I think I could tell my boss to go to hell and quit my job and just construct elaborate marble runs for the rest of my life. (Although, now that I’m thinking about it, a book is kind of like a marble run — if you assemble it right, the reader drops in and flies through it…and maybe wants to go again at the end?)
An intercourse with the world
“I’ve never planned anything. I haven’t had any career at all. I only have a life.”
—Werner Herzog
A few days ago a woman on Twitter asked me, “Do you find it ironic that your biggest impact has been made not with your art, but your art and writing ABOUT being an artist?”
I immediately thought of W.H. Auden, who died almost half a century ago, but said, “It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (He wrote a funny poem called “On The Circuit” about his speaking gigs.)
But to answer the original question: I don’t even think of myself as an artist anymore. I’m a writer who draws. (A title I stole from Saul Steinberg.)
All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.
Being a professional writer now means I can be a professional reader. Montaigne said he made bouquets out of other men’s flowers, but he was the one who provided the string to tie them together. I like that image, except bouquets eventually die, and the great thing about books is that they are paper bouquets that never die: they can be torn to their pieces and rearranged indefinitely.
Karl Lagerfield died this week, and he said: “Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.” If books are drugs, then maybe my books are just gateway drugs that lead to better ones. I’m more than okay with that!
But again, what’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?
It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.
Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.” Oliver Sacks snatched this phrase up for his end-of-life reminiscence in Gratitude:
I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
What more could you ask for?
The most valuable book on my nightstand
I have a lot of books on my nightstand, but the most valuable is the one I like to read that never fails to put me to sleep within three to five pages. Previously, it was Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Currently, it’s Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. These are books that have good sentences but structures that knock me out — not in the “wow” sense, but the “ZZZ” sense.
When my wife can’t sleep she reads A Bird in the Hand, a book of chicken recipes.
Whatever works, man…
“Why’s it take so long?” (Timeline of a book)
I posted the galley (a galley is an advance reading copy for booksellers and reviewers) of Keep Going on my Instagram a few days ago, and a lot of people said, “April?!? That’s 5 months from now! What the heck takes so long?”
A year from sale to pub date is actually pretty danged fast by the standards of the publishing industry. (For example, I signed the contract for my first book in summer of 2008 and it wasn’t published until the fall of 2010.) What’s unusual is for us to be so far ahead in the process by now. We really cranked on this one.
In the spirit of showing my work, here’s a timeline to give you an idea of how quickly (and how slowly) this book happened:
– March 6, 2014: Show Your Work! is published.
– 2014-2018: My wife has our second son, I publish the journal, then angst for a few years over whether I’ll actually ever write another book again.
– 2016-2018: Country descends into political chaos and I — and almost everybody I know — become depressed and distracted.
– January 2017: Start a daily diary.
– October 1, 2017: Start daily blogging again.
– February 14, 2018: Start working on a new talk about staying creative in chaotic times.
– March 9: Give the talk, hand my literary agent a rough outline of a book proposal.
– April 2: After much angst and work, finish book proposal, my agent submits it to my editor.
– April 10: Publisher buys book.
– May 14: Submit first draft to editor.
– June 13: Submit full manuscript and illustrations to editor.
– July – August: Proof, edit, revise various passes, work up all the extra stuff that goes in the book. (Back matter, lettering, etc.)
– September: Finish proofing, nail down cover and jacket copy.
– A few days ago: Bound galleys arrive.
– Two days ago: Editor proofing “the blues” — printouts from the printer — I suggest a couple of last-minute changes.
– Now – April 2: Publisher must get a 100,000+ books printed and distributed, publicist has to plan 25-city tour, sales team has to reach out to booksellers, retailers, etc., and a ton of other work that I don’t even see has to happen. I must remain calm during “The Gulp,” and try to find something new to work on, while not annoying y’all with news of a book that isn’t out yet. (Also: The world needs to not explode.)
Reading with a pencil
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
—George Steiner
Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated books on Twitter:
Sacks “loved to write notes on the pages of books he was reading — thoughts, ideas, arguments with the author, diagrams.” What a delight it must be to go through such a library (of 500+ books) and see Sacks’ raw thoughts in margins and endpapers:
This is, of course, an ancient practice called marginalia. (A nice, short read on the subject is Mark O’Connell’s piece, “The Marginal Obsession With Marginalia.”)
I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:
Patricia Lockwood put it this way:
There’s a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you’re going along in a way that’s, like, half creating it as you go. And you’re also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you’re sifting for what could be gold.
Panning for gold, or “shopping for images,” as Allen Ginsberg puts it in “A Supermarket in California.”
Sometimes marginalia is the next best thing to punching an author in the face. I’m a huge fan of Sam Anderson’s “A Year in Marginalia” in which he posts snapshots of his marginal comments:
The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain.
Whether you’re panning for gold or slinging shit at a dead man, marginalia turns reading into writing. (See Billy Collins’ poem.) My friend John T. Unger once said to me, “Every piece of art I’ve ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up.”
In Sam Anderson’s “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,” he points out that marginalia used to be more of a social practice:
[P]eople would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers…. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” — a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.
I own books that were marked up by my father-in-law and my wife when they were in high school. Reading through them is like a kind of time travel — get to visit with them in the past. Sometimes I imagine my kids reading one of my books and coming across a note from me…
I love this idea of marginalia as a way to turn a book into a medium for conversation — a kind of literary note-passing. G.K. Chesterton’s once went through a friend’s newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as Platitudes Undone.) Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus. (I was delighted to see readers swapping their marginalia for my book, Show Your Work!)
Finally, marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience. Here’s Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in their classic, How To Read A Book:
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.
Read with a pencil! (I recommend Blackwing Palaminos.)
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