Author Archives: cleithart

I am alive and have two legs. This state of affairs will hopefully continue for quite some time.

A Man Works Smarter and Harder

I just finished read a book called Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder, which is about the recovery of the SS Central America, a sidewheel steamer that wrecked in the 1850s about two hundred miles off the coast of South Carolina. At the time, the shipwreck was one of the deadliest disasters in American history, claiming almost five hundred lives – at least one from every state in the union. Over the decades, people remembered the wreck for another reason: when it sank, the Central America was carrying several tons of gold.

The book flips back and forth between an account of the shipwreck, pieced together with incredible detail from the accounts of survivors, and the story of a young scientist named Tommy Thompson, who decided that he was going to locate the wreck on the ocean floor, send a submersible eight thousand feet below the surface, and recover the gold without damaging a single historic artifact. Needless to say, Thompson succeeds, but there are so many setbacks, so many false alarms, and so many twists along the way, that the story is worth reading even when you know the ending. The story of the shipwreck, too, is worth reading for its glimpses of the highs and lows of humanity.

Tommy Thompson appears to have come to an ignominious end, running from US Marshals, living under an assumed name, and paying his rent with moldy cash. But reading Kinder’s book, I was struck by Tommy’s methodical approach to the problem of working in the deep ocean. I bet you could take the core of Tommy’s approach and apply it to any seemingly impossible endeavor. Here’s a rough list of what I took away:

  • Prioritize – carefully consider what you have to do. Not all tasks are created equal. Choose the one that, when accomplished, will make all the others easier.
  • Ration your time – give yourself a certain amount of time to get something done, and then get it done in that time. If it’s impossible, increase the time slightly, but keep parameters on it.
  • Amass, assimilate, integrate, produce – always be researching. You can always get in touch with an expert by phone (or email). Keep calling until you find someone who will help you. Pepper them with questions. Put things together that don’t seem to go together. Keep attempting connections until something connects. Create and finish.
  • Simplicity of the quest – state the end goal as simply as possible. Put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Establish a working presence at the bottom of the deep ocean. The simpler the quest, the easier it will be to recognize wrong turns, distractions, redundancies, irrelevancies.
  • When you meet with investors, know your stuff. Demonstrate that you’ve thought this through before you ask someone to join you.
  • Distinguish between what is impossible and what is merely considered impossible.
  • Prepare for failure – Even when success seems inevitable, something may happen. Prepare for every contingency. Think through every outcome. Don’t be outsmarted by failure.

A Man is Mostly Wright

My friend Grant invited me to a lecture at Samford last night by none other than Bishop Tom himself, the Reverend Doctor N. T. Wright. The main thrust of his talk – or what I took to be the main thrust – was excellent. He argued that natural theology is a good and worthwhile pursuit… as long as we agree that “Nature” includes the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus was a part of the natural world, and so we must include him in the catalogue of “natural things.” Once we’ve done that, we ought to have no trouble reasoning our way back to God the Father. In fact, that’s kind of what the whole New Testament is about.

Whenever I listen to or read Wright, I come away with the same feeling: he is extremely concerned with how he comes across to his audience. Obviously, this can be a good thing. He (usually) takes care to explain himself in language the average person would understand, and he always defines his terms (sometimes multiple times).

But Wright’s concern for his audience can trip him up, as well. For example, last night, he kept putting down “theologians” for misunderstanding important aspects of the Old Testament, which causes them to misunderstand Jesus. Their vaunted theology gets in the way. (Nothing wrong there. I’d do the same thing myself, given the opportunity. No one is more fun to make fun of than theologians.) The trouble is, Wright simultaneously takes great pains to maintain his own status as a respectable theologian. He mocks the in-group, then assures us that he is a member in good standing.

You can also see this in Wright’s use of extra-biblical texts to support his understanding of the Bible. Do we really need Fourth Ezra to understand Jesus’s use of the phrase “Son of Man?” Should we read Cicero’s de Natura Deorum to get the gist of Paul’s argument in Romans? Neither of those texts is out of bounds, but neither is necessary to understanding the content of the Bible. The Bible is its own interpretive key. Radical, maybe, but true. Wright seems to be a humble man and a true Christian. Many of his theological positions, however, smack of the academy he dismisses so readily.

A Man Gives Himself Wholly to His Father

It is not the fact that God created all things, that makes the universe a whole; but that he through whom he created them loves him perfectly, is eternally content in his father, is satisfied to be because his father is with him. It is not the fact that God is all in all, that unites the universe; it is the love of the Son to the Father. For of no onehood comes unity; there can be no oneness where there is only one. For the very beginnings of unity there must be two. Without Christ, therefore, there could be no universe.

~George MacDonald, “The Creation of Christ”

A Man Tries to Please His Teacher

The greatest works of art aim to please the teacher. Novel works, innovative works… these are works which aim for the audience, to wow them and make them say, “Well, we have never seen anything like this before.” Such stories are interesting for exactly as long as it takes someone else to come up with something “we have never seen before,” which, in the realm of science fiction, is often only a few weeks. The greatest crowd pleasing story of the 20th century, Star Wars, was not made to please crowds but to please Joseph Campbell. The Duffer Brothers have told a story to please their teachers, too, and because they have not sought novelty or wealth or fame, but the nodding approval of the master, they have become wise.

Josh Gibbs on Stranger Things

A Man is American TV

Americans treat “American” as an ideology, not a matter of blood or country. Historically, there were three things that made a person American: their church, their job, and their family. Americans were churchgoers. Americans were company-men. And Americans worshiped the nuclear family.

Though churches still carry a lot of heft for many Americans, they’ve declined in the northeast and the southwest — the two places most American TV shows come from. Without the church, American identity becomes defined by work and family. Thus, the central concerns of American TV shows are work and family. (And, increasingly, work as family.) Can you imagine an American TV show where a character rejects or is rejected by his family for a reason other than work? I can’t. What about an American TV show where a group of friends remains nothing more than a group of friends, never metastasizing into a familial substitute? Me neither.

A Man’s Journalistic Writing Advice

Barry Newman started working for the Wall Street Journal when Nixon was president. His book News to Me recounts what he learned over five decades of reporting. Each lesson is coupled with a feature story to showcase the observation or technique. (Newman likes to write stories about people doing unusual – even inhuman – jobs: the men who search for the US-Canada border, people who decode bad handwriting on envelopes, the guy who blasts sewer fat-bergs.)

Though I’ve never done a feature story like the ones Newman writes, I found much of value in this book. Here’s a list of tricks I learned:

Where to get ideas:

  • Look for lonely causes, solo workers, individuals driven by an unusual passion. When you see the press, head in the other direction. Reporters crowded the US-Mexico border to research immigration, so Newman went the other way and did a story about the five guys in charge of the five-thousand-mile US-Canada border.
  • Look for things that make you go “huh?” Cock your head and take another look. Why is the cold tap on the right side of the sink? Why are the titles on the spine of books oriented one way in English and the other way in French?
  • Follow family connections. Your uncle has a friend whose wife is involved with a badminton league? Chase that down.
  • Look out the window. One of the great gifts given to writers is a penchant for looking at the world upside-down. Maybe you’ve passed the same weird sign in your car every day but never bothered to stop and ask the question: “What is a Christian Science Reading Room, anyway?” My apartment complex got a new roof a few weeks back. The whole roofing crew spoke Spanish. Do Mexicans have a monopoly on roofing and construction in Birmingham?
  • One idea will lead to another. A feature writer never has room for everything. Details are dropped that may crop up in the next story.
  • Ask questions without obvious answers. If the reader can guess what the answer will be, you’re asking the wrong question. Bad: Do Multinational Corporations Create Jobs in the Third World? Good: How does that pimento get in the martini olive? Why don’t Seattleites use umbrellas? Where do pounds bury the animals they euthanize?
  • If you know the topic or the direction, start taking notes and gathering clips. When the deadline approaches, you have a backlog to draw from. It reminds me of the strategy (popularized by Ryan Holiday) of gathering materials in folders (or on notecards) that you may have an opportunity to use “someday.”
  • Everything has been written before. There are no new ideas. Newman’s response: Who cares? You can’t do it first, so do it best. Also, don’t stop at the wisecracks. Go deeper. There’s always a story there.
  • Stories are about things that happen to things. Don’t write encyclopedia entries. Write about what happens.

Reporting:

  • I’ve heard many writers and reporters and workers of all stripes say that the kids need to learn to leave their desks and get out in the world. Newman agrees. He often leaves the office to hunt down a story before he even knows what the story will look like. He tells his editors he’s leaving and that he’ll let them know when he gets back whether he found a story. (Such freedom would be nice, wouldn’t it?)
  • On the other hand, a proposal can be a cool cloth to a sweating editor’s brow. Newman’s advice is to do enough research to justify the trip, but don’t write the story till you get back. (He has a good example of a proposal on page 91. It has all the information one could glean from the phone or the internet, but no scenes, word-pictures, or live quotes.)
  • Gather string. Take time. One tidbit may take years to merge with another and create a story. Quite a lot of a writer’s time is spent waiting and taking notes (physical and mental). Observation is work.
  • To circumvent PR reps, go to lesser competitors, yesterday’s heroes, and unrecognized experts. Thanks to Amazon’s PR, Newman couldn’t talk to IMDb about cinematic goof-ups, but its “pipsqueak rival,” Movie Mistakes, was only too happy to chat.
  • Accidents take effort. Be in the right place and wait for the right time. This ties in with a key tenet of reporting: why now? You might have all sorts of ideas to write about (I know I do), but you need an angle. Newman calls it a vehicle that your story can ride. It’s some specific person, situation, or place that metonymizes an entire cultural trend. (That said, remember the specific. More on that further down.)
  • Every story needs pictures. Not photos, necessarily, but word-pictures. When you read Newman’s stories, you notice that almost every one of them starts and ends with a description of a person doing something. You get a picture in your mind right away. Short story writers, make a note.
  • When doing street interviews, find people who stay put. Don’t chase them down, notebook in hand. Approach folks at park benches, stadia, bars, parking lots, hotel lobbies, movie lines, bus stops. Also, find people who want to talk. Don’t ask Joe Briefcase about fracking. Ask the protestors at an anti-fracking march. Ask people in line for the natural history museum about their views on cloning mammoths.
  • In interviews, people always say what they think you want to hear. The best stuff comes when they think the interview’s over. Find dialogue and you will find a scene.
  • Find talkative, unimportant people who feel ignored and have lots of time. Find people who work or live parallel to the rich and famous. And don’t make them out to be emblematic of a group, even if they are members of that group. They are themselves, and that’s what makes them interesting. Avoid pickle barrels. Find the one and only.
  • Find contrasts. An old journalism adage says, “Get the other side.” When you pair up the opposition, both sides show their colors a little more.

Some great practical advice:

  • Newman’s notebook is a National 1 Subject, Narrow Ruled Eye-Ease (R) Paper, 80 sheets. He has over 700 of them lined up on shelves in his office. Their chief assets are they lay flat and have a hard back cover that provides a portable writing surface. He uses a BIC (R) Cristal Easy Glide Bold 1.6mm, unless the temperature’s below-zero, in which case he carries a pencil and a sharpener.
  • Plan ahead. Bring cash. Don’t waste time. Your objectives are efficiency and security.
  • Get a great lede, or your reader will move on. Put your best stuff up front, even if it’s not the main point of the story. (Yet another lesson for short story writers.) Take a look at this opener: “Before he pulled the trigger, before the car chase, before the cops ran him down and threw him in jail, Jim Stevenson had a calm look at the Texas penal code, and judged that it would permit radical measures in defense of a piping plover.” Don’t you want to read that story?
  • Find a nut, a kernel, a peg. Somehow, you have to convince an editor that your story needs to run now. Relevance often feels forced, but hunting for the right nut can strength your reporting. It doesn’t have to be political at all. It just has to tie your story to the here and now. The nut is not the story, either, so Newman likes to end his nut-graf on a note of expectation, not finality, so that the reader won’t bow out early. The challenge is to stick with the formula (lede, nut, quote, to-be-sure, history, etc.), but weave a storyline through it from beginning to end, so the reader keeps reading.
  • Indexing – a great idea. Newman indexes all his interview notes, research, books, clippings, press releases, academic studies, and scribbles, then groups them according to topic. Related ideas and observations coalesce into paragraphs. No stone is unturned. The process of going through each note line by line reveals the shape of the story and unearths connections that were invisible before.
  • Last, keep it short. The secret, Newman says, to short writing is long reporting. Know your stuff so you can leave it out.

 

A Green Man

[Edit – I’ve actually finished this book now. I found this short post sitting in my drafts folder, so I’m Frankensteining it.]

I’m partway through Roger Deakin’s (not the cinematographer) book Wildwood, and I’m finding it almost exactly what I hoped: meditations on trees that vary from detailed (a whole chapter on ash) to general (living in houses made entirely from wood).

Random thoughts:

  • Wood is a bridge between man and metal. Knives have wooden handles. Guns have wooden stocks. The once-living connects the living and the dead.
  • David Nash, sculptor: three-dimensional art (sculpture, for instance) is experienced in relation to the human body, two-dimensional art is experienced more in the imagination. Also, objects increase in size when put indoors and decrease in size when put outdoors by a factor of about one-third.
  • Lots of interesting thoughts from Barthes and Ruskin on architecture and technology. Barthes: cars are the modern-day Gothic cathedral. They are almost mystical in their summation of our culture.
  • A bunch of crazy words: juglone, thwmps, bothy.