After I made this one I was reminded of Joe Brainard’s New Year poem “1970,” quoted in Ron Padgett’s biography:
1970
is a good year
if for no other reason
than just because
I’m tired of complaining
After I made this one I was reminded of Joe Brainard’s New Year poem “1970,” quoted in Ron Padgett’s biography:
1970
is a good year
if for no other reason
than just because
I’m tired of complaining
I made this blackout back in 2010, but it came to mind last night when I was finishing up Malcolm Harris’s book about millennials, Kids These Days, and I read this sentence: “The First Amendment gives us the right to get together and complain until things change or we get too tired to keep going.”
December 1st. ~8% of the logbook still empty. 31 days left in the year.
If you started tomorrow, you start a 30-day challenge. Or, you could go for a walk. Or tidy up. Or just chill. (Lord knows we all need to.)
As ever, the question is the same: What will you do with your days?
One month left, but it looks like we might actually make it. Know someone who needs to keep on top of their creative work in 2018? Get them a wall calendar.
For big, important creative work, not just the day-to-day meetings and appointments, a paper wall calendar is a simple, visual tool that helps you plan, gives you concrete goals, and keeps you on track.
The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a wall calendar method that helps him stick to his daily joke writing. You start by breaking your work into daily chunks. Each day, when you’re finished with your work, make a big fat X in the day’s box. Every day, instead of worrying about your total progress, your goal is to just fill a box:
“After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld says. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
Amassing a body of work or building a career is a lot about the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time. Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.
Work + time = art.
Buy my new wall calendar and you’ll have little bits of monthly encouragement along the way. Best of all, when you’re done with the year’s work, you can cut the calendar down the middle with an x-acto blade and you’ll have a dozen images you can play with. Add a 13×13 inch frame, and voila! Cheap art to hang back on the wall.
“Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life…”
—William Zinsser
2018, if we make it there, will be my 10th year of keeping a daily logbook. What’s a logbook? In the old days, a logbook was a place for sailors to keep track of how far they’d traveled. Mine is just a simple list of the things that happen each day, a sort of reverse appointment book. Every morning I sit down and list what I did, who I saw, what I read/watched/listened to, etc., the previous day. (Because I know everyone will ask, here’s the kind of notebook I use.)
The logbook started, like many creative endeavors, out of sheer laziness. My memory is terrible, so I wanted a record of my days, but I didn’t want to go to the trouble of keeping a “real” diary. The logbook was a way for me to keep a diary without really thinking… or feeling. (Now, I keep a pretty intense notebook and diary, but I still keep my logbook, too.)
What the logbooks have turned into is an index of my life. I consult them to reminisce about important events, like the days my kids were born, but I often consult them for really mundane stuff, like looking up the last time I replaced the air filter on the furnace.
For better or worse, I can tell you what happened to me on every day of the past decade.
I thought about my logbooks this morning when I read about how a Russian chemist’s diaries are being used as evidence of Russian doping in the Olympics. The New York Times article starts like this:
The chemist has kept a diary most of his life. His daily habit is to record where he went, whom he talked to and what he ate. At the top of each entry, he scrawls his blood pressure.
In the diaries, mundane details of his life, like going out to buy a cold medicine and complaining about the Olympic cafeteria food, are juxtaposed against juicier details, like mixing drug cocktails and transporting athlete urine. Here’s a picture of the diary, flagged by attorneys, I’m assuming:
If you want to keep your thoughts secret but archived… do it on paper! The chemist told The Times that he kept the diary on paper “mindfully… not on the computer.” (A crazy detail is that he wrote the diary with a black and gold Watermen pen given to him by his friend, Russia’s former antidoping chief who “died suddenly” after his announcement he was writing a book.)
Whether involved in a scandal or not, diaries are evidence of our days.
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