Why Owl is Not a Writer

Whenever Owl admits that she writes in her spare time, people inevitably ask her what she writes. This is Owl’s cue to scuttle away like a cockroach. In the event that Owl is unable to scuttle, she shuffles her feet and mutters something about personal essays and memoirs.

Non-fiction, the listener will say.

Owl will back away and explain sheepishly that she adds her own twists, adds composite characters and reshuffles events, journalism no-nos. Also she writes about herself. Journalists have one word for that: narcissistic.

Creative non-fiction, Owl will amend.

Journalists inevitably get offended and tell Owl there’s no such thing and she’s going to get sued. Owl panics because she really doesn’t want to get sued, she just wants to write.

So fiction, the listener will say.

Owl will shake her head and then nod vigorously and then gnaw on her fist and then completely panic and hide behind the nearest piece of furniture. This is shorthand for Owl is a Giant Fraud, which is more or less the truth.

Genius at work

Owl is not a proper fiction writer. She’s known that ever since she was very small because she’s never read anything similar to her work. If you put Owl down in front of a computer she will write short pieces about Chinese-Indian girls who have lives that are suspiciously similar to Owl’s.

Owl knows real novels are invented. You are not supposed to write about your life. This means genre fiction is about dragons and elves, or Regency England. Literary novels are usually about Sad White Men Having Lonely Sex or Sad White Men Chasing Fish. [If you really must write about anywhere outside of America and Europe it usually involves the 1800s/malaria/and savages or heathens, sometimes both.] There are aberrations like Americanah but they are rare.

Owl can’t stand these two genres. Every two years she tries to re-read The Old Man and the Sea in hopes that she will find something to love about Hemmingway because he’s a Literary God.
Inevitably she fails. (Owl doesn’t even try with Moby Dick because she had to read it twice in college and that’s enough for four lifetimes.) In the spirit education Owl finally asked her friend Shep to explain Hemmingway. Shep is a manly man. Shep would rather be constipated for six months then talk about his emotions. [Note: Owl has not fact checked this. Sorry.] Owl demanded Shep explain The Old Man in the Sea to her.

It’s like life, he said and wanted to leave it at that. So Hemmingway. So manly.

Owl requested clarification.

Like a lot of times it feels like you are on a boat, Shep said.  Trying to catch a fish. And there’s no one there with you. But you’re still on the boat trying to catch the fish. But why are you on this boat? Why are you trying to catch it? It doesn’t matter, you still have to do it, and there is no one else with you.

Owl understood.  If life is about sitting on a boat chasing some stupid-ass fish, Owl would pack her boyfriend in her suitcase before boarding. If not her boyfriend, then a cellphone, or at least glass bottles for sending off messages: Help. Lonely. Someone talk to me. Are you there God? It’s me Owl! Owl does not believe in suffering in silence. Since then Owl has taken to referring to The Old Man and the Sea as Stupid Fish Book.

But she despairs even more. Owl’s incapable of producing stories about emotional isolation because she loves gossiping about feelings. She can’t write about Sad White Men Having Lonely Sex because she’s not one of them and her imagination just doesn’t work that way. And while Owl has tried to write about dragons and Regency England or both it reads like Owl is on a lot of crack and not the good kind.

Genius takes a moment to contemplate

When she was in college, Owl signed up for fiction class to fix this. Owl had a plan. She would pay strict attention to what the professor said, work her hardest, and then presto, when she left she would be in the know. She too would be able to write proper novels.

The professor struck Owl as a Real!Novelist. He was a jolly man who wore a tweed sports coat and silver rimmed glasses. He had published a book of short stories that Owl could not quite understand, which she made him even more of a Real!Novelist. Good fiction, like good poetry, is inscrutable. Otherwise how does Owl explain Hemmingway, Jonathan Frazen, Phillip Roth and all those other Sad White Men books she’s supposed to adore but actually just wants to burn in a woodshed?  

During the first workshop the professor spent an hour complimenting a student for being able to distill the difference between Methodists and Southern Baptists. That kind of cultural literacy is what makes real literature shine, he told the student. It’s rare to find that kind of perspective in a student. Owl quaked in her chair and prayed he wouldn’t ask her to say anything. Owl knows Methodists and Baptists are Christians and that’s about it.

Then he went off on a tangent about how people of different cultures think of plot arcs differently. Like, Bollywood, he said. Owl sat up. She could talk Bollywood.

Indians just have different needs for plot, the professor explained. Bollywood plots are long and circuitous and not very logical. Owl raised her hand and said in her experience Bollywood was viewed as entertainment where you suspend disbelief and know the plot sucks but are okay with it because it’s fun. Sort of like something called um, Hollywood.

The professor pointed out coldly that Owl’s experience was just one of many. Owl didn’t want to argue because, well yes, that’s right. Instead, Owl asked about the Ramayana, the Indian epic which you could sort of compare to the Odyssey if you really want to go there. What did that plot say about Indian tastes?

The professor did not know what the Ramayana was but it was very clear Owl needed to stop talking. Owl had a bad feeling she was in trouble and she had no idea why. She hoped it wouldn’t impact her grade on her first assignment.

She needn’t have worried. Her grade was crap anyway. Owl’s first piece was about a Chinese-Indian girl whose Indian grandfather dies. The girl administers Chinese funeral rites and feeds his spirit rice white which pisses off her teetotaler Hindu grandfather so he comes back and haunts her. As a cat.

Genius is inspired

Owl wanted to make the girl Chinese-Indonesian and Indian, because she wasn’t quite sure about the funeral rites and it would be culturally insensitive to screw up—she’d only see Chinese funeral rites performed in Indonesia—but she figured Chinese-Indian was already a mouthful. Owl was also proud of herself. Alright, Chinese-Indian girls don’t appear in fiction, Owl has never met one in the pages of a book, but she worked in a haunting which smacked of magical realism. She awarded herself a Marquez point.

The professor pulled Owl aside after class. “You’re Chinese-Indian, huh?” he said. “That must be pretty hard. They are both xenophobic races,” he said.

Owl wasn’t exactly sure what that meant since her family has the whole Chinese-German, Chinese-Japanese, Indian-Thai thing going on, but she was awed by the use of the word xenophobic. Ten dollar word! Proper writer word!

“Listen,” the professor said. “You expect too much of your audience. No one is going to be able to understand the differences between Indian and Chinese culture. Pick one.”

The thing is Owl’s version of the world is a world where your mother makes pork dumplings but doesn’t teach you to speak Chinese, and your father prays at Hindu temples but never actually explains to you who the different gods are. If she picked one group, there would be giant plot holes. Owl understood that if she were to have any success as a novelist she better pick one culture or study up on her Methodists and Baptists. Mostly she understood that the things that had isolated her as a kid, being culturally different, would doom her to failure as a writer.

Owl walked back home to her dorm in a daze bowled over by this epiphany. She collapsed in front of the refrigerator and her roommates found her there hours later.

“What’s wrong?” they asked, but Owl had no words to explain the awfulness of having your worst fears confirmed: the life that you know is one that can never be translated to the written word and understood. She leaned her head on her roommate’s shoulder and cried.

Eventually more of Owl’s friends came along bringing snacks and Owl ended the evening surrounded by a ring of friends and snacks sniveling into a bag of cookies while sobbing about Methodists and Baptists and not being a Real Writer. If she wasn’t wired for writing properly at least she had friends and food.

Genius gets stuck

Owl resolved to do better for the next assignment. Owl’s Taiwanese friend told her a story about being dropped off at a monastery when she was in elementary school and worrying that her mother would never come back. Owl was struck by the image of a little girl standing at the top of a tall mountain wondering if she would ever return home.

Owl wanted the image but had no idea how to get the girl up the mountain. So she invented an entire backdrop where the girl accidentally tells the village gossip her mother is having an affair. Enraged, the mother drives the girl to top of a mountain and leaves her at a Buddhist monastery. She speeds away in a cloud of dust, while the little girl looks on, too shocked to run after the car. Owl was proud. She had picked one country and stuck to it: Taiwan.

Look, the professor said, when he handed it back. You missed the real story here. Kids are weird. No one understands what’s going on in their heads. The story is about the adultery. What made the woman cheat on her husband? Focus on the action, Owl. Think like a story teller.

When in doubt Google

Owl was not interested in adultery. She was interested in the helplessness of children who are completely dependent on adults. This, she understood, meant that she did not have proper story telling instincts. Owl spent another afternoon sitting in front of the refrigerator sniveling and wondering what she was going to do with her life because she is simply not interested in writing about illicit affairs and real writers write about adultery.

Actually, Owl is remiss. There is one story she did well on in fiction class. For a character sketch assignment, Owl turned in a story about a boy in suburban America who is doing terribly at high school because he spends all of his time on debate team. He believes he can change the world but is simultaneously failing three classes. When his mother is blasting him for his report card, a strange man approaches the boy and pats his forehead. “You have the sacred V painted on your forehead,” the man tells the boy. “You are a visionary and you will change the world.” The boy lights up, thrilled.

Owl based the story on well—a real person, who really was told by a strange man that he had a sacred V on his forehead, and really was absolutely delighted by this.

The class shredded it. Owl’s characterization was improbable. No self-respecting person listens to a crazy man talking about visionaries and believes them. Owl’s professor, however, loved the story.

Don’t you understand he’s just an insecure kid who wants validation anyway he can get it?, he asked the class. Haven’t any of you ever felt that way?

The class shrugged. The professor cleared his throat and moved on.

After class the professor pulled Owl aside. I don’t understand the class’s reaction, he said. You wrote about something very relatable. Your characters are unique. You’ve got something; you’ve really got something.

Shortly after Owl switched to poetry classes. After she graduated, the urge to write still haunted her. She produced volumes of short mostly autobiographical pieces that were not actually real writing. Get serious, she told herself and wrote some really terrible genre fiction about dissecting birds and climbing ladders that go nowhere. Okay, get more serious, she told herself and tried to mold her writing to something that sounded like Real Literature. Whenever she tried, she ran through the list of things her professors told her: no passive voice, vary the sentence length, cut all adverbs, no seven year old girls, get critical distance & don’t write about yourself, don’t make shit up, or make all of it up, show don’t tell, omg you’re still doing it wrong.

Google has answers but they don't make sense

Frequently Owl stopped writing. During these moments she turned to books for answers. This includes J.M. Coetzee who won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature and wrote this gem:

Because they are creators, artists possess the secret of love. The fire that burns in the artist is visible to women, by means of an instinctive faculty. Women themselves do not have the sacred fire (the are exceptions: Sappho, Emily Bronte.) It is in quest of the fire they lack, the fire of love, that women pursue artists and give themselves to them. In their lovemaking artists and their mistresses experience briefly, tantalizingly, the life of gods. Form such lovemaking the artist returns to his work enriched and strengthened, the woman to her life transfigured.

He’s full of shit, Owl thought and threw the book across the room. Then she picked it up. Coetzee won the 2003 prize. As far as Owl knows, no one is calling him out on flagrant sexism. V.S. Naipaul the 2001 winner has actually said women can’t write. Owl is hardly Emily Bronte or Sappho. If she were male would she be somewhat more successful? At least better at writing something like Stupid Fish Book?

As the number of rejections mounted up, whenever Owl woke up with insomnia she wondered if she was simply cut from the wrong cloth for producing real writing. Real writing is spare, elegant, lonely and depressing. Thinking about real writing depressed Owl. She figured when the gods were handing out talent she’d bypassed the line for literary genius and headed straight for compulsive dishwashing. Which, poor life choice.

New life calling please

As Owl grew older she realized she was never going to wake up and magically be a Real!Writer but she kept messing around with words because she couldn’t help herself. Call it a dumb compulsion. She wrote pieces like the essay she posted here last week.

Still, Owl has bad moments. Last weekend she woke up and wondered what she was doing with her life, why she insisted on writing when ultimately all she could produce were blog posts and something on her hard drive that resembles a regurgitated pancake. She wondered when she was going to do something worthwhile with her life. This was the kind of day where getting out of bed is a bad idea. She reached for her phone and checked her email instead.

She found this email—

Dear Owl:

I just wanted to say, thank you so much for sharing your stories…

Growing up as a Malaysian Chinese (technically one quarter Thai as well, but my Identification Card says that's not important) in an increasingly racially-charged society, race has had a ginormous influence in my life. I hated the Chinese vernacular schools I attended, and used to lie to taxi drivers in KL about my ethnicity, just to avoid judgment… One semester into college here at [redacted American university]… the discourse (or screaming) all over campus, especially in the wake of the Ferguson verdict last Fall, has been intense, scary and overwhelming. I am confused, but more than that, really sad that…conversations (or arguments) revolving around race are often so angry, violent and alienating…

And I don't know what to think about it all ... except that I couldn't agree more with the conclusion you wrote at the end of the piece. …So I just wanted to say, thank you so much for articulating your thoughts and feelings….In an unexpected way, your stories have shaped my perspective and altered my life a little, and I am grateful. 

Owl sat down in front of her refrigerator and in the time honored tradition, cried. Then she switched on her computer and started writing.

The Law of Bouyancy

Owl spent New Year’s Day of 2013 at a women’s shelter in Delhi. She was interning for a paper in India. Somehow she had been charged with putting together a video about how the women of Delhi celebrate New Year’s.

Had Owl ever put together a video before? No. Could Owl speak Hindi and interview these women? No. Did Owl have any idea how she was going to complete the assignment and not get turned into butchered meat? Fuck no.

Owl was depressed. While she was pretending to be a functional human, inside her head there was a mini Owl hiding behind a teddy bear bawling non-stop.

Owl and her boyfriend Peter were in the midst of a rough patch. By which Owl means Peter was going through a family slash life crisis and needed space. Owl is totally great at all types of emotional support except for giving people space. Owl is like a creeping vine who loves getting up into everyone’s business and talking it over while munching biscuits. Owl can give people space for like three minutes before she’s back offering donuts and a long chat.

Except Owl was in Delhi and Peter was in America so Owl couldn’t exactly pop around the corner with donuts. Peter wanted space, and thanks to the Atlantic Ocean and mad expensive plane tickets, Owl had to give him space.

The only thing Owl could do was pine.

Pining

Owl loves pining in movies. There’s a montage with Josh Groban crooning about a broken heart in the background. The piner goes to the gym, stays up late working, gets slender and gets promoted. All through this, the piner is very private, does not break down in public, and emerges like a blade of indomitable steel. It’s heart-wrenching and empowering and Josh Groban is mad sexy. Owl was totally pumped.

Owl was going to pine like the movies. She signed up for a gym membership and begged her boss for extra assignments. At night she wrote tortured essays while listening to Josh Groban and admired her emotional stoicism.

Things started to go off script after a couple of days. Owl went to the gym. The gym instructor told her she could stand to lose a kilo. (Bitch! Owl was on a starvation pining diet and was a twig. A twig!) Owl tried to stay up late working except it was the holiday season so the entire office was out and there was no work to be had.

After a week, Owl was totally done with the pining thing. Except, unlike the movies, where the pining is a snappy entertaining three minutes before the plot trots along, Peter was still crisising. Ergo Owl was still pining.

Owl realized she was stuck pining for the foreseeable future, and the gym instructor had taken to calling Owl before dinner to inquire about Owl’s diet. (Bitch! Owl was not fat.) Owl began to panic. And so when she got to work on New Year’s day, and her boss told her to go film a women’s shelter, Owl asked no questions, dug up a cameraman and went.

Delhi in the winter is cold and dusty. The sunlight is pale, the streets shrouded with dust, the air crisp. The buildings of Delhi are made to siphon off summer heat. The floors are stone and the windows don’t quite shut, so the cold hurts. It bites into your bones, it stings, it stays.

The shelter was little more than a room ringed in iron bunk beds covered in thin mattresses. Each woman had a bed for herself and her children. In each bed the women stored their lives: clothes, spare utensils, talismans from the past.

The cold crept in through the open doors, settling into the floors and walls. The shelter had no heat and Owl shivered in her jacket. The women themselves were bundled into sweaters and saris. At first they clustered around the camera, convinced their moment of fame had come and that they were going to be on TV. Websites meant nothing to them.

Gradually they lost interest as Owl and the cameraman circled around getting footage. The cameraman translated Owl’s questions, and in a slow grinding conversation, Owl extracted the details of their lives.

One woman had been thrown out of her house by her brother-in-law. She had nowhere else to go, so she was here at the shelter, glad she was indoors rather than outside. She had grand plans for the day, she was going to buy sweets to pass out to her friends, going to pass them out to her brother-in-law even.

Another had epilepsy. There was no medicine, so the women sat around her in a circle, while she shuddered and shook. They sang and beat drums, their voices bouncing off of the walls, as if their voices would ward off all illness.

There’s a woman here who speaks English, a shelter worker told Owl. A pale woman with a streak of white in her black hair, and heavy hooded eyes stepped forward. She was a refugee from Afghanistan, she said. Her husband had been part of the Taliban, so she had taken her son and fled. She pointed to a boy who was running with a group of children. When she called him over, he bounced up, happy, buoyant.

He was beautiful, large almond eyes, clear pale skin, pointed chin, dimples even. In another life, he’d be the sort of boy whose face was plastered in advertisements, the boy grinning around a mouthful of ice cream: isn’t life just grand?

“How do you like India?” Owl asked.

“In India I go to school, I eat, no one is knocking on the door trying to kill us,” he said. “There is no Taliban.” He paused. “India is better than Afghanistan,” he said and lifted his hand to sketch out better—the bare airy room, the singing women, the pale sunlight that fell like spilled water on the floor.

Better: no Taliban, food, a little bit of school.

Owl went home. She gave up on pining cinematically and focused on better. Owl Skyped and emailed her friends when things got rough. Sometimes they told her stories, sometimes they sent her pictures. They had no magical panacea, but they were there, and the sound of their voices took the edge off of Owl’s depression.

Owl still pined. In truth, it was a long time before things were better. Sometimes better was just getting out of bed and making it through the day without crying. Some days better was getting out of bed and crying in the grocery store. But, you know, whatever, moving target. And slowly, things got better.

This year Owl spent New Year’s at home, reading poetry and deep-fat-frying snacks. Peter had to fly back to lab on New Year’s eve, but he and Owl spent the tail end of December baking things, cleaning things, and making really atrocious jokes. There was no gym instructor insisting Owl was fat, and there was no pining.

Happy New Year. May whatever plagues you, sort itself out, and may everything good bubble up to the top of your life, in a delicious mad froth. Gravity dictates what goes up must come down, but buoyancy dictates, whatever goes down must come up.

The Screwtape Letters

Now that all the spare corners of Owl’s mind are no longer filled with vague worries about homework assignments and final exams, she worries about other questions, in particular, the tricky business of how one should live life. Owl stutters and stammers through the minutiae of daily life. Does one help the old lady walk across the street? Yes, of course. But what if Owl is late to work and she is supposed to take meeting notes? Leave the old lady or miss the first part of the meeting and turn in incomplete notes? What if Owl is cranky and does not feel like helping old ladies across the street and will do it with a hint of impatience? Is it better to help an old lady across the street a little impatiently, or to keep out of it all together?

Moral dilemmas

Owl’s expensive college textbooks contain no helpful guidance. Owl is alarmed. She has spent a decade and a half in school, could probably take the derivative of x with regard to y, yet she is ill-equipped to answer such questions. She has no fundamental code of behavior to consult.

Most days Owl suspects that these questions are the important ones, answering them is akin to discovering the secret to living a happy life. However, Owl lives in a city full of up and coming young professionals who talk about how large their salaries are, how much overtime they put in and how very rich and famous they will be one day. When Owl asks them about minutiae they cough politely and offer to buy her a mocha latte to shut her up.

After one or two mochas and a few hours in such company, Owl tends to believe that the real questions of life may have to do more with climbing ladders that lead nowhere instead of asking questions on how to live.

Enter C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, a series of letters from Uncle Screwtape, a high ranking official, advising his young nephew Wormwood, a junior officer, on the finer points of corrupting an average human soul. That’s right. Hell is a bureaucracy, Uncle Screwtape is a devil who works for Satan, and Uncle Screwtape wants to eat your soul.

 

Owl has her doubts about Lewis. His Narnia books made her feel rather uncomfortable about lions, but the Screwtape Letters is a diabolically clever examination of the foibles of human nature. By writing a how-to manual on corruption Lewis produces a photographic negative of true spirituality that is more powerful than any amount of preaching. It is highly irritating to be told you should aspire to certain ideals. But when someone describes certain human foibles in ridiculous and satirical detail and they sound awfully close to your regular old self…ay yi yi.

For example, Uncle Screwtape on false humility:

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth.…And since what [he is] trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, [he] cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping [his] mind endlessly revolving on [himself] in an effort to achieve the impossible.

And the photographic negative, (i.e. true humility):

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.

While Lewis wrote as a practicing Christian, Screwtape goes beyond the scope of Christianity and addresses psychological truths, spirituality, call it what you will. Owl does not have a tidy phrase to explain the manifold social pretensions and affectations that obfuscate ones relationships with the world, with other people, and above all, with oneself. 

She can only say that she struggles with these issues all the time, false humility, pretension, complacence—all issues left out of the college classroom, but issues that religion and philosophy have been trying to address since humans acquired synapses. 

Replace God or Christianity with any other belief—Art, Science, Buddhism, Compassion—and The Screwtape Letters still ring true. Owl personally translated Lewis’s references to God and Christianity to writing. (She's a tad obsessed.)

There are a dozen demons out and about, small demons, tiny little creatures who roost on shoulders and whisper:

Do this. Everyone else does, so it’s alright.

Or, conversely:

Don’t do this. No one else does, so it can’t be right.

They do this every moment of every single day. They are there when you decide whether you really ought to go for the third mocha, if you should dine with people you don’t much like, if you should maybe pretend not to like Harry Potter because you’re forty three and dignified.. Each time you listen, they nibble a piece of your soul. A small piece, not much of a piece, but if you listen often enough, you let enough of them nibble, you wake up one day and there is nothing left.  

Never fear. Uncle Screwtape will tell you how these demons work, and although he purports to be a soul eater working in the bowels of Hell, Uncle Screwtape will save you from sinking into the morasses of petty sins that plague daily life. 

Great Lions Have Loved to Piss

Home for the holidays and reading like books are Bacardi and I’m out to trash myself into a starry oblivion for Christmas. I’ve got three books going in parallel, I’ll chug one down for hours, come up for air sputtering and then switch to another book for a different flavor, a taste of a different world, one must have variety you understand?  Still, even two books is unsatisfactory, for a shot of inspiration, I must have a third book, and I am reading for balance, for love, for madness, and then, that too becomes too much, and I am sprawled on the floor looking hazily at the ceiling as the faint echoes of words drift through my head—a break before I begin the cycle again.

 1. Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Despite the good amount of time I spend plotting to escape cube-land, there’s a little owlet in me who wears a pant-suit, totes a leather briefcase and dreams of boardroom meetings.

Former consultant and current Stanford MBA professor, Jeffrey Pfeffer, knows the boardrooms backwards and forwards. Power—an examination of power within organizations, what it is, who has it, and how to get it—is the fruit of decades of observation within corporations and MBA classrooms.

Apparently, knowing the boardroom backwards and forwards turns you into Machiavelli. The biggest mistake you can make, Pfeffer says, is to assume the world is fair. It’s not.

But that’s okay, because Pfeffer is here to make the world fair. Intelligence, he says, doesn’t do much except give you an ego. With a bit of practice and a lot of hard work, anyone can acquire power.

And that’s where Pfeffer has me hook line and sinker despite his Machiavellian tendencies. Pfeffer brings it all back to the basics. Do good work. Be nice to people. Stick up for yourself. Be confident. Ultimately, how you make people feel is just as important as performing well.  

Reading Power sets off an adrenaline rush like no other. I started Power the first night I got home and I wanted to jump back on a plane so I could get back to work and test out a dozen game plans for stepping it up at work. That, ladies and gentleman, is inspirational at its best.

Pfeffer infuses his book with an addictive fast pace can-do energy that promises to make any dream attainable. Yet, post-reading Power I’m drained. Pfeffer insists the world is a competitive alpha male environment with clear-cut haves and have-nots and anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves. There isn’t room for other perspectives, I am a little nervous because while there is a business owlet in me, there are half a dozen other owlets, wanna be poet owlets, madcap owlets, sleepy owlets who want nothing more than to sit in a warm room watching snowflakes drift in the wind.

Rot! Pfeffer would say. It doesn’t matter whether if you like someone or if you can identify with them, what matters if what you can learn from them.

I suggest reading his book in the same spirit.

2. Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann

The first time I heard of Thomas Mann. I assumed he was a philosopher in the style of Nietzsche. I had no idea who Nietzsche was, so I assumed both of them were pompous old men who sat in bars eating fat sausages and puffing on round cigars. I decided I was best off avoiding both of them.

Mann, it turns out is German-Brazilian, prone to crushing on pretty young boys. The joy of reading Mann is that he knows the most wonderful people. In his head, I mean, I don’t know if he knew them in real life. His stories are filled with strange and twisted men and women (well, okay, mostly strange and twisted men) who are beautiful in their twistedness. There is Tobias Mindernickel, sad and haggard, who is chased by children and sups on sorrow, Detlev Spinnell who  is a perfect humbug of a writer, and yet falls to his knees when he hears passion raging on a piano, and awkward and tortured Tonio Kroger who writes because he loves and loves and loves yet again.

Where did Mann meet these people? How did he come up with them? Mann would smile secretly and say this is the privilege of true artists. While Pfeffer says the business world is open to anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort, it is not so with Mann and art. Mann believes all artists are born with sacred mark on their forehead which sets them apart from the rest of the world for life. This is Mann’s artist, and at some level, Mann’s description of himself:

He worked, not like someone working in order to live, but like someone who, because he places no value on himself as a living person, wants only to work, someone who seeks recognition solely as a creative artist and otherwise goes around grey and anonymous, akin to an actor without make-up, who is nothing so long as he has nothing to act out. He worked in silence, isolated, invisible and contemptuous of those insignificant rivals for whom talent is a social ornament, who, whether rich or poor, whether they went about wild and disheveled or in monogrammed-tie luxury, were basically concerned with living happy, loveable, bohemian lives, not seeing that good work only arises under the strain of a miserable life, that he who lives cannot work, and that only after having undergone death can one completely become a creator.

—Tonio Kroger

On most days I suspect I am a charlatan, this wanting to write business is a light fancy that is doomed to plague me every now and then like a case of arthritis that flares up every now and then, but this passage officially confirmed my charlatan status.  

I am fat with happiness, at loath to trade in the easiness of my life for ‘undergoing death to become a creator.’ In fact, I found that whole passage so traumatizing, after copying it out, I stopped writing and played Spider Solitaire for a good half hour.

Traumatizing, I say, but with great envy. Perhaps if I chucked my cellphone out the window, retired to an isolated cave in Northern Alaska equipped with nothing more than a pen and paper…?

No. It will not happen. Once I finish writing I will call a friend, make plans for tomorrow, and I will be very very happy. I will not write, but then, very seldomly am I moved to write.

Perhaps it is this guilt that makes me want to say rather meanly, Mann might have been an even greater artist if he wasn’t so hung up on his own artistry.

3. The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

If Pfeffer is the democratic MBA professor who is hounding you to do a better job, and Mann is the elitist artist who frowns at you for being too bourgeois to appreciate art (unwise Mann! Do not intimidate your audience!) Hafiz is God’s messenger.

Reading Hafiz is like having God reaching out of the sky to hold your hand and smile down at you, saying, it’s alright, darling, I love you.

I write this as a committed atheist who has no conception of God and a severe dislike of religious sentimentalism. The man was a Persian, a Sufi mystic who died in 1390. He should be completely inaccessible.

His poems dance on the page.   

Pay attention. This is Hafiz:

What

Is the

Root of all these

Words?

One thing: love.

But a love so deep and sweet

It needed to express itself

With scents, sounds, colors

That never before

Existed.

Hafiz is funny. Did you know that? You can write love songs to God, they can strike a chord with atheists, and you can do this while being hilarious. That’s what it means to love other people, to see them as a reflection of God.

A royal temple has been built

In a scared forest

On the exact spot

Where for thousands of years

Great lions have loved to piss

God does not like this:

His cherished beasts

No longer have the ability to leave

Their holy scent in the jungle

Near a favorite resting spot of God’s

Left toe.

Daniel Ladinsky wept as he translated Hafiz, and it shows, each line of poetry is infused with intimacy and tenderness. Sometimes Ladinsky gets carried away and adds a few touches of modernity that are jarring:

Let’s turn loose our golden falcons

So that they can meet in the sky

Where our spirits belong—

Necking like two

Hot kids.

Falcons to necking? But Ladinsky must be forgiven because he brought Hafiz out of the grave and across the ocean to us.

Read Hafiz, read him when people have been shouting at you, read him when you have been throwing yourself against the bitter brick walls of expectations and are bruised and battered beyond repair, read him when you want to laugh, when you want to feel that all is right in the world, because all is right in the world, Hafiz will make it so.

Poor Thomas Mann. Poor Jeffrey Pfeffer. They know nothing of joy.

 

Entrepreneur? Artist? Whirling Dervish? Bum? Bum.