FREAKS AND STREAKS
The Style section of yesterday’s New York Times contained a story about a New Jersey school librarian named Jim Brozina and his daughter Kristen. On November 11, 1997, Brozina sat down with Kristen at bedtime and read to her from one of L. Frank Baum’s books, “The Tin Woodman of Oz.” Their goal was to read together every night for 100 nights in a row. The project was conceived as a father/daughter bonding exercise as well as a way of encouraging Kristen, who was a fourth-grader at the time, to take an increased interest in books and literature. But once the twosome had achieved their goal of 100 consecutive nights of reading together they realized they had set their sights too low. At that point, they decided to shoot for 1000 consecutive nights of reading together. But even that goal proved a bit too modest. In the end Jim and Kristen Brozina read together for 3,218 nights in a row, concluding on September 2, 2006, Kristen’s first day of college. This stupendous accomplishment is known in Brozina family lore simply as The Streak.
As it happens I began a streak of my own in the same year that the Brozinas’ streak began. Thirteen years ago today, on March 22, 1997, I began a regimen of daily workouts with a jump rope that has not yet been broken. Yesterday’s 35-minute workout brought my streak to 4,748 consecutive days during which I have managed to squeeze in time for jumping rope. Sometime this afternoon, my streak will enter its fourteenth year. Not sickness, nor foreign travel, nor even the unavailability of a jump rope has ever stayed this exercise freak from the sweaty completion of his appointed rounds. Once, when I found myself stuck in an out-of-town hotel overnight with no jump rope, I fashioned a makeshift rope from two telephone cords and went out to the parking lot to keep my streak alive. I have jumped rope at the base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, at the base of the Swiss Alps in Interlaken, Switzerland, and at the perimeter of Saint Peter’s Square in The Vatican (it was late at night and I had to keep a pillar between myself and a patrol of Swiss Guards in order to avoid arrest).
When I opened up my newspaper yesterday I found it an odd coincidence that the Times had chosen to run a story about another freakish streak on the exact day when my own streak was due to complete its thirteenth year, especially since March 21 is a day of no apparent importance in the history of the Brozina streak. But, as it turned out, yesterday’s Times was full of stories in which I was able to find a personal connection. In a review of a new memoir by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, writer David Carr noted that Feiffer, in the early years of his struggle to establish himself as a cartoonist, often contributed his cartooning skills free of charge to various publishing outlets. Feiffer longed to be a famous cartoonist, like his heroes Saul Steinberg, William Steig, and Will Eisner. “His ticket to that rarified world,” writes Carr, “starting in 1956, was the comic strip in The [Village] Voice, then a nascent left-wing newspaper. It was another ‘job’ he was paid nothing for, but it was part of the plan: ‘The entire process – the getting famous thing – might take a year or two (certainly no longer). First I needed to establish a loyal readership, a fan base that would give me clout with publishers…This was my strategy. This was how it would happen. I had no doubts my luck had turned. Nothing could stop me now. And nothing did.” What interested me about this part of Feiffer’s life story was how closely his strategy as a cartoonist mirrored my own as a writer. I have never been fussy about getting paid for my work. Almost all of my published short stories and poems have appeared in magazines that pay their contributors absolutely nothing (except, perhaps, copies of the issue in which contributor’s work appears). I write a monthly column for an online magazine of language and linguistics for which I am paid precisely nothing. When the magazine included an essay of mine in an anthology last year, I was again paid precisely nothing. A local publisher is preparing to bring out a collection of my poems, for which I will not only be paid precisely nothing, I will also be underwriting the costs of publication. Even this blog, for which I have written roughly sixty entries this year – poems, personal essays, short stories – brings me absolutely nothing in the way of financial remuneration. Like Feiffer, I am willing to work for free just to get my name and my literary products out into the world and before the eyes of readers. But the results of this strategy have been far less successful for me than they were for Feiffer. He won an Academy Award for his work on a short film when he was 32, an Obie for his theater work when he was 40, and a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning when he was 57. I am 51 years old and still waiting for “the getting famous thing” to happen. I suspect the wait will go on for a long, long time. I am still giving away my work for free (this essay, for instance), and I have little to show for all that generosity.
Elsewhere in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review was a write-up of a new book by David Shenk called “The Genius In All of Us” in which I also saw reflections of myself. In his book, Shenk argues that the main difference between ordinary mortals (me, for instance) and geniuses like Dickens and Beethoven isn’t a huge disparity in talent but merely a difference in our respective abilities to tap into our inherent talent. In her review of Shenk’s book, critic Annie Murphy Paul writes, “We’ve traditionally regarded superior talent as a rare and mysterious gift bequeathed to a lucky few. In fact, Shenk writes, science is revealing it to be the product of highly concentrated effort.” Shenk notes that Ted Williams, Michael Jordan, Mozart, and Beethoven all worked relentlessly to achieve mastery in their chosen fields of endeavor. And Shenk argues that it was that hard work more than any innate talent that led to their outsized professional achievements. Shenk urges his readers, according to Paul, “to think of talent not as a thing but as a process; not as something we have, but as something we do.” There is an old joke about a visitor to New York who asks a bystander, “Excuse me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The bystander’s response is, “Practice, practice, practice.” That joke, according to Paul, sums up the gist of Shenk’s argument: “Whatever you wish to do well, Shenk writes, you must do over and over again, in a manner involving, as [psychologist Anders] Ericsson put it, ‘repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level,’ which results in ‘frequent failures.’ This is known as ‘deliberate practice,’ and over time it can actually produce changes in the brain, making new heights of achievement possible.” What struck me about this theory of deliberate practice is that I and most of the other serious writers I know personally have been employing it all our lives, and though we have certainly nailed the “frequent failures” part of the theory, we are all still waiting for the “new heights of achievement” aspect to begin kicking in.
If, by themselves, hard work and a refusal to quit, could produce geniuses, then I and my writing pals Tony of Texas, Darrell of Oregon, and Bill of Sacramento would all have attained nearly Shakespearean literary powers by now. Bill is in his early sixties. Darrell and I are in our early fifties, and Tony isn’t far behind us. To the best of my knowledge, each of us has written at least 100,000 words a year since we were in our early twenties. That’s a minimum of a million words a decade for every decade of our adult lives. Between us, that adds up to about 13,000,000 words. Our output has been truly Olympian. Bill’s poems resemble Emily Dickinson’s and his fiction resembles Ernest Hemingway’s, but he has produced far more poems than Dickinson and at least as much fiction as Hemingway. Darrell has written roughly a dozen novels, hundreds of short stories, thousands of poems (in both English and Portuguese), and a handful of plays. What’s more he is a musician who has written several operas (both words and music; and one of them in Portuguese), and hundreds of songs in the folk and rock genres. He has also set poems by the likes of Fernando Pessoa and William Butler Yeats to music and performed them in coffee houses and elsewhere in his hometown of Ashland, Oregon. Tony also has written approximately twelve novels as well as dozens of stories and hundreds of poems. He has written teleplays, screenplays, and book review, and he also once wrote and directed his own independent film. I’ve completed a handful of novels, hundreds of stories and poems, and written countless feature stories for newspapers and magazines. I currently write a monthly column for both Inside The City and the online magazine The Vocabula Review. As mentioned above, I’ve written about sixty essays for this blog just since the beginning of the year. Those blog entries alone probably add up to more than 100,000 words. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that my estimate of the combined output of words produced by Tony, Darrell, Bill, and me over the course of our careers may actually be way too low. It’s possible that between the four of us we have produced something like 20,000,000 words of literary output over the last three or four decades. And yet, truth be told, none of us has come close to producing a masterpiece. All four of us have evinced a devotion to our craft to rival even that of a Dickens or Balzac. Clearly, hard work and a refusal to quit aren’t enough to guarantee a writer a successful literary career. I think it is safe to say that none of us – Tony, Darrell, Bill, or me – considers himself a huge success as a writer yet. And at our ages (late forties to early sixties) the chances of a attaining a long and celebrated literary career become slimmer and slimmer with each passing day. And yet, despite the odds against us, we all keep writing. I think we do this for two reasons. We do it in the hope that someday we will prove David Shenk’s theory correct and all that hard work will result in some sort of masterpiece, be it a great poem or story or novel or essay. But we also do it for one of the primary motivating factors that kept Jim and Kristen Brozina reading to each other every night for nearly nine years, which is also one of my motivations for jumping rope every day for thirteen straight years: We are all on a streak. Each of us has produced 100,000 words a year or more for the last 30 years or so. Every impressive streak creates its own momentum, perpetuating its own freakish streak-hood. A truly long streak of regular positive accomplishment – be it consecutive days of sobriety, days without an absence from school or work, or years without producing fewer than 100,000 words of literary output – is something to be proud of, and certainly not something to terminate frivolously. I can’t speak for Tony or Darrell or Bill, but I certainly don’t intend to let minor setbacks like a complete lack of acknowledgement or monetary reward prevent me from keeping my literary streak alive for at least another two or three decades.
Yesterday, when I finished my jump-rope workout, I walked into the living room and told Julie, “Well, that’s thirteen years under my belt, and I still don’t have a figure like Matthew McConaughey’s.”
“Cheer up,” she said. “You look a lot better than you did when it was all hanging over your belt.”
Roughly the same thing can be said about the literary work produced by Tony, Darrell, Bill, and me: It may not be perfect, but it looks a hell of a lot better than it did twenty million words ago.