Drowning in Text

Too much to read, what Picasso did when he was broke, the assassination of a Quebecois coke-dealer, and how the British Cycling Team stopped sucking.

Sep 01, 2023

It’s 1907—

—and Pablo Picasso is flat broke. He’s 25-years-old, and despite his early successes, he’s about to age out of his status as the youthful prodigy of the Parisian art scene. He feels himself at an inflection point. What he does next could determine the rest of his career.

In the spring, Picasso goes to Barcelona to hang out with his friend Gertrude Stein. While he’s there, Henri Matisse drops by to say hi, carrying a funky little curio he’d just purchased: a small African sculpture in the shape of a human figure. Picasso is fascinated by it. He asks Matisse if he can hold it—and he never gives it back. For the rest of the night, as they drink and chat, Picasso holds the little figure in his hands, turning it over, examining it, running his fingers over the face.

According to many historians, this is the moment modern art begins.

For the entire 20^th Century—

—the British national cycling team sucked. They sucked hard. In those hundred years, they’d earned only a single gold medal at the Olympics and won the Tour de France approximately zero times. They sucked so bad, in fact, that some bike manufacturers refused to sell them gear, lest their brands be associated with the spectacular incompetence of those cyclists wearing the Union Jack. For an empirical power competing in a popular international sport, this was painfully embarrassing. Something had to be done.

And so it was. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the British cycling team won 14 medals, including 8 golds. At the London Olympics in 2012, they won another 12 medals (8 of them gold). How did they manage such a dramatic turnaround?

Surprisingly, the answer isn’t steroids.

I find myself—

—increasingly overwhelmed by text. Letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. I’m fighting constantly to keep my head above water, to keep from drowning in it, and lately I feel myself pulled under. The stack of books on my bedside table continues to rise—until I move them down to the basement bookshelf, where, if they’re lucky, they’ll be rediscovered a decade from now. Magazines pile up, links to online articles proliferate. Every day I receive dozens of newsletters in my inbox—I delete three quarters of them. There is so much to read, so much to process, so much to respond to. I’m bombarded by text (and, literally, texts); work emails, personal emails; message threads on Slack, Facebook Messenger. Unanswered threads are lost in the bottom of my inbox until, months later, they’re uncovered in much the same way you might uncover a dead body in the woods: with a gasp, a scream, a cry of oh, God, no!

A few weeks ago, I took a vacation. Not just from work, but from my laptop. I disconnected. I went on long bike rides with the kids. I woke up in the morning and didn’t immediately open my email and didn’t start scanning the messages I’d received overnight. It was a vacation from my own life—or, to be specific, a vacation from the way I’ve been trained to live, here in the year 2023.

This may not be a universal problem. Some people, it seems, are very well-adjusted to this contemporary way of living. They have all sorts of strategies to mitigate the stress of being perpetually reachable, and can process all that text, all those demands for their attention. They can watch all the new shows that must be watched, and dive deep into the archives of that podcast everyone has recommended, and, in between it all, post their opinions about it all on whatever the hell Twitter is called now.

But I’m beginning to think I’m not built for it—cognitively, I mean. Or psychologically. Or maybe even physically. I’m not built to be a person who is on his phone, or on his laptop, and constantly interacting, passively and actively, with the rest of the world. I hate how much information is available to me, and how much of it I can access without having earned it. I hate being reachable. I hate being reached. I thought for a long time this meant I was a misanthropist, and simply didn’t enjoy the company of other people (or didn’t need it), but this isn’t true, I love being around other people, I need it, my entire mode of interacting with the world is specifically designed to get the attention of other people. And yet, I bristle against the fact that I’m available at every second of every day, which is the expectation imposed upon all of us by our phones. And I resist this expectation by being terrible at communicating. If you know me, you have experienced my terrible communication skills firsthand. It often takes me days to respond to text messages and emails (if I respond at all). I often disappear in the middle of a conversation. I don’t answer phone calls, ever. Almost all the emails I write necessarily begin with the phrase “Sorry for the late reply…”

Ironic, then, that I am sending this to you. I’m overwhelmed by text, yet here I am, creating more of it, sneaking it into your inbox and overwhelming you, too.

Overwhelmed by text—

—but still reading. Or trying to. It took me almost two months to finish Patrick Radden Keefe’s history of The Troubles in Northern Island, Say Nothing. I started reading Annie Ernaux’s brilliant, life-changing memoir The Years around the same time, and still haven’t finished. In the middle of it all, I managed to stagger my way in fits and starts through two volumes of James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno’s The Nice House on The Lake. My struggle to get through each of these books has nothing to do with the texts themselves, which are all terrifically compelling, but rather with my ability to be compelled in the first place, which has apparently been compromised by the pleasant chaos of summer, in which nothing is going on, but everything is going on. I can say that I read these books, but even after two months reading about the conflict between Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants, I can barely explain (to you or to myself) what they were even fighting about in the first place. I try to read, I look at the page, I process the words, but an instant later they’re gone, dripped out, like trying to cup water in my hands.

There was one book—

—however, that I managed to read from start to finish in a single sitting, that burned through my brain-fog and stayed with me.

Val-d’Or Neon is a brilliant little bit of creative non-fiction by the graphic designer Olivier Ballou—an indie comic about the filthy and fascinating history of his hometown, in which we follows the lives of three real-life citizens through different eras of the city’s history: a British war bride in the 1940s, a drug kingpin riding the cocaine boom in the 1980s, and a rebellious teen in the 1990s. The true protagonist of the story, however, is a building: the infamous Chateau Inn, which, over the decades, was home to various nightclubs and low-cost housing. Not a metaphorical protagonist, either—the building literally narrates the story, commenting on the city’s evolving fortunes in first-person prose. It’s an ingenious conceit, and gives the book’s omniscient perspective a charming tone.

I asked Olivier to tell me a little bit about how this project started, how it unfolded, and how he managed to get it finished while working a full-time job as a creative director, and raising two kids with his wife in Washington, DC.

Before I settled on making this graphic novel, I was already creating four-panel comics about my childhood in Val-d’Or, Quebec. One day, I listened to a fascinating podcast about the Chateau Inn, which was a sketchy downtown bar clad in baby blue sheet metal. I created a four-panel comic about it on May 31, 2022 – one year to the day from when I sent the final book to the printer.
The story was always going to involve three or four real-life characters who frequented the Chateau over the decades. I was confident about the first, a long-dead war bride who had a memoir I could pull from. However, the other characters kept dropping off: either they ghosted me after lengthy interviews, or they had been covered by other writers who got testy with me about the project. I wasn’t willing to do anything that would make anyone mad, and this caused me a lot of angst. In the end, though, I got my stories.
I have to credit the Sequential Artist Workshop for providing structure and accountability, and making the project a less lonely undertaking. My wife works evenings, which gave me time after the kids were in bed. I did the book in bursts: completing a dozen pages in a week, followed by more weeks of outlining and research. As a commitment device, I announced the launch date when I had maybe a third of the book done, going so far as to do an interview about it on local radio. This was a great motivator to not only finish the book but also get a crowdfunding campaign and marketing strategy underway in time. I've already begun my second book, Val-d'Or Underground, about the pull of gold on the collective psyches of Valdorians.

An Aggregation of Small Things

The secret to the British national cycling team’s sudden success is both totally unexpected and totally boring. Their dramatic turnaround is credited to Dave Brailsford, who was hired as the team’s performance director in 2003. One would imagine, based on the results, that he instituted some radical innovation or sweeping foundational change. But Brailsford did something slightly less revolutionary: he bought his cyclists brand new pillows.

He got them new mattresses, too. And repainted the inside of their repair shop. And bought them new massage gels. And, most importantly, he taught them how to wash their hands.

He did these seemingly insignificant things, each of which, on their own, may have proven meaningless. But he did a lot of them. And he did them consistently. And whatever was gained from each of these minor refinements began to accumulate. The cyclists slept better. They got sick less often. The bright white walls of the repair shop made it easier to spot dust and other imperfections in their equipment. As Brailsford explained:

“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1-percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

This approach to training has come to be known as The Aggregation of Marginal Gains (maybe you’ve heard of it—like so many other problem-solving systems, it has been coopted by the corporate world and systematized to help Fortune 500 CEOs to squeeze even more juice out of the desiccated husks of consumers like us). The core principle is simple: identify and address the smallest inefficiencies and errors, and the marginal gains you earn from each minor improvement, when accumulated, will lead to significant enhancements. By breaking down complex problems into manageable components and refining each of them, one can, over time, make steady progress on a task that seems insurmountable.

This, of course, is how books get written. A few sentences each day. A few more the next. Graphic novels, too. You start drawing four-panel webcomics, and soon you’re writing an entire pop-history narrative about your hometown.

One imagines great art—

—being conjured into the physical world through obsessive focus, through agonizing effort, in miserable circumstances, and at the expense of the artist’s closest personal relationships. Each great novel, great painting, great album must demand from its maker some measure of his/her/their soul.

Right?

Or could it be, like the success of the British Cycling team, that it’s way more boring than that. Maybe the idea of the tortured artists is something that artists came up with so that people would pay attention to them (to which they might respond, oh, I am overwhelmed by all this attention, please leave me alone!). Maybe the ideal process for making great art is to continuously make small refinements to the most banal aspects of creation. To wash your hands more thoroughly so you don’t get sick.

Olivier Ballou, the writer/artist behind Val-d’Or Neon, doesn’t consider himself a professional artist. And he has no ambition to be one. He admits it this freely.

It's a hobby. Even if I were independently wealthy, I couldn't make it my main occupation (it would raise the stakes too much.) It does meet a psychic need, though. I get antsy whenever I go more than a few months without a personal creative project. I've produced a documentary film, wrote a novel, and even put on an exhibition of miniatures/dioramas. But Val-d'Or Neon is the project that has sustained me the longest. Bottom line: perfect is the enemy of the good.

Now that I think about it—

—something did stick with me from Annie Ernaux’s memoir, which documents her life through the latter half of the 20th Century, from the postwar years in rural France to the early years of the new millennium. Of this modern era, she writes:

“We lived in a profusion of everything, objects, information, and “expert opinions.” No sooner had an event occurred than someone issued a reflection, whatever the subject: manners of conduct, the body, orgasm, and euthanasia. Everything was discussed and decrypted […] The communication of experience and fantasies was pleasing to the conscience. Collective introspection provided models for putting the self into words. The repertoire of shared knowledge grew. The mind grew more agile, children learned at a younger age, and the slowness of school drove young people to distraction. They texted on their mobiles full tilt.
With all the intermingling of concepts it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one’s own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live.”

That she wrote these words in 2008 — during the infancy of social media, at the dawn of the iPhone — is somehow both comforting and disquieting.

Back in his Parisian studio—

—Picasso attempts to express, visually, the epiphany he’d experienced while holding Matisse’s African figurine. In the weeks after that first encounter, Picasso visits the collection of African and Iberian art at the Trocadero museum in Barcelona, and is struck by…

“…all those objects that people had created with a sacred and magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown and hostile forces that surrounded them, thereby trying to overcome their fears, giving them color and shape.”

He starts working on a new piece. Something that will redefine the language of painting. Something that will question the very notion of perspective. Something that will shred apart the fabric of artistic convention—

—which is all very grand and ambitious, except that Picasso still flat broke, he needs some cash, his reputation is waning, and the urgency to complete a new painting — a painting that will sell — presses upon him.

But Pablo refuses to rush. Despite the pressure, he takes his time. Like, really takes his time. He spends the next six months creating almost five-hundred preparatory drawings—the most preparatory works that have ever been made in Western history for a single painting. And those five-hundred beta tests/training runs/practice sessions will eventually pay off. Decades later, the painting that results will be featured in 95-percent of all art textbooks that cover the early 20th century (no other painting will be in more than half).

The painting is called "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” and is considered the most influential work of art in the 20^th Century. In 2011, art critic Holland Carter will proclaim that Picasso had “changed history with this work. He'd replaced the benign ideal of the Classical nude with a new race of sexually armed and dangerous beings.”

Sketch by sketch by sketch—this, I guess, is how one changes history.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this particular issue of TOLSTOYAN, you can share it with a friend by clicking the button below.

How are you coping with the abundance of text that is dumped upon you each day (including this email)? You can tell me all about it by responding directly to this email, or by clicking the button below to leave a comment.