In this week’s list of 10 newsletter:
- my message to graduates
- the album cover for Alice Cooper’s School’s Out
- the joy of pinning words to the wall
And more! Read it here.
In this week’s list of 10 newsletter:
And more! Read it here.
In today’s list of 10 newsletter:
…and more. Read it for free here.
Today’s newsletter is a zine about Aristotle’s “Doctrine of the Mean”:
When I was hanging out with Ryan Holiday last Monday, I asked him about the Stoic virtues he’s currently writing about. I admitted that in the abstract, I didn’t find virtues all that helpful to me in my work! It often feels like vices — like envy or anger — are more motivating and bring about better ideas. (My books, even though they’re fairly positive, are often written out of a negative approach that’s fueled by my disgust with the world.)
Ryan brought up Aristotle’s “Doctrine of the Mean,” the idea that virtue is located in the middle of two vices. Each virtue is “a golden mean” between deficiency and excess. A path between two extremes. (Confucius and others wrote about this, too.)
You can read the rest of the newsletter and download the zine here.
In today’s newsletter, I wrote about cactuses and knowing what to leave in and what to leave out in your work:
This weekend Meg performed surgery on Giuseppe, our crested Mexican fencepost cactus. (Imported from Italy, hence the name — ha!) Giuseppe had sprouted some offshoots that were keeping him from growing.
As you probably know by now, gardening is one of my favorite metaphors for creative work. (See also: proplifting, etc.) Propagation from cuttings is particularly fascinating to me: by severing a branch of a cactus, you can then regrow it as a new plant. (One little detail I find significant: it’s best to let the cuttings sit and dry and callous before you repot them. Time — always a magic ingredient in our work!)
These prickly pear in our front yard, for example, started out as single little pieces transplanted from our friend’s back yard. (I have been meaning to write for a while about how prickly pear really let you see exponential growth in slow motion.)
Thinking about propagation as a metaphor made me think about “relocating your darlings” — the idea that we can cut things out of our work that we love but don’t seem to be working with the piece as a whole. If we plant those cuttings in new soil, we can grow them into a whole new thing.
Read the rest here.
Filed under: gardening
Marc Weidenbaum wrote some kind words about my blackout work, which inspired me to take a day and do some “comfort work.”
I wrote about it in the latest newsletter:
Whenever somebody says something nice about the blackouts, I think, “Oh, maybe I should make some more of those.”) Marc was interested in the source material for the poem he shared, and I had to admit to him, “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — I try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.” (Almost every blackout I make is from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times — the ones in this email are all from the August 28, 2022 issue.
Read more here.
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