Today’s newsletter is about this recently-rediscovered list of notes to myself I wrote in 2014:
11. “If you don’t go to work, you never leave work.”
Wise words from my brilliant editor, Meghan Kleon.12. Death + deadlines.
The little deadlines keep you fed and the big deadline keeps you pushing towards finding meaningful work.
Read the rest here.
“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands.”
—1 Thessalonians 4:11“I’m not trying to be aloof. My superpower is that I mind my own business… And I actually think that helps my productivity more than anything.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib
I would very much like to exclude myself from most narratives and become a congregant in “The Church Of Minding One’s Own Business,” which the writer Hanif Abdurraqib has explained on Twitter:
truly cannot stress how enthusiastically I’ve tried to convert my pals to The Church Of Minding One’s Own Business — has served me on every level imaginable over the past several years.
not even as a “no thoughts, head empty” thing, but my commitment to minding my own business sharply clarifies what I consider my business and what I absolutely do not, and so it realigns my focus, my depth of care for the things I DO care about, my actual & literal energy, etc
like, quite plainly, I think I love the ppl/things I love much better (& am more open/available/curious to love NEW ppl/things!) because of the space I save simply by understanding what I don’t have interest in knowing any more about
I think because we get tangible windows into the lives of others all day, it can be easy to be convinced that the window entitles one to a depth of knowing, but I have to resist that because I can turn back to the concrete/real knowing, the potential for new knowing, etc
all that said I do sometimes like to spy on a lil bit of mess from afar while doing a bit of procrastinating or whatnot, I treat it like a small television episode that I watch for a bit & then tap out of & mostly forget about
Amen!
Here is the opening page of The Steal Like An Artist Journal painted by Heather Champ.
I wanted to start the journal with Mary Oliver’s quote because I felt that it summed up the whole project. It’s taken from her On Being interview:
I think we’re creative all day long. We have to have an appointment, to have that work out on the page, because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting, or just gets tired. And it’s helped a lot of students, young poets, doing that — to have that meeting with that part of oneself…
The quote took on greater meaning for me recently when I came across these words from James Hollis:
“We each have an appointment with ourselves, though most of us never show up for it.”
The way I show up for myself, the way I discover who I really am, is to make an appointment every day to show up to the page. If I show up to the page, I show up to myself.
“Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.”
Last week I had the pleasure to chat with art coach Beth Pickens, author of Make Your Art No Matter What and Your Art Will Save Your Life. Beth and I share many of the same core messages, but I come at making art from the inside of being a working artist and Beth comes at it from the outside of working with artists, so she picks up things that I miss.
If you have an hour and a half, you can watch or listen to our conversation.
I was charmed by this @nypl post on Instagram:
Miniature items from the Rare Book Division must be three-inches or less to qualify as *mini* and hitch a ride in a repurposed card catalog where they’re snugly stored.
And then I realized I have my own tiny rare books collection in my own card catalog:
Here are some diary doodles I drew from my notes on Jungian analyst James Hollis’s 1993 book, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Mid-Life. (I included them in my letter about Charlie Bucket’s mid-life crisis, “Quitting The Chocolate Factory.”)
After I shared these it was pointed out to me that Ted Lasso spies the book on the table in his therapist’s apartment (S02E08):
In a terrific mini Q&A, Lauren Groff (author of the wonderful novel Matrix, whose followup I cannot wait for) says she thinks writer’s block is an “umbrella term for a series of very different pains.”
1. The “fear of imperfection, which can be combatted by a writer carefully training herself to let her work be messy and impermanent.” Groff gets over this by writing longhand and not typing on the computer until she has a good sense of the piece.
2. “Being impatient with your work and not allowing it the time it needs to develop.” (Her teacher, Loorie Moore, told her to “relax” and not rush things and know that nothing is ever wasted.)
3. “The canary toppling over in the coalmine, the way that your work is telling you that you’re going down the wrong path and you need to reconsider some larger issues.” For this she suggests what I call the put it in the put it in the drawer and walk out the door strategy. And while you’re letting it sit, read, read, read:
During that time away, be in your chair every day, but be there by reading everything you can get your hands on, and you’ll find a solution in the hundreds of thousands of words you’ve read.
(For me, problems of output are usually problems of input.)
All of this reminded me of Joy Williams, who had my favorite take on writer’s block: “Perhaps more people should have it.”
See also: “Skip the boring parts”
(Groff interview via Laura Olin.)
One of the fun inventions of screenwriter David Seltzer in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) is how Willy Wonka is always quoting and mis-quoting snippets of poetry and literature.
Here are just a few bits that Wonka quotes:
“We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams…”
—Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode”
“…all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…”
—John Masefield, “Sea-Fever”*
“Candy
is dandy
but liquor
is quicker.”
—Ogden Nash, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking”
“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
“Where is Fancy bred… in the heart or in the head?”
—Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
In Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka, Mel Stuart writes:
Stan Margulies was charged with obtaining the legal clearances so that we wouldn’t be sued for the purloined lines, and he had some fun with it. He sent a copy of the final script to [producer David] Wolper’s attorney, Eric Weissman, with a note. “Mr. Wonka,” Stan wrote, “it turns out, delights in quoting famous pieces of poetry. Happily, most of them are from our good friend, William (public domain) Shakespeare, but his taste is wide ranging.”
A more complete list of Wonka’s quotations can be found here.
After my adventure last week of going through a stack of melted 45 singles, I went out and bought a refurbished tape deck. I christened it by listening to 20-year-old tapes of the short-lived radio show I did with my college roommate. If you’d like to travel back to 2003 and hear what we played here’s a 9-hour Spotify playlist:
(We stole the title of the show from Gil Mantera.)
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