My three notebooks. On the left: my logbook. On the right: my diary. And in the middle, my commonplace diary. (You can take a peek at it in the latest newsletter.)
Search Results for: commonplace book
Read Like an Artist Zine + Independent Bookstore Day 2022 events
To celebrate Independent Bookstore Day 2022 and the 10th anniversary of the Steal Like an Artist, my publisher Workman and I produced a free 12-page glossy zine called “Read Like an Artist,” with 10 tips for a better life with books.
Here is a very short list of the bookstores who ordered a ton (250+) of copies:
- Books and Mortar, Grand Rapids, MI
- Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, MO
- Highland Books, Brevard, NC
- Mojo Books & Records, Tampa, FL
- hello again books, Cocoa, FL
- Books Around the Corner, Gresham, OR
- Commonplace Reader, Yardley, PA
- Afterwords Books, Edwardsville, IL
- The Bookstore of Glen Ellyn, Glen Ellyn, IL
- Sweet Reads Books, Austin, MN
- Octavia Books, New Orleans, LA
- Aesops Fable, Holliston, MA
- Next Page Books & Nosh, Frisco, CO
- Reads & Company in Phoenixville, PA
- Round Table Bookstore in Topeka, KS
- The Magic of Books Bookstore, Seymour, IN
There are literally hundreds of bookstores participating, so check with your favorite local indie to see if they got copies!
If you live in Austin, Texas or nearby, on Saturday, April 30, I’ll be at two of my favorite bookstores here in town, signing and drawing in my books and hand-selling my favorites.
10AM-12PM – I’ll be at Bookpeople, our flagship store in town. Get there early — they should have around 100 zines.
2PM-4PM – I’ll be at Black Pearl Books, my hyper-local neighborhood shop. They’ll have about 25 zines, so they might be out by the time I show up.
Our friends at Bookwoman should have about 100 copies, too, so that might actually be your best bet for snagging one in the 512 area code. (If you’re down south, I just found out that Reverie Books has a handful, too.)
For updates, subscribe to my newsletter.
21 good books I read in 2021
Here are my favorite reads of 2021, presented in the order I read them. (Spoiler alert: A few of these will be picks for our Read Like an Artist book club in 2022.) I’ve put [***] next to my three favorites.
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” One of those infuriating books that lose you for a few pages and you start skimming and the very second you’re about to put it down and read something else, a sparkling gem of a sentence appears that you double-underline and scribble in your commonplace book, and gets you to start reading again.
One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder
Brian Doyle
A posthumous collection of an author I wish I’d read when he was alive. Maybe my favorite thing I read all winter. I savored a handful of essays each night in bed. If you’re new to his work, try his ode to the heart, “Joyas Voladoras,” or “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” There’s a big archive of his at The American Scholar. (Recommended to me by a newsletter reader. Thanks, Cate!)
No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
“You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.” Think about how hard this is to pull off: a poet writes a bestselling memoir and then follows it up with a novel. (Priestdaddy was on my favorites of 2018.) One of the most original writers of our generation. I will be instantly reading whatever she writes next.
Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal
The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal once worked as a trash compactor, and, according to the critic James Wood, he “rescued books from the compacting machine and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.” He based his wild, short novel on his experiences, giving them to the fictional narrator, Hanta, who says he “can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books.” (Same.)
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
Ian MacDonald
Have you heard of the Beatles? They were pretty good. This is probably the best book about the band I’ve ever read. I love how saucy MacDonald gets: of “A Day in the Life,” arguably the high point of their achievement, he writes, “More nonsense has been written about this recording than anything else The Beatles produced.” Of Paul’s granny music: “If any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up, it is MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER.” A highlight for me is when MacDonald points out that how many of the big British bands of the sixties were made up of kids who went to art school. (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, etc.) You could blow up the chronology stuffed in the back and make another book out of it.
The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands
edited by Huw Lewis-Jones
A downright gorgeous book. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with maps and even started my own collection of imaginary maps way back in 2008. If I’d have owned this book when I was doing my undergrad thesis, who knows, maybe I’d be a novelist? The Writer’s Map would pair well with Peter Turchi’s book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.
The Order of Time
Carlo Rovelli
(translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell)
Beautifully written and beautifully translated from the Italian by husband/wife team Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. Sadly, I found out that Segre died unexpectedly this year. Rovelli said, “They not only captured perfectly my meaning but they could completely render the feeling and sound of my Italian — and improve it, because their English language is remarkably beautiful and rich.” (I read several of the couple’s translations of Rovelli’s books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.)
Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert D. Richardson
The great reading project of my spring was reading Richardson’s trilogy of biographies: Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (which was so good Annie Dillard wrote him a fan letter and they wound up getting married), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (which I swear reads in spots like he was showing off for his new partner), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. (I also read his short biography of his mentor, the biographer Walter Jackson Bate.) Emerson is my favorite of the three and set me on a path of rethinking my indexing and filing systems. (If you’re new to Richardson’s work, I might start with First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process.)
Conversations of Goethe
Johann Peter Eckermann
This was a favorite book of Emerson and some of the other transcendentalists. Eckermann was 31 when he met the 74-year-old Goethe, and this book is a record of their conversations over nine years. Like many old books, it’s a great reminder that human beings have always been hilarious — I love how Eckermann will ask a question and Goethe goes into these long monologues that read almost stand-up routines. “The truth must be repeated over and over,” Goethe said. “My merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring the truth once more into a confused world.”
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Larry McMurtry
“Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.” McMurtry’s first book of essays, published in 1968, after his novel, The Last Picture Show. Belongs on the shelf next to Wright’s God Save Texas and other great books about this insane state I happen to live in. (Related reading: The Pirate Gardener.)
Smile: The Story of a Face
Sarah Ruhl
“Imperfection is a portal. Whereas perfection and symmetry create distance… imperfection and the messy particular had the power to open the heart.” I loved Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write, so I was delighted to read an advance copy of her memoir. A playwright, McArthur “Genius,” and mother of 3, she writes beautifully about the intertwining of her art and everyday life.
Several Short Sentences About Writing***
Verlyn Klinkenborg
“Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization,” Klinkenborg writes. “Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? It will have to be you.” This is simply one of the best books about writing I’ve ever read. Up there with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and other classics. (Related reading: “The most important thing you do.”)
Prince and the Parade and Sign O’ The Times Era Studio Sessions: 1985 and 1986
Duane Tudahl
I am a recording nerd who grew up obsessing over books about The Beatles’ recording sessions, so I tore through the official the Prince archivist’s second volume chronicling the Purple One’s unbelievable output at what was arguably the height of his powers. (Read along with this Spotify playlist!) Tudahl’s volume about the Purple Rain sessions inspired another playlist and made my favorite reads of 2018. I will read as many of these as he puts together.
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Kristen Radtke
These can be lonely times, and this was the right book at the right time for me. Somewhat unclassifiable — my favorite kind of book! — it’s not a traditional comic in panels, but more a kind of illustrated nonfiction essay. Made me want to re-read Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and pick up Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. I’m now a big fan of Radtke’s work, and I also enjoyed her first book, Imagine Wanting Only This.
Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light
Leonard Shlain
Alain de Botton once said that the least interesting thing about religion is whether it’s true or not, and I feel that way about Shlain’s thesis that great artists anticipated leaps in physics — sometimes by several centuries. What is thrilling to me as a reader is to watch a sharp mind work through the history of these two fields and juxtapose their developments. (There’s a nice afterword in new editions about how the surgeon came to be a writer.) I also enjoyed his book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer
The fall started off with the Delta spike in Texas and my kids home from school, so I took a lot more solo walks and listened to audiobooks, which is something I rarely do. (For a taste of whether you’ll enjoy Kimmerer’s voice, check out her On Being episode.) A major theme of my reading this year was the tragic divorce between the arts and sciences and how much they need each other and how much real scientists and artists have in common. (At one point in school, Kimmerer is told by a botany advisor, “If you want to study beauty, you should go to art school.”) This was published in 2016, but re-published last year and has spent 87+ weeks on the bestseller list, for good reason.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman
As he did with The Antidote, one of my favorite reads of 2013, Burkeman is able to pull off this great magic trick of writing a self-help book that not only transcends its genre, it also pokes fun at it. (This trick was a big influence on my book, Show Your Work!, which is the first time I consciously wrote a book knowing it’d be shelved in self-help.) It’s very hard to pull off. I’d also like to point out that Burkeman takes time in between his books, and works through a lot of ideas in his column and great newsletter, which I think leads to much richer work. (For a taste of the book, see my post, “The Principles of Patience.”)
Matrix***
Lauren Groff
“All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.” This was my book of the year. Just a stunning read. A historical fiction that manages to illuminate contemporary issues. (Telling the truth but telling it slant, as Emily Dickinson would put it.) I started the book around when Daylight Savings began and my clock and schedule got all messed up. It’s the perfect book to read when you’re up at weird hours, like a sleepy nun. (I drew a fantastic lecture about how Groff put the book together.) Can’t wait to read her other books, and her new one, which will be set in Jamestown.
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World***
Iain McGilchrist
I have been meaning to read this book for over a decade. I first purchased it in 2010 after hearing Lynda Barry sing its praises. I balked at its heft and its length and its Bible-thin pages and sold the hardcover at some point before one of our moves. Then I bought the paperback one day at Bookpeople after reading Leonard Shlain’s work. It took me two months to finish because I found it hard to read more than 10 pages in a day. It’s one of those books that has a cult following, because once you read it, it’s hard not to see the world through its lens.
The Sentence
Louise Erdrich
My first Erdrich book, but definitely not my last. I picked it up knowing nothing about it, and for maybe half the book had no idea where it was going. I just liked being on the ride. It’s a novel about ghosts and bookstores and the pandemic. I didn’t plan it, but it seems right that the fall started with a book about indigenous wisdom and ended with a book about indigenous wisdom.
When We Cease To Understand The World
Benjamin Labatut
(translated by Adrian Nathan West)
This book, finished in the early morning on Dec. 31st, is a prime example of why I don’t make my year end list until the very end of the year. A book that somehow ties my love of reading about physics in with my love of gardening as a metaphor. (The original title was Un Verdor Terrible, which translates to something like, A Terrible Greening.) “This is a work of fiction based on real events,” Labatut writes in the acknowledgements. “The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book.” So, the first essay has only one fictional paragraph, and by the end, it’s all made up, “while still trying to remain faithful to the scientific concepts discussed.” A wonderful way to end the reading year.
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10 great ideas from books that didn’t crack my top 21
I read a lot of books every year, and while making this list, I thought about how Errol Morris says he doesn’t think there’s such a thing as a great movie or a great book, there are just good scenes, good paragraphs, etc.
So here’s a list of 10 ideas from good books that didn’t crack my top 21, for whatever reason. In some ways, I think this list is more interesting than my top 21, and all these books are worth reading:
1. The harmony of tensions from Heraclitus’s Fragments.
2. “Compare and despair!” from Beth Pickens’ Your Art Will Save Your Life.
3. The importance of taking a day off, from Abraham Heschel’s The Sabbath, by way of Beth Pickens’ Make Your Art No Matter What. (Both of Beth’s books are very much worth reading.)
4. Narratives built on cooperation and networking, from Gail Carriger’s The Heroine’s Journey.
5. Narratives based on shapes found in nature, from Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode.
6. Writing as you read, from Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes.
7. “Disgust is a survival trait” and the idea that a good video game keeps you playing until it has taught you everything it knows (substitute “book” for “video game” and “reading” for “playing”) from Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun.
8. Giving the household a way to be alone while they’re together, from Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, borrowed from A Pattern Language.
9. The history of burnout in our boomer parents in Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation.
10. Erik Seidel’s line, “Less certainty, more inquiry,” from Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff. (A great book from a writer I admire that I read in the no man’s land of 2020/2021 turnover. It should be on one of my lists!!)
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If you liked this list, you will enjoy my newsletter, where I share what I’m reading every week, and you might also enjoy the Read Like An Artist book club, where I pick a favorite book every month.
I’ve been doing this list since 2006. You can read them all here.
I hope you read widely and adventurously, but more importantly, I hope you read what you want to read! Life is short and time is precious, and any book that doesn’t have you turning the pages is not the book for you right now.
Having trouble reading? Here’s what works for me.
Happy reading!
10 good books I read this winter
What a completely bleak winter. Good riddance. Life always feels a little bit more tolerable when you have a good book to read, and here are 10 books that helped me through, listed in the order I read them:
The Biggest Bluff
Maria Konnikova
A writer who’s never played poker before learns the game and becomes a champion. Maria is a friend of mine, and I could be making this up, but it feels like one of those books where an author is coming into her peak skills while also finding a perfect subject for those skills. The mantra from Maria’s mentor, poker legend Erik Seidel, is perfect for our times: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”
“The Plague Year”
Lawrence Wright
Not a book… yet. 30,000 absolutely riveting words in The New Yorker, one of only a handful of times the magazine has devoted so much space to one piece. Wright is the perfect writer for the job, here: he wrote a pandemic novel that came out a month after lockdown began in the U.S. Wright is expanding the material into a book coming out this summer. (His book God Save Texas was on my favorites of 2019 list.)
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
Raph Koster
This was a new experience for me: I don’t think I’ve ever been more turned off by the design of a book (crude drawings and pesky endnotes) while simultaneously devouring it. “Fun is just another word for learning,” Koster writes. His definition of a good game is “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.” (I wonder if we can apply that to books: A good book is one that teaches everything it has to offer before the reader stops reading. I like that.)
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” One of those infuriating books that lose you for a few pages and you start skimming and the very second you’re about to put it down and read something else, a sparkling gem of a sentence appears that you double-underline and scribble in your commonplace book, and gets you to start reading again.
One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder
Brian Doyle
A posthumous collection of an author I wish I’d read when he was alive. Maybe my favorite thing I read all winter. I savored a handful of essays each night in bed. If you’re new to his work, try his ode to the heart, “Joyas Voladoras,” or “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” There’s a big archive of his at The American Scholar. (Recommended to me by a newsletter reader. Thanks, Cate!)
No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
“You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.” Think about how hard this is to pull off: a poet writes a bestselling memoir and then follows it up with a novel. (Priestdaddy was on my favorites of 2018, and I expect this to be on my favorites of 2021.) One of the most original writers of our generation. I will be instantly reading whatever she writes next.
Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal
The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal once worked as a trash compactor, and, according to the critic James Wood, he “rescued books from the compacting machine and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.” He based his wild, short novel on his experiences, giving them to the fictional narrator, Hanta, who says he “can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books.” (Same.)
In Praise of Shadows
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
The shortest book on this list, coming in at barely 50 pages. Written by a novelist and first published as an essay in Japanese before WWII. My favorite part is when he writes about the aesthetics of Japanese toilets. Seems like it might be a “problematic” text these days, but it gave me a lot to think about. (Recommended to me by an architect friend. Would pair well with Koren’s Wabi-Sabi.)
The Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy
Dave Hickey
My third-favorite Hickey collection after Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers. I read an essay for dessert after lunch each day for a few weeks. There are some really excellent essays here, but they’re mostly front-loaded at the beginning of the book. (I picked this up after reading a galley of Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.)
Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler
A dark, brilliant page-turner and very hard to read right now, given that it feels like we’re living in the prequel.
“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
(I wrote more about the book here.)
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See more of my favorite books and sign up for my newsletter for weekly recommendations.
100 things that made my year (2021)
- Getting the whole household vaccinated.
- Putting in a pool! Swimming in the pool! Reading big fat paperbacks while floating in the pool! Drawing comix and doodling and writing poems in the pool! Talking on the phone while cleaning the pool! Nightswimming with booze in a plastic cup. Damselflies mating on my shoulder. The way the sunlight reflecting off the pool casts weird light all over the house. Waking up on my pizza raft in late October with a mild sunburn. Discovering that you can still float in the pool even when it’s too cold to swim. (Can you tell I’m a Pisces rising?)
- Walking. (Especially in the morning.) The Shoal Creek greenbelt.
- The continuing adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Coconut the Owl(s). Having a house built for them. Seeing them mate on a tree branch at dusk. Making pictures and posters of them whenever they went missing. Feeling like Tony Soprano when the ducks flew away. Comforting myself in their absence with the livestream of their cousins, Merlin and Minerva. Finding out Picasso had an owl. How Mr. Coconut returned with the partial lunar eclipse.
- Playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my kids’ Nintendo Switch. Disappearing into Hyrule. Watching Meg get into Animal Crossing. Mario Kart tournaments with the whole family. Being asked to play Minecraft and the boys teaching me to make a rollercoaster.
- Family pizza and a movie night. So many good movies, and at least two masterpieces: Kiki’s Delivery Service and Paddington 2.
- Playing piano. Learning Debussy’s first arabesque and “Bruyeres.” Guaraldi’s “Great Pumpkin Waltz.” Even learning the Succession theme. How I can hear a song 1,000 times, but the minute I learn it on the piano, realizing how much I didn’t know it.
- Starting a 5-year commonplace diary and writing a favorite sentence in it every day.
- My magic brush pen.
- Prismacolor Ebony Graphites.
- Copying out a poem on my typewriter and picking it apart.
- Newsletter 2.0. All my kind readers.
- Starting the Read Like an Artist book club with Literati.
- Dipping into the archives and writing the afterward for the 10th anniversary edition of Steal Like An Artist. Learning InDesign well enough that I could lay out the whole Afterword myself.
- How my books continue to have a life out in the world. YouTuber Ali Abdaal sharing how Show Your Work! changed his life and the book finding an even bigger audience. How people are slowly discovering that Keep Going is basically a pandemic manual.
- Making collages out of used fireworks and lifted type and cyanotypes of dead things I find in the yard. Losing myself. Getting into the flow state. Stepping into the portal.
- The tenderness of school pickups and drop-offs. Proper distance. What George Saunders calls “that airport feeling.”
- Driving around with the kids, blasting “Surfin’ Bird” and the Bluey soundtrack in the car.
- A road trip to Laity Lodge and the Frio Canyon. Making a fire and sitting out underneath the stars. (Jules: “It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story.”)
- My Apple Watch and Apple AirPods, two pieces of technology I initially scoffed at that Meg bought me and I ended up loving.
- Making a page for my zines.
- Spiffing up my speaking page and having our best year ever. Having a good rig, so I can talk and draw at the same time. Speaking to a quilting conference about my tape quilts. Working on more than one talk at a time. All my great clients.
- Conversational shortcuts. Not greeting people with, “How are you?” but saying, “It’s nice to see you.”
- A real January snow day in Texas. (Which was later overshadowed by the awful winter storm in February.) How much more the new growth of spring meant after the storm. How the palms regrew their fronds after being trimmed.
- Trying to actually take weekends off. Pressing Schedule Send.
- Letting things sit until they tell you what they want to be. Joy Williams saying more people should get writer’s block. (How Elton John used to say to Billy Joel, “Why don’t you put out more albums?” and Billy Joel would reply, “Why don’t you put out less?”) Remembering that nobody wants to read a book. Making covers for books I don’t intend to write. Knowing the difference between exploiting and exploring.
- Listening to short stories instead of podcasts. Typing a short story writer’s name into my podcast app and seeing what comes up.
- How some books suck you in and some books spin you out.
- Tales of marginalia.
- Leaving notes of encouragement to myself in really long books.
- Reading like a diver — sometimes going deep, sometimes skimming. Reading like a bird of prey — swooping and perching.
- Reading with a blade and a glue stick.
- The Thoreau/Emerson/James trilogy of biographer Robert D. Richardson.
- Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary.
- Reading about physics. Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics. 4 or 5 books by Carlo Rovelli. Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World.
- Accumulating more gardening metaphors! How knowing a little bit about plants helped me realize I’m not languishing, I’m dormant. Anne Patchett on being a compost heap. Learning what seeds look like. Dormancy and Wintering. Not seizing the day — plucking it! Not being a pirate or a farmer, but a pirate gardener.
- Becoming someone who takes comfort in mindless yard work. Literally tending my plot. Moving rocks with my wheelbarrow and shovel. Mowing with our old-fashioned push mower. Raking leaves. Power washing. Growing grass. My gardener’s hat.
- Trying to love the squirrels, even though I hate them so much for invading the owl house and dropping half-eaten pecans all over the yard.
- The total chaos of having a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old. One still attached to that little kid magic, and one on the cusp of becoming a pre-teen. The roughhousing. The fights and the love. Putting their arms around each other while watching TV. How much they read. How Jules leaves amazing drawings all over the house. How he sometimes keeps a diary. How Owen does the crossword in the NYTimes Kids’ Section. How they play keyboards at opposite ends of the house and make it sound like a Guitar Center showroom. How much they love Wheel of Fortune. How their dresser is basically a museum of technology. All the funny stuff they say. How they are always making fun of me. Their short film, “Cowardly Papa.” Wondering why Jules always drew me with a goofy oversized beard and then realizing it’s because that’s literally how he sees me.
- Not trying to be a great parent, just a “good enough” parent. Telling them as much as they need to know, and no more. Playing a long game. Practicing patience. How Meg looks up a joke online and writes it on a post-it note that she sticks in their school lunches.
- Drawing Batman cowls and Mario hats and mustaches on people in the NYTimes. Learning the kind of math they teach in school now. Making fart collages! Playing with their spin art kit. Printmaking with vegetables like leftover peppers and onions. Painting over Jules’ drawings.
- Rethinking Owen’s stutter as “Our Stutter,” because it’s something we share. All the cool people in the stuttering community I’ve met. Brunch with John Hendrickson. JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing.
- How much we all still have to learn about ourselves and each other. How I wrote a post about aphantasia — the inability to make pictures in your head — and Meghan said, “I think I have that.” (She does!)
- This photo Jules took of me.
- The United States Postal Service. Getting mail from artists I love. Jules sending a letter to Nintendo and getting a response.
- The re-opening of our local library branch. That feeling when your holds come in. Browsing the kids’ graphic novel section for the boys. My “What’s more punk than the public library?” t-shirt.
- Kind nurses.
- The idea that curiosity is not a luxury. Writing as just pointing at things. Playing an ignorant guy who’s curious.
- Walking past a discarded beer can so many times I decided to turn it into installation art.
- Trying to love Austin, as much as it is changing. Shouting “That’s right baby, when you got it flaunt it!” at a couple parked in a Ferrari on Burnet Road on Easter Day.
- A woman on Nextdoor asking for a recommendation for ghost removal and how many people knew “a guy” and also had very specific advice.
- Thinking of input as collage. Learning that when Joy Division were making “Love Will Tear us Apart,” they were listening to Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits and Sparks’ “No. 1 in Heaven.” Switching on PBS for 10 minutes every night after whatever we’ve finishing watching and seeing if there are any connections. How reading Carlo Rovelli and watching Michael Mann at the same time means they are now entangled in my brain.
- Jarvis Cocker singing Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here.”
- The Kata dudes shouting at the Olympics and the kids being bewildered by the spectacle.
- Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing.
- Denis Johnson’s commonplace book.
- Thinking about writing as a spiritual practice. Writing pandemic prayers. Making art as a souvenir of gratitude. Not believing in myself, just trying to keep the channel open. Waiting for that tingle in the scalp. Embracing clichés, puns, and hooks. Skipping the boring parts. Trying to rewind my attention. Searching outside the algorithm. Throwing out the instructions. Not killing my darlings, but relocating them.
- The Apple Notes app, how it syncs between phone and computer, sure, but also just crossing things out on a legal pad.
- Upgrading to an industrial strength date stamp.
- My Goldilocks theory of creativity: how there’s a sweet spot when life is just annoying enough that writing is a nice alternative.
- Keeping in mind how toxic fame is. Wishing I had a pseudonym or some heteronyms.
- How Instagram isn’t completely terrible yet. Gary Panter’s Instagram index cards. Liana Finck’s new mom cartoons. Monty Don’s gardens. Thor Harris’s life hacks.
- The woodcuts of Antonio Frasconi.
- The J. Crew pocket t-shirts that Meg buys me on clearance.
- Getting in Costco Connection!
- Reading an essay and then searching the writer’s Twitter feed to see the tweets that led up to it.
- Thinking about time. Geologic time and the trouble with months. Time as the stream you go fishing in. Almanacs and cyclical time. How what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future.
- Watching skating videos when I’m missing California.
- Listening to the Radio Garden app.
- Listening to a bunch of interviews with the same interesting person until you memorize their sound bites and big ideas.
- Watching TV! The Knick! The Mandalorian! The White Lotus! Hacks! Grand Designs. The Durrells in Corfu. What We Do in the Shadows. Reservation Dogs. All Creatures Great and Small. Sex Education. The Great. Ghosts! Squid Game. J.B. Smoove as Leon on Curb Your Enthusiasm. How being a Roy Kent is better than being a Ted Lasso. Seeing Rick Steves on TV and shouting, in Chappelle’s Rick James voice, “You want to smoke with the ol’ boy Rick Steves?!?” Trash TV! Motel Makeover! How no matter how many episodes of Magnum, P.I. I wander into halfway through, I still can’t figure out what’s going on. Discovering we have 80s and 90s music video channels on the TV. How, at certain point in the year, Marky Mark’s “Good Vibrations” came on at the same time every night. The story of “Thong Song.” The small thrill when the Roku TV changes backgrounds with the season.
- Listening to music! Blasting Depeche Mode all summer after watching Depeche Mode 101. Finally getting into Sparks thanks to The Sparks Brothers. “Bruyeres” recorded at home by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. Pharaoh Sanders and Floating Points’ Promises. Billy Nomates’ Emergency Telephone EP. (Made in her shed!) Dry Cleaning’s New Long Leg. The “Post-Brexit New Wave.” Horse Lords’ The Common Task. Suzanne Ciani. Laura Mvula’s Pink Noise. h hunt’s Playing Piano For Dad. Noveller. The Krautrock-inspired Lower Dens record, Nootropics. A playlist of tracks from the label Tasty Morsels. Silk Sonic’s “Smokin Out The Window.”
- The way Jonathan Richman talks about The Velvet Underground. How even Hans Zimmer describes the Hans Zimmer sound as “that low drone-y thingie.” How Charlie Watts pulled off the hi-hat when he hit his snare.
- How, somehow, I’m not sick of The Beatles? Revolution in the Head. Making a playlist of songs they listened to. How hard Paul tried. John Lennon singing “Cathy’s Clown.” The “God” episode of Song Exploder. Even Ringo’s fart.
- Listening to a sweet playlist and checking to see who made it and realizing it was ME.
- Watching movies! Mostly old movies. Watching half a movie today, half a movie tomorrow. How it was a particularly great year for music movies. Hail Satan! The Duellists. Midnight Run. Dangerous Liaisons. Hustlers. The Lady from Shanghai. Captain Blood. Val. Re-watching Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans with a couple of my buddies online, then rewatching Heat and Collateral. Even Dune! (Especially the David Lynch version.) How if you put Flea in your documentary, he will steal the show. Expecting nothing from Dunkirk or Tenet, and liking them both. (Same for Inherent Vice.) The Donut King. Plan B. Watching Fast 9 in my friend’s backyard and thinking about how much it aligns with The Heroine’s Journey. Derek DelGaudio’s In and Of Itself. Bo Burnham’s Inside.
- Reading outside in the yard and smelling something delicious and thinking, “Dang, somebody is having something good for dinner,” then coming inside and discovering that somebody is ME.
- Meg’s St. Patrick’s Day feast: corned beef and potatoes and sauerkraut and soda bread and Guinness.
- Oysters, clam chowder, a cheeseburger, and affogato at Clark’s, out in their parking lot.
- The carne asada burrito at T-Loc’s.
- So much takeout and delivery. Stiles and Switch BBQ. Tso’s chinese. Enchiladas y Mas. Bagels from Nervous Charlie’s. Sushi from Kome.
- Strawberry ice cream and pretzels.
- Goodies from Milk Barn Farm.
- Watching Meg fix the dishwasher after watching a YouTube video. The smart LED light Meg installed in Owen’s noise nook. The towel warmer rack she installed in the bathroom.
- Fixing my broken prescription sunglasses by using frames from another pair of glasses.
- Thinking about the harmony of tension, how most things in life run on the coincidence of opposites, like the string of a guitar slung between two tuning pegs: too slack, it makes no music, too tight, it snaps.
- Signing books at Bookpeople. Walking into Kinokuniya and Black Pearl Books to shop and finding out they stocked my books. Meeting booksellers and getting to thank them in person.
- Having a really great office, losing the office, and then dreaming about having my own studio again someday, while also knowing that nothing will ever beat working at the kitchen table in the morning sunshine.
- When Willie and Merle, the neighbor cats, decided they lived in our yard now. The time Merle ran into the house and a wild chase ensued. How they slept on the porch all night and I had to decide in the morning whether to go outside with my coffee or let them sleep. How much I missed them when they moved to Elgin.
- Halloween, the highpoint of the year, in between COVID spikes. Carving pumpkins. Trick or treating with friends and dancing in the streets. The painting I found on the sidewalk.
- Playing Uno and Five Card Nancy with the kids. Playing Scrabble with mom.
- Approaching 40, realizing how much I can’t afford to lose friends. Calling them on the phone. Meeting up. Having an (outdoor) lunch. Planning to get a bike so we can go for a ride together.
- People looking through my telescope and seeing Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings for the first time.
- Re-reading letters from my grandma and writing her obituary.
- KUTX’s Christmas mix, which I swear made Christmas 100% merrier.
- Celebrating our 15th anniversary with Dairy Queen.
- The steeple of the church near our house, how I see it in the distance and know I’m almost home.
- The sunset over the river at Laguna Gloria.
- Hearing the people I love laugh.
- Taking afternoon naps.
If you liked this list, you’ll love my newsletter.
Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.
Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you have
“A good idea is not of any use if you can’t find it.”
—Logan Heftel
When I was working on Keep Going, I wrote about “the importance of revisiting notebooks,” detailing the notebook method I’d learned from the Two Davids — David Thoreau and David Sedaris — how to get down daily thoughts and mine them for material for larger pieces. At the end of the piece, I wrote:
I have no index for the notebooks (unless you count my logbook), and no way, really, of knowing what’s in them, a condition worsened by my terrible memory, and the fact that one of the reasons I like keeping a diary, as Henry Jones, Sr., said, is because I don’t have to remember what’s in it. I plan on starting an index in the coming weeks, and updating it for each new notebook.
Reader, I… never started that index. And four years later, here I am, my dumb ass, trying to write another book, staring at a crate of notebooks, literally thousands of pages, with no idea what’s in them, really:
I have filled pages, but I have missed a crucial step: indexing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks. He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire:
Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.
Emerson called his notebooks his “savings bank,” and over four decades, he spent an enormous amount of time in the vault, not just writing, but re-reading what he’d written and indexing.
The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and give him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that interested him throughout his life.
As time went on, it took Emerson longer and longer to put lectures and essays together, simply because he had this vast trove to work with. He had no typewriter, no word processor, no computer. Everything was done with ink and paper. His indexes were massive, running hundreds and hundreds of pages. “These indexes themselves, never printed—with one exception—represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.” He wound up with 263 volumes on his shelf.
It could be dreary work, doing all this indexing, but it was crucial as he worked up to a new work. (Emerson’s creative process is so fascinating, Richardson wrote a wonderful slim volume about it, called First We Read, Then We Write.)
I am fascinated by the notebook and filing systems of other writers. In my experience, it’s very easy to write every day and get ideas down, but it’s not so easy to keep track of it all.
(A wild example, I’ll let you click through to read: In his excellent memoir, My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt writes about his father’s elaborate system of notebooks that allowed him to write hundreds of erotic novels.)
Comedian Phyllis Diller had “gag file,” which is now housed at The Smithsonian:
Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag.
In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comedian showed off a similar “joke bank”:
For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she’s written (at this point she’s amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: “Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?”
These filing systems are all analog examples, but one of my heroes, George Carlin, embraced an analog/digital system:
I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder… When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it….[In my filing system there are files for all kinds of subjects] but then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles….It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it’s just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let’s see, if I say “asshole” and “minister,” I then can find what I want find.
“A lot of this,” Carlin said, “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”
No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.
On Twitter the other day I saw someone point out that the longer you listen to Song Exploder, the more you discover that the Voice Memos app on the iPhone has probably had more of an impact on songwriting than any other piece of software. But recording things in Voice Memos is just one step. The next is listening back to things, finding diamonds in the rough.
Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants, aka the lead singer and songwriter for The Presidents of the United States of America, says he dumps all his raw song ideas into an iTunes playlist and then puts it on shuffle while he’s washing dishes. (I read that Brian Eno does something similar: he makes a tremendous amount of music, and then hits shuffle when he’s answering email, etc., and whatever catches his ear, he investigates.)
Like William Blake said, you either create your own system or get enslaved by another’s. In some sense, this very blog is a system for me to find out what I have: I take material from my notebooks and turn it into blog posts, and the posts become tags, which become book chapters, etc.
But I have a ton of material that never makes it online, and I need to get it out of my notebooks and into an indexed and fully searchable system. I think this will be easiest if I do it as I go, and keep it simple: the minute I finish a notebook, go back and type the whole thing into a .txt file and save it. (And back it up.)
I suspect that rather than being totally dreary, this transcribing step can also be a creative step, and I will see patterns of thought, generate new ideas…
You have to be obsessed
“Talent is cheap — you have to be obsessed, otherwise you are going to give up.”
—John Baldessari
This week I finished Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is so prescient it feels like we’re living the prequel. The main character, Lauren, is a young writer who keeps a diary and invents a new religion called “Earthseed” while surviving in an America that has collapsed due to climate change.
At one point Lauren writes:
I’m trying to speak—to write—the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.
Any time a character writes things down the story in some ways becomes a story about writing and what the act of writing can do for a human being. (I wonder how many people remember that 1984 begins when Winston Smith buys an illegal diary to write in.)
I was interested in Butler’s ideas about writing before I even read any of her work. (I’ve previously blogged about the positive affirmations she wrote in her commonplace books and her method of reading.)
After finishing Parable, I found a couple of her essays collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories, which are worth reading for any artist.
The first is called “Positive Obsession,” and it tells the story of how Butler became a writer. Obsession, she writes, is simply about not being able to stop. “Obsession can be a useful tool if it’s positive obsession.”
She took archery in high school, and saw positive obsession “as a way of aiming yourself, your life, at your chosen target. Decide what you want. Aim high. Go for it.”
There’s a similar emphasis on persistence in the second essay, “Furor Scribendi.” (A mania or rage for writing.)
Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent.
Persistence, she said, was her most important talent. Sticking with it.
What connects these two pieces, for me, is how much easier persistence is when there’s obsession behind it. (And likewise, discipline is much easier when it’s fueled by desire.)
But obsession, John Baldessari warned us, cannot be willed.
So, in some way, the question to ask yourself isn’t just what you want or need to be doing, but what you can’t stop doing or can’t stop thinking about. That’s your obsession. The thing you cannot will.
Obsession is a living thing. A kind of beast. When you find a positive obsession, an obsession that seems like it can take you somewhere good, you keep feeding it, and you ride the beast until it’s dead.
What obsession looks like pic.twitter.com/p27pUQzX2P
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) July 23, 2017
A quote a day
Because yet another notebook is just what I needed in my life (I think that makes 4 daily notebooks), I ordered one of Tamara Shopsin’s lovely 5 year diaries (added to my gear page):
I’ve been using mine not as an actual diary, but as a kind of commonplace book, writing a favorite quote I read or line I hear in it every day, like so:
I love books like The Daily Thoreau and Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom, so this idea (stolen from Dan Pink) instantly appealed to me.
I like flipping back through my entries and seeing if there are any threads or themes that run through the week:
I’m curious to see whether the quotes in the following years will speak to others on the same page, and what kind of juxtapositions will pop up. I could easily see this becoming my most treasured notebook. (You can get one here.)
Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey
I wrote about Mary Ruefle’s erasure book A Little White Shadow in the history section of Newspaper Blackout, but I didn’t truly fall in love with her work until I read her collected lectures in Madness, Rack, and Honey in 2013.
As someone who tries, desperately, to write books intentionally, it humbles me to look at the bookshelf and make note of how many of my favorite books were the author’s happy accident.
“I never set out to write this book,” Ruefle says in the introduction. In 1994, she had to deliver lectures to graduate students, and rather than trying to wing it, she wrote them out first, because “writing is my natural act, more natural than speaking.”
She notes that the book becomes more “increasingly fragmentary” as it goes, and David Kirby picked up on this in his NYTimes review:
In many ways, “Madness, Rack, and Honey” reads like a steroid-boosted version of a commonplace book, those thinking persons’ scrapbooks that became popular in early modern Europe and contained quotations from the classics, scraps of conversation, poem fragments, recipes, proverbs and lists of every sort. With all of Ruefle’s borrowings and rephrasings, it’s difficult sometimes to tell exactly who’s talking, which may be the idea. One authority burrows into another, as when the painter Cy Twombly is cited as quoting the poet John Crowe Ransom’s assertion that “the image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.” I believe the rappers call this “sampling.”
I like her idea for a class called “Footnotes”:
In it, the students would read a footnoted edition of a definitive text—I thought it might as well be The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge—and proceed diligently to read every book mentioned in the footnotes (or the books by those authors mentioned) an in turn all those mentioned in the footnotes of the footnoted books, and so on and so on, stopping only when one was led back, by a footnote, to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.”
And her connection between drawing and writing:
The greatest lesson in writing I ever had was given to me in an art class. The drawing instructor took a sheet of paper and held up a pencil. She very lightly put the pencil on the piece of paper and applied a little pressure; by bringing her hand a little ways in one direction, she left a mark upon the paper. “That’s all there is to it,” she said, “but it’s a miracle. Once there was nothing, and now there’s a mark.”
Some sentences I underlined in 2013. It is fun to realize how many of these ideas I have internalized — particularly the parts about “breaking bread with the dead”:
- “if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path”
- “dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there”
- “fear is overcome by procedure”
- “In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time.”
- “I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back…”
- “I do not care if I am writing a poem or a letter—it is just making marks on a sheet of paper that delights and envelops me.”
- “Poets are dead people talking about being alive.”
- “Insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.’ That’s writing poetry, but hey, it’s also getting out of bed every morning.”
- “For me, there is no difference between writing and drawing.”
- “When I make contact with a piece of paper without looking up I am happy.”
I tend to love essays written by poets — it’s interesting to me that Ruefle is hesitant about writing prose essays, because they are the thing that led me to her poetry, not the other way around.
As I said, I have since become a huge fan of her work — I love her sense of wonder, her way with images, and her sense of humor. (And her erasures, of course, which she’s as crazy about as I am.) Her last two books, My Private Property and Dunce, were at the top of my 2020 reading list.
Her writing gave me much comfort at the beginning of lockdown and she became my quarantine queen, in a sense — I figured with her penchant for solitude and self-entertainment, if anybody could make it through this it would be her.
I was not disappointed when I googled her name the other day and found out she had spent a good portion of the pandemic mailing poems to Vermonters whose names she found in the phone book.
* * *
Every Saturday weekend I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.
All good things must begin
“All good things must begin.”
—Octavia Butler, journal entry
Here is the inside cover of one of Octavia E. Butler’s commonplace books, from around 1988. She wrote herself many of these motivational notes, which can found in her archives at The Huntington.
That encouragement was probably essential: Butler faced a lot of challenges. She grew up black and poor in Pasadena, Calif., when legal segregation was dead, but de facto segregation was very much alive… In several interviews Butler said she wrote because she had two choices: write, or die. “If I hadn’t written, I probably would have done something stupid that would have led to my death,” she said cheerfully.
Looking at Butler’s notes I was reminded of the notebooks of another fiction writer, James Salter, who wrote all his novels by hand, but would start his notebooks with advice to himself on the inside flap:
This flap, from his notebook for his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime, has advice from André Gide:
Write as if this were your only book, your last book. Into it put everything you were saving—everything precious, every scrap of capital, every penny as it were. Don’t be afraid of being left with nothing.
His notebook from Light Years has the same advice: “SAVE NOTHING.”
“As always, you try to put everything you have in a book,” he said. “That is, don’t save anything for the next one. (The book of his uncollected writings is titled, Don’t Save Anything.)
(These images are from his collection in the Ransom Center.)
I always take comfort in the fact that even the great writers needed to pump themselves up to get to work.
Even if you don’t believe it or feel it 100%, it can be of great help to write down the things you want to be true about your life and work. (If you believe otherwise, why write?)
“Creative work is very hard,” wrote Sidney Lumet, in Making Movies, “and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”