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
“Get yourself a little studietto where no one will bother you at all.” —Cennino Cennini, Book of Art, c. 1400s A delightful bit from Tom Stammers’ review of David Hall’s The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History: it’s helpful to know that the term ‘studio’ derives from a verb as we … | Continue reading
This summer I’m offering 20% off paid subscriptions to my newsletter! Going paid gets you an an extra “deep dive” newsletter from me every Tuesday, as well as access to a creative community of thousands of interesting and helpful people. Today we’re talking about what we’re readi … | Continue reading
Yesterday’s newsletter was called “You don’t need a vision,” and seemed to be a big hit with some folks. (A few people told me this was their favorite letter.) Took me a few hours to read and respond to all the comments. In the letter, I suggest that instead of worrying about som … | Continue reading
A drawing of me reading by my 8-year-old son Jules is at the top of my most recent newsletter. | Continue reading
Every time I pass the local community garden I think of Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap.” I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the creative process. | Continue reading
In the back of Show Your Work! and Keep Going, I took out the “recommended reading” heading I used in Steal and quoted Cormac McCarthy from a 1992 NYTimes profile: The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written. I … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is on the benefits of having a creative nemesis. I start out by quoting Dana Jeri Maier’s Skip To The Fun Parts: The purpose of an artistic nemesis is to harness the narcissism of comparison, helping us identify the critical differences between our work and the … | Continue reading
From today’s newsletter: As I rapidly approach middle age (I’ve got exactly one week before the big 4-0), something I’ve been saying a lot to myself lately is “More for me!” Oh, the kids are rolling their eyes at something I like? More for me! People have soured on an artist I li … | Continue reading
If you can’t afford an Apple Vision Pro but you’d still like to see what isn’t really there in front of you, just get yourself some tape, a ping pong ball, and a radio, try out The Ganzfeld Procedure: Begin by turning the radio to a station playing static. Then lie down on the co … | Continue reading
Here’s a box I keep of random knick knacks from bulletin boards and desk drawers that I keep on the top shelf of my studio. The box somehow didn’t make it into today’s newsletter about nostalgia, which begins: Last weekend I spent a day at my mom’s house sifting through my childh … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is a list of 10 ways to “unschool” yourself over the summer: In our house we believe that summer is a time for unschooling — a time for living and learning outside of the classroom, a time for self-guided education, for slow learning, and also a time for plain … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, my summer reading assignment for y’all: Visit your local library and apply for a library card. (Or pay your fines and renew.) Ask a librarian for a tour of the library building, the online catalog, and the digital holdings. Ask the librarian to show you how … | Continue reading
In this week’s list of 10 newsletter: my message to graduates the album cover for Alice Cooper’s School’s Out the joy of pinning words to the wall And more! Read it here. | Continue reading
“We talk of poetry in such an abstract way because most of us are bad poets.” —Nietzsche I loved this note from Ethan Hein about the final day of his songwriting course, which ended with “a spontaneous singalong” of “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. “I consider it to be the best Amer … | Continue reading
Here are some recent additions to my inspiration corner beside my desk. Years ago, I took inspiration from Raymond Carver’s index card aphorisms that he described in the essay, “On Writing”: Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. So … | Continue reading
In today’s list of 10 newsletter: Joan Baez on drawing Another gardening metaphor for creative work: “Sleep, creep, leap” Television, time, and constraint …and more. Read it for free here. | Continue reading
Some advice on the art of imperfection, courtesy of Joan Baez: If I really don’t like what’s happening, I drop the drawing in the swimming pool. If I’ve gotten too precise about it, the imperfection brings it to life. One of my friends said, “Tell me just one thing that will last … | Continue reading
Now is one of my favorite times of year, the time of new growth. I mentioned in a recent newsletter how the prickly pear really you see exponential growth in slow motion, and a reader alerted me to the gardening rule of thumb for perennial plants, “Sleep, Leap, Creep.” In the fir … | Continue reading
I lot of my work is about the freedom of artistic constraint, so its fun to think about it in mediums I’m not as familiar with. In his new book, Avidly Reads Screen Time, Philip Maciak writes about television as a medium of constraint, particularly in regards to time: Its various … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is a zine about Aristotle’s “Doctrine of the Mean”: When I was hanging out with Ryan Holiday last Monday, I asked him about the Stoic virtues he’s currently writing about. I admitted that in the abstract, I didn’t find virtues all that helpful to me in my work! … | Continue reading
This picket sign reminded me of one of my favorite cartoons by Alex Gregory and Flannery O’Connor in Mystery and Manners: The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of … | Continue reading
I was at the eye doctor last week and I found myself captivated, as I often am, by my retina scan. (I forgot to ask if I could get a copy) These images reminded me of Stephen Ellcock’s The Cosmic Dance, and what he wrote of “the cosmic egg”: THE COSMIC EGG, or world egg, […] | Continue reading
