David Quigg is a writer. David Quigg is a photographer. David Quigg lives in Seattle. David Quigg devours audiobooks. David Quigg is an armchair warrior and diplomat. David Quigg used to be a newspaper reporter. David Quigg resorts to satire. David Quigg is a dad.
These are their stories.
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
sights from this afternoon’s dog walk
sights from this afternoon’s dog walk
- Nabokov, writing as John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in the foreword to Lolita
I love this sentence. There’s an Updike quote that often shows up on the covers of Nabokov books: “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”
John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. does not write ecstatically. That, perversely, is why I love the sentence. I love it but forgot about it and only found it just now while searching my computer for something unrelated. I’d stashed the quote in Evernote and attached this reminder: “Lolita snippet for VWP (corn reference in Nebraska).”
VWP stands for Void Where Prohibited, my own version of a “put my first book into the drawer, and shut it” unpublished novel. The “(corn reference in Nebraska)” bit refers to these two paragraphs:
Morning in Nebraska is something I’d rather forget. I had wanted to go looking for the real Nebraska — a place a journalist from Omaha once assured me really existed. This is a place of sand dunes and true natural beauty, if my memory isn’t confusing that reporter with one of the hundreds of others who interviewed me over the years.
Interstate 80 breathes not a word of this secret paradise to the travelers who speed through, counting on something better in Colorado. Having confined my drive to that deadening corridor, I can scarcely pass blanket judgment on the state. An unchewed corn kernel bumming a ride aboard a piece of shit knows as much about the beauty of its digester as I do about the beauty of Nebraska.
Which is to say that my narrator’s casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. He admits as much.
From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks:
I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit.
There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.
sights from this morning’s dog walk
Parents are the biggest obstacle to letting kids play, says study in Pediatrics - On Parenting - The Washington Post (via npr)
This is why I just let Bean crawl around. If he wants to eat the rocking chair legs, who am I to say he shouldn’t? He’s learning about those legs!
(via italicsmine)
======================
Exactly! Let Bean crawl. Let Bean gnaw rocking chair legs. Let Bean become close personal friends with our planet’s pitiless, fascinating gravitational tug.
A few things.
First, a deep breath and a quote from the actual study:
Our findings should be interpreted as exploratory, because this was a qualitative study of child care providers within a single county in Ohio. The primary purpose of qualitative research is to probe phenomena in-depth, not to generalize the results to other populations.
Also, they talked to “nine focus groups with 49 child care providers” and zero parents, so the stuff I’m about to quote about parents being “mostly to blame” is, in some sense, secondhand.
Still, this craziness:
Another surprising finding was that a societal focus on “academics” extended even to the preschool-aged group. Several commented that parents wanted to know what their child “learned” that day, but were not interested in whether they had gone outside, or had mastered fundamental gross motor skills. Participants felt that academics were valued by both low- and upper-income parents, and thus were motivated to demonstrate a “purpose” for gross motor time so that the children would not be seen as just “running around.”
There’s pretty much only one question I ask our kids at the end of their school day. I ask it with genuine enthusiasm because there’s literally never been a time that asking it has yielded a sighing, stereotypical “Nothing.” This is the question: “Hey, what did you guys do at recess today?”
I like the study’s marching orders for doctors:
Recognizing that school readiness is a prevalent concern, pediatricians may need to highlight for parents the many learning benefits of outdoor play (better concentration, learning about science, negotiation with peers), and reassure parents that active time does not need to come at the expense of time dedicated to “academics” and “learning.” Because we have previously reported that children sometimes are dressed unsuitably for active play, pediatricians can remind parents about the importance of “dressing for success,” which in preschool would be dressed for active play. … Last, in dispensing injury prevention advice, pediatricians should be careful not to reinforce messages that physical activity is inherently dangerous.
Speaking of dangerous, I came home from the library yesterday with a somewhat unhinged book called 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your kids do). The kids and I ended up chewing on aluminum foil and tasting the meaning of, in the book’s words, “foil will create a weak electric current when it contacts the acid in your saliva. If you have any fillings, you may experience an odd tingling in your teeth as the metal in the fillings conducts the electricity to the nerves nearby.” (This would be a good point to stress that our kids aren’t nearly as young as the kids in the study. Start with chewing rocking chair legs. Your preschooler has years to work up to chewing foil.)
- David Quigg, 1/4/2012
So my notion of poking fun at (Ayn Rand) evolved into an idea for a more sophisticated satire that would try to play fair with her philosophy, and present not just the bad and the ridiculous, but the good and the thought-provoking, and try to give some sense of where her ideas had come from and why they had such value to some people. And I also decided that I wanted to bring Rand herself into the story, so that she could defend herself, and so that I could give her her due.
And this idea would eventually become my second published novel, Sewer, Gas & Electric, which to me represents the point in my career when my dad’s influence caught up with my mom’s. Many of the elements in that book—the fantastical setting, the flashes of missionary zeal when my protagonist, Joan Fine, engages Rand in debate, the bicycle trip to heaven—these are things that I would associate with my mother. But the decision to treat Rand and her philosophy as more than just the butt of a joke—as a person, not a perversity—that’s Dad.
- from Seattle novelist Matt Ruff’s 2010 speech at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing, which I found tonight by a strange route.
Ruff’s words fit well with my favorite bit of that Camus quote I blogged in December: “true artists scorn nothing; they oblige themselves to understand rather than to judge.”*
Or, as Geraldine Brooks asked in that Best American Short Stories intro that I seem doomed to quote from at least once daily, “why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?”
More than just the butt of a joke. To understand rather than to judge. Not just a foil for humor. Ruff and Camus and Brooks aren’t saying exactly the same thing, but they’re singing in the same key.
I’ve typed and retyped and retyped this sentence. Every attempt ends up being about fiction I’ve written or fiction I hope to write and about how devoted I’ve become to the idea that I can’t be worth a damn as a writer unless I understand all my characters. Not admire all my characters. But understand, be able to step in and serve as their court-appointed defense attorney in a pinch.
I know what you’re thinking. Please, oh unpublished novelist, give me at least seven more paragraphs of your beliefs on this important topic. Tragically, I’m heading to bed.
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* This is my latest stab at improving on the official Nobel translation. I explained my thinking in the December post. If you understand French, you can decide for yourself. The original is “les vrais artistes ne méprisent rien ; ils s’obligent à comprendre au lieu de juger.”
If your band needs a name, I humbly ask that you at least consider “Rick Santorum and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Thank you.
- from themillions.com’s “Most Anticipated: The Great 2012 Book Preview”
Both hands shot up to the sides of my head when I read this. Amazement. Joy.
Caro has shouldered such a monumental task. Sometimes I worry that no single human can complete it. Considering that I don’t know Caro, I think more often than is reasonable about his health and about the care he takes when crossing streets.
Caro’s previous LBJ volume is one of my favorite books. I continue to believe that its tenth, eleventh, and twelfth chapters should be read by anyone who blogs, tweets, uses Facebook, or posts comments online.
There are any number of ways to drill our world for core samples. Tracking every Twitter reference to “Gatsby” is one. Odd but occasionally fascinating.
Have I mentioned my (possibly crackpot) Gatsby-wasn’t-rich theory lately?
David Dobbs just tweeted a link to “Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone.” In it, the NYT’s Nick Bilton writes:
… I climbed a large rocky hill as the sun descended on the horizon. It painted a typically astounding California sunset across the Pacific Ocean. What did I do next?
What any normal person would do in 2011: I pulled out my iPhone and began snapping pictures to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
I spent 10 minutes trying to compose the perfect shot, moving my phone from side to side, adjusting light settings and picking the perfect filter.
Then, I stopped. Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen.
“What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.”
Bilton turned his horror into a new year’s resolution: “In 2012, I plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone.”
If you read the post I wrote after taking five weeks off from blogging, you’ll know why I think Bilton is making a great choice. But I want to offer a partial defense of peering at the world “through a tiny four-inch screen.”
As I fully realized when we got dogs and it stopped being practical to tote my Nikon everywhere, a camera is itself a way of exploring the world, of cropping out distractions, of isolating what is beautiful in the ordinary, of permitting us to share that beauty with others.
So here’s a proposal: Stop photographing sights that are inherently beautiful. As Bilton wrote, he saw that Pacific sunset and did what “any normal person would do in 2011.” In other words, anybody witnessing that sunset would gawk and bask. What’s more, no photo—no matter how expert—could do it justice. So it’s no wonder the experience felt hollow. Just as there’s value to Bilton spending 30 minutes per day without his iPhone, he might benefit from restricting his camera use to detecting and documenting the striking sights that “any normal person” would fail to notice.
That’s personal. That’s worth sharing. Even when it’s just the sock you wrecked during your run.
