Midyear in a mid year

10 things worth sharing this week

Looking at my logbook and thinking, “Half empty or half full?”

Hey y’all,

If you need some summer reading, the paperback of Steal Like an Artist is still 53% off and only $6.99 on Amazon.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. My kids love to use the slang word “mid” to describe things that are “mediocre or of low quality” or “bad, boring, or inferior in some way.” I thought about the word a lot this week, and what it means to be in the middle of things — mid-year, middle age, etc. My slogan: “mid-life need not be mid.” (Know Your Meme is still a great website for “the olds.”)
   
   

2. Took me five weeks, but I finally finished George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I’m not sure it was quite my cup of tea! (I love reading big books in the summer, but I don’t think anything is ever going to top turning 40 and reading Don Quixote.) If you’d like someone to talk you into reading Eliot’s masterpiece, check out Rebecca Mead’s essay “Middlemarch and Me,” which she later turned into a full-length memoir, My Life in Middlemarch. Eliot is a great inspiration for the middle-aged writer: She didn’t start writing fiction until she was thirty-six!
   
   

3. “The nineteenth century didn’t think the dash on its own was nearly enough,” wrote Nicholson Baker in his famous essay about punctuation. The Victorians loved the now-extinct “dash-hybrids,” which Baker named:

   

   Eliot uses the “colash” in Middlemarch. (Thanks to my friend Clive Thompson for pointing this out.)
   
   

4. Eliot, by the way, is extremely quotable, and her contemporaries knew it: in 1872, Alexander Main published Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot and later The George Eliot Birthday Book, even though Eliot herself said birthday books were “the vulgarest thing in the book stalls.” (A few years ago the novelist Adelle Waldman re-read Middlemarch and shared her favorite quotes.)
   
   

5. Speaking of quotable books, I tried reading Pascal’s Pensées, as its influence can be felt throughout Middlemarch, but I eventually decided I couldn’t stand Pascal, so I picked up a similarly aphoristic and fragmentary book from my shelves — G.C. Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books. Holy cow am I in love with this book! It’s the best bathroom reader ever.
   
   

6. “The single most important question I think that one must ask one’s self about a character is: ‘What are they really afraid of?’” RIP screenwriter Robert Towne, who wrote Chinatown, and doctored scripts for movies like The Godfather. (He wrote the “I never wanted this for you” scene.”)
   
   

7. RIP artist Anton Van Dalen, who was the secret assistant of Saul Steinberg. (Here’s a tour of his home in the East Village he lived in since 1968.)
   
   

8. RIP calligrapher Alan Blackman, whose “Letters to Myself” project is considered by some to be “one of the seven wonders of the world of calligraphy.”
   
   

9. “How Hard Could It Be?” was the campaign slogan of the late Austin musician and writer Kinky Friedman when he was running for Governor of Texas. I checked his Austin guidebook The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic out of a Cleveland library seventeen years ago before I moved down here. I picked it back up this week after I heard he died — it reads like a relic from another era. (RIP to another ornery Austin writer, Michael Corcoran.)
   
   

10. Writing books, making art, recording music… it’s all a lot easier when you don’t know what you’re doing. Better yet if you don’t know that you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s when you know you don’t know what you’re doing that you’ve got to really get after it. Best to do what the poet Rumi advised: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. Here’s a page from Show Your Work! to get you in the spirit of summer vacation: