I made a new zine about the two things that motivate me: death and deadlines.
The cease-and-desist of winter
I do a lot of RIPs in the newsletter, and not to be grim, but this time of year… a lot of people die.
Sometimes on a Thursday after I’ve finished the Friday newsletter and arranged it exactly how I wanted it, I’ll get the news that someone who merits an RIP has died and I’ll have to decide whether to go back and change the newsletter or not.
David Lynch was too big to squeeze in last-minute last week, so I gave him a big number one spot this week:
“The old is dead, and I don’t know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there’s something that can come out of experimentation. It’s somewhat unsettling, but it’s a hopeful thing in a way. I’ve been here before, lots of times.” RIP filmmaker and artist David Lynch. I’d love to wipe my brain so I could watch Twin Peaks for the first time — the first two seasons are streaming for free on Pluto TV and The Criterion Channel is streaming the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life for free until the end of the month. Lynch “didn’t fully trust words” as his friend Kyle MacLachlan put it, but he wrote a good book about his approach to creativity called Catching The Big Fish, and I just picked up a book of his interviews called Lynch on Lynch. Even if he didn’t fully trust them, he dished out many words of wisdom: “An artist doesn’t have to suffer to create.” “Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.” “Fix your hearts or die.” “Every day, once a day, give yourself a little present.”
You can read the rest — and the other RIPs, both giants in their fields — in the newsletter: “The cease-and-desist of winter.”
10 years without Roger Ebert
The film critic Roger Ebert died 10 years ago today.
I came late to his work: I remember seeing him on TV when I was a kid, but I only really started reading him post-cancer, around 2010 or so, when he was in the middle of his great blogging explosion caused by losing his voice due to his health complications.
Something I wrote in 2011 about his blogging:
what makes Ebert such a brilliant blogger is that he’s doing it wrong—in the age of reblogs and retweets and “short is more,” he’s writing long, writing hard, writing deep. Using his blog as a real way to connect with people. “On the web, my real voice finds expression.” Man loses voice and finds his voice. “When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.” Blogging because you need to blog—because it’s a matter of existing, being heard, or not existing…not being heard.
He died while I was working on Show Your Work! and he has a whole section in that book called “You can’t find your voice if you don’t use it.” It might seem weird, but I thought the best way to start that book about putting yourself out there was to talk about death and what you do with your time — here was a writer who knew his time was short and he was sharing everything he could think of before he left.
One thing I’d like to call out that I don’t think a lot of people know is that Ebert was a writer who draws!
He wrote a blog post, “You Can Draw, and Probably Better Than I Can,” where he explained how he met a woman named Annette Goodheart in the early 1980s, who convinced him that all children can draw, it’s just that some of us stop.
He wrote beautifully about the benefits of drawing, how it causes you to slow down and really look:
That was the thing no one told me about. By sitting somewhere and sketching something, I was forced to really look at it, again and again, and ask my mind to translate its essence through my fingers onto the paper. The subject of my drawing was fixed permanently in my memory. Oh, I “remember” places I’ve been and things I’ve seen. I could tell you about sitting in a pub on Kings’ Road and seeing a table of spike-haired kids starting a little fire in an ash tray with some lighter fluid. I could tell you, and you would be told, and that would be that. But in sketching it I preserved it. I had observed it.
I found this was a benefit that rendered the quality of my drawings irrelevant. Whether they were good or bad had nothing to do with their most valuable asset: They were a means of experiencing a place or a moment more deeply. The practice had another merit. It dropped me out of time. I would begin a sketch or watercolor and fall into a waking reverie. Words left my mind. A zone of concentration formed. I didn’t think a tree or a window. I didn’t think deliberately at all. My eyes saw and my fingers moved and the drawing happened. Conscious thought was what I had to escape, so I wouldn’t think, Wait! This doesn’t look anything like that tree! or I wish I knew how to draw a tree! I began to understand why Annette said finish every drawing you start. By abandoning perfectionism you liberate yourself to draw your way. And nobody else can draw the way you do.
“An artist using a sketchbook always looks like a happy person,” he said.
(Come to think of it, I quoted some of those bits of him on drawing in Keep Going. So Ebert features in not one, but two of my books.)
Knowing that Ebert was a drawer means a lot to me, because, as far as I know, the only time our paths really ever crossed is when he praised my drawing of the Ross Brothers’ 45365 on his Facebook page.
I could go on — the “Roger Ebert” tag on my Tumblr is about 30 posts deep.
RIP to a great one.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching
In the introduction to her translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
The first Tao Te Ching I ever saw was the Paul Carus edition of 1898, bound in yellow clothe stamped with blue and red Chinese designs and characters. It was a venerable object of mystery, which I soon investigated, and found more fascinating inside than out. The book was my father’s; he read in it often. Once I saw him making notes from it and asked what he was doing. He said he was marking which chapters he’d like to have read at his funeral.
A few years ago, when you could actually shop in a bookstore and talk to strangers, an elderly woman walked up to me in a Half Price Books and said she had nothing to read.
“Well, you’re in the right place,” I said.
We got to talking and discovered we both enjoyed poetry. She said a lot of people in her life were dying so she was reading Lao Tzu.
“Lao Tzu?” I said. “I love Lao Tzu.”
We walked together from section to section. I browsed; she talked. At one point she recited some Robert Frost and some Basho:
Eventually we said our goodbyes. I think of this woman now when I pick up the Tao Te Ching, and I wonder how she’s doing.
“It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts,” Le Guin writes. “Funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.”
Every poem seems to me a subtweet of our crooked world and our lousy, corrupt leaders.
And Le Guin’s footnotes are perfect:
If you read Le Guin after reading this translation, you realize how many lines from her books could’ve been lifted from Lao Tzu.
This sentence from The Left Hand of Darkness, for example:
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
Or this one:
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching (more excerpts over at Brain Pickings) was a great solace to me for the past four years, so much so that I put it in the recommended reading for Keep Going. And there’s a fairly new reprinting, which means it’s pretty easy to find.
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Every Saturday Friday* I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.
* In the interest of preserving my sanity, I’m cutting my daily blogging, and hopefully all my online time, down to Monday-Friday.
David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives was published in February 2009. I read it in January 2017. (I called it “good pre-dream reading.”) Now I’m writing about it in February 2021. These dates suggest to me that it is a great wintering book, a collection of possibilities (that word will have more relevance later) in a season in which the possibilities feel quite grim: Death, frozen pipes, snow that is white and terrifying like a blank sheet of paper.
There are two afterlives in this book that I think about often.
The first is from the title story, “Sum,” in which you “relive all your experiences, but this time, with the events re-shuffled into a new order,” and “all the moments which share a quality are grouped together.” So you sleep for 30 years, sit on the toilet for 5 years, have sex for 7 months, experience pain for 27 hours, etc. That story is a reminder that “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces” is a well-designed and endurable one.
The second is the afterlife in “Metamorphosis,” a limbo-esque lobby the dead wait in until every single person on Earth has ceased to remember them. It starts this way: “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
I think of these three deaths whenever a loved one dies. Their first and second death has passed, but their third and final death has not, and the absolute earliest it will is at the moment my brain forgets their name. So, until my own first death, I keep them alive. This is easiest for my favorite musicians: Put on their record, and their voice fills the room.
One question that it didn’t even occur to me to ask when I first read the book: What are Eagleman’s actual religious beliefs? From the 2011 New Yorker profile of Eagleman called “The Possibilian”:
Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? […] “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”
“I’m not saying here is the answer,” he says. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.” (For more, look to his piece, “Why I am a Possibilian.”)
It’s really of no matter. Sum is like the movie Groundhog Day: it gets at something universal that will be claimed by humans of all walks.
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[PS. The New Yorker profile, which I only read this afternoon, features Eagleman hanging out with one of my heroes, Brian Eno, and hooking drummers up to an EEG monitor while they played. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno says. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.” (Eno, an early reader and enthusiast of Sum, wrote some soundscapes to go along with readings, and the composer Max Richter actually turned it into an opera.)]
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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.