Here’s Ingmar Bergman on stealing like an artist:
“I’m not one of those who believe that an artist grows up out of nothing and starts to bloom with no nourishment at all. I believe we’re all part of a great hodgepodge, so we take from each other, and I’ve always been completely uninhibited in that regard. If I see something good, I steal it and make it my own.”
Bergman gets quoted in chapter 9 of Keep Going: “The demons hate fresh air.”
My biggest tour ever. Two months. 25 cities. See all the dates here.
Couple of things:
1) I’m pumped about how eclectic the mix of venues is: Indie bookstores. Public libraries. A brewery. A movie theater. Even a Methodist Church! So fun. I also have an amazing batch of people interviewing me on different stops, including Heather Havrilesky, Chase Jarvis, and Debbie Millman.
2) It might look random, but my publicist at Workman (shoutout to Diana!!!) worked tirelessly on this lineup. Planning a tour like this is months and months of work. (A lot of it not even visible to me.)
3) The 25-cities-in-North-America constraint is due to budget and my physical and mental health. If your city was left out of, it’s nothing personal!
And yes, I would love to come to your city, but I’m one person with a young family. They need me, and I need them. I’m already an absentee dad for two months. Gimme a break.
If you really, really want me to come to your city, scrounge up a budget from your employer or school and check out my speaking page.
Hope to see y’all soon!
A few days ago the big box of author copies of Keep Going arrived on my front step. This is one of my favorite points in the book timeline. I’m trying to savor the moment of holding something in my hand that I feel is the very best I can do.
Here’s the beginning of a Robert Frost’s “A Prayer in Spring”:
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
It’s spring outside, but the harvest is in, and it is a good one.
Yesterday started with the news of Scott Walker’s death, and I thought of that great Camus quote on the back of Scott 4.
Then, during a recording for the Stacking Benjamins podcast, host Joe Saul-Sehy described to me a Camus quote he saw in a piece at the Detroit Institute of Arts. “It was handwritten on this print of a bag of Wonder Bread…”
“Corita!” I said, and quickly found the piece and sent it to him.
The quote comes from “Create Dangerously,” a lecture delivered by Camus at the University of Uppsala in December 1957 (collected in the book Resistance, Rebellion, and Death).
Here it is in full:
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.
Corita used the Camus quote to emphasize that the artist can’t turn away from the world, but must find their work within it.
“Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living,” Camus wrote. “Instead, let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of the battle.”
If you want to learn more about Corita, I write about her in chapters 5 and 10 of Keep Going. (She was a major guardian spirit, and looked down from the bulletin board while I was writing.)
PBS’s The Art Assignment also recently shared this great 15-minute video about her work. It has a bunch of stuff I didn’t know, like how all art majors at Immaculate Heart had to be English minors, and Corita’s concept of “Plork,” a combination of play and work, the “one responsible act necessary for human advancement” that represents “the ecstasy we feel when work and play are one.” (I wish I’d remembered that bit of Learning By Heart when I wrote the “Your Work is Play” chapter of Keep Going!)
We lost another Ohio boy: Scott Walker has died. I like a lot of his work, but I absolutely love Scott 4. That record has comforted me on many a sleepless night. Until a few years ago, I’d never owned it on vinyl — the back cover features nothing but this pretentious Camus quote about images. I love it so much.
The quote, by the way, is from a preface to a collection of Camus’ essays published in 1968, the year before Scott 4 was released. The sentence after the quote makes it even more meaningful to me:
A time always comes in an artist’s life when he must take his bearings, draw closer to his own center, and then try to stay there…. A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. This is why, perhaps, after working and producing for twenty years, I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun.
It’s no surprise that this quote appealed to Walker at the time: he was trying to re-invent himself, to get away from his image as a boyish pop star. The album flopped commercially, but the rest of his career would embody this very idea.
(PS. “It’s Raining Today” is on Scott 3, not Scott 4, but it’s the perfect song for this late March day.)
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