Write what you don't know

The saying, “Write what you know,” has become a maxim of creative writing. It seems to imply that if you want to write and have grown up in a family that runs a dry-cleaning business in a small town in Iowa, you had better write about dry cleaning in the Mid-West, and not even think about anything else. But this cannot be right. One can imagine an editor saying to a writer about a passage that lacks verisimilitude: “Write what you know.” But here—as with the best feedback in teaching or psychotherapy—what is said must be exactly the most helpful thing to say at exactly the right moment. When broadened to a principle, the saying becomes empty. George Eliot wrote, in Middlemarch, about Dr Tertius Lydgate without herself being a doctor, without even being a man. Stephen Crane, in The red badge of courage, wrote an engaging story of a private on the Union side in the American Civil War without having fought in that war and without having been in combat of any kind.

We do need principles. One might be: “Write about what fascinates you.” The fascination needs to be enough to sustain you as you explore your subject. Your writing will be your coming to know it.

The best book I know on principles of writing is R. G. Collingwood’s The principles of art.  I have written about it here before (click here), but the book deserves to be revisited. Collingwood argues that all art derives from an emotion that affects us deeply, that has an urgency about it, and that is not understood. So, says Collingwood, imagine this man:

At first he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel . . . I don’t know how I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It also has something to with consciousness: the emotion expressed is the emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious (pp. 109-110).

A work of art is the expression of such a not-yet-understood emotion in a language. The language might be of the words of a novel, or of the colours and layout of a painting, or of the notes a piece of music.

Collingwood says that we might make something such as a chair and know what to do, as well as what the result will be. Art is different. If we know the result before we start, what we do may be craft but it’s not art.

An exploration in a language of art is apt to take a long time and, for Collingwood, the emotion is both the object of the exploration, and the almost obsessional urge that drives us. I think Collingwood’s principle here needs modification. The urge must be emotional. It’s what keeps an artist going, perhaps for years on a single work, but the subject matter need not be an emotion itself. (A lovely film on this question is Tim’s Vermeer. It’s about the language of visual art. Its subject matter was not an emotion but the question: “How did Vermeer manage to paint such wonderful pictures.” The film is a documentary about Tim Jenison’s exploration of the question. The project took him more than five years, and doing the painting of an actual Vermeer, The music lesson, took him 130 days.)

Artistic writers write what they don’t know. They write what they deeply desire to know, and come to know it better in the exploration that is their writing.

Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Teller (2013). Tim’s Vermeer. Film. USA.

Warm Land Lunch: Sharing Stories for Eating

Domestic Confections, credit (c): Molly Balcom Raleigh

I am lucky enough to study food and food stories for a living—and on top of that, I get to work with a number of artists who play with food for their living (as with Molly Balcom Raleigh’s mouse nest confections project pictured here and to the left). Involving the construction of edible mouse nests representing what a mouse might be able to make from the various detritus of common domestic spaces, this project encouraged participants in the opening festivities to make themselves mouse nest sundaes, and as the artist explained: “Eating the nests at the end of the meal allows us to symbolically re-integrate the self with nature at the sites where it is most relevant to our lives: our homes and our bodies.” 

Despite the thoughtfulness and delight evident in this approach to food, a recent conversation on mindful eating art practice convened by St. Paul Artist in Residence Marcus Young revealed that it turns out that many of us still have trouble eating lunch.

Especially when I am in the midst of researching some particular labor atrocity or unbelievably mundane source of avoidable toxins, it is not surprising that it might be hard to shake off judgmental feelings about potential lunch fixings. So at the end of this extraordinarily long and cold winter, when the idea of a picnic on the warm grass seems like an astonishingly captivating way to reintegrate ourselves with nature, I will briefly share the idea I am thinking of as a "warm land lunch" series, responding to all the subtle but palpable pressures that keep lunch a distinctly third class meal despite its delightful potential as a rejuvenating repast in the center of our days.

Conversation amongst Molly, Marcus, and I along with our colleague Aki Shibata and Clouds in Water leader/teachers Sosan Flynn and Ken Ford made us realize how much we responded to these pressures: lunch seems so hard to prioritize, especially in the midst of busy days. And yet we all agreed on how rewarding it was to step away from the desk, set a space, enjoy the surface, the vessels, the implements, and the food, and to connect with the conviviality and social space of lunch--even, paradoxically, if we were doing so in silence, or only in virtual companionship, knowing, for example, that a companion elsewhere was also stopping to eat lunch.

We may be a world away from more formally convivial lunches, as in Japan, where Aki tells us shared lunch hours are still much more common than most of us have experienced. But the shared space of navigating the meaning and affect of lunch has been a compelling prospect for us, and we are considering what sorts of platforms provide enough scaffolding for a convivial lunch--neither stripping away the actual conviviality (in simulated virtual companionship) nor necessarily burdening the already difficult-to-justify time with additional sociality. While we dream up community picnics on the warm land (once this new layer of snow melts), I am suddenly hearing lunch stories from many colleagues (many unprompted--perhaps lunch romanticism is a feature of this time of stir-crazy fake springtime). Some reminisce about the daily departmental lunches they used to eat together. Others ask why we have stopped walking out (across the icy tundra of sidewalk) for companionable if occasional lunches. On the day after our conversation above, a colleague asked if I had time for lunch with that tone that says "I know you don't," and seemed surprised when I responded that we had to eat, so we might as well make time for it. On the walk to lunch, she told me about quiet eating spaces she had experienced in past jobs, where people brought brown bag lunches to a common room and ate in companionable silence. The promise of the warm land lunch seems just below the surface of this season, and I look forward to sharing how it sprouts.

Bones, Fat, Disgust, Comfort: Props for Navigating Difficulty

On the night before a surgery to repair a torn hip socket last fall, after I had prepared my daybag for the hospital and finished all the paperwork, I drove the half mile to my food co-op, and, on my crutches, collected all of the hip joints I could find in the store. 

“How much soup are you making?” the cashier asked as he piled my many pounds of bones.

“Enough to heal I hip I’m having repaired tomorrow.” I spent the next month healing on bone broth. (The bones here are a part of the pile I boiled down into cylinders of gelatinous fascination.)

I tell this story—and I carried it out—for a few reasons. First, I’m thinking about what kinds of food experiences cause discomfort and disgust, and, in contrast or in compensation, which ones give us comfort beyond sustenance? So many food practices carry meaning far beyond food. And as I was starting off on the unexpectedly novel path to relearn walking, I decided I ought look more closely at other habitual patterns that help provide comfort in the face of challenges—or that reinforce discomfort or make it harder to find havens from it. In the spaces of gratitude, comfort, horror, and disgust, I explored some of the ways that dealing with the stories we tell ourselves—the catastrophizing narratives that exclaim over how gross things are and how we should move along without further engagement—can be richly rewarding, and might help build not only the capacity to face difficulty, but also enjoyment doing so.

Feeling grateful the cows and pigs and for the people who raised and cared for and procured them over many processes so I could benefit—I also realized that the story of this bone soup was important because of the value it showed in premodern practices of using parts of foods. In this case, extracting not only the connective tissues but even the minerals from bones was something I learned from a neighborhood ramen shop near the university, where their opaque and delicious tonkotsu broth takes over a day and half of boiling.

The comfort of such a wonderful milky soup with the added bonus of feeling like somebody really cared to make it seemed like a good layer to add to the appropriate hip components for rebuilding and the generally handy easy-to-eat nutrients for my recuperation, especially given the multiple layers of challenges I faced. I am unfortunately allergic to the shells of lobsters, one of the sources of the commercially available modern supplement marketed for the healing and repair of fibrous tissue, since bottle labeling leaves space for market fluctuations. Further, before even getting to the repair step, it was remarkably difficult to get a diagnosis. Hip injuries are a significantly underdiagnosed injury for women, partly because pain “down there” is apparently as painful as the acknowledgement of pubic hair, and so I felt doubly lucky: I had a source of hip building materials not dependent on the marketing value of the Maine state license plate icon (toward which I held some antagonism, beyond the annoying allergy, since I am relatively certain that it was my account of the need to hold down thie lid while cooking lobsters that reduced my desirability as a travel writer for tourists during my college summers—while perhaps also maintaining me some local friends). In addition, I had medical care ungrossed out by facing imperfections in womens pelvic infrastructure.

I had already started writing about the need for contemporary food movement participants to come to terms with discomfort and disgust enough to talk to each other across some differences of opinion—via the topic of “pink slime.” The odyssey of setting out to repair a hip while also teaching about building comfort with food systems in my university courses made me think about all sorts of ways we produce and reproduce comfort and discomfort. Some things were almost silly—but then they’d get you right where you’re vulnerable—like while eating a really good dry fatty sausage. When I moved to the upper midwest, Italian sausages were something I really missed. People kept directing me to St. Paul, where I found people making familiar sausages and importing to the midwest the same cheese my grandmother used to send my father to the market to buy with a pierced cone scoop. I also found dry Italian sausages that remind me more than dimly how pervasively fears about eating fat are peddled, and how much even I am exposed to them. Eating the raw fat of fermented salamis can be very tasty, as well as carrying the comforts of the familiar and the delicious, but in the presence of the mouthfeel of that much fat, it is suddenly viscerally clear how thoroughly the horror of fat is propagated in our society: although we clearly need and crave fat, a mouthful of animal fat feels like a mistake, something to spit out.

And yet it’s so tasty, and perhaps even more tasty because of the effort required to get over the hump of initial disgust. Likewise, sipping a cup of plain broth on that last night before surgery, looking ahead to many subsequent days of broth sipping, I was struck by how much flavor could be held in that bone soup, how overwhelmingly umami it could taste without any salt, how nineteenth century I felt to be drinking teacups of broth, and settle into the dissonance of something simultaneously so banal and so foul. (I tested the fowlness further over the Christmas holiday, reboiling chicken carcasses until the bones softened and broke down so that their entire composition could be seen—and eaten, again, making something delicious but remarkably difficult.) The emotional terrains landmarked by some of these outstanding examples are filled in by many more mundane potential meaning making moments with food: textures, tastes, smells, past experiences, and the relationships of production and exchange embedded in foods all influence how we encounter them. And settling in to observe how to navigate this terrain made it clear to me how overwhelmingly important the shape of time has become in food.

Hairy Popcorn

For all of the massive effort we put into growing food, and particularly livestock, we are usually too hurried to use it well, and, contributing to our loss, our sense of orderly time and a well-told meal do not usually include the ragged ongoing tasks of breaking down the inedible parts into rich sources of nutrients, skills, and practice dealing with discomfort.

Substance, Interactivity, and Navigability

As a geographer, I have a professional interest in maps -- and one of maps' most important features is how well people can navigate them. I have my introductory students read provocative texts like How to Lie with Maps and I put considerable effort into trying to make the associative chains of the work I do NAVIGABLE. But comprehensibility is a challenging concept. For one thing, as I have explored in past essays, there is the tension between coherence -- an arguably central part of making something comprehensibly navigable -- and correspondence, which could be condiered a crucial measure of the fidelity of a representation. How much fidelity is adequate is a question that nerdy people are probably unlikely to be able answer parsimoniously. And here lies a significant challenge in building successful interaction into the presentation of information.

As the editor least involved in the study of fiction on this site, I often think about the relationship between the various disciplines built into the crafting of fiction and the themes they share -- or do not share -- with non-fiction narrative. As a geographer, for example, I cannot help noting that the vast majority of fiction is far more coherent than most social science writing -- and this is, in many ways, precisely because there are limits to the number of ways one can navigate fiction. Even with all the background experience and interpretation a reader brings to a text, and even with all the "play" inherent in texts, the practice of science requires a radical interactivity to be available in the way a narrative is presented: the reader must be able to recreate the scenario described with adequate fidelity to try for replication of whatever the effects that are being described.

The problem, of course, is that a Science Frame of Mind makes people like me want to give my readers virtual blueprints for replicating the idea that I am following. In a map of a concept, for example, I am likely to include all of the lines of thought: and this is usually too many to make something navigably interactive.  

I am spelling this problem out because the tension between taking advantage of the possibility of laying things all out where someone can see them -- where someone can TRACE the lines of thought that might spark additional insight and add yet more fidelity to some model of what is going on -- and the disciplined practice necessary to make interactive navigation possible is difficult not to underestimate. Most of the "voila" moments I witness (in both myself and others) do not have corresponding "oh, I see!" moments; instead, they usually initiate an endless inching from one side and another, in best case scenarios, toward some meeting between the exciting ideas being laid out and what someone might be willing to explore.

In the case I'm currently inching through, for example, we are ninety-eight corrections into making an exuberant series of connections drawn by hundreds of people between parts of the food system (like this -- click images for the linked versions) 

into steps that allow someone to follow at least some of the trains of thought enough that they might be able to add some of their own thoughts in (maybe like this?).

And that seems like the holy grail of interactive narrativity that so little of the internet yet lives up to. (C'mon, comments, show me good examples that show I'm underestimating this! I want to believe in internet 2.0 in its visualization version...)

Jane Jacobs and the City

On a visit to New York I made a pilgrimage to the house where Jane Jacobs used to live at 555 Hudson Street. The house is still there. At street-level there is clothes boutique called "Mint Julep," and beside the shop is a door to go upstairs to the floors where Jacobs lived with her family from 1947 until 1968, when she moved to a house at 69 Albany Avenue, Toronto, where she lived until her death in 2006. Her Toronto house is just a few blocks from where I live and I felt honoured sometimes to see her shopping in a greengrocer's where I also used to shop. Although I never introduced myself at the greengrocer's, I did meet her when she was signing her 1997 book Ideas that matter. Her inscription reads:  “Best regards to Keith Oatley, Jane Jacobs.”

Jane Jacobs was one of the great public intellectuals of our time. Her 1961 book, The death and life of great American cities, was written at 555 Hudson Street, in the wake of her successful public activism in New York to prevent Washington Park having a multi-lane expressway built through it, and to stop Greenwich Village being turned into an area of faceless high-rise buildings. It was Jacobs who seemed first to have seen clearly the destructive aspects of post-war town planning, with its demolition of communities (see also my post on this topic of 2009, click here). It was she who, in the modern era, was the most engaging proponent of city life, not just in her 1961 book, but in her 1970 book The economy of cities.

In English-speaking countries, the Romantic era came into its own in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. With them and other Romantic authors, Europeans began to value nature, to see countryside, forest, and lake, not so much as frightening wilderness, but as beautiful prospect, offering peaceful contemplation of the infinite, of pantheistic communion with the divine. Even cities could be co-opted to this vision. Take, for instance, Wordsworth’s famous sonnet, “Upon Westminster Bridge,” of 1802. Here are its first two quatrains. The city has become part of nature.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Here, by contrast, is what cities are really about. This passage is from Death and life of great American cities.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city ... The section of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high-school students walk by the centre of the stage ... I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacaccia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair ... (pp. 60-61).

I often find nature quite pleasing. I like estuaries and lakes. I have enjoyed walking along cliffs, and when I was young I used to love walking in England’s Lake District, an area made famous by Wordsworth. But now it’s Jane Jacobs’s vision of the city that thrills and excites me. The idea that people who are unrelated to each other can walk peacefully along a street, can live in their houses and apartments side-by side, can mingle and interact, buy things in shops, go to the cinema, have a cup of coffee, is to me a continuing source of wonder and engagement. It’s not at all fanciful of Jacobs to call this art; it’s art that combines a moving beauty with human benefits that is utterly unpredictable from the natural ways of life of our pre-city ancestors 12,000 years ago.

And the difference between the art of Wordsworth and the art of the city? Whereas Wordsworth is about nature, the art of the city has people in it, people like you and me.

Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities: The failure of town planning. New York: Random House.

Jacobs, J. (1970). The economy of cities. New York: Vintage.

Jacobs, J. (1997). Ideas that matter: The worlds of Jane Jacobs. Owen Sound, Canada: Ginger Press.

Wordsworth, W. (1984). The Oxford authors: William Wordsworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 

Marriage Equality Applesauce and the Smell of Care: Food Politics, and Further Thoughts on the Importance of Setting for Stories

After spending the U.S. election day of connecting voters to their polling places and campaigning for Minnesota marriage equality, I spent the lull before voting returns  at home making applesauce. This moment of comforting domesticity -- especially after intense conversations with so many newly met neighbors! -- make me appreciate not only how many of my gay friends are amazing parents, but also, as I thought about this while making applesauce (which I came to think of and label as Marriage Equality Applesauce), how food politics work in ways that recent complaints about there not being enough POLITICS in food politics may not be appreciating.

There has been considerable recent discussion of the problems with the narration of food politics. The California proposition (37) to label genetically modified food, for example, received a lot of support via the fairly straightforward narrative that people have the right to know what goes into their food. 

The political struggle over this food labeling proposition not only calls into question the authority of the current stories most people use to quell unease about the amount that is unknown about the food they must ingest at regular intervals, whether or not they feel they know enough about it, it also revealed to many people who had not been paying close attention just how much effort is put into controlling the stories used to frame food. 

After late September polls suggested that over 60% of Californians supported the labeling proposition, significant out-of-state funds were assembled to re-message the importance of trusting in the safety of existing food systems.  An election day article reported that:

"In late September, 61 percent of polled Californians supported Prop 37. But just a month later, that opinion flipped upside down, and only 39 percent were in support of the proposition, with 51 percent in opposition of it. ... Prop 37 has received significant national attention and money because of the precedent it could set for the country. Food, biotech and chemical companies have spent over $45 million on the No on 37 campaign, and 93% of that money has come from out of state. Natural food companies and other supporters have spent over $8 million on the Yes on 37 campaign, most of it also coming from out of state."

Spending an hour making applesauce here and there gives one time to think about how much of the story of what it takes to get food is caught up in such struggles over who gets to tell what, and how much of food's story is silenced. As I work in the domain of food, I hear food stories all the time, and I am increasingly struck by the importance of these stories for people, and of the dramatic struggle these stories often embody for people. People feel very strongly about the stories they associate with their food. 

At the same time that I appreciate the value and importance of meaning making around food, however (work like peeling apples leaves a lot of time for talking, and I sometimes wonder what percentage of what I know about my family I learned doing some task like this!), I also sympathize with recent critiques of food politics as being perhaps too much about people exploring food stories to connect more with desirable lifestyle choices than with an alternative set of stories about food that make farm-to-fork or producer-consumer relationships more significantly meaningful -- or actionable. (Looking at the healthy junk food marketed to the wealthy, I can't help thinking that the not-insignificant amount of corporate money that went into supporting the labeling proposition raises additional questions about how much a "market share by labeling vs. control of the market by not labeling" impoverishes our ability to have meaningful discussions of the conditions that make people comfortable or uncomfortable with the risks of food biotechnologies! In encouraging gushing exhibitions of virtuous satisfaction over food efforts or imbibements, this marketing of "good" food with little explanatory depth for its goodness also helps aestheticize the relationship between well-paid people's labor and poorly-paid people's labor embodied in our current food system.)

However again, though, as we start to see the massive resources pouring into the control and silencing of food stories, I think it is worthwhile paying close attention to the work that people's everyday food stories do, especially in contrast to the food stories of corporations struggling to maintain control of our understanding of food -- and, in fact, the meaning of food itself. People use food to open up perspectives on food system connections that may not be easy to apprehend, to make more visible the practical (and political) choices that we could be making, and to remind other people of the possibilities of those choices (and, importantly, support their making those choices), every time they eat.

As people who pay attention to material feminist practices (an author list crossing fiction and social science I would love to start compiling!) have been telling us for a long time, it is in no small part in the way that we experience the everyday practices of care -- the smell of applesauce reminding me how much my mother and father show they love their family in the way they stockpile applesauce for meals, dried apple slices for snacks, apple pies for gatherings, and reminding our whole household that we will be alright across a long Minnesota winter, with hot applesauce for breakfast, even if it's still dark -- that we construct the robust settings of our love stories, stories that are hard to rival in breakfast cereal ads (and I'm sorry, but in any storebought applesauce I've tried), even, I suspect, the ads that cost $45 million.