First, I wanted to let you all know that I’ll be appearing at the National Book Festival in D.C. The Festival is on Saturday, Aug. 12 from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Doors will open at 8:30 a.m. The festival is free and open to everyone, and ticketing is not required. My event runs from 5:15 pm - 6:00 pm EDT. Hope to see some of you there.
Last week I wrote here about reading as a way of becoming more unafraid of ideas.
I want to follow-up a bit on this, just to clarify what I mean.
For me, it all starts with specificity.
I have this sense that as we are more specific about an idea, that quality of empty, and often emotional, judgment falls away.
For example, let’s say that I’m reading a story I’m meant to critique, and I am finding it dull. My attention is drifting and I’m getting fidgety and maybe even a little annoyed.
My first impulse might be to write, in my critique: “This story was so boring.”
Now, that’s not nice and it’s not helpful. The writer, receiving that critique, is going to feel angry and defensive. He’s not going to hear anything else that I might have to say.
That critique is also vague. As the reviewer, I haven’t done my job, which is to take that broad, insulting placeholder of a reaction (“boring”) and break it down into more specific sub-descriptions.
I also haven’t located that reaction to a specific place in the text. (Was I bored after the first sentence, or was there a period where I was interested? Where did the alleged “boredom” begin?”)
When we urge ourselves toward greater specificity, we’ll find that what we described as “boring” will be found, actually, to be…something else.
Other, more precise, descriptions of that state will appear:
“The section on page 4 seems only to reiterate what you’ve just said on page 3.”
“This description of the sea is the fourth one so far in the story and doesn’t seem particularly additive.”
And so on.
If I propose that you take a look at page 3 and then at page 4 and see if the latter adds anything to the former – that gives you something to do. There’s no quality of accusation. It’s a simple technical observation.
(This approach works even better if we give some credit where it’s due. “Things were moving along nicely, and that description on page 3 seemed very fresh, but then my reading energy went down slightly when that section on page 4, which was good in and of itself, seemed, however, not to be adding anything new.”)
What I really want to point out is the way these comments land on the person receiving them. They are, first of all, more workable. (The person is given a task, essentially). In tone, they aren’t insulting and might even be felt as respectful; the reviewer has respected the writer and the work, by investing the time to get in there and really have a look around.
It’s a different world, hearing things this way.
So, reading with specificity in mind can break broad, judging, generalizations down into smaller, more accurate, truthful, and workable sub-observations. There’s a movement from the abstract to the concrete.
Reading this way can have the effect of converting or eliminating non-relevant questions for the writer.
“Why am I so boring?” simply becomes “I wonder if that bit on page 4 wants to say something more, that will feel like escalation?” (He’s not generally, terminally boring, as a person; it’s just that his text has temporarily lapsed into that which produces stasis, let’s say. And a person can, you know, recover from that.)
Whether we are generating comments in this spirit or receiving them, there’s a move toward the objectively observed – that is, a move toward the technical. (A piece of writing made us feel a certain way; why and where did it do so? The work here, for the reviewer, is work of self-awareness, and then of struggling to articulate those findings.)
When, as suggested by the reviewer, the writer compares page 3 to page 4, he either does or does not observe something there. If not, fine. If so, he will likely, very naturally, want to do something about it.
And what a relief: it’s not that he has a problem or a defect or a moral failing; it’s just that his story has a characteristic.
Which he can alter, in revision.
And this won’t involve remaking himself or becoming a bigger person or a greater artist or eliminating his dullness, all of which, of course, would be daunting – it's just a matter of, in the moment, deciding.
Deciding in the face of a factual observation.
There’s no real confrontation or insult in this moment between writer and reviewer – just respect from the reviewer, that has come in the form of increased specificity.
If I ask you how I look, and you say, “Bad,” there’s not much for me to do, and I’m a little mad. Whereas, if you say, “Your shirt and pants don’t match and your hair could use brushing,” I feel, at least, that 1) you took the time to really look, and 2) I now have something to try.
Now, what does this have to do with (groan, ugh) politics?
Well, maybe nothing.
And I’m very aware that we don’t want to move Story Club in an overtly political direction.
But bear with me as I explore this a little, assuming that, at heart, it’s a literary idea.
My feeling is that a lot of what we think of as “politics” these days happens in the realm of the abstract; lots of feelings about, say, “immigration,” by people of both political stripes who may not have had that much direct experience of immigration, for example. Much heat and emotion about issues of sexual preference in theory when, in reality, most people are relatively polite, or at least circumspect, in the presence of someone differently inclined than they are.
We sit over here, in our house, thinking of “those people” out there, who are all the same and fit perfectly with our most negative view of them (a view we may, these days, likely have acquired not by personal observation but by way of media, which is increasingly overdetermined and algorithmically informed).
So, to my way of thinking, it’s a good thing to try to move our political discussions, as much as possible, away from the abstract and media-incited to the local and actually observed and personal.
This has the potential to improve the general hygiene of the conversation; it tends to push aside perceived differences between people and accentuate what they have in common.
In the light of the actual, most abstract political ideas wilt a little; are shown to be inadequate, given the complicated nature of the real world.
In the same way that it might work when we are reviewing a piece of fiction, as we narrow a question, our answers become more useful and more easily implementable and less laden with negative emotion.
For example: imagine gathering ten self-declared “liberals” and ten self-declared “conservatives” into a conference room somewhere and asking the group to “discuss immigration.”
We know, probably, where that’s headed.
(Or ask them to discuss, anything, really, that is abstract and that they understand as “political” and has minimal intersection with their actual, lived experience.)
Now, instead, give them a budget of $300,000 to fix $1,000,000 worth of potholes in their town.
There’s not much room for abstraction there, not much room for theorizing. It’s essentially an engineering question. The group would end up making decisions, like, “Is it more important to fix that road leading to the hospital, or that isolated section on the outside of town?”
And those are easier questions, generally, and draw on common assumptions. They live in the town, they drive the roads; they all need that hospital, and so on.
So, as in writing fiction or critiquing it, the idea is to try to get in the habit of moving, as one can, from the abstract to the particular.
We might find ourselves asking, ritually, of any text (a story, yes, but also an essay, a newspaper article, a pundit speech, an on-line screed), questions like, “How so?” and “Where, precisely?” and “Can you say more about that?” and “But is that always the case” and “Can you be more specific?”
But, of course, sometimes we have to have abstract discussions. (Although, I suspect not as often as we think we do, ha ha).
And there are limits. Sometimes people express themselves with so much vitriol and aggression, it’s best just to walk away. They can’t hear us, and we’re only going to get heated and vague and accusatory in response. So, walking away can be seen as a form of self-protection. (And/or, we may not be good enough at these practices ourselves, to actually make them work – that is usually where I find myself.)
In such a case, walking away might even be seen as a form of specificity; we’re essentially saying, “You know, given the vagueness of your argument, I can’t see a worthwhile way of engaging with you just now.”
But even in such “texts” (arguments, rants, rude posts) there are tells.
We might find, for example, an empty, aggressive assertion: “You’re just stupid,” or “Who cares what you think?” “You’re a classic (liberal/conservative) turd!” These are just placeholder phrases – vehement, forceful, but empty of any real ideas. They indicate that the speaker has a strong feeling but that he or she hasn’t tried, yet, to know specifically what that feeling is, or what it might be related to. (This is for sure true of me, when I get heated and accusatory: I’m frustrated and don’t know why, and this is making me even more frustrated, and I start verbally flailing around. I know the other person’s idea is unacceptable to me (hence my anger) and, to make things worse, I can’t imagine how in the world I could feel that way. There’s a place where we diverge – a point at which our views of the world differ – but I don’t know where it is. To try, at least, to ask questions like, “Why do you feel that way?” or “At what specific point do our views diverge?” can be a form of specificity.
Another “tell” is a tendency toward circular argument. For example, pronouncing something as “perverse” or “hideous” in a sentence that sounds factual but that has, as indicated by the presence of such a phrase, already made up its mind. “How can anyone find anything worthwhile about something so perverse?” There’s no there there. The sentence is, we might say, involved in a form of self-flattery. (“The man was so stupid, which we could all see because he was so dumb. There! I’ve proven it!”)
And so on.
In a sense, we might even see civility as a form of enforcing specificity on ourselves. To say to oneself, “Stay civil,” is, in effect, to say “keep it specific.” (When we find ourselves engaging in uncivil speech, we’ve often departed from the realm of specificity into the realm of empty assertion.)
Another way of saying this: if we hold ourselves to a high level of civility, we will find that, denied empty vehemence and insult, we’ll be forced to look more frankly at our actual idea. Staying civil – refraining from becoming insulting or personal – is a form of gently urging our idea out into the public square, to be assessed for its validity. We take off its garish costume (rage, aggression, the tendency to swerve into the personal, the swaggering posture that says “Well, of course I’m right!”) and put on it some very spare, simple clothing, so that it may be more clearly seen for what it actually is.
This takes guts; but committing ourselves to civility means that, if we have a bad idea, it won’t be able to hide from us.
Next Sunday, I’m going to try, in a general way, to apply this principle to “The Devil,” the Tolstoy story we’ve been working on behind the paywall, by seeing if we can come up with a “technical” explanation for what some readers have felt as a feeling of misogyny in the story.
Join us over there if you feel inclined, and thanks for being here.
I've collected etiquette books since the 90s, I have so many I've been giving them away. I'm only keeping the ones from the 1800s and early 1900s. Before I started the collection, I thought of etiquette books as stuffy, now I see that it comes from kindness and respect for other cultures. It's good to crack one open every now and again.
Today's post reminds me of a story I heard about small newspapers closing down around the country, and how reporting/writing about the town's specific problems or celebrations brings citizens together for common goals.
My thesis advisor, Kevin McIlvoy of blessed memory, made a point of looking for (and finding!) where the story DOES work, and push out from there. Then, all the criticism of what does not work makes more sense in that it does not help produce the story whose germ is worth growing.