I shall work in detail on this. But I know that my obsessions were entirely pop culture-based until I got to college. As a poor kid growing up on a reservation, my cultural life was based on our very limited TV reception (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS) and the very small libraries on the reservation that contained far more magazines (People, Life, Reader’s Digest, Time) than books, It’s in this way that poor American kids are acculturated to becoming extremely American. I was an Indian boy who became an All-American archetype without having ever seen any representation of myself in the mainstream culture. So, yeah, it was all Brady Bunch and Bruce Lee for me.
I grew up in a house without books, where reading and storytelling were far from valued. I didn't discover literature until after I'd graduated from college, having earned a BS (pun intended) in business. One job took me to London, where I lived for a few months in a beautifully furnished flat lined with Penguin classics, shelves and shelves of shimmering black and orange spines. Having no friends there and little money, I turned to these books for company and instantly fell in love, first with George's pantheon, the Russians. Nearly forty years later, I'm still reading and scribbling in the margins, making up for lost time and my book-deprived childhood. Thank you, George, for keeping me on the student's path with your humor, grace, and wisdom.
Oh, George, George. I came of age as the Monkees were coming to fame. When I heard about Nesmith's death, I started sobbing, but also felt strangely ashamed, as the group seemed to always occupy a kind of cheesy reputation. But they were a part of me. (I had such a crush on Mickey Dolenz.) You know, this past year, I have been so horribly depressed by the state of the nation, political hostility and craziness -- I guess I just wanted you to know that this club, this little club, is the best therapy I've ever had. I want to stay alive to keep being a part of it. I haven't felt this alive or excited about anything in a long, long, time. Thank you, George. And I wish you a peace-filled wintry season, full of love, light, and energy.
I'm going to do the whole project, but I think the most honest/embarassing revelation will be the fact that the books that made me a "reader" were the Fear Street books by R.L.Stine. I read so many of them and no one I knew liked them (they were all about The Babysitter's Club, which I still don't understand.)
What this tells me about myself is that for me, the stakes have to be high. Social conflict is not enough. The BIGGER and more WORLD ENDING the better. Or at least, the implications of the conflict have to cut deep.
This looks like fun! I think though, at my age (63), I may have to switch to decades rather than 5's for the later years--maybe post 30s. Not sure I can differentiate 45-50 from 50-55, for instance, though I could give it a go.
Also, I would never have thought of Jaws as an influence, except a few years ago I started connecting it to my interest in Moby Dick (I know that's been said before) but I had a particular view of the book, connecting to the movie, and to (bear with me) present day examples of fatuous arrogance (including DJT and environmental degradation). Anyhoo, wrote an essay about it once that is one of my favorite publications ever, so yeah, you never know what things from the past will stick their fins out of the water in front of you!
Looking forward to filling this out and learning about past-me's a little.
What a liberating exercise! I never really thought that I self censored so much but (alas) I do. So, my name's Ulka and I frickin' LOVED Quantum Leap. :)
I found out that only experiences and objects were memorable until about 6, then at the same exact moment it seems, people and stories became equally as important to me. I find that interesting!
Some surprise influences I unearthed: SNL reruns from the 80's on Comedy Central, all my childhood pets (several cats, a parakeet, and several mice, some fish too), listening to doo-wop with my dad on car rides to the San Fernando Valley every weekend, my eccentric elementary school teachers (My 2nd grade teacher had a full-on beehive even though it was 1992).
My "serious" influences: Kid A, Ravel, "The Confessions", Bob Dylan, Georgia O'Keefe, Marina Abramović, Aldous Huxley, Director's Label series, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Brian Eno, David Burn, David Lynch, David Cronenberg (Holy Trinity of Davids), Robert Rauschenberg, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Banana Yoshimoto, Mos Def, Eckhart Tolle, Tao Te Ching, Sylvie Guillem, Miles Davis, Edith Piaf, and on and on ad infinitum.
Anyone else feeling full and warm after this exercise? You've invented quite a powerful time machine, George :)
I'm going to work on this grid but first wanted to express gratitude to George for how he teaches writing as an act of self-discovery and growth.
I know how his own journey evolved from Hemingway cosplay to his stew of humor and optimism and gravitas, but really appreciate the repeated nudges to honor brought us all to this point and what has resonated with us. Getting all these pieces to coexist and even sing together is the crux of a writer's voice, I think.
"And what will be needed, if the story is going to be good, is: everything, all that you are, even those parts you don’t like or usually exclude."
This brought up some tears for me - sorrow at recognizing how much has been excluded, but also gratitude in the possibility of welcoming it back in. There's a sense of release and enlargening here: I have much more to draw upon than I'd allowed myself. Thank you for this!
And thanks everyone for sharing your influences. It's interesting to consider the "guilty pleasures." Where do we get the idea that one thing is worthy of enjoyment and another thing isn't?
I remember as a child how this worthiness was influenced by the judgement of my peers (it was okay to enjoy the Spice Girls for a few months; then, suddenly, it wasn't), and a fear of judgement by respected figures like my parents and teachers. By adolescence, I'd happily tell a teacher that I'd read Jane Austen; I'd leave out the Archie comics - I began to believe I never really liked them. Surely, there was something I liked about them, but I was afraid to admit it, even to myself. What would it say about me if I liked something so "un-literary"?
So much to consider here! What have we disliked and discarded? What led us to do that? What might it be like to reclaim those things as part of ourselves? I'm excited to explore this further!
At first I thought this might be just about nostalgia and remembering what great taste I have ;) but it's made me think about a lot of different things which is good. Thank you for allowing me to think and reflect.
I'm thinking a lot about my brother and what led us to become such polar opposites. My influences were all cerebral while his were all visceral. I think it had to be this way. He couldn't have turned into a left-leaning, always reading, artsy fartsy emotional person and I couldn't have become an adrenaline-seeking, right-leaning, hunting, stoic type. We each found the influences we instictively knew we needed to find. Kurt Vonnegut was never an "option" for him just as Ted Nugent couldn't be an "option" for me.
Some of my main influences ended up being Sesame Street, Calvin & Hobbes, The Simpsons, Vonnegut, The Beatles, Pearl Jam, Lucinda Williams, Buddhism, Jeff Bridges, "Mink River" by Brian Doyle, and my wife.
Those are some of the positive ones. I've also been thinking about the things that influence us to NOT become a certain way. The things we see and go, "Oh. Let's not be like that". My dad taking me hunting as a young teenager and killing a deer. That was a major turning point in my life. Seeing the animal's suffering didn't turn me into a vegetarian that day, but it was the event that triggered it, no pun intended. Also anti-influential was just the way my dad behaved with his hunting friend, getting wasted on cheap whiskey, telling disgusting, racist jokes. I took that all in silently thinking "This is uncomfortable. This is not me". Not to mention that he almost killed us both later that night by speeding through a train track so we wouldn't have to wait for the train coming. We missed it by feet. This is a story I've been trying to put on paper but haven't cracked the code yet on how to tell it properly.
One last thing I noticed...from age 10-15: Basically nothing in the story/novel boxes. I started playing guitar at ten and it pretty much consumed my entire life there for quite a few years.
Dec 20, 2021·edited Dec 20, 2021Liked by George Saunders
As a member of the 84 boxes to fill club, as well as Story Club, this will take a while. But right out of the gate, I remember listening to Steve Martin's stand up comedy albums, Let's Get Small, and Comedy is not Pretty. I memorized a lot of the bits. I can still sing the verses of Grandmother's Song: Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus.....
I really enjoyed this exercise! Weird/fun things came up (like my pre-teen obsession with Absolut vodka and Got Milk magazine ads, with which I plastered by bedroom walls), but also beautiful/fun things like the incredible names and vivid memories of the people in my preschool (Nike Ife, whose dad was British and drank beer out of green bottles; Joshua Raisin, who slept in a family bed). The exercise as a whole inspired me to reach out to a few people who've been constants through my life to let them know how grateful I am to them. It also made me think about my kids, who are 5 and 7, and how they are in the process of building their own authentic influence maps and how cool that is (!!!).
Would it be OK for me to offer a version of this to my high school students? They are neurodivergent learners, and I think it would be cool and inspiring for them to reflect on all the (non-academic) influences that have made them who they are.
This is surprisingly fun but also shocking! I can't believe how much I've forgotten...probably I blocked it out, like the fact that as a teenage girl in Dallas (land of big hair and football) in the 80s, I was secretly obsessed with Neil Simon. I don't know how many times I checked out his plays from the library. The Odd Couple was my favorite, and I remember convincing my partner in Drama class to do a scene with me. The other thing was a book by Patrick Dennis (Tanner), who wrote Auntie Mame, called Genius. My mom and I used to read it out loud to each other, and my first creative act was to try and adapt it to a screenplay. (I failed.) When I got into Serious Literature, I set it aside. (And in all honesty, I can't bring myself to pick it up now because there's a whole section down in Mexico that just....isn't funny through today's eyes.) In an earlier post, George talked about trying to be a serious writer, like Hemingway, but how things just didn't come out naturally. I am always and forever thinking of Alice Munro when I think about writing, but that kind of writing, when I do it, just plods along on the page. Only recently have I started to let myself be funny on the page. It's terrifying (what if I am only funny to me?) but so much more dynamic. Sorry for the ramble, but this was such a DUH! moment!
I shall work in detail on this. But I know that my obsessions were entirely pop culture-based until I got to college. As a poor kid growing up on a reservation, my cultural life was based on our very limited TV reception (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS) and the very small libraries on the reservation that contained far more magazines (People, Life, Reader’s Digest, Time) than books, It’s in this way that poor American kids are acculturated to becoming extremely American. I was an Indian boy who became an All-American archetype without having ever seen any representation of myself in the mainstream culture. So, yeah, it was all Brady Bunch and Bruce Lee for me.
I grew up in a house without books, where reading and storytelling were far from valued. I didn't discover literature until after I'd graduated from college, having earned a BS (pun intended) in business. One job took me to London, where I lived for a few months in a beautifully furnished flat lined with Penguin classics, shelves and shelves of shimmering black and orange spines. Having no friends there and little money, I turned to these books for company and instantly fell in love, first with George's pantheon, the Russians. Nearly forty years later, I'm still reading and scribbling in the margins, making up for lost time and my book-deprived childhood. Thank you, George, for keeping me on the student's path with your humor, grace, and wisdom.
Oh, George, George. I came of age as the Monkees were coming to fame. When I heard about Nesmith's death, I started sobbing, but also felt strangely ashamed, as the group seemed to always occupy a kind of cheesy reputation. But they were a part of me. (I had such a crush on Mickey Dolenz.) You know, this past year, I have been so horribly depressed by the state of the nation, political hostility and craziness -- I guess I just wanted you to know that this club, this little club, is the best therapy I've ever had. I want to stay alive to keep being a part of it. I haven't felt this alive or excited about anything in a long, long, time. Thank you, George. And I wish you a peace-filled wintry season, full of love, light, and energy.
Oooh- love this exercise! I thank you so much for this- and for what it’s worth, I adore silly exercises.
This one makes me feel there is a reason I watched Splash and put on a trash bag in the bathtub so I looked like I had a fin. Diving in….
I'm going to do the whole project, but I think the most honest/embarassing revelation will be the fact that the books that made me a "reader" were the Fear Street books by R.L.Stine. I read so many of them and no one I knew liked them (they were all about The Babysitter's Club, which I still don't understand.)
What this tells me about myself is that for me, the stakes have to be high. Social conflict is not enough. The BIGGER and more WORLD ENDING the better. Or at least, the implications of the conflict have to cut deep.
Drama queen from day 1.
Great- now I have a list with Anna Karenin AND New Kids on The Block.
This looks like fun! I think though, at my age (63), I may have to switch to decades rather than 5's for the later years--maybe post 30s. Not sure I can differentiate 45-50 from 50-55, for instance, though I could give it a go.
Also, I would never have thought of Jaws as an influence, except a few years ago I started connecting it to my interest in Moby Dick (I know that's been said before) but I had a particular view of the book, connecting to the movie, and to (bear with me) present day examples of fatuous arrogance (including DJT and environmental degradation). Anyhoo, wrote an essay about it once that is one of my favorite publications ever, so yeah, you never know what things from the past will stick their fins out of the water in front of you!
Looking forward to filling this out and learning about past-me's a little.
What a liberating exercise! I never really thought that I self censored so much but (alas) I do. So, my name's Ulka and I frickin' LOVED Quantum Leap. :)
I found out that only experiences and objects were memorable until about 6, then at the same exact moment it seems, people and stories became equally as important to me. I find that interesting!
Some surprise influences I unearthed: SNL reruns from the 80's on Comedy Central, all my childhood pets (several cats, a parakeet, and several mice, some fish too), listening to doo-wop with my dad on car rides to the San Fernando Valley every weekend, my eccentric elementary school teachers (My 2nd grade teacher had a full-on beehive even though it was 1992).
My "serious" influences: Kid A, Ravel, "The Confessions", Bob Dylan, Georgia O'Keefe, Marina Abramović, Aldous Huxley, Director's Label series, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Brian Eno, David Burn, David Lynch, David Cronenberg (Holy Trinity of Davids), Robert Rauschenberg, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Banana Yoshimoto, Mos Def, Eckhart Tolle, Tao Te Ching, Sylvie Guillem, Miles Davis, Edith Piaf, and on and on ad infinitum.
Anyone else feeling full and warm after this exercise? You've invented quite a powerful time machine, George :)
I'm going to work on this grid but first wanted to express gratitude to George for how he teaches writing as an act of self-discovery and growth.
I know how his own journey evolved from Hemingway cosplay to his stew of humor and optimism and gravitas, but really appreciate the repeated nudges to honor brought us all to this point and what has resonated with us. Getting all these pieces to coexist and even sing together is the crux of a writer's voice, I think.
"And what will be needed, if the story is going to be good, is: everything, all that you are, even those parts you don’t like or usually exclude."
This brought up some tears for me - sorrow at recognizing how much has been excluded, but also gratitude in the possibility of welcoming it back in. There's a sense of release and enlargening here: I have much more to draw upon than I'd allowed myself. Thank you for this!
And thanks everyone for sharing your influences. It's interesting to consider the "guilty pleasures." Where do we get the idea that one thing is worthy of enjoyment and another thing isn't?
I remember as a child how this worthiness was influenced by the judgement of my peers (it was okay to enjoy the Spice Girls for a few months; then, suddenly, it wasn't), and a fear of judgement by respected figures like my parents and teachers. By adolescence, I'd happily tell a teacher that I'd read Jane Austen; I'd leave out the Archie comics - I began to believe I never really liked them. Surely, there was something I liked about them, but I was afraid to admit it, even to myself. What would it say about me if I liked something so "un-literary"?
So much to consider here! What have we disliked and discarded? What led us to do that? What might it be like to reclaim those things as part of ourselves? I'm excited to explore this further!
At first I thought this might be just about nostalgia and remembering what great taste I have ;) but it's made me think about a lot of different things which is good. Thank you for allowing me to think and reflect.
I'm thinking a lot about my brother and what led us to become such polar opposites. My influences were all cerebral while his were all visceral. I think it had to be this way. He couldn't have turned into a left-leaning, always reading, artsy fartsy emotional person and I couldn't have become an adrenaline-seeking, right-leaning, hunting, stoic type. We each found the influences we instictively knew we needed to find. Kurt Vonnegut was never an "option" for him just as Ted Nugent couldn't be an "option" for me.
Some of my main influences ended up being Sesame Street, Calvin & Hobbes, The Simpsons, Vonnegut, The Beatles, Pearl Jam, Lucinda Williams, Buddhism, Jeff Bridges, "Mink River" by Brian Doyle, and my wife.
Those are some of the positive ones. I've also been thinking about the things that influence us to NOT become a certain way. The things we see and go, "Oh. Let's not be like that". My dad taking me hunting as a young teenager and killing a deer. That was a major turning point in my life. Seeing the animal's suffering didn't turn me into a vegetarian that day, but it was the event that triggered it, no pun intended. Also anti-influential was just the way my dad behaved with his hunting friend, getting wasted on cheap whiskey, telling disgusting, racist jokes. I took that all in silently thinking "This is uncomfortable. This is not me". Not to mention that he almost killed us both later that night by speeding through a train track so we wouldn't have to wait for the train coming. We missed it by feet. This is a story I've been trying to put on paper but haven't cracked the code yet on how to tell it properly.
One last thing I noticed...from age 10-15: Basically nothing in the story/novel boxes. I started playing guitar at ten and it pretty much consumed my entire life there for quite a few years.
As a member of the 84 boxes to fill club, as well as Story Club, this will take a while. But right out of the gate, I remember listening to Steve Martin's stand up comedy albums, Let's Get Small, and Comedy is not Pretty. I memorized a lot of the bits. I can still sing the verses of Grandmother's Song: Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus.....
Can't wait to do this!!!
This makes me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's version of this exercise: note his recollection for when he was four years old, September 1900:
"He had a party to celebrate his birthday. He wore a sailor suit about this time + told enormous lies to older people about being really the owner of a real yacht." https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/fitz/id/42
I really enjoyed this exercise! Weird/fun things came up (like my pre-teen obsession with Absolut vodka and Got Milk magazine ads, with which I plastered by bedroom walls), but also beautiful/fun things like the incredible names and vivid memories of the people in my preschool (Nike Ife, whose dad was British and drank beer out of green bottles; Joshua Raisin, who slept in a family bed). The exercise as a whole inspired me to reach out to a few people who've been constants through my life to let them know how grateful I am to them. It also made me think about my kids, who are 5 and 7, and how they are in the process of building their own authentic influence maps and how cool that is (!!!).
Would it be OK for me to offer a version of this to my high school students? They are neurodivergent learners, and I think it would be cool and inspiring for them to reflect on all the (non-academic) influences that have made them who they are.
This is surprisingly fun but also shocking! I can't believe how much I've forgotten...probably I blocked it out, like the fact that as a teenage girl in Dallas (land of big hair and football) in the 80s, I was secretly obsessed with Neil Simon. I don't know how many times I checked out his plays from the library. The Odd Couple was my favorite, and I remember convincing my partner in Drama class to do a scene with me. The other thing was a book by Patrick Dennis (Tanner), who wrote Auntie Mame, called Genius. My mom and I used to read it out loud to each other, and my first creative act was to try and adapt it to a screenplay. (I failed.) When I got into Serious Literature, I set it aside. (And in all honesty, I can't bring myself to pick it up now because there's a whole section down in Mexico that just....isn't funny through today's eyes.) In an earlier post, George talked about trying to be a serious writer, like Hemingway, but how things just didn't come out naturally. I am always and forever thinking of Alice Munro when I think about writing, but that kind of writing, when I do it, just plods along on the page. Only recently have I started to let myself be funny on the page. It's terrifying (what if I am only funny to me?) but so much more dynamic. Sorry for the ramble, but this was such a DUH! moment!