Alan Jacobs

Forthcoming in Comment.

Perhaps because I write different sorts of books, one of the most important writerly skills I have developed is the ability to adapt my working methods to the project at hand. Not every project calls for the same approach, the same model of organization, or the same tools.

For instance, when I was writing The Year of Our Lord 1943, with its five protagonists, the two most essential tools for me were (a) a color-coded timeline in Excel, so that I could see what each character was doing at any given time, and (b) a set of index cards. I had five protagonists so I got cards in five colors, and gradually accumulated information. Then, laying the cards out on a table or pinning them onto a cork board, I was able to understand the relations among those different pieces of information.

However, when I was writing How to Think I didn't need that kind of system — I needed something very different. In that book, I had a sequential argument to make, one in which each chapter or section built upon the previous one. So I used OmniOutliner to lay out the whole argument in outline format, and then fill in the details.

When I was writing Breaking Bread with the Dead neither of those two methods would work for me. I was trying to create a kind of mosaic of ways in which we can encounter the past — a task that did not require and indeed did not admit a rigid argumentative or historical sequence. I had rather a set of portraits of people engaged in the complex activity that I call breaking bread with the dead, and each of those portraits needed to be coherent, vivid and, to some extent, self-contained. So in writing that book I just kept a set of text files open on my computer. I could go back and forth among them, but I didn't need to do that very often, because each chapter had its own integrity. And on any given day, getting whatever chapter I was working on properly shaped was my primary task. 

But now I'm starting a new book. I'm not yet ready to talk about what it is, though I’ll get to that point before too much longer. For now, I'll just say this: After fumbling around for a while to figure out how I could organize my thoughts in for this project, I realized that once again, the good old multicolored index cards were my best friends. And it's actually been very pleasurable to go back and, for the first time in several years, build up a collection of cards and figure out how to relate them to one another. I use my own version of the Zettelkasten system, and maybe one day I’ll write a post about what that looks like.

But for now I just want to say that I think writers make a mistake when they try to use the same method, the same organizational system, for every book. The character of the project — its structure, its form, the demands it makes upon you as a writer — should determine the way you write the book. If you’re writing the same kind of book every time — like Robert Caro, for instance — then by all means use the same system. But if not, exercise your imagination! 

Hmmm, maybe, given current trends, I should put this little baby up for sale on eBay. 

Italo Calvino:

I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public — that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed. 

Same. 

Here’s a wonderful post by Ian Paul on the Epiphany story — what Matthew and Luke have in common and how they differ; the unconfronted assumptions of many biblical critics; the Parthians’ use of horses and camels. All the good stuff.

Honestly, I’m glad about this. The team’s behavior was disgraceful — and it starts with the manager. Arteta needs to understand that, because he has the youngest side in the Premier League, he needs to exhibit a compensatory maturity. But he doesn’t, and over the long run these outbursts (by him and his players) will hurt the team. Making every official in the country despise Arsenal is not a sound management strategy. 

Of all the great movie critics, present and past, I suppose the one whose judgments about particular films I am least likely to endorse is Pauline Kael. But I would rather read her than anyone this side of James Agee, and that’s because of the sensibility she brings to her movie reviews. She’s so openly personal and invested — and this lasts for about twenty years, from her early work for literary quarterlies and radio stations to somewhere around the middle of her New Yorker career. As the eighties progressed she became more full of herself, more dictatorial, more insistent that her view was the only view. And of course at times she was dishonest. But before the rot set in she was consistently brilliant.

Just one example: here she is in 1968 writing about The Lion in Winter, which means writing about Katherine Hepburn, which means writing about so much more:  

Seven years ago, in Pocketful of Miracles, when Bette Davis became lovable and said “God bless” to Glenn Ford with heartfelt emotion in her voice, I muttered an obscenity as I slumped down in my seat. I slumped again during Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, because Katharine Hepburn had become sweet and lovable, too. The two great heroines of American talkies, the two who dared to play smart women (who had to), the two most specifically modern of women stars — the tough, embattled Davis and the headstrong, noble Hepburn — have both gone soft on us, have become everything we admired them for not being. They had been independent enough to fight the studios, but they have given in to themselves. The public has got them at last as it always wanted them. They have become old dears — a little crotchety, maybe, but that only makes them more harmlessly lovable. And though, of course, we can't help prizing them still — because what they once meant to us is too important a part of our lives to be relinquished — there's a feeling of dismay, and even of betrayal, when we watch them now. They make us fearful that they will humiliate us by turning piteous, and they mustn’t; we've got to have a few people who know how to age gracefully in public, who don't go flabby with the joy of being loved every time there's a fan or a reporter around. 

Everything about this is wonderful, but the key clause, the most completely Kaelian clause, is this one: because what they once meant to us is too important a part of our lives to be relinquished. 

Damon Krukowski:

We are in a far worse situation than we were in 1991. Thurston’s part-jokey, part-deadly serious condemnation of the industry then — “When youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do?” — feels like an understatement today. It’s no longer just about youth culture; it’s all cultural production that’s monopolized by big business. Thirty years of capital consolidation have created monopolies larger and more disconnected from “content” than we could have imagined even at our snottiest in the 90s. The major labels, music mags, and MTV still needed musicians, after all.

But Apple doesn’t – music is the least of their business. Same goes for Amazon. And what Spotify seems to need is to get away from music as fast as it can. With so much attention paid to Tesla’s precipitous fall in value, many seem to have overlooked that Spotify also lost nearly 70% of its market capital this year. 

I think this points to something important: Professionally-made music — music you buy, played by musicians you’d pay to see live — is now under the nearly complete control of companies that don’t give a rat’s ass about music or musicians. 

About a month ago I started drafting an essay about how Richard Rorty both predicted the rise of Trump and in a certain sense prepared the way for it. I was about 1500 words in when I got the January 2023 edition of Harper’s and saw that Mark Edmundson had already written my essay. I have never before been so comprehensively pre-empted. 

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“2400”] Owens Salvage, Wellington, Texas[/caption]