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I forgot how to write again

“After I finish a book, I forget how to write,” says Patricia Lockwood. She followed up: “And then I always forget I’m going to forget how to write and plunge into the depths of despair … so beautiful.”

(LOL SAME)

Here is how my friend Maureen McHugh put it:

Every time I think I’ve figured out how to write, I discover that actually, I’ve just figured out how to write the thing I just wrote, and I have no clue how to write the next scene, the next story, or the next book.

I think all the time about this paragraph I clipped from comedy writer Tom Koch’s obituary:

Can I do it again? Probably. I mean, I have before?

I like what Meaghan O’Connell wrote this week about revision:

Imagine taking the very sharpest thought you had each day for two years and then adding it to a pile. If someone walked by and looked at your pile of best thoughts, they’d think you were a genius.

Yes! Something small, every day. The slow accumulation of bits over time. “BITS & PIECES PUT TOGETHER TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE OF A WHOLE.”

Workin’ on it.

100 things that made my year (2018)

  1. After angsting for a few years over whether I’d ever write another book again, giving the “How To Keep Going” talk in March and spending the rest of the year turning it into my next book.
  2. Getting a real telescope for my 35th birthday. Seeing the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter with my own eyes.
  3. Watching my youngest son draw. My wife embroidering his accident.
  4. Putting together a plug-and-play studio for my oldest son. His amazing jam, “Loveheart.”
  5. So much Kraftwerk. Buying the 3-D Catalogue set for the kids. Kraftwerk in the studio. Kraftwerk in space. Early Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk fan art. Kraftwerk mixes. Even Kraftwerk covers, like The Balanescu Quartet’s Possessed and Senor Coconut’s El Baile Aleman.
  6. The Lang Stuttering Institute at The University of Texas. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. 
  7. Visiting Los Angeles the weekend before Malibu burned. Driving the PCH in a stupidly large rental car. Walking El Matador beach. Finding a “correct” Mexican dive next to the Cheesecake Factory in Pasadena with Mike Lowery. Driving the 134 west from Pasadena when Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day” came on 93.5 KDAY. Walking around Los Feliz at night with a strawberry ice cream cone. Hiking to the observatory in Griffith Park with the Flynns. Touring the Corita Art Center. The menu at The Best Fish Taco in Ensenada. Reading Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood on the flight back. Listening to 2Pac’s “To Live & Die In L.A.” for a month afterwards.
  8. The Bill Callahan show at the Austin Public Library.
  9. Library tourism. The Chattanooga Public Library. The Eastham Public Library on Cape Cod.
  10. Driving the 6A through Cape Cod to Provincetown. Clam strips. Lobster rolls. Clam chowder. Taking the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and running into an old Austin friend in the bookstore.
  11. Listening to Prince’s Piano & a Microphone 1983 while doing the dishes and pretending he was playing for me in the next room.
  12. Sonia Harris’s ginger, lemon and maple syrup tea.
  13. Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy strips.
  14. San Francisco. Burritos in the Mission. Driving the PCH. The boys chasing birds on Rodeo Beach in The Headlands. Celebrating Jules’ 3rd birthday at Presidio Bowl.
  15. Abandoning the notion of linear progress. Creativity as a spiral. Creativity as a renewable energy. James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. Giving up on genius. Not being a noun, but doing a verb. Not discarding anything of myself. Wearing many hats. Replacing that dreaded question, “So what’s next for you?” with another question: “What do you want to learn?” Shooting the arrows, then drawing the bullseye.
  16. Thinking of the studio as a garden where ideas grow.
  17. Hot plates. Dart Bowl enchiladas. Torchy’s queso almost every time I came home from the airport. Ramen Tatsu-Ya. Takeout from Maudie’s.
  18. Eating Gus’s Fried Chicken with Drew Dernavich during SXSW, then walking all the way home through the greenbelt while talking to my dad on the phone.
  19. That shopping center at Airport and North Lamar — eating at the revolving sushi bar, shopping next door at Kinokuniya, having dessert at 85C Bakery.
  20. Cheap pies from the grocery store.
  21. Drinking boulevardiers. Baileys on ice.
  22. My wife’s St. Patrick’s Day feast with corned beef, red cabbage, and soda bread.
  23. Watching Coco with the boys.
  24. Seeing Phantom Thread in an empty theater in suburban Baltimore. Watching it at least 3 more times throughout the year, and it getting weirder and funnier each time. Listening to Jonny Greenwood’s wonderful soundtrack.
  25. Pusha T, Daytona. The Beatles vs. Wu-Tang Clan. DOOM XMAS.
  26. This Here is Bobby Timmons.
  27. Every time I got to hip someone to Kenneth Koch’s “You want a social life with friends.”
  28. Looking for like-hearted people vs. like-minded people.
  29. Not thinking about my life after dinnertime.
  30. Making collages. Robots from the Restoration Hardware catalog. Comics from my son’s Peanuts calendar. Swapping speech balloons.
  31. Re-thinking art as a process of falling in love with your material. Letting the materials tell you what they want to be.
  32. Giving it five minutes. Doing a 30-second fact check.
  33. Thinking of the blog as a refrigerator and thoughts as nest eggs.
  34. “…and some sausages!”
  35. Having a bag of tricks for getting writing done. Willing to be bad. Playing with blocks when I’m blocked. Pulling cards when I’m stuck. Starting a project with a new banker’s box. Opening a fresh pack of index cards and pushing them around. Hanging a bulletin board above my desk with pictures of my heroes. Pressing the sleep timer on my clock radio. Smoking a fake cigarette pencil. Knowing that first draft doesn’t have to be good, it just has to exist. Remembering that beautiful things grow out of shit. That you don’t drive ideas, they drive you. Scooping up the residue of the process. Procrastinating. Wearing clothes with pockets.
  36. Interviewing Mac and Laura from Superchunk.
  37. Having breakfast with The Dead Milkmen.
  38. Visiting Valerie Fowler and Brian Beattie’s studio.
  39. The creative magic of diner booths and mundane retail spaces.
  40. Hanging out with my boys in the studio. Taking them to work. Taking them to the art museum. My oldest’s amazing zines, like “How To Make Your Life Go On Forever.” Making fart collages. My youngest’s incredible drawings and his sweet singing voice. Having the boys draw side by side. Making art out of bugs. Thinking about how being a parent is like being an artist. Drawing all the ridiculous things they say.
  41. Drawing this diagram to explain complexity and how families grow.
  42. Real wealth.
  43. Pop-Up Magazine at Hogg Auditorium.
  44. Delivering a new talk, “Creative is not a Noun,” during the Scratch Conference at the MIT Media Lab.
  45. Marvin Gaye rehearsing “I Want You” while lying down on a couch.
  46. David Marchese’s interviews. This interview with Jaron Lanier. This interview with Kate Bush in 2005. Kevin Shields showing off his guitars. Desert Island Discs with Sister Wendy.
  47. The ease of Spotify playlists. The Blitz Club. The Atlanta Soundtrack. Songs from every year, 1925-2018. A mix for restaurants. My 2018 songs.
  48. David Sedaris’s Calypso.
  49. Parquet Courts, Wide Awake!
  50. Drag City records on streaming services.
  51. Reading music books to take my mind off writing. Duane Tudahl’s Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions. Lizzie Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom. Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach. Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music.
  52. Non-fiction written by poets. Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy. Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
  53. Songs that make me want to break down and keep going at the same time. Jonathan Richman, “The Morning of Our Lives.” Wire’s “Outdoor Miner.” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.” Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “On and On.” Schumann’s “Traumerei.” Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer.”
  54. Keeping a diary every day of the week for over two years. Cheerful retrospection. (The why and the how.) Reading diaries, especially visual ones, and especially on the day of the year they were written. Thoreau’s journal. Tape for the Turn of the Year. The Assassin’s Cloak. The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. Eleanor Davis’s You & a Bike & a Road. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies. Heidi Julavits’ diary, The Folded Clock.
  55. My oldest starting a diary, only it was just stuff I say that he doesn’t like.
  56. Re-reading James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me and getting mad as hell.
  57. Voting.
  58. Iggy Pop’s cockatoo.
  59. Feeding off the trolls and feeling sorry for them. Making an enemy of envy.
  60. Celebrating my sixth Father’s Day. Remembering that children try out every single emotion on you first. Remembering that it’s not a vacation with kids along, it’s a trip.
  61. Having something to look forward to. Even a bowl of soup.
  62. Walking, walking, and more walking. Frederic Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Garnette Cadogan’s essays, “Walking While Black” and “Due North,” Thich Nhat Hahn’s How To Walk.  Taneda Santoka’s little book of diaries and haiku, For All My Walking.
  63. Randomly coming across Rick Steves’ wonderful lecture, “Travel As A Political Act,” on PBS late at night.
  64. Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland.
  65. Comedian Nate Bargatze at Hilarities.
  66. Dreaming up a sitcom about a Millennial Thoreau.
  67. Worrying less about getting things done and more about things worth doing. Learning for learning’s sake. Trying to be worthy of my life. Remembering my heroes. Trying to find better images. Having no time for despair. Being the light or reflecting it. Staying alive and getting weird.
  68. Checking in with death. Learning from the leaves. Remembering that “now is the envy of all of the dead.”
  69. Surviving the dark days. Taping this Mary Karr poem on the fridge: “Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.”
  70. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
  71. Art. Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin. Ed Ruscha at the Ransom Center. Jerry Saltz’s life as a failed artist and 33 rules for being an artist. David Lynch: The Art Life. Agnes Martin, Paintings, Drawings, Remembrances. Chris Ware’s Monograph. John Berger, Confabulations. Agnés Varda and JR’s Faces Places.
  72. Having a good old-fashioned hobby. Knitting at the end of the world. Working hard at play. Working hard at making it not feel like work.
  73. Looking at maps. (While knowing there is no map.)
  74. Paying attention. Looking at stains on the wall. Seeing by turning things upside down. Reading right to left. Seeing moons in pancakes and galaxies in coffee grounds. Looking at the world one piece at a time. Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Making your own connections. Listening closely.
  75. Keeping up the weekly newsletter and (trying) to keep up with all the good newsletters out there. Audrey Water’s HEWN. Matthew Ogle’s Pome. Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press. Warren Ellis’s Orbital Operations. Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files.
  76. Reading good fiction before bed. Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Melville’s “Bartleby The Scrivener.” Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Edward Carey, Little. (And seeing his show at the Austin Public Library.)
  77. Becoming a fan of writers on Twitter before I even read their books — people like @EmilyRCWilson and @TedGioia.
  78. Hanging out with friends in Chicago and Evanston. Walking along Lake Michigan. Finally meeting Matt Thomas and having lunch at Lou Mitchell’s.
  79. Being in publishing for a decade and having a million copies in print.
  80. No line at the barbershop.
  81. Getting my photo taken by Clayton Cubitt.
  82. Re-watching favorite movies. Jaws (in July, before flying to Cape Cod). The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Stop Making Sense. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Top Gun. Heat. Much Ado About Nothing. When Harry Met Sally. The Terminator. The Birdcage.
  83. Making The Last Waltz a Thanksgiving tradition.
  84. Last-minute trip to NYC. Sunset in Battery Park then walking for hours afterwards. Stuffing my bag with bagels from Russ & Daughters and Pastrami sandwiches from Katz’s for the plane ride home. (Get two. Always get two.)
  85. Wandering the grounds of Laguna Gloria after taking my son to art lessons. Seeing the peacocks.
  86. The remixes of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s and The White Album.
  87. A photograph of Paul McCartney moving his own microphone.
  88. Music to write to. Bach. Brahms. Mary Lattimore, Hundreds of Days. Chilly Gonzales, Solo Piano III.
  89. Remembering that I don’t have to live in public. Thinking about what can be lost when we share what we love.
  90. Watchin’ teevee. Atlanta: Robbin’ Season. Better Call Saul. Queer Eye. The Defiant Ones. Ali Wong’s Hard Knock Wife. Grand Designs. Billions.
  91. Nacho Libre.
  92. Luke Pearson’s Hilda books.
  93. Horace’s Epistles.
  94. Watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. Reading Kitchen Confidential. Giving him the last words in Keep Going.
  95. Taika Waititi’s movies: Boy, What We Do In The Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor…
  96. Thinking about how paper is a great technology.
  97. Hanging out with Alan Jacobs at Magnolia in Waco on a long drive north.
  98. Our trip to Cleveland.
  99. Building driftwood sculptures with the boys on the beach.
  100. Watching the sun set over Lake Erie.

My reading year, 2018

Here are 20 good books I read in 2018, in no order other than the order in which I read them:

Tape For The Turn of the Year
A.R. Ammons

In 1963, Ammons got a roll of adding machine tape from the hardware store and decided to write poems on it every day until the tape was used up. I started the book on December 6 of last year, and followed along with each entry until January 10th.

 

Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Denis Johnson

Beautiful stories.

A perfect swan song.

 

Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie

Takes a look at Bach’s work through the recordings of his works throughout the years. I especially liked reading about Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals.

 

A Natural History of the Senses
Diane Ackerman

I originally thought Keep Going would have more about the senses in it, so I picked this up for research. Very dense, lush book.

 

Prince and The Purple Rain Sessions
Duane Tudahl

A day-by-day play-by-play of Prince in the recording studio at the height of his powers. I did a lot of skimming and skipping around, but really enjoyed it.

 

A Philosophy of Walking
Frederic Gros

A sausage-fest, but a good sausage-fest. (Compliment with Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust or Keri Smith’s The Wander Society or Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse.)

 

You & A Bike & A Road
Eleanor Davis

A comic diary of Davis’s bike across the south. I love her work so much. If I had to pick, this might be my favorite book I read this year. (I also read How To Be Happy and her newest one, Why Art? Both very much worth reading.) She’s on fire, and I can’t wait to read what’s next.

 

Meet Me In The Bathroom
Lizzie Goodman

An oral history of NYC music from 2001-2011. How much you enjoy it will probably depend on your familiarity with the music — I was eighteen and a freshman in college when I saw The Strokes in Newport, KY, in 2001, so it made me pretty danged nostalgic.

 

Calypso
David Sedaris

I mean, what’s there to say? The dude makes me laugh out loud… and he keeps getting better and better. (I also enjoyed the visual compendium of his diaries.)

 

Confabulations
John Berger

Considering how much Ways of Seeing influenced me, I’m ashamed I haven’t read more Berger. This was the last book he published before he died.

 

Monograph
Chris Ware

A gorgeous, gigantic tome dedicated to the work of one of our great Midwestern artists.

 

Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances
Arne Glimcher

By far the most expensive book on this list. (I bought it for my wife years ago, but I’m not sure she ever read it.) Gorgeous printing, with life-size facsimiles of Martin’s notebook pages bound in with the regular pages.

 

Priestdaddy
Patricia Lockwood

I was a year late to this, but it’s as advertised: Smart, smutty, and laugh-out-loud funny.

 

Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies
Duncan Hannah

I loved this book, which was edited from Hannah’s actual diaries that he kept as a young man in 70s NYC. My only gripe is that the book doesn’t include images of the actual notebooks, which are wonderfully visual.

 

The Hildafolk Series
Luke Pearson

It’s a rare, wonderful thing when stars align and you love reading the same books as your kids. (Last year: Jon Klassen’s Hat Trilogy) Pearson’s Hilda comics are like a cross between Miyazaki and my beloved Moomins with a dash of unschooling. Magic.

 

Words Without Music
Philip Glass

Devoured this one, and afterwards, was surprised it took me so long to pick it up. Glass writes about so many of my favorite topics: creativity, day jobs, parenting, lineage, etc. Totally accessible, and made me want to listen to more of his music.

 

The Folded Clock: A Diary
Heidi Julavitz

I’m not so sure that Julavitz and I would get along together at a party, but dang, I liked her book.

 

Eve’s Hollywood
Eve Babitz

What I wrote about Slow Days, Fast Company in last year’s roundup works here, too, so: “I love reading and thinking about Los Angeles, and I love writing that’s smart and trashy, so I liked this a lot.”

 

Little
Edward Carey
A strange, gloomy work of historical fiction with wonderful Gorey-like, Gothic drawings. (I was delighted by the show at the Austin Public Library.)

 

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Hanif Abdurraqib

Abdurraqib and I were born in the same year and grew up within a 45-minute drive of each other in Ohio, but our worlds were so very, very different. Columbus — a city I never felt much affinity for, despite its proximity in my youth — is one of the main characters here, and the book exposed me to a different side of it.

* * *

Here are 20 other good books I read, many of which, on another day, or in another month or year, could be in my top 20 (again, listed in the order in which I read them):

Note: I usually don’t post my favorite reads until the very end of the year, but I’m poking through this annotated Walden and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey right now, so I think it’s safe to say I won’t finish any other books before 2019 arrives.

See the past 13 years of my reading, here.

Reading with a pencil

Oliver Sacks’ writing in a Noam Chomsky book

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
—George Steiner

Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated books on Twitter:

Sacks “loved to write notes on the pages of books he was reading — thoughts, ideas, arguments with the author, diagrams.” What a delight it must be to go through such a library (of 500+ books) and see Sacks’ raw thoughts in margins and endpapers:

This is, of course, an ancient practice called marginalia. (A nice, short read on the subject is Mark O’Connell’s piece, “The Marginal Obsession With Marginalia.”)

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Patricia Lockwood put it this way:

 There’s a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you’re going along in a way that’s, like, half creating it as you go. And you’re also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you’re sifting for what could be gold.

Panning for gold, or “shopping for images,” as Allen Ginsberg puts it in “A Supermarket in California.”

Mark Twain’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives

Sometimes marginalia is the next best thing to punching an author in the face. I’m a huge fan of Sam Anderson’s “A Year in Marginalia” in which he posts snapshots of his marginal comments:

Sam Anderson marginalia

The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain.

Whether you’re panning for gold or slinging shit at a dead man, marginalia turns reading into writing. (See Billy Collins’ poem.) My friend John T. Unger once said to me, “Every piece of art I’ve ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s notes on Puzo’s The Godfather

In Sam Anderson’s “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,” he points out that marginalia used to be more of a social practice:

[P]eople would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers…. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” — a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

I own books that were marked up by my father-in-law and my wife when they were in high school. Reading through them is like a kind of time travel — get to visit with them in the past. Sometimes I imagine my kids reading one of my books and coming across a note from me…

My notes in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

I love this idea of marginalia as a way to turn a book into a medium for conversation — a kind of literary note-passing. G.K. Chesterton’s once went through a friend’s newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as Platitudes Undone.) Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus. (I was delighted to see readers swapping their marginalia for my book, Show Your Work!)

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Suttree

Finally, marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience. Here’s Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in their classic, How To Read A Book:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Read with a pencil! (I recommend Blackwing Palaminos.)

School and the seasons

Last night my wife and I re-watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The movie deals with time: how a prisoner does his time, how time brings back old wounds, and how we can use time to rewrite our stories. One device director Alfonso Caurón uses to show the passage of time is shots of the Whomping Willow in each season. (Stitched together in the image above.)

For me, the Harry Potter movies (I’ve only actually read book 7) have always been the story of going to school. The story starts when the summer is ending, and the story ends when summer begins again. Growing up, I was always like Harry: my life tied to the school year, I dreaded the summer and couldn’t wait for fall to come. The death of summer = the hope of new adventures. (Books, girls, etc.)

Before I went to bed last night, I came across this perfect passage in Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy:

I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones. I had forgotten that when you pay attention to the seasons, you are returned to school and all its feelings, the freedom of three o’clock and the nameless dread of Sunday night, when the sky looms over you like the deadline of some paper you haven’t even started. I want to drink cocoa out of a thermos; I want to go to a high school football game.

School is about to start here in Texas, but summer will continue to blaze for at least another two months. I wonder what time feels like to people who grew up here. I’ve lived in this seasonless place for over a decade — for 11 years I’ve lived in a constant state of seasonal disorientation. (And deprivation.) I want to feel that feeling again, of how “fall sharpens pencils.”

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