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Category: writing

Words and Flowers

Words and Flowers

Today, inspiration in my inbox. Sunday’s “Marginalian,” which I didn’t have time to read yesterday, reminds me (in the voice of diarist, novelist and poet May Sarton) to choose joy over will. 

Though the context in which she makes this point is through her love of gardening, a love I only partially share (I appreciate the garden a lot more than the gardening) Sarton’s point is well-taken. 

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it
cannot be done on will alone,” Sarton wrote. “What will can do, and the only thing it
can do, is make time in which to do it.”

This is the point I will take with me through the day, to let myself off the hook if the words don’t flow as I wish they would … that I can make the time, and that is essential, but the words come when they want to come. Just like the flowers.

Human Content

Human Content

At the end of its segment on artificial intelligence last night, CBS’s “60 Minutes” included a disclaimer it never has before. “The preceding was created with 100-percent human content.”

This kicker was the perfect conclusion to a jaw-dropping report on Bard, the new chatbot released by Google. Interviews with the Google CEO and other members of the company revealed a team of humans who seem genuinely concerned about the implications of this earth-shaking new technology. But even they seem to be struggling with what they have created. 

These bots are not sentient beings, they said, although the content they produce (including a story built on Hemingway’s famous six-word novel “For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”) make you think that they can. 

These new bots are something of a black box, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who brought up the problem of alignment — the divergence between the models we use to create artificial intelligence and the intentions we have while creating them. They teach themselves subjects they weren’t programmed to learn. They will take our jobs and create ever-more-hard-to-detect fakes. 

As a student of the human condition (the title of the class I’m taking this semester) I’m thinking about the new technologies we’ve experienced in recent decades and how we will adapt to this one. Many knowledge workers will lose their jobs and many others will be teaming up with robots on a daily basis. How will we face this new challenge when we can’t even keep up with old ones? 

Lots of questions. Not many answers. But of this you can be sure: This post was created with 100-percent human content. 

(Above: a small printing press, vestige of a lost world.) 

Stop Time?

Stop Time?

Speaking of buttercups … spring unspooled slowly through the month of March. Daffodils that bloomed in late February were still with us this time last week. 

But in the last few days the season hit fast forward. Our dogwood and Kwanzan cherry were barely leafing out on Monday; now they’re in full flower. Temperatures above 85 degrees will do that to a plant.

I’m hoping that today’s burst of cool air has stopped time enough to preserve “nature’s first green,” which is gold. It’s been gold for weeks now. I hope, against all evidence to the contrary, that it will stay. 

(A hyacinth blooms in February.)

Seriously Speaking

Seriously Speaking

I’ve just finished George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life. It’s a slightly misleading subtitle because Saunders is the one giving the master class. It’s his interpretations of Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy. The interpretations are only there because the stories are, of course, but Saunders has a way of parsing and illuminating these classics that makes you want to read them—and do your own best work, too. 

One piece of advice I found especially helpful (even as a nonfiction writer) is when Saunders describes how he came to find his “voice.” I use quotation marks here because Saunders points out that we have many voices. What we need to do is find the voice that is most energetic, even if it’s not the spare, Hemingwayesque one we originally thought was ours. 

When Saunders first found his “voice” (I will persist with the quotation marks), the story that resulted was the best he’d ever written, he said, but it was no Chekhov or Tolstoy. He felt he had let the short story form down. “It was as if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a Barbie doll.”

In a world in which writing is taken oh-so-seriously, Saunders is seriously refreshing. 

Guest Post

Guest Post

Careful readers of this blog will know that with one exception I write every post every weekday of every year. This has nothing to do with my willingness to welcome new voices and everything to do with why I started A Walker in the Suburbs: to limber up my own voice, cramped as it’s been by years of scribing for hire. 

Luckily, not everyone has this proclivity. Many sane bloggers do seek guests posts, and I’m shamelessly plugging one of them here. 

Reflecting the Sacred was started by a longtime friend, avid reader and deep thinker, Gwen Zanin. I’m honored that she asked me to contribute a guest post to her blog. Wishing this new blog many years of posts and pleasures. 

The Fact Checker

The Fact Checker

Do facts matter? How integral are they to the underlying truth? These questions and more were raised in the one-act play “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which I saw last night with journalist friends.

The play and book on which it is based raise all sorts of questions about literary license, rights of authorship and fiction versus nonfiction. But for me it was also a trip down memory lane, as I recalled a fact checker I worked with at McCall’s magazine. 

Carmen had a quick laugh and a determined air. She wore well-tailored skirts and blouses, and everything about her was precise, from her sturdy pumps to her tidy bob. When she appeared at my desk with a manuscript covered in red ink and pencil marks I always wanted to slink down into my chair, down, down, down until I could slide under my desk and hide out there a while. 

Too late, of course. Carmen knew I was there. And even if she didn’t, she would hunt me down just as she did every fact in every article. I’m not a sloppy reporter, but everyone trembled in Carmen’s wake. In a pre-Internet era, fact-checking was no easy task, but Carmen and her minions made sure that every piece in the magazine was shipshape and gospel-true. There were no questions about the lifespan of those facts. 

Margins as Message

Margins as Message

In a retrospective mood after yesterday’s blog anniversary, I pulled out an old hard-bound journal and started reading. 

It was summer. The previous fall, I’d accepted an editorial position downtown, my first office job in 17 years, though I hadn’t yet extricated myself from writing freelance articles. I had three- to four-hour roundtrip commutes and deadlines when I got home. My daughters were 10, 13 and 16. Every few minutes, I was driving them to band camp or track practice or the movies. 

Still, my first thought on reading the loopy entries from those crazy days was … why didn’t I leave wider margins?  Every available inch was pressed into service. I had trouble reading my own writing. 

It took me a minute to realize the connection, the appropriateness of the typography. The pages were as busy as I was. The margins were the message. 

(Above, some halfway-margined class notes from last week.)

Turning 13!

Turning 13!

It seems just the other day it was toddling around, cutting its first teeth, skinning its knees. Now my blog has plunged headlong into its teenage years. Thirteen years ago today I wrote the first post for A Walker in the Suburbs, thinking that I might write every so often and coax it along for a year or two.

In the same way that parents of a newborn can’t picture sitting in the passenger seat as their “baby” drives a car, so could I not imagine my blog turning 13.  

But the years pass, and the quest for toys becomes the quest for boys … and here we are. Will my blog start demanding the car keys? Will it sneak out the basement window? Will it hide a skimpy sweater in its backpack and change when it gets to school?  

All I can say is, I’m prepared for anything. 

Writing in Bed

Writing in Bed

With Copper gone,  I’ve no need to rush downstairs in the morning. Which means I can indulge in one of my favorite pastimes, writing in bed. 

Churchill did it. Marcel Proust did it. Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and Truman Capote did it, though the latter said a bed was not required. A couch would work just fine, as long as coffee and cigarettes were available.

I can’t relate on that score. More my speed was Wordsworth, who wrote poems in bed but made up for it by walking 10 miles a day, striding all over the Lake District, often with his sister Dorothy. 

It makes perfect sense to me, a great expenditure of energy, followed by an equally great period of rest. 

(Marcel Proust writing in bed.)

Once More to the Breach

Once More to the Breach

There is something both unsettling and gratifying about charging into a project that you’ve left idle for a month. Never mind the explanations for your idleness — a research paper due, the holidays to prepare for — the work itself has been left behind, and it lets you in on its annoyance. 

Surely nothing else can account for the way a once-admirable essay shrinks in power and perceptiveness. Nothing else explains the inelegant phrasing, the lack of insight.

And yet … with the power of time and distance, suddenly there is potential again, too. A new overview, perhaps even a revised table of contents. It’s a good way to enter the new year, with rolled-up sleeves.