If a book makes me want to keep reading, it’s the right book.
If a book makes me want to start writing, it’s the right book.
Any other book is not the right book. (Right now.)
If a book makes me want to keep reading, it’s the right book.
If a book makes me want to start writing, it’s the right book.
Any other book is not the right book. (Right now.)
“One cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by new records of shame…. the house and land we occupy, have lost their best value, and a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1851
A devastating image by photographer Brook Mitchell in the NYTimes. Nails the stakes of climate change: It is our children who will have to sift through the wreckage.
I was particularly affected by the photo, as I have a towheaded almost-six-year-old who looks a lot like Harry. (“Where have you been my blue-eyed son?” Dylan sings in “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” a song that now destroys me.)
A little googling led me to the original Guardian piece about Australian farm families battling the draught. You can see more photos of Harry and his family there, including this one, of him wearing what he calls his “monster hat”:
That one brings the slightest smile: Children are resilient, and no matter how bad it gets, there will still be moments of humor. Even if it’s gallows humor.
In the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesn’t want his file boxes of source material organized too much, that he specifically avoids organizing them, so that he can find unexpected things when he starts searching. “He depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.”
“Keep your folders messy,” Steven Johnson says in Where Good Ideas Come From. This is also the secret to what he calls his “spark file,” the document he keeps on his computer to generate ideas:
The key is to capture as many hunches as possible, and to spend as little time as possible organizing or filtering or prioritizing them. (Keeping a single, chronological file is central to the process, because it forces you to scroll through the whole list each time you want to add something new.) Just get it all down as it comes to you, and make regular visits back to re-acquaint yourself with all your past explorations. You’ll be shocked how many useful hunches you’ve forgotten.
Film editor Walter Murch, in his brilliant book, In The Blink of an Eye, writes about how different kinds of editing machines affect his process of piecing together movies out of hundreds of hours of film. The most convenient and efficient machines — the “random-access” machines that can pull up any individual scene with a few keystrokes — are not necessarily the ones that are the most helpful to him.
“The machine gives me only what I ask for,” he writes, “and I don’t always want to go where I say I want to go.”
Like Letscher with his collages, Murch wants the material to guide his work, to tell him what to do next. Linear editing systems, in which he had to load a whole 10-minute reel of film in order to find what he was looking for, gave him many more moments of serendipity:
[I]n the mechanical, linear search for what I wanted, I would find instead what I needed—something different, better, more quirky, more accidental, more “true” than my first impression. I could recognize it when I saw it, but I couldn’t have articulated it in advance.
There are several paragraphs in Murch’s book about the importance of fighting against the touted “features” of digital tools, such as speed. “The real issue with speed,” he says, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”
Here’s writer Irving Welsh, on why he doesn’t organize his record collection:
“I don’t organize my CDs and vinyl by genre or alphabet anymore…. Having it all haphazard means I can never find what I want, but the benefit is that I always find something else, which is cool. I believe that art is as much about diversion as focus and planning.”
In her Autobiography, Agatha Christie talks about the importance of messiness when re-visiting her chaotic notebooks:
[I]f I had kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled, it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot—do it yourself—girl and not really sister—August— with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.
The theme, again, is that speed, efficiency, and convenience (a.k.a. the opposite of “trouble”) is often at odds with creative serendipity.
This is exactly why I still keep paper notebooks and make time in my writing process to dive back into them time and time again: because I often don’t know what I’m looking for, and even if I do, what I actually find is more often than not better than what I set out to find. If I was simply able to execute a full-text search on my notebooks, and pull up exactly what I was looking for, that’s all I’d find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didn’t know I was looking for.
I was planning on picking up Foreskin’s Lament this month (I loved, loved, loved Beware of God), but after listening to Auslander’s interview on Fresh Air, I’ll probably pick it up tonight:
Shalom Auslander: [reading from the book]The people who raised me will say I am not religious. They are mistaken. I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each more hateful and bloody than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably. I believe in God. It’s been a real problem for me.
Terry Gross: In what sense are you having trouble getting away from God even though you’ve stopped practicing religion and you don’t believe anymore?
Shalom Auslander: The trouble is that all the things I can do to get away from him are intellectual. And all of the things that put Him inside of me are emotional. The Jesuits have an incredibly creepy expression: Give me a boy until he’s seven, and I’ll show you the man. And they know the score. They know that getting in there early and twisting the wires up makes it very difficult later in life to untwist them…And so I can read everthing. I can read Spinoza, and I can read Hitchens, and I can read every book ever written about religion and the secular world, and just how silly it all is, and I’ll put the book down and I’ll wonder where my son is and I’ll assume he’s dead.
He also said something great about anger, and using it for good:
Anger gets a bad wrap. Anger was bad for me when I was self-inflicting it, when I was turning it against my wife, who I wasn’t angry at, because I was afraid to point the gun at the people who deserved it. When I was afraid to express it properly. But everything I read that I like, all the music that I like, all the comedians I like, everything I like comes from that place. And why shouldn’t it?
Great interview, great writer.
It seems like just about everybody has the plague these days, and over at our place it’s no different. I spent the weekend recovering from the crud, watching the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, reading comic books and Elmore Leonard, and eating like a hog. (Starve a fever, feed a cold.)
The best thing about the trilogy box set is a 2 1/2 hour long documentary called Empire of Dreams. It mostly focuses on the first movie, but it does a pretty amazing job at putting Star Wars — which seems like it came out of nowhere — into a context.
What interested me the most was the huge role played by Ralph McQuarrie, a conceptual design artist who Lucas hired to make paintings of several scenes (including C-3P0, R2-D2, a lightsaber battle, stormtroopers, and Darth Vader) so that Lucas could take them to the studio and say, “This is what it’s going to look like.” Essentially, McQuarrie’s drawings sold the movie, and got the thing made, but not only that, he created the look of the films. He took what was in Lucas’s head, and made it come to life.
Pictures trumped words.
You can see a bunch of these things at McQuarrie’s website.
Other inspiration from the weekend? Check out Tom Gauld’s Guardians of the Kingdom:
I love pretty much everything that I’ve seen from him.
And I can’t say it enough: if you haven’t read Elmore Leonard before, you are in for a real treat. Killshot is about to come out as a movie.
Ok, that’s all I can think of. Between wedding plans, GRE, and grad school apps, there’s not much time for anything else, but maybe I’ll put something pretty up this week.
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