Work In Progress

It’s the last linky-newsletter before Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!

My goal for this week-plus is to write/finalize a lot of the pieces for GUEST/HOST, my Instax photo book. My professional work will slow down a lot between now and the first full week of January, at which point it will go right back to full throttle, so I need to make real progress with this project if I hope to produce the book in the first half of 2026.

This time last year, I tried to rent a small office in walking distance of my house, so I could go there after work to write. I couldn’t convince either of the office-space owners to rent on a month-to-month basis, so once we got Birdy (her gotchaversary is Dec. 30, if you’d like to send presents) and she made clear her disinterest in the sofa that was blocking a wall of my office-library-studio-gym-meditation lair, I reconfigured the space, bought a new desk and some other accessories, and tried to make a non-computer writing area where I could work on this book with fewer distractions.

Of course it didn’t work out, because of a whole slew of internal and external factors. (I’m willing to concede some stuff was beyond my control, but I still beat myself up for not working hard enough on it). But writing really only happens when you put your ass in the chair — I bought a Mission-style chair specifically for this desk — and so yesterday I printed out every two-page spread of the book and taped them up around my writing desk.

Now I can see it all, for better or worse. It’s intimidating to have so many blank and half-written pages before me, but I think I can make something out of it that you guys will dig reading, or at least looking at.

I’d say, “Wish me luck,” but it’s more, “Wish me work.”

Birdy Of The Week

Taken a couple days before Saturday’s grooming, her tasteful centerfold pose.

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And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

• Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Jonathan Sandler • Morten Høi Jensen • Prue Shaw • Glenn Kurtz • Jennifer Hayden • Rian Hughes • Josh Neufeld

• RIP Rob Reiner (great anecdote from Shalom Auslander about meeting Reiner on set) . . . RIP John Carey . . . RIP Gil Gerard / Buck Rogers (he was the first namesake I ever heard of, before I found out about Gil Kane) . . . RIP Anthony Geary / Luke . . . RIP Joe Ely . . . RIP Peter Millson / Max Eider . . . RIP Nuno Loureiro . . . RIP Robert J. Samuelson . . . RIP Peter Arnett . . . RIP Lou Cannon . . . RIP Rachael Carpani . . . RIP Greg Biffle . . . RIP Steve Taneyhill . . . RIP Robert Mnuchin (I debated putting him in the Also section, because his son was the Treasury secretary 2017-2021 and because he once spent $91 million on a Jeff Koons sculpture; really, the latter should be enough, but I’m feeling generous today, and it turns out he was buying the sculpture for Steve Cohen, who burned far more money for his Mets to miss the playoffs last season) . . .

• Also, Norman Podhoretz died.

• Jonah Weiner wrote a good piece about his realization that reading a great book is better than dicking around on his phone. The malady is more profound than that, but at the same time not. I’m always happy when people realize the pleasures to be had in literature, and I’m glad he found an escape/balance from screen-mediated life.

• Meanwhile, Joshua Rothman asks what exactly we’re supposed to do once we’re mindful and undistracted.

• In response to those pieces, I’ll say that taking up drawing then painting 5 years ago (!) reframed my relationship to the world, caused me to see things differently, and meant a lot more to me than taking a picture of something and posting it online. I need to get back to daily drawing, and maybe that’ll be a 2026 goal. (I restarted yesterday, because I accidentally skipped a two-page spread in my last journal so I filled it with a pair of sketches.)

• Vauhini Vara wonders what happens if readers prefer AI prose over real writing, which I figure is more a sign of the degradation of reading and writing in the internet era than “how good” AI prose is getting.

• Oh, and AI-generated video is making documentaries (more) untrustworthy.

• But what if AI is The Answer? (No, not THAT AI.)

• For the New Yorker’s 100th anniversary, they had several cartoonists pay tribute to past cartooning legends: Summer Pierre on Helen Hokinson, Emily Flake on Alice Harvey, and Roz Chast on Gahan Wilson (!). (Also, not-yet-guest Liana Finch on William Steig.)

• I was checking out this 12 Must-Read Books For Guys This Winter list during the train back from DC, and while I was glad to Jonathan Ames’ novella You Were Never Really Here on the list, I gnashed my teeth when Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery showed up on it. I mean, I get the value of what Herrigen wrote about, and his role in popularizing zen in the west. HOWEVER, I think Herrigel’s “Nazi until the bitter end” thing needs to be mentioned in any discussion of his work, even if it’s “some might be put off by the fact that he was an ardent Nazi, but ymmv.” You might be interested in this Arthur Koestler takedown of Herrigel (PDF), during which he mentions that zen might lend itself to fascist goals. Of course, some might be put off that Koestler was a rapist, but ymmv.

• Beautiful and sad piece about reading The Lord of the Rings with one’s kids, which I will admit that I never actually read. I read The Hobbit when I was pretty young, but before I could dive into LOTR, I discovered some pretty trashy science fiction, and between that & comics, I never really took to fantasy.

• Private equity fucks up fly fishing.

• Kinda glad I never read much of David Foster Wallace after Infinite Jest. (As noted in past newsletters, I have talked several people down from reading that one, after a couple hundred pages in.) (Illustration by Aaron Lange, who has posted his list of books read in 2025.)

Current/Recent Reading

Shadow Ticket - Thomas Pynchon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

+ the mourner’s Kaddish every morning

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I again missed Wednesday and Thursday weights/yoga because of travel (FDA negotiation Wed., Hill meetings Thu.), and Friday’s weights because of work/board meeting/exhaustion, but did yoga yesterday, so that’s something. My weight’s starting to creep back down a little, but I need to make more of an effort about that. I walked ~5 miles with a couple of The Guys this morning, which was nice.

For laughs, here’s a post-workout pic from 2 years ago. I was only a few pounds lighter, fwiw:

I haven’t made time to meditate each day, but I’m managing to have instants in which I gather into myself and float above or below or with the chaos, so yay.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll back on Wednesday, with the annual Guest List episode, a new Instax, and some art. On Sunday I’ll be back with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.

I lie here making a weapon out of desire / You hear me from far away but / My voice does not touch you / I throw out a net, waiting to gather you in / So I can keep you like a photograph,