Just got word that Steal Like an Artist is in its 30th printing.
Back in the day, I’d get these “REPRINT NOTICE” postcards in the mail:
That stopped after the 10th printing or so. (LOL)
Start here
It can take a while when you’re writing to get to what you’re really trying to say.
One of the most helpful marginal comments is “start here.”
You can often cut to the chase in your draft by deleting the first paragraph or two.
For example, here’s how today’s newsletter, “Same but different,” began:
At the end of my shelves of diaries, I keep a little “on this date” stack, and when I have an idle moment or I’m out of ideas, I’ll flip through the stack and see what else I was doing on today’s date.
I do not recommend this practice if you would prefer to think of time as linear, instead of circular. Over and over again, I find old versions of me feeling the same feelings that I’m feeling now and hearing weird echoes of the present in the pages of the past. Some people might find this depressing, but I find it comforting. The sense that I’ve been here before and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be here again.
Just now, flipping through my 2018 diary, I found this entry from September 10th, 2018:
There’s a part in Duncan Hannah’s diary when David Hockney points at a contemporary painting and says, “If art really progressed, then that would be better than a Caravaggio. David Byrne (also once an art student) has said the same— “Presuming that there is such a thing as ‘progress’ when it comes to music… is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present.” Linear progress. Abandon the notion. More like a spiral.
Abe Lincoln once said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.”
My notebooks serve to show me just how old my ideas actually are!
And all that’s fine, whatever, but Meg thought it read cleaner and faster this way.
“Good cut,” I told her, “I’ll put it on my blog, instead.”
The notebook is where you figure out what’s going on
I saw a trackback to my blog with this quote:
“The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.”
Who said that? I thought. That’s pretty good.
It was me. Many years ago!
Still pretty true, although, I also figure out a lot of stuff at the keyboard, too.
(I’m a little less binary than I used to be, which I count as progress.)
Better to light a candle than curse the darkness
My friend Alan Jacobs writes in response to a piece bemoaning the fact that nobody reads Arthur Koestler anymore:
You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.
I am big on being a “curious elder” — and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.
(I should note I found the Peanuts comic by looking up the origins of the phrase.)
Related: “Be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
To increase the variety of the created world
Friday’s newsletter, “Wondrous Variety,” started out with something I read in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia:
Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.
I was having trouble coming up with an image for the newsletter and then I remembered this photo I took in a Costco on Oahu.
Read the whole newsletter here.
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