WordPressers, day in and day out, you entertain us, you make us think, you make us laugh, and you make us grateful to be exposed to so many voices all over the world. It’s a pleasure to read what you’re writing. Like everyone in the community, we value that feeling of connection that comes from reading something that speaks to you, that resonates, that makes you feel not so alone.
For this edition of Freshly Pressed Faves, we’re looking at three posts that do just that, all around the idea of “busy-ness.” Modern society seems to embrace the idea that unless you’re “swamped” or “super busy,” you just aren’t being productive enough. Free time? Fill it up, preferably with something that pays! This attitude permeates children’s lives, too, with scheduled after-school dance classes and soccer practices and violin lessons and foreign language tutors. The idle hours that once allowed kids to daydream seem to be no more. When’s enough enough, though?
Author Tim Kreider believes ‘Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.’ We feel we are nothing, not worthy, unimportant or left out if we have nothing to do.
But there is another aspect to it. Perfectionism – that shadow from our childhoods. We want to be excellent – because if we are, we will be worthy of love. So we take on anything and everything that is thrown us. Even when we are aware we are overwhelmed, we find it hard to say ‘NO’. Because we fear that if we do – people will think less of us. So we end up doing more than our fair share.
Sofagirl at Campari & Sofa writes eloquently about her own fight with the “busy” beast and the scary personal episode that drove her to question it all. Weaving in others’ research on the topic, she presents a compelling argument for taking a step back — and a deep breath — and for refusing to participate in the tyranny of “busy” any longer. Bet you’ll find it difficult to disagree.
As kids we could come up with 16 ways to put our lives on the line using the jungle gym in ways no designer ever intended. They were days when we simply looked at clouds and imagined animals (or teachers or, for the juvenile delinquents, body parts) hiding in the puffy expanse of the heavens. … We were bored, but no one was ever bored enough to learn something.
Except it appears, according to recent research, that boredom is good for the brain. Evidently, boredom switches our brain’s little buttons and the synapses and neurons start firing on more cylinders, pushing us to creativity and intellectual growth.
John Wegner of Consistently Contradictory harkens back to a time when “boredom” and free time were acceptable and even encouraged, when we didn’t rely on technology and scheduling quite so much, and when we allowed our brains to wander. Are we losing the benefits of this today? Should we re-introduce some “slack” into schools? Read John’s convincing and thought-provoking post and you’ll probably be answering “yes.”
When I was a kid, Dad made it clear that ‘mere play’ was being idle—something lazy people did. And boy, you couldn’t get lazier than me.
Michael Maupin from Completely in the Dark takes us back to his childhood and the lasting effects of not being encouraged to “play.” He explains, “As a shadow, it darkened the room, filling me with anxiety and self-doubt: ‘What am I doing now? Is it practical? Is it useful? Shouldn’t I be ashamed?’ … For years that sound, that shadow, was all around. It blocked up my writing, my artwork, my self-esteem — everything. I was psychologically held at gunpoint by an ethic that carries little currency in my world.”
Not one to be bullied, however, Michael has found ways to protect and embrace his natural tendencies towards “play and reverie.” Read his post, and you’ll be inspired to do the same.
Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.
For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.
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| Most images grabbed off the internet are terrible. |
A few days ago, I wrote a draft of this post that was a snarky attack on
a badly thought-out essay by J. Robert Lennon at Salon. It would be nice if sites like Salon would expend more of their energies in bringing attention to some good writing that doesn't get noticed rather than running yet another quick-and-dirty "contrarian" takedown.
After writing the snarky draft, I realized my problem wasn't with Lennon or the essay per se. My problem was more with the people who seemed so desperately to want to like his essay.
Lennon sets himself up against
some comments by Dan Chaon that have been bouncing around the internet for a while (for some unfathomable reason, that website doesn't clearly date its material). These comments by Chaon are intelligent and accurate. He says writers need to read widely and eclectically, and he even suggests some good things to read. Specific, helpful advice.
Lennon decides to contradict Chaon's advice. And that's where he goes off the rails, making vague accusations that something called "literary fiction" is "terrible" and "boring".
Here was my original first paragraph:
J. Robert Lennon proves himself to be the latest person who needs to have Sturgeon's Law tattooed on his arm so he can be reminded of it every day. Yes, Mr. Lennon, most contemporary literary fiction is terrible. Most everything is terrible.
Lennon provides little evidence and little analysis, just yammering for the knee-jerks in the peanut gallery. (For a vastly better discussion of "literary fiction", with evidence and analysis and all that jazz, listen to
this podcast with Nick Mamatas. The set-up of "literary vs. genre fiction" is inane, but Nick actually knows what he's talking about, has read widely, is not a "SCI FI RULZ!" kind of guy, and in any case is mostly discussing one of the strongholds of adorable My Literature Is The One Ring cosplay, the AWP Conference.)
After writing on and on about Lennon's vapid essay, I realized I didn't care about what he had written, nor did I care if he'd made an idiot of himself in public. Go for it. We all do it now and then. God invented the internet so we'd all have an easier way to parade our stupidies for the world to see.
What really annoyed me, I realized, was seeing Lennon's piece linked to approvingly by people on Twitter and Facebook, those machines of social infestation. Clearly, it wasn't Lennon's argument that was appealing to people, because his argument is about as strong as homeopathic water. What appealed to people was, it seems, the impulse to clan identification that Michael Chabon described so well in
his 2004 Locus interview:
It's quite obvious to me that so much of what goes on in the world of science fiction has analogies with a ghetto mentality, with a sense of clannishness and that ambivalence that you have: on the one hand wanting to keep outsiders out and identify all the insiders with a special language and jargon so you can tell at a glance who does and doesn't belong, and on the other hand hating that sense of confinement, wanting to move beyond the walls of the ghetto and find wider acceptance. It's a deep ambivalence. You want both at the same time: you feel confined, and you feel supported and protected.
People who spread around the most bombastic and attention-seeking sentence from Lennon's essay — "Let’s face it: Literary fiction is fucking boring." — likely did so for reasons of clannishness and
ressentiment. In Lennon's construction of the sentence, there's the audience-flattering opening:
Let's face it. Like the guy at the bar who says, "Let's face it, we all know the Yankees suck." (The difference here is that "the Yankees" is an identifiable thing.) Anyone passing this sentence around is excluded from its claims. Are you a self-published writer who identifies with genre fiction of some sort or another? Lennon's sentence, then, was built to make you feel good about yourself. Are you somebody who's been rejected by all the major university-sponsored lit mags? You are loving that sentence, because you know your own writing is just too interesting for the tweed-spattered boringheads who edit those publications. Anybody who nurses a grudge about their writing career, anybody who doesn't feel appreciated, anybody who thinks the institutional They is enforcing boredom so as to keep the individual, interesting You outside the gates raises a fist in solidarity with that sentence. Every unpublished, highly-rejected, destitute writer can love that sentence in just the same way that Stephen King can love that sentence. No matter what, it's not about you. You are not boring.
Except you probably are. To somebody, at least. Maybe to J. Robert Lennon. (Full confession: I thought Lennon's
Castle was sometimes boring. Not as boring as lots of other books, but sometimes, yes, boring. To me.)
The problem is not that most
x is boring. It is. Stories, books, poems, movies, food, appliances, bunny rabbits, sex, drugs, rocknroll. Fill in the
x and the equation will always be true for somebody. (A person once even said to me, "Cocaine is boring." I have no experience with the drug myself, but while I'm sure many things could be said about cocaine, this statement surprised me.)
The problem is that saying, "Most
x is boring" or "Most
x is terrible" lets you off the hook. It's easy. It makes knees jerk and fists rise in the air. It creates a hierarchy in which you stand in the superior position. How's it feel up there at your exalted heights?
While saying, "
X bores me," is an incontrovertible statement of personal experience and taste, making a universal ontological statement ("
X is boring") is indefensible. You can say, "William Gaddis novels and Andrei Tarkovsky movies bore me," but once you say, "Gaddis novels and Tarkovsky movies
are boring," you have entered dangerous territory in which you have set yourself up as superior not only to Gaddis and Tarkovsky, but to anyone interested in their work. You are saying, "If you enjoyed and appreciated
x-that-bored-me, you are wrong."
Are you really that much of an egomaniac that
your lack of engagement with something must become universal?
What Sturgeon's Law really gets at is not that most everything is terrible, but that most of us experience most everything as terrible. A person who likes everything is a person who likes nothing (and other banal and obvious statements). Our experiences in life condition us to appreciate some things and not appreciate others. Somebody who finds everything interesting is somebody who probably has trouble getting out of bed in the morning because the potential for absolute awesomeness is too overwhelming.
Even that, though, is not really what most bothered me about Lennon's essay and people's support for it. We all say stuff is boring all the time, it's a rhetorical claim rather than a statement of fact, whatever dude.
What really, truly, deeply bothered me is that Lennon's claims are so broadly dismissive when in reality there's all sorts of varied work being published that could be tagged "literary fiction".
If Lennon had said, "Most of the anthologies used in Introduction to Literature classes for undergraduates are created with a pretty conventional and quite narrow definition of 'literature'," he'd be on solid ground. If he said, "In my experience, lots of writing workshops define what is 'acceptable' for students to write in narrow, conventional ways," he'd also be on perfectly solid ground, just as he's on relatively solid ground in implying that the
Best American Short Stories volumes are ruled by quite conventional and conservative standards, ones enforced by the publisher and series editor even, it seems, occasionally against the will of individual guest editors (the brand must be protected).
Anyone who uses the term "literary fiction" as anything other than an admittedly unsatisfactory placeholder for an undefinable something-or-other ought to feel some obligation to get specific. Do you mean
Tin House and
Conjunctions and
Ninth Letter and
Denver Quarterly? Do you mean books from
Dalkey Archive and
Dzanc and
Coffee House and
Melville House and
Open Letter and...? Do you mean
Pulitzer winners or
Sukenick Award winners or
Booker winners or
PEN Faulkner winners or
Nobel winners or
Whiting Award winners or...?
What are you talking about when you talk about "literary fiction"?
Are you sure that your view of fiction isn't narrow, provincial, and more based on your own limited assumptions rather than any actual evidence? Are you primarily annoyed that you didn't get a good review in the
New York Times and nobody has nominated you for a major award and your books are taught in college classes and you got dropped by your publisher and Dan Brown sells more books than you? Are you still angry about your 9th grade English teacher making you read
The Scarlet Letter?
Instead of blathering on about how terrible literary fiction is, instead of sharing links to vapid essays about the evil conspiracy of boredom committed against you, instead of ra-ra-ing for your clan and salving the wounds of your ego with the balm of drivel — why don't you try 1.) reading more broadly, and 2.) pointing to interesting work that isn't getting noticed?
Most literary fiction is terrible.
Most fiction is terrible. Most nonfiction is terrible. Most blog posts are terrible.
Most everything is terrible.
Big deal. Get over it. Go read something that interests you, and if nothing interests you, then the problem is not with other people and other writers, but with you.
With (UK) summer holidays just around the corner I’ve started thinking about how we’re going to make the most my extra time with my two young girls, having lots of fun AND staying sane. One magic resource I have prepared in my box of tricks is a stack of “activity books” for the girls.
To find out what I mean by activity books and why I think they can be so great, do head on over to Tasha’s blog, WAHM-BAM, where I’m reviewing a wide range of said books today, and explaining why they are indeed Summer Holiday Life Savers for me, M and J.
My post at WAHM-BAM is part of a week long celebration of books which Tasha is hosting – do be sure to check out all her great posts and guest posts that are part of her Book Week.
But before you go, leave me a comment about what you think of activity books. Doing so will give you a chance to win a fantastic Summer Holiday Life Saver Pack worth over £45…
Thanks to the incredibly generous folk at Derwent Pencils I have a gorgeous set of art materials to give away to one lucky reader. The set is made up of an Inktense Pencils 12 tin, an Inktense Block 12 tin, a small waterbrush and a pack of Grippers.
In addition to these fab materials, I’m throwing in a copy of Everybody’s Activity Book (which features in my article at WAHM-BAM).
If you would like to be in with a chance of winning this bundle of goodies simply leave a comment on this post 
If you want extra chances to win this Summer Holiday Life Saver set set you can:
Tweet about this giveaway. Please use this text or something similar: @playbythebook is giving away a fantastic set of @derwentpencils art materials & an activity book over at http://bit.ly/jZjLJt
Mention this giveaway on your blog
Link to this giveaway from your Facebook page
For any of the extra entries to count you must leave a separate comment here on this post saying what extra chance you’ve gone for (eg tweeted about the giveaway etc).
This giveaway:
is open worldwide
is open until 6am (UK time) 12th July 2011
The winners will be selected randomly with the help of random.org, and announced here on Playing by the book sometime during the day on 12th July. Good Luck!
3 Comments on Summer Holiday Life Savers, last added: 7/5/2011
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Thank you WordPress for drawing the attention to our blog. On behalf of sofagirl and I, we are forever indebted (she is busy answering comments)
I have such a hard time being inactive because I feel guilty if I am not doing something constantly.
I love this. Sometimes I do so much and feel like I’ve done nothing. I’ve done nothing fulfilling. That’s why I take out time to read these wonderful articles and look at the reader to see what’s on. This is something I can enjoy and learn from.
Really interesting piece. I’m such a daydreamer and am often bored in my day job so encouraged to learn that this may be boosting my creativity!
LOVED the comments about kids’ play and need for time to ‘do nothing’. There really isn’t enough of that in most people’s today… not in the ‘western’ world at any rate.
I read all three and love the premise. It’s just been in the last few years that I have learned to relax and stop being so driven! It is very difficult to be surrounded by people who constantly “do” and maintain my sense of confidence in going at my own pace. Might I be thought lazy? I had to learn to do this in order to accommodate the ebb and flow of my daily life with kids and keep my sanity.
I have been accused, at many points along the line, of being lazy, unmotivated, uncaring, inconsiderate of other people’s needs, distracted, distractable, useless, shiftless, and other things as well.
My immediate response: Your point is?