Dead White Guys Cheering Me On

A little more than a month ago, I dubbed this 'the year of the essay' as I looked in that ugly stepsister of a genre to find academic, personal, and ideological redemption from what continues to be a taxing year.

Update: Politicians are still idiots, my job at a software company still turns my brain to mush, and I'm not sure if I want the cost of gas to go up or down (such ambivalence about long- vs. short-term good!).

However, in one pivotal instance, the essay, or rather the pretentious aristocrats who wrote some essays in England during the 17th century, helped save my sanity just a little bit.

I had come up with a brilliant plan. I won't go into details, but I was certain that I had found a way turn my life around in a way that both supported my family and my ambitions with a new job that I would have loved. One small issue: the job no longer existed. I'm not sure what little chasm of mischief in my mind convinced me that it was ok to fantasize about a dream life without first inquiring about the job's availability, but I did. And I was somewhat crushed when the prospects didn't pan out.

Enter Ben Jonson (1572-1637 [according to Master Norton]). Always a comfort to those of us who lack the instinctive or hereditary abilities that seem to appear spontaneously in others ("For a good poet's made as well as born"), Ben gave me some perspective on my difficulties. You see, I don't find much joy in my job, and it requires long hours. The fantasy job, while still requiring much effort, would have been within my comfort zone and used skills I've already spent a fair amount of time honing.

But Ben said to me, "And though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all. For as in an instrument, so in style, there must be a harmony and consent of parts."

And I said, "What the heck does that have to do with anything, Benjamin?"

And he said, "My name is Ben, and it's not short for anything. But what I'm saying is that if this aspect of professionalization is not of your taste, then all the more reason to embrace it for a time, knowing that you'll be more balanced in the long run."

To which I said, "Cool, thanks Benjamin," and promptly stopped talking to the Norton Anthology of English Literature because my wife came in the room.

Life is hard. And you want the best job and best situation you can get. But sometimes, you need to be patient and embrace the less palatable steps in that ladder, realizing that (at least for me) true happiness in the world is being able to act confidently and efficiently in it to help others and do good work. And today, tomorrow, and the next day will all push me in that direction as long as I keep a balanced and positive 17th century bourgeois attitude.

So in sum (for those of you just waiting for pictures):

This guy:
 

Helped turn me from feeling this:
 
 To this:

2012: Year of the Essay

So there I was, sitting in my hotel room, minding my own business, when I vomited a little in my mouth at the inanity of the ideas coming out of the television. It doesn't matter which channel. It could have been any of them.

I felt smug and superior for a little bit until I realized--put in the same situation, would I be any better at cohesively and coherently telling a complex story, arguing a multifaceted issue, or exploring a thought that goes deeper than "Obama=socialist=ugh" or "Santorum=gay hater=ugh"?

The fact that I would staunchly defend Obama from (and/or love him for) charges of left-leaning or immediately hate and vilify Santorum because he disagrees with my opinion on an issue means that I, like so many of the collective "you" out there, suffer from a draining lack of creative thought, argument, opinion, and experience and, more importantly, the ability to express that creativity.

Enter the cavalry.

My goal: learn from the best writers of our and other times. Nonfiction style. I know nonfiction is a vast and imprecise term, but I've loaded up on Baldwin and Didion, Montaigne and Emerson, and I'm going to work. These men and women took the complex and made it accessible to anyone with enough patience to read a few pages. It might be my flaming idealism for the written word, but I believe their example contains the germ of what can defeat the defeatism of mainstream sound-bite thought.

The result? Hopefully a better blog, a better person, and a better life.

Who else should I add to my list?

Tweaking Capitalism (Or how my lit degree relates to the real world)

Sources: Creating a World Without Poverty by Muhammad Yunus, Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and Democracy Matters by Cornel West

Since I started being a grownup, a staple of my daily media consumption has been NPR's Marketplace broadcast. I listen to it while I drive home from work or to the podcast when I work a little late (or leave a little early). I use the time as part of a crash course in the real world, a subject I attempted to ignore for 4+ years.

As a graduate student, I went forward every day in my arcane studies with the sincere belief that my understanding of 1970s Black Arts essay or diaspora studies theory would benefit the world in some way. It was a naive but not altogether ignoble belief. However, it left me completely unprepared for a world where hunger motivates much more than idealism, and where getting things done takes much more effort than I ever thought. At first glance, it would seem my education has been an exercise in random knowledge acquisition.

But here's the central question of the real world that I've encountered as a project manager, a question my education has helped me to tackle: Why can't people just work, get things done, and take care of business?

The truth is, in a big project where the sum is too complex for any one brain, every team member is lazy, or scared, or uninformed, or confused, or misdirected, or bored at some point in the day. Add personality to the mix. In every team, you have lemmings, John Waynes, and a whole host of individuals who make decisions (or choose indecision) throughout the day, and every individual requires a different management style, tack, or technique. The prospect of dealing with this on a daily basis can be staggering, but this is where my lit degree kicks in.

When I get discouraged or overwhelmed, I begin to think of my team as a host of characters straight out of Dickens, Faulkner, or (on bad days) The Walking Dead. My lit training has honed my memory, increased my ability to extrapolate personality and motivation from small details, and allowed me to visualize the tableau of human resources as a real life Yoknapatawpha County. The only difference, of course, is that my characters talk back and often fail to cooperate, but the application of lessons learned from my study of the Snopes makes my job doable.

The size of my projects, though, pales in comparison to the astounding problems that currently beset the country and the world. With more experience, I hope to contribute to the solution for some of these problems, but only a few months of management experience has highlighted the fallibility of so many of the movements happening around me.

Take Occupy Wall Street, for example. A movement of thousands that has managed to get a few things done, namely create a human megaphone and...well, that's about it, isn't it? A churning mass of humanity is not a spearhead for change. The presence of grievance does not translate into solutions because 5,000 people stomp their feet in the same place. Beautiful rhetoric won't bring the change we need. We forget that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not successful because of his speeches, but because of his organizational ability. The same goes for every other successful movement. We need fair, hard-nosed, and efficient leaders who can mobilize resources and inspire diverse groups of individuals to coalesce into a team. Then, and only then, will the world move forward.

Knowledge for knowledge's sake is a false idol perpetuated by an academic establishment either too incurious or too lazy to face up to the world outside its ivy-clad walls. Having an intimate knowledge of Black Arts essay is valuable, but only if it is used to make the world a better place. The same goes for economics, mathematics, political science, or biology. Without application, knowledge creates only entitlement. The proof is in the unemployed youths who mill around Zuccotti park chanting slogans instead of getting to work to fix the system, positive that their college degrees contain, in and of themselves, an entitlement to society's recognition and financial endorsement.

Application isn't pretty. You have to deal with lazy lemmings and wild card John Waynes. But until people stop waiting for others to serve up opportunities like breakfast in bed, the very real problems that inspired the outrage of Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the world's other grievances will never go away.

What Will You Choose for Your 2,000?

The other days, a friend of mine acquired a copy of the recent HBO version of Cormac McCarthy's play, The Sunset Limited. Very good. Tommy Lee Jones played White brilliantly, and Samuel L. Jackson was fantastic as Black. At one point, the two men are (surprise) having a conversation. Ok, so they're having a conversation for 90 minutes. At one point in that 90 minutes, Jackson asks Jones how many books he's read. Jones plays a professor, and he realistically says something like (I'm paraphrasing here): "Oh, I don't know. 2 books a week. 100 a year. For 40 years. 4,000."

4,000 books. That seems like a lot, but when put into perspective, 40 years is a long time. Now, this got me thinking about my own reading. I don't read 2 books a week, or at least I won't when I'm no longer a graduate student. There just won't be time.

So let's do some math. Prepare yourselves. If I read just one book a week for the next 40 years, that's about 2,000 books. That will take me to my mid-60s. After that, I may not even be able to see anymore, so maybe 2,000 books is it (or, like the few times I've seen my grandparents "reading," I'll sleep through a few more after that). So what are my 2,000 books going to be?

This is a lot of pressure. For every book I choose, another won't be read. I've operated for a long time under the delusion that, eventually, I would be able to read all the books I've ever wanted to read. Now I know that's not true, even if tomorrow people stopped writing books.

In a moment of panic, I thought, "Wait a second. I'll just look at that list '1001 Books to Read Before you Die.'" Then I thought, "Heck no!" I'm not letting some pretentious list-maker determine how I spend the next 20 years of my reading life.

I have no solutions. Only depression. I'm no longer making goals like: "Read the complete works of Faulkner" or "Read more Dickens." I want to read all of Faulkner (maybe not Dickens), but can I justify that kind of bite into my 2,000?

This is troubling. So troubling, in fact, that I spaced out during the pivotal hour-mark of The Sunset Limited. Which means I'll have to re-watch it. Maybe that bumps my number down to 1,999.

Best of 2010

What's that you say? I'm a week or so late? Well, I actually thought about my "best of" picks. Also, unlike most reviewers, I actually waited until the end of 2010 to reflect on the year. Starting before January 1 devalues the end of the year. If you publish a "best of" list before that and experience something phenomenal, your "best of" life is a lie. I just don't want to lie to people. That was a lot of ado. Here are my picks:

Best Fiction I Read in 2010
1. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
2. Democracy by Joan Didion
3. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

My reviews of all these books are available on my goodreads page (accessible by clicking on the goodreads widget on the right), so I won't go into too much detail here. I'll just say that Mengestu blew me away, Didion changed the way I think about storytelling, and Udall made fresh and new a subject I thought untouchable and uninteresting.

Best Nonfiction I Read in 2010
1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
2. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
3. Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Ronald Walker

I'm naming my first-born son Malcolm. That's how much I admire this man. If the Simpsons hadn't ruined the name Nelson for me, I might consider naming my second son after Mandela. It was a long and tiring book, but Mandela taught me a lot about leadership, patience, and charity. Walker's historical research reaffirmed my faith in Mormon history after a year of reading subpar and poorly researched rubbish.

Best Reading Surprise of 2010
-The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
This was (maybe) the last book I read this year. I was expecting the usual self-consciousness and affected lyricism of most "up and coming" authors. Mengestu's writing, though, was organic, beautiful, and understated. The story was real without being heavy-handed. I love this book.

Best Guilty Pleasure Read 0f 2010
1. Night Soldiers by Alan Furst
2. World War Z by Max Brooks

I'm not even guilty about either of these. Brooks made zombies more alive [rimshot!] on the printed page than they are in most films. And Furst is a master of spy fiction that I've only recently discovered. Not everything I've read by him this year has satisfied me, and I blame that mostly on the fact that I read Night Soldiers first.

Best Movie Theater Experience of 2010
1. Inception
2. I need to go to the theater more....

It's been a long time since I've spent 3 hours in a theater and felt like a half hour has gone by. Inception might not be the best movie of the year, but I don't see enough movies in theaters to make this a very deep category.

Best Movie Rental Experience of 2010
1. Un Prophete dir. Jacques Audiard
2. Mystic River dir. Clint Eastwood
3. Blood Simple dir. Coen bros.

A Prophet is one of the best movies I've seen in a while. While I don't recommend it for most, it retold the prison story in a world of prison movies set on remaking The Shawshank Redemption. Casey Affleck blew me away in Mystic River and I loved watching part of the genesis of the Coens' genius.

Best TV Series I Watched in 2010
1. The Walking Dead (AMC)
2. The West Wing (NBC)
3. MI-5 (BBC)
4. Mad Men (AMC)

This category is so magnificently deep! But I always reward innovation, and The Walking Dead expanded the idea of a TV series. My wife and I have been watching the West Wing on DVD, and last year we finished the first two seasons. Best casting and dialogue. Whatever happened to good, witty shows like that? MI-5 is what 24 wanted to be but couldn't with an American audience. Fast, dark, understated, and troubling. I love me some spies. And Mad Men season 4...keeping on strong into the mid-1960s. I have the sneaking suspicion that I love this show the same way I used to love soap operas. But I reassure myself by remembering that my tastes have matured....

Correction 2/2011: So, it looks like I mixed up Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone. Both based on Lehane novels, if that's any saving grace. I still stick with Mystic River as my number two. Affleck was good in Gone, but so were Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and (though I hate to admit it) Kevin Bacon. Trifecta. Bam.