Recorded in my bedroom closet in Austin, Texas during the pandemic of 2020, this audiobook collects all three of my bestselling books about creativity: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and Keep Going.
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It was a crummy summer, but we still had books. Here are ten good ones, in the order in which I read them:
Essays in Idleness and Hojoki
Kenko and Chomei
Two wonderful works of the Zuihitsu genre — “consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author’s surroundings“ — both read at my kitchen table. Somehow, I haven’t yet been able to get into the other classic of the genre, Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, but I can see revisiting these two every couple of years.
The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig
“The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening everywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened.” Zweig wrote that in 1942, and he sent the manuscript off to his publisher before committing suicide shortly after. If you can get through this book, you won’t forget it. (I’m also a big fan of Zweig’s short biography of Montaigne.)
The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays
W.H. Auden
In his essay about Iago, Auden makes this life-changing distinction: Instead of asking yourself, “What can I know?” ask yourself, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” I wore down my pencil underlining this book. Like many collections by poets, the sentences sing, and can be savored on their own. Here’s another: “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” A book I’ll be returning to often.
The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
Seymour Papert
In July, I jokingly tweeted the cover of this book with the caption, “Don’t worry about school reopening y’all I’m getting it figured out.” It actually turned out to be a great read, much more about how we learn and play and think than about computers. Other good books I read about teaching, school, and kids: Murray Schafer’s Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course, Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and The Carpenter, Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry, and bell hook’s Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. “One must never get tired of reiterating the obvious,” Papert wrote, and it’s true of so many great books about education: We know how it works, we just won’t or can’t do the things that really help children thrive.
Intimations
Zadie Smith
A tiny collection of essays written during lockdown, inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. By no means essential, nor was it meant to be. (Writing, she says, is primarily “Something To Do.”) Why should we ask writers to only publish long, “important” books, anyways? I think so highly of Smith’s essays, I’ll take whatever I can get. (Another short, lovely book I recommend: Esther Pearl Watson’s Galactic Halo, a collection of her flying saucer paintings along with a mini-memoir of growing up in small town Texas.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
Richard Feynman
Half brilliant and half annoying, half illuminating and half cringeworthy. But, in total, what you have is a lively portrait of a curious mind, always turning, always thinking, always impatient with the stale thoughts and habits of human beings. I’d kind of like to cannibalize this book and cut it with the first essay in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and some other works of his that focus more on learning and teaching.
My Private Property
Mary Ruefle
I savored this prose collection, reading it slowly, one or two pieces at a time, early in the morning, with a cup of coffee. Ruefle has really been my patron saint of lockdown. Her short, brilliant books are perfect quarantine reading. I liked this review: “Ruefle can seem like a supernally well-read person who has grown bored with what smartness looks like, and has grown attracted to the other side.” Honestly, grab any title of hers from Wave Books, they’re all worth reading. (Her newest poetry collection, Dunce, was one of my favorite books I read this spring.)
Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa
Marilyn Chase
I can’t remember the last time I was so inspired by an artist’s biography. “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.” How does an artist go through so much and still work so hard and give so much without any hint of bitterness? How in the world did she make such great work and raise six kids? (Answer to that one: very little sleep.)
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
Andy Warhol
What’s interesting to me about this book is that Warhol tipped his hand as far as how emotional and feeling he actually was. (Or wanted us to think he was — like many an artist, you have to take everything he says about himself with a grain of salt.) He famously said he wanted to be a machine, but you realize that’s just a reaction to the exhaustion of being an artist, having to constantly make choices. Commercial art, he said, was easy because people told him what to do. “The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own.” He wanted a computer programmed to be a “boss who could tell me what to do…” (I skipped the “B” parts, FWIW.)
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson
I picked this up after critic Dwight Garner called it “an instant American classic,” and it gripped me immediately. Amazing read. (Her previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns, was recommended several times as a book with an unusual but brilliant structure.) Expect this to be up near the top of the best of the year lists, including mine.
(Here’s everything good I’ve read so far this year.)
Is it weird to start a post about blogging with a video of my paper diaries? All I want to do is make the point that I have made over and over and over again, on this blog and in my books:
The days stack up.
Here’s what I wrote five years ago:
One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work. This blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back in some way to this blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships—they all exist because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.
I started this blog when I was 22 years old. I’m 37 now. Good grief.
Why keep blogging? For me, there are at least 3 good reasons:
1. To leave a trace.
Here’s what William Kentridge says in Six Drawing Lessons about why he thinks he makes art:
An insufficiency in the self, the need to be a snail, leaving a trail of yourself as you move through the world. Hansel, leaving a trail of crumbs to lead you home.
On a single post of this blog you’ll find a form of navigation known as “bread crumbs” and if you click here the hyperlink will take you to the blog’s “home” page.
This is my home online. It’s where you can find me. If you want to know me, knock on the door, and I’ll let you in.
2. To figure out what I have to say.
I made this point in Show Your Work! and elsewhere: I didn’t start a blog because I had something to say, I started a blog to find something to say.
Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.
Here’s how Marc Weidenbaum put it in his celebration of blogging on the twentieth anniversary of his blog, Disquiet.com:
Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.
That last line is worth repeating: “Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.”
In my case, a single post becomes two posts, and two posts birth a blog tag, and a blog tag often births a book chapter. (Or a whole book.)
3. Because I like it.
This doesn’t get said enough in this culture: You should do things because you like them, because they’re satisfying.
It is very easy to be disciplined when you like what you’re doing.
Blogging is very satisfying to me — even more satisfying, in many ways, than having a book in a bookstore or a page in a newspaper. If I have an idea or an image I want to riff on, I sit down for half an hour or an hour, and then I publish it where anyone can see it. Instant self-publishing. Instant gratification.
Yes, I think I’ll keep blogging, because I like it, and also because, as Van Morrison put it, “It’s too late to stop now!”
Thank you for reading.
“People say to me, ‘I’m interested in doing audio books, what should I do?’ and I say, ‘Well, grab something at random, go sit in your closet and read out loud for 8 hours. And if you feel like doing it again tomorrow, give me a call.’”
—Scott Brick
This week I spent two days in my bedroom closet, recording an audiobook of the Steal trilogy for release on November 24th. Here’s how it went down:
First, I wrote a script, which required translating the highly visual books into something that worked as pure audio. (My wife suggested I listen to one of our sons’ copies of The Magic School Bus to come up with a good introduction. “Dear readers and listeners…”)
Once we had a script, we set a recording date, which was going to be at a local studio at first, but then I asked if we could do it at home. The engineers shipped me a laptop with recording software and a Rode NT USB mic. (A very decent condenser — I use an older dynamic Rode Podcaster down in my office.) I put down a rug on the floor of the carpet, and padded the walls with a few blankets and pillows. The laptop had a loud fan, so to cut down on noise, I put the laptop in our bathroom, and ran the USB cord to the mic under the closet door. (My boys were allowed to have their iPads downstairs all day as long as they promised not to make any noise. They complied!)
On the day of recording, I called my engineer and my producer on Zoom, shared my screen, and gave the engineer control of the computer so he could adjust levels and start and stop the recording. Once he had control of the computer, I stepped into the “booth” (closet) and put on my headphones, and all I had to do was read the script off my iPad. The engineer and the producer had the same script, so they could stop me and tell me when I screwed up, or suggest changes. We were doing all our actual communicating over Zoom, but the recording was happening locally on the machine in the bathroom. Very cool.
My producer and I were also able to make edits on the fly, with the engineer marking the changes in the script, so the final production guys will be able to cut the file together properly. (For example: I tried to say the word “ruminative” about two dozen times, until I just changed it to “reflective,” which sounded better anyways.)
The thing that slowed us down the most was looking up pronunciations for all the proper names that get mentioned in the text. (When I give a talk, I usually just let everyone know I’m a Texan and that gives me license to mispronounce everything.) Next time you need to figure out pronunciations, here’s a good list of places to look things up:
It took us two days to get through 42,000 words, which I’m told isn’t too bad! I had two big revelations:
1. Recording is a physical process. It’s actually really hard work — it requires a ton of concentration and performance while sitting on your ass. My throat and my nerves were raw and I was an exhausted wreck at the end of the day! You start to notice every single weird pop and click your horrible mouth makes. I drank probably 3 gallons of water. (I was told, too late, that a green apple helps with mouth noise.)
2. You should record the audiobook before you turn in the book. I always read my work out loud when I’m editing, but being forced to say your words into a microphone and hearing your voice over headphones turns up every wart and wrinkle in the text. “What illiterate wrote this script?” I thought, five minutes into recording. The books got even better in the course of recording.
Anyways, this audiobook trilogy has been a long time coming, I had a lot of fun working on it, and I’m excited for y’all to hear it! To be the first to know when it’s ready for download, sign up for my newsletter.
We had such a wonderful winter, and then…well, you know. Despite the pains of quarantine, I got a lot of reading done this spring. Here are 10 good books I read, in the order I read them:
A Love Letter To Texas Women
Sarah Bird
A lovely, slim book about Texas and the women who live here. I love her scenes of day-dreaming while wandering the aisles of HEB and how she writes about “neighboring,” the quality she most admires in Texas women, the “bone-deep instinct to be friendly to anyone who might cross one’s path.” (Rooted in the loneliness and struggle to survive in an often hostile frontier.) [Buy indie]
Dunce
Mary Ruefle
I’m a huge fan of Ruefle’s essay collection, Madness, Rack, and Honey, but it’s taken me a while to fall in love with her poetry. This collection did the trick. I love Ruefle’s sense of wonder, her way with images, and her sense of humor. (And her erasures, of course, which she’s as crazy about as I am.) [Buy indie]
Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton
Are you detecting the pattern here? At the beginning of quarantine, the writers who gave me the most comfort were women grappling with art and domesticity. Other diaries I read: Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life and Anne Truitt’s Daybook. The three diaries speak to each other in really interesting ways, and I recommend them all. [Buy indie]
Growing Without Schooling, Vol. One
John Holt
John Holt started his newsletter in 1977, “about ways in which people, young or old, can learn and do things, acquire skills, and find interesting and useful work, without having to go through the process of schooling.” I read an issue every day, tweeting out my favorite bit. A remarkable countercultural document of parents trying to figure out how to help their children learn from home at a time when homeschooling was, in many states, illegal. (Read my blog post about it.)
How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto
Tom Hodgkinson
We’ve had Hodgkinson’s manifesto hanging on the fridge for years now, but I’d never bothered to read this. Tons of references to some of my favorite books, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers and Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. I also enjoyed Hodgkinson’s book about parenting, from The Idle Parent. [Buy indie.]
Life Among The Savages
Shirley Jackson
Speaking of parenting, I’d read both of Shirley Jackson’s most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was not ready for how much I loved her book about motherhood, Life Among The Savages. It was so funny I would stop and read excerpts out loud to my wife until she read it, too. Looking forward to reading the sequel, Raising Demons. (I also enjoyed the introduction of Ruth Franklin’s biography of Jackson.) [Buy indie.]
The Annotated Alice
Lewis Carroll
This books collects Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, along with excised chapters, alternate illustrations (thought Tenniel’s are, in my opinion, unbeatable), and other ephemera. The stories are worth reading on their own, but the annotations give you a good context for what Carroll was doing. [Buy indie.]
The Swallowed Man
Edward Carey
I’ve written about Carey several times on this blog, and his novel, Little, was one of my favorite reads of 2019. He sent me an advance copy of The Swallowed Man, which tells the story of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale. (Come to think of it, I owe him a blurb. How about this: “I can’t think of another working author who is so deftly weaving pictures and words into such wondrous and weird tales. I’ll read anything he publishes.” Like Little, this book contains illustrations drawn by the main character, something I’m not sure I’ve seen anybody else do outside of children’s literature. (Somewhat related: John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook, an exploration of drawing in which Berger creates what he thinks Spinoza’s lost sketchbooks might’ve been like.) [Pre-order indie.]
How Buildings Learn
Stewart Brand
My wife read this in architecture school, and we’ve had this on our bookshelf for over a decade now. I’ve gotten a lot of it through osmosis, but I figured since I was working on these house collages, now was the right time to read it. So good! Like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, its lessons apply far beyond architecture. I think designers, in particular, would benefit greatly from reading it. Maybe my favorite book of the spring. [Buy indie.]
Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich
I picked this up so I could participate in the book discussion going on at The Convivial Society. (I read his book Deschooling Society years ago and it made a big impact.) Illich’s books are short, but they’re so dense with ideas, it can be slow going. Published in 1973, more relevant than ever. (Other great books I read that addressed art and social issues: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency.)
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