Susan Wise Bauer's Blog, page 15

Writing and cooking

The new season of Gordon-Ramsay-themed cooking shows has begun. Yes, OK, I'm addicted. Thank goodness I don't KNOW him, or work for him, or in any way have to interact with him on a professional or personal basis. But as a craftsperson myself, I admire dedication to craft.

I'm with Michael Ruhlman on this one, by the way, when he talks about the CMC test for chefs:

Cooking is a craft. Oh, I know how the foodie blowhards–and even a lot of chefs–love to talk about food as art! (But….don't talk to me about food as art or chefs as artistes.) As with any craft, there were artful levels and shared standards of excellence. The test's very existence implied that great cooking….was not art, was only craft, the result of physical skills that were consistenlty measurable and comparable from one chef to the next.

The only thing I'd quarrel with there is his use of the phrase "only craft." Craft is stinking hard. What I do is also craft. (More on this when I come back to my reflections on The Courage to Write.)

My oldest son got hooked on Master Chef in Australia and told me I HAD to watch it. Now I'm hooked on the American version. Like all those ambitious home cooks, I love to cook. In fact, when I heard about the casting call for the first American season, I said to my husband, "Hey, wouldn't that be fun? What if I just went down and tried out? For fun?"

(My husband said, "Are you nuts?")

Watching the current season, I've become clear about something. I will never really master the craft of cooking, because I don't care enough about the tiny details. My meat has more sear on one side than the other? Whatever. My ravioli are irregular? I couldn't worry less. My exact flavor combination isn't quite right? Well, it still tastes good, doesn't it?

Part of this, I'm sure, is the by-product of years cooking for teenage boys. Not much point in laboring over the exquisite details of something that's going to get snarfed down in thirty seconds with a chaser of Doritos. But the larger issue is that I'm not essentially absorbed by the craft.

I compare this with what I do when I write.

I revise and revise and revise.

I change single words and then change them back and then change them back again and read sentences out loud over and over to see what version is better.

I spend hours and sometimes days locating an authoritative source that confirms some tiny detail that might or might not even make it into a final draft.

In other words, I take infinite pains. It's a compulsion.

I think there are a lot of people who want to write, or talk about writing, or even publish, who write the way I cook. Pretty competently, that is. In a way that gives others pleasure, which is no small thing. But they don't feel the (painful and obsessive) compulsion to polish the corners and crevices, to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, to aim for perfect clarity: the prose version of taking the time to melt your onions for an hour over low heat with a freshly made herb sachet instead of doing a quick olive oil saute, because the tiny change in flavor will make the final dish sing just a little more clearly.

If I cook something and it's good, but not perfect, I don't have the slightest hesitation in plopping it on the table. (Even for company.) But it takes me a long time to get a book out the door, because so many little flaws that need mending pop up every time I reread.

So, back to work. Need to find the perfect word to describe a king who blinds his five-year-old nephew in order to assure his own son's ascent to the throne.

Sometimes cooking is more fun.

This here is not a good sign

I just came across this grammar review site. It was put together (according to the site itself) "by teaching professionals to help students and teachers gain more information and preparation" for the New York State English Language Arts test, given to fourth grades as part of New York's standards testing.

Hmm.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-06-26

Just got smeared at Settlers of Catan. Again. #
New grammar resources (exciting for those of us who are grammar geeks): http://t.co/hKjh4Sb #
Finishing school w/kids this morning, then packing for Philly conference; 2 days talking about how to teach clear writing & good history. #
Waiting at Richmond station for train to PA. Freight train just went thru with string of cars marked MOLTEN SULFUR: DO NOT TAP. No worries. #
Wires are down between Philly and NY, so train is temporarily halted in DC. Hey, I have a row to myself, power, laptop, and food. All good. #
And we're on the road (track) again. #
Heading back through Valley Forge for the second day of conferencing/lecturing/signing/talking/collapsing. #

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Obfuscation and turgidity, Part I: No one wants to feel like an idiot

I'm halfway through reading The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, by Ralph Keyes.

For me, reading "how to write" books is more of a stalling technique than anything else. Generally speaking, I know perfectly well what I'm supposed to be doing with the current manuscript, I just don't want to do it. Reading about writing is a relatively guilt-free way of putting off writing.

Usually, I get out of these books exactly what I deserve, which is nothing at all. But there have been a few exceptions (Thomas McCormack's The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist stands out).

The Courage to Write is shaping up to be another exception. The first half of the book has forced me rethink my approach to writing, in a way I'll tackle in a future blog post (sooner rather than later, I hope). But let me start with an excerpt from a later chapter–one about bad writing.

When the English writer Douglas Jerrold was sent an advance copy of Robert Browning's poem Sordello, he read the poem eagerly, only to realize that it made no sense to him. "Oh, God, I am an idiot," Jerrold told himself.

But the problem, Keyes points out, wasn't actually Jerrold's brain.

When members of the London Poetry Society asked Brwoning to interpret a particularly difficult passage of Sordello, he read it twice, frowned, then admitted, "When I wrote that, God and I knew what I meant, but now God alone knows."

Douglas Jerrold's reaction rang a highly personal bell. A month or so ago, I acted as outside reader for an article in a scholarly journal. If you're not part of the academic community (not that there's anything wrong with that, believe me), a scholarly journal is one in which the articles are "peer reviewed," read by other academics to determine whether or not they fall within the broad boundaries of "not insane" as understood by other academics. It's not a perfect system, but any peer-reviewed article has been read by at least three other scholars–probably from different disciplines–and has been passed as meeting the very basic requirements of scholarly discourse.

Which is to say, the article doesn't scoff at anyone who disagrees with its theories as "personally involved" or "emotionally committed" to another interpretation. Or blame opposing theories on stupidity, malevolence, or sin. Or propose an interpretation that no one else under the sun has ever suggested before. (This is a bit of a tricky criteria, but generally, if an author proposes a theory that NO OTHER THINKER has ever come up with, and that EVERY OTHER AUTHORITY is in disagreement with…you should be cautious.)

More on those criteria later. The point here is that the scholarly article I reviewed did not violate any of these criteria. But I couldn't READ the thing. It was so filled with jargon and five-syllable words that I couldn't quite figure out what the author was getting at.

Finally, I wrote a report on the article that said, essentially, "I think the writer has some good ideas, worth developing. But I recommend against publishing it unless she can write it in English."

This took more courage than I expected.

Now, I'm a fairly well-read person. I did, after all, manage to earn a Ph.D., which involved not just reading but also understanding–and being able to talk about–an extensive and fairly technical list of books.

But I had a hard time convincing myself that the problem with the article was with the prose, rather than with my brain.

So what does Ralph Keyes say about this?

Rather than risk sounding dense, readers, colleagues, and critics who can't figure out what a writer is trying to say but think it sounds intelligent will typically resort to calling such work "daring," "provocative," or "complex." An unholy alliance of writers and readers is at work here. Should anyone dare to raise questions about her hard-to-grasp writing, the author can brush these responses aside by saying that the person "missed the point"….This shifts the focus from the author's writing to the reader's intellect…

Bad writers can usually do better; they simply prefer not to. Most function in settings where plain talk not only isn't encouraged, but is actively discouraged. Far from fostering clarity, the average bureaucracy, corporation, or educational institution rewards obscurity. It does this in ways that make sense only to members of that organization.

Keyes calls "hard-to-grasp writing"–filled with obfuscation and turgidity–neotribal prose, "filled with words and phrases that are comprehensible only to insiders."

Outsiders don't get it. That's the whole idea. Regular use of insider words confirms and reconfirms that one belongs to a group whose members do get it.

When you blow the whistle on bad writing, you not only risk sounding stupid (as Douglas Jerrold admitted), you also admit that you're not part of the tribe.

Keyes ends his discussion of turgid writing with this anecdote:

According to Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania, among academics, "obtuse writing…seems to yield higher prestige for the author." Armstrong has conducted a number of studies to test this hypothesis. In one, he asked twenty management professors to identify the more prestigious of two unidentified journals presented to them. The more readable journal…was judged the least prestigious. In another experiment, Armstrong rewrote the same journal article in two different forms. One he rated confusing and convoluted, the other concise and clear. A panel of thirty-two professors agreed that the confusing version reported a higher level of research.

More from Keyes in my next two posts…

Part III: Just fear

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-06-19

And my croquet losing streak continues. On the other hand, getting stung first means I get to go sit in the garden with my laptop. #
This history of Spain says that Charles I died of "fatal malaria." Well, yes, if he died from it, I guess it was. #
Same chicken has been exulting over new-laid egg for, oh, half an hour. I should go out to the chicken house and see this wonder for myself. #
Last night I had a long and incredibly complex dream about dried fruit. #
Imagine my shock: http://t.co/Pp7A95C. #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-06-12

Must…tweet…faster… #
This morning: working on maps for the next installation of the History of the (Entire) World. That means I get to play with colored pencils. #
Writing day: Looking forward to a fun morning in Leon-Castile. #
Check out today's Google logo–and don't forget to hit the "record" button. #
I have 1492 followers! (OK, that's a bit of history-geek fun.) #
Back finally from our library "morning." Can't seem to get three kids and four bags in and out of the library in less than an entire DAY. #
Sitting thru interminable dance school recital that has so far included TWO, count 'em, performances set to "Butterfly Kisses." #

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Want to hear more confessions?

In case your appetite for scandal is still unsatisfied, let me suggest the following:

Grovelling in Print: The Five Most Interesting Confessional Memoirs

The Confessions, by Augustine (398)

Augustine of Hippo writes the first real autobiography because he is the first to turn a series of life invents into a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. As he does so, Augustine becomes the model for all who follow him: he confesses those sins which fit into the schema he has laid out for his life (an adolescent theft of pears, which stands as a perfect example of how the sin of Adam is operating in his own soul) and ignores sins which don't fit at all. (What did happen to his common-law wife and her son?) Augustine's confessions are a fascinating combination of self-examination and self-deception–a mix that characterizes confessional memoirs for the next two thousand years.

Born Again, Charles W. Colson (1976)

Come on, Chuck. We really want to know what happened at the Watergate. But Watergate occurs in an offhand half-sentence: Colson heard about it on the radio. If you want to know what Colson is confessing to, then, the answer is simple. Pride. Pride drove Colson to serve Nixon with a religious fervour; he describes the Nixon presidency as an extended "Holy War against the enemy–those who opposed the noble goals we sought of peace and stability in the world. They who differed with us, whatever their motives, must be vanquished." Colson, after his conversion, is still pursuing the same goals; he is still fighting a cultural war, this time against the enemy of secular humanism. But he never admits the likeness–even though his memoir makes very clear just how interrelated the strategies of political and evangelical leaders have become.

I Was Wrong, Jim Bakker (1996)

Remember Jim Bakker, and his promises that God wanted his children to be rich? The heyday of the health-and-wealth preachers is gone (it was an easier message to get across in the 1980s), but Bakker remains memorable for the sheer magnitude of his self-delusion. Two scandals still mark Bakker's name–financial defrauding of PTL partners and sexual shenanigans with Jessica Hahn in that Florida hotel room–but Bakker insists that he was wrong only in trusting others too implicitly, loving his wife too deeply, depending on his friends too much, and working too hard for the kingdom of God. This autobiography, written after he served his prison term for fraud, is worth reading simply because it stands as the most blatant and clear-cut example of how to apologise endlessly without ever taking responsibility for a single evil deed.

My Life, by Bill Clinton (2004)

How many readers of Clinton's autobiography went straight to the index to find Lewinsky, Monica? Reading Clinton's account is like sitting through a master class in rhetoric. He is able to give a convincing impression of honesty while throwing an invisibility cloak over the whole perjury problem. He admits to stupidity (hardly an impeachable offense) while dramatically pointing a finger at the opposition: "As a husband, I had done something wrong," he writes. "As President, I was in a legal and political struggle with forces who…severely damanged innocent people in their attempt to destroy my presidency and cripple my ability to serve." Nothing succeeds in confession like casting yourself as a holy warrior, striving on the side of good against evil; in comparison with the vast right-wing conspiracy, an "improper encounter" or two appears almost inconsequential. Almost.

The Confession, by James McGreevey (2006)

At the press conference held when he resigned, the former governor of New Jersey struck a single confessional note: "I engaged in an adult consensual affair with another man, which violates my bonds of matrimony," he announced. "It was wrong." The Confession is more complex; McGreevey sees his closeted sexuality as merely one facet of a life which was hopelessly distorted by his time in elected office. He blames the distortion, in large part, on the mess of American politics, which he sees as a game of smear campaigns, baseless allegations, and character assassinations: "I doubt that it's possible to live as a totally integrated person and succeed in the backrooms of America's political system," he concludes. Despite some careful self-justification over McGreevey's shady political dealings ("For all but the wealthy," he writes, "ethical compromises…are all but compulsory"), The Confession is surprisingly frank about McGreevey's own failings. Chalk the honesty up to McGreevey's decision to leave politics and train for ordination in the Episcopal church, where being a repentant sinner is a positive advantage.

My commentary this morning for CNN

Some of my readers may remember that, as well as writing the history of the entire world, I wrote an academic study of public confession. The slightly unexpected result: every time a politician or preacher runs off the rails, I have to drop everything and comment.

Which happens a lot.

A LOT.

Anyway, CNN asked me to comment on Anthony Weiner's troubles this morning…the jokes tend to write themselves, but here's a more serious take (I'm only allowed to reproduce the first 150 words, so you'll have to go to CNN for the rest.)

It's a familiar scene by now: The politician is caught with his pants down, even if his boxers are still up. He feints, spins, lies and ducks. And then, finally, he breaks down in tears, apologizing to us, to his wife, to his constituency and, occasionally, to his God.

The sequence is monotonously predictable, but we're still riveted.

And with good reason. A politician's confession uncovers a vital truth about his relationship with us, the voters who put him into office.

On a scale of one to ten, Rep. Anthony Weiner's sexting doesn't exactly top out on the sexual depravity meter. But it still reveals a willingness to use his power — the power that the voters handed over to him, to use for the public good — for his own selfish ends…

Click anywhere to read the rest at CNN.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-06-05

Buttermilk biscuits and coffee in the garden. There's a breeze, and shade, and flowers, and a background chorus of REALLY LOUD cicadas. #
Daughter (10)+ seven-year-old neighbor + sleepover = 24 solid hours of giggling. #
85 degrees at 7:30 AM in Houston… #

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