One result of the pandemic is that I’m actually able to attend author events at the same frequency I did before I had children. Last week I watched Edward Carey discuss writing and drawing his re-telling of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale, The Swallowed Man (and one of my favorite reads of last spring), while highlighting treasures from the Ransom Center here in Austin, Texas. (You can watch the whole talk on YouTube.) Here are my notes:
Last weekend I invited one of my favorite writers, Sam Anderson, staff writer at the NYTimes and author of the fabulous book Boom Town, to celebrate Montaigne’s birthday with me on Instagram Live. I ended up with a tour of Sam’s library in his converted garage and a long chat about the guardian spirits that inspire his workspace, his dictionary stand, the magic of blind contour drawings, the calm of collage, how he writes nonfiction, the writing exercise he warms up with every morning, and yes, our shared love for Montaigne. You can watch the whole thing on IGTV.
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New month, so here’s a 31-day challenge to match. (See also: the 28-day, 30-day, and 100-day challenges.)
Here’s a fun video that Alistair Humphreys made about his 30-day challenge:
Happy practicing!
Lawrence Ferlinghetti died this week at 101. I can’t remember when I picked up my copy of Poetry as Insurgent Art. The latest copyright in the back is 2007, so that rules out college.
I was ready to claim the title page as an inspiration for the look of Steal Like An Artist, but if I didn’t get the book until my first trip to City Lights in San Francisco, that was in 2012 on the Steal book tour.
(I do think sometimes that artists tend to claim influence apocryphally — you put your work in the world and then you find all the stuff you should’ve looked at before you made the work.)
The thing I remember most about my first visit to City Lights in North Beach — other than the wonderful poetry room with the big dictionary in the corner — was all the hand-painted Ferlinghetti signs everywhere. I think I liked looking at those as much as I liked browsing the books.
One thing to know about Ferlinghetti is that while best known as a poet and a publisher, what he really wanted to be was a painter. He wrote about it in “More Light”:
I never wanted to be a poet. It chose me, I didn’t choose it. One becomes a poet almost against one’s will, certainly against one’s better judgment. I wanted to be a painter but from the age of ten onward these damn poems kept coming. Perhaps one of these days they will leave me alone and I can get back to painting.
There’s a great story on the City Lights website about how he discovered the basement and the signs you see behind him in the photos above:
Ferlinghetti also discovered signs painted on the walls by a Christian sect that had used the basement for prayer meetings, and on the walls today you can still fragments of them: “Remember Lot’s Wife,” “Born in Sin and Shapen in Niquity,” “I and My Father Are One,” and “I Am the Door.” Ferlinghetti made a deal with the landlord, put in a staircase, persuaded the Chinese Dragon to leave, and expanded the store into the basement.
Surely, those signs must’ve inspired him to make his own.
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Every Friday I pull one of my favorite books off the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.
Dan Sinker is one of the writers who I think is best capturing the fury and heartbreak and fleeting moments of beauty involved in being a parent right now.
I loved this piece about bird-watching during the pandemic and this epic thread of his kid’s drawings:
If you want something nice in your feed, here are posters from the last few weeks of the four-year-olds research projects. pic.twitter.com/QKHCLbHkF4
— ? damned sinker ? (@dansinker) June 15, 2020
He recently published “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Good’ Parent in a Pandemic” in Esquire:
Every parent wants to be a good parent. And every parent, every day, fails at that because, right now, being a good parent is literally impossible. A fine parent? Maybe. An OK one? Possibly. But a good one? We’re eleven months into a pandemic that sent all our children home, laid waste to jobs, killed a half-million people in this country, and sickened many millions more. Politicians like Ted Cruz ensured it would hurt as much as possible by fighting against public health measures and relief efforts that would have made a difference. So no: a good parent isn’t really an option. We’re all just barely getting by.
“Every parent—every single parent—has known the crash this year,” he writes.
Yup.
I have two of these bumper stickers: one in my studio, and one on our refrigerator.
What I hang onto these days is the D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good-enough” mother. “Success” in caring for children, he wrote in Playing and Reality, “depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment.” All the devotion required is an ordinary devotion, as he put it. No particular need for extraordinary skill or expertise.
In Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2016), she jokes about the concept’s popularity:
Winnicott’s concept of “good enough” mothering is in resurgence right now. You can find it everywhere from mommy blogs to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? to reams of critical theory. (One of this book’s titles, in an alternate universe: Why Winnicott Now?)
“If you are satisfied with being a good enough parent, and have no illusions that perfection is possible,” Peter Gray writes, “you see this problem for what it is, a problem to try to solve, not a tragedy, not an occasion for blame or shame.”
Me, I’m trying to see it as a comedy, or a farce, or maybe just bad improv. Making do with what we have.
We might not be able to be good right now, but we can be good enough.
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See also: “Manifesto of the Idle Parent” and “You are forgiven!”
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