. (Vonnegut knew this--he used to say that one reason there are so many gay men in the arts is that it takes so long to establish a career, marriage and family is unaffordable.) But there was also the doubt that I could be emotionally and personally responsible to relationships and to my writing. So this is in part why I fell into that statistically insignificant class of hetero men who never married.
I saw what the costs to a family might be. In being reminded of those days, I realized that I was in that particular career track, which through a combination of my own actions and the actions of women who saw all this more clearly than I did, I left.
In the end I suppose the joke was on me, for I didn't have much success, especially success on the page, especially in my most cherished forms of fiction and plays. I'll never know what my refusal to sacrifice others to my writing struggles contributed to that, but less than a fierce and selfish dedication to that writing above all may well have contributed. I expect it still does.
It's not that I've been the height of responsibility, far from it. And as a factor in my failures this may be a self-serving delusion. But when I look back on what the writer's life was supposed to be and sometimes was, I'm glad I dodged that bullet. Like a lot of my accomplishments, this one is of what I didn't do, of pain not caused.
To some extent that was a road deliberately not taken. And to perhaps a greater extent, it remains so. I suppose if I still felt my gift was so great I'd make different choices. And I don't presume to judge those whose accomplishments are greater. Even at a distance, I found the Vonnegut biography shockingly reductive. What's in it (if its proportionately true) may be another side of the story, but it isn't the whole story. He may have been different in life than he was in interviews and books, but the interviews and books are a big part of the story. Maybe no writer can live up to the ideals in the work, in the wit and inspiration of the words. But we can share those ideals and aspirations.
Reviewing a biography of Kurt Vonnegut has prompted more thinking about the difficulties if not impossibility of writing to the highest standards while being a decent human being who is fair to others. Vonnegut's biography is one of several literary exposes recently (of Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, and Hemingway again) that emphasize how bad they were at life. Hemingway as a phony macho, a self-promoting liar, etc. Heller as a bad father, and Vonnegut as a sad and bitter man, who betrayed friends, abused one wife (and was abused by another), and scared children. He, like the others, was not like his public image. That's the big revelation supposedly.
(I should say immediately that there is plenty of counterevidence in this biography of Vonnegut's kindnesses, loyalty, etc. But on the whole it seems to emphasize the flaws.)
Vonnegut brings this topic to me in a peculiarly personal way. I was in precisely the generation of young readers in the late 60s that made him famous, and my admiration was as a writer as well as a reader. Vonnegut had taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop just a few years before I entered there. My fiction teacher in my senior year of college had been one of his students. So the evocation of that place and that time in this biography has particular resonance.
Those years turned out to be the tail end of an era--roughly Hemingway to Vonnegut and Heller--in which the novelist was an important and influential figure. This was also a time that people drank a lot, especially writers. And they smoked a lot, especially writers. It was during the sexual revolution so-called, and before the consciousness-raising--and that's what it was--prompted by the womens movement. But even within the context where drinking, smoking and philandering was common--and even more expected among writers-- there was behavior that stood out as troubling, awful, even scary. So even before Iowa (at a few writing conferences, or on campus during writers visits) I had seen professional writers behaving badly. I saw writers who were abusive drinkers, sexual predators, liars and cowards. What I didn't see I heard, because writers could also be vicious gossips.
So even as I saw some of these writers as role models, I was troubled. The drinking and smoking was just exhausting and debilitating, though it was a long time before I gave it up, as it could occasionally lead to some memorably wild evenings, as when I found myself playing blues piano with novelist Vance Bourjaily on slide trombone. But patterns of deceit bothered me, and cruelty repulsed me, and frightened me. I didn't want to become that. Then there were the questions of irresponsibility.
Some of this behavior made me lose respect for these writers, and question the validity of their work. I think that's inevitable, even at a distance-- when you read that writers were cruel, it casts a pall over the writing. But as a reader, it's ultimately the words on the page that make the difference in our lives. As a writer, a beginning writer, it raises questions of identity, and what kind of a life is possible.
For even though character flaws are involved, the necessities of writing itself come into play. I also learned from writing how hard it is to maintain a balance. The world being created on the page is a very different world from the one populated by real people, in which actions have actual consequences that can't be corrected in the next draft. I know a writer now, with several very well-respected novels, who said he gave up writing novels because it was too hard on his family and his relationships. The sensitivity required of a writer writing leaves a painful vulnerability to reality, while the discipline and standards of writing so intensely can feed a monstrous impatience with the world, for its imperfections and shoddy standards, as well as its conspiracy designed to destroy your concentration.
Despite my call-me-irresponsible bravado, that question of responsibility, and doubts that I could be a writer and also responsible, was a major reason I never married. Mostly it was my inability to be financially responsible while still pursuing a vocation as a writer, but that alone was so hard that it became overwhelming to consider adding house and children. (Vonnegut knew this--he used to say that one reason there are so many gay men in the arts is that it takes so long to establish a career, marriage and family is unaffordable.) But there was also the doubt that I could be emotionally and personally responsible to relationships and to my writing. So this is in part why I fell into that statistically insignificant class of hetero men who never married.
I saw what the costs to a family might be. In being reminded of those days, I realized that I was in that particular career track, which through a combination of my own actions and the actions of women who saw all this more clearly than I did, I left.
In the end I suppose the joke was on me, for I didn't have much success, especially success on the page, especially in my most cherished forms of fiction and plays. I'll never know what my refusal to sacrifice others to my writing struggles contributed to that, but less than a fierce and selfish dedication to that writing above all may well have contributed. I expect it still does.
It's not that I've been the height of responsibility, far from it. And as a factor in my failures this may be a self-serving delusion. But when I look back on what the writer's life was supposed to be and sometimes was, I'm glad I dodged that bullet. Like a lot of my accomplishments, this one is of what I didn't do, of pain not caused.
To some extent that was a road deliberately not taken. And to perhaps a greater extent, it remains so. I suppose if I still felt my gift was so great I'd make different choices. And I don't presume to judge those whose accomplishments are greater. Even at a distance, I found the Vonnegut biography shockingly reductive. What's in it (if its proportionately true) may be another side of the story, but it isn't the whole story. He may have been different in life than he was in interviews and books, but the interviews and books are a big part of the story. Maybe no writer can live up to the ideals in the work, in the wit and inspiration of the words. But we can share those ideals and aspirations.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Three college teachers who were important to me have passed away in the past few months. The most recent was Sam Moon, the professor who sought me out and first talked to me as I was registering for classes at Knox College. I was there on the Scholastic Magazines Writing Awards Scholarship, and he was head of the writing program (which he pretty much invented.) I can see his face across the table right now.
He wanted to talk to me before I registered in case I thought I had to take writing courses because of my writing scholarship. He said I didn't, and probably would have gotten a scholarship anyway. I had read and re-read the brochure on the writing program the previous spring, and then all summer. It was one of the main reasons I chose Knox (I had a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh as well.) So I told him I actually wanted to take writing courses. He seemed very pleased.
I did take several writing courses from him, and he was always willing to read and discuss a manuscript even when it wasn't part of a course. He listened well, asked questions, tried to get inside your thinking. But he also let you know what he thought, in certain terms. I don't remember much that's specific, just odd moments of classes or in his office. I believe--and this applies to other teachers--that a lot of what we learn from teachers that turns out to be most important is what we absorbed without realizing it, or at least without realizing and remembering where we learned it.
What I do associate the most with Sam Moon however is the bounty of writers and others who spent time at Knox while I was there. Many of those specific individuals were there because of Sam Moon. He was himself a poet who published regularly in Chicago's prestigous Poetry Magazine and elsewhere. He had the respect of writers and he was connected to their world.
So in my time I saw and heard poets from Mark Van Doren to David Ignatov. I had lunch with W.H. Auden! Gary Snyder came pretty much directly from Japan for a week one spring, and read for hours every day. We waited for him in Old Main, listening for the bells in his boots jingling down the stone hallway. Nobody who was there will ever forget the week that Robert Creeley visited, or (for other reasons) James Dickey. Robert Bly came to read at least twice. These poets changed us. John Cage came to campus several times, as did dancer Merce Cunningham--and once they were there at the same time, as the Cunningham group performed a piece by Cage. Grace Paley read her stories. They are part of my college memories--bringing tea to Denise Levertov, talking about the New York Worlds Fair on the Gizmo patio with John Cage ("I liked the lines," he said.) Others probably had something to do with bringing these people to Knox, but it was pretty much Sam.
He was also possibly the last Knox teacher I talked to in his Old Main office, when I visited campus in the 1980s. I'd been out of school 15 years or so by then, but he recognized me standing uncertainly at his office door, as a group of undergrad writers surrounded him at his desk. We had a coffee in the Gizmo.
He retired soon after that (I remember I wrote something for a book to be presented to him at his farewell dinner), and I was surprised to see that he left Galesburg soon afterwards. He had another life, another quarter century somewhere else, in New York state. He's buried in Ontario. Our teachers are always something of a mystery to us, as young as we were, but I'll bet Sam was more of a mystery than most.
William Matthews was pretty much the entire Religion department when I was at Knox. I don't think I ever had a class with him, but for some reason he liked things I wrote, for the newspaper and the campus magazines. People would tell me that he quoted them enthusiastically in his classes. I was embarrassed, since it seemed to compromise my lapsed Catholic dogmatic anti-religion. I did talk with him from time to time, but again, I couldn't feel comfortable, thanks to 12 years of priests and nuns. I do wonder if he had anything to do with bringing another speaker to campus, who had a profound effect on me. I don't remember what he was actually talking about, there in the Commons Room of Old Main, but he made one offhand comment that reoriented me completely: he noted that after killing an animal, a Native American hunter would say a prayer thanking the animal. Eventually this moment would send me on a different road, spiritual and otherwise.
I recently learned from a fellow student who got back in touch after a very long time that Fred Newman died several months ago. Fred was a philosophy professor who changed more than my life in his time at Knox. I had only one class with him, and knew him for no more than a year or so. I could write pages on that spring of my freshman year, and its impact on me for years following.
But I lost complete track of him after Knox, and though I had seen his name from time to time--not usually in flattering contexts, as a kind of New York political eccentric--I was unaware of the extent, nature and influence of his work over the years. Which is kind of astonishing, since I used to spend a fair amount of time in New York in worlds that touched upon his. He was political, a "public philosopher", a playwright and songwriter with dozens of productions, etc. I learned most of this from his website. It even has sound files of him lecturing--talk about a blast from the past!
I'm sorry that I wasn't aware of this while he was alive. He remained a charismatic figure well beyond Knox, so on the other hand it's unlikely I would have wanted to go through that exhausting experience again. From his obits I learned something else: that he lost his college teaching jobs after Knox because he insisted on giving all his male students As because of the draft. I wish I'd known that. I'd probably need pages more to explain that to those who weren't young men then, but it's something else I will always admire about Fred Newman.
May they rest in peace--Sam, Bill, Fred, if I may call them that. I probably can.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Hillman on the Author's Battlefield
I was never in any military, and although I played at war endlessly for a few years as a boy, I never developed a lot of interest in the military vocabulary. But James Hillman was in the U.S. Navy during World War II, tending to amputees and other severely injured in hospitals. His last book (so far) was A Terrible Love of War, which according to the paperback back cover, somebody in the San Francisco Chronicle called "A skillfully constructed tour de force." Oh yeah, that was me. And yes, it was a pun, kind of.
Anyway, that's a long way to get to this slyly revealing passage in that book in which Hillman talks about writing using military terms and concepts--not something I've ever thought about, or how I approached writing, but worth considering.
"Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way. When stuck, don't dig in; keep moving forward. Don't obsess trying to reduce a strongpoint by sheer force or laying seige. Isolate it and in time it will fall by itself. No pitched battles with the interior voices of saboteurs, critics, adversaries. A light skirmish, a show of arrows, and disappear into the next paragraph. Camouflage your own vulnerability, your lack of reserves with showy parades and bugles---remember everyone else is equally vulnerable. Pillage the storehouses of thought, refurbish old material and use it to reinforce your lines. Abandon ground you can't exploit, but when you've got an issue on the run, take all the territory you can."
Anyway, that's a long way to get to this slyly revealing passage in that book in which Hillman talks about writing using military terms and concepts--not something I've ever thought about, or how I approached writing, but worth considering.
"Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way. When stuck, don't dig in; keep moving forward. Don't obsess trying to reduce a strongpoint by sheer force or laying seige. Isolate it and in time it will fall by itself. No pitched battles with the interior voices of saboteurs, critics, adversaries. A light skirmish, a show of arrows, and disappear into the next paragraph. Camouflage your own vulnerability, your lack of reserves with showy parades and bugles---remember everyone else is equally vulnerable. Pillage the storehouses of thought, refurbish old material and use it to reinforce your lines. Abandon ground you can't exploit, but when you've got an issue on the run, take all the territory you can."
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