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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 some grand vision for your life, you focus on practice:
Establish a daily practice and use it as a way of getting through your days. Sometimes creative work really is just going through the motions. You don’t necessarily need a vision. Stick to your practice, and things will appear.
There’s a Sex Pistols song with the lyric, “Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.”
That’s where I am. I don’t have a grand vision for the future… but I have a practice, and I am curious to see what turns up, and that’s why I get up in the morning.
I’ve had fun lately posting “rough drafts” — little mind maps — of the newsletter online as a kind of #showyourwork style tease.
On a micro level, I rarely have a “vision” for the Tuesday newsletter — I think about it often throughout the week, and I keep a list of potential topics, but I wait for Monday morning to wake up, do some kind of exercise, and then work on it most of the day. (I block off all of Monday on my calendar to write.)
Read the newsletter here.
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 theirs, to emerge with a clarified sense of who we want to be instead. The point is not to be consumed with debilitating bitterness or rage but to summon just enough precious envy to put to constructive use.
(I previously wrote about how feelings are information and how making an enemy of envy can lead to new creative work.)
This, by the way, is how theses newsletters often begin: with a bubble map of my mind.
There were a few things I forgot to throw in, like Plutarch on how to profit from your enemies:
In Plutarch’s “How to Profit by One’s Enemies,” he advises that rather than lashing out at your enemies or completely ignoring them, you should study them and see if they can be useful to you in some way. He writes that because our friends are not always frank and forthcoming with us about our shortcomings, “we have to depend on our enemies to hear the truth.” Your enemy will point out your weak spots for you, and even if he says something untrue, you can then analyze what made him say it.
And these excellent Kate Beaton cartoons, which make me think of one of my favorite movies: Ridley Scott’s first feature, The Duellists.
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 like? More for me! Not only one of my favorite conversational shortcuts, but a way to stay focused on minding my own business and doing my work.
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 childhood. Among the artifacts I saved or discarded from the first two decades of my life: a hundred pounds of notebooks and binders from high school, random junk like chem lab aprons I never returned, letters from former girlfriends, bank statements, rental agreements, brochures, ticket stubs, wristbands, notes, old sketchbooks, a stack of song lyrics and guitar tablature several inches thick, tuition statements, computer manuals, hint books, baseball cards, floppy disks, and best of all, toys. A glorious batch of toys from my youth, including He-Man, Ghostbusters, Robo Cop, G.I. Joes, and even one lone Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
You can read the rest here.
Today’s office hours over on the newsletter are making me feel guilty about all the books I tried to write to answer some of those exact questions and failed to get off the ground. (What’s beautiful is that other people have better answers than I do.)
This is just a quick roundup of this week's posts over at New Work in Philosophy. This week NWP featured:
You can also visit NWP's full archive of posts, and our YouTube Channel and Playlist. Also, if you have recent or forthcoming peer-reviewed work that you'd like to share more widely, please do consider emailing us with a pitch. NWP currently has nearly 1,100 subscribers, and we feature new posts on a rolling basis as they come in.
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We particularly encourage submissions from junior philosophers and underrepresented groups in the profession, as well as postdocs, VAPs, and full or part-time faculty from a diverse variety of institutions.
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Today’s newsletter is about the shortest month and what to do with it.
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