After a long day of apartment hunting in a city I don’t know as well as I should, I’m lucky enough to sit down to a round of Old Fashioneds with a fellow poet and a historian, friends in this city where I’ll be working for the next year, writing a nonfiction book on contemporary art and Civil Rights history.
The historian is finishing a book; the research has taken years, and now he’s thinking about the very different work of shaping a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a manuscript. He remarks, to me and the more prolific poet, how much he wishes he’d had some guidance or advice about writing when he was in graduate school. He says, You guys, you know a lot about writing, and you talk about writing, and goes on to explain how he felt, when he was in school, that discussion about these matters of craft was discouraged, as if a historian’s concerns should always be elsewhere.
We briefly discuss the work of finishing a book before turning to a second round, and other points of common interest. After another hour or two, and some seriously good food between us, we elect to depart to our respective perches, declaring our intention to make such summits regularities in the coming year.
*
The next day, I drive two hours west to see my parents, who are renovating an 80-year-old farmhouse, originally built by my great grandfather. They’ve made some alterations to the plan of the main floor, expanded the kitchen and the bedrooms in the gables, reroofed the whole thing, and added a spectacular porch on the back side of the house, looking across the terraces my great grandfather shaped for his farm, long gone into memory.
I work with them in the Alabama heat all day, only occasionally pausing as the temperature and humidity catch up with me. We eat a great dinner, then adjourn to the air conditioning in my grandparents’ house next door (a house also built by my great grandfather, only 50 years ago). There, the remote falls to my father, who dials in a string of shows on the DIY network about homeowners biting off more than they can chew.
These shows are comical–a single man trying to install a skylight in his Boston townhome (he doesn’t have a good saw, doesn’t know how to frame drywall), a couple in a New York co-op installing a breakfast bar (they’ve never heard the phrase “measure twice, cut once”). But they’re also meant to be instructive, whether by negative example (“Don’t do this”) or through direct demonstration (the friend shows up with a special tool, &c).
Are we watching these shows because of the comedy? Are we watching to find someone whose foibles and failures are so much worse than our own that we look good by comparison? Are we just stuck in a mode of thinking about structure, about wood and fastener and tool? Are we hoping to learn something?
*
I know what my friend, the historian, means–how the dialogue about writing, how the deliberate attention to writing, seems so often sequestered in the English Department of the Creative Writing Department, when it’s useful, when it’s necessary to anyone who’s trying to communicate effectively, even gracefully, how the suggestion that we talk about how we write may be taken as a sign of some apocalypse of literacy or of the unnecessary growth of writing programs and the conversations that must be hazarded to justify them, though, again, as we turned to our second round of Old Fashioneds, and then to our locally-sourced succotash and heirloom tomato salad, we talked naturally about how the drinks, about how the plates were made because our talk was a means of processing what we tasted, and because what we tasted was important, not only to our palates, but as well to our conversation: our talk would mean that we would eat again together, that we would enjoy ourselves and be enlarged in our talk and in our friendship. We talk about what we taste so we can become better eaters–not because we’ve watched too many episodes of Top Chef and are just waiting to use a pile of phrases, like Needs some acid. We talk about what we eat because it’s a form of attention to our time together. So we talk about what we taste, in part, to become better friends.
This is, of course, all under the placemat–we’re not really thinking too consciously about this; we’re just doing it–until the waiter comes around to gather our plats and works through some carefully-chosen verbiage designed to heighten our appreciation of this already-amazing food: we taste the taste, but we are meant, also, to think about the art.
*
You won’t have this conversation at Chick-Fil-A. Or a Burger King. Or Whatever. But I don’t think this means, as is so often suggested, that this talk is elitist–or academic in the sense of without consequence.
The reason we talk about such things, I’m sure, is because we want to learn something–and because we want what entertainment we can draw from such talk and because we want to see something that will make us feel better about what we do and better at what we do and because we live in this place where we have to keep making up sentences, good ones, to tell the people we respect that we are with them. I hear you.
The reason we talk about such things is the same reason we watch D-I-Y shows–because as much as we will enjoy the satisfaction of doing it ourselves, doing it somewhat solo, we’re never really doing it alone. We are always–watching TV, talking with the hardware store employee, reading the liner notes to a CD or the digital booklet that comes with the download, watching the YouTube interview with the writer we read most often–we are always trying to learn to do it, whatever it is, better.
Otherwise, what are we doing?