I dig this @paulmignard summary of my book Keep Going — especially the Sisyphus on the left and the Corita on the right.
I actually tried to make a drawing of Sisyphus for chapter one of the book, but cut it:
Unboxing
A few days ago the big box of author copies of Keep Going arrived on my front step. This is one of my favorite points in the book timeline. I’m trying to savor the moment of holding something in my hand that I feel is the very best I can do.
Here’s the beginning of a Robert Frost’s “A Prayer in Spring”:
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
It’s spring outside, but the harvest is in, and it is a good one.
Camus and Corita
Yesterday started with the news of Scott Walker’s death, and I thought of that great Camus quote on the back of Scott 4.
Then, during a recording for the Stacking Benjamins podcast, host Joe Saul-Sehy described to me a Camus quote he saw in a piece at the Detroit Institute of Arts. “It was handwritten on this print of a bag of Wonder Bread…”
“Corita!” I said, and quickly found the piece and sent it to him.
The quote comes from “Create Dangerously,” a lecture delivered by Camus at the University of Uppsala in December 1957 (collected in the book Resistance, Rebellion, and Death).
Here it is in full:
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.
Corita used the Camus quote to emphasize that the artist can’t turn away from the world, but must find their work within it.
“Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living,” Camus wrote. “Instead, let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of the battle.”
If you want to learn more about Corita, I write about her in chapters 5 and 10 of Keep Going. (She was a major guardian spirit, and looked down from the bulletin board while I was writing.)
PBS’s The Art Assignment also recently shared this great 15-minute video about her work. It has a bunch of stuff I didn’t know, like how all art majors at Immaculate Heart had to be English minors, and Corita’s concept of “Plork,” a combination of play and work, the “one responsible act necessary for human advancement” that represents “the ecstasy we feel when work and play are one.” (I wish I’d remembered that bit of Learning By Heart when I wrote the “Your Work is Play” chapter of Keep Going!)
Like waiting for Christmas morning
Today a podcaster asked me what being in “The Gulp” was like.
“It’s like I’m waiting on Christmas morning… and I’m Santa Claus. But instead of going down the chimney and delivering presents, I have to knock on the door and ask them if they want to buy a book.”
We made a book trailer
https://www.instagram.com/p/BtzWVhFgOqJ/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
We were having dinner and I was trying to think up ideas for a Keep Going book trailer and I thought, “Why not just have Owen letter it?” (He’s six.) I asked him and he said sure and we shot it right there at the kitchen table and I edited it on my laptop in the bathroom while he took a tub. (I’m not sure if it’s going to be the book trailer, but it’s a book trailer!)