Lost owl

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

The owls are gone again and I am sad. (Although it’s nice to know that Merlin and Minerva, not too far away, just hatched chicks!) I asked the six-year-old to make a “lost owl” flier and maybe that would help bring them back. This is what he drew. I am someone who is sometimes unfeeling, and because he seems, sometimes, to feel everything, he can often show me what I’m feeling in his drawings. For this reason, among many others, he’s been my favorite artist since he picked up a piece of chalk.

A book of words

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Nick Cave handwritten dictionary — Nick Cave’s handwritten dictionary

In his latest newsletter, my friend Alan Jacobs notes that Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is now fully online, and points to his 2006 piece, “Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges: Dr. Johnson and his Dictionary,” in which he recounts much of Johnson’s struggle putting together his book of words. (I was particularly sympathetic to Johnson’s disgust at his own “idleness” while holding a firm conviction that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I do love a man who contains multitudes… especially multitudes who hate each other.)

At the very end of the piece, Alan writes about the magic of paper dictionaries (emphasis mine):

Surely every user of dictionaries or encyclopedias can recall many serendipitous discoveries: as we flip through pages in search of some particular chunk of information, our eyes are snagged by some oddity, some word or phrase or person or place, unlooked-for but all the more irresistible for that. On my way to “serendipity” I trip over “solleret,” and discover that those weird, broad metal shoes that I’ve seen on the feet of armored knights have a name. But this sort of thing never happens to me when I look up a word in an online dictionary. The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you’re not looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need books.

Fifteen years later, this is no less true: the magic of a paper dictionary is the magic of finding things you didn’t know you were looking for. It’s a magic that electronic texts, for all their usefulness and convenience, still haven’t touched.

The supposed “shortcomings” of paper are what, in fact, make it such a wonderful technology. Here’s Alan, again (with emphasis mine, again):

George Landow has written that “the linear habits of thought associated with print technology often force us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization, and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment.” But it turns out that, when it comes to dictionaries anyway, it’s hypertext that narrows and impoverishes. The simple fact that I cannot pick up a dictionary and turn to the precise page I wish, or, even if I could do that, focus my eyes only on the one definition I was looking for — the very crudity, as it were, of the technology is what enriches me and opens my world to possibilities.

Get your paper dictionary today! You shan’t regret it.

I am no longer weakened by the weekend

Monday, April 19, 2021

I spent Sunday afternoon reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath. Published in 1951, the book explores the Jewish faith’s unique relationship to time and the meaning of the Hebrew god’s blessing of the seventh day in the book of Exodus, 20:8-11:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

“Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space,” the rabbi starts. “We expend time to gain space.” But things go wrong, Heschel writes, when space becomes our only concern. We become so occupied with objects, with things, or nouns, that reality is a “thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.”

The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, is “more concerned with time than with space.”

Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.

“The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” Heschel writes. “Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.” The meaning of the Sabbath is “to celebrate time rather than space,” and to get out from “under the tyranny of things of space.” The Sabbath is a time in which you not only abstain from work, you don’t even think about work. Each Sabbath is a kind of a mini-eternity — something to look forward to.

I came to The Sabbath via artist coach Beth Pickens’ new book, Make Your Art No Matter What. Pickens uses the concept of Shabbat with all the artists she works with, regardless of their religious background: “I ask them to choose a twenty-four-hour period every week from which they abstain from any work that could lead to making money, including their art.” Many of her clients balk at this suggestion. “They want more time for their art and here I am asking them to do none of it for a whole precious day each week.”

But these artists often find that — surprise! — taking a day off from their work restores their spirit and energy. There’s a balance here, of course, as Pickens defines an artist as a person who makes art, but also someone whose life suffers when they’re away from their creative practice. A real day off is usually more than enough to have us chomping at the bit to get back to the studio. (Just a few days ago I heard cartoonist Adrian Tomine say he takes one day off and he’s ready to start a new project.)

Personally, I have started focusing on having good, old-fashioned week-ends. In the Before Times, I felt the pressure to stuff weekends full of activity, the same pressure Witold Rybczynski describes so well in his great book, Waiting for the Weekend:

We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it, too.

Worst of all, my boss, (me), was a complete asshole, and often asked me to work at weird hours, even on Sundays. At a certain point, I started to despise weekends — I called them “Weak Ends” and joked that I was “weakened by the weekend.”

The pandemic has made me actually enjoy my weekends: I have nowhere to go, no traffic to fight, no lines to wait in for brunch, no crowds at museums. My kids are always home, so the school week provides no relief in the form of daycare. The week-end, however, means that nobody outside the house really expects anything from me. I don’t have to answer my email. Everything can wait until Monday.

Best of all, and perhaps the most crucial point: I’ve started abstaining from Twitter and social media on Saturday and Sunday. (As Pickens writes: “This wasn’t in the Talmud, but most certainly would have been: Put down your fucking phone.”)

My weekends are now about real rest and idleness.

It helps that my week sort of climaxes with the Friday morning newsletter. Once that’s out, I spend Friday clearing the decks, cleaning my office, answering letters and email, and winding down. The weekend begins with Friday night pizza and a movie with the boys.

Saturday morning, I still got up pretty early, and I still wrote in my diary, but afterwards, I just puttered around, read books, played piano, went for a walk, messed around in the yard, etc. My eight-year-old and I finally watched Star Wars and chased it with some Donkey Kong. Sunday, I read the paper and called my mom and laid in a hammock and read while the boys got their screen time.

It’s a strange feeling… I am no longer weakened by the weekend!

my notes from Witold Rybczynski’s *Waiting For The Weekend*

The Hernandez brothers and Tomine talk comics

Saturday, April 17, 2021

A pleasant lunchtime surprise yesterday: my friend Sonia Harris alerted me to a live-streamed conversation between legendary cartoonist brothers Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets) and Adrian Tomine (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist). I only came in about half-way through, but I doodled some blind drawings and made a few notes.

The brothers talked a lot about how they work. Gilbert works 8 to 5 and then he’s done for the day and goes and hangs out with his family. He has about 3 comics going at once, and sometimes he’ll make up a comic just to have a place to put a story that’s in his head.

Jaime said getting to the drawing board is the hard part, and he spends a lot of time avoiding work, “letting it swim in my head.” Tomine said he tells people that’s how he works: by taking his kids to the playground and working the stories out in his head.

“I’ve been drawing comics since I was five,” Gilbert said. He lamented how comics isn’t the “nutty frontier” it once was. “Old shit is great.” he said. “I’m addicted to having old comics around.”

“I feel like I’m a descendent of you guys and it’s important to make that lineage clear,” Tomine said. When he’s asked about his influences by younger cartoonists, he lists sources he thinks are obvious, but the young cartoonists scribble down the names in their notebooks, as if they’d never heard of them. Gilbert said the only time he was bothered by being copied was when cartoonists started copying cartoonists who copied Love and Rockets, and the link in the chain was lost.

When asked about tools or tricks, Jaime voiced hesitation about giving advice, because most of the time with the work, he didn’t know he was doing it while he was doing it. He talked about making drawings that nobody was ever supposed to see and drawing without an audience. “Trust your instincts,” he said. “A lot of times it’s the pen that makes you draw the way you draw.”

“’Til the last comic you draw,” Gilbert said, “you’re still trying to figure out how to make a good one.”

“Do it because it makes you happy,” Jaime said. “That’s why you did it in the first place.”

Return of the pansies

Thursday, April 15, 2021

My friend Manjula Martin (author of Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living) posted a pansy from her backyard that was so good I had to resurrect my dormant Pansy Luchadores project!

painting by Tateishi Tetsuomi, *Spring*, 1973

I’m become a little bit of a pansy nut and have taken to collecting (saving images to my hard drive) artwork featuring the flowers. I recently came across this wonderful painting by Tateishi Tetsuomi, who was described this way in a documentary synopsis:

Tateishi Tetsuomi was born in Taiwan in 1905. He returned to his birthplace to find painting subjects and then he had been attracted by the landscape and local cultures of Taiwan. During his stay in Taiwan, he made oil paints, illustrations and wood engravings for the magazine Minzoku Taiwan (Taiwanese Folklore).

He was regarded as a promising painter, but his achievements were to be forgotten when he was repatriated to Japan at the end of WWII and lost most of his paintings. He earned a living as an illustrator for children’s books, but finally achieved unique expressions in his last years.

And our recent neighborhood walks have yielded sights like this, so stay tuned for more: