K×K³, the Selfie Pathology, Our Leader McPhee

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Author: Craig Mod
Full Title: K×K³, the Selfie Pathology, Our Leader McPhee
Category: #articles
URL: https://craigmod.com/roden/060/

Highlights

But amidst all the lovable goofiness, there is refined wisdom in McPhee’s Draft No. 4 essay collection on craft. Take this letter to his daughter, who had writer’s block and feared she lacked talent: Dear Jenny: The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again—top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.
McPhee on a trick of his own: You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”
Archetypes, maaaaaan, archetypes. I more and more believe that the most powerful thing a young person can have in their life is someone (often older, experienced; triple score if it’s a parent) point at a door that may be right in front of them that they can’t even see. Or aren’t willing to see. Just pointing at the door — pointing! — is freakishly powerful: This option exists. That alone can change a life. And then, geez, in the cases where the mentor or archetype helps you open the door, helps you interpret what’s on the other side. Well, then you end up with kids like John McPhee’s daughters.
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When I wrote “selfie” way back somewhere above, I put it in quotes because the front-facing-camera-shot-of-yourself is only the most base instantiation of the term. Lots of things can become the equivalent of “selfie” and I’ve tried to prune my ego of the impulse to reach for those bobbles over the past ten years. Breathless discharges are selfie-like. Work a bit and you can cultivate a kind of maniacal radar for most social-mediated opiates that might get in the way of thinking/seeing. “Razzle-dazzle” might also be a flag, an indicator for sussing out selfie-like activities in the world. Too much razzle-dazzle jazz-hands might mean there isn’t much below the surface. As Sam writes in his McPhee profile, McPhee is pathologically private. Has never had an author photo appear on any of his thirty book jackets. McPhee can write with razzle-dazzle, but often does so in a kind of anarchist, fuck-the-system, mode (“Caspar Milquetoast” — extremely punk). He is not looking for superficial accolades when he writes the book, “Oranges,” about oranges. Or 700 pages about rock (the mineral, not music).
McPhee found out he won a Pulitzer during a class break, and didn’t tell the students when they resumed. Until Sam showed up knocking, McPhee hadn’t allowed anyone to profile him. McPhee seems to have recognized early on that value and self-worth and the foundation of a good life are built on caring and looking closely at the world with wide-open eyes. Over the long arc of a life, an award is a bit of boring razzle-dazzle; more important is showing up to teach the class. McPhee has made a life of this: Solitude, teaching, family, and a distaste for anything superficial that gets in the way that work. In this way, he leads. And his badass cape of books flowing out behind him is proof enough.