Colin Marshall

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part III: The Problematic of the Dale Praxis

This is the third in a five-part series. The second is here.

It's one thing to verbally parse insights dropped by the Dale Carnegies of the world; it's quite another to internalize them. I think of this as Dale's Theory-Practice Gap, or, more academically, The Problematic of the Dale Praxis. It's pretty common to read or hear an idea and think, "Hey, I'd do better if I acted on that." It's almost as common to understand the idea and think and write about it yourself; hell, that's a big chunk of what I do here. But does any of this translate to patching the idea into your own code? Hard to say.

What gets in the way? The lingering detritus that junks up all our minds, I suspect: unreasonable but unreconsidered preconceptions, plastered-over knowledge gaps, unhelpful but comfortable habits of thinking. The paranoia of the meek that sees sources of potential embarrassment everywhere. The cultural and intellectual siege mentality of the subconsciously self-considered elite. The solipsism of the once-"gifted" kid. It's this kind of nonsense that makes me wish brains had manual override switches.

Having cleared away all that stuff must be what Zen Buddhists mean by "beginner's mind," about which Shunryu Suzuki had much to say:

In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means "beginner's mind." The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind. Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen to you if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it.

[ ... ]

You should not lose your self‑sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few. If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself.

It occurs to me that a beginner's mind toward other people is exactly what the social maladroit lacks. If you keep stumbling over the fallen assumptions you've failed to juggle, you won't have a lot of attention left for pure interest. Dare I invoke the tired word "openmindedness," to which we give such unending lip service?

Just as the near-epic challenge of developing a Dale Carnegie-style "genuine interest in other people" often goes unacknowledged, it seems to me that people tend to be wrong in the same way about openmindedness — or empty-mindedness, ready-mindedness, or beginner's-mindedness, or shoshin-mindedness. Whatever you think of Zen Buddhists, at least they don't sugar-coat the struggle to attain it. The way I hear it thrown around in the mainstream, you'd think it was something you could just decide to "be."

I would submit that, like anything worthwhile, cultivating this sort of receptive mind demands actual sacrifices. I've mourned living people due to to their unwillingness or inability to understand this. If I could only frame life in one way, I'd frame it as the constant pushing outward of one's own comfort zone, with all the attendant risks. If you're not doing that, you are, in some sense, dead. With constrained interests, you're similarly dead. Without the willingness to separate your interests from your identity, from your various prejudices and from any other of the aforementioned lingering brain garbage? Dead. At least it makes me feel dead.

Note that interest ≠ admiration. Being interested in something or someone, as we all know but maybe don't often remember, doesn't mean you have to like it. But haven't you heard people hem and haw about how they're not interested in person, place or thing x because don't think they'll like it? It's a strange conflation, one that makes a kind of sense on an intuitive level but absolutely none when even casually examined. You see it happen a lot with art and culture ("Ulysses? Aw, forget it"), but I find it doubles down in plain old society. It feels so natural to avoid working up an interest in people you doubt you'll really like.

As frequently as I quote Terence on these matters, some humans, alas, remain totally alien to me: Netflix user reviewers, for instance, who seem as slow, pedantic and obtuse as they accuse most great movies of being. Social media marketers, of whose existence as sentient beings I have seen no persuasive evidence. And I'm absolutely convinced that I'd have a more fruitful discussion with an 80-year-old Dinka tribesman than an SEO consultant.

So this is all much easier said than done, but it's a problem worth working on. If there's one thing I've realized for sure about the lack of interest in developing social adeptness and an inclination for broad engagement with the outside world, it's that, to the extent that someone doesn't straighten it out, they are so fucked.

Stay tuned for the thrilling Part IV of The Plight of the Social Maladroit, tomorrow on The War on Mediocrity.

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part II: Carnegie Knew Everything

This is the second in a five-part series. The first is here.

If, like those "talented" kids who grow up lazily shielding the dubious glory of their intelligence, you buy your own hype, you might come to believe some weird things. If other people bow before the awesome power of your brain, for instance, then what could you ever stand to gain from interacting with other people? They're worshiping you, after all. You're a god to them! The assumption that you only need your projects, your own brain and maybe the friendship of the 99th percentile most like-minded and demographically similar people in your region.

I'm reminded of the Five Geek Social Fallacies, though those don't kick in until social interaction begins; this nips it in the bud. Yet it's still very much (though not exclusively) a geek problem. I've written here before about the geek tendency to simulate social competence in the same way they'd learn chess: figure out the rules, form basic strategies and memorize effective responses to recurrent situations. Hence the number of sites about how to make small talk.

The paradox in this is its fatal flaw: people seem to value your engagement with them to the extent that you're not following some operating procedure, much less instructions off a web page. Even the hopefuls committing these guidelines to memory must realize how weirded-out they'd be if someone were to ask them about their lives because about.com said to "ask them about their lives." The idea is that nobody needs to tell you to ask, because you're supposed to be interested in the first place. But it never occurs to some people — geeks, anointed children, shut-ins, what have you — to be interested in the first place.

This is only natural if, in your life so far, other people's primary function was to be impressed by you. In this worldview, your only hope to win humanity's favor is to drill down as far as possible into the soil of your brain, your projects and your like-mindeds and present to the world an image of brilliance. Hence, I suspect, the strong temptation to say effectively nothing on the net but: "Here's a thing I did. Here's another thing I did. Here's yet another thing I did." As a kid, when I was still burning my energy (such as I burned it at all) jealously guarding my smartness trophy, I didn't feel like I could spare the bandwidth to be interested in other people. It would've been like asking someone desperately flapping his limbs in the middle of the ocean to get to know the water he's treading.

In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Douglas Coupland said about his undimming fascination with everything around him, "I used to worry that my interest in the world would just wear off one day. It’s a beautiful place and we are lucky to be alive. We really are." I've written here before how someone's interestingness usually equals their interestedness. One of the gems in my meta-MetaFiltered advice, I thought, was: "When you talk to people, let them spend the bulk of the time talking about themselves. The more they talk about themselves, the more interesting they'll think you are."

This all comes back to Dale Carnegie, doesn't it? I somehow happened on his immortal How to Win Friends and Influence People in high school and, despite the book's dopey aspirational title, found that its ideas made so much sense I could hardly think directly about them. (Some say the same about evolutionary theory, but I didn't read that.) Paul Graham wrote, "When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself."

One of Carnegie's oft-repeated dicta is that you should "take a genuine interest in other people." This principle's sub-points include listening hard, urging your interlocutors to talk about themselves, etc. I seem to recall examples of an everyman complimenting a postal worker on his head of hair and a raise-seeking employee asking his boss about his stamp collection. Carnegie's critics read this as advocacy of the sleazy fakery of interest in other people; "genuine," they claim, is a mere figleaf. But geeks, often self-styled Holden Caulfields, seem to get disproportionately het up about honesty and consistency. I think that, in their minds, asking someone about their stamp collection couldn't be anything but dishonest, since it's not, like, whatever sub-sub-branch of robotics is their own passion.

But here's the thing: effective or no, I doubt Carnegie was all for this kind of charlatanism. I think he used "take a genuine interest in other people" to really mean "take a genuine interest in other people." It wasn't about putting on a show or following a set of instructions. It was about something much, much harder.

Stay tuned for the thrilling Part III of The Plight of the Social Maladroit, tomorrow on The War on Mediocrity.

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part I: Put it Out There

The internet exploded when people started widely perceiving it as a communication device, like a telephone. Paul Graham writes about it as the point everyone grasped the net's "social applications": "This was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers." Hence your blogs, your Facebooks, your Twitters, your Orkuts, etc.

Still, the action on the net doesn't seem especially communicative to me. When I think of communication, I think of face to face conversation, a talk on the telephone, or even, yes, a back-and-forth over e-mail. When I think of blogging, tweeting or Facebooking — all of which I engage in, to various degrees — I don't think of communication. I think of talking at, not talking to. That stuff is, or has become, more about saying something really loud and hoping someone persuadable is in earshot. It's like wearing a colorful getup in a stadium and hoping to get on the Jumbotron, or floating high-powered messages in bottles. All this stuff is, quite literally, just "put out there."

Merlin Mann said something incisive, as is his wont, when I interviewed him: "In the very same way that a message CC'ed to 50 people will generally get a response from none of them, I think that when you speak to no one in particular, that's exactly who's going to listen." That seems to be true — most of the time. The problem is, a fraction of the time, a nontrivial amount of people do respond to these directionless pseudo-communiqués, especially if numbers lead their titles. A staggering amount of net.culture has come to base itself on these very same long odds.

Nightmarishly, I sometimes find myself thinking in this way: "Okay, if I just make a clever enough post in the right forum..." "Okay, if I just argue smartly enough in view of enough third parties..." "Okay, if I just make a hilarious enough tweet..." As if other people were simple organisms in a lab who exist to respond to whatever stimuli I send their way, or drops of mercury in a thermometer that measures the awesomeness of my self-presentation. If I lay it out intellectually this line of reasoning it sounds preposterous, but it appears to drive a substantial chunk of what people do on the net nonetheless.

This reminds me of the way I thought as a kid. I had the combined fortune and misfortune to grow up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when children's self-esteem was our most strategic natural resource. If you clocked in, for example, two or three ticks above the intellectual average, your environment turned on a firehose of praise for your smarts. Though I wasn't the brainiest-kid-in-the room type, I guess I showed enough promise to cultivate a reputation for intelligence. I proceeded to assiduously avoid any task difficult enough to challenge that reputation.

My experience wasn't that different from little Thomas', though he's smarter:

Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ”

Thomas said that about spelling. Spelling was one of the only things at which I was skilled, but I bowed out of a bunch of other stuff. Being in the presence of and talking to other people, for instance; I took one look at a task like that and said, "I'm not good at this." But "fortunately," because I grew up in as an only child in time and place with books, computers, television and video games aplenty, I could pretty much cut out the social stuff altogether without going sensory-deprived. And this was before the web as we know it, which must be like crack to kids with similar and worse tendencies.

I think back to how I acted then, and it's no wonder that scattershot autistic declaration has become the internet's dominant form of speech. You could hardly design a better enabling device: allow people to lob as many messages as they can type into the void, and have that void sometimes reward them with just enough of a response to imply the alluring promise of much, much more. I now can't stop seeing hundreds of thousands of childhood-Colins — or, in my moments of reversion, adulthood-Colins — hanging around the net, yammering loudly to, effectively, themselves, hoping against hope to spark a sudden mass connection.

But here's the grimmer part: I'm far less — far less — affected by these issues than a lot of people.

Stay tuned for the thrilling Part II of The Plight of the Social Maladroit, tomorrow on The War on Mediocrity.

Validation

Having taken notice of my Ubuweb Experimental video project, Ubuweb itself has taken the bold step of hosting my writeups of everything in their film and video archive. There's a link to their archive of my stuff on their front page, but they've also built a dedicated page for it whose design I quite like. Cooler still, each video I've reviewed will have a link to my writeup on its own page.

Mine own humble work hosted on the internet's largest and most respected archive of the avant-garde material; could there possibly remain any goals worth achieving? (Actually, this will probably turn out to be yet another thing at which friends inexplicably don't even bat an eye, but that's good; it makes me work harder. Or maybe I should be running with a different crowd. Hell, I'unno.)

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 37. André S. Labarthe's Antonin Artaud (2000)

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Un Siècle d'Écrivains: Antonin Artaud. 45:47 min., color, silent, 1992. Listed under Antonin Artaud. Ubuweb's description:

En janvier 1947 sur la scène du Vieux-Colombier, Artaud donne l'ultime représentation de son "Théâtre de la cruauté" : une scandaleuse et mémorable conférence où, pour s'incarner, il se déchire devant un public médusé. Un portrait non chronologique et structuré, plutôt que par sa vision du théâtre ou sa critique hallucinée de la société occidentale, par des motifs qui traversent tous les écrits d'Artaud : angoisse, impossibilité d'être au monde, incapacité à "atteindre" ses pensées.

Uh oh. Looks like a job for Google Translate:

In January 1947 the scene of the Vieux-Colombier, Artaud gives the ultimate performance of his "Theatre of Cruelty" an outrageous and memorable conference where, to incarnate, he tears before a stunned audience. A portrait not structured chronologically, rather than his theatrical vision or hallucination of his critique of Western society, for reasons that go through all the writings of Artaud anxiety, inability to be the world's inability to "reach" its thoughts.

Fair enough. This isn't so much by Antonin Artaud, the French writer/actor/dramatist, as it is about him. Makes sense, given that he died in 1948 and this was made in 2000. Production credit would seem to go to the equally French actor/producer/director André S. Labarthe. From what I can gather, it's one episode of a television series whose title translates to A Century of Writers. The video has no subtitles, so best of luck to the non-Francophones, myself included.

But film and television are fully audiovisual media: even if you can't understand what's being said, you can still experience the sound design and the play of images. I would venture to say that you could draw about 90 percent of full enjoyment from all my favorite films without understanding their dialogue. (And given how low-dialogue my own filmmaking aesthetic is turning out to to be, how much allegiance could I have to the stuff?) Donald Richie fell in love with Japanese cinema before he knew the language. In fact, watching movies in tongues I don't understand — which might as well just be "in tongues" — keeps with my recent self-styled cinematic training of watching things either completely without sound (so as to focus on the assembly of the visuals) or completely without images (so as to focus on the assembly of the sound). This would, I suppose, land somewhere between.

There are some pretty cool images here: architecturally-intensive tracking shots, a nude at a piano scoring a silent film-within-the-film. There are also some pretty pedestrian ones — several of them in the kind of runny slo-mo that only Wong Kar Wai has ever pulled off, and even then not really — and I can tell you now that, if you're into extreme close-ups of typewriter ribbons running through their machines, you're in for a treat. But strong or weak, these visuals seem to serve a technique of which I approve, and which I may not have seen as clearly had I been linguistically able to concentrate on words and narrative.

Labarthe's story of Artaud, you see, appears to be told mostly in voiceover, and the Artaud figure — the fellow in the white hat, I assume — only rarely enters the frame. What's actually shown onscreen is pitched intriguingly between the way fiction would deliver its materials and the way documentary would: old photographs and film clips, turntables, trains, floppy dogs, urban scenery, sketches, notebook page after writing-filled notebook page, and yes, that typewriter. At times, the imagery feels almost abstract, though again, that just be my noncomprehension on duty. As for the way that the words "ARTHUR RIMBAUD" morph into the words "ARTAUD" at the beginning, well, I got nothin'.

The world needs your Great Gatsby paper

I dropped by the UCSB campus on a weekend which turned out to be graduation weekend. You could tell from the sheer number of (a) students walking around dressed-up, looking as if they still haven't quite mastered the controls of this bizarre formal exoskeleton and (b) parents in triple-pleated Dockers and denim hats, slowly meandering en masse across the bike paths. I never did the whole graduation ceremony thing when I finished (read: "was told I had too many units to keep hanging around in") college myself, a decision I feel has never stopped paying off. But witnessing the proceedings from a distance got me thinking.

The most accurate way I can describe my resistance to ceremonized graduation is that it made me feel... dirty, as if I were receiving a wildly unearned degree of pomp and circumstance. I felt this way about high school graduation too, but at least that had a fresh-out-of-the-joint sort of catharsis to it. Plus, my high school graduating class was only a couple hundred kids. I'm pretty sure thousands graduate UCSB per year.

Consider than for a moment. How to feel pride about doing something that thousands of others just did to, while they're sitting all around you? I'd find it an utter impossibility, but others clearly don't. It's long seemed to me that the pride felt in an accomplishment is inversely proportional to the number of other people who do it or are able to do it. I've pondered rules of living along the lines of "Don't do anything that as many people as will earn a B.A. this year are doing."

My aversion extends past higher education to other institutions of the same mill-like scale and procedural definition: higher higher education, organizational hierarchies corporate or otherwise, parenthood, marriage, "normal" schedules, what "everyone" does. (PROTIP: Avoid people who make a lot of normative claims about what "everyone" supposedly does or is.) At a certain point, I guess I'm forced to admit that this bespeaks a freakish set of personal preferences — if they weren't freakish, they'd be in alignment with all those prevalent institutions — but, to me, they feel like the only possible conclusions from the available premises.

Then again, academia has always brought out the very worst in me. Whereas I find I can work on projects, and hard, when they're not institutionally driven, setting foot in a school turns me into a foot-dragging, intransigent monster. Even stuff I'd already found fascinating — politics, music, logic, economics, film, literature — often turn into the absolute last thing in the world I want to think about in the context of a class, lectures, assignments, tests and the like.

I'd wondered since practically the beginning of my school days about this — and I'm sure some of my teachers wondered too — but it only recently dawned on me that I wasn't particularly moved to do homework and papers and such because others were already doing it. It wasn't like I was getting them to do my assignments for me; it just seemed like they already had the assignments covered. The world, I subconsciously reasoned, did not need my 29 classmates' five-page compare-and-contrast papers on the symbolism in Lord of the Flies and The Great Gatsby, all with a maximum audience of one, so it certainly didn't need my 30th. Did it need me to be yet one more B.A. holder? Can it really need me to be yet one more holder of additional degrees, yet one more married person, yet one more parent, yet one more 9-5er, yet one more everyone?

The shibumi critic

There's this Japanese concept called shibumi, which Will Boehlke of A Suitable Wardrobe describes as a kind of quality sans flashiness. In his wheelhouse, displaying shibumi is "the best way to stand out": you do it by wearing clothes "that the eye passes over, only to return in appreciation." This concept applies well beyond men's fashion; I now find myself looking for the shibumi, the ostensibly unremarkable but subtly impressive, everywhere in life.

Peter Brunette was a shibumi sort of Marketplace of Ideas guest. I had him on the program in April to discuss the cinema of Michael Haneke, and he displayed the sort of strong grasp of craft and context a true film scholar should, not to mention the consummate lecturer's voice. The conversation's lack of unusual jags or shocking revelations perhaps caused your ear to pass over it, but did it not return in appreciation?

As anyone in film circles now knows, last Wednesday Brunette died suddenly at the Taormina Film Fest. The outpouring in response has been immense, coming from fellow critics, academic colleagues, students current and former, filmmakers, you name it. I've been seriously impressed; I suspected he was a pretty cool fellow from our interview, but he seems to have been so much more than that to so many. "My whole life is art films and foreign films and documentaries," he said to me. Calling it a life at a film festival has thus brought many of his remembers to remark that, hey, at least he went doing what he loved. But the more I happen to read about him, the more it seems to the point not that he died doing what he loved but that he lived doing it, which is maybe even rarer.

Here's a bit of Gerald Peary's memorial for the man in indieWIRE:

He was at every film festival on earth, or so it seemed: boisterous, gregarious, with that deep, booming voice, and spreading his extraordinary warmth. Who of you out there in critic-land have not shared a tasty dinner, or downed a brewski, somewhere on the globe with Peter Brunette? Who had not stuck with him, long into the festival night, when Peter—his term—would get properly “shitfaced”? Unusual in our stiff-in-our-body, I’d-rather-hide-in-the-dark profession, Peter was that weirdo film critic who really liked to have fun.

[ ... ]

“OK, I’ve got this festival figured out,” he would anounce on a first afternoon at Toronto, Cannes, anywhere, as he laid out a complicated game plan about how he would somehow get through the next days. His apprehensions started with a formidable lineup of films he’d been assigned to review for indieWIRE, or Screen International, or, in recent times, The Hollywood Reporter. Or there would be interviews he’d agreed on with negligible filmmakers because (That was Peter!) the female publicists representing them were twenty-something and damned cute.

[ ... ]

Partying away the night, Peter in the day was an unstoppable, Type-A workaholic. Also, and he agreed with my analysis, he had a Clintonian thirst to be noticed and liked. So the film reviews—and they were smart and good ones—spilled out at every festival. The publicists adored him (well, that hour) for writing about their clients. Byline: Peter Brunette.

We give lip service to living deeply, to not being one of Auntie Mame's poor suckers starving to death at life's buffet, but I find real examples strangely scant. Here is a man whose mourners have drawn an emergent portrait of as a true bon vivant, a genuine — read that adjective again, for I do not choose it lightly — lover of film, literature, travel, languages, wine, friends and "twenty-something and damned cute" publicists. In other words, a man who, even in death, probably has some lessons to teach a schlub like yours truly. Save not getting 30 more years or so, I would be surprised if Peter Brunette died with regrets.

My students go crazy because I can never remember how movies end. They say, “What happens at the end?” I say, “Gee, I can’t remember.” “What?” They’re astonished, because for them, the intrigue of the plot is most important, whereas for me, it’s striking moments, ideas that are used and played with. I rarely pay attention to plot. I know that makes me a little weird, makes my students laugh at me, but it’s just the way it is.

Meta-MetaFiltered wisdom

Bird number one: I wanted to make something helpful. Bird number two: I wanted to try my hand at collage writing, since it seems to have re-entered the zeitgeist. I found my stone while reading Ask MetaFilter's archived threads soliciting general how-to-do-life advice, a trove which includes:

What do I need to do in daily life that I don't realize I need to be doing?

What would you tell the 20-year-old you?

What do you wish you'd known when you were 18?

Advice for a graduate

What do you wish you'd known/done when you were 21?

For those about to work

What practices have had the most effect on your health?

What "rules for life" should I pass on to my fifteen-year-old brother?

Rites of passage and the requisite advice

Insights gained via one's career

It occurred to me that the most valuable words of wisdom of this veritable landslide would be (a) those that recur, (b) those that surprise and (c) those that recur and surprise. I thus read through all these threads, collected the recurring/surprising, stripped out as much cliché as possible and organized the results the best way anything can be organized: thematically. I haven't written a word. My only work was in structuring and polishing. Here it is.


* * *

Invest in genuine friendships. Surround yourself with friends who don't care if you don't talk to them for three weeks at a stretch, but make sure you do talk to them more often than that. SOCIAL SKILLS. Learn them! People you think you are smarter than, you are often not. Even if you are, you can still learn from and enjoy them. There's a lot to learn from a lot of different kinds of people you meet. Make friends who are interested in different things to you. Take an interest in what they are interested in. Surround yourself with interesting people. You'll only be bored if you're boring to begin with. Be interested and you'll be interesting. There are a lot of weird, wonderful people in the world; sometimes they scare you, sometime they scare others, sometimes a lot of negative stuff is said about them.

Don't get in arguments with random people. Rational arguments pretty much never persuade anyone of anything. Don't waste your time arguing with True Believers. Don't waste energy wishing someone else was acting differently. You can't make anyone do anything. You can only choose your own actions. People do what they want to do. Don't create drama, and avoid those who do. You can't choose your emotions; you can only control how to react to them. Don't waste your energy on hate. When you waste time mocking rednecks or liberals, you're wasting your time. Avoid listening to or spreading office gossip. You can't fix people.

You learn by doing, so get doing. Hit rock bottom as soon as possible, then figure out how to get out of it. No other challenge will seem unconquerable after that. Advice from others means absolutely nothing; fucking up is what teaches you something. Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. Realize that most people older than you really don't know any better. Figure out what your fears are and take steps to get over them. Now is your time to fail and fail spectacularly. If you don't fail, you're not taking enough risks. You are more likely to get a stunning career with one or two enormous, audacious failures under your belt than with a by-the-book, up-from-the-bottom "normal" approach. Everybody fucks up; it's how you deal with fucking up that matters. Nothing in the world can take place of persistence. Learn to laugh at yourself, and do it a lot. No matter what you do, someone will have an opinion about it.

The less you say, the more intelligent people think you are. By the same token, when you talk to people, let them spend the bulk of the time talking about themselves. The more they talk about themselves, the more interesting they'll think you are. You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do. Keeping calm and smiling is an excellent technique for needling angry people. Whatever it is that someone is trying very hard to convince you they are, they privately fear they aren't.

Get rid of the clutter. Things mean very little. It's amazing how little you really need in this world. Offload extra stuff to Goodwill regularly. Haven't worn that shirt in a year? Send it away. If you keep everything you've ever owned forever, you're just going to be dragging your past around with you like an anchor. Most things you spend your money on won't be worth it. Don't buy books, get a library card. Live as simply as you comfortably and happily can, rather than as well as you think you deserve.

Set deadlines. If you "try" to work out a couple times a week, you might miss a week or two and then completely lose it. If you play basketball every Wednesday and softball every Saturday, you won't forget. Don't make excuses, especially to yourself. Actually start making calls and setting up timelines; sometimes what you think is impossible to achieve happens very quickly thanks to a series of fortunate events. You're not likely to get anywhere in particular if you're not headed anywhere in particular. If you want to succeed at something, work at it every day. How you do anything is how you do everything. Don't wait until you feel like doing something you should do to do it; begin, and the appropriate feelings will follow.

Your brain cells will calcify and die if not exercised. You need always to expose yourself to new ideas, new people, new music, new art, new literature. When you leave college, it's easy to sink into a lifestyle where you are no longer challenged. Most jobs don't require you to learn new skills after you've reached a certain place in the hierarchy. Take the long way home sometimes, and then a different long way. Take as many weird classes as possible. Read books of all sorts, try all kinds of food, participate in events you'd never think of doing, get outside your comfort zone. Most people quit learning when they leave school or soon after. They go decades without learning any new ideas. Don't wait for life to force you to learn something.

Chill the fuck out. Ignore the media. Don't give a damn about anything that doesn't directly impact you. Mind thine own business. A disregard for social conventions and what is expected of you is often a good thing. (This is not to be confused with being mean or callous.) A lot of people do "things" they've heard are important to "do" before they get old, not doing them because they have a personal interest, but instead fulfilling some kind of twentysomething life checklist. Don't panic.

Life is too short for bad beer or bad coffee. Learn to cook great food. Slow down. Become a disciplined hedonist. Wine tasters don't guzzle. Good liquor is worth the extra money and when you order it in a bar people will think you actually know what you're doing. Avoid disposable culture in favor of stuff that's proven some lasting value. See the classics; they're classics for a reason. Travel as often, and as cheaply as you can without going into debt. Get away somehow once every season — a weekend trip, a longer trip, anything. This will shake up your head and get you out of your life and skin for a bit, and it will give you something to look forward to. Get a passport if you don't already have one. NOW. Learn Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, or any other major language so that you can work across the world.

The power of networks > the power of your talent. Advancement depends as much on networking as good work. School wasn't about getting good marks; it was about learning how to make friends. The intersection of smartest people and those who have been "most successful" is pretty small. You hear about someone's work and you go, "How did she get that job?" — the answer is, by building a mix of skills and connections outside of a formal program. Six months after you graduate, no one will care what your grades were. YOU ARE NOT A SPECIAL LITTLE SNOWFLAKE! WORK HARDER! YOU DO NOT GET REWARDED IN THE REAL WORLD FOR BEING GOOD AT TAKING TESTS, DO YOUR GOD DAMNED HOMEWORK! NOBODY GETS YOUR JOKES NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE STUPID, YOUR JOKES ARE STUPID! University is easy. If it wasn't, most of the people there wouldn't have gotten in.

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Shallow men believe in luck. Life is perspective; understand that, and you understand everything.


* * *

Some of the most prevalent advice was a little too common, a little too mundane for me to include. That's not to call it less valuable, but I can only get hit with so much about saving money, avoiding credit card debt, exploiting compound interest, flossing, backing up hard drives and the non-Vonnegutian edict to "wear sunscreen" before my eyes roll back. I also encountered a startling amount about shopping around for insurance. "Experiment with sex" popped up almost as often, which I suspect bespeaks somewhat misplaced priorities.

Because one should always end with laffs — though that was not, I notice, among the MetaFiltered wisdoms — I give you an unintentionally (but delightfully) revealing response to one of the what-have-you-learned-from-your-work threads:

Postmodernism and [academic] feminism aren't just eye-rolly buzzwords. They're also useful and complex collections of smart thoughts about understanding the world.

It makes a difference when your support request email sounds reasonably polite instead of just irritated. And be friendly to cashiers; they're often bored.

The trend piece term would be "microcritics"

There's a class of blog I run across all the time but which hasn't been named. They cover culture, but not a specifically designated wedge: maybe new Argentine novels, but not just new Argentine novels; maybe Francophone cinema from 1955-1970, but not just Francophone cinema from 1955-1970. While their authors review stuff, aren't exactly running review blogs; while they use their own lives as source material, they're not writing personal journals.

I hereby dub these "personal cultural blogs," or "PCBs" (not to be confused with those things you wire crystal radios on). Personal cultural bloggers write about their reactions to works they encounter in life, new or old, local or foreign, well-known or obscure. The constants are their prose and their perspective — or, for the P hat trick, their personality. I read the personal cultural bloggers I read because I like how they write, and therefore how they think, and/or I find their opinions are similar to, or — better yet — interestingly different than mine.

Some favorite PCBs include David Auerbach's Waggish, a blog of unclear but nonetheless absolutely coherent-feeling mandate. Much of the what he writes about sits at the intersection of literature and philosophy, though his posts I like best take on works that seem somewhat farther-flung: an inquest on "left-brained" literature (Pavic, Borges, Stephenson, etc.), an appreciation of filmmaker Shohei Imamura, a short but incisive review of John Williams' Stoner.

Focusing only on film, Blake Williams' R, and G, and B takes on a wide range of Colin-pleasing directors, including Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Abbas Kiarostami. While he hasn't updated since Cannes, what's there is solid. (Williams' is also one of the few voices to accuse Pixar of juvenile sentimentalism, a crime I've vaguely suspected they've been getting away with.)

I often quote Adam Cadre, and his calendar, a PCB in all but name, remains the one I get the most excited to see updated. He thinks so very clearly in text, which is especially fascinating when he's thinking his way to different opinions than mine. And he usually is: see his posts on Tropical Malady ("Too slow, gave up"), Hana-bi ("Too slow, gave up") and In the Mood for Love ("Recommended for Colin Marshall").

My newest find is with hidden noise, written by Dan Visel of The Institute for the Future of the Book. For perhaps obvious reasons, the blog is book-centric, and Visel makes a great (and uncommon) effort to cover interesting books: Nicholson Baker's U and I, Aeschylus' The Oresteia, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Self-Portrait Abroad, Donald Barthelme's Paradise. But it's his immortal review of Nick Smith's (a.k.a. ulillillia's) The Legend of the Ten Elemental Masters that truly cannot be missed:

It doesn’t take much poking around to come to the conclusion that Smith is somewhere on the autism spectrum. To you and me, the idea of jumping 10,000 feet in the air is not very different from the idea of jumping 12,000 feet in the air. Nick Smith sees things differently.

But looking at these PCB's comment counts, I notice that most of their posts meet the same hollow, damning silence mine do. So maybe I enjoy them purely out of brother-in-arms solidarity. Yet must it be this way?

Greenaway: 1, work: 0

Some kind soul recently uploaded, in five parts, a 1991 BBC Omnibus television documentary about Peter Greenaway. Greenaway, you'll know if you've been here a while, never ceases to inspire me in his dedication to push film into new, richly interesting places, to liberate it from its addiction to stale 19th-century psychological narrative and to open it up to accept and incorporate all manner of artistic information it's usually denied. (He's also one on the short list of people I'd commit heinous crimes for the opportunity to interview.)

Cleverly titled Anatomy of a Filmmaker — Greenaway is an enthusiast of the nude human figure, which he sees as the single constant of art — it covers the filmmaker's career from his earliest shorts up through Prospero's Books. There are bits about the time he spent honing his skills cutting together British propaganda, his experience with painting and his longtime collaboration with Sacha Vierny. It also presents subsections on Greenaway's own inspirational creators, including John Cage and the increasingly-intriguing-to-me R.B. Kitaj. Here it is:



The aforelinked account of the user that posted it is an absolute cinematic treasure trove. He's put up The Art of David Lynch, A Portrait of Lars von Trier, Dogville Confessions and specials on Aki Kaurismäki and François Truffaut. If you're unsatisfied losing only part of your day to the Greenaway documentary, consider losing the rest to all of these. Lawds, would I like to send this fellow a fruit basket.