I saw a trackback to my blog with this quote:
“The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.”
Who said that? I thought. That’s pretty good.
It was me. Many years ago!
Still pretty true, although, I also figure out a lot of stuff at the keyboard, too.
(I’m a little less binary than I used to be, which I count as progress.)
My friend Alan Jacobs writes in response to a piece bemoaning the fact that nobody reads Arthur Koestler anymore:
You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.
I am big on being a “curious elder” — and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.
(I should note I found the Peanuts comic by looking up the origins of the phrase.)
Related: “Be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Friday’s newsletter, “Wondrous Variety,” started out with something I read in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia:
Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.
I was having trouble coming up with an image for the newsletter and then I remembered this photo I took in a Costco on Oahu.
Read the whole newsletter here.
On Saturday, Sept. 14, I’m interviewing Franz Nicolay about his new book, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music at the Austin Public Library. Details here.
Here is Meghan after performing another cactus surgery on Giuseppe, our crested Mexican fencepost cactus, who had once again sprouted an offspring keeping G from growing:
In a newsletter from last summer, I wrote about cactuses and knowing what to leave in and what to leave out in your work. (We’re often encouraged to discard what doesn’t fit in our work — but what if you cut those things and plant them elsewhere?)
Here is Giuseppe (on the right) with all the offspring of Giuseppe:
You may wonder why the offspring aren’t crested! A crested cactus is the result of injury or mutation and not heredity, so the form isn’t passed down to the offspring. And the reason you want to cut off the offspring is because they will compete with the crested growth. (Succulents, man! Fascinating!)
This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.