The Poker Project (playing and writing about poker in the U.S.)

2023 in Review, Looking Ahead

As a reminder that this lovely dumpster fire of a thread is at least a bit about the silly card game that unites us all, let’s start with poker. I logged 260 hours at the lolive tables—up slightly from 242 hours the previous year. As longtime readers know, these days I focus less on grinding and more on enjoyment. #reclife

From this vantage point, the year was a success: I look forward to almost every session that I play, despite the fact that my poker skillz have much to be desired. One of the blessings of lolive, of course, is that everyone else is even worse, and my incompetence was rarely punished. With the exception of the rare donkament, I stuck to cash and results were good. I’m always tempted to use forward momentum as an excuse to push myself, to grind harder, to play bigger, but no, poker is still a relatively low priority for me at the moment. That said, I do want to get more involved with the Gulf Coast community this year, and one of the best ways to do that is to plop my butt into a seat. So here’s a modest volume challenge to kick off the year.

Bob's Lolive Mini-Challenge: 250 hours by the end of May.

Punishment for failure: I’ll ship a gee to the first person who poasts a TayTay-with-dog pic itt

Bob’s Books [25/52]

I'm probably missing a few, but whatever. The standouts, for me, would be Ross’s Delight books and Nunez’s The Friend. "One day last July," Ross wrote,

[quote=]feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself for how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights. I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day. Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up. For instance, I traveled quite a bit this year. I often write in cafés. My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.

It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights, I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it. [/quote]

Part of the delight of reading about delight is that you can easily turn the project inward, and start writing yourself. Or even better: you can foist delight-writing upon others, as I did with my high school students.

Spoiler

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We spent a month sharing Ross's delights and writing our own, and I have to say that my students—Gen Zers who have been born into the era of infinite distraction—did a great job. There was a funny moment involving Delight #17: Just A Dream.

[quote=Ross]A few years ago I had a dream in which I had been ****ing my mother for about two years. Thankfully I didn’t actually live through (dream through) the ****ing part but instead just woke up (in the dream) to the fact that for the past two years (is two a significant number?) I had been ****ing my mother. Just as you would if you just realized you had been ****ing your mother for the past two years, I lost my goddamned ****. I was pacing around, hyperventilating, thinking, How could I have been ****ing my mother for the past two years?! Mind you, this wasn’t an Oedipal faux pas, which, as far as I’m concerned, is completely forgivable and understandable; he was ****ed from the start, and the blind man said so.

As I recall, in the dream, maybe my mother and I were to meet up later, or she was on her way over (a date?), when it occurred to me that something (****ing my mother for the past two years) was not okay. What have I done, what have I done, I thought. In writing this I will commend myself for not, in the dream, blaming my poor mother, my dear mother, who was also a party to the depravity.[/quote]

Needless to say, this isn't the sort of thing that teenagers usually read. There was a lot of hooting and hollering, let me tell you. Afterward, I couldn't resist snapping a photo of the excerpt above and sending it to a teacher-friend and telling her that my students' heads were stupendously blown.

(To be clear: Yes, I am corrupting the youth.)

What I'd forgotten is that, for the last year or so, my phone automatically shares photos with my mom, a wonderful, and wonderfully prudish, Boomer. Here's what she sent me later that afternoon.

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No more autosharing photos with Mom!

The Friend is a very different book. It's also honest and wise, but slanted in a dark direction—towards sexual trauma, suicide, and hypocrisy. The narrator, an unnamed novelist living in NYC, constantly questions the purpose of writing through arguments with herself, her friends, her students, and most of all, other writers.

[quote=]Lecture notes.
All writers are monsters. Henry de Montherlant.
Writers are always selling somebody out. [Writing] is an aggressive, even a hostile act . . . the tactic of a secret bully. Joan Didion.
Every journalist . . . knows . . . what he does is morally indefensible. Janet Malcolm.
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered
in learning to read. Rebecca West.
There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it. W. G. Sebald.

***

You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg.
Turn then to Isak Dinesen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting it into a story or telling a story about it. [/quote]

The book also contains one of the best takedowns of literary culture I've ever read. At one point the narrator has a conversation with an aspiring Buddhist who had abandoned a promising writing career. Why had she stopped? "It wasn't that I wanted to withdraw completely from the world," the woman said.

[quote=]I wasn’t about to become a Buddhist nun or anything like that. But as I say I started having doubts about becoming a writer. I didn’t see how I could reconcile a literary career with the goal of freedom from attachment. Soon after I finished the Buddhist retreat I did a residency at an artists’ colony—I was hoping to get back on track with the novel. I remember looking at the other people there, some of whom were just starting out like me and some of whom were already established, and thinking about what it took—besides talent, of course—to succeed. You had to have ambition, serious ambition, and if you wanted to do really good work you had to be driven. You had to want to surpass what others had done. You had to believe that what you were doing was incredibly serious and important. And all this seemed to me in conflict with learning to sit still. To let go.

And even though writing isn’t supposed to be a competition, I could see that most of the time writers believed that it was. While I was at the artists’ colony, one of the writers there got an advance so huge it was reported in the Times. That night at dinner he said, There go my last two friends. He was joking, of course, but I have noticed that whenever a writer hits it big a lot of effort seems to go into trying to bring that person down. Also, it seemed like money was in the front of everyone’s mind. I didn’t get that. Who on earth becomes a writer for the money? I remember my first writing class, the teacher said: If you’re going to be a writer, the first thing you have to do is take a vow of poverty. And no one in the room batted an eye.

It seemed to me that everyone I knew who was a writer—which back then meant pretty much everyone I knew—was in a state of chronic frustration. People were constantly getting worked up over who got what and who got left out and how horribly unfair the whole business was. It was very confusing. Why did it have to be like that? Why were the men all so arrogant, and why were so many of them sexual predators? Why were the women all so angry and depressed? Really, it was hard not to feel sorry for everyone.

Whenever I’d go to a reading I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed for the author. I’d ask myself did I wish that was me up there, and the honest answer was hell no. And it wasn’t just me. You could feel it in the rest of the audience, that same discomfort. And I remember thinking, This is what Baudelaire was talking about when he said that art was prostitution. Meanwhile I was still struggling with the novel. And then one day I said to myself, Say you don’t write this book. Weren’t there a zillion other people willing to bring novels into the world? Weren’t there, in fact, already too many novels? Did I honestly think mine would be missed? And could I justify doing something with my life, my one wild and precious life, that I knew, undone, would not be missed?

Around this time I happened to hear some writer talking on the radio. I can’t remember who it was, but for me it might as well have been God. I remember him saying that if in all the next year not a single work of fiction was published, instead of the staggering number of stories and novels we knew would be published, the effect on the world would be essentially the same. Not true, of course, because I suppose there’d be a significant effect on the economy. But I knew what he was saying, and I felt as if he were saying it to me. Which is when I said to myself, You must change your life.[/quote]
I suspect that most writers have had these or similar thoughts, just as most poker pros have asked themselves, during the millionth trudge to the cardroom, wtf am I doing with my life? More to the point, I've had these thoughts. During the pandemic I had to watch my writing group—filled with some of the best people you'll ever meet—die an excruciating, poisonous death. I spent some of this year, through therapy and journaling, asking myself what I really wanted out of writing. The answer, I think, is not much. This summer, after a second failed go-round with a NYC literary agent, I mostly felt relieved to be freed from the expectations of satisfying "the market" and building a brand and creating an emotional "payoff" for readers so that I, in turn, might extract a financial payoff: ten gees, fifty gees, a million gees + a movie deal, who can say? The Big Five publishing industry appears to be about money and competition, just as Nunez said.

Fortunately I don't have much skin in the game. Teaching is my jam, and with luck that's what I'll continue to do, while also finishing my poker book on terms that I'm comfortable with.

PUPDATE

In June I got the sad news that my beloved fluffball has cancer. Surgery wasn't fully successful, and the vets couldn't say how long she had. Welp, six months later, against all odds, she's thriving. A lot to be thankful for this year.

GL in 2024!