CxD #206 🎾
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This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.
~ Nsisargadatta Maharaj
1. One of our own CxDers, Circe Sturm, for whom I have a particular fancy, was recently interviewed on the NPR podcast Code Switch about the topic of “Pretendians.”
People lie about being Native American all the time – on college applications, on job applications, in casual conversation. But how do "Pretendians" hurt real Indigenous people and communities? And what does all that mean for people who aren't quite sure if they're claiming or reclaiming?
In this episode, we spoke to writer and journalist Justin Brake. The essay of his that we reference, about whether or not he should identify as Mi'kmaw, can be found here.
Enjoy the podcast and tell us your thoughts and ask Circe some questions over on www.cxd.community!
2. Spotify has been thrown in a boiling cauldron for hosting Joe Rogan’s podcast. The crime is spreading disinformation about COVID, and Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and a slew of other big-name musicians have removed their music from the platform. But is this approach the wisest one available to us? Joe Rogan, Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah all weigh in with a sense that de-platforming and censoring and agitated reactions are not as useful as they seem. Contribute to the conversation on www.cxd.community.
3.
You're tuned to Dawn FM
The middle of nowhere on your dial
So sit back and unpack
You may be here awhile
Now that all future plans have been postponed
And it's time to look back on the things you thought you owned
Do you remember them well?
Were you high or just stoned?
And how many grudges did you take to your grave?
When you weren't liked or followed, how did you behave?
Was it often a dissonant chord you were strumming?
Were you ever in tune with the song life was humming?
If pain's living on when your body's long gone
And your phantom regret hasn't let it go yet
You may not have died in the way that you must
All specters are haunted by their own lack of trust
When you're all out of time, there's nothing but space
No hunting, no gathering
No nations, no race
And Heaven is closer than those tears on your face
When the purple rain falls
We're all bathed in its grace
Heaven's for those who let go of regret
And you have to wait here when you're not all there yet
But you could be there by the end of this song
Where The Weeknd's so good and he plays all week long
Bang a gong, get it on
And if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil
Consider the flowers, they don't try to look right
They just open their petals and turn to the light
Are you listening real close?
Heaven's not that, it's this
It's the depth of this moment
We don't reach for bliss
God knows life is chaos
But He made one thing true
You gotta unwind your mind
Train your soul to align
And dance till you find that divine boogaloo
In other words
You gotta be Heaven to see Heaven
May peace be with you
4. Rafa Nadal has had numerous serious injuries playing tennis at body-crushing levels you can’t even begin to comprehend. His last one had him seriously contemplating retirement. Then he got COVID in December, and suffered a long and exhausting battle. He was ready to miss his nemesis, the Australian Open, a tournament he’s only one once before. Broken, sick, aging.
But he healed in time, started working, and decided to show up anyhow to see how things went.
He made it to the quarterfinals, which he won in 5 sets saying it completely destroyed his body: the heat, the stomach ailments, the utter and complete exhaustion of it.
He won the semifinals too, somehow.
And then in the finals, against the 2nd ranked player in the world, a man 10 years younger than him, he lost the first two sets.
Here’s the highlight reel from the match should the outcome and maybe peeing your pants be of any interest to you.
5.
From Neal Stephenson’s website, so you know ahead of time why I won’t be interacting with people much unless it’s on www.cxd.community.
Why I Am a Bad Correspondent
Writers who do not make themselves totally available to everyone, all the time, are frequently tagged with the “recluse” label. While I do not consider myself a recluse, I have found it necessary to place some limits on my direct interactions with individual readers. These limits most often come into play when people send me letters or e-mail, and also when I am invited to speak publicly. This document is a sort of form letter explaining why I am the way I am.
When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.
All of this seems perfectly reasonable—I should know, since I have had these feelings myself! But it turns out to be a bad idea. To begin with, a novel has roughly the same relationship to a conversation with the author, as a movie does to the actors in it. A movie represents many person-years of work distilled into two hours, and so everything sounds and looks perfect. But if you have ever met a movie actor in person, you know that they are not quite as dazzling and witty (or as tall) as the figures they play in movies. This seems obvious but it always comes as a bit of a letdown anyway.
Likewise, a novel represents years of hard work distilled into a few hundred pages, with all (or at least most) of the bad ideas cut out and thrown away, and the good ideas polished and refined as much as possible. Interacting with an author in person is nothing like reading his novels. Just about everyone who gets an opportunity to meet with an author in person ends up feeling mildly let down, and in some cases, grievously disappointed.
Authors are participants in a kind of colloquy that joins together all literate persons, and so it seems only reasonable that they should from time to time stop writing fiction for a few hours or days, and attend public events, such as conventions, signings, panels, seminars, etc., where they should exchange ideas with other authors and with other members of society. Therefore, authors such as myself frequently receive invitations to do exactly that.
Letters or e-mail from readers, and invitations to speak in public, might seem like very different things. In fact they are points on a common continuum; they have more in common than is obvious at first. The e-mail message from the reader, and the invitation to speak at a conference, are both requests (in most cases, polite and absolutely reasonable requests) for the author to interact directly with readers.
Normally, my only interaction with readers is to go to a Fedex drop box every couple of years and throw in the manuscript of a completed novel. It seems reasonable enough to ask for a little bit more than that! After all, the time commitment is very small: a few minutes tapping out an e-mail message, or a day trip to a conference to speak.
For some authors, this works, but in my case, it doesn’t. There is little to nothing that I can offer readers above and beyond what appears in my published writings. It follows that I should devote all my efforts to writing more material for publication, rather than spending a few minutes here, a day there, answering e-mails or going to conferences.
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.
That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second.
Another factor in this choice is that writing fiction every day seems to be an essential component in my sustaining good mental health. If I get blocked from writing fiction, I rapidly become depressed, and extremely unpleasant to be around. As long as I keep writing it, though, I am fit to be around other people. So all of the incentives point in the direction of devoting all available hours to fiction writing.
I am not proud of the fact that some of my e-mail goes unanswered as a result. It is never my intention to be rude or to give well-meaning readers the cold shoulder. If I were a commercial best-seller, I would have enough money to hire a staff to look after my correspondence. As it is, my books are bought by enough people to provide me with a sort of middle-class lifestyle, but not enough to hire employees, and so I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent.
He's sure doing a lot of gigs to introduce his books: https://www.nealstephenson.com/tour.html