To warm up for the past couple mornings I’ve pulled out my trusty ol’ Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and filled a page in my diary before writing. (Hard not to be influenced when reading Lynda Barry!) The pen is probably half a decade old, and still works like new. Something magical about drawing with this thing…
I spent yesterday thinking about these words of Wendell Berry, from his 1968 essay, “A Native Hill”:
I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay.
My wife and I took a magical little walk (just an hour or so after I had written this post!) in a part of town unknown to us and I thought about happy we were to be back here, in the place that suits us, walking and exploring and just living our lives.
There used to be a spot on KVET radio, though I haven’t heard it in a long time, when the DJ would come on and say, “Ain’t it good to be alive in Austin, Texas!”
Día de los Muertos has come and gone on the calendar, but it’s still going at the Arte Sin Fronteras show at the Blanton Museum. I popped in last night an hour before closing with my notebook and stole what I liked. Always good to check in on death. The spirits speak of possibility.
When I got home, I saw the news that Tom Spurgeon died. I didn’t know him personally, but I loved his website, and he was generous to me and my work, linking to this site and even wishing me happy birthday. RIP. He lives on in the lives of the cartoonists (and wannabe cartoonists like me) he encouraged.
It’s cold and rainy and a little bit bleak in Texas today, but the fireplace is going, and even if it wasn’t, as Thoreau asked his diary on November 13, 1851, “Is not this a glorious time of year for your deep inward fires?”
I’m off now to walk with my wife and then get coffee with an old friend. It’s good to be alive. Now is the envy of the dead. Go live in it.
Sometimes when I begin a project, I want to slip my vision of the finish into a fortune cookie, forget about it, then crack it open at the end and see how close I got.
Talking to my friend Dan Roam about the structure of Keep Going, I mentioned that I was thinking a bunch about time when I wrote it, which is why it starts with days and ends with seasons. Time in the micro and a macro sense.
“I didn’t even notice that,” Dan said. “It’s like an Easter Egg!”
We got to talking about things you hide in your work that you know nobody’s ever going to see just to keep the work interesting for you.
Since we both write books, I confessed that with each book I usually have a secret sentence that I write down somewhere but don’t show to anybody. That sentence is sort of my North Star for the project, the thing I can rely on if I get lost.
The sentence usually doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than me. And sometimes it’s pretty dumb. (When I was writing Show Your Work! the sentence was: “What if Brian Eno wrote a content strategy book?”)
I mentioned this to my wife and she pointed out it’s a little like the little messages Reynolds Woodcock sews into his dresses in Phantom Thread. (I’ve seen that movie probably six times since it came out a few years ago.) The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has talked about how close he needs to keep his movies when he’s making them, before the film is exposed.
Which reminds me: Sometimes readers are upset by the idea that I might want to keep secrets. “Aren’t you the guy who said we should share?” Yes, but the message of Show Your Work! was never share everything with everybody. The real message was: Show the scraps and bits and by-products of your process that you think would be useful or interesting to the people you’re trying to reach, and anything you need to hold back, hold it back, and keep it as close as you need it to be, until the work is done.
Yesterday I was on the phone with a music producer I know. He’s starting an interview series with other producers and wanted to know if I had ideas for good kinds of questions to ask them.
I thought this was an interesting question itself: Is there a set of questions for creative people that are always interesting?
Much depends, I think, on the audience, and whenever I interview someone, I try to find some Venn diagram of what I’m interested in that the interviewee would be interested in that the audience would also be interested in.
It’s tricky.
Some things I came up with:
1. Media diet: what creative people watch, read, listen to, etc. Their input, how they fill the well. (I love, for example, reading Steven Soderbergh’s Seen/Read list at the end of the year.)
2. Storage and retrieval: How do they capture and keep track of ideas? Do they keep a notebook? Voice memos? (I recently read that Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes ideas down in a big draft email on her phone.)
3. Daily practice: What their day-to-day routine is like, any rituals they have, favorite tools, etc. (See: Daily Rituals.)
4. Troubleshooting: Overcoming block, what people do when things aren’t working. Weird tricks and constraints they come up with. (Example: Oblique Strategies.)
5. Hobbies: What people are interested in outside of work, how they recharge, how they spend their time away from the studio.
6. Personal life: What their parents did, how they grew up, did they go to school, did they like it, what they wanted to be when they were younger, etc.
7. Collaboration: I’m not much of a collaborator, honestly, so I’m interested in how people warm up to each other, the balance between making things comfortable and getting people “out of their comfort zone,” how much of your own aesthetic and ideas you inject into a project.
This last item was particularly funny in hindsight because this morning my son, Owen, who’s a budding music producer at the age of seven, asked if he could listen to a piano track he asked me to add to one of my songs.
“Yes, but I’m not sure if it’s any good,” I said.
“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “If it’s not good, I’ll make it good.”
Here are my clippings from a profile of composer Philip Glass in the Sunday NYTimes. (Whenever you publish a book, you can be sure that in the years following you’ll find several tons of stuff that should’ve gone into it.)
Glass had the right spirit from his beginning: “I had the naïve but probably correct idea that if I wrote enough music, I would start to get better,” he wrote in his excellent 2015 memoir, Words Without Music.
The online version of the profile has the headline, “Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy,” but he’s spoken at length about the subject before. In a 2015 interview, Terry Gross asked Glass about his experiences with death. “What kind of afterlife do you want for your body? Do you want to be buried? Do you want to be cremated?” He answered:
I’m not so interested in that so much. But I’ve had other thoughts about that lately, which are quite interesting ones. I’ve thought of the lineage of music that goes way into the past and the future of music, which we hope will go into the future, and where does my life fit into that? I think just expressing it that way: What is the meaning of an artist’s life? Or of anybody’s life? A doctor’s life, a teacher’s life, or a radio interviewer’s life — what is the meaning of that? I’m more and more coming to the idea that it’s the lineage and the connection to the past and the connection to the future — that is the real connection. Everything else, I think, is kind of imaginary. Is there a heaven that is waiting for us or some afterlife of some kind? We have no idea. In fact, it’s not even important.
The important thing is how [you are] connected to the past. Does that represent not only continuity, but does it bring us closer to something that’s richer, that’s more interesting? What have we brought to the world and what do we leave behind us and what does the future have for us? The future … is in our children. It’s in our friends. It’s in our work. It’s all around us.
I find that the most reassuring when we contemplate living and dying, that [it] really misses the point: It’s not the living and dying, it’s the continuity of the lives that’s important.
Emphasis mine. Glass has made the point that when it comes to artistic lineage, it “is often something chosen. Before choosing it, we have to become aware that there’s something to choose. When I first began writing music, I really didn’t know where to begin…. The lineage is something that became revealed to me through several remarkable teachers.”
Here’s Jay-Z in Decoded (quoted in Steal Like An Artist):
We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.
I like this idea of thinking about lineage vs. legacy, because it means you can sort of reframe any worrying about immortality and how you’re going to project yourself into the future, and think more about what you’re taking from the past and what you’re adding to it that creates a more interesting and helpful present. Whatever you keep alive or re-animate from the past in the present has that much better chance of surviving into the future. (This also explodes your options as an artist: perhaps, for example, your part isn’t to invent so much as it is to preserve?)
See also: Climbing your own family tree.
Here are collages I made while listening to Lynda Barry and Chris Ware talk to Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm podcast. (The handwriting is a discarded shopping list I found on a walk and my son’s handwriting from years ago — I don’t remember why he wrote those words, “NOW TO WORK” — I used to keep them above my desk.)
The podcast conversation goes to interesting places regarding school: Barry has written of elementary school as a “sanctuary” from her homelife as a child, at The Evergreen State College she studied under Marilyn Frasca, who she says changed her life by introducing her to The Image World, and she now runs the Image Lab and teaches at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The Image Lab was started because she couldn’t figure out why grad students were so miserable and why it was acceptable to the academy for them to be so.
(Ware speaks of his own daughter being admonished by her third grade teacher not to bring her sketchbook to class, and his misery during undergrad and graduate school.)
“I had no idea that I could be as unhappy as I was in graduate school,” Silverblatt says. He then tells a story about taking grad school examination tests. “The thing was, I was so cramped, bent over, so stiff at the end of that test, that I wrote them a letter and I said, ‘I’m really frightened. This was a test on everything I’m supposed to know, and this is a subject — writing, imaginative literature — that I care about more than anything, and for the first time ever your test gave me the feeling that it was boring.”
“That’s kind of school in general,” Ware says.
“I’m trying to keep my heart alive,” Silverblatt continues. “I’m trying to keep my joy alive. And if I stand up and roar, I’m trying to keep my soul alive… That’s what we have all done, when we get to do what we want to do with our lives: We keep our joy, we keep our hearts, we keep our soul.”
Here is Ben Shahn’s Maimonides, painted in 1954. “Teach thy tongue to say I do not know and thou shalt progress.”
I’ve long believed that “not-knowing” is the proper mental state for making art, but I’m starting to think it’s the proper mental state for going about life in general. (As Mike Monteiro says, “The secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”)
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” said the poet Wislawa Szymborska in her 1996 Nobel Prize lecture. She spoke of why she values “that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly”:
It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize….
Szymborska said that inspiration was not just the domain of poets and artists, but people in all sorts of work — work that “ becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it.” Their curiosity is never quelled, and “[a] swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve.”
Here is how the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman described getting into the role of Truman Capote:
I think you have to kind of start with saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to do this at all.” Really be as naive as possible, you know, as ignorant as possible, because then you can keep yourself as wide open as possible for anything that could be of help, could be of use…
“Naiveté,” is the title of the penultimate chapter of Gareth Matthews’ Philosophy and the Young Child, and in which he writes, “An adolescent or adult who writes poetry or does philosophy has to cultivate innocence to be able to puzzle and muse over the simplest ways of saying and seeing things.”
There’s a big connection between philosophy, wonder, and puzzlement. Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”
I think this “puzzlement” is in good art, too. The artist, like the philosopher, is exploring what she doesn’t know.
Bertrand Russell said of philosophy,
“if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.”
Sounds like art to me!
This is, again, why I rail against being called an “expert” or a “guru”: the minute you think you know everything — or anything, really — you’re out of that state that leads to good creative work. The more time you spend giving people answers, the less time you spend asking questions.
Here’s Matthews on why we should make room in our lives for philosophy, or what Robert Spaemann calls “institutionalized naiveté”:
Sophistication may bring increased knowledge and, perhaps, a refined sensibility. But it may also encourage a cult of experts, dull sensitivity, and may reward flatulence in thought and language. Every society needs a barefoot Socrates to ask childishly simple (and childishly difficult!) questions, to force its members to reexamine what they have been thoughtlessly taking for granted.
“[A] cult of experts, dull sensitivity, and… flatulence in thought and language.” Sounds like a conference of “thought leaders”!
More about the importance of not-knowing and uncertainty in chapter seven of my latest, Keep Going.
(Thanks to @seekandspeak for sending me Szymborska’s Nobel lecture.)
I always keep a pencil handy when my friend John T. Unger is talking.
This bit came from us discussing how my books are the by-products of my process of figuring out how this stuff is done.
Art is much more interesting and makes a lot more sense (at least for the artist, anyways) if you think of the finished works as just the remains — the “fossil record” — of a process of looking, thinking, making, etc. (No more is this on display when we clean up my 4-year-old’s drawings at the end of the day.)
By the way, the reason John is so quotable (I think I’ve quoted him in the past three books) is that in a past life he was a poet. Here is one of my favorite stories of his, which I retold in Show Your Work!:
Here are Galileo’s drawings of the moon, made over 400 years ago. And here are my comparatively pathetic doodles of the moon phases, copied from online diagrams yesterday in my diary to try to memorize them:
Why bother copying a diagram of the moon? Because copying is how we learn, of course, and in the course of learning how to learn again, I’ve discovered that if you want to understand something, you need to draw it out, with your own pencil and paper, to force yourself to really look at what you’re copying and internalize it.
Even better if you can start sneaking what you’re learning into your work:
Filed under: the moon
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