Category: reading
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find yourself a “scenius”
Austin Kleon doesn’t believe in the term “genius.” He makes the argument that no great work of art it born from isolation. “If you believe in the lone genius myth,” Kleon states in his book, Show Your Work, “creativity is an antisocial act, performed only by a few great figures–mostly…
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fascination with adaptation
I’m currently enraptured listening to Andy Serkis narrate JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of The Ring. It’s my first time through The Lord of The Rings and also my first foray into audiobooks. While my thoughts on the act of listening to a book is a separate blog post, the biggest…
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play time
One of my favorite reads from last year was Get Jiro, a graphic novel written by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose and featuring art by Landon Foss. The graphic novel depicts a wild world in which chefs dominate the social fabric like crime lords. There’s a joyful savagery to the…
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the doorway
In anticipation of my annual Christmas card, I’ve been tinkering around with songwriting recently. I’ll be honest, it’s miserable and I hate it. The difficultly lies in embracing that fact that I’m not very good at it. As with anything else, you have to allow yourself to be bad at…
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recent musings
It’s been a busy couple of weeks. A few highlights:
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on being the portal
I’ve written about how the best art acts a portal, transporting us somewhere else entirely. Be it a story that takes us on a journey with its characters or a painting that swallows us whole, we engage with these works to get outside of ourselves. But what if we’re the…
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some assembly required
Maya Angelou famously said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I’ve been feeling this agony a lot lately. I simply have too many ideas and must often decide what’s worth putting on paper and what isn’t. After finishing Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time…
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tomorrow
I recently stumbled upon a letter E.B. White wrote in response to another man’s despair and loss of faith in humanity: Dear Mr. Nadeau: As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.…
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something to lose
I’ve spent a good amount of the last few weeks trying to hold it together. This seems to be the case for most of us these days. Something I’ve found distressing in the midst of it all has been my inability to engage with certain media. Watching TV is often…
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happiness is not bullshit
I was struck by a brief exchange in Ann Lamott’s episode of The Midnight Gospel, which quickly dispels the myth of the tortured artist. “I felt terror that if I stopped drinking, I would never write again,” Lamott muses. “Because I needed the misery. Because I needed that edge. And…
joshua chamberlain 