Fritinancy

Sixes and Sevens

It all started with Ernest Hemingway, who wrote what's said to be the saddest story in the world in just six words: "For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn." That inspired the editors of SMITH Magazine to solicit readers' six-word memoirs, which poured in:

Cursed with cancer. Blessed with friends.

I need sex. I hate men.

I do it to be bad.

...and the sextet that became the title of a recently published collection of 1,000 six-word memoirs: Not Quite What I Was Planning.

The New Yorker's Lizzie Widdicombe attended a celebrity-ful publication party; her Talk of the Town report aptly consists solely of six-word sentences (and some virtuoso punctuation):

Brevity: a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. Not associated with the biography genre. But then—why shouldn’t it be? Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story.

(I asked MSWord to tally the total word count of Widdicombe's piece: it came to 679, a number not evenly divisible by six. Not sure where the extra word is.)

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, health reporter Tara Parker-Pope challenged readers of her blog, Well, to outdo writer Michael Pollan's advice in his new book, In Defense of Food: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Distilled wisdom. Seven words. With a twist.

Parker-Pope received more than 1,000 entries, the best of which you can read here. I liked these a lot:

Drive safely. Use turn signal. Not finger.

Accept him. Or dump him. Relationship fixed.

Know thyself. But not completely. Need surprises.

And from the comments:

Didn't enter. Wish I had. Too late.

Parker-Pope chose six winners (why not seven?): five honorable mentions and a grand prize winner, identified only as A.K., whose entry read:

Ate plants. A big heap. Still hungry.

(About the title of this post: Ever wonder where the expression "at sixes and sevens"--meaning "total confusion" or "loggerheads"--comes from? Michael Quinion explains over at World Wide Words.)

Lucky

All things considered, I'm pretty lucky. All the key indices--health, shelter, friends, food--check out remarkably well. People actually pay me to do something I love--write and develop names--which I consider to be a stroke of insanely good fortune.

On the other hand, maybe I'm not lucky at all. Here is what the choreographer Twyla Tharp has to say about luck in her marvelous book The Creative Habit:

Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn’t dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they’re anything like the fortunate people I know, they’re prepared, they’re always working at their craft, they’re alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.

So how do you get luck? Here is Tharp's advice:

Be generous.

I'll repeat that: to get lucky, be generous. Here's why:

Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you’re generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It’s like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune.

I'm thinking today about luck and generosity and the "community of good fortune" because my friend Jon Carroll has reminded me that it's time once again for the the Untied Way. That's not a typo: it's "untied," not "united." Each December for the last umpteen or so years, Jon has devoted one column in the San Francisco Chronicle to the Untied Way, an invention of his that makes a very important point about luck and generosity. Namely: if you're blessed with the first you have an obligation regarding the second.

What is the Untied Way? Glad you asked.

The Untied Way is a nontraditional charity. It has no officers, no headquarters, no brochures, no regional offices and no guidelines. It is not a tax-deductible organization because it is not an organization at all. It issues no receipts, nor do letters come in the mail thanking you for your generous contribution.

The Untied Way does not have a Web site. The Untied Way does not sponsor a fun run, a masked ball, a gourmet dinner, a silent auction, a noisy auction, a turtle race or a runway show. It does not have buttons, badges or stickers. It will not send you address labels in the mail. The Untied Way has no overhead at all, and 100 percent of its donations go directly to those in need.

All you need to participate in the Untied Way, writes Jon, is access to an ATM, and lucky people always have access to an ATM.

Go to your ATM and take out some money. How much money is entirely your business, but the sum should be sufficient for you to notice its absence. It shouldn't hurt, but maybe it should pinch a little.

Then--and here's the beautiful, simple thing about the Untied Way--"you take your fistful of dollars and stroll down the avenue. When someone asks you for money, you give him $20. You repeat this until you are out of $20 bills."

Oh, sure: you have objections to this methodology. Jon answers your objections. The bottom line is, anyone who asks you for money probably needs money. And you have excess money. Simple as that.

Every time I read Jon's column, which varies only slightly from year to year, I'm reminded of the Jewish philosophy of charity. Actually, in Hebrew there is no equivalent of the word "charity." "Charity" comes from the Latin caritas, meaning "affection" or "esteem." Christian charity is based on love. But the Hebrew equivalent of charity is tzedakah, which means "justice." You don't have to love someone to practice tzedakah. You just have to have a sense of what's right. And--get this--the very highest form of tzedakah is utterly anonymous. You don't know who's receiving your money, the recipient doesn't know where the money came from, and you get zero credit for your unselfishness. You do it just because it's the right thing to do.

Maybe that doesn't work for you. In that case, consider Twyla Tharp's advice: to get lucky, be generous. Don't pretend to be anything but self-interested. The person who gets your $20 won't care. He's self-interested too. He gets money; you get luck. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

See you at the ATM. And...good luck. Really.

Book Value

Seth Godin offers some hard-headed advice for wannabe book authors in this list of 19 do's and don'ts. I've plowed this field myself as author, ghostwriter, and editor, and I'm frequently approached by authors seeking help, so I offer a fervent "amen" to Seth's tips. Especially useful are #3 ("Pay for an eidtor editor. Not just to fix the typos, but to actually make your ramblings into something that people will choose to read"), #5 ("Don't try to sell your book to everyone... Far better to obsess about a little subset of the market--that subset that you have permission to talk with, that subset where you have credibility, and most important, that subset where people just can't live without your book), and #6 ("Resist with all your might the temptation to hire a publicist to get you on Oprah"--can't tell you how many clients I've had who think the Big O is the sole arbiter of success.)

I do wish Seth had followed his own advice and paid for an editor, or perhaps just a good dictionary, to fix this common homonym error in tip #4: "...you shouldn't horde the idea! The more you give away, the better you will do." A horde is a throng. Seth meant hoard: to amass; to keep hidden.

By the way, if you're serious about writing a book and getting it published, here are two very helpful resources: Susan Page's The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book and Mary Reynolds Thompson's and Stephanie Lovinger's Write the Damn Book, a workshop and teleclasses that get you into gear.

Or you can just hire me to write the damn book for you.

What I'm Reading

Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, by Geoffrey Nunberg. Linguist Nunberg, a professor at UC Berkeley, frequent commentator on NPR's "Fresh Air," and contributor to the wonderful Language Log blog, uses wit, intelligence, and historical perspective to analyze why words are failing Democrats (aka liberals, aka progressives). "Words like elite, values, and traditional didn't work for the Republicans because they came with suitable frames already attached to them," Nunberg writes, "--rather, the words acquired their charged meanings in the context of the stories they were used to tell." Semi-frivolous aside: I was tickled to discover, in the middle of a riff on populism, a reference to Banana Republic's "populist pants" of the late 1980s. I had a hand in those pants, so to speak: I was Banana Republic's editorial director back then, and Nunberg's mention sent me back to my catalog archive. (Yes, children, 20 years ago BR was known for its witty illustrated catalogs and safari-themed stores where animal calls emanated from the speakers.) There they were, in the Fall 1987 book: Populist Pants, in khaki and navy, 100% cotton twill, $36. As I recall, we weren't making the "fashion statement" Nunberg disparages, but rather raising consciousness about a nearly forgotten high point in U.S. history. The copy began: "'Raise less corn and more hell!' So admonished a tough-spirited slogan of the Populist movement, back in the 1890s. Styles have come and gone since then, but certain values [aha!] persist. Our Populist Pants, steeped in grass-roots sensibility and the simple good sense of solid workmanship, are case in point. ..." Those pants were made in the U.S.A., by the way.

  One Tough Mother, by Gert Boyle. I'm talking with a former CEO about ghostwriting his memoir, so I'm surveying the competitive landscape. This little book by Columbia Sportswear's "ChairMa" is a rule-breaking charmer from start (its unconventional size and format) to finish (a recipe for "Gert's Finger Apple Pie"). Beginning in 1984, Columbia started running attention-grabbing print ads that featured a chunky, unsmiling, gray-haired woman next to a big headline that said something like "My Mother Wears Combat Boots." That woman was Gert Boyle, nee Lamfrom, who fled Nazi Germany with her family in 1937, settled in Portland, Oregon, and, after her husband died suddenly in 1970, took over the company with her son Tim, then 21. They nearly drove the business into the ground before making a pivotal decision that reversed their fortunes. The text is straightforward and self-deprecating (shout-out to ghostwriter Kerry Tymchuk, who also wrote Bob and Elizabeth Dole's joint autobiography), and it's a treat to see a whole bunch of those classic ads reproduced here.

Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman. The Canadian-Indian production Water is the most extraordinary film I've seen this year. Gorgeous and heartbreaking, it tells the story of a group of widows in 1930s India condemned to mendicancy and ostracism because of strict Hindu precepts that forbade widows to marry or mingle in society. The back story is even more astonishing: filming began in 1999 but was shut down after thousands of religious fundamentalists protested (they even burned an effigy of the director, Deepa Mehta); it resumed four years later in Sri Lanka with a mostly new cast. Mehta's daughter, Devyani Saltzman, was a 19-year-old cinematography assistant when shooting began, and she rejoined the production in Sri Lanka. She recounts the experience as an ambivalent outsider--she grew up in Toronto with her Jewish father--who has deep emotional ties to her mother's country. There's a fair amount of teenage mooniness here (Devyani loves Vikram, Vikram has a girlfriend), but the book is also a fascinating and intelligent account of the persistence of artistic vision despite almost inconceivable challenges.

The Secret Universe of Names, by Roy Feinson. The subtitle is "The Dynamic Interplay of Names and Destiny"--how woo-woo can you get? But I admit I'm drawn to this hefty tome (458 pages) for its insights into the relationship between sound, meaning, and emotional impact--three important elements of name development. Each page analyzes a consonant cluster (e.g., JN as in Jane, John, or Jonah) and teases out its associations: "the letter J's ability to impart a sense of integrity" (from justice and judgment) countered by "the influence of the negative letter N." A lot of this stuff is too close to astrology for my taste ("With their ability to lead and influence others, G people enjoy above-average success in business and politics"), but there's also a good deal of useful etymology and name history. And I defy you not to turn immediately to the page that analyzes your own name.