Reject the side hustle
Hi, there!
(First, a little housekeeping: I’ve migrated this newsletter from Substack to Buttondown. If you notice anything different, that’s all it is; if something’s not working for you, reply and let me know.)
What I’m reading
I finished David Epstein’s Range last week, which is a pretty good read about the difference between people who specialize (think: Tiger Woods) and people who generalize (think: Roger Federer, to use one of the book’s examples). It was a good read, but I needed to switch to fiction again as soon as I was finished. I re-read Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story collection, Nocturnes, in anticipation of his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, which arrived last week. Ishiguro is one of my favorite writers, but it’s always hard to explain why. Quiet narrators, always observant, and quite still, not easily disturbed by their own emotions. In this he’s often very different from the other fiction I read—from almost any other fiction I read—and once I reacclimate to his pace, I can easily get lost in his stories.
I’ll be done with Klara any day now, though, and it’s anyone’s guess what I’ll follow it with.
Drowning in television
This probably describes most of us this past year, no? As I mentioned a few emails back, I finally got around to watching Breaking Bad. Well, I finished that, and then watched El Camino, the movie that ties up some of Bad‘s loose ends. And then when I finished that, I figured what the hell, right, and dove into Better Call Saul, the spinoff show whose story precedes Breaking Bad‘s. I’ve now officially binged them all—ten seasons’ worth of gritty southwestern crime drama (plus that movie)—and I have a verdict: Better Call Saul is way better than Breaking Bad. That is, it’s more my speed, I guess. And I find myself constantly startled when Bob Odenkirk transcends his comedy roots to deliver another harrowing dramatic moment.
One of my favorite things is watching a comedian play anything but comedy. (I saw Dumb and Dumber exactly once, and that was enough for me. But I can watch Jim Carrey weeping while driving in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind many, many times over, and it always friggin’ gets me.)
That said, I’m now all caught up, and in need of something to watch next. Suggestions? What’s getting you through this season of lockdown?
Side hustles and forgetting about winning
As I puttered around the internet last week, I stumbled across an anecdote that’s attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. I can’t vouch for this attribution; a little research turned up many blog posts about this very anecdote, but no verifiable citations. I’m going to share it anyway, because I think it’s a worthwhile thing, but if you’re a Vonnegut fan, you’d be right to be skeptical of the provenance of this little story:
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archaeological dig. I was talking to one of the archaeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
“And he went wow. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’
“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’
“And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.”
When Squish was younger, she often complained that she wasn’t very good at things. In particular, if we were making art together, she’d point out grumpily that she wasn’t “as good as” me. As she’s gotten older, she’s slipped more fully into her own artistic point-of-view, and such comparisons aren’t as valuable. She’s learning Vonnegut’s lesson young; that the pleasure of doing a thing is often enough.
Felicia’s probably responsible for this, in fact. When I met her fourteen years ago, she’d been knitting for years already; she was exceptionally talented. But when the subject of turning her craftiness into a business ever came up, she always dismissed the idea. She was in this work for the enjoyment of it, not to earn a buck. In fact, stapling the expectation of money to her knitting would only strip away her desire to do it any longer.
This reminds me of something I’ve heard Austin Kleon complain about: The insistence that we turn our hobbies into “side hustles.” In a podcast interview with Texas Monthly, he said:
“People are anxious about feeling like they should be doing more. Information is not their problem. A lot of these people that I meet, they’ve read all the blogs, bought all the books, and they know they’re supposed to get up and do their three morning pages and share something every day. They know they’re supposed to write down their dreams and thoughts and do their bullet journal. They know they’re supposed to be doing this stuff, but what they really need is someone to just take them aside and remind them this is supposed to be fun. This work we’re talking about isn’t about running an Etsy shop. It’s about like feeling like a human being. It’s hippie stuff like that people really need someone in my position to share. They need someone to say, ‘I watched three hours of Justified last night.’ You would be amazed how many nights I spend drinking whiskey and watching reruns of my favorite shows. The purpose of this work is not to build a side hustle. It’s about being a human being, and there are just so many people out there right now that just need a little bit of affirmation.”
Well, hey, I just binged ten seasons of pretty great TV, if that helps any of you. And for what it’s worth, I’m supposed to be working on my novel right now, and instead, I’m writing this.
How that novel’s going, btw
Has there ever been a more up-and-down year for our creative pursuits? (I keep saying ‘year,’ I know, even though this whole strange thing started more than a year ago now.)
I sat down yesterday to do some work on the novel. Small goal: Edit a scene. What happened instead: I reformatted a chapter or two, dropped a prologue, replaced it, then re-replaced it, then cut it, then wrote a new one, then threw that one away, and brought back the original, and edited it way shorter. And when that was done, I figured I could edit my scene. But first, I needed to remove chapter headings from forty-two chapters in Part I, so I didn’t forget to do it later, and then I thought, Well, I guess I’m done for the night.
I know what’s wrong, though. It happens every so often when I’m writing. I’m doing my work in Pages these days, see, and I have all these different styles—chapter headings, part titles, body text and epistolary inserts and a dozen other things—that distract me. All those things say, Hey, this is starting to look like a book, and believe me, that’s the last thing that’s useful to me when I just need to put words on a page.
Right now I’m writing this email in Ulysses, which looks like this:
Writing like this takes all of the angst about how the thing looks out of the equation for me. Turns off my designer’s brain (which is active all day long, and not easy to disable). So I think that’s what I’m doing next: Switching away from Pages for awhile, and over to Ulysses again. I did this once or twice on my last project, and it always seemed to clear the logjam. Sidestepped that design brain, rather than switching it off. (Writing in Ulysses is a beautiful experience of its own kind.)
That’s all for tonight. Having failed at book progress, but succeeded at this letter, I’m going to turn the lights out in my study (I’ve recently learned that an “office” is a room with a computer in it, and a “study” is one without a computer, and I say fuck that, I like the word “study” and I’m keeping it) and head upstairs, hopefully in time to read another few pages of The Hobbit with Squish. (It’s fun to ape Ian McKellan when I read Gandalf’s dialogue, though I’m nowhere near as good as this guy.)
Hey, maybe one day we’ll get to live through a single year that doesn’t feel like ten years all squeezed into one. It’s been rough on us all in different ways, and often in ways that aren’t at all visible on the surface. Do a kind thing for someone, even if you don’t know if they need it. (It’ll be good for you, too.)
✏️Take care,
Jg