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Nobody’s gonna give you permission.
Nobody’s gonna welcome you into the club.
Nobody’s gonna pat you on the back and say “well done.”
All you can do is keep making the work you want to see in the world.
Nobody’s gonna give you permission.
Nobody’s gonna welcome you into the club.
Nobody’s gonna pat you on the back and say “well done.”
All you can do is keep making the work you want to see in the world.
“No one really says ‘get a life’ anymore,” @perpetua tweeted earlier this month, “and frankly people need to ~get a life~ far more urgently now than they did back in the late 80s/early 90s.”
I tweeted back, “I think there was more life to get.”
Obviously we were both joking, but the sense of exhaustion can be quite real, the feeling that we’ve depleted our inner and natural resources and we’ve explored what there is to explore.
This feeling is amplified by living in a city like Austin, Texas, where you’re constantly hearing about how much better it was before you got here. In a recent piece on Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Sean O’Neal writes:
Austinites carry a default attitude of “You just missed it”—as in, all the really cool stuff already happened. As Linklater pointed out in his post-show Q&A, that’s something he and his friends heard back in the eighties from all the hippie cowboys who’d seen the city’s “true” heyday in the sixties and seventies. Linklater pointed to the Slacker scene where local noise rockers Ed Hall played their song “Sedrick” to a near-empty Continental Club. Its lyrics, Linklater said, perfectly sum up the Austin point of view: “Things were so much better before you were here / . . . So much better in the past / I had myself a real gas.”
Again, this is a feeling, a feeling that can be alleviated by a single person saying, “You know, I lived here then, and it wasn’t that great.” (I think all the time about Patti Smith pointing out that the New York City of the 70s and 80s that we romanticize was filthy, bankrupt, and dangerous.)
This feeling that “it’s all been done” is amplified and exacerbated by artistic pretensions.
On a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was talking about reading Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence early on and how unconcerned he is now with being new or original. He recalled a speech he heard by Brian Eno about his early ambient work:
It’s hard to explain, but it was very easy to be new at that time…. He had gone and seen Cluster and the early Krautrock bands. And no one had thought, “I’m going to put all these things together…” At that time, there was still a lot of ground unclaimed. The time we live in now, there’s far less unclaimed ground.
“Which I think is normal, you know?” he throws in at the end, and yes, this feeling is extremely normal, and has been normal for at least 4,000 years. In the new afterword to the 10th anniversary edition of Steal Like an Artist, I point out that in addition to Ecclesiastes’ “there is nothing new under the sun,” two millennia before that, the Egyptian poet Khakheperresenb was already complaining that the good words had been used up.
In 1824, Goethe, who was always forthright about his influences, told his assistant Eckermann that he was glad he didn’t read Shakespeare at a young age because “Shakespeare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, in all its heights and depths,” and “there remains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do.”
And how could one get courage only to put pen to paper, if one were conscious in an earnest, appreciating spirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable excellences were already in existence!
Goethe warns of engaging with work that’s too good in your youth. He says what’s important is to admire someone just a little bit further than you, and maintain a “standard of excellent” that is “not much higher” than whatever step you’re on and able to attain. Had he read too many masterpieces in his youth, he says,
..they would have overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do. I could not have gone on with such fresh light-heartedness, both should have had to bethink myself, and look about for a long time, to find some new outlet.
We celebrate the fact that most artists today have a huge portion of humankind’s output at their fingertips at any given moment, but we rarely think about the fact that exposure and abundance can also become a paralytic. Eno said he wanted to hear a certain kind of music, so he had to invent it for himself. Who feels the need to make new music, when you can almost always call up music that is completely new to your ears?
Sometimes when I watch my 8-year-old making music, I note how unencumbered he is by musical history and how free he is of any need to be original. He is happy, for now, to make music that is a parody of what he’s heard, and in the parodying, he comes up with his own thing. It’s new to him and that’s what’s important.
In fact, this is the great gift of children: everything is new to them, and so it can become new to you, if you let it.
Let’s face it: life these days is depressing. I sometimes find it hard to imagine a future. It feels like the GAME OVER screen could pop up at any time, and what is the point of raising children in an age like this?
And then I come to my senses and remember that it’s probably felt like the end of the world since the beginning of the world.
Here is something Nancy Wallace wrote in 1983 — the year I was born — in her book, Better Than School:
I constantly have to remind myself: now is the envy of the dead.
There’s always more life to get, and more art to be made out of it.
Today I saw someone tweet, “Your ideas aren’t very good if nobody steals them.”
Which at first might sounds like something I approve of, but actually, there are lots of bad ideas that get stolen and recycled all the time. (See: racism, fascism, etc.)
Ideas only travel as far as the minds ready and willing to take them in.
If your ideas are really, really good (see: the Beatitudes, universal health care, etc.) they might have a much harder time being stolen.
Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers is one of my favorite picture books, so it was awesome to read about how he came up with it in his treasury:
I found one of those old German printings sheets called Münchener Bilderbogen — they were the equivalent of a comic strip in the 1890s. There was a a story in there with a picture of three robbers. They inspired my story, which developed as I started drawing. So I must say that originally those three robbers were not my idea. Original ideas can always be traced back to something. We are all influenced by something, and then we translate it and transpose it into something else.
Emphasis mine. (Steal like an artist.)
Cécile Boulaire, assistant professor in children’s literature at Université de Tours, tracked down the original sheet Ungerer was talking about:
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of a page from the book with a panel from the sheet:
And a close-up of the original robbers:
Ten years ago, I was working on the book proposal for Steal Like An Artist. Next year we’re releasing a 10th anniversary edition, so I’ve been digging in my archive for inspiration while writing the afterword.
The “archive” in this case is just a banker’s box. Most of the book was written fast an the computer, so there’s not as much fun material (false starts, deleted scenes, etc.) as there is when you open the boxes for the other books.
Most interesting might be the gigantic stack of index cards, many of which appear in the back of the book. (It was funny to see “Gesamtkunstwerk” scribbled on this card, as the word is in the zeitgeist thanks to this review.)
The index cards serve to show just how long I’ve been obsessed with the ideas I’m still writing about. (For example, there was a card about centrifugal books.) Steal was a book that tried to cover a lot of ground with very few pages, and there were so many seeds tossed in there that I was able to grow entire books out of some of them.
It makes me laugh to see how simple the illustrations are. (I got a lot of mileage out of Photoshop’s “invert” function.) I really wanted the book to just feel like a fancy zine.
I’ve had a decade now of people asking what “font” I use. Everything was just marker on typing paper. (“But what kind of typing paper?” my friend joked on Instagram.)
My favorite object in the box is the “dummy” I made for my editor, Bruce Tracy, by printing out a dust jacket for a book with the same trim size. (The Cute Manifesto by James Kochalka.) The legend is that design had a few options in the cover meeting and the late Peter Workman pointed at my dummy and said “that one.”
In the old days, my publisher would send me reprint notices on a postcard. (They stopped at the 10th printing. I think the book has gone through at least two dozen reprintings at this point.)
As for the book itself, it doesn’t even feel like I really wrote the thing. There are more years now between me and the me who wrote the book than there was between the me who wrote the book and the 19-year-old me he was writing it for. Time to finish up this afterword, put the archive back on the shelf, and write something new…
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