Sometimes I start a collage in my diary but then I just let it sit until it tells me what else it wants. (This one was started around Christmas.)
Blexbolex’s Ballad
If you’re lucky, the overlap in the Venn diagram of books you love to read and books your kids love to read is more than a sliver.
Blexbolex’s Ballad is a mysterious little book. Starting with a simple, 3-page chapter about a child who walks home from school (“The school, the road, home.”) the second chapter adds a page in between each previous page (“The school, the street, the road, the forest, home.”) and the author continues that pattern for 7 chapters, eventually culminating in a story of over 50 pages.
There’s a wonderful post over at Picturebook Makers where Blexbolex talks about his process:
The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home.
The OuLiPo-inspired hijinx would be impressive on their own, but what’s truly amazing to me is that for a book that feels so analog and textured, almost all of the artwork was done digitally:
The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.
This process makes the book something that feels both ancient and futuristic, or rather, simply out-of-time.
This post is the first in a new Bookshelf series in which I’ll be sharing one of my favorite books every Saturday.
Scraps into poetry
While many writers are turning to the calm of collage as an escape from needing words, Hanif Abdurraqib is turning to self-collage and assembling his leftover scraps into poetry:
[I am] recycling my way toward a feeling of productivity. I copy and paste email responses that work across multiple inquiries. If I don’t feel up for making a morale-boosting lunch, I pile some leftovers into a bowl and hope for the best. I’ve found myself doing this with poems, as well. Piling leftovers onto the page and seeing what makes sense. I don’t throw away drafts of my poems. I keep them all in a folder on my computer. If I cared for something enough to write it, I care for it enough to imagine that it might be useful later.
About once a week, I’ve been digging through my folder of misfit poems and constructing new ones out of them. It’s like a joyful puzzle. The work of writing is already done. The work of arrangement is where the excitement is.
This is a fine method for artists of all kinds. A little hoarding goes a long way. You never know when a discarded scrap from something can be turned into something new. (Keep Going contains a whole section that didn’t fit into Show Your Work!)
Sticky note collages
In my never-ending borderline-OCD quest to never waste anything and make something of my by-products, I’ve started keeping a pad of sticky notes on my desk and when I have unused scraps from my collages I add them to a note. Eventually the note becomes its own collage, sometimes more interesting than the “real” collage I was working on. (The note above was made while tidying my desk and talking to the friend on the phone.)
Something you can live with
I’m an imperfectionist when I’m working, so I’m usually puzzled by perfectionists and their problems.
“I figure I’m going to be living with this song for a long time,” says Weird Al Yankovic, in regards to his painstaking process of crafting parody lyrics. “We’ll probably be doing it onstage for the rest of my life. It’s got to be right.”
I like this argument for craft, especially for books. Make it good enough that you can live with it for the rest of your life! Or, if that’s too much (and it is, really) make it good enough that you can live with it for at least the next couple years while you hawk it…
A secret sentence
Sometimes when I begin a project, I want to slip my vision of the finish into a fortune cookie, forget about it, then crack it open at the end and see how close I got.
Talking to my friend Dan Roam about the structure of Keep Going, I mentioned that I was thinking a bunch about time when I wrote it, which is why it starts with days and ends with seasons. Time in the micro and a macro sense.
“I didn’t even notice that,” Dan said. “It’s like an Easter Egg!”
We got to talking about things you hide in your work that you know nobody’s ever going to see just to keep the work interesting for you.
Since we both write books, I confessed that with each book I usually have a secret sentence that I write down somewhere but don’t show to anybody. That sentence is sort of my North Star for the project, the thing I can rely on if I get lost.
The sentence usually doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than me. And sometimes it’s pretty dumb. (When I was writing Show Your Work! the sentence was: “What if Brian Eno wrote a content strategy book?”)
I mentioned this to my wife and she pointed out it’s a little like the little messages Reynolds Woodcock sews into his dresses in Phantom Thread. (I’ve seen that movie probably six times since it came out a few years ago.) The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has talked about how close he needs to keep his movies when he’s making them, before the film is exposed.
Which reminds me: Sometimes readers are upset by the idea that I might want to keep secrets. “Aren’t you the guy who said we should share?” Yes, but the message of Show Your Work! was never share everything with everybody. The real message was: Show the scraps and bits and by-products of your process that you think would be useful or interesting to the people you’re trying to reach, and anything you need to hold back, hold it back, and keep it as close as you need it to be, until the work is done.
Art is the fossil record of the artist
I always keep a pencil handy when my friend John T. Unger is talking.
This bit came from us discussing how my books are the by-products of my process of figuring out how this stuff is done.
Art is much more interesting and makes a lot more sense (at least for the artist, anyways) if you think of the finished works as just the remains — the “fossil record” — of a process of looking, thinking, making, etc. (No more is this on display when we clean up my 4-year-old’s drawings at the end of the day.)
By the way, the reason John is so quotable (I think I’ve quoted him in the past three books) is that in a past life he was a poet. Here is one of my favorite stories of his, which I retold in Show Your Work!:
Operational transparency
A few months ago, the Harvard Business Review ran a piece by Ryan Buell on what he calls “Operational Transparency.” Here is the summary:
Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are partitioned away from the operation, they are less likely to fully understand and appreciate the work going on behind the scenes, thereby placing a lower value on the product or service being offered…. Managers should experiment with operational transparency—the deliberate design of windows into and out of the organization’s operations to help customers understand and appreciate the value being added. Witnessing the hidden work performed on their behalf makes customers more satisfied, more willing to pay, and more loyal.
If this sounds familiar, it’s a fancier way of saying, “Show Your Work!”
Today I visited my friend Wendy MacNaughton’s studio in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Piled and pinned everywhere was the physical evidence of how hard she works on her stories. She showed me a bug she was painting for a new story and now I can’t wait to read it.
Earlier, we were having lunch at the bar in Piccino and the chefs were preparing a lemon meringue tart. Seeing their delicate work, we immediately ordered one to split.
What windows into your own operations can you open for the people you serve?
Walker Percy’s problems of reentry
In Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, he writes, “Exhilaration comes from naming the unnamable and hearing it named.” I was exhilarated as a reader at the point of the book when he explains a phenomenon I’d thought about, but never had a name for: “reentry.” (Actually, I had used that word before, but only when talking about being on the road and then coming back home to family life — never for the making and consuming of art itself.)
[W]hat is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?
Percy points out that “the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers.” Percy then lists a bunch of reentry options, such as anesthesia (drugs), travel, sex, suicide, etc. (One needs to remember that the whole book is both brilliant and tongue-in-cheek, which can be hard, especially for American readers. “People in America are so binary,” said Ian Svenonius, whose books I love and also keep you wondering is-he-serious-or-joking? “They think that if something’s funny that it’s not serious. If you can manage to be funny, that doesn’t mean that things don’t mean anything.”)
One of the reasons I’m such a huge fan of a daily routine and the Groundhog Day approach to working is that it attempts to minimize these exact problems of re-entry that Percy outlines. By scheduling little doses of daily transcendence in which you work on your art, you can pop in and out of your everyday life without becoming a horrible parent or drug addict or total maniac. (Many argue that that’s just the price of Great Art, but I’ve never never bought it.)
Detritus
After I posted about her creative residue, Wendy sent me a link to a show she was in at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art last year called “Detritus.”
Detritus explores the leftover scraps and byproducts of the art-making process that artists do not discard for a number of compelling reasons.
Wendy exhibited empty sketchbooks with all the pages torn out. (More at KQED: “ICA’s ‘Detritus’ Looks at What Artists Leave Behind.”)
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