Steve Martin describes a breakthrough in his comedy routine

At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, I played for approximately a hundred students in a classroom with a stage at one end. I did the show, and it went fine. However, when it was over, something odd happened. The audience didn’t leave. The stage had no wings, no place for me to go, but I still had to pack up my props. I indicated that the show had ended, but they just sat there, even after I said flatly, “It’s over.” They thought this was all part of the act, and I couldn’t convince them otherwise. Then I realized there were no exits from the stage and that the only way out was to go through the audience. So I kept talking. I passed among them, ad-libbing comments along the way. I walked out into the hallway, trying to finish the show, but they followed me there, too. A reluctant pied piper, I went outside onto the campus, and they stayed right behind me. I came across a drained swimming pool. I asked the audience to get into it—“Everybody into the pool!”—and they did. Then I said I was going to swim across the top of them, and the crowd knew exactly what to do: I was passed hand over hand as I did the crawl. That night I went to bed feeling I had entered new comic territory. My show was becoming something else, something free and unpredictable, and the doing of it thrilled me, because each new performance brought my view of comedy into sharper focus.

His memoir is a great read: well written, not long, full of memorable stories and recognizable people (like Elvis).

Life = a Garden

The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food. It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses; it’s about winning, about providing society with superior things, and about proving that you have taste and good values and you work hard. And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it. What a great metaphor!

A friend recommended Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird [Kindle]. It had a cute title and seemed a quick read and was about the life and advice of a successful writer, so I read it. I confess, I had to grind to finish the book. I just wanted her to tell me how to be a better writer. Semicolons or no. When to use adverbs if at all. How to start and finish a short story.

Instead, she wanted to use writing as a metaphor and a gateway to explore the more important issues, of family and loss and struggle. I was too impatient. Maybe that’s her point. Just take it bird by bird, right.

Apparently the book has quite a cult following. I found the above passage glowingly quoted in another book (I forget which one, sorry). And then the flashbacks came, of Anne’s wonderful writing, of the neat little images she painted into my mind’s eye. Her voice really is unique. Part of me suspects that when I reread the book in a few years, maybe sooner, it will be like seeing a casual friend after many years. And who knows, times have changed. Maybe we can become great friends now.

9 beautiful sentences from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It

You know a story is a good one when it makes you care, deeply, about worlds you never bothered before. In this case, fish and rivers and fly fishing in rivers and the love of brothers. In A River Runs Through It [Kindle], Norman Maclean’s writing feels like that of Steinbeck: folksy, grounded in a place and tradition, and always seeking to discover more, to shed more light, on why human relationships are the fragile and miraculous things they are.

“You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.” Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

I could feel all the excitement of losing the big fish going through the transformer and coming out as anger at my brother-in-law.

Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.

My mother had to go from basement to attic and to most closets in between looking for a fishing basket while she made lunches for three men, each of whom wanted a different kind of sandwich.

Clearly by now it was one of those days when the world outside wasn’t going to let me do what I really wanted to do—catch a big Brown Trout and talk to my brother in some helpful way. Instead there was an empty bush and it was about to rain.

That’s how you know when you have thought too much—when you become a dialogue between You’ll probably lose and You’re sure to lose.

We had to be very careful in dealing with each other. I often thought of him as a boy, but I never could treat him that way. He was never “my kid brother.” He was a master of an art. He did not want any big brother advice or money or help, and, in the end, I could not help him.

Good Habits Checklist: June 20 – July 3

Good Habits Checklist

Two good weeks. Were it not for a 14-hour Monday flight to Taipei, I would have reached my target of 80% for both weeks. I don’t expect this kind of performance to continue. There’s usually a boost that comes from travel, from being in a new city. Like the start of a new relationship: extra energy, extra promise. But the grit and grind of reality hits us all.

Singing is my least consistent habit. When I take weekly voice lessons, I can sustain 30 minutes of daily practice. But without that accountability, I soon stop. So, the fix is simple: resume lessons!

Thanks for following along. What are your habits? How do you grade yourself? Email me anytime.

We construct when we increase the potential energy of the system…

Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it. … We construct when we increase the potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy when we diminish the potential energy. … Whatever may be thought of these definitions, we all know in practice whether an activity is to be regarded as constructive or destructive, except in a few cases where a man professes to be destroying with a view to rebuilding and are not sure whether he is sincere. – Bertrand Russell

…one of my favorite thinkers and creators (read, for example, Russell’s thoughts on persecution mania, on the career treadmill, on competition, and on envy.

Hat tip to BrainPickings.