One result of the pandemic is that I’m actually able to attend author events at the same frequency I did before I had children. Last week I watched Edward Carey discuss writing and drawing his re-telling of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale, The Swallowed Man (and one of my favorite reads of last spring), while highlighting treasures from the Ransom Center here in Austin, Texas. (You can watch the whole talk on YouTube.) Here are my notes:
“I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones.”
—Patricia Lockwood
I’m at the buy fancy pencils based purely on the aesthetics of the box phase of quarantine.
(Above: two boxes of Mitsu-Bishis and a box of Tombows. Not shown: a box of Bear Claws I bought for my kids. Oh, how I wish I could visit C.W. Pencil Enterprise in NYC right now!)
I didn’t really care much for pencils until a few years ago when my friend Clive Thompson (author of Coders and Smarter Than You Think) turned me onto Blackwing Palaminos. I love those pencils and try to always have one on me, particularly for marginalia and marking up books.
The pencil is a wonderful piece of technology. (Did you know that pencil marks in a notebook will survive a washing machine?)
Here’s Sam Anderson:
In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.
A pencil hero of mine is Edward Carey, who has drawn a portrait every day of quarantine with one of his beloved Tombow Bs.
Edward says:
There is something so comforting about a blank piece of paper and the lines the pencil can make upon it. The pencil is such a humble object but such a versatile one: It can make very faint marks or the blackest black. It is also very forgiving: If you make a mistake, you can rub it out. A pencil can be anything, and drawing requires no great setup—just a piece of paper and a sharpener, and then it can be kings or trolls, philosophers or grackles.
When I saw a show of Edward’s at the Austin Public Library, he displayed his Tombow stubs in an ashtray. (He used to be a smoker.) This amused me, because I often “smoke” a cigarette pencil:
I’ve become such a nerd I bought pencil extenders, which seem ridiculous, but make every pencil 100% better by extending their life and giving you a big fat grip.
And for sharpening, I use my friend Carl, who brightens any table top:
Of course, some pencils you never want to sharpen, like this pencil my friend Katie gave me in college:
You never know where you’ll find a good pencil! The Blanton Museum doesn’t allow pens in the galleries, so they have these plain ol’ #2 golf pencils, which have an almost waxy lead that’s pretty nice to mark with (I keep a pencil in the elastic band of my pocket notebook):
And, indeed, as Edward notes, “a pencil can be anything.” Here are some pots made out of pencils by artist Nick Zammeti:
Here’s a video of how he makes them:
Graphite, it turns out, is a great conductor:
TIL that the graphite in pencils is conductive ??? pic.twitter.com/HqLMRElHcd
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) August 4, 2017
Pencils can tell jokes with unintended messages:
There are all kinds of pencils! Here’s John Waters with his mustache pencil, which he carries with him at all times (photo by Hayley Campbell):
There’s a lot more to be said for pencils (and their sharpening), for sure, but I’ll end this post with John Baldessari’s “The Pencil Story”:
Related reading: “HBs are for architects”
After Edward Carey (author of Little) finished writing his first book in 1999, he wrote to his hero, Alasdair Gray. This was Gray’s response.
…please tell anyone you know in the writing game that I’m too selfish to be of use to anyone. If you photocopy this letter and pass it around I will think it a favor.
That handwriting! Exquisite. I want to copy every letter.
I’d never heard of Gray or his work until a few years ago, when Elizabeth McCracken (author of Bowlaway, and, not coincidentally, Edward’s wife) sent me this charming video of him talking about his writing and art:
“I couldn’t make a living by either of them,” he said, “so the writing helped the painting and the painting helped the writing.”
I particularly loved his response to the ever-worn-out question, “Can writing be taught?”
Of course! I couldn’t write before I was was taught! That’s why they give it to you in primary schools. Writing and speaking are things that have to be learned first. Some people at a certain stage think that they don’t have to learn any more. If you’re very interested in words then you try to keep on learning more. And the best way, of course, is by reading other writers. Good ones! Or even bad ones are better than none to begin with.
Delightful video. Do watch.
Related reading: Edward Carey at the APL
A few days ago, my friend Wendy MacNaughton (who has a terrific new column in the New York Times) posted this “Mistakes” jar, filled with eraser shavings “and tears.”
Einstein supposedly said that creativity is the residue of wasted time, but I think a lot about the residue of creativity. Sometimes that residue is a work of art, but more often than not, it’s a tiny trail of waste —debris, dust, shavings, clippings, trash, etc.
I love it when artists collect and display this residue. (Sometimes they even sell it.) One of my favorite parts of Edward Carey’s show at the Austin Public Library was a bowl of his pencils, used all the way to the stumps.
Years ago, I saw a show of book carver Brian Dettmer, and there was a box of his X-acto blades on a pedestal. (He estimates he goes through “15-50 blades a day, usually switching over to a new blade every ten minutes to half hour.”
In 2013, designer Craighton Berman ran a funny, tongue-in-cheek Kickstarter called “The Campaign for the Accurate Measurement of Creativity.” It included a “Sharpener Jar” — “a product designed to quantify creative output.”
Since I wrote Show Your Work! in 2013, I’ve been interested in how artists share their process, how social media allows you to share when there’s nothing, really, to share, and how sometimes the scraps and ephemera from our process can turn into their own attractions. (Above: Amanda Palmer’s sticky notes posted while working on The Art of Asking: “[I] was trying to find a way to share their colorful beauty without also revealing their content.”)
Oh, and while I’m riffing: “Butt Pattern,” from the #MTAMuseum (more here) is this idea of process-residue-as-art taken to its most extreme and funny conclusion.
I actually left the house last night to attend Edward Carey’s art show opening & book release for Little at the Central Library gallery. It was a special treat because after Edward read, he was interviewed by his wife, Elizabeth McCracken. (It was their first time onstage together.)
I’m inspired by how much pictures and words are fully integrated in Carey’s work. His stories often start with a drawing, and he’s drawing constantly while writing. (I wondered about how much his visual thinking makes it into his classroom work — he mentioned that in his courses at UT he talks to his students about maps and the importance of knowing the worlds of your characters.) If you read this blog regularly, you might remember his bit on productive procrastination:
The exhibit (up until January) is very well done, and organized by book. (The second great exhibit I’ve seen in the space — the first was Lance Letscher.) Here is original artwork for The Iremonger Trilogy:
And here’s a drawing from the new one:
Carey’s work is wonderfully dark, but with a good splash of humor. (It’s fitting that earlier in the day my 3-year-old was drawing pages out of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.)
There’s a lot to like in the show, but my favorite thing might’ve been this bowl of his pencil stubs — Tombow Bs, I think— which resembled an ashtray with cigarette butts. (Carey is a former chain smoker.)
Productive procrastination for writers who draw: Going through my notebook, I found this clipping from a piece by Edward Carey (author of The Iremonger Trilogy) about how he works.
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