Third Thought

OPENING MONOLOGUE

In last week’s newsletter, I made a list of occupations that deserve to be booed more often. One reader questioned why I had put babies on the list. And my response is, what else are babies? It’s what they do. If student can be an occupation, then baby can be an occupation too.

And don’t even get me started on Harley Jarvis.

God, I hope he dies.

Today's reading

• Getting to third

• The End or the Beginning of a Widening Beam

• The thing about cows

• There’s always money in the banana stand!

Getting to third

Anthony Jeselnik brought up the idea of third thought on the recent Tom Papa podcast. While it’s not his concept, I’ll let Jeselnik explain it:

I think third thought is the space where we just let the work happen — that is, we let things gestate long enough for the solution to find itself. Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, “Everything is gestation and then birthing.”

In the glory days of Drunk Hulk, when I was scrambling to react to everything happening in real time on Twitter, I was living in first thoughts. The race to be the first one to the joke — the first one to break the news — meant that I often reached for the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable. Sometimes it worked, but it was also hack (the definition of first thought in a nutshell). The more evergreen jokes — usually not attached to the moment — were the ones I could take my time with, and those are the second thoughts, or in some cases, third thoughts.

When I think of the artists I admire, like David Lynch, where they seem to exist only in the space of the third thought — that is, they create a lifestyle that allows for the work to always be running in the background. In the case of Lynch, that’s through TM and a disciplined series of routines — like eating the same foods every day — so that his brain can focus on the art.

Constant gestation, constant birthing.

It’s also the space where you can be open to inspiration. In Adam Moss’ The Work of Art, he interviews the showrunner for Veep, David Mandel. At one point in the show, the writers hit on the idea of fusing Dr. Seuss and Maya Angelou. To make it work, Mandel remembers a specific episode of Moonlighting with an exchange between the lead characters and a security guard that devolved into a Dr. Seuss-like bit. With that touchstone in mind, Mandel “ordered up what the joke should be, which rarely happens” and from there the writers created a crude and funny scene for the show.

(This reminded me of how I was struggling with how to introduce a character in a book I’m currently working on, and the breakthrough came — of all places — when I rewatched Die Hard with a Vengeance. Watch the scene when John McClane is introduced in the back of the police truck. You see him through the eyes of everyone else in the vehicle before you finally see what shape he’s in. Voila!)

I have more I want to say about third thought, but hearing Jeselnik discuss it opened up a lot of ideas I was already considering (especially when it comes to Lynch’s work).

(And I know it seems weird to be focusing so much on comedy and then trying to drag Lynch into the discussion, but people keep forgetting how funny some of his movies and TV work can be.)

I’ll come back to this another time.

It clearly needs to gestate more.

The End or the Beginning of a Widening Beam

Last week I re-read Stephen King’s Carrie for the first time since I was 12 years old. It’s, like, a completely different book than the one I remembered. Who knew?

My favorite part of the book is when Tommy comes to pick Carrie up for the prom. She’s already stood up to her mother and she’s potentially on the verge of starting a whole new, happier life. This is the beautiful calm before the horrific storm:

King is the master of the final chapter sentence. Usually, as he does a few times in Carrie and his other work, it’s an ominous warning of what’s to come (like when the book’s antagonist, Chris Hargensen, storms off after being suspended for bullying Carrie, and she says, “This isn’t over by a long way.” And the next sentence ends the chapter with And she was right.) But here, in the excerpt above, it’s King stepping in to sweetly remind us of Carrie’s humanity, and her right to feel happy, safe, and control her destiny.

Carrie works like a retelling of a school shooting. It’s even filled with metafictional excerpts from books, newspaper articles, and reports published after the tragedy where everyone is Monday-morning quarterbacking the infamous prom. And in many cases, we can see what the experts — and even people who were there — got wrong.

The story is about a young woman coming into her own in the world (with or without telekinesis). It’s also about how someone can be manipulated by two opposing forces — in this case, Chris Hargensen setting up the buckets of pig’s blood that will have tragic consequences, and Sue Snell, who gets her kind-hearted boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom as a way to ease her own guilty conscience), and how precariously easy it is for those forces to determine the rest of Carrie’s life (is it the “end or the beginning of a widening beam”?).

(I’m not including the mother — truly one of King’s most horrifying characters — as a force because you get the sense that once Carrie’s powers manifested, it was only a matter of time before she stood up to her. I’m more focused on the forces Carrie is unaware of.)

Anyway, I’ve tended to dismiss Carrie over the years (a lot of this, I believe, is that I’ve conflated the Brian De Palma movie with the book — and I feel that his adaptation did more harm to King’s book than Kubrick did with The Shining), and this reading reminded me that I was an idiot.

He was.

The thing about cows

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida once gave an English lecture where he talked a lot about cows. The audience was confused, but the famous deconstructionist was known for being playful and speaking about various topics, so they assumed Derrida had a point to make.

So, the packed audience full of academics took furious notes about cows.

There was a break at the conference. After which, Derrida returned to the stage and said, “I’ve been told it’s pronounced chaos.”

There’s always money in the banana stand!

Here’s something I found at my parents’ place in October: my first paystub for an article I wrote for the St. Petersburg Times in January of 1991. This was the first time I was paid for my writing.

This wasn’t the first time I was published. That honor went to an article I wrote for The Suncoast News in November of 1989. I wasn’t paid for that one, but 15-year-old-me was thrilled just the same.

All right. That’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading. You’ve been great!