Writer’s block is trying to tell you something

Thursday, August 24, 2023

A page from Joe Brainard’s “People of the World: Relax!”

In a terrific mini Q&A, Lauren Groff (author of the wonderful novel Matrix, whose followup I cannot wait for) says she thinks writer’s block is an “umbrella term for a series of very different pains.”

1. The “fear of imperfection, which can be combatted by a writer carefully training herself to let her work be messy and impermanent.” Groff gets over this by writing longhand and not typing on the computer until she has a good sense of the piece.

2. “Being impatient with your work and not allowing it the time it needs to develop.” (Her teacher, Loorie Moore, told her to “relax” and not rush things and know that nothing is ever wasted.)

3. “The canary toppling over in the coalmine, the way that your work is telling you that you’re going down the wrong path and you need to reconsider some larger issues.” For this she suggests what I call the put it in the put it in the drawer and walk out the door strategy. And while you’re letting it sit, read, read, read:

During that time away, be in your chair every day, but be there by reading everything you can get your hands on, and you’ll find a solution in the hundreds of thousands of words you’ve read.

(For me, problems of output are usually problems of input.)

All of this reminded me of Joy Williams, who had my favorite take on writer’s block: “Perhaps more people should have it.”

Joe Brainard’s I Remember

Saturday, December 12, 2020

I remember Saturday night baths and Sunday morning comics.

Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a 150-page memoir in which every sentence begins with “I remember…” Here’s a recording of him reading from it:

It seems like I Remember would make a great Twitter feed, but unlike something Moby-Dick, I think the sentences lose some of their power out of context. There’s a propulsive force to the book that runs on repetition and accumulation: little mundane bits and pieces adding up to something sublime.

(The book is reproduced in full in this lovely Library of Congress edition of his collected writings.)

Here’s the first page:

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more favorite books, check out my reading years.

Pansy precursors

Saturday, May 23, 2020

A reader sent me this amazing find: a special “Poet’s Number” of Vick’s Floral Guide from 1893, which not only contains quotations from famous writers about flowers and gardening, but also this family of “Pansy Sailors” which show up throughout the pages. Certainly, they are ancestors of my Pansy Luchadores!

I can’t find any real explanation for them or any evidence that they were used in other Vick’s guides.

Here’s a little bit about James Vick and his illustrated floral guides:

Vick’s Floral Guide and Catalog, first produced in 1862, proved to be the perfect outlet for his expertise as a printer, writer, publisher and gardener. Filled with charming wood-cut engravings and vivid color plates (by some accounts, Vick was the first to use color illustrations in a U.S. seed catalog), the Floral Guide quickly became the most popular seed catalog of its day. “Vicks Floral Guide came like the first breath of spring, with promise of future bloom,” raves a typical magazine review. “Vicks catalog, like his seeds and plants, is first class. It is finely illustrated, on good paper, and with two beautiful colored plates.”

This particular illustration is mentioned in A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siècle Art:

Inverts were also called, from at least the 1880s on, “pansies,” “buttercups,” “daisies,” “violets,” “blossoms,” and even more generally, “horticultural lads.” A Vick’s Seeds advertisement from the 1890s conflates the already queer figures of the pansy and the sailor into a suggestive hybrid. The back cover of a seed catalogue, the image depicts two flowery sailors, overseen by their captain, raising anchor. The anchor’s chain for the moment imprisons the blooming asters, but when the “sailor lads so bold and free / Put out again,” the poem at the bottom right assures us, dissemination will occur.

“A pansy is a loaded subject,” wrote John Ashbery in a 1997 retrospective of Joe Brainard’s work, then pointed out the “seed-packet look” of Brainard’s paintings and collages of pansies.

Compare those pieces to this: