Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Just a little over three years ago, a month or so into the pandemic, Fiona Apple released Fetch the Bolt Cutters into the world. I couldn’t stop playing it then, and I’m still playing it now.

One of the things I love about the record is how homemade it sounds.

It sounds like a woman who doesn’t leave the house making music in her house… because it is. A great deal of it was recorded in her house in Venice Beach, a house very dear to her.

“This house is alive to me,” she told NPR. “The fact is, this house was here when I needed a place to go.”

And so there’s this way that I feel like I want to repay this house by making it the music. Because it has been my mother, really; it’s been the home of all the music. It’s been the womb of everything, for all these years. It’s been the womb of where I’ve developed into an adult. And so I really felt like it’s an instrument in itself, it’s the microphone: The house is the microphone, the house is the ambiance, the house is a member of the band.

And you hear the house all over the record. It is a true “home recording.”

Connected to that is another thing I love about it: how much it was recorded on her iPhone and in GarageBand, the music software that comes standard on every Mac.

In my diary, I recorded this exchange with my son Owen, who was 7 at the time:

On albums like this — albums that have been worked on for several years but are released at just the right time with big world events — the lyrics can seem spooky and downright prophetic:

“I know that that time is elastic”

“I know none of this will matter in the long run / but I know a sound is still a sound around no one”

“Whenever you want to begin, begin! / we don’t have to go back to where we’ve been!”

Bolt Cutters feels like a plague album the way Purple Mountains feels like a plague album and the way Yankee Hotel Foxtrot feels like a 9/11 album. These records feel like prophesies, when really, like many works of science fiction, they are the products of sensitive souls describing our pre-existing conditions.

Great artists are tuned in to their environments. Henry Miller said an artist was a person “who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos” and they have “the facility for hooking on, as it were.”

If you’re able to really capture the present moment and exaggerate it, it feels prescient later, because that’s usually what the future is: an exaggeration of its recent past.

Related reading: “Songs as shelters in time”

Living for dinnertime

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

The other day I joked to a friend, “I’m just trying to stay alive until dinnertime.”

I have written before about my very simple rule that has served me well: “Don’t think much about your life after dinnertime.”

But this is my new motto: “I’m living for dinnertime!”

I am very “food motivated,” so it’s probably the diet talking, but when things go sideways, I focus on how good it is going to be to have dinner. If I can get to dinner, I’m good.

And once I’ve had dinner, I’m at home and at peace and I don’t care much what happens. I try not to think about my life or my problems until morning, at which point I start living for dinnertime again.

I am reminded of what Clancy Martin writes in How Not to Kill Yourself: “Suicide is indeed a human possibility, but, and somewhat paradoxically, for that very reason, we don’t have to choose it. After all, you can always kill yourself tomorrow.” Wait a day and see how you feel. Repeat ad infinitum.

A little too bleak for me, as I’m not suicidal, so for now I’ll stick with what’s working: “Living for dinnertime!”

Seneca on reading

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

I’m reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which is basically a 2,000-year-old advice column.

Here’s what he said in letter 2 about reading, and specifically, spending a lot of time reading writers “whose genius is unquestionable”:

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer, but skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all.

While I am a great proponent of reading more than one book at a time and letting books talk to each other, I also believe that when you find a writer who unlocks something in you, you should spend as much time with them as you can, read and re-read everything they wrote, and then “swim upstream” and try to read what they read.

This need not happen all at once. I like to think of these writers as old friends that I can rely on. No matter where we are, we can pick up where we left off.

Right now I’m reading Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South for the third time. (I’ve read all his novels twice.) And the normal things are happening that happen during a re-read — I’m noticing new things I never noticed before, re-underlining passages that I’ve already underlined — but I’m also starting to feel like I’m really understanding what’s going on in his sentences.

I re-read Donna Tartt’s remembrance of him and laughed out loud when she recalls their first phone conversation:

“Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you were my crank caller… I have a regular crank caller and almost every day he telephones about this time. If I don’t pick up he rings and rings.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No, it is just some prankster. Local, I think. Many people around here do not seem to have much to do.”

“That must be a big nuisance.”

“No. To tell you the truth I am a little disappointed on the days he does not telephone. I have come to look forward to his calls.”

This exchange reads almost exactly like something out of his novels. My reaction is the kind you would have upon hearing from somebody something your friend had said to them. “Yeah, that sounds just like Charlie.”

Why don’t you hire an assistant?

Monday, April 17, 2023

*Frankenstein* (1931) / *Young Frankenstein* (1974)

When I wrote about using an AI as an assistant a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’ve always resisted hiring an assistant.

Last Friday the kids selected Frankenstein (1931) as our pizza night viewing. It’s a wonderful movie, directed brilliantly by David Whale.

I laughed a lot at this scene in which Dr. Frankenstein sends his assistant, Fritz, to go steal a brain for the monster. Fritz drops the “normal” brain in the lab so he takes the “abnormal” brain instead. This scene was later parodied in the also-brilliant Young Frankenstein (1974).

Some trivia: Fritz does not appear in Mary Shelley’s novel! Fritz was invented for an 1823 adaptation by Richard Brinsley Peake for his play, Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein. In the early scripts for the 1931 movie, Fritz was mute, and, supposedly, this scene with the brains was only added late in the process. (Fritz also tortures the monster and, in general, makes things worse.)

Shelley’s Frankenstein is often mentioned these days as a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, but read another way, the 1931 version of Frankenstein is a cautionary tale about hiring an assistant to do your dirty work!

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game, he writes about “one of the best pieces of advice” he ever got: “to have no assistant.”

The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering—and its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way. (By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities). This is a via negativa approach: you want maximal free time, not maximal activity, and you can assess your own “success” according to such metric. Otherwise, you end up assisting your assistants, or being forced to “explain” how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself. In fact, beyond my writing and research life, this has proved to be great financial advice as I am freer, more nimble, and have a very high benchmark for doing something, while my peers have their days filled with unnecessary “meetings” and unnecessary correspondence.

Taleb also writes, of trying to “optimize” the writing and art-making process in general:

Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.

Of course, art history is full of assistants and whole workshops full of helpers, and many of the great artists were at one time apprenticed to a master.

Maybe that’s the important point: making a distinction between assistants and apprentices.

Because they eventually want the master’s job, apprentices have more skin in the game…

Janet Malcolm’s collages

Thursday, April 13, 2023

Janet Malcolm, “Crater” (from The Emily Dickinson series)

I really enjoyed Ian Frazier’s introduction to Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photograph and Memory. (Sometimes I think one could have a pretty rich reading life just reading book introductions and ebook sample chapters.) Of particular interest was his mention of Malcolm’s collage practice, which some say she started in earnest after her piece “Forty-One False Starts,” about artist David Salle. (In that piece they talk a bit about collage, and she even brings some of her collages for him to critique, asking him, “Why are your collages art and mine not?”)

Frazier writes about her bookmark collages:

She also loved assembling bookmarks, her favorite kind of collage. I have fifty or seventy bookmarks she made and sent me. I use her bookmarks in most books I read, which means that now I can’t find them all. In some future century, one or two of Janet’s bookmarks will fall out from between a book’s pages in the shop of an antique-book dealer and amaze their re-discoverer. The bookmark collages bring together papers from her father’s psychiatric practice, Chinese communist propaganda leaflets, Soviet hotel DO NOT DISTURB signs, strange newspaper clippings, World War II ration stamps, Muybridge motion-capture photo sequences, reproductions of classic paintings, her grade-school report cards… she color-xeroxed the components and reduced them to bookmark size and fit them together… she had a knack for choosing which ephemera to save.

Filed under: writers who collage