In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Steal Like an Artist, we’re releasing a limited gift edition on March 15th:
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Latest newsletter is a roundup of all the books we read in the Read Like an Artist book club.
After I posted Tuesday’s newsletter about how I hit an “invisible wall” at the edge of a map of my understanding, I came across these two familiar quotes:
1. “A map is not the territory.”
—Alfred Korzybski (via the comments)
2. “It’s not down in any map; true places never are.”
—Melville, Moby-Dick (misquoted in Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture)
Filed under: maps
A list is one thing, but making a map of the books you’ve read often reveals connections between them that you might have missed. (More in Tuesday’s newsletter: “A cluster map of books.”)
Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan once said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
That’s the thing about the job: you’re never “off.” If “everything is copy” (Nora Ephron) then you’re always “on,” even when it looks like you’re doing nothing. (Arm yourself with Gertrude Stein, if only as a joke: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”)
“All things are potential paragraphs for the writer,” wrote Shirley Jackson in her lecture, “Memory and Delusion” (collected in Let Me Tell You):
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.
The “always on” thing can feel like a curse, but it’s also a blessing: it means that any boring old experience (grocery shopping, getting stamps at the post office, picking your kids up from school) can become potential fodder for the work, so you’re “always on,” always paying attention, alert, awake to life, alive, casing the joint, looking for stuff to steal.
Sometimes I collage my kids’ homework in my diary pic.twitter.com/4PdS14Smgb
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) December 19, 2021
Lots of people said they weren’t able to get their hands on this zine during Indie Bookstore Day, so I posted the full text in last week’s Tuesday newsletter.
Here’s a preview of the first half:
Read the rest in the newsletter.
“Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.”
—Psalm 126:6
“I climb up on the house / weep to water the trees”
—Guided By Voices
Another tearful week in our crumbling empire. At our house, we’re taking pleasure in our garden beds. Elsewhere, bad seeds are bringing forth rotten fruit, but here, good fruit is coming in. We’ve eaten a few strawberries plucked right off the plant. The tomatoes are getting bigger.
The more I learn about gardening, the richer the metaphor for creative work. This week I’m learning more about composting. On a recent bike ride, Hank gave me a mini chemistry lesson in exothermic and endothermic reactions, anaerobic vs. aerobic decomposition, chemical bonds, carbohydrates, etc. I even got to stick my hand in to feel the heat of the heap.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes how she has “fullblown chlorophyll envy,” and wishes she could “photosynthesize” so that she could “be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.” It’s hard not to envy the plants, who seem to know how to grow without anybody’s help. They know what to do without asking.
Here is a map in my diary of Lawrence Weschler’s “Taxonomy of Convergences” that the writer has been working out in the past five issues of his Substack.
His idea of “convergences” — when something resembles something else, or makes you go, “that reminds me of…” and you make “free associative linkages” — has been a big influence on me. (See my blog tag: “Convergences.”)
Here is an example of a convergence from Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences:
In this recent taxonomy, Weschler proposes a spectrum of things that resemble one another, ranging from an imagined but not real connection (“apophenia”) to a connection that is being deliberately concealed (plagiarism).
The only trouble is that these marvelous pieces have been sort of buried in his numbered Substack issues, so I’m hoping by sharing these images from my diary and direct links to the pieces, maybe it’ll make you want to click through. It’s a lot to sift through, but it rewards the sifter.
First up is an introduction to the concept of “convergences.”
Second is Apophenia, Chance/Accident, and Affinity, or “inchoate projections, vague coincidences and misty affinities” in which there is no real underlying connection other than the one we make.
The third installment is “Co-Causation,” or “that part of the widening spectrum where if things happen to look alike, it’s because they’re likely to be drawing on the same sorts of sources.”
The fourth installment covers “Direct Influence” and “Invocation,” or, “the kind of things that happen as one artist or thinker or group of such artists or thinkers impacts upon another—both forward and backward, and consciously and unconsciously.”
The fifth installment covers Allusion, Quotation, Appropriation, Cryptomnesia, and Plagiarism. (My favorite of the batch.) Weschler ends at a point on the spectrum in which things resemble each other for a reason, but the reason is being hidden from us.
I suspect that some of us are wired to see these convergences more than others. But I also think this way of seeing is very infectious. (I call it “the world keeps showing me these pictures.”)
Alan Jacobs on how he uses Instapaper:
Whenever I see something online that I think I want to read, I put it in Instapaper — and then I try to leave it for a while. Often when I visit Instapaper the chief thing I do is delete the pieces I only had thought I needed to read. So for me it’s not just a read-later service, it’s a don’t-read-later service. But that only works if I don’t go there too often. I try to catch up with my Instapaper queue once a week at most.
Stealing this move.
A while back I found myself in the middle of doing something and thinking, Why on Earth did I agree to do this?
There’s a question that helps you avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret: “Would I do it tomorrow?”
Here’s David Plotz to explain (who learned it from his wife Hanna Rosin, and her friend, New Yorker staff writer Margaret Talbot):
That’s it—those five words. Not: Would I do it on some theoretical day in the future? This is the crucial question: Would I upend whatever I am doing tomorrow so that I can go there and do that?
Are they paying you enough to skip your daughter’s soccer game tomorrow? Is the panel interesting enough that you don’t mind asking your colleague to cover for you, tomorrow? Is the conference important enough to your career that you would blow off your college roommate’s visit, which is tomorrow. When you get the invitation, pay no attention at all to its far-flung date: Move it mentally to tomorrow.
Tomorrow makes decisions simple…
A little extreme, maybe, but it helps me just a teensy bit more than Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No. (I posted this on Twitter and James Kochalka responded,“ If I lived by that creed i’d just never do anything, I think. And also be happier.”)
* * *
Related reading: the “Learn to say no” section in Keep Going.
The outside edge of a book’s pages opposite of the spine is called the “fore-edge.” Like many things that are neglected or overlooked, it’s a place of great creative potential. Check out this video with fore-edge painter Martin Frost:
I don’t usually do all that much with the fore-edges of my books, except for my notebooks, which I sometimes index by rubbing ink or pencil over the page edges of some sections and labelling them. (See the logbook above.)
Most recently it occurred to me that I could use fore-edge indexing as a way to track the structure of a book. I was reading a book and it was going splendidly and then all the sudden I got bogged down. I suspected it had something to do with pacing and chapter length. So I did a fore-edge index and soon I had visual evidence of my suspicion: swelling chapters broke up the flow. (I could probably find similar evidence based on where I happened to dog-ear a page.)
This might be a good exercise for writers: make a fore-edge index of some of your favorite books, and see how they are structured and paced. For books that alternate narratives or subjects, you can use different colors. (See above.)
Filed under: marginalia
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