The Naked Beginner returns

A few months ago I posted a series of entries about my passage from stick-figure artist to wide-eyed beginner. I'd like to tell you a bit more about my artistic education and its psychological and emotional implications. The first two exercises that I practiced were called gesture drawing and contour drawing, both of which demanded that I look away from the paper in which I was drawing, keeping my eyes “locked” onto the object I was drawing and let feeling alone, not vision, guide my hand's path on the paper. After I got the hang of not looking at the paper as I drew, I started mixing looking and not looking.

I practiced the exercises in a number of different settings, some public, some private. Every night I'd do a drawing on a sketchbook dedicated to my night person, preparing myself to sleep, to dream, to shift my energies from the quotidian to the spectral (that means, from the sometimes petty preoccupations of daily life to the more fluid energies of the subconscious...).

On that sketchbook I started copying faces from the art books I had lying around the house. My wife studied art in college, and over the years she collected a series of books, some about art history, others about aspects of craft, others still purveys of great masters. As an art lover I too had bought a few art books. And you know what? I had never properly read the majority of art books in our modest library. To some degree the books made me feel bad about myself: bad for buying too many books, buying expensive books, buying books that I didn't read... I finally started reading the books, looking closely at some of the images, then reproducing a few. A bonus side-effect to my art education: my library doesn’t make me feel bad anymore!

I began filling in huge gaps in my knowledge of art history, and of history itself. I read a biography of Rodin. I read Gauguin's notebooks. And I drew faces: from Velasquez, Murillo, Picasso, Rembrandt, Fra Angelico, and a dozen others. The faces taught me a lot. You look closely, really closely, for twenty minutes or thirty minutes, and the face becomes a person; you invent a whole story for that face, and you begin to empathize with someone who has been dead for hundreds of years. A sparkle in someone's eyes, a shade of sadness, a mysterious smile... (Double-clicking the thumbnail images will magnify them and give you a microscopic view of my handiwork. It's kinda neat!)

A well-trained artist might find my sketches very basic, perhaps even full of unpardonable flaws. But, hey! A few weeks before I didn't believe I could draw altogether. You can imagine how happy my night person was with my offerings! It felt to me that I had entered a heightened state of creativity and awareness, of risk-taking, of permanent learning and discovery. I highly recommend the process and the state that comes with it. You know what is required? A sheet of paper and a pencil. If you don't have art books lying around the house, a magazine or a newspaper. Don't have those either? Look in the mirror and draw yourself!

Okay, you blog readers out there. Who's going to recognize these images and tell us exactly where they come from? Show us what you know, and we'll reward you with a virtual pat on the back.

You have no manners (and neither have I), part 6: Seven Pointers

We’ve been looking at how our sense of propriety, also known as “manners,” affects touch, language, food, and pretty much everything else we do. Now it’s time to make that famous list of pointers where we try to be intelligent and practical-minded.

1. I’ve often asked Americans to explain the rules of baseball to me. Everyone has always failed—the game is so deeply ingrained in their unconscious that they can’t verbalize the rules in a coherent and comprehensive order. Your sense of propriety is the same: it develops so early in life that you won’t be able to fully grasp it intellectually; it’s a nearly biological reflex by now. You take an awful lot of your tribe's customs for granted!
   
2. There are very few absolute propriety values, shared by all nations, cultures, and tribes. You should never assume a trait of yours is shared by all, or that it should be shared by all.
3. Looking at people from a culture different from yours, you might think that their manners are crazy, absurd, and unhealthy; and you might wonder why on Earth don’t they give it all up already. First, manners arise for reasons that at the outset may be quite logical. Second, those crazy people aren’t aware of their craziness, and in fact they don’t even consider themselves crazy—not in the least. Third, to them you’re just as crazy, absurd, and unhealthy. So… why don’t you give it all up already?
4. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” In other words, adapt the mores of the culture you visit or the country you move to. In France, say “Bonjour, Madame,” every time you enter the bakery—every single time, always! Entering a Catholic church, uncover your head—always! Entering a synagogue, cover your head—always!
5. Clashes of manners are inevitable. An overly sensitive introvert meets a brash extravert. The introvert finds the loudmouth extremely rude and insensitive. But the extravert considers the introvert terribly stifling. Whose manners ought to change, to accommodate the needs of the other? Oftentimes there are no fair solutions.
6. Although we learn most of our manners intuitively, from a very early age, we can also learn new behaviors as grownups. It takes discipline, sensitiveness, and imagination. But, most of all, it takes a little “distance,” the capacity to leave your own certainties at the door.
7. When someone invites you to dinner, ask what’s on the menu before you say “yes.”

You have no manners (and neither have I), part 5: Mangia, mangia!

As we have seen already, our deeply held feelings of propriety include matters of language and matters of physical contact (for instance, in the form of handshakes, kisses, and hugs in social settings). Today I have one word for you: Food.

Much of what we eat and how we eat is socially determined, from a very early age. If you grow up in a culture where drinking milk is considered healthy, you may find it very hard to actually believe that milk is bad for you—as it is indeed, if not for you personally, then for a great number of adults who can't quite digest milk and yet continue to drink it. If you come from an Asian culture—Japan, for instance—you might find the idea of drinking milk absolutely revolting, and you might find it hard to imagine why on Earth some people would even think of drinking glasses and glasses of the stuff.

You see, the beliefs are so deeply held that we can't quite grasp them; we can't question them; and we can't imagine that other people might see things differently.

Our beliefs about food go well beyond nutritional matters; they include matters of hospitality, of times and spaces shared together. Someone might think like this: Everyone knows meat is an essential part of one's diet. Meat is good for me. I like meat. Meat is good for you. You should like meat. You must like meat. You have no choice but to like meat. I'm going to serve you meat, and if you don't eat it you're not only crazy but rude as well, since you're telling me that I'm wrong to like meat. Mangia, mangia!

In 1988 I went to Berlin for the first time, when the Wall still divided the city. I stayed with a friend of mine for a week, a Brazilian of German descent whom I knew from our shared adolescence in São Paulo. A friend of his—a purely German woman—heard about my presence in the city, and she decided to invite me for dinner. She didn't tell me this, but she wanted to show the distinguished guest something typical of her land. Off I went to her home. Ten or twelve people met: friends of hers, friends of my friends, the sort of incoherent assembly that comes together once and once only. The centerpiece of the meal was a German delicacy, which my hostess had prepared at great cost to her: Eisbein. That's pig's knee. Yes, the knee of a humongous pig, served whole on a plate, with bones, gristle, ligaments, tendons, fat, and a little bit of meat hidden behind the rest of the pig's anatomy.

Each guest was served an entire knee. Plus trimmings, of course—potatoes, cabbage, and whatnot.

I sat looking at it for a long time. It was impossible, this late in the game, for me to pretend I was a vegetarian, or a vegan, or a fish eater, or a monk from a strange sect that only ate pasta and ice cream. No. I had to eat the pig. It had been prepared especially for me, lovingly, by a dedicated German hostess who had gone out of her way to welcome me, a complete stranger, into the bosom of her home.

It wasn't dinner, it was vivisection. The pig looked so pig-like you could hear its squeals. You know what it said? It didn’t say, “Hello, Pedro, I'm delighted to be eaten by you. I'll do my best to go down your throat smoothly. Trust me, we're on the same side here.” No. It said, “I’m a pig, for goodness’ sake. I should be playing in mud right now. If you eat me you’re nothing but a blue-eyed devil.”

After the longest time I took a thin slice of meat from one side of the knee, removed the fat and other anatomic paraphernalia as well as I could, and ate a small forkful of it. One of the guests, a hearty Pole, turned his attention to me. “What's your problem?” he asked. “Are you sick, or something?” He had finished his Eisbein already, and on his plate there remained only the bones. He had consumed, devoured, masticated, and sucked off everything else in his sight.

It has been reported that, in certain Arab communities where hospitality is of the utmost importance, a host might KILL you if you refuse his or her hospitality. It was the awareness of this risk that led me to consume a few more forkfuls of that fateful pig.

Where I come from, the pigs are congressmen and senators. We don't eat them, man!

You have no manners (and neither have I), part 4: A Brazilian picks a fight with an Englishwoman in France

My friendly and dedicated correspondent, Lisa Marie (an Englishwoman who lives in France), is at it again. She wrote most thoughtfully about my recent posts on the subject of manners.

And you know what? The Brazilian in me disagrees with the Englishwoman in her, proving that I have no manners whatsoever! My retorts to Lisa Marie's remarks are inside the little boxes.

Hi Pedro,

I've been silently enjoying your posts on politeness. It's such a potentially hilarious subject. I think there are two kinds of behaviours which both fall into the category good manners but are very different. The first are all those culturally specific things that are often absurd (though not always) -- and have to be learned. The second category includes all those ways in which you attend to others to make them feel comfortable, e.g. listening to people until they've finished their desultory sentences, not staring over their shoulder in search of someone more interesting to talk to, not making other people aware of their lack of the first sort of good manners -- like the (probably apocryphal) hostess who drank her finger-bowl to save the blushes of a guest who had just drank his. It is easy to get the two categories muddled because some behaviours fall into both categories, for example -- remembering that guests arriving from far might want to rest and wash before they feel like being chatty and entertaining.

Er... I think both types of behavior you mention are similarly "cultural," speficic to certain groups and having to be learned. Listening to other peope until they finish their sentences, for instance: oftentimes in France and elsewhere, several people in a conversation might talk at the same time, without waiting for other people to finish what they're saying; and for people in such cultures, it's not considered rude in the least to converse in this manner. Indeed, I think ALL social behaviors are culture-specific; if that weren't the case, there would be SOME universal behaviors, and I can't think of even one that happens in all cultures, tribes, social settings, and so on.

I have problems in France with "Bonjour Madame X", to which, as you know the correct reply is "Bonjour Monsieur Y", (rather than plain unadorned "Bonjour" which I would find more natural)."Bonjour Monsieur Y" always makes me feel as if I've become trapped in a language primer and the words always come out of my mouth with audible (to me at any rate) inverted commas. I suppose any formulaic exchange learned later than childhood will always feel like an exercise in role-playing.

I think one can learn to absorb behaviors -- and make them become "natural" -- at any point in one's life, not in childhood alone; it's just that some things learned in childhood are more deeply rooted than others. Also, I somehow suspect that there are people in all groups who feel unhappy with the behaviors imposed by the traditions of the group. I'm sure there are Brazilians who don't like the cheek-kissing thingy, even though they grew up with it, and Frenchmen who are impatient with the "Bonjour, Madame" thingy.

Someone (Paul Theroux?) wrote 'The Japanese have so perfected good manners to the point that they have become almost indistinguishable from rudeness.'

Funny. And astute, I think. 

Your hypothetical American sins by ignorance (bad manners category 1). Your hypothetical baker is arrogant -- despising his customer as a barbarian just because he cannot imitate his (the baker's) local customs inferring thereby that he (the baker) would fare better if suddenly whisked accross the Atlantic -- but he only commits bad manners category 2 if the American becomes aware of the baker's mépris.

Warm beer is the result of incompetence. English real ale should be served at (cold) cellar temperature but not refrigerated.

Sure, sure. But for a Texan who ALWAYS drinks beer ABSOLUTELY FREEZING-COLD (and any other beverages that he perceives as beer-like), real ale served at cellar temperature will appear WARM, therefore WRONG. The guy doesn't know the difference between real ale and lager, doesn't know about the gustatory demerits of drinks that are too cold... and he doesn't know he's making tons of assumptions about everything in this world.

PS I forgot to say that "I was only being Brazilian" is not an excuse I've ever heard before... Do you think the recipient of your Brazilian-ness subsequently felt embarrassed to have reacted as she did? -- how culturally insensitive!

If that woman regretted flinching at my Brazilian-ness, she certainly hasn't sent me a telegram about it -- yet!

PPS The possibilities for painful embarrassment are endless. I haven't even begun to bang on about tertiary embarassment -- that's when you feel embarrassed on someone else's behalf because they miraculously fail to feel as embarassed as you feel they ought. Perhaps that's an English thing... 

Aha! The truth comes out! I knew most of the things you think, say, and feel arise from the assumptions you learned as a child in England!

Warm regards from the the patch of Brazilian jungle near the Bastille, Paris.

-- Pedro 

You have no manners (and neither have I), part 3: Watch your mouth

Politeness and propriety cover vast swaths of our behavior. Take the language of greeting, for instance. A Texan arrives in London for the first time and is introduced to a proper Englishman.

“How do you do?” asks the Englishman.

“Oh, I’m doin’ great,” says the Texan. “But why is this beer so damn warm?”

The Texan misunderstood the Englishman’s question. This is how it was supposed to go:

“How do you do?” asks the Englishman.

“How do you do?” replies the Texan.

The question isn’t even a question, but a greeting—given in the full expectation it’ll be answered by the very same greeting. It doesn’t mean “How ya doin’?”, as the Texan assumed. The Englishman DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW how you’re doing, and his greeting is designed to indirectly let you know that.

In France, where I live, it’s an absolute obligation for everyone to greet everyone else by saying “Bonjour.” You walk into a bakery and the baker says “Bonjour.” You MUST say “Bonjour” back. It doesn’t matter how friendly you behave yourself, how full of smiles, how appreciative of the baker’s goods. If you don’t say “Bonjour” you’re as rude as a Barbarian taking a pee inside the Notre Dame cathedral.

The French learn their “Bonjour” so early in their lives, and so insistently from so many trustworthy sources like parents and teachers, that the reflex is totally integrated into their psyches and out of reason’s reach. The baker doesn’t think this:  “Ah, yes, we the French learn to say bonjour so early that we take it extremely seriously—so seriously it’s kinda funny. The Americans have a different way of expressing their friendliness, which they too learn early and take seriously. But since we all understand how the sense of propriety is different from culture to culture, we can appreciate one another without enmity and, indeed, with a lot of humor and tolerance.” No, the baker thinks this: “Mon Dieu, how rude. Get this Barbarian out of my bakery.”

Okay, you blog readers out there. In your opinion, who is being rude to whom in that proverbial French bakery frequented by the proverbial American? And who’s being rude to whom by serving you a pint of goddamn warm beer?

You have no manners (and neither have I), part 2: Turn the other cheek

Every culture has its deeply ingrained notions about manners and propriety. But no two cultures are exactly alike. I grew up in Brazil, where the overall style of human interaction is quite informal. People greet friends and acquaintances with kisses on the cheek—women kiss everyone, men kiss women but don’t kiss men, God forbid! Even when you get introduced to someone for the first and last time, however briefly, you might kiss him or her on the cheek.

You grow up with it and you acquire a reflex: you kiss as a matter of course, without much thought, without ever asking yourself if perhaps the kissing is appropriate. Indeed, not to kiss someone becomes the inappropriate behavior, and if you decide not to do it, or if you forget or neglect it, people will think there’s something wrong with you.

The kisses vary in number and intimacy. Sometimes a single kiss (right cheek to right cheek), sometimes two (first the right cheek, then the left one). The lips might not touch the cheek at all, so the cheeks meet lightly and you do a little sucking sound. It’s not quite like the air kisses of certain celebrities in America, say, as contact is actually established. Until very recently, it was absolutely taboo for two straight men kissing each other on the cheek, with the exception of your kissing your father, uncle, or grandfather-and those man-to-man kisses were by no means obligatory. Now it’s becoming fashionable in some circles for men to greet their straigth men friends with the usual cheek contact or a variation thereof, but I expect it’ll be a while until man-to-man cheek-kissing becomes universal.

In the US, it’s extremely rare for friends to kiss each other, however intimate the friendship. Only friends of mine who have lived in Europe seem comfortable with the cheek-to-cheek contact; other friends might hug me, but never kiss, and even their hugging entails tons of space being kept between our bodies. And strangers meeting for the first time never, ever kiss, of course.

Decades ago, when I was a college student in the US, I spent a summer in Brazil and returned to NY for the beginning of the school session in September. The night after my arrival I attended a concert somewhere. During the intermission I ran into a woman my age whom I knew in passing from the previous semester. Without thinking, because I was still in my Brazilian mode, I put my cheek against her and did the sucking thing. She recoiled in horror. A microsecond too late I understood what I had done: I had sexually harassed her, and in public! I thought it’d be impossible to explain the situation, so I just disappeared into the crowd, and we never crossed paths again. It’s been roughly 28 years since the event, and I still remember her disgusted reaction and my own sense of shame.

You guilty and shameful readers out there—care to share some traumatic bouts of bad manners with us?

You have no manners (and neither have I), part 1: Are you CRAZY?

Sometimes we read articles about foreign cultures in distant lands—the Mongolians, say, or a religious sect on the border of Arizona and Utah—and we wonder at their strange rites. Not only do we wonder, we laugh at them, since they’re so stupid and ridiculous. Kissing a spoon four times before slinging mud in your baby’s face? Those Absinthians are really crazy.

What we don’t realize is that all people, regardless of their culture, have well-established social habits of which they may not be consciously aware. And, to an uneducated observer from another culture, those social habits appear illogical and incomprehensible, if not downright perverse. The bone-crushing handshake of an American used-car salesman, for instance, is quite logical to him, a sign of his being friendly and interested in doing business with you. To a countess in Westphalia it’s a criminal act.

A Parisian student of mine once confessed that she was always uncomfortable when she arrived for her lessons, because I didn’t shake her hand in the exact French way (which of course is quite different from the Bonecruncher). On another occasion I was having lunch with a French friend who became agitated when someone else put a loaf of bread belly-side up on the table. It’s just not done! As it happens, centuries ago French people put the loaves of bread that were meant for lepers belly-side up, to distinguish them from the bread of healthy people. There were no lepers at our lunch table, but that didn’t reassure my friend in any way.

It’s not possible to foresee every culture’s habits and quirks, particularly since so much of it goes unspoken and unexplained. But it’s possible to suspend your critical judgments of people who live differently from you. By that I don’t mean to say that every behavior is equally acceptable, only that before you approve or disapprove of something you must first understand it.

Shaking my student’s hand as she expects me to is a solution. Another is to become playful, bring the phenomenon to the surface, share the details of my culture with her, laugh at myself for being crazy, and perhaps laugh with her for being anxious over a handshake. To dismiss her anxieties altogether is no solution at all.

In this series I’ll look at the quirks of social habits and how they shape our perceptions and behaviors. I’ll tell you about the time a young American woman thought I was molesting her when I was just being “Brazilian.” I’ll tell you about the day I had to eat pig’s knuckles because politeness demanded it of me. And I’ll tell you about the man who insisted on licking the soles of my feet to celebrate the birthday of King Stavros the Injudicious.

Ten challenges, one reaction: Do Nothing!

The other day I went to my favorite café for a work session. I took the following materials with me:

• my computer;
• a large notebook, which I use for free associating, creating mind maps, and exploring ideas for new books;
• a three-page letter from my editor, asking for a last round of revisions to my forthcoming novel Backtracked and requesting that I cut four or five chapters out of my manuscript—with a two-week deadline;
• printed comments from the members of my critiquing group, with feedback about a new novel project;
• a print-out of three rejections yet another novel of mine, W.W. Werewolf, received through my literary agent;
• and a letter from a publisher in England asking for an very short story to be submitted to an anthology, again with an urgent deadline.

I laid out my notebook and pencils, opened my computer, and ordered an espresso. Then I nursed my coffee for a long time, watched people at the café, and refused to do anything else whatsoever. I didn’t write, didn’t read any of my materials, didn’t even think much at all.

It’s one of the best exercises a writer can ever do: Put yourself face to face with all your challenges, and learn to do nothing for a while. No reactions, no ambitions, no feelings, no love, no hate, no resentment, no hurry. Niente. Nada.

Once you clear your mind of preconceptions and fears, you’ll be in a much better position to actually meet the challenge. An editor has rejected one of your submissions? Rejections are part of the job, and indeed part of everyone’s lives. Read your rejection letters dispassionately, separate yourself a little from your work, realize the editors in question are turning down your book, for now; they’re not turning YOU down FOREVER.

Your editor wants you to amputate some of the best parts of your book? Calm down. Put her letter aside. Take a few days to think about it. It doesn’t matter how strongly you feel about your book; given enough time and space and intelligent feedback from seasoned professionals, you might quite possibly change your mind and agree with the cuts.

Your crit group floods you with suggestions of all types, complaints, musings, contradictory remarks? That’s exactly what they’re supposed to do. Your job is to use a mixture of intuition and intellect to find some order in chaos, discern those ideas you can and must discard and those you can and must explore—in due course.

Urgent deadlines? As long as you’re freaking out, you won’t be able to work constructively. Take your sweet time to pull yourself together, then you might be able to write that short story in an hour. It was Abraham Lincoln who said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax.”

My espresso was delicious, the people in the café were friendly and entertaining. After twenty-five minutes of doing nothing, I started working on my editor’s suggestions. She’s absolutely right about those five chapters. They must go.

Write a story every day, part 7: Triggers revisited

Writing a story every day can seem like a tremendous challenge before you get the hang of it—just like dancing the tango, speaking a foreign language, or changing a diaper. I mean, I’ve never, ever changed anybody’s diaper in my life. If I had to do it without instruction or supervision or the right tools, I’d probably try to convince the freaking baby just to do it herself. It’d be easier for everyone involved.

Let’s say you’ve decided you want to dance the tango, speak German, and change diapers. And you want to write a new short story every day. Problem is, you have no ideas for a story. None. Zilch. You want the freaking story just to write itself. It’d be easier for everyone involved.

Here are a few suggestions. They don’t involve Q-tips or safety pins or anything smelly. Take my word for it: writing a story is easier than doing the other thing.

1. Give yourself just a few words to start the story with, and open the spigot. Or ask someone else to say something. My wife proposed the following: “Nobody could control him.” I wrote a story about a Hollywood producer who has gone berserk.
2. Write something involving a historical figure or situation. Judas selling Jesus for thirty pieces of silver—as told from the point of view of a Roman soldier who acts as a broker. Winnie Mandela pondering her divorce from Nelson. You meet Jack Nicholson at a party in Los Angeles, and to your surprise he has somehow heard perverse rumors about you. It’s 1957, and you’re riding an elevator by yourself in New York City. It stops on the way to the lobby, and Marilyn Monroe enters it, her hair disheveled, her mascara running. You smell alcohol in her breath. “Could you please help me?” she asks.
3. Find inspiration in something that happened to you earlier today, or that you witnessed. You watched an old woman slip on the icy sidewalk and fall. You received a phone call from a stranger who had dialed the wrong number. You started brushing your teeth, only to realize you had put shaving foam on your toothbrush. Any one thing that has ever happened lends itself to a dramatic invention. It all depends on the connections you create between the event and the psychology of people involved. Conflict is the name of the game.
4. Use a traditional trigger. “X, Y, and Z walk into a bar.” Give yourself a strange set of participants: A peacock, a chicken, and an eagle. A carrot, an eggplant, and a zucchini. A lesbian, a transsexual, and a priest. You get the idea: use a square formula and un-square variables, and your creativity is likely to be tickled. Formulas abound, and it’d be a fine exercise by itself for you to make a list of them. “Once upon a time…”
   
5. Use stereotypes, archetypes, age-old characters: the wizard, the fool, the rebel, the maverick, Santa Claus, Captain Hook, Donald Duck, Prince Charming, Superman. Put one of them in a difficult situation: Santa Claus gets stuck in a chimney, and, well, it’s cold in the house, and the family starts a fire. Superman hates his name, hates the Nietzschean connotations, hates the sound of it. He decides to call himself… actually, you’ll know what exactly once you enter his mind and heart.

In short, all you need is conflict and a character’s voice. “Goo goo ga ga ouch ouch OUCH!” (Guess what this conflict is about, and who's in conflcit with whom.)

Write a story every day, part 6: Motivation

It's been a year since I decided to write a short story every day. I’ve succeeded in doing so—including days in which I was traveling from Paris to New York and vice-versa, sick days, busy teaching days, all sorts of days. My wife, a screenwriter, recently asked me how I motivated myself to do it. I thought about it, and here are a few of the reasons I keep doing it every day without exception.

1. I’m very competitive, in two different ways. A side of me is disciplined, structured, ambitious, dedicated, even rigid about following a schedule and delivering a commitment. Another side of me is the slacker ready to go take long naps in the afternoon, the reader of comic books slouching in the sofa, the brainless guy who does nothing all day and calls his inactivity “life.” (You guessed it: I'm a Gemini.) These two sides of me are in permanent competition, but in recent years I’ve tended to side with the disciplined me. And once I take sides, I’m brutal. I want my side to win and the opposition to lose, and I’ll do anything to ensure the right outcome.
2. But I’m also competitive with others, not just within myself. This will sound ugly to you, dear reader, but writing every day allows me to feel superior to other people. I like to wear my discipline as a badge: I’m a pro. I know how to do it, and I can do it. I’m such a pro, I’d write the daily short story sitting on the back pew of a church during a memorial service. Even if I'm the one who's dead!
   
3. Out of the year’s 365 stories, some were astoundingly bad, so much so I’ll never show them to anyone, not even my adoring wife. (Hey, I have a lot invested in that adoration of hers. Why spoil a good thing?) But some of them were touching, funny, surprising—just plain good. Every day I don’t know if I’m going to write a stinker or a gem, and the possibility of a gem coming out justifies the daily effort.
4. Ritual is a necessary part of everyone’s life. The morning coffee, for instance, is a ritual that gets you out of bed and into the swing of things. It’s not just caffeine; there’s the anticipation, the preparation, the appeal to all the senses, your whole relationship to coffee, your memories of having drunk a particularly satisfying cup at Caribou Coffee on a visit to Minneapolis. For me the daily short story adds another ritual, makes the daily life a little more “sacred.” It requires me to stop everything else, clear my mind, and look for the portal to creativity and insight.
5. The skill I developed in writing daily stories has permeated into my other writing activities. I can write first drafts of scenes and chapters quickly and easily; the mind opens up willingly because it does so regularly. And the storyteller’s voice seems to be always ready to speak and sing. I “improvise”  without censure or shame, and often enough the first draft comes out relatively good already. The daily short story, then, pays enormous dividents for a working writer.
   
6. I’ve found ways of speeding up the process for those days when I really don’t feel like doing it. I write rants, a page of nonsense, a page about my own handwriting… Anything goes! You’re the boss! It takes three minutes, literally, to fill up a page with words and call it a “short story.”
7. I’ve used the short story to work through personal issues. To give a banal example, my older brother’s birthday is June 1st, mine is May 31st (that means we were born almost exactly a year apart). Every year we speak on the phone for our birthdays, briefly and awkwardly as befits the state of our relationship. On June 1st I wrote a story about a man who dreads the yearly phone call from his younger brother. The story wasn’t exactly about my brother and me; it was inspired by us but not “written” by us. In an indirect, minor way the story became an expression of my love for my brother, a mini-love letter he’ll never get. I was sad-happy writing it, and the psychological benefits of writing the story added justification to the daily effort.
8. I use short stories to test ideas for novels. For instance, I wrote 30 self-contained scenes of a ghost story over 30 consecutive days. Will I write a novel about this ghost? Do I want to? Is it worth my professional attention? Writing the stories is a good way of finding out.
9. Some short stories of mine appeal to that lazy slacker who slouches all day reading comic books. It’s a win-win situation: I enjoy writing an absolutely stupid story, I can say I fulfilled my contract and proved myself to be a disciplined professional, and the slacker gets his drug and claims the day.
10. Believe it or not, I really, really, really love doing it.

I wish all my readers a highly motivated New Year. Let's tell 366 stories, one per day including February, 29!

Oh reader, your talents require TLC!

In my last blog entry I riffed on the notion of talent, the gist of my convictions being that everyone is born multitalented. A brave voice rose in the wilderness, pointedly letting me know I’m crazy. Just kidding! The brave voice, who answers to the name of Lisa Marie, makes some very good points. Here they are.

I think there is a problem with the word “talent.” Isn't it used to mean the exceptional thing, the thing that most people don't have? I think one tends to use the word unthinkingly in order to designate that happy (and indeed, rare) combination of qualities and circumstances (energy, enthusiasm, time, a little salutary egoism to enable one to be a bit annoyingly obsessive, good teachers, etc.) and one ends up being mislead by the existence of the word into thinking one is referring to something else, some further magic entity, apart from these ingredients.

And so my more somber version of your “we are all multi-talented'” would be to say “we quite probably all aren't, but that this is a lot less of a problem than we have been led to believe... particularly if it is possible to muster energy, enthusiasm, time, egoism, etc.”

Genius, now that would be something else again, I suppose.

This is my abbreviation of what the brave voice is saying in the wilderness:

“Talent” as people normally see it is a kind of illusion; people do things well because of down-to-earth qualities such as energy, enthusiasm, time, and so on—not because of a magic, mysterious quality, which we might want to call “genius” instead. It’s not a problem to be “untalented” as long as you find the necessary time, energy, and enthusiasm to accomplish your goals.

I see talent as an innate capacity to do something, a biological inheritance that is independent of these down-to-earth qualities but that needs some of them to blossom. So, I do think everyone is multitalented indeed, having many built-in capacities from birth. Ultimately, however, the brave voice is quite right: things happen not by magic but through dedicated effort. Here's the film maker Ridley Scott in a recent interview in the magazine Film Comment: "[My mother] was a real force of nature. [My brother] Tony and I inherited perseverance from her. It's really the thing you need to succeed. I always say it's stamina, stamina, stamina, then perseverance, and last is talent."

As for "genius," I’d like to offer a very specific definition. I see a genius not as someone with brilliant inborn capacities, but someone with an original insight who creates a new paradigm within his or her field. In that sense Claude Debussy was a genius, since he created a new musical paradigm contributing to the development of, among other things, atonality; but Maurice Ravel wasn’t a genius, since his work—however brilliant—hewed to the paradigms, tonal and rhythmic, that came before him. Ludwig van Beethoven: genius. Felix Mendelssohn: not (even though he was an astounding child prodigy). Miguel de Cervantes: genius (he "invented" the modern novel). Jane Austen: not. Mahatma Gandhi: genius (he created a new paradigm, non-violent resistance). The Dalai Lama: not (he embraces a paradigm that was fully formed before his birth). But note that I admire the Dalai Lama unconditionally, and I think he represents humanity's highest ideals. Here I'm using the word "genius" as a technical term, narrowly (and perhaps idiosyncratically) defined.

Given a choice between talent, genius, and stamina, I know which one I would pick for myself and my career. Phew! Writing this blog entry has exhausted the resident genius here, so please excuse me while I take a nap.

Oh reader, you're so talented!

In my recent installments of The Naked Beginner I recounted how I used to suffer from the misconception I had no talent for drawing, and how I cured myself from that handicap with help from a fictional character, an imaginary friend, and a dead white male. Here I offer you a little meditation on the notion of talent. Since the meditation applies to all people, I’m posting this blog entry on multiple categories.

1. Everyone is born multitalented; this you can see by watching a few kindergarten kids at play, inventing every sort of game and improvising brilliantly at arts, sport, music, relationships, and anything else. The tragedy is that many of those kindergartners (and I’m talking about you and me and your brother and your sister) will grow to “forget” how talented they were from the first.
2. You have hidden talents you don’t know about. Every day as you go about your normal existence, amazing things lie inside you waiting to be discovered.
3. Talents are eternal: they are always there, inside you, from birth to death. When the expression of a talent is squashed, the talent itself remains. At any time in your life, if the conditions are right the talent will come right back out.
4. You can be absolutely sure about something and yet be absolutely wrong about it. Wanna bet? The principle is universal. It applies to your feeling certain you don’t have talent for something—drawing, music, computers, managing people, you name it.
5. If you’ve tried to do something and failed miserably, you might still have a talent for it; perhaps you just need a good teacher, a good partner, a good environment. Think how many mean and incompetent teachers are out there, and how discouraging they can be.
6. “I’ve never danced in my life! I don’t have a talent for it!” Can you see what’s wrong with these words?
7. Timing is everything. Talent is always there, but sometimes you need to wait until you are good and ready to explore it. And you may not be ready until you’re 13, or 26, or 39, or 52. (Here’s testing your talent for multiplication tables!)
8. Talent is immutable; it’s already there inside you, and it’ll always be there as a latent force. But your manner of tapping into it is highly variable. It’s easy to confuse the two. If you go about blindly trying to develop a talent, your failure doesn’t mean you don’t have the talent.
9. You can develop a new skill in intermittent bursts of time and effort, as long as the effort is intelligent and the time well-spent.
10. If someone has a great deal of innate facility for something but no patience to develop the skill over the long term, does he or she really have “talent”?
11. Okay, it’s possible for you not to have talent for something and feel sure that you do. Still, that’d be a lesser problem than having talent and feeling sure you don’t.
12. Talent isn’t contagious, but enthusiasm is.

Hey, you talented readers out there: How about submitting your stories about hidden talents, talents snuffed out by mean teachers, talents that have surprised and delighted you as you went about discovering them?

What you learn is not what you expect to learn

In my previous installment of The Naked Beginner I told you about the gesture drawing as I learned it from Kimon Nicolaïdes. Today I’ll tell you about Nicolaïdes’s second great exercise.

The contour drawing shares two characteristics with the gesture drawing: you don’t actually look at the paper as you draw; and the pencil never leaves the page. But, instead of drawing something quickly the way you do with gesture drawing, you let your eyes slowly follow the contours of whatever you’re looking at… and you let your hand slowly draw the very contour your eye is looking at, millimeter by millimeter. It’s another Zen-like meditation, in which your eye and your hand so fuse that you develop the feeling you are actually touching the object or person that you draw. The eye caresses the figure, the hand caresses the paper, and what the eye sees and what the hand draws finally become one.

At first the exercise was surprisingly difficult. I kept wanting to look at the page, not at the object I was trying to draw. I found that I simply didn’t want to let my eyes linger on an image long enough. I'd scan the image in a jerky fashion, stopping at one point and then suddenly moving my eyes jerkily to another point far away. I was impatient, quickly bored, even uncomfortable. This showed me I didn’t live in the moment. I didn’t “stay,” as it were; I “came and went” instead. It also showed me I had never, ever truly looked at the world with my attention properly focused. There’s so much to see when you really look: shape, dimension, proportion, context, expression, perspective, color, light and shadow—the amount of information at your disposal is staggering. There may well be good biological and psychological reasons not to look so closely: you can be utterly overwhelmed by what you perceive!

And that is the main thing: I was learning to broaden and deepen my perceptions of the world. It’s tempting to think that what separates an artist from a non-artist is the degree of technical expertise: in short, the artist has more and better “technique.” But that is utterly misleading. Artistry is first and foremost about perception. Caravaggio’s accomplishment wasn’t in how he depicted the world, but how he perceived it. Caravaggio, Picasso, Matisse, Kahlo, O'Keefe, Rembrandt, name whom you will—it’s the case with all artists.

My artistic initiation has had little to do with art, and everything to do with perception, with looking, seeing, and touching, with living in the moment, with trusting my instincts, with passing from the known to the unknown.

In fact, I learned so many things from Nicolaïdes’s two basic exercises that I’ll need a whole new blog entry to dissect my  experiences and to offer you a few pointers along the way.

Extra! Extra! Insane Artist Finds a Teacher!

In my recent installments of The Naked Beginner I told you about how I started drawing thanks to a fictional character and an imaginary friend who lives by night. Today I’ll tell you about a dead white male who gave me the last push.

Kimon Nicolaïdes taught drawing in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. He left behind a marvelous book that provides an extremely constructive method of drawing. The Natural Way to Draw is written with such passion and humor that it makes for wonderful reading, even if you’re not interested in drawing at all.

My wife, who’s a trained artist, had a copy of the book from before the time we met. I had leafed the book on several occasions, and was always struck by Nicolaïdes’s tone of voice, so direct and engaging. But something about the book actually prevented me from trying to draw. Nicolaïdes demanded, from the reader and putative art student, the same passion, the same commitment that Nicolaïdes himself brought to his craft—or so I imagined from his tone of voice. 15 hours of practice a week! One chapter per week! Don’t read chapter 2 before you finish the 15 hours of practice from chapter 1! It’s the least you can do! It’s normal! It’s the only way to learn! Grow up already!

It was all or nothing. Despite the many pleasures I had  his book, over the years I opted for nothing again and again.

This was doubly dumb of me. First, “all” is better than “nothing.” Second, I could simply have refused Nicolaïdes’s radical entreaties (as I foolishly perceived them) and made my own choices about how to read his book. That’s what I finally did. I decided to follow Nicolaïdes exercises one by one, and fulfill his practice schedule to the letter… but in my own rhythm. I took two months to do the 15 hours of practice scheduled in the first chapter.

It was the most blissful summer of my life.

My education started with two sketching exercises: gesture and contour. They’re both simple but far-reaching. To do a gesture sketch, sit somewhere with pencil and paper… look at a figure, an object, a passerby, a child at play, any one thing… and draw, very quickly and without looking at the paper, a sort of perception of the object’s or person’s energy.

Draw a few continuous squiggles without letting the pencil tip leave the paper. It takes a few seconds. Don’t draw details or a literal physical rendering, but rather the essence, the intention, the gesture that the object or person conveys. It’s a way of having your eyes, your intuition, and your drawing hand converge in a Zen-like moment of completeness and freedom.

Nicolaïdes explains it rather better, and you really ought to read his book.

And you really ought to practice the exercise before you go on to the next installment of The Naked Beginner, in which I’ll tell you about contour drawing.

Extra! Extra! Graffiti Artist Goes Insane!

In my last instalment of The Naked Beginner I told you how a fictional character prodded me to start exploring my artistic bent. Today I'll tell you about another... well... imaginary friend, for lack of a better term.

I'm the client of a great doctor here in Paris, a German allopath and homeopath whose nearly shamanic guidance has taken me to plenty of unexpected places over the years. When I last visited him he said, in his own words, “We are all two people, a day person and a night person, a doer and a dreamer, left brain and right brain, what you will. You can communicate with your night person directly and engage him or her. Sit up in bed last thing before going to sleep and say hello to him or her. Tell her you have a problem and you need her help. Outline the problem briefly. Then go to sleep, and let the night person solve the problem for you. You sleep all night, you wake up in the morning, and the problem is gone.”

Yeah, I know. Your day person is saying, “Nonsense." I thought the same thing at first, but I decided I’d have a go. (The German fellow has quite a track record with me.) I bought myself a spiral-bound notebook with blank pages. On the notebook's first page I glued a card with a photo of a children’s party where a bunch of 3- and 4-year-olds were screaming and playing with balloons. Inside the card I wrote, “My dear night person, I welcome you into my life. Please introduce yourself to me, tell me your name.” I added four stamps, from a trove of old stamps from all over the world I had bought at a philatelist’s just for this purpose.

That night I had a dream, and a young being, both male and female, came into my life. He, she was called Noï, written just like that. In German, “Neu” means “new” and it’s pronounced “NAW-ee.” In Italian, “Noi” means “We, us.” The name was beautiful, full of different meanings and connotations, musical, nice to say. Every night since that dream I have written to Noï, always starting my messages with “Dear Noï of the Beautiful Name.” I tell her a little about my day, I praise her infinite creativity, I thank her about all that she’s given me, and I ask her for more of everything.

I’ve presented Noï with problems, issues, desires, fears, goals, and tasks of all sorts—some creative, some professional, some affective. And Noï has helped me deal with a number of them. I won’t tell you what these tasks were precisely. (Hey, this is the Internet, after all! If I tell you my secrets they’ll be on every one’s tongues and ears in a nanosecond.) But I’ll tell you that Noï has helped me sleep much better, work more productively, and have steadier energy throughout the day. All for the price of a notebook and a ten-dollar bag of old stamps.

After I filled the notebook with my nightly postcards, I decided I’d change medium. Some years ago I saw a marvelous show of drawings by Alberto Giacometti, better known as a sculptor (in particular of extremely elongated figures). Several of his drawings were made with ballpoint pens, just like the cheap Bics you and I use to take notes and write checks and so on. The drawings were expressive and original. I couldn’t ever be or become Giacometti, I thought, but I could certainly handle a Bic. I bought a box of Bics of many colors—blue, black, red, and green—and, on a fresh notebook, I started drawing a different face every night, for Noï’s delectation.

I started off copying photos of friends and family, alternating the colors every night. My goddaughter Marianne in black, my mother in green, my grandmother in red. My efforts came out stilted and distorted. I myself could barely recognize my family members.

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After a few nights maiming my elders, I chose to draw my nephew as a baby. Lo and behold, the portrait came out rather charming.

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Er… it was kinda scary. I still thought of myself as a stick artist, and my accidental success challenged my aesthetics and my conception of myself. But deep down I was quite pleased. Every night I showed my drawings to my wife, who happens to be a trained artist,with a fine-arts college degree from Parsons. My wife indulges me, and I’m terribly grateful to her. “Cute,” she says. “Funny.” “Not so bad.” “Pretty good.” “The eyes are all screwy.” Actually, I resented that remark bitterly. But she was right. I couldn’t do eyes. Or lips. Or noses. Or cheekbones. Or—well, you get the idea.

The thing, though, was that I was finally drawing, for the first time in 35 years. My drawing hand (I’m a leftie) loved the feeling of the pen on paper. My visual perceptions were changing. I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes, and I was having tremendous fun.

Then Kimon Nicolaïdes entered my life. He was dead, of course. But I’m used to communing with fictional characters and ghosts inside my heart, so a dead man didn’t scare me one bit. Stay tuned for the next instalment of The Naked Beginner!

Extra! Extra! Stick Artist Becomes Graffiti Artist!

In the first instalment of The Naked Beginner series, I told you about my life as a handicapped stick artist and how three strange people helped me overcome my handicap. Today I'll tell you about a non-existent guy who initiated me into the art of grafitti.

Tommy Latrella, the hero of my forthcoming time-travel novel, Backtracked, is a 16-year-old who rides the subways in New York City and defaces its wall and corridors, its cars, its benches. I thought I would do some research. I bought myself a marker and a big cheap notebook, and I tried to channel Latrella’s style of subway art. As I set out in my explorations, I splashed a few lines boldly drawn across a page, their rhythm more important than their shape. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t draw—I was just doing character research, right?

Sitting at one of my favorite Parisian cafés and working on my signature—I mean, on the signature of the NYC graffiti artist called Thomas Anthony Latrella, aka Ghost—I started drawing other things with my big fat marker. A cup of coffee. Someone’s face in a few round strokes, the drawing not even recognizably human. A sketch of my own hand.

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The smell of marker ink was delicious. The feeling of my hand defacing a blank page, exhilarating. And the visual result, on page after page, surprisingly adept (at least to my easily fooled eyes!).

It was the beginning of the end of my days as a stick artist.

After the Ghost initiated me into the visual arts, someone else decided I needed to go further—someone who may or may not exist, and if he or she does exist, he or she may or may not be... myself. I'll do my best to explain it in the next installment of The Naked Beginner.

Birth and Death of a Stick Artist

The last time I took an art class was in grade school, probably when I was about 13. Subsequently I became your stereotypical non-artist whose technique for drawing consisted of a few straight lines and a couple of circles. Dog? Five straight lines for the skeleton (one for the spine, four for the legs), one circle for the head. Human being? About the same. Women were different from men because they had two squiggles for hair. If I tried very hard, this is what I would be able to do:

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The fowl below (I suspect it's a chicken) is my absolute best drawing from my early period, covering the years 1958-2006.

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Drawing, painting, and sculpting were outside my domain, by a law of nature that said, “At the maternity your momma pressed a button by the side of her bed, and she chose to make you a stick artist instead of a Rembrandt. Yes, sweet little Pedro, you’re a stick artist if there ever was one. You’ll grow up a stick artist and you’ll die a stick artist. Tough nuggets.”

My momma’s button notwithstanding, like all stick artists I suffered from a severe misconception. I can’t speak Swahili—that’s a fact. I can’t pilot an airplane—that’s also a fact. I can’t draw—well, that’s a perception, not a fact. The problem is, when the wind blows just so perceptions become convictions, and convictions become realities. For roughly 35 years (that is, following my last art class in 8th grade) I didn’t draw because I couldn’t, and I couldn’t because I didn’t. “I don’t draw, you understand? I can’t! Look at my stick figures—they demonstrate I can’t draw!”

I owe the unraveling of my stick-artist identity to three people. One definitely doesn’t exist. Another has been dead for seventy years. And the third one—well, it’s hard to explain. In the next Naked Beginner installment, I’ll tell you about the inexistent one.

You're wrong about me (and I'm right about you), part 8: Judgments

A brave new voice has rung out in the wilderness, purporting to disagree with me on my “right and wrong” catechism. That I actually agree with the voice doesn’t make it any less brave. Here’s Lisa Marie’s statement.

I don't want to sound contrary, but I think negative judgments need someone to defend them.

Aren't any negative judgments ever right? Aren't any artists overrated? Wouldn't you be justifiably irritated if I suggested you were just in a bad mood and succumbing to irrational prejudice when you say that Ella Fitzgerald's bossa nova renditions give you the aesthetic equivalent of hives?

And isn't the converse of Terry's experience not “judging correctly because in a positive frame of mind, but “having one's pocket picked from being over-certain of another's good faith”?

Of course I can see that teachers, doctors and priests need/ought to hold off from judging pupils, patients and parishioners too quickly or harshly. And book reviewers should try to practice charity more assiduously even than the rest of us. But arguments about aesthetic matters are surely a form of human flourishing and must often involve someone saying "I really don't like this.” The examination of why someone objects to some great work or artist is often fascinating and need not leave one less free to come to one's own conclusions.

