This week's best reads #3

Italy's  anti-establisment - or is he? - PM Matteo Renzi profiled in Vogue:

"We sat with our coffees under the gaze of a stuffed owl Renzi placed on a marble end table to remind himself that his many enemies are always watching. Renzi has no shortage of them."

Ross Douthat for the NYT on how blanket cultural liberalism is affecting US politics:

"Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise."

Peter Beinart for The Atlantic on how American news is finally calling bullshit:

"Last Saturday, The New York Times published an extraordinary story. What made the story extraordinary wasn’t the event the Times covered. What made it extraordinary was the way the Times covered it."

The FT on how Swiss relations with Brussels affect the UK and vice-versa:

"Mr Blocher has suggested blocking access to the new 57km rail tunnel under the Gotthard mountain — the longest in the world — if its dispute with Brussels escalates."

Alfie Brown for LSE on how a new book on Dennis Hopper goes straight for what really matters:

"French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan started his project from the central belief that the discourses of structuralism and other philosophical models had always failed to account for one thing: enjoyment."

Hitchhiker "goes Berserk" after four days without a lift:

“He was a spoilt millennial, and he created a hell of a din. But all that time he was standing in the wrong place to hitchhike – a corner with poor visibility and nowhere for cars to easily pull over.”

Writing processes: circling in, bursting forth and crapping out

I wrote a short post here about how I often don't know whether my posts are worthwhile until they're written (at which point I may as well publish them, unless they're dreadful), because I think them through by writing them. (You don't really need to click the link, that's pretty much the whole post.)

Today, via a friend (who blogs here; check her out), I read this article by Megan McArdle in The Atlantic, which considers different approaches to writing and why some writers are frightful procrastinators.

McArdle suggests that writers who leave their work to the last minute may have been people who found school easy, who therefore came to think of creativity / productivity as dependent on natural ability. After these people turn pro and have to compete at a higher level, she thinks, the fear that they might not have much ability then paralyses them until the near-certainty of a failure even worse than submitting a bad article - submitting no article - forces them to the keyboard:

"If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good."

She also spoke to a psychologist who agreed with her idea:

"For growth people, challenges are an opportunity to deepen their talents, but for “fixed” people, they are just a dipstick that measures how high your ability level is."

My earlier post fits with this: I must be a "growth" person, since I'm sure I have no natural writing ability but I'm hopeful of being good at some point, and as a growth person I have no qualms about writing something awful in the hope of revising it into something decent.

Anway, if you're reading this and are an incurable "fixed" person, I have a suggestion. Even if you can't make yourself stop believing that good writing springs from natural talent, consider some advice attributed to Hemingway:

"The first draft of anything is shit."

And do yourself a favour: try believing that writing ability is all in the revising, and make a start.