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Do the Work by Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield has gone Zen on us with this little tome dedicated to the triumph of the creative spirit over the self-defeating power of “Resistance”. Do the Work is both a distillation and a complementary addition to his previous and longer non-fiction examination of becoming “a professional” in a creative field, The War of Art, which I recommend highly.

Here’s my favorite passage in Do the Work:

I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what the Buddhists call “monkey mind” chatter or reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.

In this book, when I say “Don’t Think”, what I mean is: don’t listen to the chatter. Pay no attention to the rambling, disjointed images and notions that drift across the movie screen of your mind.

                                                           Those are not your thoughts.

                                                                        They are chatter.

                                                                    They are Resistance.

Something I try to impart in my students is the practice of metacognition. Not that I expect them to execute a precision analysis of their thought process the first time through, or even the fiftieth. Instead, I am trying to break them of habitually moving on mental autopilot, running “tapes” in their head recorded by cultural  osmosis, to stop and ask themselves, what do I really think here? With skepticism and active, focused, attention. For more than a few, it is the first time in their lives experiencing what it is like to be intellectually awake and in control of their own thinking.

Reading Do the Work is a little like reading the Mao’s Little Red Book or Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations of writing. The sections are short vignettes of certitude that add up to a philosophical whole, in the case of Pressfield, a prescription for a personal creativity jihad based on in the moment creative action followed by reflection and refinement. It is meant for the person who can but doesn’t and doesn’t know why. Pressfield explains why and then, essentially, tells the reader to get off of the dime….NOW!

For the creative procrastinator ( like yours truly) or aspiring writer, Do the Work is a book that reads like an ass-kicking.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Prospect magazine just published Raffaello Pantucci‘s piece Jihadi MCs — which is about Omar Hammami and his jihadist rap songs, and more generally, the use of pop culture and tech in jihadist recruitment.

Culture as recruitment: that interests me a great deal.

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I keep an eye out for Pantucci’s work. He’s an Associate Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation, and one of the people who writes about contemporary jihadism with insight. I follow his tweets and mostly click through up on the links he suggests, and we’ve exchanged emails a couple of times. So I clicked through to the Prospect site and read his piece.

And because I’m a writer, I tried to imagine his audience. Who, for instance, is this intended for?

But it is Somali group al Shabaab (“The Youth”) that is at the forefront of this new media approach. Omar Hammami’s recent hip-hop release is merely the latest from the jihadi MC. In his earlier work “First Stop Addis” he rapped about his earnest desire to become a martyr, over shots of him and his “brothers” training and fighting in Somalia. Released through extremist websites, but also widely available on YouTube, the MTV-inspired videos and songs seek to show kids how cool it is to be a mujahedin. Other videos released by the group show young warriors from around the world speaking happily into the camera as they boast, sometimes in perfect English, of how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” (unbeliever) government in Somalia.

First, like every researcher worth his salt, I imagine Pantucci peers into these things to inform himself, to figure out significant currents in the world he lives in: he’s interested, he’s engaged. Second, it seems to me, he must be writing with an eye to his peers in the field of jihadist studies, to inform them of what he’s been able to piece together, to alert and inform those who are actively engaged in decision-making as part of the war of ideas, and perhaps to hammer some sense into the pundits who routinely misinform the public.

But on this occasion he has a third audience: he’s also addressing interested parts of the general public himself — in this case, the readers of a British magazine.

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For most of his Prospect readers, this article will be informative background reading – but not, so to speak, “actionable intelligence”.

Let’s say that the “actionable” part of what he writes – more accurately, the analytic content – is the gold, and everything else is the glitter.

The general reader of a magazine like Prospect takes in the gold with the glitter, but in all probability wouldn’t get the gold at all if there was no glitter surrounding it. If Prospect had published Pantucci’s paper, The Tottenham Ayatollah and The Hook-Handed Cleric: An Examination of All Their Jihadi Children (it appeared in the academic journal, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism) or his more recent ICSR paper A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists, I somehow doubt the readers of Prospect would have been so keen to read them. They contain, if you will, too high a ratio of “gold” to “glitter”.

The glitter is there in his Prospect piece on Hammami, we might say, to catch and hold those readers’ attention. To, if you will, recruit their interest.

Nothing new or bad about that, we all write for different audiences, with different ratios of anecdote and statistic, fact and anecdote, humor and persuasion…

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Here’s what interests me.

The “glitter” in Pantucci’s piece isn’t from Pantucci – it’s the glitter that the jihadists themselves are adding to the “gold” of their Islamist message.

So if you read Pantucci’s piece not just to inform yourself on a few new data points about al-Shabaab but in the relaxed mode of your average magazine reader, all the bits that seem like the neat “glitter” that make the article well-written and readable …

hip-hop .. rap .. socially networked revolution .. funky imagery and slang .. fanzine .. videos and songs .. how cool it is to be a mujahedin .. other non-traditional means .. dial-in conference calls .. how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” .. Facebook messages .. “‘Sup dawg. Bring yourself over here” to “M-town.”

… are also the specifics that al-Shabaab is using to recruit the attention of those who more or less idly surf YouTube and run across one of their videos…

The glitter is the gold.

In this case, I mean, the cool is the recruitment.

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Update:

Of course, if the rap itself is uncool as rap, that’s not so cool after all…

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross @DaveedGR tweets: “Seriously, John Walker Lindh is a better rapper than Omar Hammami: http://bit.ly/ifoafQ” — and Adam Serwer @AdamSerwer: “The lyrics to Omar Hammami’s rap don’t do it justice. Dude just has absolutely no rhythm whatsoever.”

Dawg.

On an article TBA soon. Normal blogging will resume shortly….

Done. Heh.

a light-hearted canon in two voices

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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I’d been doing some research for a follow-up post on story-telling in Afghanistan to go with Scott‘s account of his day at DARPA’s recent STORyNET conference, and one of the interlocutors on the list we’re both on posted a question about the impact of drug use as a consideration in narrative.

Baudelaire and Cocteau both have writings on drug use — hashish and opium respectively — but it was Afghan or more generally Islamic story-telling that I was after, and it occurred to me that the four stories in Paul Bowles‘ collection, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, were easily accessible examples of the kind of story-telling that Moroccans are prone to under the influence of hashish.  Bowles describes their mental processes thus:

Moroccan kif-smokers like to speak of the “two worlds,” the one ruled by inexorable natural laws, and the other, the kif world, in which each person perceives “reality” according to the projections of his own essence, the state of consciousness in which the elements of the physical universe are automatically rearranged by cannabis to suit the requirements of the individual. These distorted variations in themselves generally are of scant interest to anyone but the subject at the time he is experiencing them. An intelligent smoker, nevertheless, can aid in directing the process of deformation in such a way that the results will have value to him in his daily life. If he has faith in the accuracy of his interpretations, he will accept them as decisive, and use them to determine a subsequent plan of action. Thus, for a dedicated smoker, the passage to the “other world” is often a pilgrimage undertaken for the express purpose of oracular consultation.

The title of Bowles’ little collection, by the way, comes from the Moroccan proverb which is gives me the first of my two quotes, two courtyards, two intoxicants and two hundred camels below…

I wasn’t entirely satisfied, though, which a Moroccan account of hash-flavored narrative when DARPA was looking for an understanding of narrative that would apply in Afghanistan, so I thought I’d look up some of Idries Shah‘s writings, and Kara Kush in particular, to see if perhaps I could find an Afghan equivalent of Bowles’ stories there…

I already had Bowles’ one courtyard and one hundred camels in mind, so you’ll understand how pleased I was to stumble upon another slightly obscure but interesting writer — Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, who gave use the concept of the TAZ or Temporary Autonomous Zone — writing about Afghanistan rather than Morocco, opium rather than hashish, and a second courtyard, with a second hundred camels:

Two terrific writers: Paul Bowles and Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Sources: Bowles – Wilson

Courtyards with a hundred camels in them are popping up all over.

My friend, Steve Pressfield, is one high profile author unafraid to embrace the digital revolution:

THE WAR OF ART eBOOK FOR $1.99

One of the mantras of Writing Wednesdays is the ongoing effort to think like a professional, work like a professional, be a professional. But sometimes it’s not so bad to be a lucky amateur either–as long as you act like a pro and take advantage of luck.

To wit, here’s a serendipitous tale from a couple of weeks ago.

I had just received the umpteenth note–this time via Facebook–from a frustrated reader who was trying to order the Kindle eBook of The War of Art. (The Amazon page has been crashing regularly since it first went up.)  “Why,” the reader wanted to know, “does Amazon keep saying there’s no such book? And why can’t my wife get The War of Art for her iPad?”

I responded on Facebook by apologizing for the mess and explaining the various tech and contractual problems. To my surprise, I got a message right away from a third party, who happened to have spotted the exchange. His name is Michael Ashley and he wrote back: “I’ve got a new company and I can fix this whole snafu for you.”

A week later we were in business. Michael’s company is called FastPencil; he’s the Chief Technical Officer, which I guess means Main Computer Geek–although Michael clearly exceeded his job description by being a pro and reaching out to me, whom he didn’t know from Adam. It worked! We talked on the phone with his team and soon had all kinds of fresh solutions and expanded ways for readers to get The War of Art and, hopefully in the future, all my other books. 

FastPencil has set up The War of Art so the book can be ordered for Kindle or Ipad, Nook, SONY and a bunch of other eBook platforms.

The price will be $9.99 once all systems are fully up, but for two days next week–September 8th and 9th–the book can be ordered from this site for $1.99.  I’ll do a post on that Wednesday with a widget that will make it all happen with a couple of clicks.

FastPencil is an interesting company. It’s fun to work with people who are young and hungry, who are at the tech cutting edge and who have big plans and dreams.  FastPencil does hardback, paperback and on-demand publishing too; they’re in the process of corraling a stable of writers right now for a new imprint they call Premiere.  If you’re a writer and you’re struggling with the same eBook problems I was, shoot an e-mail to Michael Ashley–mashley@fastpencil.com–or Steve Wilson– swilson@fastpencilcom. Michael is the CTO, as I said, and Steve is the CEO/Prez. They’re hungry!

Read the rest here.

Outside of the obvious classics, there’s a handful of books I regularly recommend to friends and students, one of which is Steve’s  The War of Art, which should be on the shelf of every aspiring writer. $ 1.99 is a steal.

Fastpencil intrigues me.