'Til Daddy Takes the T-Bird Away

Ingrid posted a passage on the fridge a while back from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. The relevant passage is quoted here. It basically makes the case that it is practice—massive amounts of practice—rather than talent, that make brilliant musicians. You of course have to have some inborn ability to fit the instrument, but the 10,000 to 20,000 hours of practice, the 20-30 hours/week, that's what does the trick.

The word "practice" came out of a continental usage meaning "striving or endeavoring" into its earliest English use as the carrying out of a profession, especially medicine and law. It quickly spread to mean "The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to the theory or principles of it" (OED, definition 2a), and then "The habitual doing or carrying on of something" (OED, definition 3a). It has come to connote a regularly repeated activity which is reserved into a protected, private space in life, not subject to conventional human power structures. You don't do it for cash or your household or your family. Practice is about you and something other than you, and no-one else gets in the way.

I decided to become an art major the end of my freshman year in college wothout having taken any art classes. I did it because I looked at all the activities I had been doing that year, and the ones that I just did and did and paid no attention to time passing were mostly working on design and art projects. I figured that was a good indicator of the sort of work I could happily put a major's worth of effort into. It turns out I was right. I was happy to work—to practice—for hours on end.

Now, by the end of the next three years, I had of course come nowhere near the 20,000 hours of practice mentioned above. 3000 I might believe, but that's probably pushing it; I had other classes and activities. And I mostly gave up the disciplines of the studio arts within a couple years after graduating. Turns out I am not so good on self-motivation if there isn't someone (like a teacher or a client or an audience) I'm preparing work for. Just how I'm built. But I got into map-making, and I felt a similar sense of "I could do this forever."

I think map-making is fun.

And I think the key to getting to that 20,000 hours has to be "fun". Either that or some seriously twisted obsessive behavior combined with strong elder-pressure. But if they didn't love doing it, would they keep doing it? If they didn't at least some of the time wake up in the morning and say, "Wait, you're going to pay me to go out and do this? Cool!" I feel that way about map-making still a lot of the time. Ingrid says she feels that way about writing.

As Dr Seuss says, "If you never did, you should./These things are fun and fun is good."

But pursuit of fun also covers a kind of Peter Pan escape-from-reality way of approaching things which is the opposite of what I'm talking about. What is the difference between following the pleasure of a practice that works for you, and following sensual pleasures? The difference is whether the practice requires work from you; whether you are being held up to a standard.

Some friends were over and in the course of the evening's conversation, the question emerged, "so why do you go to Meeting if you aren't a theist?" Which is a good question, a good opening. And one of the answers, perhaps surprisingly, is "because it's fun." Or something like fun. It's fun in the sense that the practice rewards me. I come away with more than I went in with, usually.

But conversely I think of those awful grownups who try to make kids have fun, with a forced-march kind of determination—there was a gift to Roo when he was very small that was a clock that talked in a plummy, Judi Dench English accent, saying "Let's have fun!" when you turned it on, and "Goodbye!" when you turned it on, which at age 1 was about all he could do. Over and over and over. "Let's have fun! Goodbye! Let's have fun! Goodbye! Let's have fun! Goodbye!" Given who it was from, we considered it a passive-aggressive gift and "forgot" it at grandma's house...

Maybe I'm just avoiding the obvious word because it sounds so over-the-top gushy: Joy. Fun you can use up and throw away, but joy you keep. Maybe I find joy in the work I do, and the practice of Friends meeting, and really much of what I do in my life (OK, cleaning the cat box and balancing the bank statements maybe not so much), without the trumpets sounding and shafts of light from above. Maybe that's what the practice is about.

In which I ramble on about books I've never read

There's been some interesting discussion in the Quaker blogosphere around David Boulton's book The Trouble With God. Simon Haywood wrote a post arguing the book was anti-Quaker, and Charley Earp wrote a response. Full disclosure: I haven't read The Trouble With God, so in that regard I'm talking through my hat on this particular thread.

Frankly the arguments in Simon and especially Earp's posts made my head spin. It is late at night, but still...

What canst I say?

I am not a theist but continue to be mistrustful of the term "non-theist" because it focuses on what I don't believe rather than what I do believe (I would also point out that I am a non-Odinist and a non-Quetzalcoatlist, in which I expect I have a lot of company here).

I believe in stories. I believe in fiction. I trust love.

To me, God or no God is a red herring when it comes to truth. What it comes down to, is can you let the truth of a story into your heart without its being factually true? If no, then you are subject to a warped realism: you trust only what you can touch, or else you make true what is not empirically demonstrable.

We all do this. Quakers, Mormons, Catholics. Shi'ites, Zen Buddhists (OK, maybe not Zen Buddhists). Even not-theists like me.

Our world includes processes and structures that cannot be empirically seen. Some of them can be empirically demonstrated, most notably in the sciences. Others are social structures we all take for granted, and can see acting around us so clearly there is no need for demonstration. Some are frankly baffling. Death, for instance.

Earlier this week I had a bedtime where I became obsessed with 9/11. Imagining being on the planes, in the towers, on the street. It's like my son's interest in the Titanic: we humans believe if you turn a thing over and over long enough, there will be a solution. So we read the book over and over, and we form ideas in our heads and hearts about how the world works. That's one of the things stories are really good for.

I watched a bunch of YouTube bits from New York, 9/11/01. It helped, oddly, to see the actual events, horrifying though it was. I remembered what actually happened; it went from a movie script in my head to a horrible thing that actually happened. Probably reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would have helped, or In the Shadow of Two Towers, both still on my to-read list.

We are so... so... what's the word? neurotic? uptight? obsessed? whatever it is, we are so "that way" about fact and fiction, making sure we are clear which is on which side. "Sacred" is on the non-fiction shelves. "Funny" is on the fiction shelves. Me, I love stories that, even if only for a little while, confuse me as to which is which: conspiracy theories, metafiction, stories within stories...

To me, that's where I get a glimpse of really experiencing truth.

The New Champion

I have a new winner in the Best Book About Maps category. It's called The Map Addict (you can also view a preview of the book from that link). It is written by Mike Parker, and it is very very good.

Mike Parker is English, and his personal obsession is Ordnance Survey mapping, but the way he describes life inside a map works just as well for those of us who grew up in America. He begins with the kind of obsessive map-travel many of us practised as children, wending our way through road and street maps. In Parker's case, it was the 1:50,000 Landranger Series, but I was picturing an 11-year-old me with my family's Hagstrom and Texaco road maps and a Goode's World Atlas. Parker was obsessed enough to shoplift nearly a complete set of Landrangers in his teens, and he acted as the family's (heck, the neighborhood's) navigator for his young adult life.

The book includes the requisite descriptions of recent cartographic history—the origins of the Ordnance Survey, Bartholomew's, and the A-Z maps—but it all comes back to what it is like to be a map person. He carefully takes down the old canard about men, women and maps ("men read maps, women follow along"). He takes on the dangers of satellite navigation with great good humor. And in the end he turns on his own map addiction, describing what it is like as a map obsessive to wander without a map, to be freed of knowing ahead of time exactly where you are.

A description of the book sounds like a random collection of interesting waypoints: the solar alignment of Milton Keynes, the most boring sheet of Ordnance Survey mapping, the sensuousness of raised-relief mapping, but throughout it, Mike inserts himself and reflects on how his relationship with maps informed and changed his relationship with the world as a whole. As a gay, pagan travel writer and TV commentator, many conventional Englishmen and women would see him as weird, but his relationship with maps is tied to a quite normal English domestic way of being: Enid Blyton stories and a nice cup of tea, and the world laid out comfortably surveyed. All adventures contained.

He talks about how a mappy way of thinking about the world can and does lead to a kind of cranky, even dangerous, sense of normality. Many of his heroes turned into cranks in their old age, and he alludes to a kind of proto-fascist mentality lurking in any well-settled society.

The book is witty, and it reminded me how important humor is in discussing the things I like to talk about here. Humor is a way of pointing sideways to uncomfortable things, and Parker does it so well, you may not even recognize the discomforts he is talking about. We would all do well to pay attention to that.

Trompe l'oueil

First off, I have a warm spot in my hearts for the Mormons. In all seriousness, I do. I love a religion that consciously provides a sense of our continent as sacred space. I really like Orson Scott Card's writing, though I find his expressed political views a little disconcerting. LDS folks I've worked with or run into are generally intensely focused on whatever they are doing, have secure family lives (assuming they are not closeted), and generally nice people. Take it as snide if you will, but I really like a religion that takes wildly tall tales as seriously as they do.

We toured Temple Square this afternoon, on the last full day of visiting my in-laws, who moved here last fall. And I had a revelation of sorts sitting in the Assembly Hall while the tour-guide missionary from Canada blithely went on about the deep love of God that led the early settlers to painstakingly paint the white pine columns as faux marble and the white pine pews as oak...

I suddenly realized I was listening to someone telling me about the movie business. The dream factory.

We Americans have a cultural sense of being realists, hard-headed, plain-speaking, no-nonsense pioneers. And in some ways we are—I'm a big fan of John Kouwenhoven's work, in which he makes a pretty good case for independent, practical thought as a basis for American cultural identity. But we are also a nation that loves to be given a rosier view of things than they really are. More than that, we are a nation that reinvents itself over and over out of whole cloth, then persuades ourselves that we have always been what we have reinvented ourselves as.

Thus we can straight-facedly talk about "traditional family values" while sending wives out to earn a substantial part of family income in the marketplace. We can talk about "traditional marriage" as if women have always enjoyed equal status in our marriages. We can talk about "American health care" as if our network of hospitals and labs and insurance had been with us since the dawn of the Republic, instead of slightly over half a century.

We are a nation of scriptwriters and set decorators.

I was struck by how this observation resonated with Paul Krugman's recent post on horse-race reporting. He blames bad reporting, but I think the public audience for news reporting is also to blame. We want the story, not the analysis and discussion. We want a plot, a narrative.

I observe this, not to say, "Hey, America, get your act and your brain in gear and stop living in Fantasyland!" Though that may be tempting, it misses the point. We're not going to change America's habit of making things up as it goes along, just by wishing it to be so. But we need to be aware of the dream-making, if we are to be good scriptwriters ourselves, and we need to be good scriptwriters if we are going to be part of any real American debate.

Practice Practice Practice

In the carto-theory discussions there has been a lot of sturm und drang around the questions "what is a map?" and "what are cartographers?" — way more than I've seen in any other part of cartographic discourse. As soon as you start stating what cartography is and what cartographers are, you get yelps of indignation from folks who don't think that's what they do. This is especially true when you push the argument further, discussing what cartographers ought to do.

It's not that different in the liberal Quaker circles I'm involved in. We all gather in Meeting for Worship, and we have well-established frameworks for conducting our business. We even share a common gestalt sense, laid out in the Quaker testimonies, but just try telling a Quaker what he or she is...

I visit prisoners through Prisoner Visitation and Support (PVS). We are an organization which, while supported by a range of religious groups, does not have an evangelical or prosletyzing thrust. Our common work involves visiting prisoners, and talking with them. That's it. Now, many people do visit out of religious impulses (Jesus said, "visit the prisoners" and there are a significant number of visitors who work from this dictum). But I have been mightily impressed by how irrelevant to the common purpose that theological diversity seems at our training workshops. Practice trumps the specifics of faith.

So it's easy to come to the conclusion that we should all just ignore theory and theology and stick to practice. A lot of us do ignore it, but it is so centrally important to many individuals in their work, it makes it frankly dishonest to "leave out" of the discussion. And so we get tangled messes sometimes.

I'm thinking of situations where discord has invaded each of three three communities, and looking for a common thread in these discords. Can we get some perspective that works in general to resolve this kind of conflict on a structural level?

At PVS training sessions, people often give "personal stories" of why and how they joined PVS. I think because they are framed as personal, they are received in the spirit of personal testimonies, and I have never felt a sense of offense from the group. The only real offense I have seen taken at a PVS event was in an after-hours entertainment some years ago.

There was a recitation, clearly framed by the performer as one of her favorite poems, which involved racial stereotypes and issues of Native American suffering. It was explosive. Offense was taken. When the PVS board tried to distance itself from the performance and say it would not have allowed it had it known what the content would be, there was further irateness: some people felt that in distancing itself, the organization had betrayed the ability to speak one's mind. The whole event ended on a sour note, which is really weird for PVS. I think it shocked a lot of us, because it is normally such a "we're all in this toghether" kind of group.

What happened?

PVS does not advocate. It staunchly does not advocate. If you want to work for change in the federal prison system through advocacy or action, you need to join another group. PVS does what it does, and it is permitted access to federal prisoners because it so strictly restricts itself to this set of actions. One of the results of this non-advocacy is that the organization does not in any way link its actions to any specific theoretical or theological viewpoint. That is left solely to individuals.

Those who took offense felt that the performance violated that code. It was a statement framed not as a personal testimony, but as a performance. What caused the initial offense, I gather, was that it was seen as potentially a statement sanctioned by the organization, and there were those who strongly objected to its contents and wanted no part of such a statement. And the subsequent conflict was essentially between people who saw the performance (and perhaps performances in general) as representing the group vs those who saw it is solely personal.

In our Friends meeting, we've been wrestling for some time with a statement on theological diversity. Basically a way of saying, "the specifics of your faith are irrelevant to your being welcomed." An earlier statement was sent back, with a request to also address what it is that binds us together. A pretty broad statement was proposed this winter, and this was met with strong feelings, in large part around its deliberately non-Christian language.

The thing is, while issues of identity surrounding our Christian roots vs our non-Christian members have been brewing and percolating for some time, the meeting as a whole is steaming along. We are still a community. No real schisms. A few interest groups within meeting, and a worship group that budded off, but as far as I can tell no lasting ill-will. But the statement in question was (unintentionally) divisive. And I think the degree of passion in that divisiveness surprised most if not all.

Again, I think it was the idea that this was a statement of the whole that set things ablaze. We're used to individual statements, and have learned to frame them as such, so we can learn from them. And we do make collective statements, especially in the face of public injustice (I'm thinking here about GLBT issues, or issues around peace).

Here's what I think the difference is: We can make true collective statements if they are grounded in our collective experience. We can't make them if they are grounded in our separate experiences, even if those separate experiences seem to converge. Collective statements grounded in separate experience will be weak compromises.

The PVS performance was, I believe, not intended by the performer to somehow pressure us in to agreeing with her. I know her a little, and that's not her style. But something about the frame in which it was presented made it seem like a call to collective statement to some in the group, and I can see that standpoint too.

Likewise, the statement in meeting came out of the strongly felt sense by some members of the group which simply isn't felt by others. The group hadn't felt itself under the weight of collective experience, and so was divided on the statement.

Which brings me to cartography.

Cartography is a scattered practice. We each do our own thing, or we work within a small workgroup that does its own thing. We have common tools, mostly, and a recognizable "mappy" product, but how and why we get there are not as common collectively as we might think. And why we map is absolutely all over the board. We have assumed that there must be some commonality, but we have not really shared much specific experience as a group. And so any collective statement we made will be suspect and weak. And a proposed statement made by one of our number (or worse, someone who is not a practicing cartographer), attempting to speak for the whole, feels presumptuous.

I'm cogitating on this. Maybe hidden in this common practice are a variety of theoretical/theological types of personal bases to this practice. Maybe it would be helpful to open up the "whys" of cartographers in the same way that the "personal perspectives" pieces at PVS trainings and spoken ministry in Friends meeting can open up understanding. Maybe that would lead to a better sort of collective statement.

Or maybe it would lead to an understanding that at some level the only collective statement we can make is the practice itself.

Harley's article on his "Favourite Map" online

I've referred to J.B. Harley's article "My Favourite Map. The Map as Biography: Thoughts on Ordnance Survey Map, Six-Inch Sheet Devonshire CIX, SE, Newton Abbot" a few times. It was published in The Map Collector in 1978, and Kunstpedia.com is putting articles from that magazine online. I requested they add Harley's article and poof! Boudewijn Meijer did. Here it is! Wow, that was fast. Enjoy!

Un-personed

I had a good exchange with John Krygier recently—thought-provoking as usual. It got me thinking more seriously about the experience of maps as performance. I know very little about performance theory, and much that I have seen I find frankly impenetrable. But I know a little about performance itself from having performed. So what I'm going to outline here is a framework that may well overlap what more experienced theorists have outlined. In any case, it's getting my thoughts down in a more thought-out form. Any recommendations of relevant and not-too-thickly-jargony performance literature is welcomed.

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The aspect of performance I've been reflecting on is the centrality of the performer. Humans pay more attention to (and have more cognitive tools to explore) other humans than any other subject. So it makes sense that looking at another person is qualitatively different from looking at something that a person has made. An actor is different from a stage setting, no matter how elaborate that set.

I've made the analogy before of cartography being fundamentally about the "stage setting" for a performance about space, that perforance not necessarily being performed within the map. Well, any serious performer will tell you setting is an integral part of performance (for that matter, so is the audience). The whole thing, the entire constructed experience, is the performance.

And yet, there is something different about the designated "performer." It's a person, and so we instinctively pay more attention to that person. I think it may be that simple.

To me, this puts a new spin on the whole idea of attempts at "objectivity," in which the biases and idiosyncrasies of individuals are intentionally de-emphasized. The idea is, while maintaining a clearly human-made voice, to partly "un-person" that voice. It's not exactly the same as what I'm describing, but it is a useful device in a number of ways.

First, it allows the user to put her or himself directly into the performer role. Thus a "base map" is like a karaoke track. It fuctions a lot like the "voice" of a recipe. I had an interesting discussion with my wife Ingrid about this the other night. She reads a lot of food writing, and she confirms that it is common practice, even when the prose style is very fluid and personal, to then drop out of that personal voice into the "recipe voice", in which instructions are neutral. The goal is to de-emphasize the personal viewpoint of the author and to put the reader directly into the driver seat.

Second, it allows for the creation of the idea of a "common truth." This drives many contemporary carto-critics crazy, because they believe the common truths modern cartography has been emphasizing are fundamentally false, leading us straight to the destruction of our ecosystem and so ourselves. But on a smaller scale, it is often useful to have available a "referee voice." It's why we've always had a role in our societies for judges of one sort or another. And by putting off the personal voice and adopting an un-personed voice, we make that more possible.

I'll admit that second one is a loaded bomb. Before you all pile on, let me just ask you to consider, not whether it is right and good for us to do this, but whether it is a basic human reaction to seek someone speaking in an "neutral" voice.

I'm not sure exactly how the idea of anonymous monastic performances done for the glory of God (the Book of Kells, for example) fit into this, but I think they do.

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Ther other thing that's been on my mind is the priveleged place of performance. Larry Shiner (whom I've discussed earlier) talks about the creation of contemplative frames for the fine arts (the concert hall, the gallery wall, the silent library) as being a big part of those fine arts distinction from "craft" or "artisan" work. Something analagous happens whenever we recognize a performance is taking place. It is different from ordinary social space: we do not expect performers to have the same relationship to those around them as they would when they are not performing. Some of it is a matter of allowing for concentration, but some of it is also that performances are specifically about "setting aside space" to allow for a different experience.

It feels very like the suspension of disbelief that is essential to fiction.

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And that's all the ideas I have energy for tonight. I'm going to call it good.