Reading & Writing

It’s been a wonderful season for book birthdays. To highlight just a few titles, Nancy Werlin has outdone herself with Impossible, Courtney Sheinmel makes her heartfelt debut in My So-Called Family, and Marlene Perez knocks ‘em over with Dead Is the New Black.

Congratulations, my friends!

This is bound to sound strange, but sometimes I just like certain words. Today, I happened to see something Jason Fried quoted himself saying at Web 2.0, on seeing oneself as a “curator” of software. And while I understand and admire his point, what I really like is that word, curator. One of my father’s best friends was a curator for a museum in Toronto, so the word conjures for me very specific sorts of curation. I have a vision of lab coats and trays of antiquities and lovingly prepared labels with red borders. And the stories this man told about a childhood encounter in the treasure room of the old Shah of Iran. You see there was this room full of treasure at the Shah’s palace, with chests of rubies and pearls. And there was this one tiny box, with each side made of a thin sheet of emerald, and tiny, almost invisible silver work holding it together. Surely no one would notice if this one small box slipped into a pocket… And looking up and noticing how closely the guards watched, with their long curved swords at the ready.

The other word I like today is archivist. Again, I have a personal association, this time with a woman who used to be the archivist at Choate. She would let me into her basement-of-the-library kingdom to research articles and I every time I found myself awed at the special gray document boxes tied with string and old school uniforms wrapped in acid-free tissue. How just seeing those uniforms conjured fall days and girls in plaid skirts and pony tails playing field hockey. How fierce they were. My ankles and shins hurt just thinking about those long-ago girls and their hockey sticks.

None of this is apropos of much, I just like those words. They describe activities and a kind of attention I don’t think we notice much as things go along. We spend a fair amount of time in daily life curating our collections and archiving bits for the future. And bogging down in the minutiae and the decisions this work entails.

And then blogging about some of it. Which is both curating and archiving.

Merlin Mann, the voice behind the uber-productivity blog 43 Folders, is melting down. I mean this in the best possible way, no snark intended.

As Merlin notes in this post, he began 43 Folders almost exactly four years ago (which seems hard to believe, in hindsight, given its meteoric success — only four years?). Like many blogs, in its earliest form the blog was a means of self-discovery — a self-improvement experiment, if you will:

I also realized from the beginning that the real life hacks were about making your way from a place that’s chaotic and depressing toward someplace where you feel more competent, stable, and alive. A place where you eventually may not need the life hack any more. I wanted to figure out why this stuff did and didn’t work by living inside of it, and by filing real-time reports about what I learned — effectively operating on myself in public with a keyboard, a handful of index cards, and an infinite IV of French Roast coffee.

People, including high-profile bloggers, liked his (earnest, quirky, occasionally profane) voice and linked to it. What started out, I’m guessing, as a hobby, grew into an avocation, and then, a living.

And then comes the rub. The living-by-blog model is harder than it looks, and I’m not surprised to learn that it comes at a price and may even be damaging to the soul. The timing isn’t surprising either; Merlin wouldn’t be the first high-profile blogger to hit a wall a few years in, nor the first to do so after becoming a parent. (Yes, I believe this changes things, for fathers as well as mothers.)

Mostly, I think there’s a paradox for the people who value making worthwhile things. On the one hand, its damned difficult to do on top of life’s other responsibilities. It seems to make the most sense, be most practical, to combine making worthwhile things with making a living. And yet, it is so easy to get sucked into the vortex of being a producer, where one gets whirled so fast there’s no time to think, to deepen, or to reflect. What happens to one’s ability to create when creation is 9-to-5?

What makes Merlin’s announcement that he’s come to a crossroads inspiring rather than depressing, however, is that he’s proposing to go on, to do things differently, and to do them better. I am truly hanging on, eager to know what comes next, and wishing him all the best.