(1) Please wish me well on my March sabbatical...
Also: (2) Should you read all 896 pages of THE DELUGE? and (3) a quote about emotional intelligence worth mulling over.
1.
I excel at procrastination. In my early 30s, I used obsessive piano practice as a way to avoid a novel I was struggling to write and to distract from the stresses and grief of my inability to get pregnant. I eventually ditched the unfinished manuscript and developed an entire second career as a working jazz pianist, then a singer-songwriter, then a composer-arranger-producer, then a local-music-event impresario type, all while serving as the primary caretaker of the baby boy we adopted in 2003.
Secretly, compulsively, and effortlessly I was still generating viable ideas for novels, screenplays, political/philosophical arguments, and autobiographical essays all the time and jotting them down in a Moleskine notebook or artist’s sketchbook. Sometimes I’d be beset by entire multi-character epic plots alongside synesthetic inklings of a soundtrack for the film version. One problem with the ADHD-style brain—I’ve only recently learned—is that the capacity to envision an entire complicated story or multipoint polemic in one go is perfectly mismatched with the incapacity to sit your ass in the seat and crank that stuff out, one arduous page at a time. Your mind races and you struggle to find the deep patience required to slow things down to a sentence-by-sentence process.
That said, just as any dedicated athlete knows, it is always possible to improve on your weaknesses. A few years ago, with the occasional help of various friendly readers and paid developmental editors along the way, I did finish my first book-length work, a memoir called…well…PLAY IT BY EAR. It had taken me the better part of a decade. I briefly hunted for an agent but soon understood the manuscript would require yet another round of deep cuts before it was close to marketable. So I procrastinated again by making a studio album of original jazz-influenced art-rock songs called INNOCENT MONSTER.
I’m mostly joking about that last bit. The truth is that I had an opportunity to work with a fantastic vocal coach who offered to help me produce my best-unrecorded material to date, so for three years I redirected my energies accordingly. Having a plan is nice, but so are serendipity and timing.
PLAY IT BY EAR, the manuscript, has been mostly cannibalized for PLAY IT BY EAR, the Substack publication, although the fantastic response I’ve received here from old and new readers has encouraged me to branch out and tackle subjects well beyond the purview of that original memoir.
Meanwhile, a different book idea is pleasantly plaguing me now. Some of my recent blog posts have served as preparatory work or sketches, including the three-part video narrative I entitled “An atheist gins up some Grace,” the research into emotional neuroscience and trauma I’ve examined so far under the banner “The Body Is The Soul,” and the various remembrances of my parents.
I’ve created a detailed outline in Scrivener, have written several chapters, and am feeling an urgency to move forward with focus. I’ll be breaking from my self-imposed twice-weekly posting schedule here and working only on this new project for the entire month of March. You may hear from me on occasion, but I’m giving myself permission to be more casual about dropping in from time to time with brief updates or observations. Maybe a song video or two, if the spirit moves me. In April, if all goes as planned, I’ll be back here with new essays on Tuesdays and Fridays at 8:05 Eastern as usual.
Subscribers old and new, thank you for your interest, and if you miss me, feel free to look around for something in my archive. There are plenty of commentaries and stories to be found. Paying supporters: I hope you know how much I appreciate your encouragement and faith in me, and I’ll be back with regular new posts before you know it.
2.
Update since last Tuesday’s post “Exist locally, despair globally”: I have now listened to all 40+ hours of Stephen Markley’s climate change novel THE DELUGE, the last 4 hours at 1.5x reading speed. I recommend the book highly, although I would not necessarily stan the audio version; the quality of the narration is somewhat uneven among the more than half-dozen voice actors involved, and there are a few too many mispronounced words and amateurish, off-base line readings for my persnickety taste. (Sorry to sound like the wannabe film director I once was, but….)
Despite these imperfections, I found the story very compelling from one scene to the next. Truth be told, I have yet to read some of the more detailed nonfiction books presaging our universal existential threat, such as David Wallace-Wells’ THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH, but it feels as if Markley’s goal was quite specifically to take exactly those sorts of detailed, step-by-step, worst-case-scenarios and dramatize them. If you are highly well-read in the intersection of ecological science, environmental policy, and current US partisan politics, or if you happen to work somewhere in these complex and contested arenas, his hyperrealistic fictionalizing might feel too close for comfort.
Here’s a plot summary from a reviewer at the Los Angeles Times who admired but didn’t love the book.
The plot involves — are you ready? — a scientist named Tony Pietrus whose book on undersea methane functions as the novel’s core text; an activist named Kate Morris who makes headway toward combating ecological disaster by dint of undeniable magnetism and political savvy; Ashir al-Hasan, a genius in predictive analytics who turns his intellect from sports betting toward the future of Earth’s habitability; a once-famous actor who transitions into an ultra-right wing zealot under the moniker The Pastor; an advertising executive who helps orchestrate the oil industry’s response to fossil-fuel opposition; a recovering drug addict in rural Ohio who ends up an unwitting pawn in the climate war; and the enigmatic leader of a hardcore eco-terror outfit called 6Degrees. Orbiting these characters is an enormous supporting cast of allies, enemies and sycophants, including numerous real-life figures ranging from Barack Obama to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer.1
The LA Times reviewer, literary critic Jonathan Russell Clark, apparently admires more than enjoys story’s worst-case-scenario plotting, noting,
Climate fiction tends to take place either in an already-decimated future — dystopias like Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” or Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” — or in the prickly present, the dire era of inaction featured in Richard Powers’ “The Overstory” or Ian McEwan’s “Solar.” “The Deluge” dares to imagine, painstakingly, how we might get from here to there, filling a giant canvas with Brueghelian detail that, while making the story compelling, also flattens some of the emotional impact.
Well, that’s one view, a legitimate one, but in contrast, I was hooked on all the character’s storylines from start to finish and genuinely moved by their fates. Markley is obviously a progressive but demonstrates real empathy for those with different and even extreme views on either side of the sociopolitical spectrum. The best writers of books like this avoid making any one character serve as a mouthpiece and are willing to entertain the thoughts and choices of even the most morally inept or downright hateful characters. Every member of this multitudinous and diverse cast of characters is a believable human, and their actions lead to exactly the kind of intended and unintended consequences—some truly terrible, a few hopeful, most a mixed bag—that occur in real life every single day.
Reviewer Clark’s take on all this:
When climate change is the subject of fiction, it becomes easy to interpret as advocacy, as a political novel of ideas rather than a tale driven by characters. Markley does little to dispel this impression. When there is yet another extreme weather event in “The Deluge” and many people lose their homes, communities and lives, it’s hard not to feel a bit bludgeoned by it all.… Each storm, each wildfire, each avoidable death becomes a rehash of the same warning: This is what will happen if we don’t act now. Repeated finger-wagging, even the most deftly and eloquently crafted, grates after almost 900 pages.
I think this is a bit unfair, although not entirely unearned. I for one did not feel irritated by the reinforced dire warnings—just suitably reminded of what kinds of experiences we may all have to face in the coming decades. After finishing the book, I did walk around for the next 24 hours in a bit of a melancholy daze. I went to visit my son, now attending college in Philadelphia, and as we ambled together through the collections in the gorgeously rehabbed Philadelphia Museum of Art, I couldn’t help but wonder whether all this abundant, intentional beauty, these deep creative achievements of ingenuity and restlessness and passion, would still have any human witnesses a hundred years from now. After listening to Markley’s novel, I’m not any more certain about what I as an individual citizen should be doing to keep humans from burning up the planet in the next three generations. Maybe there’s a kernel of something important in the humility and watchfulness I’m feeling, though. We’ll see.
3.
When it comes to something we do have some control over—our attitude toward life’s small, individual calamities—I leave you with this useful quote from Alain de Botton, a writer I used to drag a bit in my 20s because, frankly, I was jealous of his career. I was jealous not only of the facility and originality of his books, such as HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE (1997), but also of the fact that he comes from significant wealth and probably never had to worry about holding down a day gig while developing his ideas. As a mature adult I can now give him all the credit his work ethic and evident wisdom deserve (even if I still want to grumble when he’s being annoyingly excellent).
In one paragraph he encapsulates so much of what I believe and have struggled to articulate or dramatize in story after story, essay after essay….therapy session after therapy session…and within relationships of all kinds…for a very long time.
See if it resonates for you.
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm… There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance. ~Alain de Botton in THE SCHOOL OF LIFE
Here’s to the encroaching of spring and the possibility that we might grow—individually and collectively—a little bit smarter with each passing season.
See you all soon.
♥️
S.
All best wishes, Dear Sandhya.