Living for dinnertime

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

The other day I joked to a friend, “I’m just trying to stay alive until dinnertime.”

I have written before about my very simple rule that has served me well: “Don’t think much about your life after dinnertime.”

But this is my new motto: “I’m living for dinnertime!”

I am very “food motivated,” so it’s probably the diet talking, but when things go sideways, I focus on how good it is going to be to have dinner. If I can get to dinner, I’m good.

And once I’ve had dinner, I’m at home and at peace and I don’t care much what happens. I try not to think about my life or my problems until morning, at which point I start living for dinnertime again.

I am reminded of what Clancy Martin writes in How Not to Kill Yourself: “Suicide is indeed a human possibility, but, and somewhat paradoxically, for that very reason, we don’t have to choose it. After all, you can always kill yourself tomorrow.” Wait a day and see how you feel. Repeat ad infinitum.

A little too bleak for me, as I’m not suicidal, so for now I’ll stick with what’s working: “Living for dinnertime!”

Pluck the day

Monday, May 31, 2021

Today I was reminded of this passage from Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book, The Anthologist:

But here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day–it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things–so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant–pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.

If you look that passage up online, the ending thought is usually left out (even I forgot this part):

And yet if it hadn’t been wrongly translated as “seize” would we remember that line now? Probably not. “Pluck the day free”? No way. And would we have remembered “gather ye rosebuds” without the odd mistake of the “ye”? Probably not. It’s their wrongness that kept these ideas alive.

Emphasis mine.

A quilt made of days

Thursday, April 8, 2021

I was recently invited to speak at a quilting conference, so I’ve been going through my quilt-inspired collage work from the past couple of years and piecing together a slideshow:

Working on a presentation of some of the collage work I’ve been doing for the past few years. God, I love making this stuff. What a gift it’s been to glue and things to the page when I don’t know what else to do… https://t.co/B4feF8ri7k pic.twitter.com/zUwHS2C14X

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) April 6, 2021

It’s always a great feeling when you start gathering pieces for a show or a presentation and you realize that you’ll not even get close to being able to showing everything.

Some topics I’m trying to ~~quilt~~ patchwork together:

Anni Alber’s idea that you must listen to your materials, because they do the dictating of what needs to be done
How in a good process, the art takes you where it wants you to go
How in any art form you must identify your materials and set up a sensual relationship with them
Terminology, and how some quilters got mad at me for calling my pieces “tape quilts”
finding treasure in the trash, saving scraps
making time to learn
the long history of collage
making ugly art
the calm of collage

But the more I think about it, the more I just keep thinking of a quilt of days. Each day is like a panel in a quilt. Some days are ugly and some days are raw and some days are chaotic and some days are colorful and some days are orderly but if you keep adding them up they turn into something.

How the days of the week got their names

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Today I remembered that the ancients named the seven days after the five planets known to them — plus the sun and moon — but only three of the days correlate in English: Satur(n)-day, Sun-day, and Mo(o)n-day. The other days are derived from Anglo-Saxon names for gods:

Sunday	Sun’s day
Monday	Moon’s day
Tuesday	Tiu’s day
Wednesday	Woden’s day
Thursday	Thor’s day
Friday	Freya’s day
Saturday	Saturn’s day

Here’s a video explanation:

After watching that video back in January, my son and I tried to map it out for ourselves (I believe strongly in copying out charts to better understand them):

This is the time of year I think a lot about seasons and how we’ve managed to carve up time. It’s amazing how much of this stuff we just take for granted. For example, the word “month” comes from “moon,” as the months roughly correlate to the length of a moon cycle. (This month, wonderfully, begins with a full moon and ends on a full moon.)

Here’s a lovely thought from my friend John T. Unger, who, after reading Thoreau on October, tweeted:

“Sunset month of the year” struck me this morning, made me realize the parallel between seasons and days. Spring is like early morning, summer; mid-day, fall; sunset and evening, winter; night. Damn, how nature loves to re-use a pattern.

Filed under: Time

Doing the work that’s in front of you

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

A decade ago, I read an interview with Jessa Crispin, talking about her work on Bookslut, and what she said stuck with me:

I’m very Midwestern in that I just do the work that is in front of me. I just did the work that was in front of me for six and a half years. Somehow, there were just always readers, and I’m appreciative that they exist.

I don’t know if she’d still say she works that way (I should ask her) but it’s the way I’ve worked all these years, and the way I continue to work: I just do the work that’s in front of me.

In 1939, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture to some students called “Learning During War-Time.” (Collected in The Weight of Glory.) He addressed whether it was worthwhile to think about literature, art, etc. — what we might, in the contemporary vernacular, call “non-essential” work — when civilization seemed on the brink of collapse. He thought it was.

At a certain point in the lecture he talks about the various enemies of doing our work. One of them is frustration, the idea that we might not have the time to finish everything we want to get done in this life.

“Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment,” he said. “It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

It is my 37th birthday today, and what I really crave, more than anything, is a continuity to my days. Not an accumulation, the sense that they’re adding up to anything, not necessarily, just a continuity. The sense that one day leads into another leads into another leads into another on and on and on. That they make some kind of chain.

Robert Creeley has a poem, a kind of haiku, really, called “One Day” that goes like this: