My 5-year-old son Owen saw me blogging and demanded his own post —Austin
At bedtime papa would read jules pigeon books, & now he wants to DRAW the pigeon. by watching a video of how they draw it. & now it’s saved on a list. jules LOVES animals & probably that’s why he got interested into the pigeon. well, what is what. -OWEN
I’m reading John Berger’s last published book, Confabulations, and it’s reminding me what an impact his book, Ways of Seeing, had on me when I first read it a decade ago. (I drew this map in 2008.)
Berger was a hero in my person pantheon of “writers who draw”:
Because he had been a painter, Berger was always a visual thinker and writer. In conversation with the novelist Michael Ondaatje he remarked that the capabilities of cinematographic editing had influenced his writing. He identified cinema’s ability to move from expansive vistas to close-up shots as that to which he most related and aspired.
One of the things Berger’s work taught me early on was the power of captions: How simply changing the text underneath an image radically altered the image’s message. Here’s an example from the book:
Because I first discovered it in book form, it took me a while to even realize that it was based on the 1972 BBC series of the same name. (It was Berger’s reaction to Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation series, which had a more traditional view of Western art.) At the momest, all of the episodes are available on Youtube:
For a fun update on Berger for the social media age, see Ben Davis’s essay: “Ways of Seeing Instagram”:
Isn’t it striking that the most-typical and most-maligned genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western secular art? All that #foodporn is still-life; all those #selfies, self-portraits. All those vacation vistas are #landscape; art-historically speaking, #beachday pics evoke the hoariest cliché of middle-class leisure iconography… Technology has so democratized image-making that it has put the artistic power once mainly associated with aristocrats—to stylize your image and project yourself to an audience as desirable—into everyone’s hands.
Wendell Berry, “A Warning To My Readers,” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
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Yesterday my 5-year-old son told me that he really wants to go to Germany so he can be friends with the guys in Kraftwerk. First, I had to explain that Florian, Karl, and Wolfgang don’t even tour with the band anymore, and second, Kraftwerk are notoriously secretive, so he probably has a better chance of meeting Paul McCartney. (Not that he knows or cares who that is.)
I then tried to explain to him what a tricky thing it is meeting the people who make our favorite things. Sometimes people whose music we really like are not necessarily people we would want to hang out with. And besides, we already get the best parts of them in their work. When you put on a Kraftwerk record or a DVD, I told him, you’re already sort of hanging out with Kraftwerk.
I realized, midway through my monologue, that these are hard concepts even for adult fans to grasp, let alone a 5-year-old fan.
“What really knocks me out,” says Holden Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye, “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
That is, in a sense, one of the things I love in books — that feeling of a human being on the other side of the page who really gets it. You fall in love with the voice, and part of you wants to talk back to it, and have it talk back to you. But it’s always so much better for me when they’ve been dead for a hundred years, and I don’t even have the temptation to want to meet them.
I love meeting my readers, but I am so aware that the person who writes the books that they read is the best version of me — the most hopeful, the most helpful version of me. In my day-to-day life, I am as confused, and stupid, and pessimistic as anybody. As Wendell Berry puts it, “I am a man as crude as any…”
Part of the problem with depression is that it’s somewhat beyond description, and almost impossible to fathom for those of us who haven’t experienced it. I’ve been bummed, sad, melancholy, etc., but never actually depressed or suicidal, and I never really began to understand depression until I read William Styron’s 80-page memoir, Darkness Visible:
Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description… it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
Styron does his best to describe it for the reader:
The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
I might also recommend Allie Brosh’s comics, “Adventures in Depression” and “Depression Part Two,” collected in her book, Hyperbole and a Half:
Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.
(I have not read Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, but I loved his book Far From The Tree.)
A few of my friends have written about their experiences, including Mike Monteiro and Clayton Cubitt.
I wish y’all well. Hang in there.
I indulge in silly little writer fantasies, like rehearsing my answers for the “By The Book” column in the NYTimes. (“If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?” Lydia Millet had a good answer: “This president? Yes. One book.”)
On Twitter, Erika Hall asked, “If you could assign every American to read one book over the summer, what would it be?” She got good answers, many of which might be on my list: Amusing Ourselves To Death, A People’s History of the United States, The Fire Next Time, etc.
If I gave a summer reading assignment to every American, here’s what it would be:
That’s it.
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