I think I could tell my boss to go to hell and quit my job and just construct elaborate marble runs for the rest of my life. (Although, now that I’m thinking about it, a book is kind of like a marble run — if you assemble it right, the reader drops in and flies through it…and maybe wants to go again at the end?)
“I’ve never planned anything. I haven’t had any career at all. I only have a life.”
—Werner Herzog
A few days ago a woman on Twitter asked me, “Do you find it ironic that your biggest impact has been made not with your art, but your art and writing ABOUT being an artist?”
I immediately thought of W.H. Auden, who died almost half a century ago, but said, “It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (He wrote a funny poem called “On The Circuit” about his speaking gigs.)
But to answer the original question: I don’t even think of myself as an artist anymore. I’m a writer who draws. (A title I stole from Saul Steinberg.)
All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.
Being a professional writer now means I can be a professional reader. Montaigne said he made bouquets out of other men’s flowers, but he was the one who provided the string to tie them together. I like that image, except bouquets eventually die, and the great thing about books is that they are paper bouquets that never die: they can be torn to their pieces and rearranged indefinitely.
Karl Lagerfield died this week, and he said: “Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.” If books are drugs, then maybe my books are just gateway drugs that lead to better ones. I’m more than okay with that!
But again, what’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?
It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.
Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.” Oliver Sacks snatched this phrase up for his end-of-life reminiscence in Gratitude:
I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
What more could you ask for?
I picked up Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed a week or so ago, and it’s taking me forever to read because 1) it’s 500 pages long and I’m slow, and 2) it’s so dense with insane stories and great wisdom about creative work that I’m constantly stopping to underline sentences.
He describes himself as an autodidact, who “never felt comfortable in school” and “never trusted teachers”:
I’ve always been more interested in teaching myself. If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations. Everything we’re forced to learn at school we quickly forget, but the things we set out to learn ourselves — to quench a thirst — are never forgotten, and inevitably become an important part of our existence.
“When he was in school,” his mother says, “Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed.”
But over and over, in the book, and in other interviews, he has one unwavering piece of advice for filmmakers: “Read.”
Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
He gives his Rogue Film School students a “mandatory” reading list and he brings two books with him on film shoots: Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible and Livy’s account of the Second Punic War. (“The Book of Job acts as consolation, Livy gives me courage.”)
He talks a lot about approaching his screenplays with a literary sensibility, often abandoning traditional structure for prose descriptions of scenes. He’s convinced that Conquest of the Useless, his diary of making Fitzcarraldo, will outlive all of his films. “I suspect that my true voice emerges more clearly through prose than cinema,” he says. “I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.”
It is a really terrific book.
No matter how much you love to talk, conversation can be difficult, and every conversation, in person or online, has the potential to turn ugly or needlessly confrontational or boring or painful and so on. It’s for this reason that I keep handy a collection of conversational shortcuts, to help me know what to say when I don’t know what to say.
When someone asks my opinion about something I could not stand but I don’t want to get into how much I couldn’t stand it: “It wasn’t for me.” (A variant: “Not my cup of tea.”)
When someone expresses their loathing for something that I love: “Oh, well. More for me!” (Stephen Colbert on why he doesn’t proselytize: “Hey, more Jesus for me.”)
When someone criticizes me and telling them to go to hell isn’t prudent: “You may be right.” (This stolen from Jerry Saltz, who says, “It has a nice double edge that the person often never feels and that gives pleasure.”)
When someone gives me a compliment: “Thank you for saying that.” (If the compliment seems to be a bit much, and I’m feeling saintly, like George Saunders saintly, I might add his line, “I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m really going to try to make it true.”)
When I don’t know something: “I don’t know!”
When I am told of someone’s good fortune, which I may or may not be happy to hear: “Good for you” or “Good for them.”
I try never to ask what people do for a living in a conversation, but when I want to be polite after someone tells me what they do: “Wow. That sounds hard.” I stole that from Paul Ford, who explains how it works in “How To Be Polite”:
Because nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult. I once went to a party and met a very beautiful woman whose job was to help celebrities wear Harry Winston jewelry. I could tell that she was disappointed to be introduced to this rumpled giant in an off-brand shirt, but when I told her that her job sounded difficult to me she brightened and spoke for 30 straight minutes about sapphires and Jessica Simpson. She kept touching me as she talked. I forgave her for that. I didn’t reveal a single detail about myself, including my name. Eventually someone pulled me back into the party. The celebrity jewelry coordinator smiled and grabbed my hand and said, “I like you!” She seemed so relieved to have unburdened herself. I counted it as a great accomplishment. Maybe a hundred times since I’ve said, “wow, that sounds hard” to a stranger, always to great effect. I stay home with my kids and have no life left to me, so take this party trick, my gift to you.
(I’m lying now: I’ve never actually tried that last one, but I really want to.)
Those are all the ones I can think of right now. Feel free to send me your own.
@austinkleon Another what to say when you don't know what to say: this one comes from my beloved thesis advisor. When someone tells you what's wrong with your work and how to fix it, the response is "Wow, I never thought of that." And then you never have to.
— Suzyn J. Gonzalez (@suzynjgonzalez) February 20, 2019
For the first time since my first son was born, I am living in a house without a piano. What I have now is a Yamaha “electronic piano,” a decades-old leftover from my pre-piano, pre-children days. The Yamaha is a hefty plank of plastic with “weighted” keys that make a sad thunky plastic sound when you play them. Unlike the vegan cashew queso my wife made for dinner the other night, it is a poor substitute for the real thing.
But The Yamaha, for now, is what I have, so I am making the best of it. The Yamaha has ten different voices: 2 pianos, 2 electric pianos, 2 organs, strings, 2 harpsichords, and a vibraphone. I hate the two pianos and never play them. The organs make the room sound like church. The other voices I can work with. As with many things in life, I like it more the less it tries to pretend to be something it’s not.
Can you have a moment of transcendence on such a sub-par instrument? I got close the other night. I was practicing some Bach, and I felt something like, I am putting my fingers on the same keys as Bach. He wrote these notes down 250 years ago, and now I am playing them. I may be doing a clumsy job, but I am making him come alive again.
I thought of Margaret Atwood’s “frozen music”:
Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.
And I thought of my friend Alan Jacobs, who is writing a book called Breaking Bread With The Dead. The title comes from a lecture by W.H. Auden, who said:
…one of the greatest blessings conferred on our lives by the Arts is that they are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead, and I think that, without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
I suppose you break bread with the dead using whatever tools you have on hand. Sometimes it’s a fine, dusty hardback, and sometimes it’s a free ebook on your Kindle. Sometimes it’s an old wooden piano, and sometimes it’s The Yamaha.
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