We had a great time on Saturday watching the annular solar eclipse. “Annular” means “ring-shaped” — when an eclipse is annular, that means the moon is centered on the sun, but it appears smaller and doesn’t completely block it out, leading to the “ring of fire” effect. We didn’t … | Continue reading
I haven’t seen any owls since May 9th when the two owlets fledged, but yesterday Meg spotted this one in the box. Thus begins another owl season. My logbook tells me that we had an owl last year on October 20th that didn’t stick around long, either, so if we’re lucky, and our his … | Continue reading
One of the delights of Wes Anderson’s adaptations of Roald Dahl’s short stories for Netflix is his recreation of Dahl’s famous writing shed, with Ralph Fiennes playing Dahl. Anderson had stayed at Dahl’s house while he was making Fantastic Mr. Fox. “It was a dazzling thing,” he s … | Continue reading
It appears that the writer John Green has recently discovered that he has aphantasia — “when your brain doesn’t form or use mental images as part of your thinking or imagination.” (The opposite of aphantasia is “hyperphantasia,” or having extremely vivid mental imagery. Most of u … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, I give readers a peek inside my summer diary: Summer in Texas is often brutal — meteorologically, emotionally, and spiritually. One nice thing about keeping a diary is that I feel I have something to show for my days. I also have a record that I can re-read … | Continue reading
Writer Mark Slutsky on “good-handedness,” or “the immediate feeling on reading the first lines of a book, or starting a movie, etc, that you are in good hands”: I’ve come to trust a certain feeling that comes over me when I first make contact with a piece of art. The opening line … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is full of good stuff. | Continue reading
I spent 40 minutes or so this morning watching and doodling Greil Marcus’s “Why I Write” lecture, recommended by Stephanie Zacharek as “deeply personal and… extraordinary. It may help anyone involved in any creative endeavor who’s feeling…stuck.” It begins: I write for fun. I wri … | Continue reading
Yesterday’s newsletter was about arguing with bots. | Continue reading
We all need variety sometimes, but when every channel has nothing, shouldn’t we notice? I came across this 1992 op-ed by pianist Keith Jarrett called “Categories Aplenty, but Where’s the Music?” Jarrett wrote it in the year after Miles Davis’ death. It’s a short, anguished essay … | Continue reading
The top image of Friday’s newsletter, like many of my images, came straight from my diary: I forgot to link to this blog post from earlier in the year, “Fire and Focus.” | Continue reading
From yesterday’s newsletter comes a new acronym I made up: SHITT, or “Should I Try That?” We know that social media can cause FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but reading about how other people work can cause a variant of FOMO we’ll dub SHITT — SHould I Try That? A silly example of SH … | Continue reading
I had a nice long chat with Jaime Rodríguez de Santiago about creativity, parenting and Don Quixote. The full video is on YouTube and here’s a little excerpt. I had a shorter but still sweet interview with Jane Ratcliff on being (not) too weird to be popular: I assumed everything … | Continue reading
Here are some pages from Tom Sachs’ zine, Ten Bullets. (More bullets here.) He suggests that in the studio one should “always be knolling.” See also: “When in doubt, tidy up.” | Continue reading
In his book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, the Jungian analyst James Hollis recalls being asked to speak to women’s groups who ask him to help them understand men: I have suggested that women look at men this way: if they took away their own network of intimate fri … | Continue reading
John Holt in 1983, talking to WBOS-Radio, on how teaching is like gardening: The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher… The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by goin … | Continue reading
A thought I had yesterday on the 22nd anniversary of 9/11: On September 11, 2001, Kurt Vonnegut, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, and Hunter S. Thompson were all still alive and could tell you what a crock of shit everything was. I know this because those were the writers I was reading … | Continue reading
The latest newsletter is about “scenius,” which I described in Show Your Work!: There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, cur … | Continue reading
News I can use: The Guardian thinks you should subscribe to my newsletter. | Continue reading
“But have you gotten a rocket to Mars?” Walter Isaacson’s response to a friend criticizing the subject of his new biography reminds me of Gareth’s defense of Chris Finch in “The Quiz,” my favorite episode of The Office. “He’s thrown a kettle over a pub! What have you done?” | Continue reading
Here’s the writer Alan Moore on why writers should read terrible books, too: As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books. If you are inspired by a good book, there’s alw … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about this recently-rediscovered list of notes to myself I wrote in 2014: 11. “If you don’t go to work, you never leave work.” Wise words from my brilliant editor, Meghan Kleon. 12. Death + deadlines. The little deadlines keep you fed and the big deadline ke … | Continue reading
“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands.” —1 Thessalonians 4:11 “I’m not trying to be aloof. My superpower is that I mind my own business… And I actually think that helps my productivity more than anything.” —Hanif A … | Continue reading
Here is the opening page of The Steal Like An Artist Journal painted by Heather Champ. I wanted to start the journal with Mary Oliver’s quote because I felt that it summed up the whole project. It’s taken from her On Being interview: I think we’re creative all day long. We have t … | Continue reading
“Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.” Last week I had the pleasure to chat with art coach Beth Pickens, author of Make Your Art No Matter What and Your Art Will Sa … | Continue reading
I was charmed by this @nypl post on Instagram: Miniature items from the Rare Book Division must be three-inches or less to qualify as *mini* and hitch a ride in a repurposed card catalog where they’re snugly stored. And then I realized I have my own tiny rare books collection in … | Continue reading
Here are some diary doodles I drew from my notes on Jungian analyst James Hollis’s 1993 book, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Mid-Life. (I included them in my letter about Charlie Bucket’s mid-life crisis, “Quitting The Chocolate Factory.”) After I shared these it w … | Continue reading
A couple of collages from today’s newsletter. | Continue reading
In a terrific mini Q&A, Lauren Groff (author of the wonderful novel Matrix, whose followup I cannot wait for) says she thinks writer’s block is an “umbrella term for a series of very different pains.” 1. The “fear of imperfection, which can be combatted by a writer carefully trai … | Continue reading
One of the fun inventions of screenwriter David Seltzer in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) is how Willy Wonka is always quoting and mis-quoting snippets of poetry and literature. Here are just a few bits that Wonka quotes: “We are the music makers, And we are the dr … | Continue reading
After my adventure last week of going through a stack of melted 45 singles, I went out and bought a refurbished tape deck. I christened it by listening to 20-year-old tapes of the short-lived radio show I did with my college roommate. If you’d like to travel back to 2003 and hear … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter I wrote: The best thing I read this week was Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. Why did it take me so long to read the last novel by one of my very favorite writers? For some reason I had assumed it was “minor” Vonnegut, but even “minor” Vonnegut is major to me. Tim … | Continue reading
I am fond of Kurt Vonnegut’s assertion that good writing is an act of “sociability.” He said he tried to teach his students “how to be a friend to a reader so the reader won’t stop reading” and “how to be a good date on a blind date with a total stranger.” (From The New […] | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about having patience with ambivalence long enough for it to be fruitful: We should seek out art which brings us mixed feelings, and use our mixed feelings in our own work…. Mixed feelings can be confusing, but they can also be our richest, most complex feel … | Continue reading
Lewis Hyde on why he still walks with his butterfly net even though he doesn’t collect butterflies anymore: I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk. I don’t know if the same is [… … | Continue reading
Today’s list of 10 newsletter begins: My primary adventure this week has been going through a stack of 45RPM singlesthat someone in my neighborhood left out in the Texas heat. Remarkably, a few survived. (Here’s a Spotify playlist.) One of my favorite surviving 45s was Pete Drake … | Continue reading
In physicist Carlo Rovelli’s Anaximander: And The Birth of Science, he writes: The ancient world teemed with masters and their great disciples: Confucius and Mencius, Moses and Joshua and the prophets, Jesus and Paul of Tarsus, the Buddha and Kaundinya… Mencius enriched and studi … | Continue reading
On her morning walk yesterday Meg found a melted stack of 45RPM singles left on the curb. I couldn’t stand to leave them there, so I walked a couple of tote bags over and carried the stack home. I didn’t know what the heck I was going to do with them until I decided to […] | Continue reading
An alternate title for today’s newsletter was “Greetings from Arrakis.” Texas in August much resembles the feelings of the inhabitants in Dune and the collages at the top were made while listening to the audiobook. Item #2: “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter was inspired by this bit by painter Philip Guston, quoted in the book I Paint What I Want to See: This is not only an emotional process, it’s also a process that involves matter. By matter I mean ink, paper, space, and spatial divisions. It’s matter. You see, I … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about keeping track of the movies with watch on pizza night. One star = Everybody really liked it, would watch again. Two stars = Everybody loved it, feels like a classic. Read the rest here, and get Meg’s dough recipe here. | Continue reading
“When does a diary pay off?” I asked earlier this week. One of my favorite things about revisiting old notebooks is all the little complaints and grievances I find. The pettier the better, like this one, which I jotted down on our honeymoon trip to New York in 2007 that almost re … | Continue reading
People occasionally ask me why I keep a diary. What it does for me. What, in icky business words, is the ROI, the Return on Investment. Today’s newsletter is all about when a diary “pays off,” and what it’s like to have five or six years of daily diaries at your fingertips: I kee … | Continue reading
I think anybody who is a Beatles fan sort of identifies with one Beatle or the other. When I was a kid, I wanted to be John. The older I get, the more I want to be Paul, granny music and all, moving his own microphone. One thing I’m interested in is Paul’s insistence that […] | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter, “Printmaking with the Sun,” begins: This is the season in Texas when the horny cicadas start screaming at the volume of leaf-blowers. I’m fascinated by cicadas, their long history in art, and how they make themselves available to metaphor, as in one of the Thi … | Continue reading
I have written often of the deep connection I feel between my laziness and my productivity. Here’s writer Hanif Abdurraqib on The Stephen Satterfield Show, putting it much more poetically, so much so that I thought it was worth transcribing in full: I came to writing significantl … | Continue reading
I turned 40 last month and spent three weeks reading Don Quixote, so the mid-life crisis has been on my brain. “Never waste your midlife crisis.” That’s advice I heard while listening to a podcast interview with John Higgs, author of William Blake vs. The World. (One of my favori … | Continue reading
Inspired by the 4th and my recent reading of Don Quixote, I wrote yesterday’s newsletter, “In Search of America,” about John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley: The setup: in 1960, Steinbeck was 58, in ill-health, wealthy, and famous. He’d been living overseas for a while and felt … | Continue reading