The 5-year-old has been coming out to the studio with me while I finish up the back matter for the new book. He wrote about it in his diary (above) and then I came back from working the other afternoon and he had drawn an ad for his books. (Including the classic, How To Make Your Life Go On Forever.)
How it usually works: The minute I finish a book, I find something that would’ve been perfect for it.
Yesterday I got a big overnighted envelope in the mail with the printout of the first pass of the next book. I dare say, it’s pretty damned good! Here are some teaser pics of some spreads:
I walked into the kitchen to tell the 5-year-old that it was tubtime, and this scene unfolded:
Unfortunately, we have to wait eight months for it to come out in April of next year, which is actually super quick in publishing time, but glacial on one’s nerves. Soon the book will enter what Jonathan Lethem calls “The Gulp”: “that interlude where the book has quit belonging to you, but doesn’t belong to anyone else yet.”
There I was, reading Horace’s Epistles, dreaming of my upcoming vacation, dreaming of expatriating, even, and he slaps me across the face from 2,000 years away. (As he tends to do.)
My friend Alan Jacobs, who was the one who got me into Horace, suggests that the poet might “be the man of our social-media moment — the man who shows us another and better way.” He quotes the letter “To Maecenas,” i.18:
what do you think I pray for?
“May I continue to have what I have right now,
Or even less, as long as I’m self-sufficient.
If the gods should grant me life, though just for a while,
May I live my life to myself, with books to read,
And food to sustain me for another year,
And not to waver with the wavering hours.”
“Not to waver with the wavering hours…” There’s a motto.
I heard Richard Strauss’s “Waltz Sequence No. 1” from Der Rosenkavalier on KMFA in the car this morning and it made me want to go home and rewatch Don Hertzfeldt’s marvelous short film, World of Tomorrow:
Sometimes when I get low, I think about Emily’s monologue:
Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away, and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well, and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.
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