Mad Men: Poem Unlimited!

Learning to enjoy poetry with Don Draper

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collection of poems made an appearance in Season 2, Episode 1 of Mad Men, and concludes with the eponymous title for the final episode of the season. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sees a guy reading this book in a bar, and asks, "Is it good?". The guy says, “I don’t think you’d like it". Later, Don is reading the book.

I enjoy "discovering" literature through other books and media. One of my favourite discoveries was Lady Rose's Daughter by Mrs Humphry Ward, where a journalist visiting my home town in Gunning in 1905 tells of reading the book while waiting for a delayed train. I have since read numerous references to Mrs Humphry Ward, including in Downton Abbey. Both Downton Abbey and Mad Men include numerous cultural references that are worth pursuing.

Indeed, my fascination with the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald began with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which I first watched while finalising the submission of my PhD thesis. Since casting that monkey off my back, I have been reading great literature as often as I can in an effort to "catch up" (as Harold Bloom said, we often end up reading "against the clock").

It has taken me some time to come to enjoy reading poetry; my earlier hard work in reading Homer and Virgil stood me in good stead. Yet I recall a quote from The Big Short:

Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.

At the time, I might have agreed. But after reading O'Hara's work, I had to think why, as someone who randomly writes poetry, that I would shy away from reading it. And then it all flooded back.

It was in 1981. There was a monsoonal storm outside the old Queenslander classroom in Cairns, Far North Queensland. I was sitting next to the window on the verandah and it was our Year 6 English exam. We had to write a poem. I looked out the window and I wrote a poem about the storm, as if it were a group of demons "playing their game of bedlam" and then moving on. (Bedlam was a rough game all the boys in the school used to play. It was invariably banned as we cycled through new variants of rough games that often ended in bloodied noses.) Debussy would have been proud (the memory makes me think of one of my favourite pieces - the "symphonic poem" Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune).

I was quite happy about the poem, went home, and thought nothing of it. The next day, Mum was called to the school, and I was accused of plagiarism. No child could write such a poem. After what I remember as the longest time, it was decided that my poem was indeed original, and I was awarded 100% for the exam.

But then it got worse. They made me read it out to the entire class - a combined class of about 60 eleven-year-old children. My reference to the game of "Bedlam" wasn't a hit. Kids today would have said that this reference was "lame". What I didn't know then was that the other kids were jealous. But after the whole experience, my thoughts were simple. Fuck poetry. Until I read O'Hara.

I hope the reader will forgive my indulgence in my pitiful primary school memories (channelling Turgenev here), but O'Hara's work brought all this back to me. But not just childhood memories. O'Hara refers to Greek mythology, botany, music, composers, artists (many I had to look up), but I could recognise O'Hara channelling Walt Whitman when I read a line in "Mayakovsky", the final poem in the book:

I leap into the leaves, green like the sea.

So now I find myself wanting to read poetry again. The first thing I did today was to renew my subscription to The Paris Review. (Today I received the last edition of my subscription.) I don't want to miss out on any more new poems, and I will go back and read my old editions. I might even start writing poetry again. All this from buying a book based on a cultural reference in Mad Men.

But one thing that struck me while reading Meditations was what voice would the author use if he were to read his own poems? Would it be lyrical and sweet? How would he pause, where would he place his emphasis? I was shocked to watch a few of Frank O'Hara's readings on YouTube. It was a bit like listening to Ernest Hemingway's voice in his Nobel Prize speech after listening to Corey Stoll speak the way we wished Hemingway spoke (in Midnight in Paris). Yet it gives me confidence that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Magazine and movie people might provide us with perfect images of the literary greats, but great literature is written by real people who live real lives and have foibles like the rest of us.

Why read poetry? I will need to buy Harold Bloom's book to find out in more detail. But for me, at least, reading O'Hara has opened up a whole new world of inner experience, sentiment, and beauty. His work makes me feel exactly as I do when listening to the work of Claude Debussy or my favourite American composer John Adams. It isn't sublime, it's magical. It makes sense of the term that up until now has vexed me: Poem Unlimited.

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Meta-cognition: How I Read Bloom and Why

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill by Pieter Claesz  (1628).
Pieter Claesz [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

How To Read And Why by Harold Bloom

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read of Bloom in The Paris Review article Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1. I took particular note of his relationship with his teacher, William K. Wimsatt, whom Bloom "agreed to disagree" with on matters literary. In my academic work, I hear this phrase often, and again only recently. For Epictetus, we should thank those who point out our faults so we may change ourselves. Bloom, however, suggests that we can bring about self-change on the basis of self-overhearing. A number of coinciding readings and experiences led me to self-consciously self-overhear myself. For Bloom:

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

This book outlines "how to read and why", and focuses on a handful of Bloom's chosen authors of short stories, novels, plays , and poems, and how and why to read them, in particular. Bloom's (p. 21) thesis is:

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest... but eventually you will read against the clock... One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change is universal.

Further, Bloom quotes Sir Francis Bacon's advice on reading:

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

When I found myself recently forced to "agree to disagree" with a few people who like to argue for the sport of argument, and who, rather than to learn and change, prefer to find themselves persistently correct and take the final word as some form of noble victory, I found myself overhearing myself. In a case of reading "with an overt urgency" (p. 21), I stumbled upon the concept of meta-cognition in the literature on "self-consciousness". And, thanks to Bloom, a new horizon is visible from the scaffolding of my inner citadel.

Alexander Pope, in the first stanza of Part 2 of An Essay on Criticism, tells me that ignoramuses have the strongest biases, and they let pride prevent them from changing (or "growing"). Instead, our power of reason should drive away pride, so that we can see our faults - not through ourselves, but through friend and foe alike. In effect, we can use feedback from others to correct our knowledge, but only if we can learn to "overhear" ourselves.

The concept of overhearing ourselves, as in being able to hear what we are saying almost as an independent observer, is what Bloom meant. But when I first read it, I immediately thought of it as hearing ourselves too much. When I think of "agreeing to disagree", I see an un-shifting opinion, where facts are "false news", where it is no longer about knowledge, but about some sense of superiority, one over the other. For a very long time, for me this has been a form of "class self-consciousness". Not false consciousness, nor class consciousness, but of being simultaneously conscious of one's class and of one's position in one's class. (I must point out that I mean the class one inhabited as a child, rather than the class one may have "moved to" since.) It is often that I hear from silver-tails and dyed-in-the-wool working class comrades this inability to use reason to develop knowledge.

Pope (and later, Mortimer Adler) wrote that being educated and having read widely are not guarantees of wisdom. Indeed, many well-educated people I have met, particularly those who love to argue for sport and "agree to disagree" when they cannot beat down their opponent with their own sense of righteousness, may properly be referred to as "bookful blockheads, ignorantly read". Given Bloom's focus on the "Western Canon", I wondered how much he was of the Huntington creed of imaginary belonging to some mythical people who span half the globe and much of recorded history. I suspected at first that I might have to acquiesce and accept; to agree to disagree. Yet Bloom doesn't take it there at all.

I meet these people (too often), who, whenever they speak of democracy, are "extremists" who think that democracy is the source of all good, and all political alternatives are the sources of all evil. I don't mean Neoconservatives, but a form of non-violent insistence that "democracy is good for you even if you don't know it" - a form of Western pride. While I am not suggesting that political and economic circumstances are irrelevant, I am of the democracy "deserves two cheers, not three" camp. And I am open to learning more.

So as I "overhear" myself when ambushed by such projected pride in an ambiguous and abstract idea of where I belong in the "Clash of Civilisations" thesis, I feel class self-consciousness, rather than a sense of who is right or wrong. And this is why I read. But how?

Bloom paints so many pictures of literary theory, especially concerning Shakespeare, that focus on the concept of the "will to change". For Bloom, literature is of either the Shakespearean or Cervantean (of Don Quixote fame) modes. Shakespearean characters change when they overhear themselves, as if it were someone else who had spoken.

The Cerveantean approach is where we "learn how to listen to one another" (p. 195) as the basis of change. Further down page 195, Bloom suggests that the solitary reader is more likely to learn, from reading, how to talk to herself than to others. To put these two literary modes in context, authors in the Shakespearean camp include Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Proust, Jane Austen, and Stendhal. In the Cervantean camp reside Italo Calvino, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Guy de Maupassant. I suppose this is why my mind expands when I read the latter, because the mode is less Anglo. And this is where I find Bloom confusing. Is he talking about the Anglo (Shakespeare) versus the Continental (Cervantes) philosophical approaches? Or is there some mystical, mythical, "other" Eastern Canon, as opposed to the Western Canon? In the final pages, it seems more likely that Bloom means the West in all its Abrahamic glory. This makes more sense, hence my refusal to agree to disagree with Bloom. (And thank God I did not imagine Bloom waving a flag with Huntington's nonsense.) Which all leads to my own experience with overhearing myself, and the concept of meta-cognition in relation to my class self-consciousness:

The term “meta-cognition” typically refers to the capacity to monitor and control one’s own cognitive states, and is manifest in one’s judgements (or feelings) concerning one’s own learning and consequent level of certainty or confidence (J.D. Smith 2009; Beran et al. 2012; Proust 2013; Fleming & Frith 2014). The suggestion is that if a creature is able to monitor their own level of confidence, they are to that extent self-conscious.

So, how to read Bloom and why? There is genuine wisdom in his work, and, if one will only listen for oneself while reading, the reader may just "overhear" herself speak. Unless, of course, you prefer to agree to disagree. But I suspect if that is what is happening for you, you might be "overhearing" yourself in the manner of hearing yourself too much. The former helps us to change, the latter helps us to "harden the categories". Or at least that is what I overheard.

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How I Journal

My prompts for daily journalling

This week I delivered a guest lecture to a postgraduate leadership class at the University of Canberra. I lectured on the importance of self-knowledge in becoming an effective leader, with a focus on Stoicism and journalling. The most common question I am asked when I lecture on this topic is: How do you journal?

I began keeping a daily journal on 3rd December 2016. Since then, I have developed a simple formula that helps me to write, even when I don't feel like it. In this article, I outline the process and the resources I use when journalling.

Why keep a journal?

Marcus Aurelius kept a journal, and so did Seneca. The primary purpose of keeping a journal is to live the examined life (as espoused by Socrates) but also to "declutter the mind". Journalling is also central to the practice of Stoic philosophy. For the simplest overview of this philosophy, read the first paragraph of Epictetus' Enchiridion. This sounds simple enough, but to actually believe in the correctness of the philosophy requires daily practice. If one doesn't constantly remind oneself that what is good and bad is within us and we choose how we react to external events, it is easy to slip into old habits. Journalling is a powerful tool to not only establish new habits, but to keep Stoic philosophy at the forefront of living.

And what is the best time to write? Again, Aurelius wrote in the morning as part of his daily preparation, and Seneca wrote in the evening to reflect on the day that was, so I journal both in the morning and the evening. 

Keeping the discipline of journalling can be difficult, so there is some self-discipline involved. Research by James W. Pennebaker suggests that writing about and to oneself (as Aurelius did) can improve our mental health and well-being. But the proof is in the pudding: whenever I miss a morning session (which has happened twice), and even though I have "caught up" with my morning routine that same evening, I have found myself to flounder during the day. 

The reverse is not so true. If I miss an evening (which has also happened a couple of times, particularly when travelling), as long as I catch up the next morning, the effect is less drastic (although I do tend to forget some of the lessons learnt during the previous day).

What do I write?

I had tried several times in the past to keep a journal, but the purpose always escaped me. My writing was directed by my mood, and I was often too tired to write anything meaningful. At the beginning of 2017, I purchased a copy of Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic and used the daily meditations as a prompt for my writing. This was simply a case of reading the daily meditation, then writing about the ideas or the quote or whatever else entered my mind. This led me to add a number of other daily prompts.

I use three other books that provide prompts for my reflection and writing. The first work is Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, where he outlines his thirteen-week virtues program. Franklin deliberately practised each of what he considered to be the thirteen key virtues, focusing on one each week, and leaving the rest to happen by chance. At the end of each day, Franklin assessed himself against each virtue, making a mark in a table against the virtue he had compromised that day. His idea was to complete four 13-week programs each year. 

Franklin was realistic, and accepted that humans can never be perfect. But self-improvement was the goal, and the daily process forces one to take stock of the daily practice of the thirteen virtues. Self-awareness is the greater part of the battle.

The second work is La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. Although very witty and rather sarcastic at times, I enjoy the way La Rochefoucauld is realistic. His is not all positive thinking, but rather a reminder that we are human, and despite the best intentions, we can never be perfect.

The third work is James Allen's (1921) collection of morning and evening meditations, As A Man Thinketh. Allen believed in the law of attraction: that we bring into our lives the things that we hope for (and the reverse). He meant we attract inward states, not a McMansion or a Lamborghini. But Allen also believed that we can control our own minds, and only through a process of self-analysis and self-examination and deliberate reflection, bit by bit, can we conquer ourselves (and therefore the universe).

At the beginning and end of each session of journalling, I draw on Franklin's Virtues Journal and prepare myself for the day ahead, then assess my behaviour each evening. Again, one can never be perfect (as Franklin admitted), but it does provide a long-running record of behaviours and indicates rather clearly one's strengths and weaknesses.

The Routine

Each morning, I write systemically against the following:

1. Reflection on the day ahead, and any thoughts that I "slept" on.
2. La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. Usually, I write the maxim out in full.
3. James Allen's morning thoughts. I usually summarise the key parts for the relevant day (there are 31 days with morning and evening thoughts, so it is a month long process).
4. Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic. I summarise the key parts for each day (there are 366 meditations).
5. Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic Journal. There is a question relating to 4 above and I write in the journal in pencil. There is a short space for journalling in the morning and evening.
6. Franklin's Virtues Journal. I ask myself "What good shall I do today?" 

Each evening, I write systemically against the following:

1. Reflection on the day just gone, and any issues or lessons learnt.
2. James Allen's evening thoughts. I summarise the key parts for the relevant day.
3. The Daily Stoic Journal: I write in pencil against the day's question.
4. Virtues Journal. I assess myself against the 13 virtues, place a black circle where I compromised the virtue, an open circle where I could improve for next time, and a tick when I feel I did the right thing, and a blank if there was nothing related to the virtue.

The Results

It is difficult to assess oneself objectively, but the key thing for me is that I have developed an evidence base on my own thoughts, behaviours, and issues. Because it is my evidence, I have little choice but to accept it. This provides an important "mirror" in which I can see my behaviour more clearly. I suppose the process is a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. But the process is my own, and I do enjoy it. While others may not notice an improvement in my behaviour, the benefits are importantly internal.

As James Allen would say, we must fly to the "Rock of Refuge" which resides deep within our soul, and with our minds, we either forge weapons for our own destruction, or tools with which to quarry the mine of our soul. The point is to develop an "inner citadel" where we can be at peace, and all of our "possessions" reside. Not earthly possessions, but the possessions of our very soul. 

This is just one way of practising Stoic journalling, but it works for me. Even on the days when I have no clue what to write, I can read and reflect on the various texts. This usually becomes a trigger for personal reflection.

But it must be daily. Seneca (I think it was) said something about how his entire philosophy was battered and bruised every time he left his house. 

It is only through morning and evening practice that I can stay true to the philosophy: to focus on what I can control, and be indifferent to external events, and to act right in response to the things that I cannot control. 

Daily journalling makes Stoicism work. It justifies why Ryan Holiday says "Journalling is Stoicism". And I think he is right.