Leven is wat er gebeurt…

…terwijl ik niet over te schrijven.

It’s been a couple of months: ‘apologies for my absence.

Everything is fine with my life, my work, and my important people.  But there has been a lot going on the past couple of months, leading to a lot of (mostly positive) changes.

In the middle of it all, I got a new computer and lost my camera to a month’s repair.  Cut off from two foundation tools of my blogging, the essays lapsed into scribbled notes for future posts. 

Now, with everything back in hand, I’m beginning daily posts again.  ‘Bear with me, please,  while I regain my rhythm.

As always, the blog’s focus will be on my experiences of expat entrepreneurship, tech and travel, and on stories and photographs of the people and places met along the way.   Travel still fills many of my days (a two-week stretch a month ago is logged at right), but I’m trying to see that as an opportunity rather than a block for these pages.

I remain reachable via email, on Instagram, and always for koffie/bierje along the waterfronts of the Netherlands or the UK.

‘lots to catch up on, then.  ‘Life is what happens while I am not writing about it.

Good news, bad news and the novel

How many ways can you tell a fictional story?  British newspaper columnist Christopher Booker suggested in 2004 that the answer was “7”: 1. Overcoming the Monster, 2. Rags to Riches, 3. The Quest, 4. Voyage and Return, 5. Rebirth, 6. Comedy and 7. Tragedy.  All  but the seventh have happy endings, either the restoration of order or the promise of renewal.

‘nothing magical about 7, of course, and other authors argue for anywhere from three to thirty-six basic plots.

Complementary to that was Kurt Vonnegut, who argued for Universal Shapes of Stories in his rejected Masters thesis.  In it, he traces the sentimental arc of stories, the shifting balance of happiness and sadness as the plot unfolded.  He identified eight basic types of story arcs, well illustrated here and charmingly presented in video by Vonnegut here.

Enter Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English Professor.  He assigned a sentiment weighting to any word that carried some emotional affect: for example, Pout, Powerless, Prejudice are all unhappy; while Gallant, Generous, Gentle are all happy.  As computers scan text, they can assign emotive values to each word, calculate cumulative sums and averages, and thus follow the ups and downs of sentiment across a work.  So, for example, Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist:

A few things to note: the average sentiment is positive (μ > 0.0), the novel has many ups and downs (black annotated line) but the smoothed trajectory is sort of happy-sad-happy (blue line).  It roughly follows Vonnegut’s Man in Hole model (top of page). 

Analyzing 41,383 novels with Syzuhet, he concluded that there are six, maybe seven, basic sentiment plots.  The two Primary arcs were Man in Hole and Man on Hill, with variations on each.

It’s not a perfect path to analysis.  Jockers notes that happiness can be false-notated in sections where the bad guys are having a very good time.  It completely misses British subtleties of irony or dark humour (as do I). 

Still, I find the whole analysis sort of delightful, I’m looking forward to an atlas being published so that I can see how some of my favorite works are diagrammed (the software is available if you want to do your own analysis as well).

‘On not writing

I started the Random Walks in October, 2007, two years after I left the US for a midlife renewal at Cambridge, and about ten months after I moved to Arnhem as a corporate expat.  In the 1530+ essays and nearly 10,000 photos that followed over seven years, I explored what it means to be an entrepreneur and an expat, describing the aspirations, doubts, discoveries and reflections that fill my busy days (and sometimes my sleepless nights) in the Netherlands and the UK. 

I never conceived of my blog as lifelogging.  I took this remarkable opportunity to make a fresh start and to create a new business. That is a life that needs to be lived, and documented only to the extent that there are interesting observations, ideas, tips and insights to share. 

The stories and pictures given me direct communication with my extended family and for significant people in my life, scattered across thousands of miles and seen too infrequently.   It also connects me to an everchanging community of expats living in the Netherlands.

The essays have, finally, given me an opportunity to reflect on the experiences. Writing invites comparisons with other people, places and times, connections with reading and conversations, makes me a better observer and listener.  The process of writing creates context and perspective around everyday events.

And so, at the end of July 2014, I decided to stop writing.

As daily life became busier, my essays were becoming more superficial.  Pictures substitutes for words, events for thoughts.

Writing was becoming an obligation instead of a passion.  I worried more about the frequency of my writing than the value of what I wrote.

I was losing my voice.  Call it the Facebook effect, crafting an aspirational image of myself,  rather than a true account of the ups and downs of my daily life.

I knew that I would start again, but that I need to make that break in order to improve.  For a month, I did more reading and more traveling, took fewer pictures at events, and kept lighter notes of thoughts.  And I came across some notable NYT essays that helped to frame my thinking:

Writing in the Here and Now.  Specifically directed to writing travel essays, Perry Garfinkel proposes Here and now I am…  as the right place to start.  I find that it gets me out of my own head and focused onto my environment with fresh senses.  Although there is an element of in-the-moment Mindfulness to the exercise, it’s a necessary step.

Introspective or Narcissistic?  David Brooks asks How do you succeed in being introspective without being self absorbed?   He advocates keeping a distance and focusing on narrative.  I especially like his emphasis on trusting feelings more than analysis, and on avoiding rumination as a motivation for feelings.

Doing things right.  Technique matters, so Keep it Short and Punctuation Tips are worth remembering.

Of Myself I Sing.  Self promotion poisons writing: it distorts the truth and bores the reader.  An impulse to be positive and reassuring can easily degenerate to branding and boasting.  Are you writing something people need or want to know…are you honest about your frustrations and able to laugh at yourself?  asks Rebecca Makkai.  She recommends maintaining a balance by writing about others and by mixing types of content.

On Not Writing.  Writing has analogs to fitness training, argues Bill Hayes: your creative fibers need stress, then rest, just like muscle fibers.  He recommends 2 days on, 1 day off, and notes that exhaustion from daily writing may require weeks to properly refresh.  I’ve described 5:2 feast-fast cycles and their more general applicability in organizing life.  It’s intuitively appealing to see it pop up here among Hayes’ Sis Rules of Writing.

Eventually, my topic notes and everyday snapshots spoke to me again, and I felt the familiar pull of thing to share.  I’m experimenting a bit, easing in: the first week was challenging.  The ‘lessons remembered’?

7th year breaks are vital for growth and renewal. 

A sabbatical opportunity made the move to Cambridge possible.

7 years among the Europeans was a good time for taking stock of life’s trajectory.

A month out, seven years in, feels well-earned.  And well-used.

Peer reviewing

One of the foundations of the scientific method is publication of results so that they can be assessed and reproduced by the wider community of researchers.  Peer review is the first step in that publication process, voluntary, anonymous review of work by experts in the field, with comments returned to the author so that the paper can be improved prior to publication.

I serve as a peer reviewer for several journals and probably get requests about twice a month to comment on a paper.  Generally it takes about an hour to understand the work, to assess whether it is correct, clear, open to alternative interpretation,and properly positioned within the relevant landscape of background literature. I try to write balanced comments, praising a clear hypothesis, a well-reasoned discussion, while perhaps suggesting where figures could be more clear or an alternative method might yield better results.  The revised paper comes back the next month and I generally pass it if the author has replied to my points (whether or not those result in changes).

Occasionally I run into situations where I struggle.  I received one where the author had copied an earlier paper, word for word, yet not cited it. I talked with my editor (the lead author was fairly senior) and we recommended that he include the citation: it was enough to alert him that we’d found the earlier work.   Another was proposing pages of dense calculation for an obscure visualization technique that, in the end,m didn’t reveal anything new in the data.  I think that, in six revisions, we did everything but rewrite the paper for him.

Last month, I received a work that was analyzing structure in short-and long-term heart rate changes.  It’s a tricky analysis, since it’s statistical rather than deterministic, and the author had calculated some crude ratios to support his hypothesis.  Worse, his underlying technique destroyed the very ordering among data points that he based his hypothesis on.  I pointed out that the results weren’t supported by the method, suggested some alternative approaches fo analysis, and worked out an example to illustrate my point.  Throughout I was constructive and respectful (I though), allowing that I might have missed his point, but didn’t follow the logic.

The authors absolutely blistered me in their reply.

…there are many comments made by the Reviewers with which we disagree, comments which we consider unhelpful and comments which are just wrong…we strongly believe that the Reviewers should be aware of the fact that, even though they are anonymous, they should put time and effort in reading and reviewing the papers. We are frequent reviewers for a number of peer-reviewed journals,and we always try to helpful for the Authors and never write from the position of someone who, by definition, knows better.

Most of my comments were subsequently dismissed with this is an opinion and there is nothing we can do about it, except state that we disagree.  Fair enough: I went back through my analysis and still cannot link their conclusions with their data using their method.  I had to just recuse myself after that: while we might have solved the disagreements over a beer and a whiteboard, their reaction was so strong and their comments so dismissive, that there just weren’t actually any explanations to discuss.

I felt badly about the comments and about the outcome: I do take the job seriously and give every paper a good read.  I know how much work it takes to do research and to write it up.  In the end, if they are right, they should be able to refute the counter argument and to say why.  If they are wrong, they need to make corrections.

And, fundamentally, I disagree with them that Reviewers are there to serve the Authors. 

Reviewers are present to serve Readers.

If, as a first reader, I think that a paper is wrong, I have a responsibility to (nicely) say so, suggest why, and present alternatives.  Maybe it’s a real mistake, maybe I just don’t understand, maybe the Methods contain omissions or ambiguities.  But honest and differing perspectives should be addressed openly.

We might argue that every author is entitled to his view and the Readers will sort things out. Eventually, yes.   But errors enter indexed literature, then pop up on searches, news reports, and blogs.

The Letters to the Editor don’t have much impact, and are presented as a debate that obscures rather than resolves issues.  It can take years before the truth is sorted by Readers, years of contradictions and misinterpretations in which true facts have been undermined and genuine debates get muddied. 

The argument presented by these Authors, that Reviewers should only check for clarity of language and labels on graphs, is wrong.  The peer review process is intended to engage experts as surrogate Readers, not as supplemental Editors.

Catching up around the neighborhood

A misty grey morning in East Anglia – thick dampness rolls out of the fens and across the fields, diffusing the morning sunlight and coating the fields with droplets.  The birds and bunnies hide, huddled against the chill; a light frost whitens the roof of the car.

The coffee’s brewed, but the apartment’s quiet and I’m not quite ready to start slinging pans for breakfast.  E-mail and social networks are quiet, family are winners at casino-breaks and photographing dinners in Alaska,  friends are performing in plays and shoveling snows.  A new episode of Sherlock has downloaded overnight; an upgrade is confirmed for an upcoming flight.  It’s a funny world

The RSS feed (left) signals that the twenty-some expat blogs I follow have accumulated a hundred new posts; I start to page through them.  I enjoy reading what everyone writes.  Some folks create postcards: pictures of trips to Prague and of city life in Utrecht, a recipe to try, a story of how their car fell into the canal, sightings of SinterKlaas (can it be Christmas already?).

Others hold advice for travel, for wine, for Christmas Markets, for museum nights. There was a time that this was all so new; now it’s become a familiar melody of shared discoveries, reminding me how far we’ve come.  Some editorialize, sighing about the election, the changing seasons, drug policies, work and neighbors.  The Netherlands look less picturesque this time of year, and I think a lot of folks get the blahs when it’s cold and dark.

A surprising number are signed up for Novel Writing Month, over 1000 words a day.  It’s an unimaginable task to me, that level of plotting characters, perfecting dialog.  I struggle with just crafting  closing paragraphs in blog essays (I need to be more like the BBC correspondents, who always seem to be able to come full circle).

I always hold that any day that survives the first 15 minutes of catching up with what happened back in the US is bound to go along okay.  Bad things happen overnight. 

On Sundays, though, the threshold is higher.  Like scattering a paper across the room while listening to Charles Osgood, time spent catching up around the neighborhood with expat writers is familiar and insightful.

Keep writing; we’re reading.

Trading places

I follow a couple of dozen feeds and blogs, connecting out to a range of interests and opinions.  Most are fellow expats in the Netherlands, whose insights and advice are always helpful.  Less commonly, I follow Dutch friends who have relocated to the US.

One friend who I faithfully (and very enjoyably) read is a former work colleague who moved to Minnesota.  He posts weekly updates in Dutch about his life in the Big North (where its already snowing).  It’s helpful to me to translate his writings, and its been fun to follow his adventures and observations.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed more and more (unintentional) role reversal in the topics and events that we both write about.  We both scribble about the weather, getting around town, seeing the doctor, and views from our windows.  But while I post a picture of my Locomotief, he posts one of the Audi; I show the apartment’s balcony, he captures his house’s deck.

It’s a bit spooky, beyond simply bringing home the many contrasts between Dutch and American life.  As we each settle fully into our respective environments, I’m finding that my written life becoming more Dutch as his becomes more American.  It’s an intriguing and consistent swap.

I doubt that he considers himself less dutch and I don’t see myself as less american.  But the superficial lifestyles certainly evolve that way.

It reminds me, again, how much we are shaped by the tools at hand and the culture around us; the many ways that our local society defines how we live our everyday lives.

Writing on a schedule

…really isn’t my style.

One of the fundamental rules of professional writers is that they write regularly. They set aside a time and a place that they retreat to each day, and they devote the time to advancing their thoughts and their works.

I agree that finding rhythm to my writing can be as important as finding voice. Neither, however, can be imposed.

Writing is about content and connection, and that requires inspiration and reflection. I often scribble margin notes during the day, capturing stray thoughts that I want to return to. Sometimes they whither into insignificance as soon as they escape my mind, other times, they trigger a generative stream that demands time at the whiteboard to think things through. If, a day or two later, they feel well formed and potentially interesting (that is, they qualify as ‘cocktail chatter’), then I have the motivation to sit down and organize my thoughts for the blog.

Some people are good at shooting a spontaneous tweet every day, and NaBloPoMo promotes the simple virtue of daily scribbling (National Blog Posting Month: Post every day for a month; that’s all you have to do). But it’s just never going to be that way for me: content trumps schedule.

Why we blog

A number of people whose blogs I enjoy reading have stopped writing.  While some have run out of time or things to day, others seem to have reached a point of existential concern about the very nature of their work: has their blog drifted from it’s original purpose, or has it become too personal, too revealing, or too demanding. I’m surprised at how I’ve come to know them through their writing, and that I miss their correspondence once they’ve gone.

Andrew Sullivan recently published a fascinating essay touching on this topic, “Why I Blog”, in the Atlantic Magazine.  In it, he begins by defining blogging as the “spontaneous expression of instant thought”.  He goes on to describe how this drives the main characteristics of blogs: their  impermanence, interactivity, and superficiality.  I found a lot that resonates with my own motivations and experiences writing here, and agree with his tag that blogging is “Writing out loud”.

Returning to issues brought up by my fellow expat bloggers, he counters that this medium is, by it’s nature, personal and demanding.  Blogs are “the least veiled of any forum in which a writer dares to express himself” because they captures events, emotions, and perceptions without the perspective of time and the cooling of passions.  Blogs are also social acts that generate discussion and connect as conversations, actively engaging both writers and readers.  Unlike personal journals or newspaper columns, the form will invariably tend to become an extension of the writer and their audience, whatever the original intent.

I’ve subscribed to Andrew’s feed for a couple of weeks now to see how this plays out in practice.  Returning to his article again this morning, I find that I still agree with him philosophically, but diverge from him in how this gets implemented as style.

Andrew’s blog is a stream of dozens of brief posts each day, many consisting of short snippets of text, links, and commentary.  They strike me as well-informed Twitterings, aggregated within his overall theme of politics and media.  Reading them, I feel informed, sometimes intrigued, but seldom stirred.  There is no reflection or insight: I feel like volume and superficiality overwhelm the personal and communal aspects that he rightly champions.

In contrast, I blog to reflect on the ideas and experiences that I have in the Netherlands, and to break free of the isolation of living as an expatriate. I tend to write an entry in a single sitting, but never more than once a day and seldom for less than half an hour.  I never revise prior posts except to correct factual or (obvious) grammatical errors.

Thus, I think of my blog (and others) more as personal essays: short narratives that focus on a central idea about the writer, supported by a variety of incidents from the writer's life, and, often, connected to some larger idea.

My style is heavily influenced by essayists who I enjoyed long before: Robert Waller, Robert Benchley, Isaac Asimov, David Sideris, Barbara Kingsolver, and many others who have filled my bookshelf and backpack for years.  “Excavating Rachael’s Room”, in Waller’s Just Beyond the Firelight, is a wonderful example, reflecting on his college daughter’s life while sorting through the childhood things she left behind.

Many of the blogs that I follow take similar time to reflect on their lives and write in ways that connect out to others.  They describe human moments that touched them or larger events that made them aware.  They arrive at insight through analysis or juxtaposition, sometimes just stimulating connections into my own experiences and ideas.

In this sense, I think bloggers best capture the  benefits that Andrew values through a more personal and introspective style than he uses.

It’s interesting that the expat bloggers in the Netherlands seem to have universally arrived at a similar form, adopting an essayists prose.  And so many are natural storytellers who do it well.  I guess that I note this in the hope that some will still see the personal and social value in their writing, and not draw back because it feels too personal.