Victorian botanist Anna Atkins’ book on British algae is considered the first book ever to be illustrated with photographs. Her cyanotypes capture the negative impressions of seaweeds left on chemically treated paper exposed to the sun. The resulting images are a confluence of science and art, the process of their making mirroring the processes of photosynthesis in their subjects.
For the last several months, I’ve been deep in revision mode for a full-length manuscript that has come close-but-not-quite with publishers too many times to count. Though the document is called “draft ten,” it’s really at least the 30th, not counting all the various revisions of the different pieces that make up the whole. I’m going through, sentence-by-sentence, assessing each word and line. It’s the sort of tedious process where I thrive. In college, I had the dream job of photocopying each page of an old Icelandic dictionary and also cataloging the little scraps of medieval manuscripts torn up and used as bookbinding for other medieval manuscripts—I love a task attuned to minutae and, for me, revision is exactly that.
Because I’m very much immersed in the thick of it, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of what we see and consume is only the tip of the iceberg—beneath the surface of a finished product is this invisible process. All the work, collaboration, creativity, skill, and humanness that goes into making something is usually hidden to us. This is true of books, art, and performance, of watching a baseball game and walking through a building. We live in a constructed world, and with this episode, I want to explore the process of that making.
I love looking under the hood of a piece work that I think I know and finding new layers of it. For many people, myself included, Elizabeth Bishop’s oft-anthologized “One Art” is one of the first poems we learn to love. The New York Times “Close Read” series is always a great interactive and in-depth look at a piece of art, and if you click this link, you’ll get a guided tour through Bishop’s poem. I love how scrolling through the page you move through the onion layers of the poem’s structure and creative process. The whole series is great if you want a rabbit hole for a rainy day.
I also love their “Anatomy of a Scene” series. I really enjoyed The Worst Person in the World, how it presents flawed decisions and people with compassion, how refreshing it is for a woman to find herself in herself rather than in other people or a love interest.
Trier’s scene uses a similar technique to a scene from L’année Dernière à Marienbad that I shared in a past episode on mirrors. But that film is the epitome of stylized, and as Trier says in his explanation, he wanted to capture humanness in this scene, and though the technique is the same, the effect is so different.
As with Bishop’s poem, you probably already know well the song “Under Pressure” often enough that you have a relationship with it. You know that simple riff that Vanilla Ice ripped off, the slow-building climax of the song. At some point, I heard the isolated vocals and it made me think of the song in a whole new way. I realized that, yes, the intertwining of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury’s voices is incredible, but the real art is in how Bowie uses his voice to set Mercury up, to let him truly soar. Listen to about 2:30 in and see what I mean.
(On the subject of this song, check out this rendition performed by dueling Kermits that lent the song new meaning during the 2008 recession. The performer is a busker, not an unhoused person as the video attributed, but it spoke to the moment and what we collectively needed to process our world, and I still enjoy it today).
When I was a kid, I used to go to my father’s studio when he wasn’t there and just stand there immersed in the mess of it, breathing in the smell of weed and wood smoke and paints and turpentine. I think for the same reason I now read and listen to a lot of artist and author interviews about their creative process. There’s a formula to them that I find endlessly fascinating in their little variations. Often, the space in which an author writes is important to their process.
The Paris Review does some of the best interviews and this one with Toni Morrison in 1993 is especially good. Because she had young children and a full-time job at Random House, she woke before dawn to write:
Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don’t remember exactly what the gesture was—there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard—but we began to talk about little rituals that one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that’s a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular . . . Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.
The interesting part comes in the contrast. Take Ocean Vuong’s recent interview with The New Yorker for his new poetry collection. It’s not a time, but a place, not solitude but being among people, that allowed him to immerse into the work. He wrote at a Popeyes in Manhattan.
Because it’s a franchise, it was almost like you don’t have to think about your surroundings. […] It’s, like, no one wants to go to a Popeyes to have anything to do with work. They go there to get Popeyes and go on their way. It’s very transient. When you are static in that space, you realize that you almost become invisible. The location absorbs you, which is a wonderful way to work. I used to do that also in the food court in the New World Mall, in Flushing.
Going from where, interviews often move to the how or why of writing. Take the contrast between Morrison and Vuong in the where and draw a line to the how. Morrison writing in solitude with opening daylight talks about writing as a process of making—making sense or order:
I do know that I don’t like it here if I don’t have something to write. [Interviewer: Here, meaning where?] Meaning out in the world. It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain. I’m always conscious of that though I am less aware of it under certain circumstances—good friends at dinner, other books. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.
In contrast, Vuong writing in a busy restaurant talks about writing as a process of finding and discovery:
The more I write, the more I realize that writing is predominantly a curatorial work and it’s about listening rather than making. “Poet” in Greek is a maker, but I think a maker at their best is a maker of space rather than a maker of objects. And so I think, for me, it’s about: How do I create space? That’s the harder work. And I think any architect will tell you that you’re sculpting space, you’re sculpting light. That’s much harder ’cause anyone can fill a page with themselves or their expressions, but how do you collaborate with the material world, with the cultural world?
Ultimately, both Morrison and Vuong’s writing is in conversation with and engaging in the world around them, but how they get there that’s so different!
I so loved this oral history of Barbara Kruger’s “(Untitled) Your Body is a Battleground” that I found myself wondering where the equivalent of this work is for our time. Have Instagram reposts taken the place of posters in public discourse and protest? I want more protest art for the people.
I don’t remember where the image of the woman with a bisected face came from, but I used it to create a work which was part of a discourse about vulnerability, about bodies, and in this case women’s bodies, but also about ageing and the failures of the American medical system.
As a not-particularly-a-Beatles-fan, I will tell you I was fascinated by all eight hours of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary. Talk about getting deep into the weeds of the creative process. Amidst intense time pressure and public attention, interpersonal tensions, and ordinary moments of goofing around or eating toast, the documentary shows the chaos and collaboration of making something bigger than the sum of its parts. I’m including one of the more incredible moments of this work, which someone has had to, unfortunately, cut into two parts.
While it looks like McCartney pulls this tune out of thin air, it’s important to remember all that went into making that moment of magic happen, and then you have another six hours of documentary to see how they make that magic moment matter. If the work of making art is the iceberg below the waterline, collaborative work is even more enormous: nuanced, messy, and difficult.
I’ve always loved this passage from William Blake’s long, rambling form-defying poem that nobody reads anymore, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” possibly because it’s also the source for the title of Aldous Huxley’s book, but also because the ideas of it made sense to me.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at [the] tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
While I’d always known that “the infernal method by corrosives” was a metaphor referring to the printing process, what I just recently learned was that it was Blake’s own, invented method. Blake was trained as an engraver, which was tedious work, and images and text needed to be made separately by two different skilled workers, printed twice on two different presses. Rather than carving and etching into a copper plate, Blake found a way to paint directly on the plate with acid-resistant varnish, then wash the plate in acid, revealing the images painted beneath (hence his metaphor). Like illuminated manuscripts or modern-day comics, his “Illuminated Printing” allowed Blake to print both text and images on the same plate, with the same press. This not only gave him complete control over every step of the process, but it also allowed him to achieve his creative vision of text and poetry intertwined.
I was tickled to find all of the prints for “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and this essay is where I learned about all the very cool details that I’m being told I’m running out of space to include.
In the process of writing this episode, I learned what I maybe already intuitively knew in my long hours of revision and just didn’t feel empowered to admit to myself: creativity is real, difficult, and important work. Our consumerist society devalues that process, emphasizing and commodifying the final product. In the spirit of hard work, I want to end with work songs.
Dust to Digital is a true gem of sound. If you click below and turn up your volume, you’ll get to hear a breadth of work songs including 1) women singing while finishing Harris Tweed in the Outer Hebrides in 1941 2) a Ghanaian postal worker stamping envelopes in the 1980s. 3) workers chopping corn in Serra Preta, Brazil in 2019. 4) Thai workers last year pile driving while singing a song by a Thai rock band.
A different kind of "work song," but I recently discovered this wonderful Ada cover/reimagining of Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4," which is about trying to write a song in the middle of the night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07iZsOgcKQc
There's also the Adderley brothers' "Work Song," a staple of the jazz canon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlepuNi40M8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_Song_(Adderley_song)
Thank you for another inspiring episode of "Notions"!