Issue 32: On Gordon Parks' Newspaper, Terence Malick and the Sublime, and how Mark Twain Saved a President's Family

New York, New York: A Woman and her dog in the Harlem section by Gordon Parks

What detail surprises you in this photograph?

 

Columnist Pat Snyder from Columbus noticed “what looks like a newspaper spread along the windowsill.”  

 

Just like we ask in our workshops, Pat used the detail to tell a story:

 

 “Maybe she was in such a hurry to safeguard the dog in the open window that she grabbed the paper she was reading and headed his way. The dog was in the moment, and for that moment, she cast aside concerns about the world at large and envied her pet…"

 

Why do I love this exercise? Now when I look, I see Pat's story and wonder what happens next.

 

Can you find a surprising detail and use it to start a story?

Congrats, you've just sharpened your ability to identify emerging possibilities.

First name / Reader, , would you like to be featured in an upcoming issue?

Maybe you've had this experience: you touch down in a foreign city and hail a cab. As the cabbie wends his way through traffic, you experience a familiar sense of propulsion — in a cab, going to your hotel—  but you can't quite process the unfamiliar snapshots of life outside your window.

 

You don't know this place. You can't make sense of it. But you're moving through it with certainty.

 

That's the sublime.  

 

You don't need a passport to recreate this intoxicating combination of purpose and confusion. You can just watch a Terence Malick movie.

 

 

Malick uses a narrative invention that helps your mind experience exultation. He juxtaposes a purposeful narrative —  a clear and direct story— with dreamy montages that are lush and sensorial and full of images that your mind can't reconcile.

 

I love the video above because it uses three of Malick's movies to recreate the  effect. You have a forward-driving story— the voiceover — tethering a set of unrelated images from the The New World, Badlands and Days of Heaven.

 

You're left in a state of what Angus calls “ecstatic incomprehension.”

 

The sublime.

Why do we do this exercise? 

So you get better at identifying what you feel and why. 

So we have a reference library of literary works to help you alleviate hard feelings when they hit and build on positive ones. 

 

 

If you chose Option C, you have the kind of commonsense that might make you the next Ulysses S. Grant.

 

Commonsense is your ability to match the newness of your plan to the newness of your environment. 

 

Grant took his problem to his friend Mark Twain who immediately understood the gravity of the situation. Twain's father had died when he was 14, forcing him to abandon school and work as a typesetter.

 

Twain convinced former President Grant to set aside his sense of loyalty and embrace new publishing opportunities. Grant signed with a savvy publisher who enlisted an army of salespeople— mainly civil war veterans devoted to their former general—who went door-to-door drumming up pre-sales.

 

Grant died almost immediately upon finishing the manuscript. His memoir earned his widow the largest royalty check ever written at that time — 200K— and nearly half a million in total sales.

 

The book is still available today.

 

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