I absolutely agree with everything Lisa Marie says! Plenty of negative judgments are right, and plenty of positive judgments are wrong. Plenty of artists are overrated. The naive permanently risk getting their pockets picked, literally and metaphorically. The give-and-take of aesthetic arguments is very enriching, and stating one’s likes and dislikes unequivocally is all for the better. My philosophy isn’t “Never make negative judgments” but, rather, “Make the judgments that you will, positive or negative, but don’t forget you may possibly be wrong about them—particularly if the judgments come from preconceived ideas of which you may not be aware. And if you find out you’re wrong about something, change your mind and your behavior regarding the thing in question. Your change may come from a judgment that goes from negative to positive, or from positive to negative. It all depends.”

A positive judgment may be wrong and extremely harmful—for instance, when the electorate issues a positive judgment on a wicked politician. In such a case the collective duty is to scream bloody murder.

I don’t plan to start liking Ella’s bossa nova renditions any time soon. Or anything by John Denver. Or Barry Manilow. No way—not Barry Manilow. I’ll never change my mind about Barry Manilow. Not in a million years. Never, ever, ever.

You're wrong about me (and I'm right about you), part 7: Moods

After my recent call for testimonials about right and wrong, Terry sent me the story below.

I like to think I'm patient and I give people the benefit of the doubt. I remember once standing in line with my wife at a movie theater in a very grumpy mood. Why so grumpy, I can't remember. I saw a couple apparently start another line, as if to bypass us. I yelled something unpleasant out to the guy in the couple and complained loudly. He looked at me like I was some kind of a nut and just ignored me. Later I realized his line was for something else and had nothing to do with what I was waiting for. The guy was right: I was some kind of a nut. I was mentally prepared for someone to do wrong by me, so that's what I instantly saw.

Terry’s anecdote demonstrates a simple but powerful fact: when in a bad mood, our judgments of right and wrong deteriorate, and we end up doing dumb things for dumb reasons.

Fortunately, the reverse of the medal is also true: when in a good mood, we usually make fewer dumb mistakes, though of course there’s no guaranteed way of stopping all mistakes.

These are some of the things I do regularly to affect my mood for the better and, indirectly, my judgment of right and wrong and the behaviors that follow from the judgment.

1. I instantly feel boosted when I hear the Golden Gate Quartet, Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, the Miles Davis of “Kind of Blue,” or Ella Fitzgerald (except when she sings the bossa nova of my native Brazil, which she butchers with a not-so-infectious joy!). When I'm in a bad way, I listen to one of their CDs and I get good in a nanosecond.
2. I’m a big fun of comic books and cartoons: Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts, Fat Freddy’s Cat, The Muppet Show, Daffy Duck and his friends. (Actually, Daffy doesn’t have any friends. I meant his foes.) If I need mood therapy I watch a DVD or read a few pages from the anthologies in my library. Wile E. Coyote’s humiliating losses in battle make mine seem rather petty, so I give up my irritation and take it easy instead.
3. Chocolate is a legal mood enhancer, packed with caffeine, theobromine, and many other chemicals that end in “-ine” (just as in “coca-ine” and “hero-ine”). A few ounces of dark chocolate can turn Scrooge into a pussy cat. Like all drugs, however, chocolate has unpleasant side effects: the unwillingness to eat your vegetables, diabetes, Flabby Belly Syndrome, you name it. But—hey, today I want my chocolate. Tomorrow’s another day.
4. My childhood friend Debby and I like chatting in Portuguese on the phone, gossiping, whining, and telling each other all the terrible things we’ve done in recent days. Somehow when Debby laughs at my right-and-wrong struggles I go from upset to relieved, from grumpy to cheerful, from dumb to intelligent.

It’s best to use these tools preventatively. If you spend your days eating candy and watching cartoons on TV, you’ll be in a permanent good mood. In fact, your mood will be so good you won’t do anything wrong at all (other than spending your days eating candy and watching cartoons on TV!).

You're wrong about me (and I'm right about you), part 6: Ah, the French! (Ah, the Brits!)

We have a guest blogger today: John, a Brit living in France who’s an expert on Brazilian music. His story is about assumptions,  perceptions, and convictions—and how they all lead you to being WRONG. Enjoy!

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I am in the midst of a community perceptual spectacle along the lines of your topic.

The building in Roubaix, where I am 5 days a week at Le Day Job, formerly housed on its 2nd floor a branch of Trésorier Publique, the public-treasury office that handles tax returns. They moved out in January, taking everything, including the door handles. They put a sign up indicating the move and took their own sign down. However, now not even the "We have moved" sign remains.

Not a morning goes by without someone in my company (or our neighbours) having to explain as calmly as possible to someone or other that the Treasury office is no longer here. Some of these people are so convinced that it is here (after years of knowing it really was here) that the "It's moved" possibility is not the first thing in their minds. The 2nd floor is totally empty and dark (they even took the light bulbs), there is no door handle or any indication that anyone has touched the place for close to a year... yet it is not uncommon to find people on the staircase who want to know at what time "we" open, since no one is there yet. No sign, no furniture, no lights, yet... the treasury must be here, as here is where it has always been! Sometimes their confusion is alleviated when you point to the envelope invariably clenched in their hands, with the new address of the public treasury printed neatly in the upper left corner.

But sometimes not. "Yes, but I am looking for the place to pay my taxes..." (“Well, sir, if you are making a cash payment I will see what can be arranged….”)

I make a game with myself, seeing if I can guess who is in the building, or approaching it, in order to make use of its former fiscal functionality. I count the points. Two days ago, not wanting to abandon my ipod in mid-song, I preemptively told a lady about to embark on the staircase that the public treasury was no longer here. I couldn't hear her response too well. She might even have been going to the dentist on the 5th floor... but sometimes, you just know.

Before you start thinking that I’m right all the time and enjoy rubbing it in, here’s another story. Yesterday I went to say goodbye to my mother at the station. I had even bought her train tickets for her, so I had already seen all the dates and hours. I panicked for most of the afternoon, realising I had told her to take a Eurostar that didn't exist at the appointed time, asking the check-in helpers to see if they could look up what time her train to London really was (had she left already? had she missed her train and panicked herself? was she on a later Eurostar?); I ran all over Lille looking for her and cursing my absent mindedness, why had I got the time of her train wrong??? I later realised to my horror that her train was not to London, but to Paris (and from Paris to the Eurostar). So I had doubly confused her: sending her not only at the wrong time but to the wrong station!

There is a tangible taste to this "inversion of the world" when we miss a set of circumstances that is not only possible, but probable, or indeed actual; it is disconcerting. Luckily, wise woman that she is, she got all of her trains, no problem. I am still feeling disoriented!