When I was a kid, my mom and I would played “The Alphabet Game.” We’d pick a theme and then try to come up with words for each letter of the alphabet. My eight-year-old and I have started our own alphabet game, only we use it to make dada-ish nonsense poems together in the pool. (I jot them down in my waterproof notebook.)
“A good idea is not of any use if you can’t find it.”
—Logan Heftel
When I was working on Keep Going, I wrote about “the importance of revisiting notebooks,” detailing the notebook method I’d learned from the Two Davids — David Thoreau and David Sedaris — how to get down daily thoughts and mine them for material for larger pieces. At the end of the piece, I wrote:
I have no index for the notebooks (unless you count my logbook), and no way, really, of knowing what’s in them, a condition worsened by my terrible memory, and the fact that one of the reasons I like keeping a diary, as Henry Jones, Sr., said, is because I don’t have to remember what’s in it. I plan on starting an index in the coming weeks, and updating it for each new notebook.
Reader, I… never started that index. And four years later, here I am, my dumb ass, trying to write another book, staring at a crate of notebooks, literally thousands of pages, with no idea what’s in them, really:
I have filled pages, but I have missed a crucial step: indexing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks. He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire:
Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.
Emerson called his notebooks his “savings bank,” and over four decades, he spent an enormous amount of time in the vault, not just writing, but re-reading what he’d written and indexing.
The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and give him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that interested him throughout his life.
As time went on, it took Emerson longer and longer to put lectures and essays together, simply because he had this vast trove to work with. He had no typewriter, no word processor, no computer. Everything was done with ink and paper. His indexes were massive, running hundreds and hundreds of pages. “These indexes themselves, never printed—with one exception—represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.” He wound up with 263 volumes on his shelf.
It could be dreary work, doing all this indexing, but it was crucial as he worked up to a new work. (Emerson’s creative process is so fascinating, Richardson wrote a wonderful slim volume about it, called First We Read, Then We Write.)
I am fascinated by the notebook and filing systems of other writers. In my experience, it’s very easy to write every day and get ideas down, but it’s not so easy to keep track of it all.
(A wild example, I’ll let you click through to read: In his excellent memoir, My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt writes about his father’s elaborate system of notebooks that allowed him to write hundreds of erotic novels.)
Comedian Phyllis Diller had “gag file,” which is now housed at The Smithsonian:
Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag.
In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comedian showed off a similar “joke bank”:
For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she’s written (at this point she’s amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: “Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?”
These filing systems are all analog examples, but one of my heroes, George Carlin, embraced an analog/digital system:
I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder… When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it….[In my filing system there are files for all kinds of subjects] but then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles….It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it’s just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let’s see, if I say “asshole” and “minister,” I then can find what I want find.
“A lot of this,” Carlin said, “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”
No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.
On Twitter the other day I saw someone point out that the longer you listen to Song Exploder, the more you discover that the Voice Memos app on the iPhone has probably had more of an impact on songwriting than any other piece of software. But recording things in Voice Memos is just one step. The next is listening back to things, finding diamonds in the rough.
Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants, aka the lead singer and songwriter for The Presidents of the United States of America, says he dumps all his raw song ideas into an iTunes playlist and then puts it on shuffle while he’s washing dishes. (I read that Brian Eno does something similar: he makes a tremendous amount of music, and then hits shuffle when he’s answering email, etc., and whatever catches his ear, he investigates.)
Like William Blake said, you either create your own system or get enslaved by another’s. In some sense, this very blog is a system for me to find out what I have: I take material from my notebooks and turn it into blog posts, and the posts become tags, which become book chapters, etc.
But I have a ton of material that never makes it online, and I need to get it out of my notebooks and into an indexed and fully searchable system. I think this will be easiest if I do it as I go, and keep it simple: the minute I finish a notebook, go back and type the whole thing into a .txt file and save it. (And back it up.)
I suspect that rather than being totally dreary, this transcribing step can also be a creative step, and I will see patterns of thought, generate new ideas…
While I very much like the idea of writing “shitty first drafts” and making something crummy and fixing it later, that’s not really how I write most of the time.
My process usually is: I procrastinate, endlessly, and work things out in my head, and then sit down and agonize sentence by sentence until the thing is finished.
Something that works better for me, especially since I draw and make visual art, too, is: “Just make something, anything.”
This is something a creative director said to me when I worked in marketing: Move from idea to manifesting the idea in some object as soon as possible. Doesn’t matter if it’s a shitty sketch on a napkin, or a model out of toothpicks, or a paragraph typed into the Notes app, or whatever it is, the important thing is to make some thing. When you have the thing, it’s out of your head and you can look at it for what it is, figure out what it needs to be.
For example, I was trying to work out a structure with the elements “Time, Space, Materials” and “Head, heart, hands” and “Past, present, Future.” My son was playing with a Spin Art kit he got for his birthday, so I used his discard pieces and made this dumb spinwheel thing that doesn’t even really make sense, but it was something, and something is better than nothing:
Now it sits on my desk, and I play with it and think with it while I still try to figure out the piecce.
The only trouble with this system is that I am an imperfectionist — I think most of things I make are most beautiful in their raw state, living in my notebook, and someone should just publish it as is! (My delusional dream is that one day my books will look just like my notebooks.)
A pleasant lunchtime surprise yesterday: my friend Sonia Harris alerted me to a live-streamed conversation between legendary cartoonist brothers Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets) and Adrian Tomine (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist). I only came in about half-way through, but I doodled some blind drawings and made a few notes.
The brothers talked a lot about how they work. Gilbert works 8 to 5 and then he’s done for the day and goes and hangs out with his family. He has about 3 comics going at once, and sometimes he’ll make up a comic just to have a place to put a story that’s in his head.
Jaime said getting to the drawing board is the hard part, and he spends a lot of time avoiding work, “letting it swim in my head.” Tomine said he tells people that’s how he works: by taking his kids to the playground and working the stories out in his head.
“I’ve been drawing comics since I was five,” Gilbert said. He lamented how comics isn’t the “nutty frontier” it once was. “Old shit is great.” he said. “I’m addicted to having old comics around.”
“I feel like I’m a descendent of you guys and it’s important to make that lineage clear,” Tomine said. When he’s asked about his influences by younger cartoonists, he lists sources he thinks are obvious, but the young cartoonists scribble down the names in their notebooks, as if they’d never heard of them. Gilbert said the only time he was bothered by being copied was when cartoonists started copying cartoonists who copied Love and Rockets, and the link in the chain was lost.
When asked about tools or tricks, Jaime voiced hesitation about giving advice, because most of the time with the work, he didn’t know he was doing it while he was doing it. He talked about making drawings that nobody was ever supposed to see and drawing without an audience. “Trust your instincts,” he said. “A lot of times it’s the pen that makes you draw the way you draw.”
“’Til the last comic you draw,” Gilbert said, “you’re still trying to figure out how to make a good one.”
“Do it because it makes you happy,” Jaime said. “That’s why you did it in the first place.”
Not sure what possessed me, but yesterday I posted my diaries from the first week of our plague year — Wednesday, March 11, 2020 to Wednesday, March 18, 2020 — on Instagram. I’m transcribing some of them here, for whatever reason. Mostly for myself. No edits, except a few for privacy reasons, but I did add a few links.
At the time, I started each entry (usually 3-5 pages) with a blind contour drawing. You’ll notice in several of the entries I ask myself what was the “best thing” yesterday, a technique I learned from Nicholson Baker about cheerful retrospection. I always write in the morning about whatever happened the day before, something I got from David Sedaris. And because someone will inevitably ask, here’s the notebook and pens I use.
* * *
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
I’m so tired. Boys both home with fevers. Tired of getting up before the sun — at least it’s shining on the desk. Read a book about the “dragon” of cyclical family anger. Feeling the stress flow — it’s like I’m forgetting to breathe or something. But then again, life is stressful! “Social distancing.” It’s like the whole culture needs to take break. Reset. Like the “circuit breaker” they have on Wall Street.
It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When the mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast, even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.
(From “Stonetelling,” in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home (via Alan Jacobs.)
Thursday, March 12, 2020
Reading of William Kentridge’s method of pinning images around his studio — “the studio becomes a compression chamber for the images, ideas and historical links” — a metaphor for “what happens inside the walls of our skull — the head as cloud chamber” and “Through this… cacophony of excess and uncertainty the artist arrives “at a set of meanings.” [“Art is a way of processing information.” —Kochalka]
We do this all day now—our head is full of unsynthesized and UNPROCESSED images. It would be like swallowing several meals of Burger King without a digestive system. (New metaphor…) We have all the DERANGEMENT of the artist w/o the crucial step of meaning-finding w/o the handiwork.
(A crucial point is that Kentridge selected and arranged the images himself — they were not pushed at him via feeds.)
Again, the switch here would be to become intentional about all this — to trim the inputs more and then STOP the flow of images at a certain point so that you can process and synthesize them. We do all this taking in and very little letting out. We’re full up, as if poisoned, and there needs to be the occasional blood-letting. (Another option: stop the flow of externally produced images completely.)
Friday, March 13, 2020
It’s hard not to feel like a real cosmic event is occurring — as if everyone is bombing their brains with so much information that it’s impossible not to find meanings, ie, “conspiracy theories.”
Meg and Owen and Jules have been running fevers and hacking for a couple days now — I’ve been mostly symptom-free, but that might change at any moment — spring is springing outside — Owen noticed the tree out the tiny window above the bookcase was getting leaves. The bluebonnets are out — patches in yards. The oak + mold are high, which makes it hard to know what’s wrong with you. It’s just warm enough that we have to run the air-conditioning, which is never good for anyone’s cough. I can always tell who isn’t feel well by the level of non-problems they’re causing.
We’ve kept the boys home for two days — they canceled school today. Grocery stores are slammed. We’ll probably be home for at least two weeks. Strange to think about.
There’s nothing they can do for you Coronavirus-wise anyways, except for fluids and oxygen while your body fights it off. My worry is that Owen gets pneumonia though and we can’t get to the doctor or we can’t get him meds.
I’m trying to focus on what will make the day better — I sense a great letting go — if you have extremely low expectations… Hopefully we can just make art and listen to music and relax. But I don’t know how it’ll go.
Fluids. Fluids. Fluids.
You can sense that the culture, on the whole, is exhausted. It’s sort of a relief to just cancel all obligations. In the meantime, the pandemic is exposing just how fake and corrupt and hollow our institutions really are. I need to read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, about how ppl respond in disasters.
It does seem like such a thing is possible: a little paradise, or a little, smallest viable utopia, in the middle of hell.
“I wish the government was as reassuring as the HEB website,” Meg said.
Gloomy out. Truly a Friday the 13th if ever there was one.
[11:36 AM] Back from our walk. Owen coughed the whole time and Jules listened to The Gashlycrumb Tinies on repeat.
Things are grim. Owen keeps playing this minor key song he’s working on over and over.
Jules won’t eat the ramen I made him.
Deep breaths. Deep, deep, deep breaths.
Making us a schedule to stick to.
Washing my hands so much they are dried + cracked.
Family yoga?
Saturday, March 14, 2020
[ Gould’s “Goldberg variations” with his weird humming]
This [drawing] was truly blind, done with my glasses on top of my head, couldn’t really draw my hair or my chin because I’m so blind… I like it.
Owen is laid out — he looks bad — he’s just not a robust kid. You look at his little arms. He said his teeth were chattering last night. Meg’s fever is broke — both boys running low grade 100 [degree] fevers, but Jules is in better spirits. Need to just keep them calm. and rest, rest, rest.
Amazed I haven’t gotten laid out yet. But no fever yet.
Yesterday on our walk, Jules + Owen hacked the whole time and Jules requested “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” on repeat. That night, he said, “Goodbye,” instead of “good night.”
Owen says his stomach hurts — his anatomy books lead him to self-diagnose his appendix. (Web MD.)
The germaphobe + hypochondriac in me is taking quite a beating.
The irony of all this is that we made (2) big life decisions in the past year (1) stop hoarding (2) send our kids to school so they don’t drive us crazy.
The universe has a sense of humor, for sure.
I’m thinking of Dougal Robertson’s line: “If any single civilized factor in a castaway’s character helps survival, it is a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Laughter. Helps…
I was reading about the plague in Shakespeare’s time: how he wrote his sonnets — how they were a relief to have minus the theater money.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Saying the Lord’s Prayer. It helps. But to pray when this is all over — that will be the key. [Forgive us our trespasses.] The boys are doing better today, which is a great thing — I’d rather them be rambunctious than worry about them. Meg still sounds pretty bad — I don’t feel great, but no fever so far. Very tired though — Meg was up in the night downstairs to keep me from waking. (Really just kept me up!)
I had a strange feeling today that actually this is how I’d prefer my days to be — nothing to prepare for travel wise, no social obligations, the city is nice and quiet…
And I have a sense of purpose — keep everybody in the house going, but stick to what works — make art. And it can be things that seem frivolous — in fact, it feels like the more frivolous the activity, the better it turns out!
To add to my feeling something cosmic is happening — it’s the Ides of March. This is, traditionally, the time of year that I sort things out for myself — pick a project to keep me busy for the rest of the year. Thank god this wasn’t the year I was to be on book tour! And thank god we aren’t [redacted]. Life is so much different than it was a year ago. We knew something was gonna happen + better to be where we want to be…
THE BEST THING YESTERDAY: Making dumb zines and listening to a Mary Ruefle podcast. Just sitting in the studio and vibing just like I’m doing now.
Man, I love the smell of a sharpened pencil.
I love how cool and rainy it is outside.
I love how Mary Reufle talked about reading, not to remember — cutting out marginalia + hanging it in her house.
[Just heard 10cc’s “Worst band in the world” and goddamn Dilla’s “Workinonit” is a piece of genius.]
SPACE TO FILL, YOU SAY?
Monday, March 16, 2020
THE BEST THING YESTERDAY: I went off on a zine-making tear and at tub time I finished making these “Song Birds.” (Presented here in the order they showed up. God, that’s it, isn’t it? What kind of mindset it takes to just show up in the studio and ask, “What wants to show up today?” “What wants to show up today?” That’s the only real question.
[I’m listening to a 1974 Megamix and it’s half awesome and half horrible.] I could see these little zines showing up in a book like this — almost as a kind of art book — what if it was like an art book catalog for the art made in this house, 2015-2020. KLEONS 2015-2020. Ha! The “limitations of our personalities” are starting to show up around here.
I have an idea for another zine that I’m going to try when I get done writing here — that’s my new thing — don’t wait on an idea to grow stronger — once you have an idea, just start trying too make it appear — in the process of making the thing it’ll show you what it wants to be, I think. Better to take any signal and run with it.
In some ways, this time is a huge relief — we know what we’re supposed to do. “Stay home and make, art, not friends.” (Thinking of Mary Ruefle saying what a huge relief it is when your biological family passes on.)
I’ve learned, too, that I like working in miniature. I like working on small pages.
SMALL ART GETS BIG.
Instagram is exactly the place to show these little domestic pieces of making.
I long for the homebound and homespun.
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Emotional accuracy. Feeling the deep malaise today. Listening to the crackling coughs of my family. (I am still, other than a headache and my bladder acting up again, symptom-free.) It’s a pathetic statement on the breakdown of things that a doctor can’t just visit the house and diagnose us all together — instead, the system, for billing, can only handle one individual patient. But our whole family is a unit. A team to be treated.
[ Kraftwerk – “Autobahn” ]
Ok, THE BEST THING yesterday: probably the zines and Camus. Somebody online told me how much my work is helping them — I usually err on the side of words in a blog post — but my words, in my poems, in my cut-ups, seem much more helpful to me certainly, and maybe to others, too? But art, and poetry, they are there for you when you need them, that is for sure…
Today: Go for a walk. Make a zine. Stay positive. Be supportive. Let the light in. Drink coffee. Stay away from booze. Drink tea. Go ahead and do your pushups.
Take this time to read the classics — finish Camus’s The Plague — pull William James off the shelf. Read Mary Ruefle. Think of her puttering around the house, never touching the doorknob, just flittering from one thing to the next, attacking books with her trusty pot of White-Out…
Wednesday, March 18, 2021
You think, “Oh god let them get better,” when they’re sick, and then when they’re back to normal, you can’t stand them. [Phantom Thread.]
“You’ve got to be the dumbest genius I know,” is something I have said out loud now.
Forgive us our trespasses.
Tired of this house.
At least “the trees are coming into leaf… like something almost being said.”
And good light.
* * *
Read more of my diaries.
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