A few weeks ago I finished reading Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and then put up a review on this blog that was a bit cold. Then, I decided to go back through the book to pick stuff out of it for my commonplace book, and discovered that I’d actually really enjoyed the first half, but bounced off an essay around the midpoint, and then had my impressions coloured by the weaker second half and my fading memories of the first.
Let this be a lesson in recency bias. Let this also be a lesson that if you’re going to keep a commonplace book and a blog, it’s probably best to finish a book, transfer stuff to your commonplace, and then write the review.
If I’m a fast learner it’s because I’m generally quick to find the absolutely wrongest way to do something and then work my way backwards.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare contains a couple of gems that I wanted to share with you. Writing at the time that the modern world was being born, and particularly at a time when the world was mechanically gearing up to slaughter millions of people for the second time that century, Miller couldn’t help but consider the role of technology in society. Here’s what he had say,
“Inventions which would throw millions more out of work, since by the queer irony of our system, every potential boon to the human race is converted in to an evil, lie idle on the shelves of the patent office, or are bought up and destroyed by the powers that control our destiny.”
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, pg. 30
I couldn’t help but feel this rings particularly true in our current moment. Why do computers get to paint and write poetry while we keep having to work shit jobs, indeed.
Here’s another one. Mind the, uh, out of date language.
“I used to think that perhaps one day I’d own a little apparatus which by turning a dial would enable me to see [an outdated word referring to people from China] walking through the streets of Peking or Shanghai!”
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, pg. 44
God bless you, Henry Miller, you’d have loved YouTube.
I’m also reminded of one of my favourite tweets that I now sadly can’t find. I’ll paraphrase it for you. If you know the source please do let me know.
“If James Joyce had access to pornography on the same device he used to write, he’d never have written a word.”
All quotes taken from the New Directions paperback edition of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, ISBN: 978-0-8112-0106-3
I submitted a couple of poems to the Peterborough True Voices Anthology being developed by final year English students at University Centre Peterborough, and they selected one of them to appear in The Moment Magazine Peterborough to help promote the coming pub date in June. I’m super happy; they picked a poem I wrote about going to my first Posh match that really means a lot to me.
You can read it at the link below. There’s some other preview pieces from the True Voices anthology as well. I’ll keep you up to date; I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing!
You’re at a dinner party (or some other similarly sophisticated get-together). You’ve had a couple of drinks, you’ve finally loosened up, you’ve forgotten that you spent Friday afternoon showing Craig from marketing how to read a forwarded email and that you’re going to have to spend a good chunk of Monday doing it too. You wanted to be an artist. You’ve got the humanities degree to prove it.
The conversation takes its turns. Your friends tell you about a conference they recently attended in San Francisco, opportunities they might take to develop a game in Toronto, leadership vacancies.
You tell them about Craig.
Of course, they discuss the housing market.
Finally the conversation moves towards something you might know about; culture. Someone mentions having seen a play, or read a novel, or seen a film adapted from a book. And you’ve read it, you’ve seen it. The book was better.
They ask you what you thought of it.
“Umm, it was good. I really enjoyed it. I need to read the rest of their work.”
Trenchant insight right there.
Me writing this blog post
I’ve read a bunch of classics and can remember only bits and pieces of them.
Take Moby Dick for example. I remember being weirded out by the continual shifts in and out of it being formatted like a play script. I remember the chapter on making rope. I remember… this bit:
Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I’ve read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and can remember only two things; the image of him straining to read by a bit of dull light filtering down a prison hallway, and his advice on preventing burglary:
A light on for the burglar to see is the very best single means of protection. One of the ideal things is to leave a bathroom light on all night. The bathroom is one place where somebody could be, for any length of time, at any time of the night, and he would be likely to hear the slightest strange sound. The burglar, knowing this, won’t try to enter. ‘It’s also the cheapest possible protection. The kilowatts are a lot cheaper than your valuables.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
James Joyce is one of my favourite writers and I can’t remember much of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man except for the classic moo-cow opening and the bit about forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.
I realised what I hadn’t been doing was taking proper notes.
Take a look at my copy of Ulysses for example, loads of notes, and it’s easily the novel I know best. Taking notes helps you think and helps you remember, and there’s loads of different ways to do it.
The copy of Ulysses I used while I was an undergraduate.
I journal, and some of my thoughts on my reading go in there. I’ve started keeping a spreadsheet where I put a one or two sentence review of every book I finish. This blog plays a part in me actually remember my reading and making some use of it, too. I’ve been endeavouring to keep more personal notes and to make them useful and share them.
I’ve also started keeping a commonplace book.
I’ve known about them for a long time, but in my recent drive to just take more notes in general, I decided to give it a go. I came across the idea again while researching Zettelkasten, which I ended up not trying because it just looks like too much work, whereas copying down the odd quote I found interesting seemed manageable.
Some Things I Enjoy about Keeping a Commonplace Book
It makes me feel like I’m back at uni, a bit. Anything that makes you feel ten years younger is worth doing.
It did increase my comprehension and my recall. I tried my best to treat my books the way C.S. Lewis suggests; like toys. Flipping back through them at the end to look for quotes I wanted to copy down helped me recall what I’d read and cement it.
The copying down fixed the ideas further, and also acted a little bit like a gym for my fingers. Hunter S. Thompson said he learned a lot about writing by literally copying out great works of literature to see what it felt like to copy those words down, to feel them being written by his own fingers. Keeping a commonplace book is microdosing this effect without having to type out The Great Gatsby.
It’s a great way to form connections and stockpile material for blog posts.
Some Things I Wish I’d Known about Keeping a Commonplace Book
Leave a few pages at the start for a table of contents. Leafing through the whole thing to find notes on a particular book might increase your memory of what you’ve copied overall (see my point above in “Some Things I Enjoy…”), but in the moment it it just frustrating. You want that quote for a blog post. You need that quote for a blog post. Your blog post won’t be complete unless you find that bit you copied from Moby Dick where he talks about how much he loves squeezing sperm.
Don’t be overzealous. I remember my first year of uni – people would take way too many notes, me included, up to and including writing down everything the lecturer said verbatim. I think the first book I took notes from for my commonplace was The Winds Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose (see my reviews here and here). You know what le Guin is like. I underlined every other sentence and then copied it all down dutifully. This lead to…
…me feeling bad about finishing books, because I’d then have a load of work to do. I know, right? Do yourself a favour and don’t introduce any more friction into your reading experience than absolutely necessary. Selecting what bits are resonating with you and that you want to remember is an important part of the process.
To be entirely truthful with you, keeping a commonplace book hasn’t been a priority for me the last few months. I’ve finished five or six books without worrying about copying any quotes down. I think the most useful part of the exercise might actually be taking the time to have a flick through a book when you’ve finished it, just to refresh bits of it in your memory while it’s still recent.
This is a particularly good tip for e-books, I think. (I read this somewhere and can’t remember where, sorry.) Part of the reason we have an easier time recalling information from printed text as opposed to reading on a screen is that printed text engages our spatial and tactile memory. You remember a quote saying a certain thing, but you also remember it being in a footnote on the bottom right of a page, and not having many pages left in your right hand. That can be lost with an e-book, but you can re-engage that sense by taking time to flip through an e-book before reading it in earnest, making sure you highlight and create notes, and then going back through checking those highlights and notes when you finish. (Again, I read a post to this effect somewhere and now cannot find it, because, as you see, while I am engaged in improving my note-taking practise, it isn’t perfect. If you recognise this advice as your advice, please let me know and I’ll credit you.)
Have you tried keeping a commonplace book yourself? Do you have any advice? Is there anything I’m doing wrong? Please do say in the comments!
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Book V. What the Thunder Said
I’ve always enjoyed seeing how artists do things. That goes for pretty much any form of art. I’ve spent a lot of time on sites like TheGearPage and Equipboard looking up exactly what fuzz pedal Kevin Shields used on what album. It’s an impulse with its dangers; go on TheGearPage yourself and you’ll find a legion of middle aged men interested in having a fuzz pedal with the exact same transistors that David Gilmour used, who can’t even begin to imitate his approach to actually playing the guitar.
With writers it’s particularly interesting. If you enjoy someone’s writing and they’ve written a book on how they did it, it’s a double pleasure, your curiosity satisfied and another work in and of itself. Stephen King’s On Writing is a particularly good example of this.
W. Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook is something I picked up in a charity shop having only read a couple of his novels (The Moon and Sixpence, and Ashenden). They interested me enough that this non-fiction collection appealed to me, that and I’d been interested for a long while in journaling, systems of note taking, and fragmentary works. I read The Book of Disquiet and it broke my brain. I love the idea of fragments, snatches of dialogue, shattered images.
Even my experience of reading Maugham’s Notebook has been fragmentary. I actually can’t remember when I started reading it, but I remember it laying on the bedside table at the last house I was living in, with a bookmark in it and so implying I’d started it and not that it was languishing, and that was years ago now. The Notebook is a collection of mostly two things, images and anecdotes. More specifically, descriptions of splendid nature, and cutting depictions of human foibles and social structures.
I mean, who wasn’t expecting that. It is Maugham, right?
Not having read most of his novels, there wasn’t much of a thread for me to hold. I’m sure hardcore Maugham fans read the whole thing doing this:
The Maugham superfans
Having recognised where those pieces ended up, what form these notes took in his fiction. Me, I had to judge them on their own merits. And they are fantastic! But I find it more of a work I wanted to dip in and out of.
I picked the Notebook back up last year at a time when I was incredibly unsure about a decision I was about to make. Maugham’s insight into people really helped me in that moment. I read it as him saying that people are fundamentally irrational, and we can never really know why some people make the choices they do. That bought me a bit of comfort.
I put it down again, I had a lot on.
I decided to finish it recently because I’ve been engaged in my own project of journaling and note taking. (I really do need to write up that post on my commonplace book). I returned to this Notebook not concerned with how he used his notes to write fiction, but how he structured his notes themselves. I continued to find them fascinating. As the book wears on, Maugham pokes his head out more, you get his recollections on the process of keeping notes, his career, his friends, his contemporaries, literature in general, ageing. The very stuff he says he regrets not keeping more thorough notes on in the Preface:
“There were many years I never kept notes at all. They do not pretend to be a journal; I never wrote anything about my meetings with interesting or famous people. I am sorry that I didn’t. It would doubtless have made the following pages more amusing if I had recorded my conversations with the many and distinguished writers, painters, actors and politicians I have known more or less intimately. It never occurred to me to do so.”
Page xiv
Maugham travelled a lot (there’s a reason he set up a prize the purpose of which is explicitly to enable young writers to travel3), so a lot of the notes end up forming collected impression of places he’s visited. Still mostly scenery and character sketches, but with the frisson of the exotic and the different. I won’t lie, there’s some… outdated language. It was the inter war years and the British Empire was still a thing, I guess. I recently read Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, another account of a writer travelling between the wars which is, as you can imagine, about a different world. Miller likes his character sketches too, but he kept very different company.
It’s fascinating what he choses to focus on and what he doesn’t – it ends up being an autobiography by proxy before he comes around to being more direct in the last entries. Consider this entry from 1941, where Maugham tells us how sexually frustrated he is:
“One of the misfortunes of human beings is that they continue to have sexual desires long after they are sexually desirable. I suppose it is not improper they should gratify them, but I think they would do better not to talk about it.”
Pages 316-317
Followed a few pages later by
“At times I reflect somewhat ruefully on the opportunities for sexual congress that I missed when I was of an age to enjoy them; but I know that I couldn’t help missing them, for I was always squeamish, and when it came to the point a physical repulsion often prevented me from entering upon an adventure that beforehand had fired my imagination with desire. I have been more chaste than I wished to be.”
Page 324
Maugham telling you all about his sex life
Yeah, he had a different experience of travel in the inter-war years to Henry Miller all right.
I have a stack of unread Maugham novels that I’ve been meaning to work my way through for a long time. I’m not going to beat myself up, it took me five or so years to read this one, and I enjoyed the process. It’d be common sense to say that this Notebook is just for the Maugham superfans, but actually I think it stands up in its own right, and can give you in concentrated form the things that make Maugham’s fiction so good. Re-reading the Preface at the end of it I was reminded that Maugham cites Jules Renard’s journal as an inspiration. That’s another one for the reading list.
1 All quotes from Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook are taken from the Vintage Classics edition published in 2001, ISBN: 0-09-928682-3
2 The Simpsons screenshot kindly provided by Frinkiac.
3I just realised I am too old to receive an award for young writers and felt my bones crumble to dust.
Recently I came across a great idea that I’ve been talking about with everybody who’ll listen – Scott Hanselman’s exhortation to not waste your key strokes.
I love this idea. It speaks to my own impulse to write so I leave something of myself behind. It isn’t purely selfish, as the idea is that if you know something, and you’re in a position where you’re going to tell someone about it, it’s better to work that knowledge into a shareable form that’s accessible while you’re not in the building and then send them the link, rather than putting it in one email to one person. Thus advances humanity.
Think about the amount of times a Reddit comment from ten years ago has saved your ass. And then think about the times you’ve been screwed at work because the only person who can answer your question just went home, or quit, or is on holiday.
Or died.
Single points of failure really suck.
I’d already kinda come to a similar conclusion myself. I’ve had this blog for over ten years now and part of the reason I started it was to share some knowledge while it was still fresh in my brain. I remembered how impenetrable Ulysses was before I finally made some progress and decided to write my undergrad thesis on it. I didn’t want that knowledge to sit on a shelf somewhere, so I whipped it up as accessibly as I could and turned it into this blogpost. Ditto my post on academic essay writing; a lot of my friends were asking me for advice around that time, so I thought why not do a post.
(I am not an expert, I’ve just shared what I know, whatever that is).
And I remember hearing about the Sims reading list and not being able to find an easy copy of it. I ended up finding a photograph someone had taken of a page in the manual and posted to Twitter. It definitely wasn’t on Goodreads back then like it is now. Still, in the spirit of sharing, I transcribed it and threw it up on my blog. It got linked to under a Super Bunnyhop video which is like, a career highlight for me. A few other people have found it since and hopefully it’s been of use to them.
I try take and share notes at work as often as I can. I take the notes for my own benefit (if you think your memory is flawless you’ve just forgotten how bad your memory is). But if I’ve got them, I might as well share them. And I work in a sector where outcomes aren’t always obvious; being able to demonstrate change is really important. A trail of notes helps me do that, and sharing the notes means my colleagues can spot patterns that have eluded me.
Then there’s my D&D campaign journal. We’re a few sessions in and I’m already finding the notes from earlier sessions invaluable. It’s nice to know the name of the blacksmith, and keep track of what your character owes their party. And it’s up on a blog, so other people in the group can access it as they please. And if anyone else finds it entertaining, then great!
I used to really love sites like GameFAQs and Everything2, and I was really sad that I didn’t have the skill or the knowledge base to contribute to places like that at the time. I’m glad I’ve found someone who has put a name to this impulse.
So yeah, don’t waste your keystrokes! Writing what you know is the first thing people tell you for a reason, but consider what you know that you could share, for the betterment of humanity and our collective knowledge, the way the internet was supposed to be.
We’ve only had two sessions so far but I’m having a blast. I’ve rolled myself up (ok, stat arrayed myself up) a human barbarian who is totally not Conan. In fact, I’ve accidentally reverse engineered Conan. I designed a guy with a mercenary/military background, who has a really sharp sense of fairness, and who now wanders the land until he witnesses an injustice, where he will, with a cold rage, despatch the people who would exploit and abuse those weaker than them.
A bit like Jack Reacher.
Who is pretty much Conan the Barbarian.
Oh well.
–
I’ve had an interest in D&D ever since I played the original Baldur’s Gate, along with the other Infinity Engine games Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment, and learned about the ruleset behind all the mechanics. What the hell is THAC0? Why is a lower number better for armour? I didn’t really have an appreciation of what tabletop D&D looked like. I didn’t know any elder nerds who could guide me. I hung around at the Games Workshop a bit, and I collected and painted a bit of 40k, but otherwise D&D was mostly a computer game thing for me.
Some friends and I got invited to join a tabletop group when I was in my late teens. They were playing 3.5e. We were joining to replace some players who left, I think? I just remember being given a character that someone had been playing before me. It was a dwarven monk that was basically fitted out to wrestle things to death, and also, he was mute.
I can’t imagine how *annoying* that must have been for the DM. This was my first ever TTRPG experience, and I was having to figure out the 3.5e grapple rules. Yeah.
Had loads of fun though. I remember nothing about that campaign, except, through a combination of careful argument and good rolls, one of the other players launching me in the air to grapple with a dragon.
Oh, I also remember how frustrating it was not to be able to speak. The group had decided on an RP thing before I joined where another player knew sign language and so did I, so I could “talk” directly to him, and then he’d relay it to the group. The DM eventually took pity on me and decided to give me back my power of speech through a demonic bargain with what turned out to be the BBEG. I can’t remember if the debt ever got called.
It annoys me that I can’t remember anything about this campaign, and I daren’t have a look at any of my journals from this time. This was a period in my life where I was otherwise Not Happy. My journals probably don’t have anything about this campaign anyway. Probably just complaining about a girl.
So this new group, this new campaign, I am determined to take lots of notes. I’ve got a nice fresh notebook I am using exclusively to capture our tabletop sessions, and I am recording the dates and session numbers. I am not logging every action, just taking general notes the way I am trying to in other contexts in my life. (See my post on keeping a journal, and keeping a reading journal. I really need to get on my post about keeping a commonplace book).
I am also considering taking part in this group to be storytelling practise; D&D is just storytelling after all. The rules give it structure and the dice give it a frisson of unpredictability, but really, what you’re doing is telling a fantastic story with a group of friends. I’ve enjoyed the fantasy I have read (Book of the New Sun was boss and of course I love Tolkien), and I’ve got more on my shelves too read, but I’ve never really tried writing it.
So I’m writing up my notes from my character’s perspective. A bit of backstory, too, but I intend to flesh that out more as the campaign goes on. I’ve been reading up on West Marches campaigns and I really like the idea that it can be really valuable to your group to keep a record, but it can also be fun to see how you’ve perceived events, what was important to you and what wasn’t.
I also really, really like Scott Hanselman’s ideas about not wasting your keystrokes. I absolutely see the value in writing something up just for myself, but if I intend to share it, I could just share it among the WhatsApp group, or I could put it up on a blog to make it more accessible and allow other people to possibly get some enjoyment out of it too.
So that’s what I’ve done. You can read it here. There should be a new post every couple weeks. I’ve put it on a separate blog because I’m not sure the people who read this one (all three of you) are interested in a D&D 5e campaign journal. But hey, if you are, let me know, I haven’t spent any money and could always change where I’m posting. I’ll probably be writing a bit more about D&D on this blog anyway, as it pertains to SFF, as I want to do something on Appendix N/E.
I’m already having to stop myself buying a new set of dice every week, and am thinking about maybe running my own game for my family. Soon I’ll be looking at new games. There are some Fallout TTRPG systems I’d like to try…
I do, but not always. I tend to want to listen to an album, and an album is a commitment, so choosing an album can get in the way if I’ve had an idea and need to start getting it down right away. I struggled to start this piece because I wanted to try write with music in the background and I couldn’t decide what.
I settled on Dopesmoker, because I haven’t listened to it in a while and there aren’t too many words in it.
I struggle trying to write and listening to something with a lot of meaning in it that my brain is trying to decipher, willingly or not. It’s dangerously close to multitasking, and you can’t really multitask, only switch between tasks, and at a cost.
I wouldn’t have thought about this, except that I’ve done things like practise scales on the guitar while watching YouTube, which does kinda work, at least for muscle memory. I’m sure there’s someone out there upset I wasn’t paying proper attention to the intervals.
(It’s me, who is terrible at identifying intervals, lamenting my past self. I’m the one who is upset.)
Oh YouTube, something I absolutely cannot do while I write. I tell myself I can, and then I hear an interesting bit and want to see the context, and bam, I’ve alt-tabbed. I can clearly see the insidious influence that Facebook or Twitter have had on me, but I’m starting to think YouTube has hooked me deeply in a way I never expected.
Maybe if I was a painter, or a sculptor, I’d have an easier time listening to music while I work, the contexts not clashing as much. I don’t really have any visual art as part of my overall creative practise and I probably should.
My most vivid memory of drawing: an art class in year 8 (I was about 13). The homework? To draw a picture of your house. So I did, I got out a ruler, and I planned it out, all straight lines and right angles, just like my house actually was.
The feedback was one sentence.
“Do not use a ruler.”
What can I say, I was using methods I thought would best capture the form I saw. I wonder how many other kids broke out a ruler. Probably a lot. I think of myself as a reasonably creative person but apart from this anecdote and a memory of an excited discussion about Metal Gear Solid 3 with a classmate who’d picked up a copy before me, I have almost no recollection of these classes.
Nothing highlights my personal growth to me more than how I feel when I think of all the free, state-mandated education I had access to and didn’t take full advantage of.
Sometimes I’ll grab a notebook and sit by the backdoor in my kitchen and write. I’ll leave the back window open so I can hear the birds, wind, trees, children, my cat meowing to be let in. I’d leave the door open, but there’s a neighbourhood cat who keeps trying to get into our house. We love him, but he isn’t our cat.
There’s a passage in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas where she describes how she liked to write to the sounds and the rhythm of Paris around her. She’d drive to a busy, central street somewhere in Montmarte, crack the window a bit, and proceed to get out her notebook and write.
“She was much influenced by the sound of the streets and the movement of the automobiles. She also liked them to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune.”
Similar to what people try and do in coffee shops I suppose, although every time I try it I just end up daydreaming and people watching – which can be useful to the work in general, but it is emphatically Not Writing.
The urban environment tends to be most fruitful for my writing when I’m walking through it, not sitting in it.
Maybe if I was a luthier, I’d be able to listen to podcasts while I worked, the way Ted Woodford does.
I can’t recommend Ted Woodford’s channel highly enough, by the way, if you have any interest at all in stringed instruments.
YouTube might suck up a lot of my attention, but it’s also given me a window into the lives of people I’d always had a curiosity about but would never have been able to see. What does the day to day life of a luthier look like? Well, now you can see, and that’s pretty fucking cool, even if it means you’re not writing.
Ah who am I kidding, I’d find some other way to distract myself. For a long time I toyed with the idea of writing a series of essays on albums I associate with certain games. For example, around the time I got a copy of Resident Evil 4, I also got The Smith’s Singles and the Melvins album Houdini.
Yeah, what a combo, right?
Any time I hear a major Smiths song now, or any song off Houdini, I have a vivid sense memory (kinda like the one I wrote about here) of that summer I spent playing Resident Evil 4.
I coulda made this even more granular. Back in Vanilla World of Warcraft (or Classic now, I guess), levelling took ages. If you were a newbie, you might spend weeks in a zone. So, for example, around the time I got my first character, a dwarven warrior, to the badlands, I’d also picked up a copy of White Light/White Heat, and I now inextricably associate that album of avant-garde New York rock with a zone in a videogame.
James Farson 
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