The book I was reading when the new year began was Take Back Your Time by Christy Wright, who advocates a five-step process that can be described as time management only as a shorthand. “Life management” may be more precise but that sounds a little too grandiose and controlling.
Anyway, the five steps are: Decide what matters. Stop doing what doesn’t matter. Create a schedule that reflects what matters. Protect what matters. Be present for what matters. (Details in the book.)
I was tinkering with creating a schedule when this thought entered my mind, an old thought that often recurs when I tinker like this: We have divided our weeks into seven 24-hour days, so 168 hours every week. Take away 7 times 8 hours equals 56, and we’re left with 112 waking hours. Set aside 40 hours for the day job, and 72 discretionary hours are left.
We’re in charge for more than 10 hours a day, on average.
Shouldn’t that be enough if we use the hours well?
I oversimplify. I admit that. My main point is that every day has time enough, if we remember to seize it.
(I thought perhaps to hold this thought for a Monday, but then I realized that on Friday for most of us, the two freest days of the week are before upon us. Go for it!)
The forced closure of theaters two years ago changed the way we watch movies. The last film we saw on the traditional big screen was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in December 2019. The government’s decision to shutter the movie theaters led me to the conclusion that for the price of two tickets and a bucket of popcorn, we can own the Blu-Ray for infinite replays on our widescreen TV and a box of microwave popcorn.
So these days if there’s a movie I really want to see before it hits Netflix/Prime/Whatever, I buy it as soon as it’s available. It means not sharing the collective experience until three or four months later, but so be it.
And so it was that I watched “the greatest Marvel movie ever” for the first time on Wednesday morning, trying to imagine the impact in the theater when Andrew Garfield and then Tobey Maguire show up playing Peter Parker, not to mention the joy of seeing Alfred Molina reprise my favorite comic-book movie villain, Doctor Octopus, and Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin again, and all the rest of the Sinister Six Minus One.
It was almost as good as I thought it would be. I always love Tom Holland and Zendaya as Peter and MJ; I think they have the best chemistry of the various permutations of Peter Parker in love, and back in Homecoming I was rooting for him to fall for Michelle even before that magical moment when she said, “Call me MJ.” I was truly moved by the scene when Garfield-Spidey rescues MJ and gets some redemption for failing to save his Gwen.
I had managed to avoid spoilers enough to be surprised by Aunt May’s fate and impressed by the way they wove Uncle Ben’s famous words into the story: “With great power comes great responsibility.” In fact, I was impressed by the way they wove all eight Spider-Man movies into one multi-dimensional reality.
I have a bone to pick with the resolution of the movie’s central issue, Peter wanting the world to forget that he is Spider-Man. The matter is resolved by having the world forget Peter Parker altogether, which is vastly different from what he and Dr. Strange were attempting early on. That’s what keeps me from agreeing with the critic who declared Spider-Man: No Way Home the best Marvel movie ever.
It’s pretty close to the top, though. For what it’s worth, it didn’t quite knock Spider-Man 2 off my personal favorite Spidey film list, although with Molina in the cast and just as wonderful as the first time, it had a fair shot.
Spider-Man has been a part of my life for almost 60 years now (Good grief, that makes me sound old), so I care about these characters like old friends. I appreciate the way the recent films have reinvented the Spider-Man mythos while remaining true to the spirit of the original books. And this one is easily the best of the post-Endgame Marvel efforts.
(The post-credit scenes have lost their charm, though. The second one especially felt more like a trailer for next month’s Doctor Strange movie.)
“Hello, Muse, are you out there?” he asked, taking a deep breath and positioning his fingers to write. “How can I serve you today?”
The fingers trembled a bit, but no words came. He looked up and saw the phone, sitting on a box on a book stand, the little electronic connection to the world that he carried in his pocket.
“Pick me up,” the electronic toy beckoned. “Lose yourself in me.”
“N-no,” he told the toy. “I promised myself I —“
“You would what? Deny yourself a news update? Keep yourself in suspense as to whether the package really will be out for delivery today? Not know whether anyone Liked your comment? Miss all your friends’ comments? You know you want to. Pick me up. Come on. You wanna.”
He stared at the persistent electric nag and saw his addiction. It had become his go-to time filler, a place to glaze his eyes while he was between tasks — even during a pause in his task. It always pulled him in and away from his real life.
But he had made a promise to himself.
“I will not let you control me,” he said, even as the impulse took control and it began to require serious energy to fight it. In the quiet of the morning, a raging soundless battle ensued.
He began to inch forward in his analog task by making a new promise, to reward himself with a digital peek when he completed his morning goal. In the corner of his mind, he held onto a conviction that it was OK to break a promise and yield to temptation if you agree not to yield until after resisting for a certain period of time.
He employed the old “one moment at a time” tactic: He could resist the temptation for just this moment, right? And now this moment … and on and on.
The words kept flowing onto the page, and the temptation waned a little, but the fear he could yield at the next pause remained. “Better not to pause, then, mate,” he told himself, and he kept going.
Having set a goal to fill three pages before allowing himself to peek at the phone, he declared victory at the bottom of the fourth page, even if his victory included, in part, several paragraphs written in the third person about being addicted to looking at his cellphone.
“Take that, you miserable electronic demon,” he said, reaching for the device. Just before he picked it up, however, he stopped, looked into the sky, shook his head, and left it alone.
“You’ll regret this!” the phone screamed at him as he walked away. But he never did.
It’s been eight years since I posted this on Facebook in April 2014.
There’s an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I’m not sure about interesting, but I’m beginning to think we live in ridiculous times.
I watch the social media go by, and I watch the politicians do their dance, and I watch and I watch and I watch.
And the more I watch, the more I think I nailed it eight years ago.
There’s nothing wrong with the world that couldn’t be helped by a good belly laugh.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone, in the middle of a huge argument or a heated battle or a self-righteous declaration, just waved their arms and said, “Wait, wait, wait. You know what? This is ridiculous!”
I think I found my Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 2 at Goodwill for pennies. Maybe it was a rummage sale. In either case I did not spend much money to obtain this 3,000-page behemoth. And every so often I pick it up and browse through it, like I did Sunday morning.
Fun facts I learned this time:
+ Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley were two different women, mother and daughter. Mom wrote about the rights of women in 1770, and daughter wrote Frankenstein in 1817. I had never thought about it, but whenever I saw either name I had always assumed the reference was to one woman.
+ Thomas Hardy wrote a very cool poem on the occasion of his 86th birthday.
+ I noticed an essay about “Racism in Heart of Darkness” that I’ll have to check out sometime. During an earlier foray through Norton, I found Joseph Conrad’s great essay “The Task of the Artist” which is his preface to that novel he wrote about the ship Narcissus. I wonder how modern literature professors deal with that title, anyway?
+ The main thing I learned Sunday is “The Task of the Artist” is not the only awesome essay in this book.
I settled on reading “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (pen name of Eric Blair), because I figured the man wrote my favorite novel about politics and how nefarious people in that field misuse the English language, so it’s a safe bet I would enjoy this essay.
And oh, dear George/Eric. I love how he writes. Here are two of the best snippets, which only hint at his main theme, which is how sloppy use of language makes people sloppy and stupid. (And of course, reducing a dense essay to less than a dozen words does it no justice.)
This would make a great meme, although when surrounded by its context it’s even more powerful:
“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
I’m breathless. In an essay about writing clearly and precisely, those two sentences are crystal clear and undeniably precise.
Toward the end he offers six rules for clearer language, rules that every editor should consider posting next to his keyboard:
i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word when a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I have now found two immortal essays while browsing Norton. I think I should browse Norton more often.
Today is the 100th day of 2022. April 10, 2022. I remember when 2022 was the far-distant future. Heck, if I lived to 2022, I’d be closing in on my 70th birthday. Are you kidding me?
Come on, I remember watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and thinking it was about the far-distant future. If you really push me, I’ll confess that I read 1984 and prayed that THAT far-distant future could be avoided. (Actually, 1984 was a pretty good year and far less totalitarian than today.)
Dwelling on what became of our vision of the far-distant future makes it feel like the years went by in a flash. But, you know, a year is a very long time.
For that matter, an hour is a long time. The other day (actually, earlier this morning as I write this) I wrote “A possible first chapter,” the 533-word blog post I posted April 7, in less than an hour. There are dozens of stories about musicians or poets who have a huge hit single and admit, “I never thought that would happen. I banged the darn thing out in 20 minutes.” There’s an idea: An album of 12 hit songs whose composers claim they wrote in 20 minutes. You could title it Four Hours of Miracles. OK, give me 20 minutes to come up with a better title.
A month is a long time. On March 10 it was still winter, the NCAA tournament field had not been selected, almost nobody knew anything about the St. Peter’s basketball team, Will Smith was known as a talented actor and gentle man, and — you get the idea. A lot happens in any given month.
Time seems to go by in an instant, until you remember where you were and who you are at the beginning of that time. We are approaching the 10th anniversary of moving into our brand new home, and it feels like it went by in a flash, until I look up and realize that the books I’ve written and/or published take up 9 inches of shelf space that would have been 2 inches in April 2012. I look out the window and see the fence we built around the back yard so the dogs could run and play without a leash or our supervision. I walk into the basement and sit down in the entertainment room or lie down in the bedroom or use the bathroom where concrete and storage area existed when we moved in. All of those things have been there for as long as I can remember, but they did not exist 10 years ago, and it occurs to me that 10 years does not “flash” by.
It feels like 100 days zipped by in an instant, but look how much has changed already. Most people in the USA didn’t give Ukraine a thought on Jan. 1. Here in Green Bay we were glibly making plans for cheering the Packers in the upcoming Super Bowl. Placed in that context, it feels like a long time ago, and it was.
It’s noon and I should stop here to feed the dogs their lunch. I think it was 11:35 that I started wondering when the 100th day of the year is, looked it up and typed the first sentence of this blog post. Do you see, now, how much you can do when you take the time?
The legend of how George Harrison didn’t realize he was plagiarizing “He’s So Fine” when he wrote “My Sweet Lord” is the stuff of legends (and settled lawsuits) by now, but the other day I realized another thing George “stole” and never noticed until 53 years after the fact.
The two best songs on one of the Beatles’ best albums, Abbey Road, are written by Harrison. “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” I think I’ve seen him admit that he liked the phrase James Taylor used in his song “Something in the Way She Moves” and used it as a launching point for his own song.
It’s ridiculous that I never noticed he kind of did the same thing with his other masterpiece, which begins … wait for it …
“Little darling …”
There’s nothing wrong with this. Heck, Elton John also riffed off the classic Diamonds tune when he wrote the intro to “Crocodile Rock.”
In fact, stealing bits and entire melodies from other songs is an ancient tradition. Woody Guthrie used the melody of the Carter Family’s “When the World’s On Fire” when he wrote a little something called “This Land is Your Land.” You do know Francis Scott Key grafted the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” onto the melody of an English drinking song, right?
There is a haunting melody that, if you start humming it, half the room will sing one set of lyrics and the other half will sing another: “What child is this who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping?” or “Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously.” It’s not clear who paired William Chatterton Dix’s 1865 poem with the melody of the 1580ish English ballad “Greensleeves,” but it was brilliant.
It used to be commonplace to take a familiar melody and add new words to it. It’s only when the lawyers got involved that it became taboo.
This is the 10th anniversary of Austin Kleon’s nifty book Steal Like An Artist, which essentially makes the point that there’s nothing original under the sun anyway; all artists are building on what’s already been discovered and molding it into their own creation.
I’m not sure at what point borrowing from elsewhere turns into plagiarism; to paraphrase the familiar Supreme Court justice’s comment, I can’t define plagiarism but I know it when I see it. But the result can be something wonderfully “original,” as when George “stole” from older work and crafted three very beautiful songs during that period of his growth as an artist.
