[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about the art of writing, my motivations and tribulations when I write them (I do this about every fifty Readers). For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
-The title of an article where a question mark follows a provocative statement could easily sound as a rhetoric artefact rather than the formulation of a real hypothesis. To provide a clearer answer to this doubt, and a full justification of the legitimacy and relevance of the question mark, I will share with you a few considerations and explanatory notes that I deem necessary as a framework to understand where I come from. In this Reader, the considerations come in a hopefully logical sequence. (Gianni Tognoni, Alejandro Macchia)
The potential power of I
-Visibility brings responsibility.
- I have been a writer of the Reader for 15 years. I have wanted to assume that the experts I quote can be trusted to understand their subjects –put simply, to get it right.
- I find that the most difficult thing in my Readers is linking one thing with the other. The link may just be a sentence or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares me for what is to come. (V.S. Naipaul)
- I cannot help but feeling that valuable information and time fast slip from my hands risking the Readers will ultimately be but a footnote in what you do every day and will never be used for meaningful change. (adapted from Maria D. Villamil)
- I, together with many, think about vitally important global issues that most people have neither the time, expertise nor the desire to dwell-on. Then, I write the Readers about these issues and occasionally make a speech to half-filled rooms –and the rest of the world goes merrily along ignoring me (us) completely. (David Baldacci, The Whole Truth)
- I am thus no longer accepting the things I cannot change (as an ostrich). I am changing the things I cannot accept. (Idle No More, Grassroots Canadian Aboriginal Rights Movement)
- I never quarrel with actions; my one quarrel is with words (that do not lead to action). The man who cannot call a spade a spade should be rather compelled to use one; it is the only thing he is fit for. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
If I am not straight with myself, I cannot be straight with those who read me (Tomas Eloy Martínez)
-In my attempts to change society, I have discovered the need to change myself. It is not enough to imagine fairer and more democratic social relations: I need to become a person capable of living those relations in real time. (Sandra Angeleri)
- My writing is always straight –even if sometimes my lines may be crooked… (Gustavo Gonzalez) [I wonder: Can you tell my writing identity by looking at my punctuation alone? Research has found that an author’s use of punctuation can be extremely revealing].
- As a critic, in the Readers, I translate into another format my impression of facts. In them, there is nothing moral or immoral; they are either well or badly written. As drivers of opinion, the Readers show work that is presented differently; they debunk complex and vital topics. (O. Wilde, op cit)
- At this stage of my life I have become more skeptical, suspicious, sometimes cynical. Nihilism is at the turn of the corner. After having traveled the world, having read tons, having participated in too numerous to count ideological debates and having been part of only a few victories and many defeats, there is a certain tendency to become a grouchy complainer. (Louis Casado)
- Through my Readers, I have always hoped to get you, my readers, to agree with the Chilean scientist-philosopher Humberto Maturana who told us that coexistence in harmony is only possible when each of us understands that coexisting consists in making it possible for individuals-who-have-had-different-domains-of-experience to cooperate. We indeed can widen our respective experiential domains so as to reach a new domain that includes us all: a domain where the ‘other’ also has a place and in which we can build a new world together.
- We all carry out most tasks with little or no conscious attention. Competence without comprehension may apply to menial tasks like brushing your teeth or driving a car, but certainly not to science and other noble and superior intellectual pursuits. Only perhaps partially comprehending what I write in the Readers, I compose responses and reactions that too many push under the carpet. (This is why in them I abhor fables without a moral lesson and I constantly puncture myths, sometimes presenting a deja-vu, but mostly a presque-vu and/or a jamais-vu). It is in this way that I manage to survive, even though I seldom really fully grasp what the hell is happening, and why. (Daniel Dennett)
The Readers are always part of a lucid decision. Yet sometimes, they are the result of an unconscious process of taking from a varied black and grey literature (Mario Vargas Llosa)
1. In my Readers, I have 30 seconds beyond the title and the TLDR to get your attention. If I do not ‘sell’ any Reader to you in 30 seconds I have exhausted your patience. Good ideas are easy to write about, bad ideas are the hard ones to sell.* Everybody’s impatience has increased with our enslavement by the social media. Someone reading a book 20 years ago had few other distractions. Today your phone offers infinite, nonstop competition for your dopamine. Writers of everything from emails to books (to Readers) have to accept that reality. Therefore, today, whoever says the most stuff in the fewest words wins. So I delete without mercy.
*: When I have a writer’s block, this usually simply indicates ideas are struggling in my head. The writer Jason Zweig said “you can never create something worth reading unless you are committed to the total destruction of everything that isn’t.”
2. Most good writing is a byproduct of good reading.** You will never meet a good writer who does not spend most of her/his time reading. A lot of bad writing comes from scheduled writing. Good ideas cannot be scheduled. They come randomly, usually after you read something that connects the dots to an unrelated thing. So, you have to grab good ideas as they fly by (that is the function of the general Reader folder I keep and add to). If you have an idea but think ‘someone has already written about that’ just remember there are 1,010 published biographies of Winston Churchill.
**: My readings are not always for knowledge. They remind me of an easy and enjoyable way to run into the things I did not know. Reading fiction and non-fiction is my form of a drug. It sets me dreaming of some impossible future time when I would start at the beginning of all subjects and devote my days and nights to study. (V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River)
3. A powerful incentive for me is to write something people intuitively know, but have not yet put into words.*** It works, because readers learn something new without having to expend much energy questioning whether it is true. Writing the Readers may look like a soft skill, so it is easy for people in technical fields to ignore. But in every field, the person with the best story wins –not the best idea, or the right answer, or the most useful solution. Just whoever tells the most persuasive story. A lot of good ideas are killed with bad writing. No one wants a lecture. Everyone wants a story –which is anything that subtly puts information into relatable terms. It makes everything easier to remember and contextualize. Writing is an art, and art is subjective. Novelist William Maughan said there are three rules to good writing. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” I actually think there is one: write the kind of stuff you like to read. Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows. Writing for others is work, and it shows. (all the above from Morgan Housel)
***: Yes, ‘words’: We live in a world of words as if they were the real world; but the word ‘water’ does not quench our thirst… (Albino Gomez) The only words that have a right to exist are those that are better than silence. (Chinese proverb) The meaning of the word depends on whether we use it as poets, philosophers, scientists, writers or as activists like me. (Louis Casado)
By writing the Readers I attempt to create meaning for you
-Simone de Beauvoir claimed that all written work was a collaboration between the writer and the reader.
–I have never been the author of anything, because I am always catching things that are flying around. (Nicanor Parra)
4. Through the use of words, more things happen than just words. Therefore, for me, writing the Readers works like a medicine of the soul.**** The idea of the Readers is to make a multitude that is silent (you included?) actually speak out, attempting to contribute a grain of sand to the dignity of the wretched of the earth; making visible glimpses of possible rebellions; aiming at big quantum jumps in human rights (HR) through which can emerge a new wo/man that can overcome the multiple resitances to change –trying even to pass some camels through the eye of a needle. (Diego Weinstein)
*: The great writings of our civilization (and the Readers are not it) have almost always started as marginal or subversive pieces, directed to a minority; they were received with indifference or even with opposition when they first appeared. (Octavio Paz)
5. My many bewilderments/perplexities justify why I get more assertively involved in the HR debate. My wish is that it were you, my readers, primarily the younger among you, who make the needed sensible, urgent and long overdue decisions on the open questions for which there are no unequivocal responses on the horizon. The important thing is that you deeply reflect about the many conflicts humanity is undergoing, and do so without outside influence, be it from activist-intellectuals or well-intentioned internationalist-activists like me, but who, like me, are always prone to make mistakes. One thing is certain: whatever you decide, will have important consequences –positive or negative– for the future of the rest of the world that is affected by so many polarizations. (Boaventura Sousa Santos)
6. The old does not want to die and the new cannot be born. Is it perhaps because the young are too young and, we-the-old, are too old? Actually, the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is still young; or put another way, the problem of/with youth is that I no longer am part of it. We always say that time passes, but the truth is that it is us who pass. Yes (sigh!), …experience is almost always a judgment acquired too late. (A. Gomez) So, I figured, if I cannot prolong my years, I may as well devote myself to intensify my days writing…
7. Hence, be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind do not matter and those who matter do not mind. (Bernard Baruch) [Remember: should is where you hope-for, must is where you are-urging-that-it-be-so, and shall is where you can-and-will-act. (Joseph Heller, Catch 22)].
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com