Birds Sing from the Heart, Revisited

Five years ago this week, author Erik Deckers invited me to guest-post on his blog. "Birds Sing from the Heart" was the result, one that still holds up years later. Here it is in its entirety.

Erik recently invited me to discuss “My Writing Process,” a dead-horse topic if there ever were one.

But I’ll beat that horse anyway, just because Erik asked.

Here you go:

Where I find ideas. The wellsprings of ideas are many and inexhaustible. The ones I return to again and again are:

• Other writers—from the sublime (e.g., Emerson, Faulkner, Sartre, Updike) to the ridiculous (names withheld)
  
• Pop culture (songs, movies, TV shows, blogs, etc.)
  
• Current events (AKA La Comédie humaine)
  
• Memories, dreams, reflections
  
• Other people’s observations (my wife’s, in particular)

How I write the ideas down. My secret sauce is no secret. Writing isn’t thinking. It isn’t even writing. “Writing is revision,” as Tracy Kidder says. “Write once, edit five times,” David Ogilvy urged office mates.” Priceless advice. Your fifth draft may not excel, but it will beat your first by a long shot. And, as you edit five times, be like the birds. An ornithologist mentioned during a recent NPR interview that birds’ voice boxes are lodged deep within their chests. “Birds sing from the heart,” she said. You should, too. Readers like it and will respond accordingly.

How I assure quality. Copy’s never error free, but I try hard to check my facts. In fact, I often spend more time fact-checking sources than writing and editing. (Don’t hem and haw: fact-checking is enlightening.) And I proofread, both twice before I hit publish and twice afterwards. Boring task, but my reputation’s on the line.

How I spread ideas. Outposting has helped aggrandize my scribblings more than any of my other activities. Adman Gary Slack advises clients to invest in “other people’s audiences” more than their own. He’s 100% on the money.

For more advice about writing. If you’re hungry for sound advice, listen to Paul Simon and Chuck Close discuss the creative process in a podcast for The Atlantic. You’ll learn more than you will by reading 50 how-to books, with these four noteworthy exceptions:

• The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William E. Blunder
• On the Art of Writing Copy by Herschel Gordon Lewis
• Secrets of a Freelance Writer by Bob Bly
• Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

Oh yeah, don’t forget No Bullshit Social Media.

Above: Little Bird by Jose Trujillo. Oil on canvas. 14 x 14 inches.

Bounce

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

— Omar Khayyam

Americans are happier than ever, according to Gallup.

In fact, 6 of 10 (59%) are "thriving," the pollster says—a record number since it launched the National Health and Wellbeing Index in 2008.

That number is up nearly 13 points since the appearance of Covid-19 last year, when the number of happy Americans plunged to 46% (tying the record low, reached during the Great Recession).

Gallup divvies Americans into three buckets it calls "thriving," "struggling" and "suffering." 

"Thriving" Americans rate their lives 7 or higher on a 10-point scale. Over 59% currently do so.

Not that you'd know it from news coverage and social media, but only 38% of Americans currently are "struggling;" and only 3%, "suffering."

That's far too many in my book; but, still, it's a minority. 

Gallup also measures worry.

Worry gripped 6 of 10 Americans during the pandemic.

It grips many fewer now—only 4 in 10.

Instead, most Americans—7 in 10—are enjoying their lives every day.

Less than 3 in 10 are ever bored.

Gallup claims the bounce is due to the availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, the reopening of in-person events, and the recovery of the economy.

I would add to those causes last November's exorcism of the incubus Trump. No doubt about it. Ding dong.

Although, as Gallup warns, the Delta variant of Covid-19 could again crimp our happiness, it's clear, altogether, we're a pretty happy bunch, even if we don't deserve our happiness.

"What is happiness?" Friedrich Nietzsche asked. 

"The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome."

So if you're feeling blue, get with the program: feel the power.

And put on a happy face.

NOTE: Be sure to click the embedded links above. They're guaranteed to make you happy.

Lest We Forget

If America forgets where she came from, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

— Carl Sandburg

Covid-19 has killed 625,000 Americans.

Yet Trump, the ever-impertinent troglodyte, asks, “Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything?”

Right about Covid-19? Really?

Ebola, lest we forget, killed two Americans. 

Two.

Obama, lest we forget, dealt with Ebola with dispatch. (Ebola, lest we forget, is the virus that, before it kills you, makes you bleed from the eyes, ears, and nose, as you feverishly vomit and shit and cough up blood.)

Obama eschewed willful ignorance and heeded the science.

Obama strategized, asking doctors to guide his decisions. 

Obama activated the CDC and DOD, deploying men and materiel to West Africa to halt the spread of Ebola "at its source."

Obama built frontline hospitals; trained West African healthcare workers (25,000 of them); initiated contact tracing; and buried victims' bodies. 

“Here’s the bottom line,” he said in October 2014. “The best way to stop this disease, the best way to keep Americans safe, is to stop it at its source—in West Africa.”

Two years after the first case was discovered there, the outbreak was halted.

But not without costs.

Eleven people were treated for Ebola in the US during the epidemic, most of them doctors who deployed to West Africa. They flew back to the US for treatment. Two of the eleven died.

Two.

Not 625,000; two.

Trump tweeted at the time, "If this doctor, who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola, then Obama should apologize to the American people and resign!"

And last May, Trump called Obama "an incompetent president—grossly incompetent."

Trump, incompetence incarnate—and the GOP's likely presidential candidate in three years.

GOP, you stand for amnesia, and for rot and dissolution.

I'll take leadership, any day.

“We are the United States of Amnesia," Gore Vidal once said. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt is the only thing free in the modern era.

— Ugwu Kelvin

Before there was water-cooler talk, there was scuttlebutt.

An 18th-century nautical term, a scuttlebutt was a cask of drinking water kept on deck for the crew.

Scuttlebutts had a gaping hole, so sailors could dip a cup into them. They would often gather around the ship's scuttlebutt to gossip.

The word compounded scuttle, meaning a "hole in a ship," and butt, meaning a "barrel."

Scuttle was a 15th-century term derived from the Spanish escotilla, meaning "hatch."

In battle, when a captain preferred to sink rather than surrender his vessel, he would order sailors to "scuttle the ship" by cutting holes in the hull.

The nautical term bore no relationship to the inland scuttle, meaning "dish," "cup," or "bucket." The inland word was a 14th-century borrowing from the Latin scutella, meaning "platter."

By the 19th century, shipboard rumors came to be known collectively as scuttlebutt, the maritime version of fake news—the lies rival newspaper publishers accused each other of printing in the 19th century.   

Inland rumors, on the other hand, when they didn't appear in newspapers were spread through the grapevine in the 19th century. In America, at least.

No sooner than Samuel Morse invented the telegraph (1844) did a company named Western Union string thousands upon thousands of miles of telegraph wire across the country. 

Americans thought the company's labyrinthine handiwork resembled a grapevine, and telegraph messages were said to arrive "through the grapevine."

During the Civil War, when a soldier wanted to vouch for a suspect rumor, he'd say, "I heard it through the grapevine," meaning "it must be true." 

Rumors themselves soon came to be known collectively as grapevine (or what the British would call humbug).

Now that you've heard them, be sure to share these facts with colleagues—on line or at the water cooler.

Flailing About

Johnson has been flailing about desperately.

— New York Magazine

The cognitive dissonance Republican Senator Ron Johnson suffers would pain an intelligent man, according to New York Magazine. Nonetheless, Johnson must wonder how he can call the louts who assaulted the Capitol on January 6 "tourists."

"Johnson has been flailing about desperately in search of a resolution to this contradiction," the magazine says.

The verb flail, meaning to "whip," is an 11th-century word that originally meant to "thresh" or "winnow." 

Knight wielding a "flail"

A flail was a Mediaeval farm tool made of wood and leather. Its name was borrowed from the Latin name for the same tool, flagellum, from which we also get the verb flagellate, meaning to "flog."

When we see a flail today, we think of knights doing battle, but the flail was never a weapon. 

Mediaeval artists merely convinced us it was.

By depicting flail-wielding knights in illuminated manuscripts, medieval artists led later viewers to imagine that these wily cavalrymen must have used flails to terrorize foes. 

But, the "flails" wielded by knights were actually goads—wood-and-rope cattle prods that somewhat resemble flails. Knights used goads to prod their horses.

Medieval flail

The spiked iron "flails" in museum collections today are in fact simulacra: 19-century copies of a 10-century weapon that never existed.

So when you read that Johnson is "flailing about," don't think of knights of old. 

To flail about means to "whip around," to "engage in erratic movements."