Likeness and likeability

Wednesday, May 8, 2024

The past two newsletters have been about likability and likeness. Last week I wrote about Courtney Love and how freeing it is to shed the desire to be liked:

“Being liked was never my thing,” Love says. At the same time, her ambition was enormous: She wanted to be a rock star in a big way. This capacity, this lack of desire to people please, like all energies, has enormous creative and destructive potential. (This fits in with some of the perfectionist stuff we talked about last week.) To be able to shed the desire to be liked and to be likable sets you free in your work.

It is never lost on me that the collages I fuss over are one thing, but the ones like the collage above, which are made by just sticking random tape scraps on my desk to the page, seem to have something much wilder and free in them. The more I listened to Love, the more the collages seemed to loosen up. (I have a beloved Wayne White painting in my house that says “UNFOLLOW,” but in the studio I have a tiny framed piece that says ”UNLIKE.”)

Last week I wrote about how looking at Ralph Steadman’s drawings of the Kentucky Derby made me want to draw my own and, again, how liberating it is not needing your drawings to be likable to their subjects:

While paging through Steadman’s drawings, I got the urge to draw. So I started to make some blind contour drawings of the TV without looking down at my pen and paper. I drew the bugler, the jockeys, the owners, and even a few horses. The whole time I was thinking about Steadman’s monstrous drawings, how liberating it is to be unafraid of flattering the subject of your drawing. A likeness is not what you’re going for, in fact, you’re going for a kind of unlikeness.

One of the reasons I didn’t connect with writer Nicholson Baker’s recent book about learning to draw, Finding a Likeness, is that he couldn’t seem to enjoy the process of drawing unless the drawing resulted in what he felt was visual accuracy. I remember watching him learn to draw on Twitter and Instagram and noticing a point at which he seemed to get much better, and saying so. Upon reading the book, I realized that point was when he started tracing photographs to begin his drawings. In the book, Baker draws like a kind of anti-Steadman — he gets photos of couples off of Reddit threads and tries to do right by them in his portraits — to find a likable likeness.

We have been living through a “please like me” era — “like us on Facebook!” — but I wonder if the tide will turn soon, and artists will find power in being unlikable again…

A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself

Thursday, June 23, 2022

Stewart Brand once said to Brian Eno: “Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”

In a similar vein, I enjoyed this story of how KC Davis, author of the brilliantly-titled How To Keep House While Drowning, wrote their book:

I had long stared at blank word documents, unable to get my thoughts on the page. I’m actually not a great writer — but I am a pretty good speaker. So I went back through my social channels and transcribed every short form video I had ever done on this topic and that left me with all these disjointed paragraphs. I spent another two months trying to decide how to connect these little vignettes into a “real” book and finally realized that my choices were to publish an imperfect book or not publish the perfect book. So I decided to make each section its own chapter — some only a page long.

I’m reminded of this advice from Matt Zoller Seitz:

Here is a technique I suggest to fellow writers who are blocked for whatever reason: just talk about the piece with a friend, record it, then play it back and write down the good stuff. This method also works with Gchat & similar programs. Go straight to document after.

And how Nicholson Baker wrote his brilliant book The Anthologist by filming himself with a camcorder:

He set up a camcorder and recorded himself presenting in various parts of his house. “I would try to rehearse what it would be like to explain something complicated, like iambic pentameter, in a familiar way,” says Baker, who also found himself singing poetry in his own barn, in Maine. “How would you explain it if you’d been thinking about it for twenty years? So I came up with 40 hours of tape and transcribed the audio.”

I suppose one could skip the transcription step by talking directly into the computer’s speech-to-text?

I know a lot of songwriters do this with song ideas: they record a bunch of voice memos on their phone, but then they make time to listen to what they’ve recorded, often on shuffle.

Regardless of the tech you use, the method is: record yourself thinking out loud, and once you’ve transcribed that into a draft: edit yourself by reading out loud.

Pluck the day

Monday, May 31, 2021

Today I was reminded of this passage from Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book, The Anthologist:

But here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day–it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things–so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant–pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.

If you look that passage up online, the ending thought is usually left out (even I forgot this part):

And yet if it hadn’t been wrongly translated as “seize” would we remember that line now? Probably not. “Pluck the day free”? No way. And would we have remembered “gather ye rosebuds” without the odd mistake of the “ye”? Probably not. It’s their wrongness that kept these ideas alive.

Emphasis mine.

The best thing (cheerful retrospection)

Saturday, July 14, 2018

When I write in my diary, I often try to start with Paul Chowder’s advice in the novel The Anthologist, paraphrased this way by author Nicholson Baker, and quoted in Steal Like An Artist:

If you ask yourself, ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about. If you ask yourself, ‘What happened today?’ it’s very likely that you’re going to remember the worst thing, because you’ve had to deal with it–you’ve had to rush somewhere or somebody said something mean to you–that’s what you’re going to remember. But if you ask what the best thing is, it’s going to be some particular slant of light, or some wonderful expression somebody had, or some particularly delicious salad. I mean, you never know…

Sometimes the Best Thing is not even something I did, but something I watched or listened to:

Sometimes the Best Thing is a stretch:

And sometimes I can’t even come up with it:

Copying is how we learn

Thursday, February 8, 2018

“You start when you’re young and you copy. You straight up copy.”
—Shel Silverstein

All artists begin by copying. (I wrote a book about it.) But what’s instructive about hanging out with kids all day is understanding on a day-to-day kid’s eye level just how natural copying comes to us.

My kids (5 & 2) are gleeful, natural born copycats. Copying is how they wrap their hands and hearts and heads around the world. They not only copy drawings and music and recreate the world with blocks and play, they mimic their parents, they mimic each other, they mimic kids on the playground, etc. Copying and mimicry is as natural to them as breathing. There’s nobody around telling them they should do any differently, nobody saying something dumb like, “Don’t you want to do something original?” So they go about their mimicry, unfettered by any adult notions about originality.

When my son got into engines last year, he spent endless hours copying diagrams out of car repair manuals.

Soon, he was into drawing musical instruments:

And at that point, since he’d landed on one of my own passions, I decided to start copying him. I would copy his drawings into my notebook, trying to steal some of his line style:

Then he started copying sheet music, just for kicks:

I’ve decided to copy that from him, too, and start copying piano pieces I want to learn by hand. There’s a beautiful story told by Paul Elie in Reinventing Bach:

Johann Christoph [Bach’s older brother] kept a collection of sheet music locked in a cabinet with latticed wood doors. Bach, perhaps now twelve, yearned to make music, not run through the exercises his brother assigned him, which he had already mastered. One night while the others were asleep he slipped a hand through the latticework, took hold of a sheet of music with thumb and forefinger, drew it out through the slats, and copied the notation onto a fresh sheet. Working by moonlight, he copied the manuscript the next night, and the next, until the moon entered a new phase. After six months of moonlit nights he had a complete work. Finally one morning he brought the fresh piece of sheet music to the clavier and played it….

Bach himself liked to tell that story, and his point was that this is how he educated himself and learned how to make music—by deeply studying the work of other composers. One of the best ways to internalize someone’s work is to copy it by hand.

Here’s Nicholson Baker, with his advice to writers:

Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose, and you’ll find that the comma means something, that it’s there for a reason, and that that adjective is there for a reason, because the copying out, the handwriting, the becoming an apprentice—or in a way, a servant—to that passage in the book makes you see things in it that you wouldn’t see if you just moved your eyes over it, or even if you typed it. If your verbal mind isn’t working, then stop trying to make it work by pushing, and instead, open that spiral notebook, find a book that you like, and copy out a couple paragraphs.

After our last presidential election, the artist Morgan O’Hara went to the reading room at the New York Public Library with “with a small suitcase of pens, a few Sharpies, papers and copies of the Constitution. I brought old notebooks, half-used drawing pads and loose sheets to share with anyone who might show up.” Then she started copying the Constitution by hand, with other people who showed up joining along. She wrote of the experience:

Hand copying a document can produce an intimate connection to the text and its meaning. The handwriter may discover things about this document that they never knew, a passage that challenges or moves them. They may even leave with a deeper connection to the founders and the country, or even a sense of encouragement.

The cartoonist Lynda Barry writes beautifully about the magic of copying writing and drawings by hand. Here’s a page from Everything, Volume 1:

She says:

I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.

She brings the practice into her classrooms, and every few weeks, has her students get up and look at the notebooks of other students. “They are encouraged to try out anything they see. To copy all they want. To draw in a way they would have never thought of on their own.”

When I was in middle school, my English teacher, Mrs. Neff, had us keep composition books, and sometimes she gave us a prompt to answer, but sometimes she simply wrote a poem on the board for us to copy. She never made it explicit exactly what we were supposed to be learning by copying, but now I know. We were absorbing the poem. (I still do this regularly in my notebook.)

Eventually you can’t help but move from copying into something of your own. My 5-year-old is already figuring this out: A few months ago he started recreating Kraftwerk songs in Garageband, but his versions always had something new and interesting in them. It was his inability to perfectly replicate the song that made something interesting happen.

This process was brilliantly summarized by @neinquarterly on Twitter: