I usually don’t make art specifically for the newsletter, but I needed a top image for today’s edition, so I cut out Words from ads in the April 1935 issue of National Geographic.
Read the newsletter: “Verbify!”
Verbifying with Dylan
First, off: “verbify” is a word. It means what it sounds like: use something as a verb.
In 2015, the late comedian Norm Macdonald tweeted about the time he met Bob Dylan.
According to Macdonald, they talked about all kinds of stuff, like their favorite books of the Bible. (Norm said he liked Job, Bob said he liked Ecclesiastes.)
At one point, Macdonald said, “I remember he talked over and over about verbs and about ‘verbifying’, how anything could be ‘verbified.’”
The writer Tony Conniff wrote a piece about Dylan’s use of verbs and used “Tangled Up in Blue” as an example:
They drove that car as far as they could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was bestShe turned around to look at him
As he was walkin’ away
She said this can’t be the end
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”Tangled Up In Blue
“So much of the story,” Conniff writes, “is in the rich, vivid, and active verbs. It’s something you can find in almost any Dylan song.”
Of course, it ain’t like no other songwriter has ever talked about verbs before.
“When you’re writing a song,” said Chuck Berry, “nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”
UPDATE (9/20/2024): A reader sent me this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon about “verbing”:
Filed under: Verbs.
Hands at work
Today is the release of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s monograph Citizen Printer.
In the foreword to the book, I write:
Kennedy’s work is evidence of the head, the heart, and the hands together at play. His is a physical process, done by a human body in time and space with the real materials of ink and chipboard and wood and machinery, pressing them all together into something new. In this digital age, it’s inspiring to see someone using their digits. Among the many images in this book that bring me joy, my favorite might be the photograph of his ink-stained hands… To hold a thing in my hands that he’s made with his hands makes me want to make things with my hands.
You can read the whole foreword in today’s newsletter, “A Man of Letters.”
30th printing
Just got word that Steal Like an Artist is in its 30th printing.
Back in the day, I’d get these “REPRINT NOTICE” postcards in the mail:
That stopped after the 10th printing or so. (LOL)
Start here
It can take a while when you’re writing to get to what you’re really trying to say.
One of the most helpful marginal comments is “start here.”
You can often cut to the chase in your draft by deleting the first paragraph or two.
For example, here’s how today’s newsletter, “Same but different,” began:
At the end of my shelves of diaries, I keep a little “on this date” stack, and when I have an idle moment or I’m out of ideas, I’ll flip through the stack and see what else I was doing on today’s date.
I do not recommend this practice if you would prefer to think of time as linear, instead of circular. Over and over again, I find old versions of me feeling the same feelings that I’m feeling now and hearing weird echoes of the present in the pages of the past. Some people might find this depressing, but I find it comforting. The sense that I’ve been here before and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be here again.
Just now, flipping through my 2018 diary, I found this entry from September 10th, 2018:
There’s a part in Duncan Hannah’s diary when David Hockney points at a contemporary painting and says, “If art really progressed, then that would be better than a Caravaggio. David Byrne (also once an art student) has said the same— “Presuming that there is such a thing as ‘progress’ when it comes to music… is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present.” Linear progress. Abandon the notion. More like a spiral.
Abe Lincoln once said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.”
My notebooks serve to show me just how old my ideas actually are!
And all that’s fine, whatever, but Meg thought it read cleaner and faster this way.
“Good cut,” I told her, “I’ll put it on my blog, instead.”
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- …
- 341
- Older posts→