I got a new "job" and other stories
I'm a new contributor to "3QD." Assessing the post-pace of 'Stackers. Procrastination, or not. A gathering of writerly news and thought.
I will indulge in some mild navel gazing, the kind that other writers might recognize and forgive occasionally. Substack’s readers, it seems to me, are mostly writers. I hope my “regular” readers, less burdened by toiling over prose, will forgive this indulgence, too.
_Jaguar_-_Panthera_onca_swimming.jpg){kind=link}
“Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
I have taken on a new writing assignment, as if I need yet more prose-toil. But I think this will be exciting, too. This month, I’ll start as a contributor to 3 Quarks Daily. My first essay will appear soon, probably next week. Contributors have a five-week rotation, so I’ll have some time to regenerate and write. My plan is to use my pieces for “3QD” to goose the revision of my book, which now lies fallow (as it should). However, my first 3QD essay is a bit off that topic, since I chose to write about a recent YouTube video by Rick Beato and an old, old essay by John Philip Sousa.
I think the two musicians would hit it off well, even though their musical tastes diverge.
3 Quarks Daily will celebrate its twentieth year at the end of July. I very much respect what its editor Abbas Raza and his colleagues have accomplished, no doubt because of their dogged persistence. And the name? What’s up with the name? Here’s the explanation on the 3QD website:
When Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig postulated the existence of three new subatomic particles in 1964, Gell-Mann decided to name them “quarks”, an unusual word which James Joyce had used in Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” In present-day physics, there are more than three quarks, and some are said to have properties named strangeness and charm, which, we think, describe this website as well. We also meant the name to symbolize our connections to science, art, and literature; and we mistakenly thought it short and memorable.
You can see why I was interested in taking part.
I’ve subscribed to 3QD’s daily emails, which is handy. You can, too, just provide your email on the form that’s included on the website pages (every one of them, I think).
Is newsletter posting “lackadaisical” or newspapery?
I’ve trained my eyeballs on Bond Girl Bride’s old Kindle, which she gifted me after her new shinier version landed on our doorstep. It’s not exactly for reading, I’d say, but it does make the Durham County Public Library easier for me to use. I can do that from my living room couch, where I can flick through the virtual shelves and land a few titles (mostly non-fiction) in my “wishlist.” I’ve done this enough lately to make me feel that I need to send the Friends of the Library a check, since I’ve learned that public libraries have to shell out big bucks for the eBooks on their shelves. That makes me wonder if the eBooks in the library end up burdening the essential services of public libraries. See “Libraries struggle to afford the demand for e-books and seek new state laws in fight with publishers” from AP News.
On my hand-me-down Kindle, I just finished Calvin Trillin’s latest book, The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press (Amazon; Bookshop) a collection of some of his finest magazine pieces reflecting back to his work as a reporter in the South during the civil rights movement. He includes obituaries, which, unexpectedly for me, are really great reads.1 As the book’s title suggests, Trillin gathers his work around his life as a writer, and that makes it especially tasty for the community of writers—would-be, struggling, semi-accomplished, “arrived”—that Substack seems to have gathered.
Among my Kindle “highlights,” this from Trillin’s introduction:
I should mention that my own reporting for the past five or six decades has been overwhelmingly for magazines, and that magazine reporting is, compared to newspaper reporting, a lackadaisical calling. For fifteen years, I did a three-thousand-word piece for The New Yorker from somewhere in the United States every three weeks. When magazine writers heard that, they’d say, “How do you keep up that pace?” Newspaper reporters would say, “What else do you do?”
So, what is Substack writing? “Lackadaisical”? Newspapery frenetic?
When I look at my pace over the couple of years, it seems a newspapery “calling.” Posts every week, on Thursday mornings no less, at least for the first year or so. Second year, more or less the same, but on Fridays.
But now, well, now I’d say my posts are “seasonally adjusted.” Summers seem a good time to adopt The-New-Yorker-lackadaisical pace. And I think I’m not alone.
I’ve narrowed my morning reads to about 35 Substack newsletters that regularly appear—say, every couple of weeks at least.2 Another dozen or so I have maintained on my subscription list in hopes that their authors will come back someday. At least a quarter of my subscriptions haven’t appeared in my morning reading list in months; some writers have drawn back on post frequency, usually to every couple of weeks or even once a month.
This kind of pulling back is normal, and I think that it’s a sign of writers finding a comfortable pace. Or maybe discovering that they have said enough to scratch an itch of publication, and they just want to chill a bit. Writing should be fueled by wit and desire, not determined by a calendar.
Procrastination. Or is it percolation? Incubation?
A couple weeks ago I wrote to a friend far to the north and a little east, a regular writer-poet-artist, posting like clockwork, I note. “We have a remarkably clean kitchen, and I've been busy making dinners and baking,” I wrote. “Yesterday shepherd’s pie. Day before, scones ... blueberry ones. A few days before, clotted cream.” I added to my list of projects, too: “You know, the downstairs bathroom needs a bit of a spruce-up. Nah, but the pool3 filter needs a good spraying off, and there are hickory nuts swirling around.”
She wrote back, “I love this menu you’ve been curating—all comfort foods in times of need. (Also, I need that clotted cream recipe….) And cooking/baking is far more satisfying than cleaning the pool or bathroom or my floors or garden beds. I’m happy it’s raining today to keep me from that task!”
So, we all do this very ingenious procrastination, I guess.
My friend reassured me. “It’s not procrastination,” she said, “but percolation, incubation.” And she’s right.
As every writer knows, there are great and worthy tasks perfectly designed to avoid writing. A clean kitchen is of course a sign of writerly procrastination, but the human mind can invent so many things that merit foregoing the mind-breaking work of lifting a pencil. Still, you’d think that eventually the procrastinator’s “to-do” list would dwindle. Nope, the list is a miraculous self-replenishing fountain of tasks. Yesterday, I spent a good part of midday fixing a tire on a manure spreader, so there’s that.
Many are the ways of procrastination. Soon, I shall be fully percolated. Soon, my shell will crack open after long incubation.
Got a comment?
Tags: writer, burnout, subscription, substack, red-neck pool, procrastination, quarks, 3qd, kindle, ebook, library
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
“While reporting on a barbecue-related contretemps among the staffers at Texas Monthly, he has a meal with the kind of fellow that a lesser writer might describe as ‘heavyset.’ Trillin would never reach for such off-the-shelf and impolite verbiage. Instead, he writes, the man had ‘a midsection that reflects a 40-year interest in Texas barbecue.’ Multiply that kind of observation across a career and you have the foundation, like a Cajun cook’s roux, of the Trillin style.” Garner, Dwight. “With Wit and Understatement, a Press Veteran Reflects on His Trade.” The New York Times, January 22, 2024, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/books/review/calvin-trillin-the-lede.html.
Abbas Raza: “I felt very strongly that we should look at all intellectual fields including those of science and so we started doing this. And 3 Quarks kind of took off in its readership and we got more and more readers and also some very prominent names like Richard Dawkins who wrote to us saying, ‘I really love 3 Quarks,’ and that thrilled us.” Kampe, Adam. “An Audio Interview with Abbas Raza of 3 Quarks Daily.” National Endowment for the Arts. A Kind of Beauty, 2013. https://www.arts.gov/stories/magazine/2013/3/kind-beauty/audio-interview-abbas-raza-3-quarks-daily.
Here’s the caution, or one of them: “While one hardcover copy of [bestselling author Robin] Cook’s latest novel costs the library $18, it costs $55 to lease a digital copy — a price that can’t be haggled with publishers. And for that, the e-book expires after a limited time, usually after one or two years, or after 26 checkouts, whichever comes first. While e-books purchased by consumers can last into perpetuity, libraries need to renew their leased e-material.” Haigh, Susan. “Libraries Struggle to Afford the Demand for E-Books and Seek New State Laws in Fight with Publishers.” AP News, March 12, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/libraries-ebooks-publishers-expensive-laws-5d494dbaee0961eea7eaac384b9f75d2.
The obit for Molly Ivins was my favorite, but just by a hair. In his review of the book, Dwight Garner wrote that “Trillin has long been more in demand as a eulogist, in Manhattan’s interlocking journalism and literary worlds, than probably anyone alive…. I’ve known people to attend the funerals of people they’ve never met because word had spread that Trillin would be speaking, in the manner that an N.B.A. nonfan might attend a Knicks game solely because he’d heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem.” Same goes for his work in obits.
Molly Ivins, you may remember, commented on US Representative James M. Collins (R-Dallas, Texas), saying “If his IQ slips any lower we'll have to water him twice a day.” She got in hot water for that but, in typical Molly Ivins fashion, was able to use it as a nice refreshing hot bath.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been astounded when I get a new subscriber or the mysterious “follower” whose profile announces “Reads 459.” How can anyone really pay attention to hundreds of Substack newsletters? (And, really, does anyone know what a “follower” actually means?)
Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? It’s not. Just a gussied up livestock waterer, big and round, fitted with a modest filter pump. A little plastic doo-dad floats in the current spreading chlorine from a tablet hidden inside. But the set up cools us in the summer heat, when BGB and I can sip wine or beer as we sit with water up to our necks.
Oh boy, I saw myself in this one Mark! As you know, I decided some time ago that would did not want to work toward any schedule and that I would publish when something was “ready.” There are times when I wonder if I’ll ever hit publish again … but then I realize that I write to figure things out and I’ll never stop doing that, so I just have to give it time. I’ve got a piece coming soon.
A big part of me deciding to break from the once-a-week metronome was just my recoiling from all the growth/profit imperatives that push that agenda. I just don’t want to engage with those.