“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
“Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.”
—Brian Eno
My notebook vs. my father-in-law’s, left out on the kitchen table.
Seeing the two side-by-side reminded me of a few months ago when I was visiting my dad and he pulled out a logbook — I had no idea he kept a notebook:
I posted the galley (a galley is an advance reading copy for booksellers and reviewers) of Keep Going on my Instagram a few days ago, and a lot of people said, “April?!? That’s 5 months from now! What the heck takes so long?”
A year from sale to pub date is actually pretty danged fast by the standards of the publishing industry. (For example, I signed the contract for my first book in summer of 2008 and it wasn’t published until the fall of 2010.) What’s unusual is for us to be so far ahead in the process by now. We really cranked on this one.
In the spirit of showing my work, here’s a timeline to give you an idea of how quickly (and how slowly) this book happened:
– March 6, 2014: Show Your Work! is published.
– 2014-2018: My wife has our second son, I publish the journal, then angst for a few years over whether I’ll actually ever write another book again.
– 2016-2018: Country descends into political chaos and I — and almost everybody I know — become depressed and distracted.
– January 2017: Start a daily diary.
– October 1, 2017: Start daily blogging again.
– February 14, 2018: Start working on a new talk about staying creative in chaotic times.
– March 9: Give the talk, hand my literary agent a rough outline of a book proposal.
– April 2: After much angst and work, finish book proposal, my agent submits it to my editor.
– April 10: Publisher buys book.
– May 14: Submit first draft to editor.
– June 13: Submit full manuscript and illustrations to editor.
– July – August: Proof, edit, revise various passes, work up all the extra stuff that goes in the book. (Back matter, lettering, etc.)
– September: Finish proofing, nail down cover and jacket copy.
– A few days ago: Bound galleys arrive.
– Two days ago: Editor proofing “the blues” — printouts from the printer — I suggest a couple of last-minute changes.
– Now – April 2: Publisher must get hundreds of thousands of books printed and distributed, publicist has to plan 25-city tour, sales team has to reach out to booksellers, retailers, etc., and a ton of other work that I don’t even see has to happen. I must remain calm during “The Gulp,” and try to find something new to work on, while not annoying y’all with news of a book that isn’t out yet. (Also: The world needs to not explode.)
Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants, writes about the slow disappearance of hobbies and amateur pursuits, and finds, in their absence, a void of freedom:
The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. But demanding excellence in all that we do can undermine that; it can threaten and even destroy freedom. It steals from us one of life’s greatest rewards — the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.
See also: “Knitting at the end of the world” and “In praise of the good old-fashioned hobby.”
“I still think of New York City as a powerhouse of a place in which human energy, imagination, and spirit are nourished.”
—Philip Glass, Words Without Music
Since I was 19-years-old and visited for the first time — a whole week! paid for! — NYC has been one of my favorite places in the world. (How could it not be?) One day I hope to have a whole week there again, but recently I’ve made quick, two-day trips: fly in one the morning, stay over, fly out the next night.
Never a resident, always a vampire. Flying in, sucking up the energy, then flying back out. But these quick trips kick up the bloodsucking a notch. (Last time was a visit to my publisher and photo shoot, this time a last-minute corporate offsite gig.)
“There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
On these quick trips, I like to let wherever I’m staying dictate where I go. This time I was staying near Wall Street, so I walked six miles, down to Battery Park for the sunset, then up the esplanade, then east to McNally Jackson to book shop, and finally back down through Chinatown while eating a heavenly strawberry ice cream cone that cost me $6 but tasted like $60.
My gig was on the lower east side, so I got to walk over to Katz’s and Russ & Daughters for the first time and load up on bagels and deli for the plane home. (My bags are stuffed and they smell heavenly.)
There’s still a little bit of funk around there, so I got to take a stroll before and after. Vampiring it up until next time. Now it’s time to board the plane for home.
A few years ago, Tamara Shopsin, illustrator and author of the splendid Arbitrary Stupid Goal, recalled seeing a Claes Oldenburg exhibit:
I’ve loved his work for a long time, but had never seen his Ray Gun Museum. It is a display case of 1950s toy ray guns alongside homemade ray guns and found ray guns. It is funny because by the end anything shaped like an “L” really is a ray gun. And you go home and for a while you see ray guns everywhere — boots, toothbrush, your laptop.
The same thing happened to me just from looking at the them on the internet — I was watching John Waters preview his new show, Indecent Exposure, on PBS Newshour, and…
…those sevens looked like ray guns to me!
And later Waters showed off his piece “308 Days,” which is a 3.5 x 9 feet long piece showing about 10 months worth of his crossed-out to-do lists on index cards:
Looking at the scribbles I thought, “Hey, wait a minute that reminds me of…”
Twombly! Waters is a collector, and says he owns over 80 of his books. He keeps the catalog for Letters of Resignation beside his bed. (His housekeeper once told him, “They have the nerve to put this in a book!”) Waters says he loves Twombly because he makes people mad. “This kind of contemporary art hates you too, and you deserve it.”
He explained on Newshour:
I even have a piece that says, “Contemporary Art Hates You.” Because it does, if you hate it first. It’s a thin line. You can’t have contempt about it and go in, but you have to learn, you have to study a little. You have to figure it out. Why these things happen and then suddenly this whole world up– opens up to you. You can see it in a completely different way. It’s like, you were blind before.
The minute you start looking, the world will keep showing you pictures.
PS. Here’s Waters showing off the joke with the sevens:
“One cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by new records of shame…. the house and land we occupy, have lost their best value, and a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1851
A devastating image by photographer Brook Mitchell in the NYTimes. Nails the stakes of climate change: It is our children who will have to sift through the wreckage.
I was particularly affected by the photo, as I have a towheaded almost-six-year-old who looks a lot like Harry. (“Where have you been my blue-eyed son?” Dylan sings in “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” a song that now destroys me.)
A little googling led me to the original Guardian piece about Australian farm families battling the draught. You can see more photos of Harry and his family there, including this one, of him wearing what he calls his “monster hat”:
That one brings the slightest smile: Children are resilient, and no matter how bad it gets, there will still be moments of humor. Even if it’s gallows humor.
“The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
—Carl Jung
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
“What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.”
—Marcus Aurelius
Seeing a lot of “We’re fucked” tweets lately. These tweets are not necessarily wrong, but I don’t see their point.
“Doom is inevitable,” as Seth recently put it. “Gloom is optional.”
Life is bad enough. Twitter is already worse than bad. I’m not asking you to blow sunshine up my butt, but if you’re going to tweet, “We’re fucked,” at least follow it up with the “eat trash be free” raccoons:
I am, believe it or not, one of the least optimistic people you will meet. I’m not kidding. You don’t want to see what I write in my diary. (That’s why I write it in my diary.)
But I’m here. And I have people who depend on me to be here. So I gotta keep going, somehow.
Edith Wharton said, “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
You don’t have to have your own light. You can reflect someone else’s. That’s what I’m doing, here, and elsewhere: I’m trying to find the light and reflect it. I’m trying to be a reflector, not Human Vantablack.
We all want to scream into the void. We all feel the need to express the dread. But, it’s like Zadie Smith says, “Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.”
“It’s not dark yet,” sings Bob Dylan, “but it’s getting there.”
So either be the light or go find some and reflect it.
Toni Morrison — Toni Morrison! — was once on the phone admitting how upset and depressed and unable to work she was when her friend interrupted her:
“No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”
In his book, Artists in Times of War, the historian Howard Zinn tried to outline the relationship between the artist and society. He emphasized the word “transcendent”: the artist transcends “the immediate,” “the here and now,” and “the madness of the world.”
The artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework the framework that society has created. The artist may do no more than give us beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama. I don’t mean to minimize these activities by saying the artist can do no more than this. The artist needn’t apologize, because by doing this, the artist is telling us what the world should be like, even if it isn’t that way now. The artist is taking us away from the moments of horror that we experience everyday—some days more than others—by showing us what is possible.
The artist provides a much-needed, much-valuable service to us, as trivial as the work might sometimes feel when the artist is doing it. “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,” says Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels. “Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
But.
But, Zinn says, that is not all the artist does:
[T]he artist can and should do more. In addition to creating works of art, the artist is also a citizen and a human being.
And yet, when the artist attempts to do her duty as a citizen, she often hears: “I follow you for your art, not your politics.”
(Whenever I hear this I immediately think of George Orwell: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” And Margaret Atwood: “You’re supposed to do one thing. If you do more than that, people get confused.”)
There’s a specific feeling from some fans that artists and creative people should stick to their business. “I didn’t sign up for this.” “Leave the politics to politicians.” “What do you know, anyways, you’re just a singer.” (Even though, as in the case of health care, politics has everything to do with whether the artist will be able to keep making the work their fan loves.)
Zinn says we can’t be deterred by such sentiments. “It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they’re doing.” This country is our business, and it’s our business as citizens to try to make it as good as we can.
Here’s Jacob Marley’s ghost in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:
“Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
These are dispiriting times, but it’s our our duty as artists and citizens to keep using our gifts and to keep using our voices to make the world a better place.
So, please: Keep making your art. Keep speaking the truth. We need your efforts, no matter how small and how trivial they may seem to you.
There’s no time for despair, but if you really need a day off, take it. Find the beauty and peace you need to keep going. The work will still be here when you return.
One of the most important points of Steal Like An Artist is that you don’t get to pick your actual genealogy, but you can, and must, establish your own artistic genealogy.
Seneca said it better than I did a couple thousand years ago:
We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. Nor will this property need to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more it is shared out, the greater it will become.
“I’m one of your children,” Philip Glass once said to John Cage, “whether you like it or not.” Glass writes a lot about lineage in Words Without Music:
I sometimes hear about work described in terms of ‘originality’ or ‘breakthrough,’ but my personal experience is quite different. For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.”
(Glass talks a lot more about lineage at the beginning of this interview.)
There are many ways to discover and construct your own lineage. The easiest is what Alan Jacobs calls “swimming upstream.” You pick some artist or writer you love, and you find out who influenced them. From The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction:
We can turn our temporal attention upstream rather than downstream—toward what preceded Tolkien or Austen or whomever rather than what succeeded them. After all, Austen became the Austen we know largely through her reading—something that is true of almost all writers… If you imitate them in that sense—not by trying to write what they wrote but to read what they read—you’ll find your horizons expanding, your mind stretching, your resources of knowledge coming near their limits…
“I am very influenced by the people who influenced my influences,” says the musician M. Ward, “and I am influenced even more by the people who influenced them.”
Sometimes with an older artist you can swim both upstream and downstream.
When my 5-year-old got obsessed with Kraftwerk, I didn’t quite realize just how perfect of a wormhole they would be into 20th-21st century music. When reading their biographies, he learned that “Autobahn” is a pun on The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and the 1-2-3-4 countdown in “Showroom Dummies” comes from The Ramones, so he wanted to hear their songs. Later, he found out that “Planet Rock” takes the beat from “Numbers” and the synth line from “Trans Europe Express,” so he’s been playing that track over and over. He’d never heard rap music before, so now I’m (carefully) picking out some early hip-hop for him.
At some point, I’m guessing he’ll leap to another tree (eventually you find that they all have the same roots), but for now, it’s fun to watch him explore the branches of this one…