A friend of mine, an accomplished playwright with a graduate degree, shared (with concern) that her boss demanded she “take a grammar class.” Why? She wrote successful grant proposals; he wrote proposals that were not funded. So, he focused on a couple of typos he was able to find in her work.

As the late Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, noted - you can hire a proofreader to clean up the style for a good writer who can’t spell. What you cannot do is fix boring ideas or the inability to recognize an interesting story or relevant topic.

Maybe people are just wary to admit to themselves that their efforts to become something other than “regular guys” have been a waste of their time.

• checking in with people in the class about their health issues
• telling people how to set up the bike
• educating the class about the hand positions
• leading guided breathing exercises
• supplying enough information about heart rate zones and how to measure them that people would have a clue what you meant when you screamed, “Keep it at 80%!”

Just sayin’.

“What makes someone act like a conservative? I finally—these four years later—have figured it out. For those forty-five days (of surgery and radiation oncology) I was like a little kid in a very good prep school. There is no emotional ease like the ease in American prep schools…in those forty-five days I lived in that sort of kindly ambiance. Anyone would want to stay in such an ambiance. Of course they would! They would want to stay in such an ambiance all their lives.”

I know prep school is a horror rather than a joy for many people, but I agree wholeheartedly with Carol Bly here - and I’m not even sure how or why the surgery and radiation oncology experience replicates prep school’s ambiance.

For now, I have managed to arrange an era that replicates a dimension of prep school that’s easier to describe: the schedule. 8 hours of intellectual play broken into two hour chunks - with physical activity in between. Heaven.

This suggests an entirely different role for all people in the “socializing” professions - teachers, therapists, managers - that they will be stripped of their charge to enforce rules and extract specific behaviors from people. Instead they will be equal co-creators building environments that others can build in.

I contrast this to my recent first read of Elmer Gantry. A bestseller of 1927 it satirizes small-town, Midwestern church life. I had to look up a lot of words that are not commonly used today. Overall, though, the language experience was fresh.

My thoughts:

These two genres create entirely different relationships between author, subject, and reader. The autobiographer says, essentially, “Let me share with you my reflections on my life.” These reflections may be more or less honest, more or less self-aware, more or less complete. The author/narrator aims to seduce the reader into solidarity with how the life has been lived.

In a biography, the author uses the triangulated relationship between the subject, the author, and a particular realm of ideas to release literary truths about all three of them. The biographer says, “What meaning can we find in this life? What conclusions can we draw from this example?” With that basic question as a launching point, the author/narrator explores a space circumscribed by his or her own associations with an individual.

I love both - and reading either about an individual tends to lead me to wanting to read the other! How can one read Anne Frank, I wonder, without wanting to know the facts and context of her life from the outside? And after plowing through over 1,000 pages of Elvis’ biography, reading about everything from his colon problems to his Cadillac fetish, I (like the author) really wish he had produced his own account of his life!