Seymours

I loved My Salinger Year when I first read, back what seems like a long time ago.

It was easy for me to love it, it felt like it could have been about me. I’d done the writing internship thing. I’d done the long distance thing. I had trod those paths just as she had.

One of the handy things about being a writer is that it’s not hard to relate to stories about and by other writers. When Cheryl Strayed talks about books and her desperate desire to be a writer in Wild I know exactly how she feels. I share this longing and passion. It’s not much of a stretch.

This was back the first time I was living in Vancouver, back when I was still trying to be a writer though I was steadily giving up on that dream. I was learning to create content and churn out words. I was taking my worn notebooks to cafes and scrawling out a first draft of Set Your Watch to Moscow Time. I was trying very hard to be a writer — maybe one of these days I will make good on those efforts.

I too had failed to read much Salinger so I took his books out of the library and meandered through them. Catcher in the Rye never really did it for me but then again I was never a teenage boy so perhaps it’s not my cup of tea. I loved Franny and Zooey, and couldn’t help but notice the Seymours all around me as I wandered around Vancouver.

I’ve been meaning to watch the movie and finally did. It’s a good adaption of what is a fairly introspective memoir. It feels about right based on what I remember.

Really, it’s a bit weird and surreal to watch, to reach back in time to the version of myself that resonated so much with a story that felt like it was basically about me. It’s not my story anymore, at least not in the present tense.

Vancouver doesn’t feel the same, I don’t feel the same. I’m no longer enchanted by these streets and it has become a lot harder to imagine a future here. I’m no longer trying to make a living off my words, I have other far more pleasant options at my disposal. A lot of things have happened to me over the last six years and they have changed me.

I bristle at Jerry’s admonition: write everyday. I do a version of morning pages ever since my hand recovered enough for me to be able to write again, the novelty of being able to perform this act the impetus for overly ambitious daily journaling goals, so I suppose that I do write. But it’s much harder to take those lists, those drafts, those ideas, that love of books and make it into something. Life takes up so much time. Mostly I manage to tread water. I want to make things but I don’t know where the energy comes in.

I am working on it. As I try to take Set Your Watch to Moscow Time across the finish line from draft with potential to real actual thing other humans might read I reach across time to the versions of myself that went on the trip, that wrote the first draft out by hand in several notebooks, that typed it up, that edited it, that thought about working on it but never quite got around to it. I re-read Country Driving by Peter Hessler recently as part of my research for Set Your Watch to Moscow Time, and it was a lovely reminder of how I got to be who I am and why I am so determined to finish this book in the first place. Talking to my therapist about the book I said that Hessler and the other writers I loved at different points in my adolescence raised me. It might be a puzzling thing to talk about in therapy compared to all the other things one might discuss but some books can take me back to a moment in time, to who I once was, to what was going on in my life and what was important to me. My Salinger Year was one of those books.

A poster I made for a Skillshare class back in 2015

Vancouver coffee: Kranky Cafe

Kranky Cafe

228 E 4TH Ave, Vancouver BC V5T 1G5

Tucked away off Main Street Kranky’s is a cute little spot with a nice patio to read at. The coffee was decent (I really just have a drinkable/undrinkable standard so my coffee opinions are not super useful for picky folks — if you put some espresso shots in milk and the milk isn’t off and the beans aren’t burnt I’m probably happy). I’d walked past and wanted to come back because they have lots of patio space and some nice vegetation to make it less gray.

Jot

I have been keeping a quote spreadsheet for a number of years now. It came in handy when I started my daily quote project the summer after first year. It still comes in handy now.

I’ve always felt a desire to hang onto things, to document them. Whether it was through photography or sound recording I wanted to capture things.

In high school I started a quote notebook with one of my friends. We wanted to remember all the funny things people were saying, all the inside jokes. Spoken words are fleeting, we wanted to put them down on paper.

While listening to an episode of Other Ppl with Brad Listi (I don’t remember who the guest was currently) I learned about commonplace books, notebooks that people took notes in but mostly recorded quotes from books they’d read. It was basically what I was doing.

One of the things we have talked a lot about in my thesis class is taking notes and keeping track of everything. I learned the value of making citations as you go a long time ago through painful midnight desperation as an undergrad but I am still wrangling with the project of how to keep track of things. I am trying to find effective workflows and habits that keep things organized and let me get stuff done.

It’s an endless struggle, staying on top of all of it, trying to impose order on the chaos of my scattered existence. My project for the month is to tackle my piles of books. Some of them are books that I’ve read but need to go through. For thesis, for a project of some kind. Something I need to learn a good system for doing.

One of the piles amongst the piles is one of commonplace books. The introductions all tell a similar story and I am delighted I came across these things.

It seems that this impulse to store quotes somewhere is a very common one across time. I have the bonus of being able to do it in a digital, searchable form that is easy to carry around — I originally started in a notebook but it had an altercation with a spilled cup of coffee and didn’t survive.

Here are some of the quotes:

“Commonplace books have been an engaging adjunct of literary performance for hundred of years. Everyone knows this, and most of us, one way or another, have kept commonplace books of our own, notebooks in which we copy out fragments from our reading, anything that seems especially trenchant or felicitous”
— Hayden Carruth, "Introduction" in A Commonplace Book of Pentastichs by James Laughlin
“Some such books are famous, of course, those assembled by William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and W. H. Auden, for instance; but hundreds and hundreds have been published. Some scholars think the original commonplace books were kept by medieval philosophers and natural scientists for purposes of research and in preparing arguments; but this is fanciful. The idea is universal”
— Hayden Carruth, "Introduction" in A Commonplace Book of Pentastichs by James Laughlin
“The Commonplace Book, on the other hand, was not written for publication. It is above all a private document, a record of the personal concerns which Tawney rarely, if ever, confided or shared with his contemporaries in his correspondence and writings”
— J. M. Winter and D. M. Joslin, "Introduction" in R.H. Tawney's Commonplace book
“Yet he amorphous design and idosyncratic construction of the Commonplace Book contributes greatly to its intellectual coherence and forcefulness. Without an audience, which more likely than not would have been composed of people who did not share his religious frame of mind, Tawney achieved in this diary a clarity and simplicity of style seldom equalled in his later work. There are none of the intricate allusions or the heaviness of rhetoric which give to his later prose its characteristic flavour of elaborate and elegant irony. Instead he wrote his diary directly and unselfconsciously in an introspective dialogue with what he called the voice of conscience within him”
— J. M. Winter and D. M. Joslin, "Introduction" in R.H. Tawney's Commonplace book
“For as far back as I can remember I have been attracted by lovely, white sheets of virgin paper. As a child I quickly and enthusiastically defaced these with elaborate drawings of fierce naval battles. Later on I took to buying, when funds allowed, rather nice-looking large notebooks into which I copied, in my best italic script, poems I intended to learn — but rarely did — or pieces of prose that pleased me. I doubt if I ever filled more than ten pages of any of these commonplace books before a new and more handsome one caught my eye; and I would start all over again. Almost all of them have been lost, abandoned or destroyed. But a few years ago I struck out on a slightly different line; instead of attractive, expensive books of blank paper (and some of the modern Italian ones are very tempting) I took to buying the cheapest school exercise books, feint-ruled, and scribbling in my now nearly illegible hand the odds and ends that have caught my eye — much of it, I expect, familiar to you — and it is from these exercise books that I have culled these pages. There is no theme or shape to all this, but now and then I have placed a few things side by side, as the contrast or similarity amused me, and I have interjected a few one-liners — just for the hell of it”
— Alec Guiness, A Commonplace Book
“G. E. Moore expressed a wish that after his death, I should go through his philosophical papers and consider the possibility of preparing a selection of them for publication. These papers include nine notebooks, written at various times between 1919 and 1953 and containing his “Commonplace Book”. Only the last six notebooks were actually given this name by Moore himself; but the three earlier ones are of exactly the same character and it seemed clearly right to include them”
— C. Lewy, "Introduction" in The Commonplace Book of G.E. Moore: 1919-1953
“His decision to keep a Commonplace Book was an act of conscious continuity”
— Philip Gardner, "Introduction" in E.M. Forster Commonplace Book
“The six years of war from 1940 to 1945 occasioned in Forster a fuller use of his Commonplace Book than any equivalent period over the four decades he kept it. Affection for a now inaccessible France which he feared he might never see again seems likely to lie behind his copying out of so many extracts from French authors”
— Philip Gardner, "Introduction" in E.M. Forster Commonplace Book
“Commonplaces: My difficulty in making them is that I shall not know what they are about until they are finished. Bp. Jebb seems to have known and never to have beens surprised by any development in his own thought. This, even more than neatness of handwriting and aptness of quotation, separates him from his successor, who continues on his work after an interval of a hundred and twenty one years. Apparently, if he had an idea he could put it down as he had it. But perhaps what he had were not ideas but certified topics that could be carried about intact. I must know what is inside me before I can tell what I am after. Perhaps, if I get through a dozen pages of this book, I shall tell, and my New Ethic result. Each commonplace will be very short: how pleasant it would be to feel copious as well as fluid”
— E.M. Forster, E.M. Forster Commonplace Book

Communicating this information in quote form seems a fitting approach.

I enjoy how much attention is devoted to paper, to the physical things on which the Commonplace Books were recorded.

Definition

I have been asked to define my terms. What exactly do I mean by joy? Why this word?

What are it’s problems? It’s limits?

The dictionary can say one thing, as can our cultures and disciplines about how a word is used and what it means when uttered in different ways by different people for different purposes.

Is joy really that different from happiness and if so how? Is joy not just another attempt to individualize and commodify people’s desire to feel good and to be well? The Happiness industry 2.0. Or the self-care and mindfulness trend under a different guise.

Dictionary entries lead you from one word to another as sets of synonyms explain one another.

So there is what I mean when I use a word as much as what a word technically means.

Our language can be imprecise and clumsy, especially when my experiences and expectations differ from someone else’s — which they always do, the degrees shifting what is shared and what is interpreted, where the gaps are, where awkwardness and miscommunication arise.

I think what matters a lot is our intention as we select a word — consciously or unconsciously. The way we live out and use the words matters as much as their uttering or writing. The evoke a certain thing but they also guide an intention, a purpose, a way of being in the world.

Lulu Miller is weary of words and naming. I am being asked to contend with some of her concerns. But mostly I find words useful and beautiful. I look up words in the dictionary for fun, I think about what to say at important moments with care. Words are also about culture, how we make sense of the world. Their specificity, their options allow us to play and to understand. I want the world to make sense, I want to read enough things that I can feel safe and okay in the chaos. Words help me put the world in terms I can deal with, that feel both manageable and joyous, as well as daunting and scary.

I am working on accepting that my singular experience of the world is both lonely and something that I don’t need to share with another person. I don’t have to be perfectly understood to connect or share community with someone. This ineffable Rhiness will never be shared by another person. It is kind and mine alone.

But there are lots of other things I can share. There is enough overlap between us, enough shared expectations and experiences that we form rich relationships and interactions.

On books

The guest speaker in my class yesterday was talking about platforms and digital media, and commented that books are no longer the thing. The latter comment broke my heart a bit even if it was right.

Books don’t make you famous or influential in the way they once did. Some people make it work but if Ian McHarg or Humphrey Rempton were around today they’d be using social media.

He certainly has a point.

But I also still love books. I still love the world of writers I have longed to be a part of for as long as I can remember. Perhaps I am a stubborn straggler in this. The amount of books I read is both a party trick and something that has only ever felt truly understood by others who love books and writing the way I do — this connection is almost always occurs while I am reading.

There are some books that do make things so perhaps he is wrong as well. The Happy City and Joyful come to mind. Both are influential books with long lives, both are books I am spending time with in my research.

I think a lot about these platforms and where to post and what to post, where to spend my time. My scattered energies pull me in so many different directions. I want to leave Twitter, it ain’t what it used to be and it’s only going to get worse. I remember Wordpress and Tumble and Neopets. All of them historical artifacts.

I was a photographer once. In the process of accepting that I would no longer be a photographer I stopped using Instagram, I unfollowed all of the people doing the thing I could no longer do that I used to follow. I went away for a while. Then I came back and I started using Instagram for something different. Now I like it far more than Twitter. My account and life are very different. Things change. Our bodies, our lives, our interests, our technologies.

None of these things are permanent in an endless shifting sea.

Then there’s Austin Kleon saying simple good things last. Email lists, the blog on your website.

I might add books.

Something I can hold in my hand, mark up, fold, bend, mess up, hang out with.

Austin Kleon would tell me that blog posts become books. That I should keep writing, writing everyday. Watch it add up. And if the books make you happy and nobody notices who really cares?

Transcendence and pockets

I descend the hill and reach the threshold entering into one of my favourite places. The pavement leads me past planters and then to a crosswalk. Striding across the road I leave hardscaping behind and enter the park. These former hunting grounds are lush and green. In spring and summer the heather adds in purple.

As I climb further and further up the hill I start to feel more and more relaxed. The stress of grad school, my worries about finding a job and making a way in the world, and the drama of group projects melts away. I find a spot to sit and look out over the city.

It’s beautiful and peaceful here. I feel apart from my life, my troubles, I can almost relax. I don’t go often enough but when I do go it is the best part of my day.

Edinburgh had no shortage of viewpoints, hills that offer drama and views, transcendence as Ingrid Fetell Lee puts it in Joyful. While I am terrified of heights and Ferris wheels are my personal version of hell I do get the idea of wanting to have a view, the joy of being above.

I think about Nose Hill and Crescent Heights in Calgary, places where you can take it all in, survey the world below you. Or hiking atop a ridge line.

Perhaps prospect and refuge theory and something to say about this, why these places feel so special to us.

Reading “Transcendence” I also wonder about the need we feel to escape our lives and the places we’ve built. Planetary urbanism/urbanization would argue that there is nowhere that is actually untouched, even that ridgeline in a national park. I wonder about the insistence that we are apart from nature, rather than a part of it; that nature is somewhere else that we go to recover from our lives and the awful design of the places where we live our lives. What if our everyday included more of these qualities? What if our culture was less brutal and something that we didn’t need to go forest bathing to recover from being a part of? How would our the everyday landscapes we inhabit look different if we hustled less and meandered more?

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