I have attempted to get through this essay without mentioning the reason why I am writing it. I won’t have to. You’ll know.
A Rediscovery of a Book
Before the pandemic, I lent my copy of The New Analog by Damon Krukowski to a friend. A couple weeks ago, he gave it back. Though it’s been five years, getting it back now seems appropriate. The pandemic is still always finding new ways to remind us it was there.
I couldn’t help opening the book and reading the first lines again: “Thank you for reading this analog book. It requires no additional hardware, uses no power, and is 100 percent recyclable” (3). It’s a charming and perhaps one of a kind opening (though an ebook version is sold on all major ebook outlets, so that must read really weird on an ereader). Regardless, Krukowski argues for a very true thing with analog recording and listening, a point that I think is more and more necessary to make in our teaching of writing: Noise is important.
When we hear, we are always filtering out noise–any unwanted chaos that may stymy the clarity of what we want to hear. We are so good at it that noise can become an unnoticed backdrop. Like when you spend the night in a new place–there is a moment before sleep where you grapple with the unfamiliar sounds of this unaccustomed setting. It can take a couple days for our bodies to filter out such noise–car sounds, branches rubbing together in the wind, the odd white noise of various industrial machines, the settling sounds of a house, the sound of a different fan. It is much like what your brain does for your vision when it edits out the frames of your glasses or the grime on your car windshield.
But noise goes further than that. Here is Krukoski speaking in terms of music:
When we listen to noise, we listen to the space around us and to the distance between us. We listen below the surface. We listen each to the limits of our individual perceptions, and we listen together in shared time. (197)
What we want to hear is signal. This is the message. A friend telling us something over a cup of coffee or a song playing in our earbuds. Signal is very important to us, and that is probably why we do a lot to preserve its clarity. In writing, that means standardized grammar and formating and spelling and style guides and font and font size.
For music, we used to have a lot more difficulty separating signal from noise, even when just listening. Noise was always a part of the signal. Krukowski describes vinyl records thusly:
A record purchased in a store is rarely heard just once. It is relatively expensive and will likely be listened to accordingly: on different occasions, with different people, for different reasons. Its sounds will continue to unfold over time, and the signal that record ultimately reveals to its buyer may be quite different from the one it first provided. This deeper, dimensional signal takes shape amid the noise, not despite it. Playing the record contributes to it. (207-208)
When you make music, it is a competition between signal and noise. Signal is the music, and noise is the hiss of an amp, the screech of a hand sliding up a guitar’s fretboard, and the washout of a cymbal. It is the clarity of difference between what you heard and what shows up on the recording. But in a digital land, we can get rid of ALL noise.
Filtering out noise requires a definition of signal. Whose definition that is–which signal is chosen for isolation, which noise for elimination–is not an engineering problem but a political question. The power to define signal may well be a fundamental struggle in the digital age. So too the power to control signal, once it has been isolate. (198)
Here we can think of all the algorithms that clean out the noise of things we might not enjoy to things that we do. Getting a playlist on Spotify has much less noise than browsing at a record store.
I have not gone to a music store in a very long time, but I know what it’s like to go to a used bookstore. Talk about friction; talk about noise. It creates curiosity, a drive to seek. There are delights in the finding, in the noticing.
What’s this have to do with writing? There is a type of writing that needs very clear signal–like for instruction manuals or a law to be voted on or a road sign. But all the rest of it, good writing uses noise to boost the signal.
Grammar Anecdote
When I was going through school, I was never interested in grammar. It baffled me most of the time. Here were these uncommon words with hifalutin Latin origins–gerunds, antecedents, appositives, clauses, prepositions–that lorded over the organization of language that I thought I had mastered by both speaking and being understood and then writing and being understood.
I knew more grammar rules from the French I began in 6th grade than I did in English. And so I felt myself an imposter, having somehow never gone through the rigor of a true grammar training. At the time, I thought it was because my family had moved a lot, that I had somehow skipped the official program.
My realization that I wanted to be an English teacher came three quarters of the way through my first college degree. Why it took that long is another story, but I will say that I was a bit scared to make the decision. I did not feel like I had a real grasp of formally explaining what was going on with reading and writing, though I had learned to love it. And what I loved wasn’t the usual English teacher fare.
In high school, I read Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell, and Tom Clancy. I could not get into the high school greats–Shakespeare, Orwell, Fitzgerald, Huxley, etc. But, midway through a public relations degree with minors in English and Philosophy, I read Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (notice the title?). They approached writing with such distinctness and originality that whatever I thought I knew about books or writing was now completely suspect. In short, these books opened me. Made me realize what smart fiction could do. I was now very curious to what I had missed. So I went on a journey through the classics catalog I had almost automatically ignored. I had found noise.
As I started my English teaching degree, I knew that I had a very strong love of reading, but I also knew that everyone else in my classes knew far more than I ever did about what that meant. With each class, I sat there knowing that I had a reckoning coming.
It came for me in my last year of my teaching degree. Two classes fit my degree trajectory: one a straight up grammar class and the other a linguistics class. Oddly enough, the latter taught me more about useful grammar than the former. In fact, never was my urge to just get through a class so strong than in that grammar class. And this is coming from a teacher who you could pay to go to college for the rest of his life. ’Twould be glorious.
When I look at the turns that got me really into reading and writing, it’s not the rules or the classics. It was punk rockness that writing could be. It’s what possibilities you see with art when you see the drooping clocks of Dali or the impossible geometry of Escher.
Noise Is the Thing
I feel like my entire life I have been unconsciously collecting the ways noise makes us more human, even more likable by other humans. Not intentionally though. For instance, I DIY-ed my way into all the instruments I know how to play. I knew there was a “right way” to learn such instruments and not having formal training was always a confidence sap. How does one correctly pick a guitar? What is the correct posture of holding a drum stick? I was letting perfection stymy me when, really, it’s the denial of perfection that is more interesting.
Take my DIY learning of guitar. At one point, I knew how to read music. But that’s when I was in 5th grade and playing the clarinet. Badly, I’ll say. When I moved schools and switched to guitar, I could read guitar tablatures but not musical notation. I didn’t really know much about music theory. I knew about as much to know the differences in sounds but not why that was. And as for equipment, I knew only what got me playing. I still don’t know a lot of the lingo. But I can play. Not as well as some. But I can hold my own. But it was this comparison to those who I thought went down a formal track that stalled me creativly. Like what I did on the guitar wasn’t the proper way. I constrained myself unnecessarily for a very long time.
I realized my mistake in my mid-twenties when I found out that one of the best music writers of the common era, Paul McCartney, never knew how to read music. I started realizing that lots of people were just winging it or using their own way to get into their art, from David Bowie to Jimi Hendrix.
Britt Daniel, from one of my favorite bands, Spoon, embodies this DIY aesthetic with the way he plays guitar. Listen to “Minor Tough” on their early album, A Series of Sneaks, to see what kind of guitar I’m talking about. From the very beginning, you hear the rawness of what a guitar can do, from messing with being late and early on the beat to loose and heavily chaotic strumming. The song balances the brutal sounds a guitar can make with catchy melodies. I had this epiphany only when first seeing Spoon live, seeing how Daniel operated his guitar, realizing that punk rock wasn’t just a genre of music, but a way of dealing with art. It reminded me how much I thought a musician’s journey was parceled out into a path: Learn these chords, learn these scales, play this way, learn to read music, etc. (I could’ve very easily used Kurt Cobain’s guitar evolution as example, but Spoon rocks.)
The other week, my wife and I were listening to a Happiness Lab episode with the writer Oliver Burkeman on it. I had been reading his new book, Meditations for Mortals, and was curious what my wife would think of him.
In the episode (“How to Embrace Imperfection”), they talk about the “beautiful mess effect.” How we get so anxious when we invite guests over in terms of the state of chaos our living spaces are in, and how we clean the house and put so much effort into making the right food. There are studies showing that these perceived imperfections are thought of in a different way by our guests. Showing our regularly lived-in homes is endearing to others. Most people, the kind of people you want to hang around with, find it refreshing to see someone else’s real life and not the mask that we are usually trying to smoothly or ungainly put on. It releases the hosts from having all of that anxiety whenever they invite someone over to the house and gets rid of the second thoughts of inviting people over in the first place. It makes being with people that much easier and delightful that such get togethers becomes more frequent.
No matter how we dress a human up, we are noise. And we love it.
Perhaps it is why I love the mythos of Hogwarts and stationary stuff in general. No one would build a Hogwarts today with the money we have for education. And no one would seriously consider bringing back dip pens into the classroom. But I do think about bringing back the messiness of chalk. The chaotic organization a notebook can contain is a lovely thing. The more doodles the better. On anything. Same with annotations. I joke with my students that we need to annotate the world. (From that old movie, Hackers: “Hack the planet!”) It’s that alluring potential for messiness that is so wonderful, that computers simply do not have.
When I write, I am focused on a clean signal, true. I want to make sure my writing communicates what I want to communicate. But what makes it interesting, what makes it sit in another human’s mind, that’s the noise part. No one puts lines from a legal brief or an instruction manual or a peer-reviewed scientific article in their head for beauty’s sake or for keeps. These forms of writing are too clean, just signal. What we remember are the things that have just enough noise in them. All good writing is wabi-sabi, beauty in imperfection–craggy rocks in a meticulously raked sand garden.
This is what we are trying to say as English teachers when we say you got to know the rules to break the rules. You got to know how to control the noise in your writing, let the signal come loud and clear. But you also got to know when it’s okay to let the messiness do the talking. See what happens. That’s creativity, and that’s a very human thing to do. It is why we prefer stories to algorithms to communicate information.
Good writing contains this noise. Call it the use of metaphor or call it the use of slang or a clunky rhythm of words. A free verse of prose. Something incomplete for the reader to complete.
We know how to show our students how to get signal from noise, to mine their notebooks for ideas and refine them with outlines and drafts and revisions. But in this age of efficient refinement and the outsourcing of written text, how do we ensure our students know the value of noise? If writing is a technology that needs to be designed and also produces new thought through its own act, then it cannot be signal alone for it to be good or interesting or persuasive.