what I'm doing now #9
Biking around East Vancouver, reading The Ginger Man, finding Z a new apartment, and trying to become a planner.
biking around East Vancouver
Biking is a great way to achieve my daily goal of exercising. Seattle is prohibitively hilly but Vancouver has a great network of bike routes allocated on streets with sparse car traffic. They have a detailed PDF file available online that maps their location and marks them with useful information like incline and degree of separation from car traffic. I came up with a great acronym to remember the street names of the main bike routes in the area: W.A.L.K.
reading The Ginger Man
I bought a copy last summer and finally started it last week. I can see why Cormac McCarthy liked it. It also reminds me a lot of Fear and Loathing in Last Vegas. After finishing the seventh chapter I sat down and wrote an
initial reviewThe Ginger Man (1955)
by J. P. Donleavy
I’ve read seven chapters so far. Here are some thoughts and some excerpts.
Describing Kenneth O’Keefe’s arrival in a coastal Irish village to visit his friend Sebastian Bullion Dangerfield at his home, who greets O’Keefe at the door:
It was a steep hill up to Balscaddoon. Winding close to the houses and the neighbor’s eyes having a look. Fog over the flat water. And the figure hunched up the road. On top it leveled and set in a concrete wall was a green door.
Within the doorway, smiles, wearing white golfing shoes and tan trousers suspended with bits of wire.
O’Keefe the visitor takes in the scenery:
Standing on the shaggy grass he gave a shrill whistle as he looked down precipitous rocks to the swells of sea many feet below.
Delightfully written.
Later in the book, describing Dangerfield’s tiny new home:
[You] didn’t want to walk too fast in the front door or you’d find yourself going out the back.
I purposefully went into the book blind and I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that its writing style is quite experimental. Stream of consciousness, unquoted dialogue mashed in. It reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson for its style and subject matter. Lecherous, base protagonists hurtling through life incurring all manner of debts with no regard for consequence and no semblance of restraint. But in this one we catch more glimpses of the desperation and self-loathing that plauge rabid gluttons following their excesses and that trigger further indulgence. Here the aftermath of one of Dangerfield’s odious bursts of verbal abuse towards his wife regarding her family:
A very red face. Guilt. Grinding the teeth. Soul trying to get out of the mouth, swallowing it back into the body. Shut out the sobs.
In the first sentence of the very next paragraph Dangerfield is no longer at his house but at the bar:
He ordered a bottle of stout and a Gold Label, telling the boy to bring him another stout and Gold Label.
This is one of the objects of the author’s experimentation, time. Even on the lower gear of dialogue the speed is set high with snappy back-and-forth, each speaker on a new line, speech bare but the quotation marks. And when the author doesn’t want to dwell on certain scenes, he accelerates through them by compounding dialogue and action into dense morsels:
They had one more round of stout and she turned and smiled and said that she must be going home. And may I take you? That’s all right. I insist. It’s really not necessary. For the joy that’s in it then. O.K.
They set off along Suffolk Street, into the Wicklow Street and up the Great George’s. And over there Thomas Moore was born. Come in and see it, a nice public house indeed. But I must go home and wash my hair. But just a quick one.
In they went. The embarrassed figures looking at them and bird whispering. The man showed them to a booth, but Mr. Dangerfield said that they were just in for a fast one.
O surely, sir and it’s a grand evening. ‘Tis that.
The author slows the pace the most when he puts us inside Dangerfield’s head amongst his thoughts. Him regarding his wife:
Long limbed Marion settled in the chair. What makes you so tall and slender. You raise your eyelids and cross your legs with something I like and wear sexless shoes with sexiness. And Marion I’ll say this for you, you’re not blatant. And when we get our house in the West with Kerry cattle out on the hills sucking up the grass and I’m Dangerfield K.C., things will be fine again.
Like moments of contemplation imply pause. We linger with the protagonist’s thoughts.
It continues:
A tram pounding by the window, grinding, swaying and rattling on its tracks to Dalkey. A comforting sound. Maps shaking on the wall. Ireland a country of toys. And maybe I ought to go over to Marion on the couch.
Soon and without warning the author teleports us into the next scene:
In the bedroom, Dangerfield rubbing stockinged feet on the cold linoleum.
I see many similarities to Cormac McCarthy’s writing. Most obvious is dialogue, written without attribution, qualification, or descriptive supplement. Deft and witty, stripped of boilerplate and stilts. McCarthy took it a step further by dropping the quotation marks.
Another obvious similarity to McCarthy’s writing is the grammatically irreverant use of nonsentences. Declarative phrases stating what there is. Subject only. McCarthy’s use of these is ample yet perhaps more restrained and refined. Donleavy showers us with them. Another choice that quickens the pace of his writing.
A third and more subtle similitude is in the varying order that clauses appear between periods. Sentences structured shrewdly for effect and interest. For example, to withhold predominant details and reveal them at the end to simulate their discovery. From the first excerpt I shared:
On top it leveled and set in a concrete wall was a green door.
Two structural inversions in one sentence but most important is the second. The green door’s position at the end of the sentence grants it importance, intrigue even. We anticipate crossing the threshold.
Donleavy’s sentence structures are most pleasing when they eliminate commas and let his words come into direct contact. Reproducing an excerpt I shared at the beginning:
Standing on the shaggy grass he gave a shrill whistle as he looked down precipitous rocks to the swells of sea many feet below.
It’s vivid in part because each detail blends into the next. Instead of being given parts one at a time, we experience the image fluidly as one. McCarthy uses this technique as well. In his magnum opus Blood Meridian he conjures striking images from masterfully engineered sentences. Here is the fourth sentence of the novel:
Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.
Sentences like these are carefully configured to eliminate cruft like “there are” and even suffixes like “–ing” that weaken verbs. McCarthy opts for a touch of ambiguity by placing “darker woods” first instead of putting it after “beyond that” and consequently doubling “that”:
rags of snow and beyond that darker woods that harbor yet a few last wolves.
He also rejects the “–ing” solution to the problem:
rags of snow and beyond that darker woods harboring yet a few last wolves.
It is up to the writer and their sense of style to evaluate their options. But they have to know how to generate them in the first place.
A fourth technique that Donleavy and McCarthy (and Hemingway) employ is generous use of “and” to string together images. A snippet of an excerpt from The Ginger Man shared earlier:
They had one more round of stout and she turned and smiled and said that she must be going home.
Blood Meridian contains extreme examples. Here is a single sentence near the end of chapter thirteen:
They trampled the spot with their horses until it looked much like the road again and the smoking gunlocks and sabreblades and girthrings were dragged from the ashes of the fire and carried away and buried in a separate place and the riderless horses hazed off into the desert and in the evening the wind carried the ashes and the wind blew in the night and fanned the last smoldering billets and drove forth the last fragile race of sparks fugitive as flintstrikings in the unanimous dark of the world.
That last bit is brilliant. Again:
[the wind] drove forth the last fragile race of sparks fugitive as flintstrikings in the unanimous dark of the world
of it.
finding Z a new apartment
Z’s apartment in Vancouver is a spacious one bedroom with a generous balcony. It is recently renovated with tons of integrated storage but it lacks a crucial feature: a second bedroom. I spend a lot of time at Z’s place and when I do we often both work from home. We have comfortable workstations at opposite corners of the living room but the distance does little when one of us actively participates in a virtual meeting. Noisecancelling headphones help but they also encourage us to speak loudly. And even when we both work silently it’s too easy to call out across the room to ask a question, share a thought, or make a comment. Both of us have a habit of voicing things soon after they occur to us. It makes for interesting conversation and for a disruptive work environment.
We’ve been keeping an eye out and finally we found a good two bedroom apartment in a lively, artsy part of East Vancouver. It costs almost the same as Z’s current place and it offers great physical separation between the two bedrooms. We will be sad to leave Z’s current place and the neighborhood it’s in, but we’re excited for the new chapter.
trying to become a planner
I don’t mean a city planner. Although I do fantasize about getting involved with municipal politics someday.
I mean I am trying to get better at making and adhering to plans in general. I get a lot of stuff done in my life through what I call
coherent impulseshow to progress without planning
The other day I picked a bunch of books from my library and tried to start each of them. I had
energy and free time. None stuck. Until one did. That’s the one I read.
Instead of forcing order, I let impulse lead. I have dozens and dozens of unread books sitting on my shelves, but for my next book I often buy a new one. If I’m currently interested in a particular topic or author, I follow that. Curiosity and appetite, though they may take you in new directions, make for great fuel. Working by willpower, on the other hand, drains you.
Unsupervised impulses can lead us down paths not worth pursuing. I try to guide myself gently onto one of various directions I’ve consciously chosen. I move in unpredictable bursts but I move freely. I make progress in uneven quantities but I make progress.
, which have proved effective but lack certain special powers particular to planning. I’ve been ruminating on it and noticing when people make reference to it in their way of working.
Kiefer mentioned in his Approachable Music podcast that he keeps a to-do list and everyday he attends to one item at a time. I assume many people follow this approach. But I don’t. I keep to-do lists but my adherance to them is erratic. I suppose part of the problem is that many items have no inherent deadline and even those that do don’t threaten much consequence. If I for example neglect to plan an itinerary for a trip, I can still show up and improvise as long as my flights and hotel are booked. And that’s what I did in 2019 when I went on my multimonth trip abroad to Mexico, New York, and Europe. I enjoyed the fruits of spontaneity and just-in-time internet searches, but without a doubt I missed out on experiences that research and forethought would’ve produced. I want to reduce these kinds of losses by procrastinating less and planning more often. I want to change my habit. So I’m trying to consciously draw my attention to the benefits of planning and override the anxious avoidance that thwarts my planning impulses.
Jared Henderson, a former professor who is now a literary YouTuber, mentioned that he keeps a list of books he will read. I don’t. I keep track of books that I might want to read by saving them on Goodreads, but I never reference that list when deciding which book to read next. My methods are spontaneous and informally organized. I try out audiobooks on Spotify and Libby and continue only if they stick. I buy books impulsively and add them to my growing library of unreads. When I am ready to start a new book I eye my collection shiftily and grab the candidates my whims command me to and then I bring them to a comfortable seat in my apartment where I select one uneasily and crack it open. Then I read stingily, hesitant to imply by reading more than a couple paragraphs that I’ve now committed to My Next Book, that this is it, I must read this book through now or else I will have
left one unfinishedhow to ditch books
(Originally posted on okjuan.medium.com.)
Starting a new book is exciting. It’s like putting on a brand new pair of shoes on a sunny morning, with no puddles in sight. Sadly, the novelty wears off. Then, there’s that uncomfortable feeling at the prospect of leaving the book unfinished. The same book that starts as an exciting little activity becomes a nagging reminder that you failed to reach a goal.
Nobody likes starting a book and failing to finish it. So much so, I suspect, that it discourages us from starting a new one, in fear of not reaching the end. After all, who signs up for a marathon that they don’t expect to finish? Even if you ran an impressive 20 miles, you wouldn’t get the exhilaration of crossing the finish line and the satisfaction of officially achieving a commendable, well-defined goal that other people recognize and admire.
But is reading a book really about reading every single page that someone put between two covers? On principle, I think people would agree reading is about getting exposed to ideas that inform and influence the way we think. Surely, then, we can be done with a book regardless of whether we read it from beginning to end. And if we’ve “finished” the book in this way, shouldn’t we walk away satisfied and guilt-free?
Break Your New Year’s Resolution
Setting a goal number of books to read can foster the habit of reading regularly, a habit we all admire and covet. However, it’s easy to get carried away with trying to make measurable progress at the expense of approaching your actual goal. If you get fixated on officially finishing a book, you might be forgetting why you wanted to read it in the first place. By ditching a book when you feel you’ve had enough of it, you’re staying true to the real reason you set that goal of reading some special number of books by Christmas time.
In Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, the authors tell a true story about a government that offered civilians bounty for killing rats in an effort to mitigate the local rat infestation. Specifically, they offered people money for each rat tail they brought in. They figured they could reliably track progress on the pest problem without having to handle the corpses. The plan backfired completely. Crafty entrepreneurs realized that they could capture a rat, cut off its tail, and then release it, so that it would live on to reproduce: more rats, more tails, more money. The pest problem worsened significantly.
But why all the gossip about rodents and dishonest bounty hunters? Well, Weinberg and McCann’s point is that metrics can be counterproductive. In the case of reading books, if you worry too much about how many books you’ve read front-to-back, you stray from your objective of learning and growing. Maybe you should change your metric or add a new one: the number of books checked out of the library, or the number of books you read for at least one hour. Anything that helps you make real progress and not counting rat tails.
Avoid the Sunk-Cost Fallacy
Books aren’t perfect. Many of them are good. Many others are just okay. Sometimes, you benefit by leaving a book unfinished and moving on to another instead of persevering through to the end, regardless of how far you’ve made it. In that case, by quitting the book, you’re overriding a psychological flaw and making a more rational choice.
The sunk-cost fallacy, as defined in Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman is:
The decision to invest additional resources in a losing account, when better investments are available.
We fall prey to this error when we stick stubbornly with a book just because of the time we’ve already sunk into it. If this book is no longer doing it for you, move on. There are millions of other books and many of them are better than this one. If you can cut your losses and push through the unpleasantness that comes with doing so, you’ve likely made the optimal choice.
Read Other Books
If you feel guilty about not finishing a book you’re currently reading, you probably won’t start a new book. And so, if the book you’re reading loses your interest, you’ll end up losing steam and maybe reading no book at all. Unless it is important to you to finish this specific book, why not move on and keep your momentum going? By leaving a book unfinished and feeling good about it, you allow yourself to start a new book with excitement instead of guilt.
You’re Not Absorbing Much Anymore
We’ve all finished reading a paragraph only to realize that we didn’t absorb much of the information at all. It can happen when we’re having trouble focusing, but it can also happen when you’ve lost interest. That’s okay. It might be time to move on. Life is long, you can come back to this book in some weeks, months, or even years if it’s a book you think is worth reading eventually. By moving on, you are valuing results above all else.
Sacrifice Depth for Breadth
If you learn to ditch books with confidence, you’ll cover more variety of material. I think this is true not only because you start the next book sooner, but also because you avoid the reading slump you’ll inevitably hit when you’ve committed to a book that you have no interest in reading. By moving on to another book, you’re covering more ground when it isn’t worth staying put and drilling down for more.
It’s Not Worth Your Time
You might benefit a lot from a book early on, but less so in later chapters. Perhaps you’ve effectively satisfied your curiosity, or maybe the book’s value is distributed unevenly across its sections. Regardless, you’re facing diminishing returns and the book might not be worth your time anymore. By ditching the book, you’re reacting intelligently to a waning profit.
Conclusion
If we choose to finish a book, let’s make that choice for a good reason, and not because leaving it unfinished feels like failure. Moreover, let’s relish the opportunity to make the smart, if counterintuitive, choice of bailing on a book when it isn’t worth the time. If we overcome the mental hurdles that stop us from ditching a book even when we are justified, we’ll be free to read more widely and engage more deeply.
.
I’m trying something new. I’m writing a list of books I intend to read this year. In a way, my dabbling with planning in this way is a sort of coherent impulse. The coherence comes from the deliberate intention to exploit the benefits of forethought and the impulse is the list of fifteen or so books I slashed out based on my current interest and appetite as well as the current contents of my shelves. The list is unordered so I may choose to read them in any order I like and read multiple at the same time if I so wish. I will still entertain my penchant for sampling books impulsively via Spotify and Libby, but my main reading project this year will be dictated by my list.
what’s next?
Keep biking. Continue striving to do every day each of the following: work, read, exercise, write, enjoy, grow, discuss, plan, and socialize
Finalize Z’s moving plans.
Go snowboarding with Z multiple times.
Read the rest of The Ginger Man to keep up a good reading pace for the year. After I finish it I will start Malone Dies unless it doesn’t
suit my appetitehow to progress without planning
The other day I picked a bunch of books from my library and tried to start each of them. I had
energy and free time. None stuck. Until one did. That’s the one I read.
Instead of forcing order, I let impulse lead. I have dozens and dozens of unread books sitting on my shelves, but for my next book I often buy a new one. If I’m currently interested in a particular topic or author, I follow that. Curiosity and appetite, though they may take you in new directions, make for great fuel. Working by willpower, on the other hand, drains you.
Unsupervised impulses can lead us down paths not worth pursuing. I try to guide myself gently onto one of various directions I’ve consciously chosen. I move in unpredictable bursts but I move freely. I make progress in uneven quantities but I make progress.
, in which case I will pick up one of the other books on my list for 2025.