Ditching work to do your job

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

George Harrison’s handwritten lyrics (note the “scoobiedoobie”)

Here’s a wonderful story about the origin of “Here Comes The Sun” from George Harrison’s memoir, I Me Mine:

“Here Comes the Sun” was written at the time when Apple [Records] was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that.’ Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote “Here Comes the Sun.”

Playing is part of the artist’s job description, and sometimes you have to ditch work to do your job.

Sometimes you have to play hooky so you can actually learn something.

(Thanks to @garethchughes for this story and the title of the post.)

I was putting together a climbing dome for my kids out in the yard a few days ago (it’s December in Texas, you can still get a sunburn outside) and there were two kinds of nuts I had to distinguish between, and I thought, “How many damned kinds of nuts are there, anyways?” Many, it turns out, so I drew a bunch of them in my diary. Now I can name nuts like Harlan Pepper.

I copied those nuts from a diagram I found on the internet, much like I copied this timeline of composers a few years ago. It’s not enough, for me, to just print out a diagram and paste it in my diary. I need to copy it by hand, slowly, to really look at it and let the information sink in. Copying is how I learn, it’s a way to understand what’s really going on, and drawing is a way of slowing down long enough to really look at something. (It’s like I said in Keep Going: “Slow down and draw things out.”)

Here’s a drawing I made when I was trying to understand the moon phases. I thought I had it figured out, until I was playing with the Sundial app on my phone and realized that, duh, when the moon is full, it’s got the full sun shining on it from the other side of the earth, so lunar noon, when it’s at its peak, is at the opposite time of day from solar noon. (I think?) Again, drawing helped me understand:

If you draw something, no matter how mundane the subject, no matter how badly, you really look at the thing, and therefore, you remember it better.

If you want to remember something, try drawing it.

Schedule send

Monday, December 14, 2020

I am scheduling this blog entry to post on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020 at 8 a.m. CT.

By the time you read it, I could’ve pressed “schedule” a few hours ago, or a few weeks ago, or even a few months ago. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but whenever you read it, it will be new to you.

In an age of instantaneous messaging, I find this enormously freeing. A nice gap between writing and publishing, sending and receiving.

A bit of technology that has changed my life: Gmail’s “Schedule Send” function. (Yes, I still use Gmail, even though I know better.)

If I answer emails in the afternoon, I schedule them to go out at 8AM the next morning. This means I don’t get a bunch of replies overnight and it often gives me time to add or edit the email before it goes out.

The problem with sending messages is that they’ll get answered with new messages. If I pick a time to write all my messages, but delay sending them, that buys me even more time to be blissfully unmessaged.

I know this sounds selfish, and it is, but Schedule Send also allows me to be courteous to others: I love the world too much to send it email on a weekend. I might write dozens of emails during a weekend, but none of my correspondents will receive an email on a weekend. This is as it should be.

My dream is to never have to answer email at all.

John Waters says real wealth is never having to deal with assholes, but real wealth for me would also mean no email.

“I don’t even have an e-mail address,” Umberto Eco once said. “I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.” (This was 25 years ago, by the way.)

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things,” Donald Knuth says on his website. “But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

One day I will either have the real wealth or the courage to follow their examples, but for now, Schedule Send makes me feel a little richer.

Related reading: Answering letters

Scraps from the master’s table

Sunday, December 13, 2020

My 5-year-old often gets frustrated with his drawings, crumbles them up, and throws them across the room. I pick them up when he isn’t looking and paste them in my notebook.

Yesterday he helped me with my diary:

Joe Brainard’s I Remember

Saturday, December 12, 2020

I remember Saturday night baths and Sunday morning comics.

Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a 150-page memoir in which every sentence begins with “I remember…” Here’s a recording of him reading from it:

It seems like I Remember would make a great Twitter feed, but unlike something Moby-Dick, I think the sentences lose some of their power out of context. There’s a propulsive force to the book that runs on repetition and accumulation: little mundane bits and pieces adding up to something sublime.

(The book is reproduced in full in this lovely Library of Congress edition of his collected writings.)

Here’s the first page: