I don’t know how these Friday newsletters come together. Or maybe I do. They usually start with an image I want to put at the top, or a subject line. Today’s began with the subject line: “Listening is the whole deal.”

I came across that line when I was reading The Work of Art, and I knew I had 3 things I wanted to put in there — the Eno doc, Perfect Days, and the Four Tet interview — which were all somewhat related to listening. So once I had almost half the letter, I figured might as well make it a theme.

My favorite bit in the letter is item #9:

“The act of writing is to me to listen,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel lecture. “When I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening… At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”

I don’t consider my newsletters fine literature or anything like that, but there’s something that happens when I’m out here in the studio at my desk, and I’m writing and just pushing things around, seeing how they bump up to each other — the arrangement presents itself, and the thing just comes into being.

At least, that is, when it’s going good.

Anyways: Happy Friday.

Adam Moss in the afterword to The Work of Art:

THERE IS A PHRASE, variations of which many of the subjects of this book ended up uttering at some point. As they were describing why they did this or that, they would say they “listened” to the work, or the work would “tell” them what to do; the work would “speak” to them, as if a character in a book or a color on a canvas could issue orders. Tony Kushner asked his Angels alter ego, Louis, to explain the play to him; Cheryl Pope waited for the mother in her picture with no face to tell her whether she wanted a face. For a long while, I dismissed this phrasing as cliché — more of the empty language people often employ to describe how they work because creation is so hard to describe. Eventually, however, I began to think that no, maybe listening was the whole deal.

Listening to what the poem or song was telling them was another way of describing how they listened to themselves, taking whatever their imagination spewed forth, recognizing it and translating it back—simplifying it, usually—so their conscious self could go about manipulating it. And this attending (“I was just taking dictation,” said Kushner, a common sentiment) was really, I realized, at the heart of the project of this book. That’s what the exhibits they shared are about. The studies, notes, doodles —they are all ways the artists have of talking to themselves.

Or, as Anni Albers put it: “the listening to that which wants to be done”: