Category Archives: Reading

Finish Your Dissertation Once and for All!

Finish Your Dissertation Once and for All!: How to Overcome Psychological Barriers, Get Results, and Move on with Your Life by Alison B. Miller

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One-sentence synopsis: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, I’m going to finish this dissertation!” Yes, all I kept thinking about whilst skimming this were Stuart Smalley‘s daily affirmations. From the title I was hoping for something directed at people who are already in the midst of working on their dissertations—more concrete ideas about speeding up the process. Essentially I’m already doing everything suggested in this book. So while it was an affirmation (ha) that I’m on the right track, sadly it offered no magic bullets. Will continue to plod. (Have started to think Evelyn Hunt Ogden‘s suggestion to hire someone to help with monotonous tasks wasn’t such a crazy idea after all.) Recommended for anyone floundering at the “I don’t know where to start” stage.

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5: Refuse to Choose

Refuse to Choose! : A Revolutionary Program for Doing All That You Love by Barbara Sher

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Borrowed from the VPL.

Read in January 2013.

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I saw this mentioned The Clutter Museum:

One of my favorite career-finding books, and one I recommend regularly to my students, is Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose. In it, she describes ‘scanners,’ bright people who are simultaneously and/or serially interested in diverse and sometimes divergent subjects and careers.

and for obvious reasons was intrigued.

Sher’s opening anecdote is about reading university course descriptions, wanting to take everything—and her sadness on realizing she couldn’t:

The conventional wisdom was overwhelming and seemed indisputable: If you’re a jack-of-all-trades, you’ll always be a master of none. You’ll become a dilettante, a dabbler, a superficial person—and you’ll never have a decent career. Suddenly, a scanner who all through school might have been seen as an enthusiastic learner had now become a failure. (6)

She describes different types of scanners. I was skimming along, identifying with a characteristic here and there, when I reached the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ type, which is so me, it’s ridiculous (right down to the detail that jacks don’t have the clutter problem that other scanners do). Some highlights:

do you have more certificates and degrees that most people—all in different disciplines? *cough*
are you good at just about everything you try? / have you ever thought your problem would be solved if you were good at only one thing?
many things come easily to you so you sometimes underestimate their value
you “have often complained that being good at almost everything isn’t the same as being great at one thing.” (202) !! I say this all the time.

Jacks have so much talent, but that’s not all they have—they are the ones who show up and deliver. They do the job. With all these qualities, they should be hugely successful in business or the arts or some profession. But they rarely are. (203)

Truth.

Almost without exception, this type of scanner is gifted at something you don’t find on career lists: Catching the ball in a team situation. Bailing out the other players. Saving the day. (205)

She describes jacks as ‘rescuers.’

If you don’t have the needed skills, you’ll learn them fast, because you know how to learn. (206)

Yep. It’s always driven me nuts how job descriptions say stuff like ‘must be familiar with X’ or ‘must know how to use Y program’ b/c even if I’ve never done X or used Y, I can figure it out in like, a day. So no big deal.

She suggests scanners are best suited for an ‘umbrella career,’ i.e. one that allows you to do many of the things you enjoy—like freelance writer or researcher. heh 🙂 Indeed.

Throughout the book there are strategies for dealing with being a scanner. A lot of these are things I already do in my own way. The central one is keeping a ‘scanner daybook’—essentially a writer’s notebook—where you write all your random brilliant ideas 😉 down so you’re not overwhelmed/distracted by them.

While much of the book was a confirmation of stuff I already know, it’s always nice to get validation that you are not the only one, that you are a recognized type! Being a unique snowflake is overrated. Plus, now I have this post I can refer people to when they want to know what’s up with all those degrees. I can’t help it! I’m a jack-of-all-trades!

Immediately after finishing Refuse to Choose, I read this essay by Michael Dirda. Scanner alert!

When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I’m tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else’s life offends my vanity. I don’t want to submerge myself in another man or woman’s existence, I want to write about me, about the books and writers that I like. And I want to be able to finish any commitment within a year at best, so that I can get on to something else. I have, it would seem, the temperament of a reporter—always intensely interested in a subject for a short while, but soon ready to move on to the next assignment.

4: Mourning Diary

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Consists of the notes Roland Barthes took after the death of his mother, Henriette. She was widowed (via WWI, that recurring theme) when he was a baby and they lived together most of his life. The notes are transcribed as they were written, one note to a page. There’s a center insert with family photographs and scans of a few of the diary notecards.

(Sidenote: I didn’t realize Barthes had a brother. Specifically, a younger half-brother (Michel) born out-of-wedlock to his mother when Barthes was 12ish. This info seems to be elided from his standard bio; it isn’t on his Wikipedia page. Kinda weird, because reading MD, it seems like they were pretty close. Makes Mme. Barthes seem more human, less martyr, too!)

It’s likely the notes would have become the basis for a book but Barthes died (he was hit by a truck and succumbed to his injuries) only months after the diary stops. So what’s here are basically personal/private notes not written for a public audience. Except it’s Barthes, so…

At the same time, I think calling the diary whiny/self-indulgent (as I saw in some reader reviews) is silly because it’s a diary. If you can’t whine in your diary, please. 🙄

Some quotes:

In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me. (17)

Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà, I’m home now. (44)

Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing. (62)

I have not a desire but a need for solitude. (91)

if these ‘changes’ … make for silence, inwardness, the wound of mourning shifts toward a higher realm of thought. Triviality (of hysteria) ≠ Nobility (of Solitude). (95)

M. and I feel that paradoxically (since people usually say: work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude make us less miserable. (100)

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book — Stubbornness, secrecy. (231)

Reading this got me thinking again about the difference between loss by death vs. loss by leaving again. When someone dies, those left behind still have their (good) memories. This, I think, makes it hard(er) to move on, because it’s possible to dwell in the past, in happy memories of the person who is gone. Whereas, when someone leaves, those left behind can’t dwell in the past—at least how they’d always remembered it—that’s gone. If it’s to be remembered, it needs to be reconstituted/reconstructed in a completely different way. So while death-loss drags you backward, leaving-loss pushes you forward. It almost forces you to move on, because there are no happy memories to return to.

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2: The Rules of Gentility & 3: Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion

Janet Mullany was one of our original forum hosts at Toasted Cheese.

Janet’s writing at TC:

“A Perfect Evening” (fiction in the September 2001 issue of TC)
“The Companions are Chosen” (Best of the Boards in the December 2001 issue of TC)
“Snow, the Seven, and the Moon” (Winner of the first annual Dead of Winter writing contest)
“Enter At Your Own Risk: The Strange, Twilight World of Writing Competitions” (Absolute Blank, November 2002)

In the decade since she left TC, Janet has published more than a dozen books. Amazing right? I figured it was about time we at TC checked out her work, so I headed down to the library and picked up a couple books.

The Rules of Gentility by Janet Mullany

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first book I read was The Rules of Gentility, which was what I’d call a gentle parody of Regency (Jane Austen era) romances. She pokes fun at the conventions of the genre, but in a way that shows her genuine fondness for it. A Bridget Jones influence was apparent here as well, especially in protagonist Philomena’s penchant for making lists of potential husbands, making this a kind of a regency/chick-lit mash-up. Janet’s writing always showed her sense of humor and that was readily apparent here. The story, with its increasingly improbable situations, was at times hilarious. Recommended if you don’t take these things too seriously.

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Blood Persuasion by Janet Mullany

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This, as you may have guessed, was a Jane Austen/vampires mash-up (and a sequel to Jane and the Damned). The protagonist here is Jane Austen herself (age 35, an aged spinster), who harbors a secret: she’s not-quite-human. She used to be one of the Damned (see JatD), but she took ‘the Cure’ and now she’s caught midway between human and vampire. She’s busy being a respectable spinster when her vampire buddies reappear as the new tenants in her brother Edward’s mansion. Their presence pulls Jane back to the dark side, which she resists less because she’s worried about her soul and more because she’s worried about not being able to write (a problem when she was previously Damned). I didn’t like this as much as TRoG, but that’s definitely a matter of personal taste; vampires (werewolves, zombies, ghosts, etc.) are really not my thing. Recommended for fans of the romantic vampire genre.

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1: Turtle Valley

Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, way back in the day when she was just Anderson without the -Dargatz, I knew Gail. Not well, it was more a friend-of-a-friend situation, but there you go.

Previously I read A Rhinestone Button (in 2003) and A Cure for Death by Lightning (in 1999, which I weirdly remember because I read it on a trip). Which predates me keeping track of my reading, so no links. I can’t say I have any strong memories of either book, but then, it’s been a while! This is why it’s good to write things down.

Anyhoo. Turtle Valley. Purchased at the VPL Book Sale, October 2010:

Turtle Valley is set just outside Salmon Arm during the August 1998 wildfire. Some of the hyper-local place names are fictional (Turtle Valley, Promise), but the general geography is authentic. The fire was to the west of Salmon Arm and this is where protagonist Kat’s parents live.

She has returned home (accompanied by her husband, Ezra, and son) to help her parents move the possessions they want to keep safe from the fire to her sister Val’s garage (in Canoe, east of SA). They do this at what feels like a rather leisurely pace, intermingled with reminiscences, reconnections, and revelations.

Kat + Val’s father, Gus, is dying. Val thinks their mother, Beth, has the beginnings of dementia. Beth + Gus’s neighbor, Jude, is Kat’s ex. Kat married Ezra on the rebound. Ezra has had a stroke and Kat feels more like his caregiver than his wife.

There’s a parallel between Ezra and Beth’s long-deceased father, who suffered from PTSD as well as a brain injury (cause: WWI). There’s another parallel between Kat/Jude’s relationship and the one between Beth’s also-deceased mother, Maud, and Gus’s deceased uncle, Valentine. There’s a third parallel between war and the wildfire (smoke fills the air, ash and sparks rain down, army trucks race past the house, helicopters and water bombers fly overhead). There’s a fourth parallel between the wildfire and Jude’s kiln (he makes raku).

And… there are ghosts.

To be clear, these are magical realism style ghosts. But there is plenty going on in this story. Did it need ghosts? I think no. I think the ghosts were superfluous. The story would have been just fine without ghosts. But it’s true I’m not a vwzg* person. I know other readers love the ghosts.

This story feels very personal. I try to avoid conflating author/narrator, but… Kat is a writer. She’s the same age as the author. They both worked as reporters for the Salmon Arm Observer. They both had husbands who had strokes. etcetera. Obviously a lot of this story is culled from real life. It made me wonder how the real-life counterparts felt about this story. How do you pull from real life so transparently and survive the backlash? That’s something I still struggle with, will maybe always struggle with, though I tell myself I need to get over my hang ups and just write.

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*vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts

Weekend Reading (+ Listening)

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald,
in a letter to his daughter Scottie
via Brainpickings

Melissa Gira Grant – Girl Geeks and Boy Kings

Roxana Robinson – How I Get to Write

Gretchen Rubin – Four Personality Types: Which One Are You?

Other People: Episode 139 — xTx

Weekend Reading

The Happiness Project – 6 Simple Strategies To Pitch Your Ideas. And To Make Them Irresistible.

Apartment Therapy – Day 2: Set Up Your Outbox

(Ha. This is my method. Which I’ve been using since I was a kid, tyvm. I wish I had a mental alarm that pinged every time I had an idea that was going to show up later as a cornerstone of someone’s empire.)

Stephen Elliott – The Problem with the Problem with Memoir

Most people’s lives are very interesting but most people don’t look at their lives in an interesting way. The unexamined life is never interesting. If a good memoir was merely predicated on having an interesting life then some of the best books would be celebrity memoirs. These people live a life most of us know nothing about. But celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.

Tayari Jones – Finding the time is write is hard, but finding the courage is harder

Michael Bourne – My New Year’s Resolution: Read Fewer Books

New Year’s Day

In service of my goals, yesterday I walked downtown and bought some things:

a 2013 planner (50% off)
a sketchbook, 5×8-ish, big enough not to feel cramped, small enough to carry around. and I pulled out my pencils/erasers/pencil sharpener and put them with the sketchbook, so no excuses.
a 3-pack of Moleskine journals (like this, except these ones have a pattern on the cover) — one of which I’ve already started writing reading notes in. go me.
a box of all-purpose cards. now I just need some stamps. I think I’ll also get some Vancouver postcards. (want snail mail? email me your snail mail address. I promise not to do anything nefarious with it.)

I walked around Canada Place for a bit (drinking a latte and taking phone photos of the snowy North Shore mountains, like everyone else and their dog who was downtown) and then I went to see Argo. It was good, no doubt. I have to give BAf props for being able to create suspense when I already knew the ending.

When I first heard about this movie, I was puzzled because it was advertised as some untold story and I was like what? Because I knew this story. I imagine it was plastered all over Canadian news at the time. I can’t explain why I have a vivid memory of this story and nothing of the Marathon of Hope when they happened the same year. The only thing I can think is that the constant repetition of the Terry Fox story over the past 30 years has obliterated any of my personal memories of it.

Anyway. The “untold” part of it is the CIA involvement. But the movie makes it seem like the Canadians were just doofy bystanders, undeserving of any of the kudos they received. Which, if you think about, makes no sense: Tony Mendez, the CIA guy Affleck plays was in Iran for like a day. Clearly, there was a lot going on in Iran in the 79 days preceding Mendez’s appearance that is totally glossed over. Like the real Canadian passports that just magically appeared. There’s a slam in the postscript at the end of the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor, which seems totally uncalled for. But if you don’t think about any of that: good movie.

Oh. Before the movie, there was trailer for this. It was almost entirely Ryan Gosling shooting people. Intercut with Sean Penn emoting intensely. It has the same rating (R) as Argo, which did have some violence but I would guess probably got its R not from its violence but from the number of times ‘fuck’ was used. Because impolite language is totally equivalent to violent death. And we (society) remain puzzled as to why some people get it in their heads to go on shooting rampages. Just saying.

As I left the theater, I was thinking hmm, need food. I didn’t feel like going grocery shopping. I wanted something like fast food but not fast food if you know what I mean. As I walked to Stadium Station, I passed T&T. Through the doors I could see what looked like a deli case. Hmm, I thought. I went in. As I suspected: sushi. Perfect. Well played, T&T, well played.

And then I went home and started reading book #1 of 2013, Turtle Valley.

It was a good day.

21: This I Know

This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart by Susannah Conway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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I picked this up at Chapters on Robson while I was birthday present shopping. It was the last copy. It was that kind of day.

I read about this earlier this year when she was doing a blog book tour (I posted the quote that caught my attention here) and I started following her blog. The book interested me because it’s about navigating grief through a creative process.

[W]hen something bad happens that’s big enough to make you question your entire life, all the other hurts that are hanging around, all the wounds you’ve collected in your lifetime, will come out of the shadows and ask to be healed too.

This I Know (xiii)

In 2005, Susannah Conway’s boyfriend of two years died suddenly/unexpectedly from a heart attack. But there’s a parallel story of loss: when she was a child, her father left his family (Susannah, her sister and her mom) and moved to Australia. He wasn’t dead, but he was gone.

As I read This I Know, and the ways she worked through her grief, I couldn’t help thinking about what a difference how you lose someone makes in the grieving process. There’s a purity in grieving someone who has died vs. someone who has left. When someone dies, you get to keep your memories. You can reread the letters. You can look at the photographs. You can remember all the things you did together. These things are yours and no one can take them away.

When someone leaves, you not only lose them, you lose your memories—or rather, your memories are taken from you. All the mementos you thought were the most important inanimate things in your life (the stuff you’d rescue if your house were burning down) are now just reminders that what you once thought was true, you now know was false.

There’s also a difference in how people react to different kinds of grief. You’re not likely to hear someone say “you’re better off without him/her” to someone grieving a death (there are exceptions, I know). Everyone sympathizes/empathizes with the death of a loved one. But when a loved one leaves voluntarily, people just see someone who hurt their friend/family member. But for the person grieving it’s more complicated than that.

I don’t know if this book will resonate with everyone. I think those who share similar characteristics (read: introverted interdisciplinary creatives) will find it inspiring. For example, she writes of the exhaustion of needing to be ‘on’ all the time and writes of the luxury of solitude, the gift of time to herself. For her, being alone was a necessary part of healing. This is something I understand implicitly. (Though I’m not sure others do.)

When I have to my work—myself—out there, I do it with as little fanfare as possible.

This I Know (72)

Which is not to say I agree completely with everything. She does a lot of talking through her grief, whereas that’s something I hesitate to do. A long time ago, I read something about not talking too much about the things you want to write about because if you do, your need to write about them will dissipate and I think that’s true (at least for me). But she is, I think, a photographer first and a writer second. So maybe putting things into words doesn’t carry the same weight as it does for someone who’s primarily a writer. (Further to this point, I will be reading Emily Rapp’s forthcoming memoir The Still Point of the Turning World in 2013. She’s been writing through her grief at Little Seal.)

Susannah channels her grief into a journey of self-discovery that leads her to create her own perfect job for herself (she runs online photography-focused classes). This of course ties in perfectly with my theory that hitting bottom frees you to take risks that you otherwise never would have. This I Know is set up kind of like a workbook. At the end of each chapter there’s a ‘reflection’ with a suggested activity (writing + photography) related to the chapter topic.

One final quote I have to share (because of this and also this):

I once met [an artist] at a party whose words have always stuck with me: “Boyfriends come and go, ” she said, refilling my wine glass, “but my work is always there for me. It’s this rock I have in my life I can always rely on.”

This I Know (156)