Here’s the last photo I got of the owlets the day before they fledged. (To “fledge” is to leave the nest after you get your feathers.) Both owlets fledged today! (Neither particularly gracefully ?) Parents withheld grub for the past day or so to encourage them. They’re out in the … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, I wrote about cactuses and knowing what to leave in and what to leave out in your work: This weekend Meg performed surgery on Giuseppe, our crested Mexican fencepost cactus. (Imported from Italy, hence the name — ha!) Giuseppe had sprouted some offshoots th … | Continue reading
Here is a clip of the art critic David Sylvester in 1969 on the BBC show The Visual Scene (the “Playing it Cool” episode) talking about the dangers of artists working too much in the public eye: British art critic David Sylvester (he could also be talking about kids) pic.twitter. … | Continue reading
While reading Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, I came across this bit from Jeopardy! whiz Ken Jennings’ essay, “My Puny Human Brain,” about getting beat by a supercomputer: To my surprise, losing to an evil quiz show–playing computer turned … | Continue reading
Here is a visualization from a syllabus for a writing workshop posted by novelist Luke Geddes. (I found it via Matt Bell, who said it “might be most of what you need to know.”) I think it speaks for itself, but here’s a batch of quotes to back it up from a previous post of mine, … | Continue reading
Marc Weidenbaum wrote some kind words about my blackout work, which inspired me to take a day and do some “comfort work.” I wrote about it in the latest newsletter: Whenever somebody says something nice about the blackouts, I think, “Oh, maybe I should make some more of those.”) … | Continue reading
Among the many revelations of Life of the Record’s interview with the Violent Femmes about their debut record, one of my favorites is “the tranceaphone” created by drummer Victor DeLorenzo, which consists of a metal bushel basket turned over on a tom, played with steel brushes: Y … | Continue reading
“Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home. I’m on the alert for omens. Odd things happen when you get out…” —Charles Portis, The Dog of the South Here are two images from this week’s walks. I think they neatly summarize our present moment: circuit boards and clown … | Continue reading
“One of the few aspects of living in Austin that’s become less of a hassle over the last 15 years is riding a bicycle,” writes Kevin Curtin in his recent essay, “The Joy of Bicycling in Austin.” Deleted bike scene from Slacker … ? pic.twitter.com/egoTeSlf0e — Marty (@BBrosMarty) … | Continue reading
Here’s a close-up on the owlets in our owl box from this morning. They’re getting so big and you can see that their feathers are starting to come in. They’re about 2 1/2 weeks old now, so we only have 1 1/2 to two weeks until they’ll be ready to think about leaving the box. […] | Continue reading
“We must live life forward and attempt to make sense of it backward. So we fail in both directions.” — James Hannaham, Pilot Imposter Here is the full quote of the Kierkegaard that you often hear, from his journal in 1843: It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life mus … | Continue reading
From an interview with William Burroughs in High Times magazine in 1979: High Times: Have you had any out-of-the-body experiences? Burroughs: Who hasn’t? High Times: I’m not quite sure what they are. Burroughs: I’ll give you one right now. You’re staying where? High Times: The La … | Continue reading
Director Steven Spielberg recently talked about regretting editing the guns out of the 20th anniversary edition of E.T.: No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through…. I should have never messed with the archives of … | Continue reading
Here’s the cover of the Arabic translation of my book Keep Going. (I believe in Arabic it’s something like “Don’t Stop.”) I love how the arrow points right because Arabic is read right to left. The same is true of the FedEx logo: And here is the whole batch of my books in Arabic … | Continue reading
I make my collages by hand, but every once in a while I’ll scan one into the computer and it just doesn’t look right. Originally, the steeple in this piece looked like this: When this happens, I’ll save the file for safe keeping, then go back to the desk, pull up the tape, and fi … | Continue reading
After we got off a Zoom call, Meg stood up and spotted Mr. Coconut right in the window above my desk. He was not as pleased as we were to see him: I have to give it to him: he is working hard and keeping those owl babies fed in the evenings! (They’re about 1 […] | Continue reading
I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime. adactio.com/links/20112 | Continue reading
Just a little over three years ago, a month or so into the pandemic, Fiona Apple released Fetch the Bolt Cutters into the world. I couldn’t stop playing it then, and I’m still playing it now. One of the things I love about the record is how homemade it sounds. It sounds like a wo … | Continue reading
The other day I joked to a friend, “I’m just trying to stay alive until dinnertime.” I have written before about my very simple rule that has served me well: “Don’t think much about your life after dinnertime.” But this is my new motto: “I’m living for dinnertime!” I am very “foo … | Continue reading
I’m reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which is basically a 2,000-year-old advice column. Here’s what he said in letter 2 about reading, and specifically, spending a lot of time reading writers “whose genius is unquestionable”: To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who sp … | Continue reading
When I wrote about using an AI as an assistant a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’ve always resisted hiring an assistant. Last Friday the kids selected Frankenstein (1931) as our pizza night viewing. It’s a wonderful movie, directed brilliantly by David Whale. I laughed a lot at … | Continue reading
I really enjoyed Ian Frazier’s introduction to Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photograph and Memory. (Sometimes I think one could have a pretty rich reading life just reading book introductions and ebook sample chapters.) Of particular interest was his mention of Malcolm’s co … | Continue reading