Joy of Mother Indira

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got joy?

At our Friday Free Fall writing a lady of East Indian heritage did a poem about how her parents were so pleased, here in the New World, to have a Ford car, a house that wasn’t made of mud, and—I forget what else she wrote. She was writing to honor and appreciate her parents. Me too, in my own poems. I said, “Well, I have a poetry manuscript… where some of the poems deal with poverty after the Martians.” I didn’t tell her that one of the characters was someone the British would call Asian, or, less often, South Asian.

Mother Indira

Mother Indira, 

who fled harsh parents in India, 

once had crumbs of love, 

lots of learned books, 

but no husband or children.

Now in a commune she knows love and orphans.

Harry and Molly have lost their father and mother

but not their need for love

to fill them in the morning and at bedtime. 

Mother Indira wears army boots,

and a sensible sweater under a thin pretty shawl.

Harry enters the kitchen,

“May I please have a glass of milk?”

“Have you had one today?”

“No.”

“Then you may.”

Molly enters the kitchen,

“May I please have a slice of bread?”

“Have you had one today?”

“No.”

“Then you may.”

Mother Indira saws the bread for Molly,

as Molly always ends up cutting a triangle.

Molly returns the loaf to the breadbox.

Mother Indira clomps around the kitchen.

There is a little extra milk,

and a little extra bread.

Her eyes crinkle with affection,

thinking how surprised the kids will be to have this dessert.

“Bread pudding—oh boy!”

“You may, you may, you may” 

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2020

How You Learn

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Have you seen JoJo Rabbit, the current Oscar-nominated movie about the boy in the Hitler Youth? Two men I knew separately here in town were in the Youth, and so was my favorite business writer—luckily he left Germany before the war broke out.

Hello Reader,

Got an idea how you learn?

Prologue 

As faithful readers know: Of course I like being self-indulgent by writing a post about me or my blog, but only after I have filled up a full page of 25 weekly essay titles. Well, today marks another 25.

How You Learn

So, how are you managing your life? Are you becoming ever better, ever learning more about yourself and your business or hobby? Let’s not expect too much. My old telephone answering machine went, “If you know what you are doing, leave a message. If not, join the club.” Every caller, laughing, was already in the club.

Originally, the word “managing” meant “coping.” If today the meaning has shifted, if today we instinctively put the word “business” in front of “management” then it’s because my favorite business writer of all time quit his job during the middle of the Great Depression. There he was, a successful Wall Street analyst, when he asked himself: “Do I want to be the richest man in the cemetery?” In other words, was he living his values? That man was Peter Drucker. 

He went on to make the “practise of management” something that could be learned and taught, and caused universities to start up a faculty of Commerce, (business) because his observations and writings fell between the domains of Economics and Sociology—a new faculty was needed. Drucker’s first book was The End of Economic Man, with a forward by a German friend who wanted to “burn his bridges” against the Nazis. Drucker’s first famous book was The Concept of the Corporation where he interpreted General Motors, with it’s separate divisions, as being unlike historical companies such as, say, Ford. (Apparently Henry Ford didn’t want maximum independence and leadership in his managers, instead seeing them as his helpers) 

I have read everything by Drucker I can get my hands on, including his memoirs. 

(Wherein I found a smoking gun from his compatriot Henry Kissinger documenting that the U.S. government was secretly causing inflation)

We can’t all be a Peter Drucker, but just as he did, each of us can live, look and learn.

If for today’s post I write about styles of learning then it’s not for my ego, but because I have something interesting things to say… and because, according to Drucker, I am learning the way Sir Winston Churchill did—I’ll get back to Churchill.

But first: Right now the local bookstore is carrying On Managing Yourself, as part of a Harvard Business School series of books, each book with ten top articles on a given topic. Unsurprisingly, the first article in the book was by Drucker, called—such a classic title—“Managing Oneself.” Everybody knows that a manager or Chief Executive Officer has to be—to quote a cliche—“a lifelong learner.” Where Drucker surprised me was when he said that many people “don’t know how they learn.”  But they should.

President John F. Kennedy learned by reading. He would have his agents prepare written reports for him: Think of the brilliant writers in Camelot, and of John Kenneth Galbraith writing letters (now published) back from foreign embassies to educate JFK. 

President Harry S Truman learned by hearing: Think of his cronies playing poker in the White House as part of his “kitchen cabinet.” 

Drucker reports about a CEO who “… was in the habit of calling his entire senior staff into his office once a week and then talking at them for two or three hours…he simply needed an audience to hear himself talk. That’s how he learned.” A successful CEO, I might add.

Reading Drucker, years ago, I wondered: Am I a reader or a listener? I only found out when I was middle aged at university. Around that time, my company Vice President told me I was an “oral learner.” One day in class it was my turn, for my small group, to teach us a seminar:  There I was, just talking away about Thomas Paine, when suddenly a lady burst out: “(I just realized) You’re an oral learner! My LD kids talk like you!” (Learning Disability) A useful mirror, since I can’t see myself. 

No wonder I would study in the student bar by "talking" to myself, pretending I was explaining something. I guess I’m like Drucker’s CEO. And of course my speeches for Toastmasters are composed not at a desk but while walking along talking. (silently) As I explained in my essay about Hacking Together a Speech, archived November 2018.

As for essays and speeches, Paul Graham, like me, enjoys doing both. Unlike me, he is a famous web essayist and keynote speaker. Graham believes a grown up’s essay, unlike the ones schoolboys write, does NOT start out with a topic sentence to be proved, but as something flowing along where you don’t know everything yet. You write the essay to find out something new.

I don’t know whether Winston Churchill composed his speeches by just flowing along the way I do. What I do know blows me away: According to Drucker, during his schoolboy days Winston got poor marks, as did others who shared his learning trait: Churchill learned in a way not recognized by the education system—not by reading, and not by listening in class. He learned by writing. And today? The boy who did so poorly in school now has his writing studied by students of composition. (I have yet to write as well as he)

Knowing this about Churchill sheds new light on some of my blog essays. For example, for my essay comparing Trust and Ugly Americans. (Archived September 2019) I didn’t realize how being an Ugly Americans meant not trusting the natives, (Such as Iraqis) nor truly understand the individual I wrote about, (even though I had worked with him) not until after I had left the job and then wrote my essay. How strange.

Epilogue: 

I see I have managed to work this essay around to me and my blog. How sweet.

During the next 25 weeks I’ll listen and read as always. And, if I truly want to learn, then I’ll also speak and write. At long last, after another 25 titles, I may be self indulgent by writing about me and my blog, reporting on what I’ve learned during those precious weeks.

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2010

Note: 

My last meta-blog essay (following 25 posts) was Summer Blog Reflections, archived August 2019.

Reference:

On Managing Yourself, Harvard Business Review Press, Boston Massachusetts

The About the Contributors list has a line:

Peter Drucker was a professor of social science and management at Claremont Graduate University in California.

To my fellow writers: 

As a self-respecting adult, today I couldn’t bear to use a typical schoolboy “in conclusion” ending.

As for my seminar research about Thomas Paine, I repackaged it and sold it as a feature article to Falstaff's Table: We writers re-use everything we can. 

Paul Graham’s long list of essays includes three about writing essays.

The one I reference is Age of the Essay (link)

 (The other two are The list of n Things; Persuade xor Discover; plus one on Writing, briefly) 

For President Kennedy, his middle initial has a period because it stands for Fitzgerald.

For President Truman, his middle initial has no period because it doesn’t stand for anything.

I have copied a part of Churchill’s composition word for word, like an art student copying a master. Alas, I’m still a journeyman.

To my fellow readers:

I am so pleased to have collected various big volumes by Churchill from various antique stores. Not abridged! 

One of Churchill’s chapters is about his days among daring young men and their flying machines. Mechanical problems were common, forcing you to land at another aerodrome and motor your way back to the one where your young peers are wining and dining after their own harrowing flights. The best aviator of them all, one evening, wasn’t there. But there had been no reports of a crash on land. They waited, candles burned down, and at last they realized the truth… The abridged paperback ends: “He flew forever beyond mortal ken.”

Living Past Poverty

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got determination?

After the Martians passed on, leaving behind a ruined land, I imagine the remaining society: A few people would have wimped out, escaping into addictive substances and unhealthy attitudes which they would defend as being perfectly natural. But others would have found reasons to carry on, perhaps for the sake of their surviving children, or other people’s children yet unborn. Grief can be a dragging sea anchor, but still, I suppose, good citizenship is possible when all your neighbors are trying as hard as you are, trying to get healed while stubbornly appearing normal, trying to “fake it till they make it.” 

God bless the wounded healers. 

When my parents were little, back in the old country, children got an orange just once a year, at Christmas. There is a reference to this (blink and you’ll miss it) in the Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor art movie, set in 1954, Young Adam. (review) 

Immigrating to Canada helped my parents, food-wise. In Canada, during the Great Depression, my father felt badly about sometimes having nothing to feel the dog; my mother had sores in her mouth, stopped speaking in class, until the public health nurse advised grandma to get some fruit for vitamin C.

Here are two poems.

Guitar by Firelight

As I walk from the cold

into the warm tavern

 my neck is bent down slightly,

my gait is slightly uneven

and things are out of joint.

A man bends over a guitar in the tavern.

Some say he’s not meant for television prime time,

not for satellite international broadcast.

I say he is meant for here,

where plain people get a life.

We can see his face shining above his guitar.

Here we know our lives,

tensed then relaxed,

as guitar strums by firelight.

Once, when there was still a power grid,

back in my living room,

I lived in a dying-room

with instant coffee and instant feelings

and paper dolls posed flat on my screen 

as I escaped into the mute button.

Such a muffled life. 

The artist in the tavern locks his gaze on mine,

strums my heartstrings, and I feel what I feel.

Memories squiggle free.

From my radiant fellows infra-heat billows

around me like a firemen’s rescue hoop.

Such a raw life.

After midnight, a loose upright man

walks out the tavern door.

I am not the same man who entered.

Yearly Orange

The Martians had swept over the land like a plague,

felling people in the streets and poisoning the crops.

Like a rash the Red Weed had smothered farms

jammed canals and blocked harbors.

The Reading rail yard is still a jumble of silent rusting cars.

The Red Weed has gone, crumbled to dust.

Our ruined land is a harsh world.

Thin children are excited

as lean adults quietly talk 

about goods speeding under the sea

from the new world, to the old.

In the holds and tubes of a submarine

are spare circuits and seed stocks

artfully stowed without a wasted inch

clean and never contaminated

speeding towards us from New London.

The surface fleet was beamed and shredded,

the same day a storm of silent particles

made dead every child’s device,

every Nintendo, Atatri, Playstation, Gameboy,

leaving the children nothing.

Nothing but the timeless games:

Kick the can.

King of the castle.

Kite flying.

Robin Hood.

A tired adult perks up as children run by,

laughing and smiling.

A girl feels 

life is good, 

she raises her arms saying,

“It’s all carrots and apples!”

The children will never grow as tall as their parents.

The submarine will be an early Christmas.

Excited kids tell each other,

“Everybody gets an orange!”

We don’t tell them

oranges are good for their health.

Some day,

we will give the children

peaches and cream. 

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2020

Back-trail of Essays and Blogs

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Do you like broccoli? 

Here is an essay that, like the "broccoli movie" Ghandi, is "good for you."

Tis a nostalgia piece, a re-run, from back when blogs could be substantial like the articles in Sunday newspapers. Whatever happened to those days?

But first, a new headnote, from the blog of Seth Godin for October 26, 2019:

If we only forward the easy, short and funny things we read online, why are we surprised that our inbox is filled with nothing we’ll remember tomorrow?

What would happened if instead, we shared the most complex, useful and thoughtful things we discovered instead?

Here it is, my 75^th post. My astute readers will have noticed that for every 25 “postings” I do a piece explaining essays. I say “posting,” not “blog,” because hey, I’m not a blogger: I’m an essayist. But today I'll try to explain blogs too.

When telling people I have a hobby of writing, I merely say I write “nonacademic” essays, and leave it at that. I couldn’t begin to explain in just a sound bite how the essays school kids learn to write are—ahem!— for kids. In the wider world essays start out with different goals and functions, and of course follow different forms. Open any magazine and see: An adult essay never ends with “in conclusion;” it very seldom begins with a topic sentence as a thesis to be “proven.” Such writing would be “bad form.”

I’ve heard that essays in The New Yorker will begin by meandering along and then finally, at the bottom of the first page, announce the topic. This form allows busy New Yorkers, in their fast-paced city, a nice chance to stop rushing… and fix on something that rewards an adult attention span. I wish internet blogs were simularly aimed at adults.

It was a guy with a decent attention span, Paul Graham, who inspired me to do my own internet essays. Graham noted, in his Age of the Essay, that the internet had existed for a few years before people figured out they could use it for blogs. (web log or public diary, with people's comments) His hope was that soon people would figure out they could use it for essays too. This hasn’t happened yet, and I’m losing hope it ever will. So far, no one else writes wide ranging essays like Graham, while my number of bookmarked essayists I can count on the fingers of one hand—not including my thumb. 

I was at university when personal computers arrived for the public—but not for the university, not yet. Computers weren’t quite an everyday topic of conversation for people, not nearly as often as when color TVs or 10-speeds arrived, but still there was a trace of the old “left out” feeling if you didn’t have one. Naturally, among us starving students, only the nerds were motivated enough to get one. After all, a computer cost more than a used car.

I remember, back then, being at a seminar of people from Strategic Studies. Some one asked why armies still had those big expensive all-too-vulnerable tanks. I quipped, “Tanks are like personal computers: Everyone knows you should have them… but no one knows quite what to do with them.” As for computers, what we did with them was do household accounts, write letters, address envelopes and, uh… mostly guys resorted to playing computer games like Space Invaders.

At last came the World Wide Web. Meanwhile, at the university, at this time, there was a very long hallway, enclosed from the elements, running along the entire back length of the physical education building. I was probably the only one to notice that, on a campus of eager helpful opinionated young scholars, no one had posted anything at all. And of course no one posted “comment threads” of replies. 

Soon the nerds began “surfing” and their word entered our vocabulary. But many students still preferred to put their money on a car. At this time the student radio station magazine, Vox, ran a skeptical editorial. The editor noted that guys who wouldn’t be comfortable in a bathing suit were preaching the joy of surfing to find out, say, how to fix their bicycle. From his cozy music hangout amidst a crowded friendly campus the editor’s question was: Can’t I reach out to living people to ask how to fix a bike?

Today, when everyone knows computers are a Good Thing, the reply to that music-loving editor would be, “Yes but—…there’s so much stuff out there.” 

“Yes, I know I should get out and mingle with people, but…” 

“Yes, I know I have all the social skills of a zombie, but that’s why I honestly prefer to stay at the computer playing zombie wars.”

I have sympathy but no answers. I have no idea as to when the line is crossed: When does being in a cybernetic community of bloggers, with words on my cold backlit screen, become an escape from my real local community? I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s image of a dog stopping by a sidewalk vending machine so a cybernetic arm could come out and pet him. 

As for me, I too like to escape. Sometimes I escape away from reading stuff I will long remember, away from essays or that zombie book World War Z, (which I recommend) into reading fluffy forget-me-right-away blogs. “Yes, but— why do blogs seem to outnumber essays by a zillion to one?”

Because: Essays take more effort. I think of that long phys ed hallway. I guess it follows logically that people who wouldn’t make the effort to post with real paper onto a big hallway won’t make any effort for essays even when they finally have access to a computer. Contrawise, the non-college folks who wouldn’t normally write anything, the folks who, before telephone rates were de-regulated, (lowered) would rather make awfully expensive long-distance-phone-calls than write letters, will now write a blog.

* * *

I like young university students. At the same time, being middle-aged, and having been raised working class, I have an old blue-collar perspective. I’m aware that during the 1950’s the “slicks” were fast disappearing. These were the magazines with slick pages giving the world such things as True Romance and True Confessions. My waitress Sue, who reads pretty slowly when she reads aloud, would have liked them. She loves her Stephen King, but the other stuff? She can get it from television.

Yes, TV killed the slicks, and it killed the pulps too. Sue doesn’t blog herself, by the way, but it seems to me that a lot of her friends who type madly onto the blogosphere are literate but not readers. Not of books. They are typists, but not writers. Not for abstract thought. Naturally they wouldn’t care for essays.

I like Sue; I had her over to my housewarming party. She likes me too, yet obviously I would never expect her, let alone her friends, to read my essays. However, when it comes to ignoring my stuff, what is my excuse for any surfer with a university degree, let alone a degree in something considered extra smart like Computer Science? Of course I wouldn’t expect them to literally read my stuff, but I am surprised to find they don’t read anyone’s essays at all. 

Some of the computer “guys”—they don’t merit the honorific “nerds”—are like Sue: they seemingly can’t read or write. How bizarre. As it happens, I already knew there was such a thing as a university graduate who doesn’t read books. Now I am finding that some of them can barely even read a longer blog.

I say this after reading the comments on the blog of one of my four bookmarked essayists, Stevey, who writes for computer programmers. I like Stevey’s humor. For me, a nonprogrammer, half of his stuff I can tell is real good but it’s like trying to read The Jabberwocky. Happily, the other half I get. In Stevey’s post of January 7^th, 2008, Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter, he explains how he decides on his blog length. He looks at reading duration

“… and some folks like to read slowly. Heck, some don’t even read at all. It’s one of the amazing miracles of the internet: write-only people. They won’t read but they somehow find a way to write. You see them comment in all the time in my blogs: ‘I didn’t actually read your entry, but allow me to comment on it all the same…’ Lovely.”

I know what he means. I have read too many such comments for Stevey, complaints that his pieces (A) are too long or (B) … should be written as a sound bite. My reaction: “WTF?” They don’t get it that Stevey writes “long,” by their standards, to serve a purpose. Part of their problem is their expectations for “blogs” as being “short.” What’s a man to do… put up a headline “Essays by Stevey?” They’d still complain.

Never mind. All I can do is mutter that quote from Mark Twain. (~)

Expectations by readers are one thing. What are the expectations of the actual bloggers?

* * *

By “bloggers” I exclude the good folks of LiveJournal, as they seem to live in a nice sunny world of their own. Many other bloggers, though, seem to live in a grayer more competitive sphere… As a man from Tennessee says, “our grandparents lived in a troop of monkeys,” with a hierarchy, and therefore people tend to do a lot of comparing. In the real world some people genuinely believe in having a “mono-value,” a simplistic judgmental one-dimension criterion of “money.”

In the blog world a good many truly believe in the value of statistics: simplistically counting the “hits” on their site, or even hits on specific posts. I have even read where a few people were nasty and competitive for who has the best “stats.” Happily, I’ve also read many postings of generous advice on how to increase page hits. For some folks it might be healthier to ignore stats and simply see their blog as a chance for an ephemeral conversation. In other words, as being simply social.

But if a blogger, similar to an essayist, is striving for posts of lasting value, then I doubt the wisdom of choosing to have a mono-value of “stats.” Or, for that matter, having any mono-value in one's life. It’s too easy to be trapped. Graham once reported in an essay that after he received stock in his tech company he suddenly just couldn’t help evaluating his every action by “how it would affect the stock,” rather than “how it would affect the work.” And I once read on a U.S. waiter’s blog where every day, all day, he kept up a mental cost-benefit of how each customer was doing, value-wise, as a tipper. (In fairness, U.S. waiters are paid very little compared to waiters here)

It is money, I am sure, that is the root of some of the competitiveness, as certain bloggers desperately need to advertise their small business or generate funding from running advertisements on their blog. As for me, in my everyday job, as a “professional,” I am legally constrained from having a mono-value of money.

As a "blogger," I could simply type a one-sentence essay, “When you’re hot, you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re not.” After I gave it a catchy title, All I know about sex I could hit the “post” button and watch it get more hits than any other page I wrote. So much for stats.

Lately I’ve been following blogger Penelope Trunk (her pen name) who has a background as a business columnist. She writes on life and careers in a blog that includes lessons from her own life, even some awfully personal stuff. I should expect her blog to include archives. And I’m right, it does. I should also expect that she would write with pride, with substance, with a belief that her pieces have some lasting value. And I do. But her fans don’t. If they comment on a post that is any older than the food in my fridge, then they apologize. My reaction: WTF? I don’t expect a column post to be as lasting as an essay post, but still, I expect that Penelope put a modicum of tender loving care into her baby with hope for its future. And then to have people apologize…

When I am writing or public speaking I know I have made a connection when someone’s eyes light up and they say, “Yes! Let me tell you what happened to me!” In other words, when they feel moved to comment. So don’t apologize.

Of course many blogs, like those of Sue’s dear friends, are expected to be social, with easy social comments. As ephemeral as flowers, they are supposed to be for persons who are attention-span-challenged. Fine by me. I guess. Sure… but I admit I lose patience when I see this blog after blog … After blog. Perhaps this relates to the common wisdom that to be a “success,” as in have “successful” stats, you must blog several times per week, preferably daily. My reaction? (Besides WTF?): You can forget any lasting value.

Maybe that 20^th century Chicago columnist Johnny Deadline can be smart every day, but no one else can. As it happens, the competitive bloggers have proven, in black and white, based on their stats, that their readers will desert them in droves if their blog frequency falls off to (horrors!) once a week. My reaction: What the—! Who are these readers? And why would I “give a care” about them? So I can compete for stats? I’m no dog at a vending machine.

* * *

…What I find hard to wrap my head around is how people can leave a negative comment when they have only skimmed a piece, and have thereby badly misinterpreted things. If it is morally wrong to comment to censor a novel, without first carefully reading the novel, then it is also wrong to write in to censure a writer unless you first carefully read his piece.

This I believe: You have no right to injure the feelings of the writer, and to injure the community of readers, unless you are willing to take responsibility to read. To do otherwise is a vice. As you know, a “vice” is self-gratification at the expense of the community.

Essayist Scott Berkun takes a gentler view. Last week, for his June 16essay-blog on Why you are not an Artist he added to the comments: 

The fascinating thing so far in this post is how many people seem to have skimmed it. It’s very hard to defend myself against things I didn’t quite say : ) 

I see Scott added a smiley emoticon. Before I totally lose my sense of smiley face humor, tossing around words like vice, I had best leave today’s subject of fluffy Blogs to return to today’s other solid subject: Essays. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to go from fluffy cotton candy to solid potatoes. Especially when I’m feeling uninterested in explaining essays these days. You see, I’ve recently overdosed on explanations. I discovered in a used bookstore, while passing through Kamloops, a decade’s worth of annuals of The Best American Essays. That’s a decade’s worth of introductions regarding: What is an Essay?

Here is a sentence by Joseph Epstein from his forward to the 1993 volume:

"I prefer it when the essay takes a small, very particular subject and, through the force of the essayist’s artistically controlled maunderings, touches on unpredictably large general matters, makes hitherto unexpected connections, tells me things I hadn’t hitherto known, or reminds me of other things I had already known but never thought to formulate so well as has the essayist I am reading at the moment."

After spitting the cotton candy out of my teeth for such solid food, I have nothing left to say.

Sean Crawford

In Cyberspace 

(Hello Lain!)

And in Calgary

June 2010,  February 2020

Footnotes
~A look at the blog world as of 2003 by writer John Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2003/06/16/reader-request-2-life-online/ 

~Speaking of statistics, I am surprised that people are skipping from my home page to this page, but not my to my more recent Polite Blogs one. How strange.

Update: Comedian George Carlin changed his life and career when—lightbulb!—he stopped having laughter as his mono stat for the success of his stage comedy, as he explained in his autobiography.

~For my blog website I am the "administrators" of the site. I have a lined accountant's page, where page titles older than the food in my freezer can be seen at a glance. Any new comments there show up in vivid colored ink. 

Update: I can click on "comments" to read them all, listed in reverse order.

~Real writers, when it comes to old pieces, find satisfaction in (ongoing royalties and) comments.

~Mark Twain said, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over the person who can’t read.”