Weekly Digest: June 22
Dave Eggers joins Rick Rubin on Tetragrammaton this week - watch the full video linked here, Ellsworth Kelly's take on the altar, rules to live as exchanged by teachers and students.
“If you’re allowed to just keep doing it — that’s 99% the measure of success.”
Dave Eggers learned that his novel The Circle had been banned in Rapid City, South Dakota through a documentary.
A filmmaker named Arthur Bradford, with support from Matt Stone, traveled there to understand how a book ends up removed from library shelves. What he found was stranger than the ban itself.
According to Eggers, nobody they interviewed could identify a genuine controversy surrounding the book. Instead, a newly elected school board had removed it preemptively. The copies were pulled from shelves, marked To Be Destroyed, and discarded.
The irony was that the decision created the very attention it was attempting to avoid.
When local students learned what had happened, they were furious. Eggers partnered with an independent bookstore and offered to pay for copies of the banned books for any high school student who wanted one. More students ended up reading them than likely would have if the books had simply remained on the shelves.
Eventually, the school board members who made the decision were voted out.
What stands out isn’t the politics of the story. It was Eggers’ relationship to it.
He’s spent years asking audiences a simple question: If you could ban one book, what would it be? Most people have an answer. Yet in the town where his book had been removed, nobody was able to name one.
The whole episode feels like a reminder that creative work has always existed in conversation with forces that want to suppress it, reshape it, ignore it, or control it. Books get challenged. Ideas fall out of favor. Institutions change their minds.
And yet the work has a way of finding its audience.
For Eggers, success doesn’t seem to be measured by whether the obstacles disappear. The obstacles are inevitable.
The question is whether you get to keep going.
Whether you keep making the next thing.
If you’re still doing the work years later, there’s a good chance you’ve already succeeded.
Watch the full video on YouTube.
Red Yellow Blue White and Black II by Ellsworth Kelly
Ten Rules for Students and Teachers by Sister Corita Kent
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
The Dave Eggers piece is such a stark, powerful reminder that the real measure of creative success is simply the resilience to keep going despite the obstacles. Pairing that narrative with Sister Corita Kent's rules on trust and experimentation creates an incredible guide for longevity in any creative practice. Thank you for this week's digest!
The work has a way of finding its audience - yes yes yes! I keep reminding myself as long as I keep making and sharing, it will all work out.