I make my collages by hand, but I always scan them into the computer and adjust the levels a bit for the final image. Every once in a while I’ll scan one into the computer and it just doesn’t look right. Originally, the steeple in this piece looked like this:
When this happens, I’ll save the file just in case, then go back to the desk, pull up the tape, and fix the patch:
I call this “Analog Ctrl-Z.”
After we got off a Zoom call, Meg stood up and spotted Mr. Coconut right in the window above my desk. He was not as pleased as we were to see him:
I have to give it to him: he is working hard and keeping those owl babies fed in the evenings! They’re about 1 1/2 weeks old now! Here’s a peek into the box as of yesterday:
Just a little over three years ago, a month or so into the pandemic, Fiona Apple released Fetch the Bolt Cutters into the world. I couldn’t stop playing it then, and I’m still playing it now.
One of the things I love about the record is how homemade it sounds.
It sounds like a woman who doesn’t leave the house making music in her house… because it is. A great deal of it was recorded in her house in Venice Beach, a house very dear to her.
“This house is alive to me,” she told NPR. “The fact is, this house was here when I needed a place to go.”
And so there’s this way that I feel like I want to repay this house by making it the music. Because it has been my mother, really; it’s been the home of all the music. It’s been the womb of everything, for all these years. It’s been the womb of where I’ve developed into an adult. And so I really felt like it’s an instrument in itself, it’s the microphone: The house is the microphone, the house is the ambiance, the house is a member of the band.
And you hear the house all over the record. It is a true “home recording.”
Connected to that is another thing I love about it: how much it was recorded on her iPhone and in GarageBand, the music software that comes standard on every Mac.
In my diary, I recorded this exchange with my son Owen, who was 7 at the time:
On albums like this — albums that have been worked on for several years but are released at just the right time with big world events — the lyrics can seem spooky and downright prophetic:
“I know that that time is elastic”
“I know none of this will matter in the long run / but I know a sound is still a sound around no one”
“Whenever you want to begin, begin! / we don’t have to go back to where we’ve been!”
Bolt Cutters feels like a plague album the way Purple Mountains feels like a plague album and the way Yankee Hotel Foxtrot feels like a 9/11 album. These records feel like prophesies, when really, like many works of science fiction, they are the products of sensitive souls describing our pre-existing conditions.
Great artists are tuned in to their environments. Henry Miller said an artist was a person “who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos” and they have “the facility for hooking on, as it were.”
If you’re able to really capture the present moment and exaggerate it, it feels prescient later, because that’s usually what the future is: an exaggeration of its recent past.
Related reading: “Songs as shelters in time”
The other day I joked to a friend, “I’m just trying to stay alive until dinnertime.”
I have written before about my very simple rule that has served me well: “Don’t think much about your life after dinnertime.”
But this is my new motto: “I’m living for dinnertime!”
I am very “food motivated,” so it’s probably the diet talking, but when things go sideways, I focus on how good it is going to be to have dinner. If I can get to dinner, I’m good.
And once I’ve had dinner, I’m at home and at peace and I don’t care much what happens. I try not to think about my life or my problems until morning, at which point I start living for dinnertime again.
I am reminded of what Clancy Martin writes in How Not to Kill Yourself: “Suicide is indeed a human possibility, but, and somewhat paradoxically, for that very reason, we don’t have to choose it. After all, you can always kill yourself tomorrow.” Wait a day and see how you feel. Repeat ad infinitum.
A little too bleak for me, as I’m not suicidal, so for now I’ll stick with what’s working: “Living for dinnertime!”
I’m reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which is basically a 2,000-year-old advice column.
Here’s what he said in letter 2 about reading, and specifically, spending a lot of time reading writers “whose genius is unquestionable”:
To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer, but skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all.
While I am a great proponent of reading more than one book at a time and letting books talk to each other, I also believe that when you find a writer who unlocks something in you, you should spend as much time with them as you can, read and re-read everything they wrote, and then “swim upstream” and try to read what they read.
This need not happen all at once. I like to think of these writers as old friends that I can rely on. No matter where we are, we can pick up where we left off.
Right now I’m reading Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South for the third time. (I’ve read all his novels twice.) And the normal things are happening that happen during a re-read — I’m noticing new things I never noticed before, re-underlining passages that I’ve already underlined — but I’m also starting to feel like I’m really understanding what’s going on in his sentences.
I re-read Donna Tartt’s remembrance of him and laughed out loud when she recalls their first phone conversation:
“Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you were my crank caller… I have a regular crank caller and almost every day he telephones about this time. If I don’t pick up he rings and rings.”
“Do you know who it is?”
“No, it is just some prankster. Local, I think. Many people around here do not seem to have much to do.”
“That must be a big nuisance.”
“No. To tell you the truth I am a little disappointed on the days he does not telephone. I have come to look forward to his calls.”
This exchange reads almost exactly like something out of his novels. My reaction is the kind you would have upon hearing from somebody something your friend had said to them. “Yeah, that sounds just like Charlie.”
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