CxD #179 🐢

1. Please read this entire recent email from Cal Newport, expert at creating deep, concentrated work conditions:

I recently returned to Haruki Murakami’s 2007 pseudo-memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I first encountered this book back in 2009. It inspired me at the time to write an essay titled “On the Value of Hard Focus,” which laid the foundation on which I went on to build my theory of deep work. Which is all to say, Murakami’s short meditation on running and art holds a special place in my personal literary canon.

On my re-read, my attention was snagged by the following passage:

“Gradually, though, I found myself wanting to write a more substantial kind of novel. With the first two, Hear the Wind and Pinball, 1973, I basically enjoyed the process of writing, but there were parts I wasn’t too pleased with. With these first two novels I was only able to write in spurts, snatching bits of time here and there — a half hour here, an hour there — and because I was always tired and felt like I was competing against the clocks as I wrote, I was never able to concentrate. With this scattered approach I was able to write some interesting, fresh things, but the result was far from a complex or profound novel.”

Murakami wrote his first two novels late at night after closing down the bar he owned and ran near the Tokyo city center. These works were well-received: his first won a prize for new writers from a literary magazine, and his second also attracted positive reviews. But the effort both exhausted and frustrated him.

Murakami realized he was coasting on bursts of latent talent. He had caught the attention of the literary establishment because of inventive stretches in his prose, but he worried that if he kept producing these “instinctual novels,” he’d reach a dead end.

Against the advice of nearly everybody, he sold his bar, and moved to Narashino, a small town in the largely rural Chiba Prefecture. He began going to bed when it got dark and waking up with the first light. His only job was to sit at a desk each morning and write. His books became longer, more complex, more story driven. He discovered what became his signature style.

“My whole body thrilled at the thought of how wonderful — and how difficult — it is,” he recalled, “to be able to sit at my desk, not worrying about time, and concentrate on writing.”

Neither our economy nor the demands of a live well-lived dictate that everyone should aspire to be sitting alone at a desk in rural Narashino, crafting literature to the light of the rising sun. My growing concern, however, is that such real commitment to thought has become too rare.

It was only through this intellectual monasticism that a talent as large as Murakami was able to extract the works for which is so rightly now revered. And yet, outside of award-caliber novelists, a similar commitment to depth is alarmingly rare. Even the elite cognitive professions such as professors, lawyers, doctors, and journalists, for which the value of thought is clear and accepted, find themselves increasingly trying to slot these efforts into fragments of time sieged by unrelenting messages, and meetings, and news, and minutia.

This the moment of melancholy that hit me as I returned to this book earlier this week: Many of us in such jobs have become like the young Murakami, up late after closing the bar, frustrated that the metaphorical novels we’re crafting aren’t what they could be.

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2. Happy Father’s Day from the Killers!

Dustland fairytale beginning
Just another white trash
County kiss
Sixty one
Long brown hair and foolish eyes
He looks just like you want him to
Some kind of slick chrome American prince
A blue jean serenade
And Moon River what'd you do to me
And I don't believe you

Saw Cinderella in a party dress but
She was looking for a night gown
I saw the devil warping up his hands
He's getting ready for the show down
I saw the minute that I turn away
I got my money on a pond tonight

Change came in disguised of revelation
Set his soul on fire
She said she'd always knew he'd come around
And the decades disappear like sinking
Ships we persevere god gives us hope
But we still fear
We don't know
The mind is poison castle in the sky
Sit stranded vandalized
The draw bridge is closing

Saw Cinderella in a party dress but
She was looking for a night gown
I saw the devil warping up his hands
He's getting ready for the show down
I saw the ending were they turned the page
I threw my money and I ran away
Strait to the Vally of the great divide

And were the dreams roll high
And were the wind don't blow
Out here the good girls die
And the sky won't snow
Out here the bird don't sing
Out here the field don't grow
Out here the bell don't ring
Out here the bell don't ring
Out here the good girls die

Now Cinderella don't you go to sleep
Its such a bitter form of refuge
Ah don't you know the kingdoms under siege
And everybody needs you
Is there still magic in the midnight sun
Or did you leave it back in sixty-one
In the of the cadence in the young mans eyes
And were the dreams roll high

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3.

This is a snippet from a review of Top Gun you didn’t know you need:

Are you looking to consider the grim realities of war, or to acknowledge the humanity of “the enemy”? Top Gun elides those inconvenient complications. If you are in search of some full-throttle patriotism, however, this film has you covered. Top Gun indulges in its metaphors. A hero who is young and arrogant and attempting to come to terms with his legacy might remind you of a country you know. And again and again, that hero is absolved. Maverick disobeys orders; he gets sent to Top Gun anyway. His antics get Goose in trouble with their superior; Goose forgives him. A series of scenes with Charlie goes roughly like this: She criticizes one of Mav’s flight maneuvers; unable to tolerate the negative review, he throws a tantrum and drives away on his motorcycle; she chases after him in her car, almost causing a pileup on a busy street; she catches up to him; he braces for her outrage; instead, she tells him she’s falling in love with him. There are many versions of this exchange in Top Gun. Maverick is someone who fails not just upward, but skyward.

To watch Top Gun now, freshly aware of how easily rugged individualism can take a turn toward the toxic, is to appreciate anew the film’s dicey feat: For its redemption story to land, its hero must be arrogant but not malignant, culpable but capable, infuriating but also easy to love. Maverick’s is a load-bearing charm. And his film’s willingness to pamper him raises still-fraught questions about selfish entitlement. Who gets the gift of multiple second chances, and who does not? Who has to follow the rules? Who is allowed to break them?

“Every screenplay eventually gets to: whose movie is this?” Jack Epps Jr., one of Top Gun’s screenwriters, said in a 2012 interview. Top Gun is about Maverick, but it is also, more simply, for him. In this universe, everyone—Mav’s best friend, his girlfriend, his teachers, even his competitors—serves his needs. They give to him, selflessly. They want him to get what he wants, whether the desire in question involves his love interest (half of Miramar, it seems, is ready to drop what they’re doing to help Mav serenade Charlie) or his destiny. The Mav-centric tendencies are so great that in Top Gun’s pivotal twist—Goose dies, in a plane Maverick piloted—the loss is both a tragedy and a narrative necessity. Its pain is what leads Maverick, the film suggests, to put away childish things. Goose dies so that Maverick might live.

It’s not your fault, everyone tells Maverick. “To be the best of the best means you make mistakes and then you go on,” Charlie says. Finally, Maverick listens. Top Gun ends triumphantly—for Maverick and therefore, the implication goes, for everybody else. He is vindicated in his exceptionalism. His father, Mav learns, died valiantly. His own battle, waged against unnamed foes, is won. Authority has integrity again. It’s morning in America again. This is how you sell a country to itself. It’s not your fault : Few messages are more seductive.

Read the full nostalgic review of Top Gun here.

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