The thing about puttering is that it’s a process. You do it to do it, not to achieve an outcome. Trust the process, as they say in the game of sports. I published The Wit’s Guide to Puttering last year, then further developed it into a piece in The Globe and Mail. And happily, all that puttering about puttering connected me to John McVey.
“Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.”
— Richard Rorty
McVey is a retired professor of graphic design in Cambridge, Mass., who has made an informal study of puttering. This follows his “chronic trawlings” of the poetics of asphalt and a history of telegraph codes. He was a sarariman in Tokyo in the 1980s. His family ran hardware stores in the Los Angeles area for almost a century, and he’s written a definitive survey of hardware stores in literature. Is he the most interesting man in the world? For the purposes of this issue of Get Wit Quick, he is.
“If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.”
— Alan Bennett
Who putters? In short, McVey told me: “wealthy man, not poor man; poor woman, but not wealthy woman.” And elsewhere, he highlighted this passage from Kate Riley’s new novel Ruth: “To buddle was to waste time on little jobs; to fuss, to fiddle, to sit in a corner skinning twigs with the edge of a spoon instead of tidying up. Buddling connoted no mischief, only diversion. As with lactation, boys would or could not buddle.”
“The trouble with people nowadays is they don’t know how to do nothing.”
— Iris Murdoch
Before you buddle, you might look out the window. You might see a bird. Do you see where it/this is headed? Per McVey: “Do animals putter? Is a bird, building a nest, puttering? Its constant nervous jerks and turns, are these puttering? Maybe yes, and with no guilt attached.” And if birds putter, then evolution suggests that dinosaurs puttered.
“A bee is never as busy as it seems; it’s just that it can’t buzz any slower.”
— Kin Hubbard
And from McVey’s meticulous archive of puttering references, this gem of dialogue from the 1931 Frank Capra film Platinum Blonde:
“Well sir, to be a putterer, one’s mind must be at ease. A person with a problem could never be a putterer. For instance, sir, a fish can putter in water, but not on land, because he’d be out of place. An eagle can putter around the rugged mountain tops, but not in a cage, because he’d be restless, and unhappy.”
What does all this puttering add up to? A home in good repair, perhaps, or future calamities averted if you’ve managed to check the tire pressure, empty the lint traps, and change the batteries in both the smoke detector and the smoke detector detector. But how about collecting references to puttering; what’s that all about? Again, it’s a process.
“No Grand Truths,” McVey writes. “If anything, I veer away from anything that threatens to suggest one. Meaningless activity, that sustains my spirit. When I’ve gone wrong, or come to the end of my capacity, is when I try to draw grand truths.”
“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Abandoning the search for Grand Truths frees up so much time for skinning twigs with the edge of a spoon! And for next week?
If you send me money for this newsletter, I’ll send you gifts in the mail! That included Riposte Cards, the glorious collection of 28 bespoke works of art commissioned over two years, and now Aphoristicks, a monthly snicker of a sticker going out to those of you kind enough to cover the postage. The first one:
In Issue No. 337 as in all before it, Get Wit Quick is sustained by meaningless activity towards an arbitrary stupid goal. McVey also highlighted the term outcrop geology, wherein “problems are defined by the outcrop, rather than by the scientist.” Look at the stuff around you and think about that, as opposed to thinking of something and then shoehorning the world into it. Unless what you think of is a shoe. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Putter the ❤️ below .
Does anyone feel like puttering leans male-coded, and frittering female-coded?