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A chat about writing and drawing with Sam Anderson

Two writers doing the official hand-on-chin writer pose

Last weekend I invited one of my favorite writers, Sam Anderson, staff writer at the NYTimes and author of the fabulous book Boom Town, to celebrate Montaigne’s birthday with me on Instagram Live. I ended up with a tour of Sam’s library in his converted garage and a long chat about the guardian spirits that inspire his workspace, his dictionary stand, the magic of blind contour drawings, the calm of collage, how he writes nonfiction, the writing exercise he warms up with every morning, and yes, our shared love for Montaigne. You can watch the whole thing on IGTV.

 

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The girls

I try my best to read everything Sam Anderson publishes. I am… a fan. (His book Boom Town was one of my favorite books I read last year.) Two weekends ago, he had an essay in The New York Times Magazine about hanging out with “The Last Two Northern Rhinos on Earth,” and last weekend he had a piece called “I Recommend Eating Chips.”

I read the pieces back-to-back — one deeply serious but funny, the other funny but deeply serious — and had the perverse idea to cut and paste them together in my diary. (The way the rhinos are referred to as “The girls” made me think of the way we call my sons “the boys”…)

If I taught a writing class, I would make my students do this exercise. One the one hand, it feels disrespectful to the writer, and on the other, what’s more respectful than the close reading and attention required to perform such an exercise?

This is exactly what writing feels like to me: a weird mixture of reverence and audacity…

Filed under: Sam Anderson

 

The comfort of a pencil

“I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones.”
—Patricia Lockwood

I’m at the buy fancy pencils based purely on the aesthetics of the box phase of quarantine.

(Above: two boxes of Mitsu-Bishis and a box of Tombows. Not shown: a box of Bear Claws I bought for my kids. Oh, how I wish I could visit C.W. Pencil Enterprise in NYC right now!)

I didn’t really care much for pencils until a few years ago when my friend Clive Thompson (author of Coders and Smarter Than You Think) turned me onto Blackwing Palaminos. I love those pencils and try to always have one on me, particularly for marginalia and marking up books.

The pencil is a wonderful piece of technology. (Did you know that pencil marks in a notebook will survive a washing machine?)

Here’s Sam Anderson:

In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.

Edward Carey’s spent Tombow B stubs

A pencil hero of mine is Edward Carey, who has drawn a portrait every day of quarantine with one of his beloved Tombow Bs.

Edward says:

There is something so comforting about a blank piece of paper and the lines the pencil can make upon it. The pencil is such a humble object but such a versatile one: It can make very faint marks or the blackest black. It is also very forgiving: If you make a mistake, you can rub it out. A pencil can be anything, and drawing requires no great setup—just a piece of paper and a sharpener, and then it can be kings or trolls, philosophers or grackles.

When I saw a show of Edward’s at the Austin Public Library, he displayed his Tombow stubs in an ashtray. (He used to be a smoker.) This amused me, because I often “smoke” a cigarette pencil:

I’ve become such a nerd I bought pencil extenders, which seem ridiculous, but make every pencil 100% better by extending their life and giving you a big fat grip.

And for sharpening, I use my friend Carl, who brightens any table top:

Of course, some pencils you never want to sharpen, like this pencil my friend Katie gave me in college:

You never know where you’ll find a good pencil! The Blanton Museum doesn’t allow pens in the galleries, so they have these plain ol’ #2 golf pencils, which have an almost waxy lead that’s pretty nice to mark with (I keep a pencil in the elastic band of my pocket notebook):

And, indeed, as Edward notes, “a pencil can be anything.” Here are some pots made out of pencils by artist Nick Zammeti:

Here’s a video of how he makes them:

Graphite, it turns out, is a great conductor:

Pencils can tell jokes with unintended messages:

There are all kinds of pencils! Here’s John Waters with his mustache pencil, which he carries with him at all times (photo by Hayley Campbell):

There’s a lot more to be said for pencils (and their sharpening), for sure, but I’ll end this post with John Baldessari’s “The Pencil Story”:

Related reading: “HBs are for architects”

Advice from a caterpillar

“Who are you?” asks the Caterpillar, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice replies, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

Alice is changing and she is confused. She looks for sympathy from the Caterpillar. “When you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”

“Not a bit,” says the Caterpillar.

I keep thinking about Sam Anderson’s piece about about what caterpillars actually go through inside their cocoon:

Terrible things happen in there: a campaign of grisly desolation that would put most horror movies to shame. What a caterpillar is doing, in its self–imposed quarantine, is basically digesting itself. It is using enzymes to reduce its body to goo, turning itself into a soup of ex-caterpillar — a nearly formless sludge oozing around a couple of leftover essential organs (tracheal tubes, gut).

Only after this near-total self-annihilation can the new growth begin. Inside that gruesome mush are special clusters of cells called ‘‘imaginal discs,’’ which sounds like something from a Disney movie but which I have been assured is actual biology. Imaginal discs are basically the seeds of crucial butterfly structures: eyes, wings, genitalia and so on. These parts gorge themselves on the protein of the deconstructed caterpillar, growing exponentially, taking form, becoming real. That’s how you get a butterfly: out of the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar.

What will we look like when we emerge from our own meltdowns?

I am trying to remember: Beautiful things grow out of shit.

Blind contour drawings

For the past week, I’ve been making a blind contour self-portrait — drawing without looking at the page — each morning to warm up my diary.

If you look at the images in order, it looks like my face is re-arranging itself. I love that.

My friend Wendy MacNaughton assigns these drawings in her workshops. My friend Jason Polan used to do a lot of his Every Person in New York drawings this way.

Sam Anderson, one of my favorite writers, wrote a wonderful Letter of Recommendation for blind contour drawing five years ago in the New York Times. (How in the hell did I miss that?)

He wrote of his frustrations with trying to draw in his adult life: “The problem, fundamentally, was one of control — I had too much of it, over too tiny a territory, and I wasn’t willing to surrender it. You can’t control your way out of control.”

(I’m thinking of Brian Eno’s control <–> surrender diagram that he likes to draw.)

Then an artist friend suggested to him he draw without looking at the page.

“For the first time in my adult life, I was genuinely surprised by something I had drawn.”

He later discovered that blind contour drawing is an old art school exercise:

Freshmen at art school are forced to draw blindly for hours. It’s the fastest way to break them out of old bad habits, to make them unlearn lifeless conventions. The goal of blind drawing is to really see the thing you’re looking at, to almost spiritually merge with it, rather than retreat into your mental image of it. Our brains are designed to simplify — to reduce the tumult of the world into order. Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice — a gateway to pure being. It forces us to study the world as it actually is.

(You can see Sam’s drawings on his Instagram. And go read Boom Town while you’re at it.)

I think a lot of people come to contour drawing in Betty Edwards’ classic book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but I actually prefer the way Kimon Nicolaïdes writes about it in his 1941 book, The Natural Way to Draw. (Edwards sort of waves away Nicolaïdes’ emphasis that “students imagine that they were touching the form as they drew,” but I find his multi-sensory emphasis much more convincing than her left brain / right brain explanation.)

Nicolaïdes writes:

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see — to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilizes as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time. Although you use your eyes, you do not close up the other senses — rather, the reverse, because all the senses have a part in the sort of observation you are to make.

He tells the reader to sit close, learn forward, and sync up a point on the thing being drawn with the eye while simultaneously syncing up pencil to paper. “Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.” He says only then should you start to move your eye and pencil along the edges of the thing being drawn, slowly, slowly. “Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight.”

This exercise should be done slowly, searchingly, sensitively. Take your time. Do not be too impatient or too quick. There is no point in finishing any one contour study. In fact, a contour study is not a thing that can be ‘finished.’ It is having a particular type of experience, which can continue as long as you have the patience to look.


If you’re looking for a way to loosen up and bring life to your drawings, try drawing without looking at the paper.

How to turn your books into time capsules


Years ago I borrowed this copy of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler from my father-in-law, and when I opened it up I found Calvino’s 1985 NYTimes obit and stories from a 1983 Harper’s.

I was so surprised and delighted by these unexpected artifacts that I decided to start saving clippings in my own books. Here’s my copy of John Ashbery’s They Knew What They Wanted, in which I stuffed a NYTimes review and a photo of his collage desk.

Here’s my copy of Lonesome Dove with a July 2010 Texas Monthly map of the plot of the book and my copy of Salt Fat Acid Heat with Wendy’s piece about writers’ snacks, “The Raw and the Cooked,” from 2011:

Saving clippings this way turns each book into a time capsule. The next time I open one of these books, a paper treasure will fall out. A little surprise for my future self. (Or whoever else cracks it open.)

“Time capsules are notoriously disappointing,” writes Sam Anderson in Boom Town. “They are supposed to be magic existential wormholes to a lost reality, but instead they are almost always empty, damaged, full of junk — further depressing evidence (as if we needed any) of the absolute tyranny of time.”

These time capsules, however, have never disappointed me. They always delight.

The right book at the right time

Melville’s marginalia
Melville’s marginalia

I’ve been re-reading Moby-Dick again. In some ways, I like thinking about the writing of Moby-Dick as much as I like reading it.

Right now I’m most interested in Melville as a reader. Moby-Dick began its life as a more straightforward whaling adventure, but at some point, driven by his epic reading habit, Melville got really ambitious, and expanded it into the monster it is now. Although it would prove financially disastrous, Melville felt pulled beyond writing what he knew would be popular with his contemporaries. (“What I most feel moved to write, that is banned, —it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”) A lot of this feeling was exacerbated by the quality of the books he was reading. (Let that be a lesson to you: read the Big Dogs, and you might be doomed by your lit’ry ambitions!)

Here’s how David Herd puts it in his introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition:

Coming to literature relatively late in life, Melville did so not with the reluctance of an unwilling recipient of some institutionally imposed reading-list, but with the wide-eyed eagerness of the autodidact, hungry for the resources of the world’s great books… Melville never made any mystery of his sources, passing them on (not showing them off) in the ‘Extracts’ with which Moby-Dick begins: the Bible, Montaigne, Shakespeare…. [T]he more he read, the more Melville wanted to emulate what he read… he wanted to find a way of writing that would enable him to meld together all that he found valuable in other works. And this, more or less, as his diaries and letters describe it, was the state of mind, the state of readiness, in which he sat down to write Moby-Dick: full to the brim with the world’s literature, in a state of something like intellectual frenzy.

In Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick narrows it down just a bit, and points to two giant reading events that changed the course of Melville’s writing. First, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and read his stories. Second, he read Shakespeare for the first time:

Hawthorne had a lot to do with the making of Moby-Dick, but the novel truly began in February 1849 when Melville purchased a large-type edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The eyes that would become so inflamed during the composition of Moby-Dick were already beginning to bother him. “[C]hancing to fall in with this glorious edition,” he wrote to a friend of the large-type volumes, “I now exult over it, page after page.”

Melville’s example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. For Melville, the timing could not have been better, and in the flyleaf of the last volume of his seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays are notes written during the composition of Moby-Dick about Ahab, Pip, and other characters.

(You can see some of these notes on the wonderful website Melville’s Marginalia.)

William Giraldi sums it up in “The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia”:

Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.

sam anderson marginalia
Sam Anderson’s marginalia in Annie Dillard’s Living Like Weasels

While reading about Melville’s reading habits, I thought of Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, and perhaps our greatest contemporary celebrator of marginalia. Just yesterday, Sam wrote a beautiful little tweet thread about coming across the right book at the right time:

I was at my favorite place () and found this beautifully tattered 1st edition of [Annie Dillard’s] *Teaching a Stone to Talk*. Realized I’ve read pieces of it but never the whole thing. So I spent $14.50, cracked it open on the plane home, & got IMMEDIATELY EXTREMELY ECSTATIC.

He goes on to sample some of his favorite excerpts, and then gets to the magic of books catalysts for writing:

maybe the best thing: reading this made me want to write. Some of my best writing—including the 1st stuff I ever published—started as marginalia in my favorite books: Didion, McPhee, Baldwin, Zora NH, DFW & on & on. Them doing their voice flows into you doing your voice.

In conclusion, books are the best technology. This cost less than $15, put me in a totally new & better headspace w/in 15 seconds, & I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Also, it started me writing an essay of my own. And that was just the first 5 pages.

Melville’s notes in the back of Shakespeare vs. Anderson’s notes in the back of Dillard

This, again, is the magic of reading with a pencil: it occupies a space somewhere between reading and writing, a crucial step towards turning reading into writing. And reading the right book at the right time with pencil in hand can lead to your best work.

Reading with a pencil

Oliver Sacks’ writing in a Noam Chomsky book

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
—George Steiner

Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated books on Twitter:

Sacks “loved to write notes on the pages of books he was reading — thoughts, ideas, arguments with the author, diagrams.” What a delight it must be to go through such a library (of 500+ books) and see Sacks’ raw thoughts in margins and endpapers:

This is, of course, an ancient practice called marginalia. (A nice, short read on the subject is Mark O’Connell’s piece, “The Marginal Obsession With Marginalia.”)

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Patricia Lockwood put it this way:

 There’s a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you’re going along in a way that’s, like, half creating it as you go. And you’re also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you’re sifting for what could be gold.

Panning for gold, or “shopping for images,” as Allen Ginsberg puts it in “A Supermarket in California.”

Mark Twain’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives

Sometimes marginalia is the next best thing to punching an author in the face. I’m a huge fan of Sam Anderson’s “A Year in Marginalia” in which he posts snapshots of his marginal comments:

Sam Anderson marginalia

The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain.

Whether you’re panning for gold or slinging shit at a dead man, marginalia turns reading into writing. (See Billy Collins’ poem.) My friend John T. Unger once said to me, “Every piece of art I’ve ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s notes on Puzo’s The Godfather

In Sam Anderson’s “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,” he points out that marginalia used to be more of a social practice:

[P]eople would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers…. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” — a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

I own books that were marked up by my father-in-law and my wife when they were in high school. Reading through them is like a kind of time travel — get to visit with them in the past. Sometimes I imagine my kids reading one of my books and coming across a note from me…

My notes in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

I love this idea of marginalia as a way to turn a book into a medium for conversation — a kind of literary note-passing. G.K. Chesterton’s once went through a friend’s newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as Platitudes Undone.) Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus. (I was delighted to see readers swapping their marginalia for my book, Show Your Work!)

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Suttree

Finally, marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience. Here’s Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in their classic, How To Read A Book:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Read with a pencil! (I recommend Blackwing Palaminos.)

Crop rotation

From Sam Anderson’s great profile of writer John McPhee:


I grew up surrounded by farm fields — soy beans or corn, depending on the year. When the beans were in, you could still see the horizon, and everything felt wide open, but when the corn was high, the horizon was gone, and you were walled in…

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