Daughter! what words have pass’d thy lips unweigh’d! (Replied the Thunderer to the martial maid;)
….because I’m shouting it from every electronic rooftop! Marnie’s first chap book is completed and available now, and it’s a limited run of only 175 copies. This is the first volume of a 6-part story titled In the Sound and Seas. I already bought 5 copies, and she set some aside to send out for reviews, so if you want one you’d better hurry. It’s only $15!!
all drawn by hand. Every tiny leaf. The hatching on every tiny leaf. Thousands of tiny bunnies. Really. You will be awestruck.
Marnie’s one-a-them Arteests. She simply is an artist, it’s how she thinks, how she perceives the world. So, for instance, I look at her book and say oh, so gorgeous, it’s about three women who are building a boat! And Marnie says it’s about the difficulty of doing her work. Her – huge artistic view; me – immediate surface-level view. Her – artist; me – reader. Her formal description of this book is
This 22-page mini-comic is the first volume of a six-part, wordless narrative about obsessive creative production and failure. Volume 1 frames the future volumes, as 3 storytellers sing the tentative world of the rest of the story into existence.
Here’s a link to the flickr set so you can see the pages; here’s a link to her announcement on her professional website; and here, two ways to buy. She’s a smart cookie! You can either buy a copy of this volume, or you can subscribe and receive the additional volumes as they publish. Feel free, do one or the other. 
this book represents my proudest moment of my years in publishing, and my greatest contribution to my field.
…and have no one to share my on-the-spot joys and woes with, no co-workers I can grab in the hallway, no colleagues’ offices to dash into, my blog has to handle all that weight.
I am a social psychologist. When I worked as an acquiring editor for Oxford University Press, I acquired books in social psychology, which was an honor and a thrill, and quite unusual. Usually, a new editor just inherits a subject and a list and you develop your knowledge of that area. But in a stroke of luck, I came a-calling just as they needed a social psychology editor.
An acquiring editor thinks of book ideas and finds people to write them. Or, people have ideas and come to the acquiring editor to see if the publisher is interested. The acquiring editor is the gatekeeper for what does and doesn’t get published; it’s a powerful position, actually. Since I did not go into academia after graduate school, this was an amazing opportunity to make a real contribution to my field. Just the right book at just the right time can have an enormous impact. It was a responsibility I cherished and never took lightly.
There is one book I signed that just brought me to my knees. The concept was that the 50 most prominent social psychologists would, in a casual tone, write about their work that was misunderstood, ignored, or that didn’t get the attention they thought it would get. Sometimes, your article comes out just as a more provocative paper is published, so yours gets lost in the shuffle. Or you just gave it a terrible title. Or you just didn’t write it in a compelling way, etc. And sometimes, the article is misunderstood and takes on a life of its own.
The book’s editor succeeded in getting the superstars of our field. I was completely blown away by the roster. The names wouldn’t mean anything to you, but if you knew my field you’d be as gobsmacked as I was. And the essays were charming, and humble, and funny, and surprising. It was a peek behind the curtain, a chance to think “wow, even HE was ignored?”, a chance to learn lessons from people whose opinions you should trust. It was a wonderful concept, a shocking roster, and full of great stories.
But then something went terribly, terribly wrong, and it looked like the book was not going to make it. I had most of the essays in, but the book crashed and burned. I was heartbroken and devastated, and I’m not being melodramatic about that. After several bleak months with many people working behind the scenes trying to revive the book, the best and right thing happened and the book came in. One year late, but the book came in.
Today I received my copy. When I pulled it out of the envelope, I started crying. This book is me, in such a real way I gave birth to it, and it was a huge-headed baby whose birth nearly killed me. I wish I could express all the feelings I have, but I can’t tease them apart. I am so proud, so honored, so thrilled, so many things, to have brought this book into existence, and to be forever connected with it. My dissertation advisor is in the book, and the article he cited (as a success, not a disappointment!) was one on which I was a co-author…..I know he did that just for me.
In the acknowledgment, the editor of the book wrote about me in the 2nd paragraph. I put it here not to brag, but to have it here for my own future reference and to convey a bit about how involved I was, to help explain why I am sitting here with shaking hands:
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Lori XXX, Senior Editor at Oxford University Press, who saw the value in this project from the start. her advice and counsel at every stage, start to finish, and her willingness to field incessant questions and lend her critical eye to all made her the best sounding board anyone could hope to have. Lori is not only a gifted thinker and writer generally, but her PhD in social psychology meant she knew all the “usual suspects” and she understands the field intimately, and I ultimately adopted the salutation Jedi Lori when writing her (as in “Dear JL”).
In some ways that captures it and in some ways it really doesn’t, but it is a reminder to me of the book’s often-terrible journey, and its ultimate birth. My heart is still pounding, 20 minutes after seeing it for the first time, my hands are shaking, and I’m crying. It really is a lot like giving birth.
did you know that God’s favorite book is Frankenstein? IT IS!
radiolab
Do you listen to Radiolab? It’s an NPR program, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. They take a topic and present interviews, stories, and musical bits about that topic. I’ve mentioned it before when I wrote about how weird my own thinking is, and if you’re on the home page of this blog (and not just a page with a single post), there’s a widget — the “favorite things” widget — presenting the most recent program. I have small potatoes complaints about the program now and then, but I have enjoyed every single program they’ve produced so far. I highly recommend it — get the podcast.
A program they did that stuck with me, actually a series of programs they did in July 2009, was about the afterlife. That program comprised 11 brief stories about death and what comes after, from an individual’s death to the death of the universe. And most points in between. They interviewed a biologist, a paleontologist, a geologist, a neurological psychologist, a man who survived a suicide attempt, a man who lost his partner, and they present readings of very tiny stories. None of it is about the “white light” at the end of a tunnel. It’s smart, and moving, and fascinating. A couple of the stories were written by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and writer and all-around Smart Dude. The stories were taken from his most recent book, Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives.
This book doesn’t need me to help sell copies; the reviews are amazing (it’s even been turned into a performance at the Sydney Opera House, music by Brian Eno). For the most part the book is so strong, and I wanted to share a couple of things with you. (Out of 40 short stories, you can’t like them all, of course, but they’re mostly wonderful. It also reminds me of Alan Lightman’s great little book Einstein’s Dreams.)
The story that was read on Radiolab that left me thinking the most was called “Metamorphosis.” The concept: we have three deaths. The first is when our body dies, the second is when our body is buried, and the third is in the future, when our name is spoken for the last time.
And that’s the part that really left me thinking. I have no great aspirations to make my mark on something (other than the lives of the people I love, I hope I mean something important to them). I don’t need my name on a building (good thing, it’s a little late to start now!), or to be immortalized in some way. And actually, if you read that story, you’ll find out that that’s a path to misery. But to think about the moment when the last person alive who remembers me dies or never mentions me again, that’s stirring in some way. Isn’t it? I was thinking about this regarding my dad last month. I don’t think he had any friends, but aside from any he may have had, I’m the last person alive who knew him, really. He only exists in my memory, now, and when I’m gone it’s as if he never existed. (Not sure that’s altogether a bad thing.)
But the stories are definitely not all heavy. Some are funny, and some just have hilarious lines, like the opener of the story “Mary:”
When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.
After some questioning, you discover that God’s favorite book is Shelley’s Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in His mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively into the night sky.
Well, that just completely and totally cracked me up. What a starting point. Not all the stories are about God, and some are about what that means, the idea of God.
I grew up in the Church of Christ (you know, “the only ones going to heaven”); fire and brimstone, we’re all worthless worms, not a lot of grace. And no stained glass or cushions on the pews or musicians, for heaven’s sake! Those things aren’t mentioned in the Bible!! (I always wanted to point out that neither is air conditioning, but we had that.) In high school I completely lost my faith, and any belief in God. Then I lived a few years as a Quaker and that meant something to me. Now, though, I just don’t know what I believe. Of course I have no idea what will happen after I die; I definitely don’t have that heaven, St. Peter, and God on His Heavenly Throne idea. I’d like to think that it’s about energy, that my energy will just become part of the universe in some way, but hell, I don’t know if I’d really like to think that or not. It’s a story to hang on to.
you’re really no worse than anyone else – give yourself a break, man.
I miss David Foster Wallace. A lot. I find myself thinking about him, about his way of being in the world (and of course the fact that he’s not here). There is a new book coming out titled Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, written by Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky, and this little DFW quote is used in a number of feature articles about the book:
“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”
It’s coming out in paper, and in Kindle, and I just preordered the Kindle edition which will release April 13.
It is hard to do that, to be as gentle and compassionate with ourselves as we are with others. (Well, for most people anyway – discounting the truly mean and sadistic.) Of course we know our own true hearts, our own sometimes cruel and mean-spirited thoughts about other people or the world. We know those things about ourselves, and I believe we would be stunned to be let in on the internal dialogue of people we know…..we’d be stunned to learn the things they think, the things they think about us, even though we know we have the same types of thoughts. But we think we are the mean-spirited one, we know that about ourselves. There is a saying in AA (I think?) that goes something like “don’t judge your insides by other peoples’ outsides.” That’s brilliant! We do that, all the time. We struggle, but it looks like other people don’t so we must be failures.
I have a friend who was trying to learn how to knit – to offer a very simple example – and she made mistakes in her first scarf. She had to rip out rows. Her work was flawed and didn’t look all that great. And she thought there was something wrong, she didn’t have the makings of a knitter. But we all make mistakes, and rip out rows, and are aware of that weird place under the arm where we had too many stitches and tried to fix it by doing some strange decreases that really don’t look all that good but if we keep our arm at our side maybe no one will notice and anyway I don’t feel like ripping back so many rows I just want to get the damned thing done.
Of course there’s a fine line between being compassionate with ourselves and excusing ourselves a little too easily. I usually err on the side of keeping myself on the hook, flaying myself with recrimination for every lazy thing, every uncaring thing, I shouldn’t be so harsh, I should’ve I could’ve I would’ve. I don’t want to fail to take responsibility for what I do and say, probably to a pathological extent. But compassion….I could think about how I try so hard, and how I mean well and struggle with my own difficult places just as others do.
All at once, spring appeared in the trees and flowers in my city – it sure helps. The pale greens and bright yellows and pinks make me feel expansive, compassionate, open – even with myself. I wish I’d had my camera with me this morning to show you, but someone else’s photo will suffice for now:
[photo courtesy of newyork808]
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