Reading with a blade and glue stick

Sunday, December 5, 2021

I read books with a pencil, but I read the Sunday NYTimes Book Review with an x-acto blade and a glue stick.*

I cut out good quotes and paste the author’s name below. Then I stick them in a little envelope in the back of my commonplace diary:

Sometimes two scraps talk to each other, like this African proverb and fortune cookie. Occasionally, when I don’t have a good line for the day, I dump out the scraps from the envelope and see what I’ve got:

Sometimes if you push these scraps around they talk to each other, too.

Afterwards, the cut-up book review makes these weird little picture and caption combos, which are almost more interesting than the things I cut out…

* Brands of x-acto and glue sticks are in my gift guide.

The mothers of Matrix by Lauren Groff

Friday, December 3, 2021

I liked Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix so much I wanted to know more about it, and luckily, right after I finished it, a lecture she gave at Notre Dame was posted online.

It’s one of the best talks I’ve heard from a fiction writer. A centrifugal lecture that both explains how the work came to be and spins you out to its inspirations like footnotes.

I drew a bit of it, to help it sink in:

“My art is an art of synthesis,” she says, noting that should be of inspiration to other writers. “You just keep synthesizing and eventually you come up with something.”

The novel was inspired, mainly, by three historical women: Marie de France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Hildegard of Bingen. Groff said she saw George Cukor’s The Women on a plane, started thinking about The Bechdel Test, and the very next day, saw a lecture by Katie Bugyis, author of The Care of Nuns. They began a friendship which lead directly to the book.

Matrix hits that perfect blurb-y mix of “timeless and timely,” so it was interesting to me that Groff was working out her feelings about historical fiction and time in fiction while writing it. She quotes Ali Smith:

When we meet a work of art, there’s something about that encounter that isn’t fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment, and we know, as beings, that we are connected. All the people who lived before us, all who will come after us, are connected in this moment.

Matrix plays with time in interesting ways — it does the zoom in/zoom out thing that I love in fiction, where the writer covers a lot of ground, a whole life, by zooming into scenes and then zooming out and jumping forward in the character’s life (and backwards into flashbacks).

Speaking of time, Matrix is a book that is perfect to read when you’re up late in the night or early in the morning, and your mind is in the state of a sleepy nun. It makes me wonder what time of day/night Groff wrote the book…

The way she talked about discovering the labyrinth as a structure reminded me a bit of Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze. (I was also thinking about Peter’s book when watching Six by Sondheim, and the composer started talking about his love of old games and wordplay.)

Anyways, I loved Matrix, it’s one of my favorite things I read this year, and I can’t wait to catch up on the rest of Groff’s work.

My chat with David Epstein

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Here’s video of my chat with David Epstein, author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Our conversation, as we had hoped, ranged all over the place. Of particular interest to me:

1. He told me he reads a lot of fiction to try to pick up interesting approaches to structure. He credited his experience helping a film editor friend who had a hand injury — literally sitting there all day and clicking the mouse for him — as hugely instructive. (This didn’t surprise me, as I learned a ton about writing from film editor Walter Murch’s book, In the Blink of an Eye.) He also said that he’s taken fiction classes.

2. As for his reading diet, he said he reads The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and New Scientist to sort of get leads on what to read next.

3. He keeps “a book of small experiments,” where he forces himself, if he gets in “a rut of competence,” to try out and learn new things.

Here are my prep notes:

Thanks, David! Check out his newsletter, Range Widely.

Catching a wave

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

In today’s newsletter is a zine about The Beatles, surfing, and the creative process.

Street art

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Walks around my neighborhood have been extra-good lately. After declaring it art, I decided this Budweiser can needed its own museum label:

The text is from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium:

My method has entailed, more often than not, the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight from human figures, from celestial bodies, from cities. Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the story and from language….

When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving.

Calvino is talking about writing and reading, but he could also talk about my approach to walking.

If I go for a walk, the day never feels like a waste. Each walk is a little adventure with a beginning, middle, and end. On your walk, you never know what you’ll find or who you’ll bump into. This week I met Cindy Schiffgens, who was on the sidewalk painting one of my favorite houses: