A group of graphic design students at Serra i Abella in Barcelona, Spain made this video inspired by the 10 points in the Spanish edition of Steal Like An Artist. Bueno!
A bad equation
The U.S. birth rate sank to a 30-year low in 2017 (gee, I wonder why?) and the supposed clash between parenting and creativity is a hot topic in publishing. In the past half decade, we’ve seen a whole batch of mothering/art books, many of them quite wonderful, including Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write, Jenny Offill’s Dept. Of Speculation, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. A few years ago Meghan Daum published a collection of writers on their decision not to have kids, called Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed. This year there’s Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. (These are just the books I can name off the top of my head.)
Earlier this year, I was sitting in a theater next to someone who works in publishing (a rare event for me, believe it or not) and he said, “Yeah, you know, there’s a ton of books about art and motherhood, but not a lot new out on art and fatherhood.”
Right on time, here comes Michael Chabon’s Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve really liked Chabon’s previous writing on fatherhood, including the great essay “William and I,” from Manhood For Amateurs, which begins with the perfect line, “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” Another great essay was “My Son, The Prince of Fashion,” about attending Paris Fashion Week with his son, Abe.
The excerpt from Pops currently making the rounds is “Are Kids The Enemy of Writing?” Chabon recalls standing with a Famous Lit’ry Man and being warned, if he wanted to be a Great Writer, not to have children. “You lose a book,” the man said, “for every child.”
Chabon was clearly disgusted by the interaction and is more than okay with his decision to have his four children, saying he’s going to die no matter what and his books will probably be forgotten anyways, and:
Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back. Anyway, if, 100 years hence, those books lie moldering and forgotten, I’ll never know. That’s the problem, in the end, with putting all your chips on posterity: You never stick around long enough to enjoy it.
A beautiful thought. But what I’m puzzled by in this piece is that Chabon, though he seems like a devoted father, never really questions that equation “you lose a book for every child,” even though it is demonstrably untrue in many cases.
Take, for example, several classic children’s books. A.A. Milne made up Winnie-the-Pooh for his son, Christopher Robin Milne. Astrid Lindgren’s bedridden daughter Karin asked her to tell a story about some girl named Pippi Longstocking. C.S. Lewis convinced J.R.R. Tolkien to turn the fantastical stories he told his children into The Hobbit. The list goes on and on — and that’s just children’s books, not to mention all the art and music and film that’s been inspired by children.
I am the father of two beautiful boys, but I am not an evangelist for having children. (I mean, have you looked around?) Having children in America is difficult no matter what your profession: health care is dismal, the costs of child care are astronomical, our public education system is being stripped for parts, inflated tuition and student loans have turned higher education into a one-way ticket to indentured servitude, and adulthood, if you survive to enter it, is not all that hot, either.
No working writer with kids is able to write without a ton of help.
The bad equation “for every child you lose a book” and all that “Pram in the Hall” nonsense is the kind of toxic thinking that gives writers an excuse to be negligent parents — “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children,” Faulkner growled — but it also severely underestimates the creative potential of children.
Rather than seeing my children as a constant drain on my creativity, it has made me a better father and a better writer to see them as creative catalysts, or energizers. (See my post: “Borrow a kid.”) I have been helped along to this point by the terrific example of so many creative mothers and fathers I’ve been lucky to know, and it’s for this reason I often share, on this blog, some of the creative shenanigans the boys and I have been up to.
It’s not that my boys magically made me a better person and a better artist, it’s that my boys make me want to be a better person and a better artist.
“Art is too long, and life is too short,” wrote Grace Paley. “There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”
Of course, every creative life requires sacrifices, but I would encourage us to not accept the “for each child you lose a book” equation in the first place. Children, like anything else in your life, if you love them, pay attention to them, spend time with them, and reflect on your experiences with them, can lead you to your best work.
Above: drawings by my 3-year-old
Procrastibaking
In the NYTimes this week, there’s a feature on “procrastibaking.” It’s a form of what I call productive procrastination — avoiding work by working on something else. (More in Steal Like An Artist.)
The piece includes lines from Grace Paley’s poem, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative,” found in the collection Begin Again:
I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
Later in the poem: “everybody will like this pie… / many friends / will say why in the world did you / make only one / this does not happen with poems.”
I’m reminded of Beverly Cleary:
I like writing in the morning while baking bread. I used to bake bread while I wrote. I’d mix up the dough and sit down and start to write. After awhile the dough would rise and I’d punch it down and write some more. When the dough rose the second time, I’d put it in the oven and have the yeasty smell of bread as I typed.
I never realized how much baking was about precision (as opposed to cooking, which is more forgiving) until I lived with a baker. Then I found out that the easiest way to become a better baker is to buy a kitchen scale and start measuring ingredients by weight.
Baking is also a wonderfully sensual activity, in direct contrast to so much so-called “knowledge” work — your hands in the dough, little tastes, the smell taking over the whole house. (If you want to make a place smell like home, bake some chocolate chip cookies…)
Photo above courtesy of LaRay’s
What do you want to learn?
I’m finishing up The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. Clocking in at 4 1/2 hours, the documentary presents a portrait of a man never satisfied, always searching, sort of modeling his career and life on Samsara, the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
Shandling’s diary entries are presented in little snippets throughout the documentary, and one of the of the things I wished for when watching is a longer, closer look at the pages. This morning I discovered that Garry’s friends have been posting them on his revived Twitter feed.
Shandling owed a great debt to George Carlin, who gave him encouragement when he was first starting out. Shandling adopted Carlin’s attitude towards cycles and reinvention. (Carlin famously threw out material and started fresh every year.)
What they both figured out is that the easiest way to re-invent yourself is to find something new to learn.
My book Show Your Work! is basically about learning in public — allowing people to sort of look over your shoulder as you’re working — and in chapter 10 I quote Milton Glaser, who said, “Whenever Picasso learned how to do something, he abandoned it.”
The video that quote is taken from is basically a summary of Shandling’s career, and it’s so good that I’ve transcribed a huge portion of it below (emphasis mine):
When I talk to students about the distinction between professionalism and personal development, I very often put it this way: In professional life, you must discover a kind of identity for yourself, that becomes a sort of trademark, a way of working that is distinctive that people can recognize. The reason for this is that the path to financial success and notoriety is by having something that no-one else has. It’s kind of like a brand, one of my most despised words.
So what you do in life in order to be professional is you develop your brand, your way of working, your attitude, that is understandable to others. In most cases, it turns out to be something fairly narrow, like ‘this person really knows how to draw cocker spaniels,’ or ‘this person is very good with typography directed in a more feminine way,” or whatever the particular attribute is, and then you discover you have something to offer that is better than other people have or at least more distinctive. And what you do with that is you become a specialist, and people call you to get more of what you have become adept at doing. So if you do anything and become celebrated for it, people will send you more of that. And for the rest of your life, quite possibly, you will have that characteristic, people will continue to ask you for what you have already done and succeeded at. This is the way to professional accomplishment–you have to demonstrate that you know something unique that you can repeat over and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it. The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development.
The truth of the matter is that understanding development comes from failure. People begin to get better when they fail, they move towards failure, they discover something as a result of failing, they fail again, they discover something else, they fail again, they discover something else. So the model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success. As a result of that, I believe that Picasso as a model is the most useful model you can have in terms of your artistic interests, because whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it, and as a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist, the results were extraordinary. It is the opposite of what happens in the typecasting for professional accomplishment.
Yesterday, Dan Pink posted a video with Whitney Johnson, author of Build an A-Team. She says:
Every single person is a learning machine. You want the challenge of trying something new, figuring out how to do it, mastering it, and then starting all over again. You want to Learn, Leap, and Repeat.
As I wrote in Show:
When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.
So, perhaps, instead of asking that dreaded question, “What next?” turn it into this question: “What do you want to learn?”
Works whether you’re 5-years-old or 85-years-old.
Join us for a celebration
This morning I browsed the Austin Public Library’s fantastic zine collection (highlights: Nathaniel Russell’s Fliers and Jillian Barthold’s Scenes From Big Bend) and this afternoon the 5-year-old and I made a zine using Bruno Munari’s Plus and Minus transparencies that I picked up in Milan last year and lines from the APL’s events flier. Pretty fun day.
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