https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ88fObMa1kI listened to the audio book of 'The Prince.' Machiavelli seems to be a neutral observer of how politics was practiced in his native Italy, and through the history in books he'd read. There is evidence that the negative connotations ascribed to Machiavelli's work comes from Elizabethan English writers. The devious methods many emphasize tin Machiavelli's work is a way to demonize the Catholic opponents of the English ruling class. How Machiavellian. https://archive.is/rGr2H
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dlC8t1hcuYI posted this today on Craigslist and last night on Youtube. I bought a cassette tape of the radio broadcast of the story '1984' by George Orwell. I bought the tape at the Barnes and Noble superbookstore in Boston's Downtown Crossing. The story is interesting for taking a 'second person singular' tone of narration. Many parts begin with "You..." The Hollywood actor David Niven is the main character, Winston Smith. I like the story because it gets to the heart of the story in less than one hour.
6 Real Reasons to Keep a Daily Journal -- Living in Awareness
Some of my readers may think that keeping a daily journal is what only
little girls do, but don't be so quick to judge. I will try to convince
you that keeping a daily journal is something that each one of us should
do if we are seriously looking into changing the quality of our life.
There are mainly two reasons why I decided to bring this topic up and to
share it with others. The first reason is that keeping a daily journal
has tremendously changed me in a positive way in so many different areas
of life. The second reason is that the majority of people out there
underestimate the power of journaling. We tend to think that keeping a
journal has no real practical implications to it, and therefore no use
of having one. And even when we do understand the potential of
journaling, we procrastinate and are simply too lazy make it happen.
We forget that life is a lot about movement and becoming better as we
grow. We try out new things, become more experienced, and then we strive
to become even better. This can concern relationships, sports, career
or life in general. But because we are constantly bombarded with so many
things, we tend to miss or forget the small successes and failures of
life. And this is the reason why we make the same mistakes over and
over, and not experience the progress that we were after. Simply put, we
have nothing to compare our life to. We change, but because our memory
is very limited, we remember only what we were, and we see what we have
become. The process of changing, making mistakes, trial and error, is
unfortunately left out.
Like I said, having a daily journal has changed me to the extent that I
now feel obliged to preach to you about its effectiveness. Today, I want
to share with you six examples where keeping a daily journal will bring
you real, solid, legit and positive results!
Examples of effective daily journal keeping
1. Lucid dreaming
One of the longest periods of keeping a daily journal in my life was related to lucid dreaming.
For those of you that don't know, lucid dreaming is when you become
fully or partially aware in your dreams, and you can basically do
whatever you want. Remember the movie Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio?
It's kinda like that, kinda.
When I was a little younger, I noticed that once in a while I am able to
become aware in my dreams. It happened, but quite rarely. I decided to
improve this and got myself a dream journal. Whenever I would wake up in
the middle of the night, I would quickly write a few things from my
latest dream into the journal, and in the morning I would try to
recreate the whole dream based on the notes that I wrote. In the
beginning, I could remember one dream partially. With time, I could
remember one dream vividly, followed by two dreams, three dreams, etc.
As I wrote in my daily dream journal, my "dream memory" improved as
well. Not only I could remember in color and detail a lot of the dreams
that I had, becoming lucid in them was also fairly common. It happened
about once a week or every two weeks.
Moreover, my dreams taught me a lot about life. When you experience
dreams, you are not necessarily the same person that you are in real
life. There is an infinite amount of roles that you play. And because of
this, you are able to better understand the people around you. You have
less prejudice towards others, and you can really step into the shoes
of others. It is unfortunate so many of us never remember our dreams --
there is so much we can learn from them. A dream journal is extremely
powerful here.
2. Relationship journal
Relationships are never perfect and easy. They require a lot of work
from both people in order to satisfy each other's needs. Unfortunately,
after years of being in one, certain aspects fade out and are forgotten.
Sometimes this will lead to the inability to handle each other and
eventually break up, and sometimes will require participating in couple
therapy. Either way, the result is sad.
So, one way to avoid this is to live in awareness. Get a daily journal
and write things down that you do together that you both enjoy or don't
enjoy. Write down the things you have done or said that made your loved
one happy or not so happy. Note down as many things as you can. As a
result, you will be able to keep a healthy, romantic relationship for as
long as you desire.
3. Meditation
If you have decided to properly meditate, don't expect to do it twice a
week for 3 months and have spectacular results. No, meditation is
something that you should do daily for the rest of your life, ideally.
And just like with any other work or hobby, you will become better at it
with time.
I have meditated with both, a journal and without. And while without a
journal I still get to experience all of the positive effects, with a
journal I was more aware of the things happening around me during and
after meditation. Did I feel something special this time? How was it
different from last time? Should I try to go deeper into that state the
next time? -- these are some of the questions that I am more aware of
when I have a journal. Without a daily journal, I can experience
something, and forget about it the next day. With a journal, I am able
to notice it every time it happens to me and to expand that feeling or
state further. This also concerns the benefits of meditation outside of
meditation sessions, when I eat or ride the bus, for example.
4. Workout
This is probably the most straight-forward example of why we should be keeping a journal.
In the gym, a very good indicator of your progress is the ability to
pick heavier weights and/or do more reps. If you have only begun going
to the gym, you most likely won't know what you are doing. A lot of
walking around, checking out the machines, picking up random weights and
exercising with them in a random sequence a random amount of times.
Sound familiar?
So, unless you have been working out for a year or so and know what you
are doing, it makes sense to keep a journal of what you do and when.
This way not only you will avoid harm to your body due to heavy weights,
but you will also be able to see the progress. As an example, if your
body weight, as well as the weight that you are lifting, has stopped
increasing, it is time to change something in your workout routine. If
you don't keep track of your progress, it will take longer for you to
notice this.
5. Stress reduction
As I have already discussed this in one of my previous posts about how
to stop worrying, one way to approach the problem is to think about it
rationally. Why am I stressed out? Can the problem be dealt with? Am I
stressed out just because I am used to being stressed out in these
situations, or is there a real problem?
One very effective way to handle this is to write down your emotions,
fears and thoughts onto a piece of paper. By noting them, you are
letting it out of your system, kind of like sharing it with someone
else. Except not always people want to hear about our problems, which is
why keeping a daily journal is crucial here. By writing them down, we
become more aware and can better analyze them. I am sure you have all
been in a situation where you were under so much stress that at a
certain moment you couldn't even remember what caused it. In such a
moment a diary will be your doctor and a best friend.
6. Work and business
Last but not least, it is good to keep a daily journal regarding work and business.
Maybe there are things happening to you at work that are especially
important, and you would like to remember about them in the future. And
in the case of a business, a journal can be a place to write down your
plans, fears, strategies and overall progress. It is like bookkeeping,
but instead of handling the money question, you are also being aware of
your satisfaction towards what you do. What have I done particularly
well in the last three months? What did I do poorly? What did I enjoy
most? What should I change? . . .
Again, don't underestimate the power of this. Your work and/or your
business is what earns you the bread and butter. The best possible
approach is to make the least amount of mistakes. Both, regular job and
business can be highly stressful, leaving many important aspects of it
hidden. If you note these things down, you will be spending more time
analyzing your next steps, as opposed to making quick and sometimes
irrational decisions.
Conclusion
As you can see, I'm a big fan of writing things down. This is actually
also one of the reasons why I have decided to make this blog, to keep
track of my progress and to be able to share it with you.
I truly believe in the power of keeping a journal for a variety of
things, and my experience with it just proves how powerful it is. I
really hope that if you haven't begun one yet, that you would start one
right now. The only obstacle to keeping a journal is your laziness or
procrastination. But as soon as you overcome that, and begin writing
everything down, you will see some very positive results and feedback.
Trust me.
I re-edited a video I made of someone else' court room sketches from the Boston Marathon Bomber trial of the surviving Brother Tsarnaev. I took out the music and left it silent so I wouldn't have to have the video monetized with more ads and revenue going to the copyright holder of the music owner.
These black and white line drawings are the ultimate comic book with a real world event at the core of the story. I'm glad I didn't have to sit in judgement at this trial. I was called and questioned for jury duty with a pool of about 2,000 other people But in the end, this is all I see of the trial.
https://archive.is/9ryIq I posted this article on Craigslist in 'Community' where all the other posts are low rent commercial ads. This is a way for me to pay attention to the ideas in this wise piece of writing advice.
Every Wednesday, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard
University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed
list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don't start a
story with an alarm clock going off. Don't end a story with the whole
shebang having been a suicide note. Don't use flashy dialogue tags like
intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted
students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such
perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their
imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is
congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective
teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the
roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood
shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone
blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will
shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms
that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you
operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don't Write What You Know.
The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the
students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as
they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of
abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful
lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans,
professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet
miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly
interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling
experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip
them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds
as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka
of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and
heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it's the difference
between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and
fiction that, well, matters.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit I've been accused of
writing what I know on a good many occasions. Acquaintances, book
reviewers, kind souls who've attended public readings, students, they've
all charged me with writing autobiographical fiction. Sometimes, the
critic notes a parallel between my background and that of a character.
At other times, the reasoning is fuzzier. A woman at a reading once told
me, "I liked your book a lot, but the stories made me think you'd be
taller." I'm never offended; at times, I've been weirdly flattered.
Comments like these make me think I'm getting away with something.
The facts are these: I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, the
part of the country where most every word of fiction I've published
takes place. I grew up around horses and hurricanes; my father worried
about money, occasionally moonlighted to pay the bills, and died young;
my mother smoked and paid mightily for it. If you read Corpus Christi:
Stories, you'll undoubtedly recognize elements from my life in the
stories; however, very few of the experiences in the book are my own. In
early versions of some stories, my impulse was to try to record how
certain events in my life had played out, but by the third draft, I was
prohibitively bored. I knew how, in real life, the stories ended, and I
had a pretty firm idea of what they "meant," so the story could not
surprise me, or provide an opportunity for wonder. I was writing to
explain, not to discover. The writing process was as exciting as
completing a crossword puzzle I'd already solved. So I changed my
approach.
Instead of thinking of my experiences as structures I wanted to erect in
fiction, I started conceiving of them as the scaffolding that would be
torn down once the work was complete. I took small details from my life
to evoke a place and the people who inhabit it, but those details served
to illuminate my imagination. Before, I'd forced my fiction to conform
to the contours of my life; now I sought out any and every point where a
plot could be rerouted away from what I'd known. The shift was seismic.
My confidence waned, but my curiosity sprawled. I was writing fiction,
to paraphrase William Trevor, not to express myself, but to escape
myself. When I recall those stories now, the flashes of autobiography
remind me of stars staking a constellation. Individually, the stars are
unimportant; only when they map shapes in the darkness, shapes born of
imagination, do we understand their light.
I don't know the origin of the "write what you know" logic. A lot of
folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said
this: "From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you
make something through your invention that is not a representation but a
whole new thing truer than anything true and alive." If this is the
logic's origin, then maybe what's happened is akin to that old game
called Telephone. In the game, one kid whispers a message to a second
kid and then that kid whispers it to a third and so on, until the
message circles the room and returns to the first kid. The message is
always altered, minimized, and corrupted by translation. "Bill is smart
to sit in the grass" becomes "Bill is a smart-ass." A similar
transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and,
ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The
very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act
of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the
result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source
material.
Another confession: part of me dies inside when a student whose story
has been critiqued responds to the workshop by saying, "You can't object
to the _________ scene. It really happened! I was there!" The writer is
giving preference to the facts of an experience, the so-called literal
truth, rather than fiction's narrative and emotional integrity.
Conceived this way, the writer's story is relegated to an inferior and
insurmountable station; it can neither compete with, nor live without,
the ur-experience. Such a writer's sole ambition is for the characters
and events to represent other and superior--read: actual--characters and
events. Meaning, the written story has never been what mattered most.
Meaning, the reader is meant to care less about the characters and more
about whoever inspired them, and the actions in a story serve to ensure
that we track their provenance and regard that material as truer.
Meaning, the story is engineered--and expected--to be about something.
And aboutness is all but terminal in fiction.
Stories aren't about things. Stories are things.
Stories aren't about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.
To be perfectly clear: I don't tell students not to ferret through their
lives for potential stories. I don't want, say, a soldier who served in
Iraq to shy away from writing war stories. Quite the opposite. I want
him to freight his fiction with rich details of combat. I want the story
to evoke the texture of the sand and the noise of a Baghdad bazaar, the
terrible and beautiful shade of blue smoke ribboning from the barrel of
his M-4. His experience should liberate his imagination, not restrict
it. Of course I want him to take inspiration where he can find it. What I
don't want--and what's prone to happen when writers set out to write
what they know--is for him to think an imagined story is less urgent,
less harrowing or authentic, than a true story.
Take, for example, The Lazarus Project, by Bosnian-born author
Aleksandar Hemon. In this superb and wrenching novel, Hemon entwines two
narratives--the 1908 murder of Lazarus Averbuch in Chicago, and the
present-day journey of a writer named Brik through eastern Europe to
research a book about Lazarus. Superficially, the novel seems as
entrenched in autobiography as it is in history: Brik, like Hemon, was
born in Bosnia, and Hemon lives, like the fictional Brik, in Chicago;
Hemon, like Brik, also traveled through Europe to research the project
with a photographer friend, and sure enough, both a photographer friend
and photographs can be found in the novel. However, The Lazarus Project
is far more than the sum of its parts. The raw materials serve Hemon's
fiction in the same way that paint, canvas, and onions served Cezanne's
Still Life With Onions. The goal isn't to represent an experience, but
instead to create a piece of art that is itself an experience. In a
recent interview, Hemon, a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, said, "I
reserve the right to get engaged with any aspect of human experience,
and so that means that I can--indeed I must--go beyond my experience to
engage. That's non-negotiable." Amen.
And what of Lorrie Moore's masterpiece "People Like That Are the Only
People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk"? Upon its publication in
1997, many readers assumed Moore's short story of parents coping with
their one-year-old boy's kidney cancer was nonfiction; after all, her
family had endured similar trauma and the mother in the story was, like
Moore, a teacher and fiction writer. (At one point, the father
encourages the mother to "take notes" on the ordeal so she can write and
sell a story to offset the mounting medical expenses.) And yet the
story's potency is attributable to the architecture of fiction, the
distance that Moore pries open between her family and the family on the
page. A straightforward recounting of the experience would merely
confirm what reader and author already know: cancer is horrible,
watching children suffer is horrible, etc. To affect the reader, to
reveal the fullness and force of such trauma, Moore invokes her
imagination. She deploys humor, wordplay, dramatized scenes, a complex
(mostly) third-person narration, and an apparatus of irony built on the
crucial conceit that the mother lacks the necessary skill and courage to
write this story. As she makes her way to see her son after his
surgery, her thinking sums up the limitations of simply writing what you
know: "How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the
trip are always two different things . . . One cannot go to a place and
speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really."
Or, speaking of war stories, consider Tim O'Brien's collection of
stories, The Things They Carried. The book renders the myriad horrors,
exhilarations, doldrums, and tragedies of the Vietnam War with vividness
and intimacy, and because the author is a veteran, the book's power
might be assumed to emanate from O'Brien's firsthand knowledge. And
maybe it does. But in "Good Form," one of the short-short stories in the
collection, the narrator says, "Story-truth is truer sometimes than
happening-truth." I've always found an abiding comfort in this claim,
and the comfort is compounded by the fact that the narrator is a man who
shares so much of the author's pedigree--his experience in Vietnam, his
current literary vocation, even his age and name. O'Brien could have
written the "happening-truth" of his experience and called it a day. (In
fact, he did just that in his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone,
Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.) But by choosing fiction here, especially
after having written a nonfiction account of his experiences, he tacitly
acknowledges that something is gained by setting imagination loose on
history, something profound and revelatory and vital: empathy. Empathy,
to my mind, is the channel through which writer and reader can most
assuredly connect with the characters. And if personal experience
constrains a story, often to the point of dullness and abstraction, then
empathy simultaneously sharpens and emancipates it. O'Brien writes:
Here is happening-truth, I was once a soldier. There were many
bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and afraid to
look . . .
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young
man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the
village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the
other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
Another deeper, more essential part of me dies when a workshop student
says, "What I wanted to do was __________." The idea of a writer
"wanting" to do something in a story unhinges me. At best, such desire
smacks of nostalgia and, at worst, it betrays agenda. I feel pity for
the characters, a real sense of futility. I'm reminded of Ron Carlson's
hilarious story, "What We Wanted to Do," in which a group of villagers
intends to spill a cauldron of boiling oil on the Visigoths storming
their gates. The oil, however, never reaches its boiling point, so when
the villagers commence their dousing, the liquid is lukewarm and the
Visigoths aren't so much scalded as they are terribly pissed off. The
result is their most vicious attack. The lesson is a good one for
fiction writers: stories fueled by intentions never reach their boiling
point.
And writing what you know is knotted up with intention, and intention in
fiction is always related to control, to rigidity, and more often than
not, a little solipsism. The writer seems to have chosen an event
because it illustrates a point or mounts an argument. When a fiction
writer has a message to deliver, a residue of smugness is often in the
prose, a distressing sense of the story's being rushed, of the author's
going through the motions, hurrying the characters toward whatever
wisdom awaits on the last page. As a reader, I feel pandered to and
closed out. Maybe even a little bullied. My involvement in the story,
like the characters', becomes utterly passive. We are there to follow
orders, to admire and applaud the author's supposed insight.
Maybe, though, the hardest thing for me to hear in workshop is a
student's claim that he isn't "comfortable" writing certain stories. The
words are almost blasphemous to me, equally saddening and maddening.
Usually, the student's discomfort relates to race or gender, sexuality
or class. He feels ill-equipped to write about characters that don't
resemble him in the mirror and bedroom, so he reverts to writing what he
knows. I argue that if the subject or character is intimidating, then
that's exactly what the writer should be exploring in fiction. My
students worry about being invasive or predatory, and few things
frighten them more than charges of appropriation and literary
trespassing. But I see an altogether more menacing threat: the devaluing
of not only imagination, but also compassion. And if empathy is
important to fiction, compassion is invaluable. Compassion is empathy on
steroids.
Was Toni Morrison a slave? Did she ever slit a child's throat? Was
Nabokov, in light of his "fancy prose style," a murderer? Has Haruki
Murakami ever constructed a flute from the souls of cats? Yes, Flannery
O'Connor limped, but did she ever lose a wooden leg to a huckster Bible
salesman? Tim O'Brien served in Vietnam, but, as the narrator of "Good
Form" says, "almost everything else is invented." Even without extended
research, I can guarantee Ron Carlson has never spilled oil onto the
head of a Visigoth.
All of this recalls for me an interview with Allan Gurganus, the sublime
novelist who so thoroughly imagined Lucy Marsden, that oldest living
Confederate widow who dished all her secrets. Gurganus says, "As an
amateur historian, I'm forever aware that 'the second story' of a
building once referred to its murals." I also remember reading that the
murals painted on a building's interior walls usually depicted a tale
from history, and thus, if you were on the fourth floor, if you were
seeing the fourth mural, you were on the fourth story. In the interview,
Gurganus goes on to say, "For fantasists like me, history constitutes
the ground floor only, staff entrance. We all enter there but--given our
spirit yearnings, our malformed characters, as soon as possible, we
ascend." This seems inviolably true to me, and impossibly inspiring.
Writers may enter their stories through literal experience, through the
ground floor, but fiction brings with it an obligation to rise past the
base level, to transcend the limitations of fact and history, and
proceed skyward.
I'm also thinking again about my fiction workshop, those Wednesdays
spent talking about people who don't exist, and how chilled the students
are when I discourage them from writing what they know. To reanimate
them--or at least salvage my course-evaluation scores--I say fiction is
an act of courage and humility, a protest against our mortality, and we,
the authors, don't matter. What matters is our characters, those
constructions of imagination that can transcend our biases and agendas,
our egos and entitlements and flesh. Trust your powers of empathy and
invention, I say. Trust the example of the authors you love to
read--Flaubert: "Emma, c'est moi"--and trust that your craft, when
braided with compassion, will produce stories that matter both to you
and to readers you've never met.
The students mostly buy it. Week by week, their stories are arresting
and rewarding, and with each revision, I feel more optimistic, more
reassured and moved by their work. My students succeed about as often as
most writers do, as often as I do--in other words, often enough. As I
read their good fiction, though, I sometimes wonder if I haven't
misunderstood something simple and essential. I've long believed that
what has kept writers, again myself included, from fully transcending
their personal experiences on the page was fear of incompetence: I can't
write a plot that involves a kidnapping because I've never been
kidnapped, etc. But what if it's the opposite? What if the reason we
find it so difficult to cleave our fiction from our experience, the
reason we're so loath to engage our imaginations and let the story rise
above the ground floor of truth, isn't that we're afraid we'll do the
job poorly, but that we're afraid we'll do it too well? If we succeed,
if the characters are fully imagined, if they are so beautifully real
that they quicken and rise off the page, then maybe our own experiences
will feel smaller, our actions less consequential. Maybe we're afraid
that if we write what we don't know, we'll discover something truer than
anything our real lives will ever yield. And maybe we encounter still
another, more insidious threat--the threat that if we do our jobs too
well, if we powerfully render characters who are untethered from our
experience, they'll supplant us in the reader's mind. Maybe we worry
that fiction's vividness will put our own brief and negligible lives
into too stark a relief, and the reader, seduced by literature's
permanence, will leave us behind. Maybe we worry we'll be forgotten.
Maybe we're afraid of what we want most--for our characters to outlive
us--and maybe the possibility that the writer, not the reader, will get
lost in the pages of a great book is, ultimately, too much for us to
bear.
I almost made this video just to see if the internet companies would tell me that the sound of the wind was copyrighted. I think the wind is a secondhand use of a vinyl record I bought in the 1980's. The sleeve said that playing the wind blowing over a sound system lowered air conditioning costs because people felt cooler hearing the cold wind blowing on a hot day.
