Upate on the Tully piece

I've been working sporadically on this piece about Tully, and the (near) daily attention is very interesting.  I can see it evolve under my gaze.

Insight 1: Walking up the stairs on a very lovely morning this week, I got a chance to walk a little while with Dr. David Miller, GIS, and we got a chance to talk about writing.  He has been working on a fascinating book about hot rodders -- craftsmen and artists, really, with proprietary knowledge about how to build these automotive artworks.  He's asking these guys to tell the stories of what they know about building cars.  First person, very detail-oriented, very tedious work to transcribe.  Takes forever.  I asked him why he didn't hire someone to do the transcription for him, and he surprised me by saying that he didn't want to skip this step.  By going over them, word by word, phrase by phrase, he was able to develop a deeper understanding of what the project was turning out to be.  He said something like "the book is teaching me what form it should take," and I could connect.  Being immersed in the language, in the complexity, is necessary.  It's the only way that you can sense the patterns in the text, see places where the division are and the way they build into something (sequence, development, trajectories, arcs).  Immersion in the thick of things as a form of scuba diving into your work.

Insight 2: Talking on the phone with my brother yesterday, he talked about his teaching his students art, which is always interesting to me.  He said that sometimes he would ask his undergraduates to work on a single piece for an hour, doing some mundane task such as sanding it or carving it.  Very often, they were incredulous.  "You want me to just do that for an entire hour?" he reported them as saying.  The idea of not making progress, of having an accomplishment, of working on something for a while and having it develop out of the work, to not have there be an obvious alternative and immediate resolution, was hard for them. Heck, it was more than hard, it was not going to happen.  If it doesn't happen easily, then it doesn't happen.  But the point is not just that his students were distractable (Nicholas Carr, anyone?!), but that they didn't know -- they didn't even suspect -- that knowing somethignusualy requires being immersed in it for a long time.  He said it takes 15 years of doing woodworking before you start to have a vision of a project as if from above, with the know-how embedded in your hands and a feel for what makes sense and is likely to work.  Malcolm Gladwell called this the rule of 10,000 hours, and that seems about right.  Immersion, not insight, is the way of the craftsman.  Writing is one of the last hand-made crafts, and that is as it should be.

Insight 3: No time for number three, but it has to do with finding tensions, putting the myth first, and developing detail sentence by sentence............................𕶕†©ø¨˙ø†¶ˆ®ˆ¥ƒπ¨ª§§£∞¨˙∫∆˙©¬øˆæ¨ø¥´¶•