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I’m offering 20% off paid subscriptions for the rest of the weekend. A paid subscription gets you a special newsletter from me every Tuesday, membership in a community of thousands of creative people, and access to comments and the full archives. The kind support of paid subscribers also keeps this Friday letter free for everybody:
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and repellent.” I’m now halfway through War and Peace. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, it’s 1812, and I’m worried about everyone. I appreciate the various W&P-related links people have sent me — y’all seem to love Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 in particular — but other than work, family, and Tolstoy, I simply have no time for anything else! I also can’t help but be slightly annoyed by anything in life that keeps me away from my Russian soap opera. (Man, I really, really, really love sitting around and reading a novel.)
“I think inefficiency is pretty good.” Liana Finck’s chat with Jason Chatfield turned me onto “Call in Colonel Mustard For Questioning,” a great little This American Life mystery about why the hot dogs didn’t taste as good after a company moved their operations into a brand-new state-of-the-art facility. (“Well, you’re in your little room / and you’re working on something good / but if it’s really good / you’re gonna need a bigger room…”)
“The less you know about how you do what you do, the better.” That’s YouTuber Any Austin in conversation with Tyler Cowen. Here’s Pope.L. saying much of the same: “If I had one thing to say to artists, it would be to be patient. And to be ignorant of what you think you know. If you don’t get the answer that you were expecting, maybe that’s a good thing. Knowing what you’re doing is overrated.” (Donald Barthelme called it “not-knowing.”)
“If you step back and take a wider view of the evolution of the internet, it’s surprising how much it resembles the history of the Beatles.”
“[A Sharpie] sits right in the middle of that Venn diagram of office supply and art supply. I’ve joked for years that I use them because you can steal them from any office supply cabinet.” My friend Rob Walker quoted me in his story about Sharpie markers.
As a bonus for you, dear readers, here’s a video I made (in the early days of the pandemic) about how I break one in:
I wrote a whole book about making art in times like these, but I also recommend Beth Pickens’ zines Making Art During Facism and On Artists and Hopelessness. (I loved our chat about death, deadlines, and doing your art no matter what.)
The 7 types of deadline music. (Don’t miss all the fantastic links in the comment section.)
If you just need to zone out for a bit: here’s 10 minutes of artist Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds courtesy of Marc Weidenbaum. (For a soundtrack, I suggest pairing it with Eno’s “Deep Blue Day.”)
“I remind myself that there is one person that will see or hear what I’m about to say, and it is exactly what they needed to hear at this exact moment in time — and that is the only person I am ever speaking to.” That’s Mel Robbins, quoted in the warm-up rituals of actors, comedians, musicians, and others. (Not quoted is Nick Cave, who wrote about his own warm-up ritual of remembering lost loved ones.)
“We love these people because of what they left us. Not because of what they had.” RIP Helen De Cruz, author of Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think. Their final dispatch was titled, “You can’t take it with you,” in which they wrote, “Do the things you love for yourself and your loved ones will find something good you left behind.” (I couldn’t help but be reminded of s