Motivational posters - Austin Kleon

Getting in and out of trouble

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

I’m reading Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas and when I was searching her name in the Podcasts app I came across this conversation with writer Sheila Heti:

SHEILA HETI: With my novels… at a certain point I just have to do the thing that I absolutely don’t want to do, that’s going to embarrass me, or that’s going to make me feel like I’m doing something bad. I think there’s always this feeling when I’m making a book that I’m doing something wrong or I’m doing something bad or I’m going to get in trouble. I guess I must like that feeling in some way, because it’s always there. Do you feel that same way?

AMY SILLMAN: Oh totally. I always say that I feel like I start the painting and then I push it until it gets into trouble. And then getting the painting out of trouble is the painting. Bringing it back from a series of terrible accidents and paths it shouldn’t go down.

I’m reminded of Bernard Suits’ definition of playing a game, which is also my favorite definition of art-making: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

In this Art21 interview, Sillman says she asks her students, “What is your unit?” And then they figure out how to build a language out of those units.

When asked what her base unit is, she answers:

I think my unit is trouble. You go to trouble, then you get out of trouble, then you get back in trouble. So trouble or not trouble, getting to it and getting away from it, and getting from one trouble to the other trouble is the unit.

Verbifying with Dylan

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Entries from my trusty *American Heritage Dictionary*

First, off: “verbify” is a word. It means what it sounds like: use something as a verb.

In 2015, the late comedian Norm Macdonald tweeted about the time he met Bob Dylan.

According to Macdonald, they talked about all kinds of stuff, like their favorite books of the Bible. (Norm said he liked Job, Bob said he liked Ecclesiastes.)

At one point, Macdonald said, “I remember he talked over and over about verbs and about ‘verbifying’, how anything could be ‘verbified.’”

Dylan’s notebooks for *Blood on the Tracks*

The writer Tony Conniff wrote a piece about Dylan’s use of verbs and used “Tangled Up in Blue” as an example:

They drove that car as far as they could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best

She turned around to look at him
As he was walkin’ away
She said this can’t be the end
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”

Tangled Up In Blue

“So much of the story,” Conniff writes, “is in the rich, vivid, and active verbs. It’s something you can find in almost any Dylan song.”

Of course, it ain’t like no other songwriter has ever talked about verbs before.

“When you’re writing a song,” said Chuck Berry, “nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”

UPDATE (9/20/2024): A reader sent me this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon about “verbing”:

Filed under: Verbs.

Start here

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

It can take a while when you’re writing to get to what you’re really trying to say.

One of the most helpful marginal comments is “start here.”

You can often cut to the chase in your draft by deleting the first paragraph or two.

For example, here’s how today’s newsletter, “Same but different,” began:

At the end of my shelves of diaries, I keep a little “on this date” stack, and when I have an idle moment or I’m out of ideas, I’ll flip through the stack and see what else I was doing on today’s date.

I do not recommend this practice if you would prefer to think of time as linear, instead of circular. Over and over again, I find old versions of me feeling the same feelings that I’m feeling now and hearing weird echoes of the present in the pages of the past. Some people might find this depressing, but I find it comforting. The sense that I’ve been here before and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be here again.

Just now, flipping through my 2018 diary, I found this entry from September 10th, 2018:

There’s a part in Duncan Hannah’s diary when David Hockney points at a contemporary painting and says, “If art really progressed, then that would be better than a Caravaggio. David Byrne (also once an art student) has said the same— “Presuming that there is such a thing as ‘progress’ when it comes to music… is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present.” Linear progress. Abandon the notion. More like a spiral.

Abe Lincoln once said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.”

My notebooks serve to show me just how old my ideas actually are!