By 1992, as I approached my 20th year of university teaching, I’d evolved the philosophy that we who taught about religion had two tasks to perform with our students.  One was to shake them up.  The other was to build them up.

David Halperin tells the wonderful story of a Jewish professor teaching a New Testament class in the South to what could be described as a tough crowd.

So many lessons here on the value of shaking things up, yes, and also the responsibility to build something in its place, and the wonderful surprises that can occur when you take a calculated risk. Something alchemical happened between professor, students, subject matter, and dialogue that produced something unique and unattainable elsewhere. 

I had lunch with David recently; he said he had discovered over the years that fundamentalist students were happy to challenge when they were in the opposition, but they shut up when handed the mic. This “interactive method” for teaching a large class neutralized that stance; it also, from his description, called forth from the students resources they did not know they possessed. What they learned they had earned.

He never taught the class again nor deployed that method again. A golden memory, to be sure. 

I have noticed an interesting change in my attitude about Inbox Zero — basically, I’ve stopped trying to maintain it.

When I get home, my priorities are a workout, supper with Liz, we maybe watch some TV (only until 8pm on school nights), I wash the dishes, and I make our tea. A perfectly pleasant and comforting evening routine.

Then, I go up to my office and the first thing I do is write my blog post for the day or — if I’m really productive — for the next day. Some evenings I cycle through several ongoing drafts of posts in Evernote, adding or editing text (Mark Forster’s continuous revision process), before settling on something I like well enough to finish.

By the time I’ve published the post, it’s 10 or 10:30 p.m. and I need to get ready for bed. 

I will scan the inbox for anything time-sensitive. But by and large, I let most emails wait till I schedule time to deal with them, which may be later in the week or the weekend.

For now I’m content to let my bigger desire (writing and posting daily) overshadow the smaller duty (empty inbox). We’ll see how it goes.

For further reading

• Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk that started the Inbox Zero wave. Merlin has since renounced much of his gung-ho productivity pr0n writing and thinking. 
• Zero Dark Inbox | The New Yorker
• Why ‘Inbox Zero’ Is a Stupid Time Management Approach | Inc.com — why the pugnacious tone? Who are you getting mad at?
• To Inbox Zero or Not to Inbox Zero? surveys people who do the method a little, a lot, and not at all.

These panels are talking to me about politics, the workplace, life, lots of things. Laugh or get out of the water?

Source: Ruben Bollings’ Super-Fun-Pak Comix for March 14, 2018, via Go Comics. 

Stuff I wanted to read but didn’t get to. Maybe this weekend…? 

• Maeve Brennan: On the Life of a Great Irish Writer, and Its Sad End | Literary Hub
• All Men, All the Time: A Former Literary Editor Remembers the World Before #MeToo
• Michael Leddy links to two Youtube recordings of the singer Sylvia Syms.
• Jane Brody’s Personal Secrets to Lasting Weight Loss – The New York Times. Basically, find something that makes sense and works for you, and stick to it.
• Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity | The New Yorker. I’ve enjoyed his lectures on the psychology of the Old Testament; he reminds me a bit of an O.T. prophet. My man Oliver Burkeman suggests evaluating Peterson’s book separate from his personality. 
• Frivolous, Empty, and Perfectly Delightful. A Joseph Epstein essay on Wodehouse; will read to see if the Internet needed another potted history of Wodehouse.
• AMERICAN THEATRE | The Many Lives of Jen Silverman. We saw a performance of her play The Moors last week so I want to read more about her.
• Fine Specimens | by David S. Reynolds | The New York Review of Books. Walt Whitman and the Civil War.

 

In writing yesterday’s post, I did one of my cheeky searches in the Audible catalog for “The Untold Story of” and discovered 243 untold stories that, saints be praised, were now told.

A search of Amazon’s Books area yielded 5,000+ untold stories.

And a Google search for “the untold story of *” returned over 32 million hits for untold stories.

It seems we love stories. Especially untold ones.

 

James Tate Hill’s essay is a fascinating memoir of how he went from sighted, sporadic reader to visually impaired omnivorous reader of audiobooks. 

He also examines various facets of the essay’s title: do audio books count as reading? Are they instead a performance? Is the physical smell, heft, and tangibility of a book — beloved by so many sighted writers — the essential part of the reading experience? We have the same debates about ebooks, he notes.

When I was recovering from a detached retina in the fall and winter of 2003, I was for a couple of weeks unable to watch TV or look at a computer screen comfortably. Reading was out of the question; the page swam in front of me and I experienced vertigo. Audiobooks became my lifeline. I “read” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  and Stephen King’s On Writing. Many hours of recuperating and resting went by more pleasantly having a good long narrative in my ear, taking my mind away from my troubles. When the reader and the material align, the trance I go into with an audiobook is the same as when I read a physical book. 

For myself, I find that non-fiction audio books go down easier than fiction, and I prefer books read by the author, if possible. They know how they want the story to sound. Alan Bennett’s diaries simply have to be read by Alan Bennett to be truly savored.

A satisfying audiobook is made or broken by the reader. I tried recently to listen to The Picture of Dorian Gray and simply had to stop after Chapter 4. Part of it was that this philosophical, talky novel became a closed, airless world I simply did not want to live in anymore. Another was that the reader would read something like, ” ‘Stop,’ he cried,” so languidly that I got irritated. The text is telling you how to read it, man! Put some life into it!

I’m trying another novel now: Edward Herrmann reading John Updike’s Villages. Herrmann does an excellent job as the omniscient narrator or in close-third person, and manages Updike’s stylistic flourishes beautifully. But I have trouble discerning vocal differences between his characters when in conversation. Odd, given Herrmann’s skill as an actor.

Despite my occasional ups and downs with audiobooks (and with “real” books; not every papery book is a masterpiece for the ages), I will not give them up. I think we live in a wonderful time when there are so many options for people to take in the stories they need.

For further reading: Hill mentions a book that smells a bit like a Ph.D. dissertation dressed up for the mainstream: The Untold Story of the Talking Book by Matthew Rubery tells the story of audio-recorded literature, including its social impacts and controversies. Available from Amazon and, as one would hope, Audible.

 

 

 

Another wonderful discovery from the Public Domain Review: an eye test chart from a 1907 San Francisco optometrist George Mayerle. It not only featured international text and symbols, it had a positive and negative side.

This is a useful tip I’ve handed out since it was given to me years ago.

At the time, in my 20s, I was excitable, jabbered on and on when talking to people, and was concerned — given my job at the time — about the impression I made on people. 

A mentor advised me to lower my voice when I talked. When we’re nervous, our heart rate goes up, we breathe faster and more shallowly, we talk faster, and as we talk faster, our voices rise in pitch.

So when I caught myself talking fast or feeling nervous as I talked, I reminded myself to lower my voice. The change in attitude was almost instant. 

As my pitch fell, I could feel my voice’s center move from my head down to my chest. Lowering my voice slowed my speech, which slowed my  breathing. I could feel my shoulders relax (I hold a lot of tension in my shoulders).

And I could feel my mind slow down too. My thinking evened out, I took my time, and I usually felt like I was now consciously participating in the conversation, not flailing like a fire hose.

I stand 6’3″ (1.91 meters) and wear size 15 shoes.

At the movies today, as I stood to move into the aisle and down the stairs, it hit me again that the world does not quite fit me, or maybe I don’t fit into it. 

I unfolded myself, stepped carefully around the seats and railing, arranged my feet on the stair, and then deliberately started down. The little people all around me had no trouble navigating the cramped space.

Left to myself, I stay up late and get up late. But I live in a world where I must go to bed by a specific time so I can get up to go to work by a specific time, leave by a specific time, or otherwise adapt myself to other people’s or group’s schedules.

What would my own personal world look like, if I were the Dungeon Master?

There would be room. I could move freely without bumping into things. There would be space in my calendar to move freely without crashing into someone else’s constraints.

Note: I am aware, of course, that physical reality demands honoring appointments and deadlines, paying our taxes by April 15, etc. I accept that. I just didn’t feel like accepting it today.