All good things must begin

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

“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.”

The next 100 days

Sunday, June 21, 2020

I spent the first 100 days of quarantine on fun, repeatable daily projects: blind contour drawings, mini zines, and collage houses.

These have been needed and welcome distractions but they’ve also been productive procrastinations from the big project I’ve been avoiding: The New Book.

I plan to spend the next 100 days chasing a first draft. I’m saying this out loud for accountability, so I’ll stick to it, and also because it means things might get a little quiet around here and on social media. (Or, a little choppier, a little more fragmented. More bits and bobs and snapshots. I don’t know yet. I’ve been reading Yoshida Kinkō’s Essays in Idleness, which may become an inspiration.)

As always, thanks for reading. I’ll still be sending out my weekly newsletter no matter what, so if you haven’t already, I encourage you to subscribe.

10 good books I read this spring

Saturday, June 20, 2020

We had such a wonderful winter, and then…well, you know. Despite the pains of quarantine, I got a lot of reading done this spring. Here are 10 good books I read, in the order I read them:

A Love Letter To Texas Women
Sarah Bird

A lovely, slim book about Texas and the women who live here. I love her scenes of day-dreaming while wandering the aisles of HEB and how she writes about “neighboring,” the quality she most admires in Texas women, the “bone-deep instinct to be friendly to anyone who might cross one’s path.” (Rooted in the loneliness and struggle to survive in an often hostile frontier.) [Buy indie]

Dunce
Mary Ruefle

I’m a huge fan of Ruefle’s essay collection, Madness, Rack, and Honey, but it’s taken me a while to fall in love with her poetry. This collection did the trick. I love Ruefle’s 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.) [Buy indie]

Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton

Are you detecting the pattern here? At the beginning of quarantine, the writers who gave me the most comfort were women grappling with art and domesticity. Other diaries I read: Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life and Anne Truitt’s Daybook. The three diaries speak to each other in really interesting ways, and I recommend them all. [Buy indie]

Growing Without Schooling, Vol. One
John Holt

John Holt started his newsletter in 1977, “about ways in which people, young or old, can learn and do things, acquire skills, and find interesting and useful work, without having to go through the process of schooling.” I read an issue every day, tweeting out my favorite bit. A remarkable countercultural document of parents trying to figure out how to help their children learn from home at a time when homeschooling was, in many states, illegal. (Read my blog post about it.)

How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto
Tom Hodgkinson

We’ve had Hodgkinson’s manifesto hanging on the fridge for years now, but I’d never bothered to read this. Tons of references to some of my favorite books, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers and Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. I also enjoyed Hodgkinson’s book about parenting, from The Idle Parent. [Buy indie.]

Life Among The Savages
Shirley Jackson

Speaking of parenting, I’d read both of Shirley Jackson’s most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was not ready for how much I loved her book about motherhood, Life Among The Savages. It was so funny I would stop and read excerpts out loud to my wife until she read it, too. Looking forward to reading the sequel, Raising Demons. (I also enjoyed the introduction of Ruth Franklin’s biography of Jackson.) [Buy indie.]

The Annotated Alice
Lewis Carroll

This books collects Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, along with excised chapters, alternate illustrations (thought Tenniel’s are, in my opinion, unbeatable), and other ephemera. The stories are worth reading on their own, but the annotations give you a good context for what Carroll was doing. [Buy indie.]

The Swallowed Man
Edward Carey

I’ve written about Carey several times on this blog, and his novel, Little, was one of my favorite reads of 2019. He sent me an advance copy of The Swallowed Man, which tells the story of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale. (Come to think of it, I owe him a blurb. How about this: “I can’t think of another working author who is so deftly weaving pictures and words into such wondrous and weird tales. I’ll read anything he publishes.” Like Little, this book contains illustrations drawn by the main character, something I’m not sure I’ve seen anybody else do outside of children’s literature. (Somewhat related: John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook, an exploration of drawing in which Berger creates what he thinks Spinoza’s lost sketchbooks might’ve been like.) [Pre-order indie.]

How Buildings Learn
Stewart Brand

My wife read this in architecture school, and we’ve had this on our bookshelf for over a decade now. I’ve gotten a lot of it through osmosis, but I figured since I was working on these house collages, now was the right time to read it. So good! Like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, its lessons apply far beyond architecture. I think designers, in particular, would benefit greatly from reading it. Maybe my favorite book of the spring. [Buy indie.]

Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich

I picked this up so I could participate in the book discussion going on at The Convivial Society. (I read his book Deschooling Society years ago and it made a big impact.) Illich’s books are short, but they’re so dense with ideas, it can be slow going. Published in 1973, more relevant than ever. (Other great books I read that addressed art and social issues: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency.)

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Learn to be alone

Friday, June 19, 2020

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal said that almost 400 years ago. (Today is his birthday.)

There’s a wonderful chapter in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation called “Learn To Be Alone,” on the importance of solitude.

Merton writes that solitude is not “something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your soul.”

Solitude, for Merton, is “a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.”

He describes “a mechanism” for finding solitude that resembles Joseph Campbell’s “bliss station”:

There should be at least a room, or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the presence of other men.

“Learn to be alone” was also Andrei Tarkovsky’s reply when he was asked, “What would you like to say to young people?”

I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

“Loneliness,” writes Maggie Nelson in Bluets, “is solitude with a problem.”

As I wrote in Keep Going, visiting this place is not about sticking your head in the sand. It’s about finding the quiet strength every day to center yourself so that you can do your work.

(The zine in this post was made from a page of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The text quoted is from Clark’s writing about Montaigne. The art is Albrecht Durër’s “Apocalypse.”)