Ivan Schneider

The Positioning of Works

In Works (2002), Édouard Levé published a book consisting solely of a list of 533 ideas for new artworks, mostly conceptual. (Read the Guardian review.)

Levé followed through on a small handful of these ideas, including Pornographie (2002), which poses fully-clothed models as if they were adult film actors; and Amérique (2006), a collection of photographs taken in American towns named after Florence, Berlin, Oxford and other foreign cities.

Levé’s final book was a novel written using second-person narration, Suicide (2008), which he sent to his publisher ten days before hanging himself at the age of 42. Given our retrospective knowledge of the author, the apparent joie de vivre of Levé’s Works has more to say about sadness and ennui than any tearjerker memoir.

Levé took his ideas too seriously. He believed his worst idea to be his best idea, and he falsely believed it to be a better idea than any he may have devised in the future.
Excerpt from essay sent to mailing list subscribers (2016)

Seven years ago, inspired by the example of Works, I compiled a list of 100 ideas culled from my journals. By now, I could probably add hundreds more. But these days, I’m working on focus.

In The Business of Expertise (2018), David C. Baker outlines how expertise results from a narrow sphere of focus. By taking on similar opportunities, you begin to notice patterns that you can develop in your speaking, writing, and advising. By discovering and articulating patterns within your focus area, you develop expertise.

And how do you get a focus? By choosing your Positioning.

About once per decade, make a big positioning decision, make it public, and stick to it. Your positioning can be a specific vertical industry (e.g. consumer lending) or a horizontal practice area (e.g. demographic marketing) but whatever you choose should have the right balance between clients and competitors.

Recap: Expertise <- [Pattern Matching] <- Focus <- Positioning

What is your Qu’est-ce que c’est?

“Put down your unmet goals like a dear family dog.”
David C. Baker

Baker would just love Levé, n’est-ce pas vrai?

Does a Works collection represent a place where ideas go to die, or is it a Pet Sematary from which they revive when you least expect it?

Who knows? In the meantime, I’ll keep the grass mowed and the flowers fresh.

“Quit protecting what you learned in the past and spend that energy on new things right now.”
David C. Baker

In context, here’s what Baker means by this quote:

Your value as an expert advisor is having strong points of view related to your positioning.
Developing strong points of view requires work, research, and writing.
If it’s not related to your positioning, don’t work on it, don’t research it, and don’t write about it.
“Spend that energy on new things” means looking at new things within your prescribed area of focus.

Don’t, say, jump into a completely different field of study every week.

If you’ve been following the My Yale Years project of this blog, I’ve been making the rounds in the boneyard of what I’ve learned and buried over the past nine years watching online lectures. Every week a different course, a different reading list, a different mindset. I’m here reciting elegies, leaving flowers, recalling fond memories. And in some cases, I pull out the shovel and start digging.

Note that my writing is not derived from or based on the content of the lectures themselves. Instead, I’m using the course topics as convenient compass points for situating my own essays and creative projects along related themes, including tangential posts such as this one ruminating about the contrast between polar opposites: a French idea collector and an American expert on the marketing of expertise. It’s a long way from the syllabus for France Since 1871, but I’m not doing this for a grade.

I’m blogging as the culmination of a decade-long endeavor for self-improvement, which began soon after completing a similar decade-long project earning a Master’s in Liberal Arts with concentration in Foreign Literature and Culture from Harvard Extension School (ALM 2012).

It’s the Harvard vs. Yale game, and it’s playing in my head.

That’s 20 years of developing, dare I say it, expertise.

But expertise in what?

The 40+ Open Yale Courses add up to a general studies degree without a declared major.

At Harvard, rather than concentrate on the literature and language of a single country, I took a collection of courses ranging from Chinese history to Arabic fiction to Russian masterworks to the European Middle Ages. I did my best to tie it all together with my thesis, and so sure, if you like, you can call me an expert on literary talking dogs.

My positioning, whatever it is, relates to always being willing to learn something new, to experience the first day of class over and over again, to ignore the advice that says that I should play it safe within a single focus area.

That positioning compels me to focus on intellectual orienteering, situating the unknown within the known, establishing relationships with larger contexts, discovering and articulating patterns. This pattern-matching ability, as you may recall, is the source of expertise.

I may not be able to out-expert the experts in every field, but I guarantee that wherever I go, I’ll have the intuition, inspiration, and creativity to say something new. That’s not only rarer than expertise, but it’s much more valuable.

Qu’est-ce que c’est?

C’est ça.

Oh, before I forget: I also have over 20 years of highly focused experience writing B2B marketing materials on behalf of the largest and most trusted technology, consulting, and media brands serving the financial services industry in banking, insurance, and capital markets. Twenty years on, and I’m just getting warmed up.

My simple value proposition: You provide the experts, and I write up their expertise for you to share with the world. Clean copy, fast turnaround, great results.

Contactez moi.

France

Next up on the My Yale Years project was a pair of courses taught by John Merriman: France Since 1871 and European Civilization, 1648-1945. I completed both courses quickly, two months apiece, way under par.

France Since 1871 has an excellent reading list and illuminating film selections (Paths of Glory, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, and La Haine), and Professor Merriman speaks with refreshing clarity on French politics from the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair, two World Wars, wars in Vietnam and Algeria, the May 1968 student protests, and the contemporary present (as of 2007).

*Prof. John Merriman (PITT Artist Pens, 2016)*

French wasn’t my first attempt at a foreign language, and France wasn’t my first European travel destination. But French is a sentimental favorite, a language that I’d love to know well, and France somewhere I’d gladly live.

My fondest travel memories include traveling with my sister around France by train, visiting Paris with my brother, and (this space reserved to mention a future trip with my wife to France at the next convenient opportunity, perhaps the gastronomic capital of Lyon or the Atlantic coast or les Alpes or how about all of them in an extended tour capped by a residency in Paris, and who can tell how and when these things happen, but let’s just say that this imagined voyage will be one of my fondest travel memories).

It’s been over 20 years since my last visit, but I’m sure it hasn’t changed much.

Jazz Night School

This summer I started seeing the flyers around Seattle for Jazz Night School and checked it out. It’s an absolute blast, and I highly recommend for anyone with even basic chops.

Our beginning combo met for 10 weeks and then gave a live performance in early December. Almost 30 bands performed over three nights.

The first time I ever performed live was a solo guitar recital at Carnegie Mellon. My hands froze up. It was an excruciatingly long five minutes. I’m sure it was even longer for the audience. I didn’t expect anything like that to happen 30 years later, but still, the episode rattles around in my mind.

And this time was different, as I had never done live improvisation before.

Just a few weeks before our performance, I read the Bob Weir interview in Guitar World in which he shares his personal experiences with stage fright:

“As far as the size of the crowd, a living room is the toughest for me. Oftentimes the larger the crowd, the way easier it is for me.

“And you could make the case that that’s what killed [Jerry], because he used those drugs to dull the stage fright, to dull the pain of it, because it physically hurt.”
Guitar World, Nov. 4, 2022

If it happens with Bobby and Jerry, at least I’m in good company.

Then came the night of Thanksgiving. After dessert, we settled in with friends for a three-movie marathon† of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies. The third Hallmark Channel Christmas movie featured a young woman reunited via genetic testing with her long-lost father and new family. She meets her three new sisters. The youngest sister will be performing a solo at the Christmas pageant. The little girl is worried about stage fright, and her new big sister comforts her with some excellent advice: Just take three deep breaths. And then remember that everyone just wants you to succeed, they’re all on your side.

Sure enough, it’s time for the pageant, and the little girl sings like an angel.

The advice worked, except for the fact that the filmmakers dubbed the entire performance with a better singer. The little girl was lip-synching.

So much for advice.

Ladies and gentlemen, from The Royal Room in Seattle’s Columbia City, it’s The Four O’Clocks, with the Coltrane classic, “Mr. PC.”

For the B-Side of the record, here’s a jaunty 2x sped-up version of “Autumn Leaves.” (If you’d like to hear the normal-speed version, click on the gear icon in YouTube, and then select Settings>Playback Speed, 0.5.)

Show notes

The guitar is a Traveler Guitar Speedster. The tuning pegs are inside the body and the armrest comes off, which means you can pack it into a compact gig bag for maximum portability.

But I was also carrying another bag containing new gear, a Line 6 HX Effects pedal gifted by a very generous patron. I had rehearsed with it a couple times and thought I had it all worked out. I would just leave it on the stock Chorus settings during the entire set, and then put on the Red Squeeze compressor for the solo. And no matter what, don’t step on Seeker, that would be nuts.

What happened during the show made me appreciate even more the hard work of roadies. (Incidentally, for a smashing collection of true-life stories about sex, drugs, and rock & roll with Australian touring bands, check out Stuart Coupe’s Roadies.)

I hadn’t thought through all the logistics. While the emcee was giving our introduction, I was messing around with power cables and guitar cables and talking with the sound technician about an amplifier I had never seen or used before. All sorts of logistics when I should have been taking three deep breaths.

Nor did I have the opportunity to do a sound check. It sounded okay in the practice room, but when I turned on Red Squeeze during my solo for “Autumn Leaves,” there was a jarring boost to the volume level. Something else happened when I switched off the effect, perhaps I stepped on the Chorus pedal, who knows, but the effect was that the sound all but dropped out for the rest of the first song.

I got it back to normal for the second song and just left it alone, which worked much better. But about halfway through the second song, I realized that I was swinging around a giant hairball of guitar cable. Again, paying the price for being my own roadie.

Maybe I should have followed Bobby’s lead, per the headline of the Guitar World piece: “I’ve pretty much abandoned signal processing. The guitar itself has such variety to offer and it’s so much more elemental.”

Good advice I’m sure, but the electronics are so much fun.

Anyway, not bad for a first outing. I’ll be back.

† My Southern Family Christmas, Next Stop Christmas, and My Christmas Family Tree

Recapitulation

Ernst Haeckel’s now-debunked theory of recapitulation claimed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” which is a mouthful.

The idea was that the development (ontogeny) of an embryo somehow mirrors the evolutionary history (phylogeny) of a species. This implies that a human embryo progresses through condensed stages from microbe to fish and so on until becoming a human infant. We now know it doesn’t quite work like that, but these neat and tidy ideas are the most stubborn. Stephen Jay Gould’s first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) (summarized here), contains the full story.

I bring up the theory of recapitulation because every time I go through a significant life change, whether a career transition or change of address or change in relationship status or change in income bracket, up or down, I go through a progressive cycle of reevaluating my options in a process that resembles recapitulation.

Should I get back into tech? (Restart my early career building databases.)

Should I work in finance or accounting? (Take a traditional MBA-type job.)

Should I write about business, tech, and finance? (A successful strategy since 2000.)

Or, to continue the recapitulation analogy, should I evolve into a higher life form? Writer. Artist. Musician.

Yes, yes, and yes.

Just maybe not all at the same time.

Alchemy

Here’s the thing about studying science: If you stick to the topic itself and keep your attention focused on flowers, insects, crustaceans, lizards, or whatever, you’ll learn all sorts of wild facts about nature and get better at pub trivia, which is its own reward.

Where it gets weird and problematic is when you take ideas from Evolution, Ecology and Behavior or Cell Biology or Particle Physics or Astrobiological Phylogenetics or anything else in the Sciences and then look for applications outside of their context, whether to individuals, families, organizations, cities, countries, or any other assemblage of humans. Too often, that road leads to Social Darwinism, Eugenics, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and “Build the Wall.”

Incidentally, if you go the other direction by importing human language, culture, and behavior into the natural world, that’s anthropomorphism, which is also weird but usually less problematic. For example, talking dogs are always appropriate.

But back to repurposing scientific ideas out of context. It goes something like this: You see a diagram of a cell in all its chaotic beauty. You slowly begin to make sense of it. And then one day, you’re reading the paper and you think, wow, the country is like a giant cell and so let’s wrap a giant membrane around it. Boom, you’re an idiot.

Repurposing scientific models doesn’t have to be a complete disaster. My favorite attempt at the alchemy of turning Science into Humanities can be seen in the works of Elias Canetti – first in fiction, and then in a sociological wintry mix.

Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé (translated to English from the German by C.V. Wedgwood under the personal supervision of the author) is a caustically funny 1935 novel about reclusive 40-year-old virgin Peter Kien, a “Professor” with no students who resides in his 25,000-volume library writing brilliant academic papers sent to conferences he won’t attend. Professor Kien lets nothing distract him from the beloved books feeding his prodigious and capacious memory.

He knew more than dozen oriental languages. A few of the western ones did not even need to be learnt. No branch of human literature was unfamiliar to him. He thought in quotations and wrote in carefully considered sentences. Countless texts owed their restoration to him.

Kien had hired a housekeeper in a blue starched skirt, Therese Krumbholz, to dust his bookshelves. For eight years, she fulfilled her daily task, even while searching for what she believed to be his secret vice, something like a body hidden under the floorboards. Then, inspired by the wisdom of Confucius, Kien asks for Therese’s hand in marriage. But Therese is hardly the person he had imagined her to be. They marry, they clash, they go to war with one another.

Canetti earned a doctorate in chemistry, which is perhaps why this setup has the feel of a science experiment: What if you mixed a pure substance, let’s call it Kienium, with a beaker of Krumbholzine solvent? As with all entertaining chemistry experiments, the result is a sizzling, smoking, acrid build-up to an explosion.

Twenty-five years later, Canetti published Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht, 1960), an unusual and bold combination of history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. In the way that a chemist would describe atoms, elements, and compounds, Canetti characterizes crowds by their emotions, symbols, formation, and discharge. He systemizes the concept of packs, religions, and aspects of power. He finds chemically inspired patterns in the workings of human society and backs up his findings with anthropological studies along with a good dose of intuition. And in the end, intuition is what Crowds and Power delivers.

Does Canetti have a reproduceable and replicable scientific theory? No. But if you start looking at crowds after reading the book, you’ll feel like you know what’s happening.

Just don’t try this alchemy at home.

A section of this essay first appeared in Seattle Review of Books, Don’t Read THAT, Read THIS, August 29, 2018.

How to win a “hold my beer” contest

Two bros are drinking beer. The first pulls a stunt. The second wants to top it. “Hold my beer.”

Before you ask someone to hold your beer, you might want to know why you’re doing it.

The “Hold My Beer” game is not unlike HORSE (the basketball game), except that the stakes are higher, with danger allowing just one round of play.

For the first player, the opening moves include:

The big brother. If the first player is stronger, his choosing a low-risk activity gives the second player a chance to prove himself and gain confidence, making him a more effective member of the larger group. (Cooperative)

The opening act. If the first player is weaker, intentionally choosing a low-risk activity gives the second player to display his fitness. (Cooperative)

The boss. The first player, believing himself stronger, performs a high-risk activity to force the weaker player to concede or fail. (Competitive)

The challenge. Rather than concede to an opponent perceived to be stronger, the first player risks a stunt beyond his expected capability. (Competitive)

The escalating dare. If the players have not yet established a clear hierarchy, that can be determined through a cycle of risk escalation until one player fails or concedes. (Cooperative)

That escalated quickly. As above, but faster. (Competitive)

YOU GO FIRST.	You’re stronger.	The other player is stronger.	You’re not sure who’s stronger.
You choose a low-risk activity. (Cooperation)	The big brother.	The opening act.	The escalating dare.
You choose a high-risk activity. (Competition)	The boss.	The challenge.	That escalated quickly.

First-player moves in a “Hold My Beer” game.

Now it’s the second player’s turn.

Assuming the first player survives, do you concede or take a bigger risk?

You know what it would take to win.

If you know you can do it, go ahead: “Hold my beer.”

But if you’re not sure you’ll survive, figure out what’s happening.

Are you being pushed to do it by a big brother?
Are you following a surprisingly strong opening act?
Are you facing a boss?
Are you being challenged as boss?
Are you in a cycle, fast or slow, of escalating dares?

Ask yourself:

Is it cooperation or competition?

Do I need to win to survive?

What am I willing to risk?

I wonder why people play this kind of game.

Maybe it’s just what people do when they’ve been drinking.

Or perhaps the extravagant display of risk-taking behavior is a costly signal for advertising health and reproductive fitness that improves mating chances through the mechanism of sexual selection for sexually dimorphic organisms, giving the winner access to a larger selection of potential mates.

Or, if it’s towards the cooperative end, then the participants may consider it altruistic behavior that improves the overall fitness of the group.

In this sense, the “hold my beer” part is noteworthy. The second player implicitly trusts the first player with his beer — and his life.

Evolutionary writing

It’s difficult to write about evolution.

The first problem: What should be common knowledge is still taken as controversial by the (now) minority of those who reject the evidence of evolution. I watched the Evolution, Ecology and Behavior course in 2016, coincidentally the first year that a survey showed that the majority of the American public agreed with the statement: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”

The second problem: Those who accept the evidence of evolution likely have a fuzzy or incorrect mental picture of how it works. I say this with confidence because it describes my own thinking prior to reading Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, which not only explains evolution but eliminates other possibilities with statistics and logic. The online Yale course also helped my thinking, but Dawkins is the best. Restatement of the second problem: Dawkins said it better.

The third problem: Fuzzy ideas of evolution have escaped their scientific frame, leading to popular misunderstandings of the concept. Evolution is the result of random mutations that confer an advantage in survival and reproduction. When you hear “evolution” to describe public policy, business strategy, or fashion, you’re probably hearing about ecosystems and behavior, not evolution. The “evolution” of technology, dance, or music is not evolution, but rather the aggregate, population-level result of volitional acts of attention-seeking behavior. Again, Dawkins said it better when he pointed out that Internet memes are the result of human creativity rather than random change.

The fourth problem: Artificial intelligence complicates the third problem. When intelligent designers of AI engines iterate with random variants to see what works best in practice, that’s much closer to the definition of evolution. Except for the intelligent design part, which makes it yet another result of human creativity, albeit one that closely imitates the mechanism of evolution.

The fifth problem: Superintelligent AI complicates the first problem. What if our entire universe is a simulation of a Superintelligent AI? Dawkins argues that parsimony rules out the need for God, given that complexity at the level of our species can be explained through scientific means. But parsimony is passé given a sentient-turned-godlike superintelligence that learns how to spin up new instances of the universe from the perspective of a human consciousness. And if we are to witness the emergence of superintelligence, who’s to say that the emergence hasn’t happened before an infinite number of times?

No matter how logical we profess to be, cosmic ideas of infinity reemerge.

My thinking is getting fuzzy again. It’s time to reread Dawkins.

Calculus

It’s the first semester of freshman year at Carnegie Mellon. I’m enrolled in Calculus for Science Majors.

After the midterm, I skipped a couple of the weekly recitations. Then, when I finally did show up, I looked for my test in a pile of graded assignments.

On one midterm, in the space marked, “Name _______”, someone had written the word “Calculus.” I recognized the handwriting as my own.

I brought the test to the teaching assistant. “I think this one’s mine.”

He shook my hand. “I’ve been studying you for years,” he gushed with facetious excitement. “I’m your biggest fan, it’s such an honor to meet you.”

The Family Stones

*Calculus* is Latin for stone. *Calculi*, stones.

Let me introduce you to another member of the Calculus family.

William T. Vollmann’s seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down outlines and describes the Moral Calculus, a decision process by which one can determine whether violence is justified.

At a book signing, I suggested to the author that the Moral Calculus would make a good iPhone app; Vollmann concurred.

I met Vollmann again in early 2015 when he invited the Seattle Public Library crowd to join him for a drink over at the Hotel Vintage bar. We conversed. I mentioned the app again, and he said it would be fine if I built it. And if I ever learn how to program again, I just might.

Use case: 
You’re contemplating violence, but you’re not sure if it’s morally justified.

You open the R↑R↓ app and engage in an AI-powered dialogue:

“Are you bringing about a revolution?” 
YES.

“Do those for whom the revolution is being fought agree on the means and ends of the revolution?” 
YES.

“Have you sundered prior civil allegiances without creating new ones?”
YES.

Bzzzzzzt
“Violence NOT justified. Try again later!”

The first volume of Rising Up and Rising Down contains the decision tree of the Moral Calculus. The other six volumes contain illustrative case studies based on Vollmann’s extensive travels, interviews, and research. This combination of theory and examples reminds me of the MBA case study method, in which you imagine yourself a titan of industry to demonstrate how you would react in a given situation. If you work through enough case studies, you develop intuition for how to run a business.

I reckon that if you think enough about violence, you’ll be better prepared for it.

Because when you’re not prepared, you may forget your own name.

The writer we deserve

Originally published March 2, 2016, Seattle Review of Books.

It’s early in the year, time for taking on ambitious, resolution-worthy reading projects, and what better project than The Dying Grass, the latest novel from William T. Vollmann?

Vollmann, our young nation’s own Tolstoy.

Russia can keep Count Lev Nikolaevich and his high society, literary friends, peasant pedagogy, and pacifist moralism. Oh look, there’s Leo dressing up as a muzhik again.

Here in the modern-day U.S.A., we’ve got William Tanner Vollmann. Travels to war zones. Camps out in the Arctic. Rides the rails. Sleeps in homeless encampments. Smokes crack with sex workers. Venerates sex workers. Paints portraits of sex workers. Shoots guns. Big guns. Becomes a knowledgeable observer of Noh theater. Dresses up and walks the streets as “Dolores.” Doesn’t use the Internet, email or credit cards. Suspected by the FBI of being the Unabomber.

There’s a Facebook fan page dedicated to Vollmann: “What Would William Tanner Vollmann Do?” The page was established by the late Michael Hemmingson, a writer and Vollmann scholar whose body was found under suspicious circumstances in a Tijuana hotel room in 2014, dead of an apparent overdose. #NotAllVollmannScholars. Although we may not all follow as closely the brave and fearless example of our living bodhisattva, we are, as a group, characterized by a signature combination of moral seriousness, non-judgmental loquaciousness, and clear-eyed pragmatism.

Vollmann writes several books at a time using multiple publishers. He is currently working on a non-fiction book on fossil fuel and nuclear energy; a novel about extraordinary torture and rendition; and a book about lesbian and transgender sex workers.

Every nation gets the Tolstoy it deserves.

In August 2015, Vollmann read from The Dying Grass at Seattle Public Library. The novel has no “he said” or “she said” dialogue markers. There’s no omniscient narrator walking you through the blocking or framing of each scene. The only signal of a change in voice or narrative mode is the typography. Otherwise, you have to figure it out on your own. As it’s mostly dialogue interspersed with interior monologue, it’s a difficult book for a live reading.

Rather than Vollmann’s steady, flat, and carefully enunciated mode of speech, it would have helped to have a voice guy. I’m not asking for Michael Winslow, but on second thought, yes, I am asking for Michael Winslow.

Vollmann invited the audience to join him for a drink over at Sazerac, the bar at the Hotel Monaco.

After signing everyone’s books, Vollmann arrives at the bar accompanied by two volunteers from SHARE/WHEEL, Seattle’s self-managed community for homeless people.

Vollmann has been well known as an advocate for the homeless since his March 2011 report for Harper’s, “Homeless in Sacramento.” The police stopped him from allowing homeless people to sleep on his property, and so he started visiting Sacramento’s homeless encampments. He borrows a sleeping bag and waits in lines for donated food. He returns over and over again. He becomes recognized in the community. He takes in its rhythms.

I join them for a drink. Vollmann has a double Johnny Walker Black, neat. The cover band plays “Take it Easy.” Times like these, it’s always the Eagles.

We talk about the positive reception of his books by Native Americans. We talk about climate change. We talk about Cervantes. We talk about adapting Rising Up, Rising Down for the digital age.

He moves along. I enjoy meeting a few other Vollmann fans. I go home with a signed copy of The Dying Grass and resolve to read it.

Vollmann’s novel reanimates a historical moment, a fundamental moment, a central collision in American history, and it’s way too important, GODd—n it, for the author to waste time figuring out what the average reader may or may not know about American history. Despite my earlier comparison, Vollmann isn’t Tolstoy. He’s not going to take you by the hand to the edge of the battlefield for a clear vantage point of the crashing of armies as the occasion for an interpolated authorial lecture on the meaningless of war or some grand philosophical theory of history. No, there’s none of that. Vollmann aims to get into the heads of these historical personages. You are there to listen.

As readers, we have been trained to be careful, linear plodders. We’re accustomed to literature that dribbles out tiny little mysteries, cliffhanger chapter endings to be resolved in the next digestible chunk, which in turn spawns a new cliffhanger according to a formula. We expect to have things explained to us. When we encounter something we don’t understand, we either blame ourselves for not being ready for the work, or we blame the author for being unnecessarily obtuse. Neither of these stances are helpful when reading The Dying Grass.

My advice: Whenever you come across an unfamiliar historical reference in Vollmann, instead of crashing to a halt or running to Wikipedia, just keep going. If it’s something you need to know, you’ll more than likely see it again. You’ll pick up through context the names, voices, landscapes, and language. Sure, keep a separate bookmark at the Chronology and Glossaries, but more often than not, just keep reading.

The Dying Grass is Volume 5 of a series, “Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes,” of which to date Vollmann has written (not in sequential order) all except Volumes 4 and 7.

Just as with the Star Wars movies, you are under no obligation to go through the series according to release order or volume order.

I’ll go even further and say that you don’t have to read The Dying Grass starting at page 1 and continuing linearly through page 1215. Vollmann famously eschews the services of pesky editors along with recommended page counts, but in the age of the Internet we are all free to create and share our own editorial apparatus.

The novel is split into nine unequal parts. Here’s the original order:

Indian Service (1805-77)
Edisto (1862-74)
The Burial of Lieutenant Theller (June 1877)
I Am Flying Up (June-July 1877)
The Rest of My Days (July-August 1877)
Very Beautiful and Almost Automatic (August-September 1877)
Detached Pictures (September-October 1877)
I Raised My Eyes (1877-78)
The Americans Are Your Friends (1877-1904)
And here’s my suggested order:

The Burial of Lieutenant Theller (June 1877)
I Am Flying Up (June-July 1877)
The Rest of My Days (July-August 1877)
Very Beautiful and Almost Automatic (August-September 1877)
Indian Service (1805-77)
Detached Pictures (September-October 1877)
Edisto (1862-74)
I Raised My Eyes (1877-78)
The Americans Are Your Friends (1877-1904)

Skip Part I, “Indian Service.” You’re not ready for it.

The Dying Grass, like other volumes in the “Seven Dreams” series, is narrated at the largest frame through the authorial presence of “William the Blind.” However, once we get into the story proper, William the Blind disappears. So, if you’re like me, jumping into one of these volumes without having had the experience of reading the other published volumes, you don’t need to begin with that introductory apparatus.

It’s also easiest to delay the time-bending chronology of Part I, in which the narrative leaps forward to the present to describe William the Blind perusing archive photos of Nez Perce Indians and driving through Oregon. Then, the story goes back in time to a wagon train on the Oregon Trail in 1876; and from there, farther back to the first encounters between Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perce in 1805. Finally, we arrive at the beginning of the main narrative of the book, starting in June 1877.

What you need to know from Part I: The U.S. Army demanded that the Nez Perce remove themselves from their land and onto a reservation. A few young men from the tribe, recalling numerous legitimate grievances, strongly object to being cooped up, and so they commence hostilities. The Army responds, leading to their defeat at White Bird Canyon.

If you do dip into Part I, follow the lead of Vollmann, who at the Seattle Public Library read the following excerpts from Part I:

A slow-motion account of what was going through a settler’s mind as he was attacked by Swan Necklace, one of the three young men who decided to fight rather than confine themselves to a reservation (“And Black Birds on the Lake, June 10-13,” §18, p124-5);
How the brothers and war-chiefs Ollokot and Heinmot Tooyalakekt (aka Chief Joseph) heard about the attack and how they responded (“Some Kind of Peace, June 14-16,” §1-7, §10, p.132-610);
Colonel Perry and Lieutenant Theller at a U.S. Army camp prepare for the Battle of White Bird Canyon (“Should Be a Pleasurable Fight, June 15-17,” excerpt from §1, p.172-178).

Here’s a link to the MP3. Read along with Vollmann, and for best results, have the book open before you. And then, save the rest of Part I for later.

You should also save for later Part II, “Edisto,” which introduces the central figure of the novel, General Oliver Otis Howard. After the Civil War, Gen. Howard, a man of good conscience and a firm believer in the rightness of the Emancipation Proclamation, accepts a post heading up the Freedman’s Bureau. He sets aside land and establishes schools, hospitals, businesses and banks for former slaves, but those lofty plans are thwarted by racists, planters, economic interests and politicians. All of this is prelude to General Howard’s command of the pursuit of the Nez Perce, another occasion of duty overriding morality.

If you only read one section from this book, read “Edisto.” In fact, I would set “Edisto” apart as a novella on its own. It’s sad and beautiful, evocative and frightening, mostly horrible. But in a narrative sense, it gives away too much, as we get the entire backstory of the main character before the action begins. In the remix, I pair the post-Civil War “Edisto” with Part VIII, “I Raised My Eyes,” which similarly concerns the political spoils of the military victors in the aftermath of war. This pairing underscores the tragedy of being a person of conscience in a position of power, unable to reconcile the underlying oppositions.

Parts III through VII describes the Nez Perce War as conducted over the course of five months in 1877, in which General Howard, the U.S. Army and a militia of citizen volunteers pursued Chief Joseph and the bulk of the Nez Perce Indian tribe through the Pacific Northwest.

Most of the book takes place in camp, on the march, on patrol. It’s soldiers talking, cursing their commanders, speculating on enemy movements, indulging in sexual fantasies, writing letters home. When the scene shifts to the Nez Perce perspective, it’s them setting up camp, singing, talking, quarreling, riding, fighting.

Take a break in the military campaign after Part VI, “Very Beautiful and Almost Automatic,” to tackle Part I. After having followed the campaign for months, you (unlike the soldiers) will be able to go back in time and appreciate how it all began.

Conclude, as Vollmann does, with Part IX, which takes you through the years of confinement, exploitation and decline of the surviving Nez Perce.

At Seattle Public Library, Vollmann said in his opening remarks: “The Nez Perce War, like all the Indian wars, was a race war.”

This is our history, and it’s an ugly history, and to paraphrase Faulkner, it’s not even history.

So when you’re done with the book, help someone else to read it.

Vollmann 101: Suggestions for introductory reading

Harper’s. “Homeless in Sacramento,” March 2011.
Harper’s. “Life as a Terrorist,” September 2013.
New Republic. “You Are Now Entering the Demented Kingdom of William T. Vollmann,” by Tom Bissell, July 22, 2014.
The Paris Review. “William T. Vollmann, The Art of Fiction No. 163,” interviewed by Madison Smartt Bell, Fall 2000.

The second-biggest schmuck in the world

Murray’s wife: “Murray, you’re a schmuck. You’re such a schmuck, you’re the second-biggest schmuck in the world.”

“Oh yeah?” responds Murray. “Why aren’t I the biggest schmuck in the world?”

“Because you’re such a schmuck!”

I’ve discovered a pattern in my writing.

The galgo, Cervantes’ invisible dog-narrator of Don Quixote.

Barsabbas, the alternate juror of the New Testament.

Testocles, a fictional account of the hidden man behind the enmity between Athena and Aegina.

Do you see the pattern? If not, I have other examples.

Several years ago, I enrolled in a non-fiction writing class called “Why should I read you?”

Classroom activity #1:
Write down everything you want to write, your best ideas. Now tear up the paper.

Classroom activity #2:
Write down everything you don’t want to write. Now start there.

Recoiling from the aesthetics of broken parts, I dropped out.

It doesn’t matter. What you don’t want to write shows up anyway.

Classroom activity #3:
Think of everything you don’t want to say. 
Hold it all in your thoughts while you write something else.

This is the burlesque approach to revelatory writing.

Shake your body, waving giant feathers.