McCartney on not-knowing and doing it now

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Paul McCartney recording drums in a bathroom for *McCartney II*, 1980 (via)

I think anybody who is a Beatles fan sort of identifies with one Beatle or the other. When I was a kid, I wanted to be John. The older I get, the more I want to be Paul, granny music and all, moving his own microphone.

One thing I’m interested in is Paul’s insistence that he doesn’t really know where the music comes from. Years ago, I clipped this paragraph from a 2016 interview:

You’ve never got it down. It’s this fluid thing, music. I kind of like that. I wouldn’t like to be blasé or think, ‘Oh you know I know how to do this.’ In fact I teach a class at a the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — I do a little songwriting class with the students — and nearly always the first thing I go in and say [is], ‘I don’t know how to do this. You would think I do, but it’s not one of these things you ever know how to do.

John Higgs expands on this in his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche:

After sixty years of interviews, it’s clear that McCartney does not understand why music comes so naturally to him, or flows out of him so easily, in a way that doesn’t happen to other people. He seems at times afraid that it might stop – he has never learned how to read music, for example, in case it breaks the way he works. As the Irish poet Paul Muldoon has said when discussing McCartney’s creativity, ‘It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.’

Another thing I admire is that McCartney doesn’t torture himself too much with his songwriting process. More from Love and Let Die:

McCartney places great emphasis on starting and finishing work immediately, before you have had the chance to overanalyse or come up with an excuse not to do it. This is an attitude that he credits his father with instilling in him. Whenever Paul or his brother Mike would try to get out of a chore by saying they would do it tomorrow, their father would tell them ‘D.I.N. – do it now’. As he explains, ‘you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through’. This approach paid dividends when he came to work with John Lennon. Every time they sat down to write a song they would finish it, and they never once came away from a writing session having failed to come up with something. “I’m all for that way of working,’ he has said. ‘Once John and I or I alone started a song, there was nowhere else to go; we had to finish it, and it was a great discipline. There’s something about doing it when you have the vision.’

“There was no writer’s block or hoping for inspiration in McCartney’s writing life,” Higgs writes. “The music just came and all he had to do was get it down before it was lost.”

(I also think it’s interesting that McCartney says he used to pull The Fool card in Tarot readings.)

Increasingly, I look to incorporate “not knowing” and “do it now” into my work. Whether it’s a newsletter or a blackout poem or a collage, or whatever, I try to walk into the studio not knowing exactly what I’m going to do — I just show up and I say to myself that I’ve got to have something by the time I leave. This constraint of time and space usually leads to something, if not something good.

Printmaking with the sun

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Today’s newsletter, “Printmaking with the Sun,” begins:

This is the season in Texas when the horny cicadas start screaming at the volume of leaf-blowers. I’m fascinated by cicadas, their long history in art, and how they make themselves available to metaphor, as in one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems called “Shed Your Skin Like the Golden Cicada”:

“When you are in danger of being defeated, and your only chance is to escape and regroup, then create an illusion. While the enemy’s attention is focused on this artifice, secretly remove your men leaving behind only the facade of your presence.”

An excellent lesson for those of us who use summer to escape and regroup.

Read the whole thing here.

(If you don’t have a paid subscription: The 20% off summer sale continues!)

Related reading: “Dragonflies and The Twisties”

Laziness and discipline

Monday, July 10, 2023

I have written often of the deep connection I feel between my laziness and my productivity.

Here’s writer Hanif Abdurraqib on The Stephen Satterfield Show, putting it much more poetically, so much so that I thought it was worth transcribing in full:

I came to writing significantly later than most of my peers. I have no ‘formal education’ in writing, I didn’t study writing in college, I wasn’t very good at school. But I always had these obsessions and interests and excitements, particularly around music. And for me that meant that for a long time, because I wasn’t a writer, those things were just building, and I would store them. I kind of have an internal archive of excitements and I did not always have access to a place for them….

I constantly sit on a lot of ideas. So what that means for me is that I have to be disciplined and kind of thoughtful.

I’m very lazy!

I think there are multiple kinds of people in the world: There are people who are hard-working and disciplined. There are people who are hard-working but pretty un-disciplined — so there’s a scattershot way their work appears in the world. And me, I’m pretty lazy, but I’m very disciplined. Perhaps more disciplined, I would guarantee, than anyone you know.

Satterfield asks him how somebody can be both lazy and disciplined.

They act in opposition to each other, right?

So the laziness is kind of inherent. Which means that I know that left to my own devices, I would do nothing. I would prefer to do nothing. And I don’t mean nothing in the sense of like, replying-to-an-email nothing, I mean literally, not-getting-out-of-bed nothing.

I was an athlete. I played basketball, I played soccer in college. So I had to learn a type of discipline, because my love for what I was doing propelled me towards that discipline.

Suzan-Lori Parks, a playwright who I adore, says this thing about how discipline is simply a love for your big self. And that’s kind of the path that I follow, because I’m driven to get the things I’m excited about out of my head. Because I don’t know how good they do me — just me in the world — if they’re only in my head.

And that isn’t saying that everyone needs to see them, it just means that there has to be some kind of extraction process that fuels and excites me. Writing does that. Writing about music, specifically, does that.

I can be in opposition to my inherent laziness, and build a discipline around, not even the work of writing, but the work of joyful extraction. And to present it like that, and to put it like that, offers me a better runway to it.

And I cannot stay in bed, because I would much rather be in pursuit of some revelation that might arrive to me in the process of doing this work.

So that’s how I act in opposition to my own laziness.

There’s so much there, and so many phrases I want to clip and build whole pieces out of, like, “an internal archive of excitements” and “joyful extraction.” It’s also impossible for me not to try to read an Ohio thing into it. (Hanif and I were born the same year and grew up about 45 minutes away from each other.)

I also want to join Hanif’s Church Of Minding One’s Own Business. Elsewhere he has said, “My superpower is that I mind my own business. And I actually think that helps my productivity more than anything.”

Filed under: laziness

Never waste your midlife crisis

Monday, July 10, 2023

I turned 40 last month and spent three weeks reading Don Quixote, so the mid-life crisis has been on my brain.

“Never waste your midlife crisis.”

That’s advice I heard while listening to a podcast interview with John Higgs, author of William Blake vs. The World. (One of my favorite reads of 2022.)

Higgs was saying that the artists he admires are people like David Lynch, “People who you wouldn’t think there’s an obvious place for them in the world, but they just do their stuff regardless, and a place sort of builds around them.”

He continues:

There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.

It was when I made the decision to attempt to become a full-time writer — knowing full well the absurdity of it given all the business models of writing — there was a sort of act of faith that if I just did it, people who read my books would start to appear. And slowly over time, I’d build people who would go, ‘Oh, that guy’s interesting, I’ll read his next book.’ Just enough to support me.

You sort of create the niche that need. It’s not like the world was going, ‘Oh, there’s a real need for books by John Higgs, where are they?’ But if you do them, the world sort of reacts around them.

“It’s always on an edge of never working out properly,” he admits, but it’s working so far, and it all started when he turned 40 and made the decision to go for it:

You should never waste your midlife crisis. You can do great things with a midlife crisis. If you just waste it on like a car, it’s just a lack of imagination. Mine was the decision to write books and attempt to make a living there.

The options seemed to be: If I went for it, I’d be penniless, and if I didn’t go for it, I’d be bitter. I’d be bitter going forward. Penniless certainly beats bitter. So I made the decision. And that was ten years ago! And I’m still going.

Loved this. Never waste your midlife crisis.

(I’m currently listening to his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche while playing Zelda. He points out that James Bond was basically Ian Fleming’s mid-life crisis.)