When you get confused
10 things worth sharing this week
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
I am deep into writing at the moment and I keep repeating to myself: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now. It just needs to exist.”
“Better stop short than fill to the brim,” says the Tao Te Ching. Also helping the writing this week is Hemingway’s advice: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day… you will never be stuck.”
The evolution of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. Something I’d never thought about: because Westerners read left-to-right, we don’t read the image the same way the Japanese do.
During a recent phone call, my friend Matt Thomas told me he likes to take a high/low approach to balancing his input, which started when he was in grad school reading dense theoretical texts by day and chasing them with movies like Fast Five at night. I’ve currently got a good combo going: I’m reading Middlemarch and binge-watching Bridgerton. (As the poet Donald Hall wrote in Essays After Eighty, everybody who works with their brains all day needs to lighten up a bit at night: “Before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book.”)
Nick Cave on meeting his hero, Bryan Ferry: “This incident instructed me on the fragile and capricious nature of the creative spirit and reminded me of the necessity of constant daily work. I think of it when I struggle with my own vacillating creativity. Because deep in my heart, I know there is always something to write about, but there is also always nothing — and terrifyingly little air between.”
“The antidote to envy is one's own work,” writes Bonnie Friedman in Writing Past Dark. “Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it… [T]he work itself. It drives the spooks away.”
I sometimes fantasize about doing a series of “Life Hacks I Won’t Be Attempting.” A Reddit commenter suggested that you can use your phone’s image text recognition capability to instantly find any book in your home. But I am not interested in the instant retrieval of any book I own! Part of the beauty and joy of going to the bookshelf is all the books you bump into before you find the one you’re looking for. (I believe so strongly in this serendipity of the stacks that I don’t even organize my books.)
A line I think about more and more these days, from Taleb’s Skin In The Game: “Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more ‘efficiency’ out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.”
A documentary about some of the greatest music ever recorded: I give Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A. my highest recommendation. It made me want to re-watch Shake! Otis at Monterey and Wattstax. If I didn’t already have so many books going, I’d read Rob Bowan’s book and Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself. NPR interviewed filmmaker Jamila Wignot and the folks at Fresh Air dug into their archives and served up a medley of interviews with Stax musicians Steve Cropper, Booker T. Jones, and Isaac Hayes. I listened to a ton of Sam and Dave this week and even threw together a quick playlist of some of my Stax favorites — don’t sleep on William Bell! (If you’re already a fan and want to go really deep, check out Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos.) Someday I’d like to visit the museum.
“My bike is everything to me. My bike is my gym, my church, and my wheelchair. My bike is everything that I believe in…” RIP NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton, who loved his bicycle, loved the Grateful Dead, and was a person who stuttered. The ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about him is titled The Luckiest Man in the World. He said: “When you get confused, ride your bike and listen to the music play.” Amen.
Thanks for reading. A few of these items were inspired by our epic open thread on Tuesday. If you haven’t already, you can join the coolest creative community around and help keep this hand-rolled, ad-free, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication going by becoming a paid subscriber:
xoxo,
Austin
"When you get confused, ride your bike and listen to the music play"
There is a guy who rides his bike every weekday morning around 7am up (down?) my street playing music - hearing the music at the end of the street and rushing over to the window to hear what song he is playing today as he rides by, is one of the most beautiful parts of my day - it's magic :) as humans we touch each other in the smallest of ways that we will never know
Thank you for mentioning Bill Walton . I was raised by my Hoosier father to follow the ethos of John Wooden and being raised in LA I remember rushing home from school to watch the Bruin games with Bill Walton. Also, in my home, Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a hero.