Today’s newsletter began with this photo of Tacos Yo Soy on North Loop here in Austin, Texas. (Taken while riding my bike around.) It’s a dense Friday edition, full of good stuff. Read it here.
Anticipation and recall
I will often map out a Tuesday newsletter in my notebook, forget I made a map, and write it without my notes. Then when I go back flipping through my notebook, I discover everything I left out!
Today’s newsletter is about messing around with anticipation and recall to stretch out pleasant events and minimize unpleasant ones.
On the unpleasant side, I left out one of my favorite parts of the section of Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control that inspired the letter:
We justify agreeing to get coffee with someone whom we don’t really want to see by saying something like, “It’ll just be half an hour and then I’ll leave.” No. It’ll be the anticipatory anxiety for the week leading up to that half hour, the half hour itself, and then the negative recall of how you felt annoyed and immediately resentful upon sitting down, didn’t want to be there, and couldn’t believe she said that, even though she always says stuff like that, and that’s why you don’t like hanging out with her in the first place….When it comes to agreeing to engage in events we don’t want to engage in, there’s nothing quick about quick catch-up drinks or quick calls or quick meetings.
This adds a layer to the question to ask yourself to avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret: “Would I do it tomorrow?”
The time travel involved in this calculation is already tricky — who knows how I’ll feel about doing something five minutes from now, let alone five months from now? But if you think about the time leading up to the event and the time coming down from it, suddenly such obligations reveal their bloated shape.
(“The job never kills anybody,” says John Taylor of Duran Duran. “It’s the fucking stuff you do in between.”)
On the pleasant side, I was reminded of how important it is to have something to look forward to, no matter how silly.
All of this, by the way, is a form of playing with your experience of time: by exploiting anticipation and recall, you’re trying to effectively slow down and speed up certain events, and using your memory to shape the story you want to tell about your experience.
You can read the whole newsletter here.
Writing is listening
I don’t know how these Friday newsletters come together. Or maybe I do. They usually start with an image I want to put at the top, or a subject line. Today’s began with the subject line: “Listening is the whole deal.”
I came across that line when I was reading The Work of Art, and I knew I had 3 things I wanted to put in there — the Eno doc, Perfect Days, and the Four Tet interview — which were all somewhat related to listening. So once I had almost half the letter, I figured might as well make it a theme.
My favorite bit in the letter is item #9:
“The act of writing is to me to listen,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel lecture. “When I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening… At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”
I don’t consider my newsletters fine literature or anything like that, but there’s something that happens when I’m out here in the studio at my desk, and I’m writing and just pushing things around, seeing how they bump up to each other — the arrangement presents itself, and the thing just comes into being.
At least, that is, when it’s going good.
Anyways: Happy Friday.
Listening is the whole deal
Adam Moss in the afterword to The Work of Art:
THERE IS A PHRASE, variations of which many of the subjects of this book ended up uttering at some point. As they were describing why they did this or that, they would say they “listened” to the work, or the work would “tell” them what to do; the work would “speak” to them, as if a character in a book or a color on a canvas could issue orders. Tony Kushner asked his Angels alter ego, Louis, to explain the play to him; Cheryl Pope waited for the mother in her picture with no face to tell her whether she wanted a face. For a long while, I dismissed this phrasing as cliché — more of the empty language people often employ to describe how they work because creation is so hard to describe. Eventually, however, I began to think that no, maybe listening was the whole deal.
Listening to what the poem or song was telling them was another way of describing how they listened to themselves, taking whatever their imagination spewed forth, recognizing it and translating it back—simplifying it, usually—so their conscious self could go about manipulating it. And this attending (“I was just taking dictation,” said Kushner, a common sentiment) was really, I realized, at the heart of the project of this book. That’s what the exhibits they shared are about. The studies, notes, doodles —they are all ways the artists have of talking to themselves.
Or, as Anni Albers put it: “the listening to that which wants to be done”:
Drawing Eno
Yesterday’s newsletter, “Drawing Eno,” was inspired by seeing Gary Hustwit’s new film Eno and how I’ve been drawing Brian Eno lectures and interviews for over 15 years. Here’s a drawing I made from the generated version of the movie I saw:
You can read the rest of the newsletter here.
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