Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.

I am feeling close to human again. This is a nasty virus, my advice boils down to “don’t get it,” especially if you are at a low emotional ebb, although that’s always my most physically vulnerable time as well. And honestly, I exhausted myself over the summer and have been getting by on sheer stubbornness for a while. I’m good at gutting things out, but there’s always a hard crash at the end. I just didn’t think it would last this long.

Blah blah. Enough about that. I’m back to drinking in the real world and the virtual one as well. Here’s three pints for you.

Enjoy your Friday.

The blue people made me see red today

I am still feeling sick, although better than I was — which makes this the delicate time when I should be making myself rest so that I don’t relapse. Instead, I am writing angry emails to the Washington State Obama/Biden campaign, because they have seriously pissed me off.

Here’s the email they sent me today. Maybe everyone on the national Obama mailing list got one, who knows? And maybe everyone else thought it was just fine. I did not.

Kelley —
 
[…]
 
This is the last week before Election Day, November 4th, and we’re executing the largest get out the vote (GOTV) effort in Washington’s history. We’ve filled 82 percent of our GOTV shifts, but we have to fill every last slot this week.
 
The conversations you have with friends, family, and voters across Washington right now will make a real difference in whether they stay home or make their voices heard on November 4th.
 
[…]
 
We have to make sure every voter hears about the kind of change Barack and other Democrats will deliver for Washington families. What we do or don’t do in the next six days will decide the outcome of this race.
 
Imagine how you’ll feel if you wake up on November 5th — facing four more years of the same Bush-McCain economic policies — and realize that you didn’t do all you could to make sure Barack Obama is the next president.
 
I know that’s not a feeling I could live with.
 
Volunteer to get out the vote between now and Election Day and win this election for Barack and Democrats up and down the ticket.
 
— from an email I received from the Washington Campaign for Change. Message paid for by Obama For America.

Here is the email I sent back.

I’m on your mailing list because I’m a Washington Democrat. And as a supporter of Barack Obama, I have to tell you how angry this email made me. You have absolutely no right to lecture me about the moral imperative of “doing everything I can do to help Barack” so that I don’t have to “live with the feeling” of being responsible for his losing the election.
 
How dare you?
 
My only obligation as a citizen is to vote my conscience. If I don’t vote, fine, call me names. But the pomposity and paternalism of this email enrages me. You are not the keeper of my conscience. And if this message truly reflects Barack Obama’s feelings — if he feels that he has the right to decide when I’ve “done enough” for him — then he’s not who I thought he was, and his presidency doesn’t offer the promise of change that I thought it did.
 
I’m deeply offended by this message. Whether it comes from the state level of the campaign, or from the national level, shame on all of you for treating Washington Democrats with so little respect.
 
— My email to the Washington Campaign for Change

I’ll be doing a thoughtful, rational, nonpartisan and encouraging post on November 3, in support of Blog the Vote. I love my country and I think it’s in desperate need of reconnection and healing, and I think we are capable of making it happen. I believe it. But for right now, let me just say that I loathe and detest presidential politics, and I cannot wait for this fucking election to be over.

It grows back

I’ve had some disappointment this week, and have been wrestling with some choices about which I am highly ambivalent. The details aren’t important: we all have disappointments and unhappy choices. What I think is important is how we respond.

I told Nicola last night that I was a little worried that if I posted this cartoon — which I’ve had on my wall for years now — people would think I was depressed, suicidal, or bitter-and-twistedly out somewhere kicking down little kids’ sand castles. Me, I’m just here smiling — I think the cartoon is wicked funny and absolutely true.

Sometimes things don’t work out the way I want them too. And for whatever reason, apart from finding it disappointing or scary or frustrating or threatening or meh, no big deal, I also often find it humbling in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate well. Well, okay, yes I can. It’s wounded pride, and it comes from the cultural notion that if we are good enough, strong enough, just work hard enough, we get what we aim for. So if we dream beyond our reach we somehow deserve to fail — we’ve “got above ourselves” and shouldn’t be surprised when the axe falls. For whatever reason, we’ve taken the truth of the matter — sometimes we don’t get what we strive for — and turned it into a personal cause-and-effect failure of character. Hey, you, yeah, the Eskridge kid over in the corner, what the fuck were you thinking? Go sit down.

And the tricky thing is, of course it’s often about personal failure. And there’s also the randomness of the world, the needs and fears and dreams of other people that bang into ours, the Great Whatever that is part of the story of why things don’t always work.

Sometimes it’s hard to parse. And so I’ve decided not to. It only turns into the blame game or the I-am-not-deserving game or, gods help us, the it’s-not-fair game. I’ve been to all those places, and I don’t even like the t-shirts. And I don’t want to sit down.

My dreams and my skills either match, or they don’t. I can walk away, or I can get more skills. If I get more skills, they might still not be enough. So it goes, brothers and sisters, so it goes. We don’t know what will happen. But until the axe falls for real, I’ll be back with my dreams, occasionally getting my pride chopped off.

Because it’s only pride. It grows back.

No kissing

I will not be kissing anyone today since I have the Mouth of Crawling Lurgy Viral Grossness, but I leave this for any of you who kiss girls, even though no one in the video is kissing any girls either. Maybe your day will be better than that (grin), whomever you like to kiss.

Change the world one girl at a time

If you are a girl, if your mother or sister or cousin is a girl, if you know a girl you think is really cool, if you want to kiss that girl, if you want to be that girl, if you want to have that heart-thudding breath-stealing moment when they tell you it’s a girl!, and if you want to see your girl with every single fucking opportunity she can possibly have because someday she might just change the world…

Watch this.

 

Now go change the world if you want to.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.

A bits-and bobs-selection of summer 2003.

  • New cover (June 2003) — The hardcover image of Solitaire discussed, the trade paperback image revealed.
  • I am not a plant (July 2003) — Talk about music in fiction, in which it is revealed that Nicola and I are different people.
  • Sharing spaceships (July 2003) — More about Lindsey’s movie project.

Enjoy your Friday.

Lurgy

So what if the OED doesn’t think it’s a real word? It sure feels real to me.

Nicola and I woke up sick today. We will be hiding away from our screens drinking hot tea and canceling appointments, and you may perhaps not hear much from us today.

I sure hope your day is much less sore-throated than mine.

It’s never too late to bloom

…sometimes genius is anything but rarified; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table. — from “Late Bloomers” by Malcolm Gladwell, in The New Yorker, October 20 2008.

Thank you, Jennifer, for pointing me to Malcolm Gladwell’s article on “Late Bloomers.” I very much enjoy Gladwell’s work, but I have fallen behind on my reading (and everything else), and so had missed it. (The writer hugs the internet for redefining “behind” to mean well, we’ll just be over here waiting for you to catch up as opposed to gone forever and you missed it, now go sit in the corner and sulk.)

In the article, Gladwell discusses recent ideas of economist David Galenson on creativity: specifically, that the accepted cultural model of the creative prodigy isn’t the only way that creativity expresses itself successfully. There are young people with Big Ideas who burst full-blown onto the scene; they’re the brilliant first novelists, the astonishingly original painters, the people who stand things on their heads and create works of Staggering Genius right out of the box. There are also the experimental artists, the late bloomers, who take a long time to peak because their process and their creative goals are fundamentally different. And — here’s the the really radical notion — genius is found as often in works of late bloomers as it is in works by prodigies.

This may seem totally obvious to you — it certainly does to me — but step back and think about it. Our cultural assumptions about the early manifestation and realization of talent run deep and generally unchallenged. Everyone knows that Real Creative People hit their stride early and make their mark emphatically. I can go on at length about this, but Gladwell has already done so, very well, in this lecture he gave at Columbia University1. I encourage every artist, and anyone who has ever felt like you were in some kind of a “race to produce” that you didn’t sign up for and find somewhat bewildering, to take 52 minutes to listen to the lecture. It’s worth it.

What Gladwell takes to task in the Columbia speech (and I wish he’d gone into this deeper in his article) is that our cultural bias toward the prodigy model of creativity denies many, many potentially good or great or genius artists the chance to reach their peak — simply because we are not willing to be patient. Gladwell cites the music and publishing industries: if a first album doesn’t sell well, the band is seen as not commercially viable; if a first novel doesn’t do well, people assume that the writer is a bad writer, not that this novel didn’t work. And that’s the fallacy in a nutshell: if the first product of an artist is not A Work Of Staggering Fucking Genius, then the artist isn’t a Real Artist after all.

This attitude kills artists.

And we’re aren’t the only ones who suffer. Gladwell shows how the prodigy model underlies our expectation that kids must do well in high school or it means they are done in life. He talks about how the prodigy and late bloomer models play out in the auto and pharmaceutical industries, and in what projects or ventures get funded. This model drives cultural assumptions about what is worth supporting. And when an entire style of creativity — and its results — are unsupported at best and discouraged at worst, then we’re all losing out.

I’ve spent my life seeking, wandering down paths that compel me without always knowing why. What I bring back from those journeys goes into my work, whether it’s my writing or my consulting or the posts on this blog. My work is more than the sum of my curiosities — at its best, it’s an exponentially greater recombination of what I have seen and felt, what I’ve understood and what still mystifies me. A stranger’s private smile over the zucchini in the market, the precise way that a blue sky over Mérida is different from one over Chicago, the vertiginous moment when you know the news is bad, the taste of honeydew melon, what it’s really like to give yourself to art, what’s it’s really like when art gives itself to you…

I’ve always characterized myself as a writer who maps the internal human landscape. That’s not like inventing Cubism or being the youngest person to win a Booker Prize. What it is, in the eyes of many people, is unimpressive, underperforming, not living up to my “promise.” Huh? I don’t remember promising anything.

I’ve recently taken myself out of this game. I wrote that post with no knowledge of Galenson’s theory or Gladwell’s ideas about it, after a year or so of wrestling with the deep discontinuity between my own experience as an artist and the cultural paradigm that defines success in ways that I can never achieve. I am grateful for “Late Bloomers,” and even moreso for the Columbia lecture (again with the hugging through the internet, which is perhaps the best way to hug a stranger, you know? Apart from buying his books…). Malcolm, thank you for strengthening the foundation of this place where I am trying to stand.

You can bet I’ll be reading the Galenson book, as well as the Charles Tilly book referenced in the lecture. I’ll let you know what I think.

We have to expand our definition of what greatness is, and we have to be patient. It’s not over at 22; it’s not even over at 42…. I find it such a wonderfully liberating thought… — Malcolm Gladwell, speaking in a New Yorker podcast about his article on creativity.

Me too.


1 — I’ve blatantly swiped this audio from the New Yorker website, where it was cut into three files and presented on player technology so frustrating to use that I nearly put my keyboard through my screen a couple of times. They can come and get me for making it easier for people to listen if they want to.

If you’re interested, there’s also a 30-minute Q&A that follows the lecture.