Happy New Year!
Welcome to the 106th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal. I'll use the funds to pay for the fee the service provider of this Mailing List charges me every month. If there's money left, I'll invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
Happy New Year! I hope that you will have a happy year, full of health, joy, creativity, and success (assuming you're after the latter).
I suppose we can agree that 2023 wasn't the greatest year. Even as today is just another day the symbolism of the changed calendar might just be what we need.
On my walk to the supermarket yesterday, I noticed something at a tree in the wooded area that I passed through. What, I wondered, was a bright picture doing in a place where you would not expect to find one? I stepped down from the path I had been following and came across a 2024 Taylor Swift calendar that someone had pinned up on some random tree. Or maybe it's not a Taylor Swift calendar but merely one with assorted celebrities or singers. Regardless, the February page shows this particular singer.
Even as I don't know whether this was in fact the motivation, I like the spirit of starting the year with the February page. As a child, I always hated January because it was the month between Christmas (presents!) and my birthday in February (ditto!). There might have been some altogether pettier reasons as well, but there's no need to get into those.
Can children actually be petty? I'm not sure. Pettiness strikes me as an adult theme.
Regardless, obviously, we're not going to be able to step over January (which, mind you, would be terribly unfair to all those of us who have a birthday to celebrate or ignore).
But I like the bold look into the future, even as for me such a way of looking is more aspirational than doable. You see, I'm a pessimistic brooder (you probably knew this from following along here).
I could probably say that larger parts of my creativity are nothing other than giving form to my pessimistic brooding. You can get something out of channeling whatever turmoil you're experiencing into artistic form of some kind.
On CPhMag.com, I just published an edited excerpt from the unpublished manuscript that I mentioned here before. There's going to be a re-edited re-release of Richard Billingham's Ray's a Laugh in 2023. By the way, re-editing the book is a grave mistake, given that the original is perfect as is.
That said, even as I admire the work, I also have severe misgivings about it. You can read all about that in the piece on CPhMag.com. As I noted, it's slightly edited so it works as a stand-alone piece. In the book, it's part of a larger flow.
I hope that you will read the piece. It (in fact the book as a whole) is terribly important for me. Mind you, I'm not writing this to solicit praise. I merely wanted to point out the urgency with which is was produced (urgency not in terms of time but in the sense of seeing it all the way through and then having it).
Maybe you don't know the artist. In which case, watching the video above will tell you all you need to know. And if you knew Pope.L (or rather his art), the video still is a real treat.
If I were still teaching classes, I'd make my students watch the video. It offers a lot of examples of how this artist approached his various pieces, starting from the ideas, thinking about possibilities, removing things that didn't work, and then assessing the outcome. All of that was done with enormous integrity and humour as well.
Oh, and he talked about his upbringing and how unlikely it was that he would be an artist at all.
And then there's this. I've spent the past few days packing up my office (books and all). I'm moving. The house I've lived in for 16 years is being sold, and a new place had to be found (which was terribly stressful, given how difficult the situation for renters is these days).
A new place was found. It's 12 miles (or 19 km) to the north, smack in the countryside. I'm actually looking forward to the new place. The apartment is much bigger (and, yikes!, a lot more expensive), meaning I will probably be able to have a proper office with space for everything: book shelves, a proper work surface, and more.
Oh, and there will be heat in the new office. Believe it or not, the room I have been working in for 16 years was barely heated in the winter, given that the heating system only served some rooms well. When the realtor showed the place to interested buyers, he told them the windows were from the 1940s. Not the greatest place to spend so many winters.
Regardless, the move will probably mean reduced activity from me here, on CPhMag.com, and on Patreon until I'm settled in (should be about two weeks from now -- the movers come on the 15th).
Back to packing books...
Until next time then, whenever than might be.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg