Following Every Rabbit
Going Down the Rabbit Hole
Last summer, I read Robert Caro’s book, Working. Having spent his life as a journalist and biographer, this book was partially an autobiography and partly a look into the way he researches and works. In some ways, those are really the same thing for him. This was one of my favorite books I read last year, even thinking about it now makes me want to reread it. This idea of throwing yourself into your work so deeply that it sort of becomes your life really seems to resonate with me. I love stories on this subject, they seem to vibe with how my mind works.
I make a lot of comments about going down rabbit holes, I think some of it is an issue of focus, but some of it is just this extremely curious nature of my brain. I have always been very curious, in a lot of ways it has helped me out, sometimes it seems to get in the way though. Being curious is a great aide in problem-solving when you learn to ask the right questions and make the right connections, it helps you come up with ways to do things others have missed. On the other side, you might ask yourself a question that leads you down a tangent that you don’t even realize you have been down for three hours. There is this amazing video by CGP Grey (yes another Grey video) about following the rabbit holes, it seems like such a fun problem to have. I just love the idea of diving in and finding out some long lost answer, or why things are the way they are.
Life sometimes seems very cyclical (time is just a flat circle after all), a lot of the time we don’t even realize it. The best way to flush these cycles out is by collecting data. In (sort of) keeping up with journaling for the last few years, I have noticed a lot more of my own patterns. I seem to get struck with this desire to find a research problem every six months or so. I am sure it is often fueled by outside factors. I remember reading this blog post by author Lev Grossman a few years ago and just being so captivated by the idea that he was taking sword lessons to help better write about sword fighting in Arthurian times. When these cycles hit, they seem to kind of take over my brain. Suddenly I find myself rewatching Spotlight and Zodiac over and over again. Then funny part with Zodiac is I skip over all of the “exciting” stuff, I fast forward through the murder scenes, I just want to watch them go over all the little details trying to solve the crimes.
For a while, when these moods would strike me, I would think I just need something to research, find a project to give me the fix, just some odd topic that I could look into for a while. I found this was harder to satiate with just finding a topic and looking into it. I want to find something that isn’t as straight forward. If I were to pick Abraham Lincoln, sure I can find out a lot about the man that I didn’t already know, but I am not going to discover something new. That and I think it needs to be something I can turn into a more narrative form, not just fact-finding, but telling a story.
In the last year or so, I have come up with three topic ideas that might work to dig into. I have really felt it pick up again in the last two weeks. I am still trying to figure out if any of them would work, or if I could find the right angle for them.
I think part of the reason this ‘love of research’ cycle is hitting me again is that I am reading The Library Book by Susan Orlean. The book is about the fire at the LA Public Library in 1986, but it is also so much more. She spent six and a half years researching and writing this book. She spent time with every person she could that had anything to do with the library in the last hundred years or so. The ability to just dig in like that just seems so awesome to me. The way it is presented is fantastic, you can see the detail of someone putting years into it, though, which is sort of scary.
In Working, Robert Caro’s main research idea was to “turn every page.” You never know what might be important later. To me, it seems like follow every rabbit hole is the same idea; you might need what’s in there. Maybe I will decide to pursue one of these topics, or perhaps after I finish The Library Book, the feeling will release me for a while. Either way, I am just going to keep following my rabbit holes, following my curiosities. You never know what might come in handy, and maybe one of them will turn up the perfect research project.
As I mentioned, I have had a few ideas for research projects, but nothing has really stuck and really do I even have the time for something like this? That aside, if you have any good ideas for topics that I might be interested in, let me know. I am always up for looking into something.
Thanks for reading,
Mike