THE LEAFLET

July 18 2024

pragmatist book clubs, beware idealists, murakami on vocations

PRAGMATIST BOOK CLUBS

I recommend a pragmatist book club. These clubs cost ~$20 / per person - the price of a paperback and maybe a cup of coffee. 

The pragmatist part is important. You and your people are reading this book to find things to do and use. The measure of the book’s quality is its usefulness. And you can make good use even of a book that has crummy prose, unnecessary content, and weak empirical evidence. You don’t need to cook every recipe in the cookbook - if there are one or two really good dishes, that book was worthwhile.

Outside of the K-12 context, this is often seen as a little didactic and annoying. I say do it anyway: give your people homework. Pick something you want them to do, or say, or try that came up in the book. Do this for each session, each discussion. 

The homework is important - it’s a way to ensure that you’re getting real action and durable learning, even from a dubious book. It forces you and your people to create instead of critique.

-Eric

Read the rest here.

BEWARE, YE IDEALISTS

Idealists are a tricky bunch. We need them around. They see what should be and they share what they see. That’s an important source of hope, creativity, possibility - resources that can get frightfully scarce even in very good circumstances.

And. Cynics and politicos are often idealists. They’ve just been disappointed too often. They don’t want to experience that pain yet again. They can get bitter and small, shrinking the surface area they have to protect. 

If you’re reading this, I’m guessing there’s an idealist streak in you somewhere. These posts will all be pretty annoying if you don’t think there’s a better way, that you can practice it, that your people might be able to as well.

So beware, ye idealists. If you’re finding yourself frustrated and depleted, consider pausing your idealism, lest ye tumble into the woebegone vale of cynicism. Let go of your aggrieved belief in what should be, for just a bit. Catalog, with as little judgment as you can, what is. 

Then decide what you’re going to do about it.

-Eric

Read the rest here.

MURAKAMI ON VOCATIONS

Murakami says something about running that I think is almost as vocationally important as the whole rest of Novelist as a Vocation’s advice about writing. 

Of running, he says, “I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life.” (italics in original)

I wonder what you write under that heading, if you had to make a short list. What are the recurring actions, the activities, that are things you have to do in this life? (nb: this is not a bucket list.)

Murakami’s not talking about and I’m not asking about your passion, or your dream. It’s not a question of your occupation. What he says about running sounds more to me like a pre-occupation. 

Rather than a top down approach, where you try to choose a line of work, a professional identity, and then take on all of its subjacent activities, I wonder what you might find if you went bottom up. You identify a few activities, things you could readily do every day, things you might feel impelled to do. And you then give a name to that set of activities considered as a composite whole - that name could be a profession, a line of work.

-Eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Writer Jim Harrison on water and presence:

Moving water is forever in present tense, a condition we rather achingly avoid.

Novelist and runner Haruki Murakami on suppleness:

If you’re able to view where you’re standing from other perspectives - to put it another way, if you can entrust your existence to some other system - the world will grow more three-dimensional, more supple. And I believe that as long as we live in this world, that kind of agile stance is extremely important.

Writer Grace Paley on hope:

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric