donald barthelme

Tsundoku (Books piled everywhere)

Friday, November 16, 2018

“Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk?”
—Donald Barthelme

I was sick in bed yesterday, and after I posted a picture of my makeshift office, a follower asked to see all the books on my nightstand. I was bored and bedridden, so I figured, what the heck. (I forgot the hashtag #shelfie.)

Several folks commented in relief that they weren’t the only readers with unread books piled everywhere. Heck no, you aren’t the only reader with unread piles everywhere! In fact, I would argue, as others have, that your library should consist mostly of unread books. Here’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.

“The important books in my library,” says Edward Tufte, “are the unread books.”

The Japanese even have a word for the unread books that pile up: “Tsundoku.” (It literally means “reading pile.”)

The nightstand isn’t the only place my books pile up. My dad keeps a gigantic junky stack of magazines on the fireplace next to his chair, and I used to make fun of him for it, but now look at me turning into him:

The “This Sucks” Hammer

Thursday, December 7, 2017

In the most recent episode of Song Exploder, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross talk about their creative process in the studio. Reznor discusses his history with addiction, how he used to be afraid of failure in the studio, but how he now trusts “the process” to getting him somewhere. Maybe most importantly, he says that when the ideas are really coming, he’s learned to give them enough time to come forth, without worrying too much about whether they’re good or bad. “There’s plenty of time to bring out the ‘This Sucks’ hammer,” he says.

Every artist has to balance between at least two modes: call them, for lack of better terms, the creative mode and the editorial mode. In the creative mode, you don’t worry about whether things are good or bad, you just let them happen. In editorial mode, you go back and look at what you’ve got, and you ask the questions, “Is this good? Does this suck?”

Lynda Barry’s essay, “Two Questions,” from her brilliant book, What It Is, explores why and when the editorial mode appears and how you can make it go away long enough to get things on the page. It’s essential, Barry says, “To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions so much is possible.”

Donald Barthelme says the same in his classic essay, “Not-Knowing”:

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the… process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…

Fortunately for Reznor, he says he has been able to offload most of the editorial mode onto Atticus Ross, so he can stay in the creative mode — he’ll even leave the room for 20 minutes while Ross is assembling pieces of what they’ve recorded in Pro Tools (Oblique Strategy: “Go outside. Shut the door.”):

The different mindsets, or different hats one has to wear in this environment: one of them is the subconscious, follow the Muse, eyes closed, and another one, that’s radically different, is the editorial. “What sucked? What was good? What’s the piece that fits with that?” I love having [Ross] do that part, because I can stay in the other mode of not trying to analyze exactly what’s going on, and still stay subconscious. It keeps this momentum going where neither of us are bogged down too much. Our skill sets compliment each other. So, it’s him arranging stuff. I just kind of bang into things.

This is a terrific argument for collaboration, and the power of two, but for those of us who work solo, we have to try to split ourselves into two different people. We have to play the two different roles, inhabit the two different mindsets, wear the two hats. The easiest way do this, I’ve found, is to split up the modes in time: Write something without stopping, let it sit for 24 hours, or even a week, or even a year, then come back to it with the red pen. Or, make something in one space, then take it over to another space to fiddle with it. (This is why I have separate analog and digital desks in my studio: analog for creative mode, digital for editing mode.)

Most important of all, though, is to keep the “This Sucks” hammer out of reach until you’re ready for it.

ALL IN A NIGHT’S WORK

Friday, February 27, 2009

girl talk

I tried to keep as many “poems about making poems” out of the book as possible, and so this one got cut. Done from an article about another Midwesterner using collage to make his art, Greg Gillis (a.k.a. Girl Talk).

In the late 1950s, Brion Gysin, originator of the cut-up technique, and his buddy William Burroughs who ran with it, had this idea: writing is fifty years behind painting. And so, they looked to collage.

Last week the New Yorker an article by Louis Menand about the writer (and native Texan) Donald Barthelme, examining Barthelme’s fascination with collage.

Having worked at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and then in New York for two art-world figures at a magazine covering the arts, Barthelme naturally looked to what was going on in painting for a way to get back to the spirit of Joyce and Beckett without merely copying Joyce and Beckett. The method he struck on was collage.

Barthelme, at a symposium on fiction in 1975, said:

The principle of collage is one of the central principles of art in this century and it seems also to me to be one of the central principles of literature.

Which is echoed by Jonathan Lethem in his remarkable plagiarism, “The Ecstacy of Influence“: “collage…might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first.” (Lethem writes that he heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say that, in defense of sampling, in the trailer for his documentary, Copyright Criminals.)

But When it comes to the use of collage, there’s a big difference between visual artists and writers. Menand:

The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, [is] to treat sentences as though they were found objects.

And just as Caleb Whitefoord, the first writer to make poetry from the newspaper, noted almost 250 years ago, Menand writes that we are already bombarded with juxtapositions of nonsense every day in the daily newspaper:

The illogic, the apparent absurdity, of a Rauschenberg collage or a Barthelme story makes people impatient, because it seems to violate ordinary habits of perception and understanding. But we experience the arbitrary juxtaposition of radically disparate materials every day, when we look at the front page of a newspaper.

Our goal then, with blackout poems, is to treat words, phrases, and sentences as “found objects” and to capture Barthelme’s “faculty of ‘not-knowing'” and to have “faith that, by an intuition operating below the threshold of consciousness…the juxtaposition of unlike to unlike [can] trigger a new kind of awareness…”

Phew!

WE ARE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN SERVING LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

This sketchbook page is what happens when you put me in customer service training for 4 1/2 hours.

The title of this post is the motto of the Ritz-Cartlon.

Here is my own definition of customer service: tricking people into thinking they’re #1.

Here is the secret to life: knowing that every person is the center of his or her own universe and using that knowledge to manipulate them.

Here’s a quote from Don Barthelme:

“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.“

IN WHICH WE TALK ABOUT THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Somewhere in the past two months I’ve lost the joy of waking up in the morning, and, to paraphrase Donald Barthelme and Lynda Barry, not-knowing. Everything seems forced and planned, and spontaneity is dead, just like the work.

No more! I say. Time to get back to the good stuff. Time to play.

I pulled out my Good Books last night, my James Kochalka and my Lynda Barry, and afterwards just started doodling in my notebook, trying to get back to that state.

Then this morning, I was checking up on Lynda, and in addition to a new page from WHAT IT IS, I came across this magical artifact up for auction her ebay account:

That’s right! An original manuscript page of CRUDDY. As Lydna says, (and I know I’ve quoted this before):

I tried not to think about the book unless I was actually writing it and I tend to write in the first person, in the character of someone, and that someone was Roberta….My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself. That draft was seven hundred pages long. I used a hairdryer when I got to the end of each page so I could stack them without smearing. I can do some pretty nice handwriting now. I tried to write it a word at a time like it was being dictated. Cruddy was the result.”

Genius. Check out her interview on Talk of the Nation.

Now back to ~~work~~ play!