Beginnings

This, recently on Brain Pickings, from artist Richard Diebenkorn:



This week for me, #2. #2.

Writing, Order, & Chaos

Brain Pickings, which is a website worth following, has put all its advice from writers for writers in one handy post, yay! Very useful.

Scrolling down it I saw a piece by Isabel Allende called "Writing Brings Order to the Chaos of Life," which it does. That's often the point of writing--to make sense out of the chaos you feel and observe.

But what immediately popped into my mind is that writing also brings chaos to the order of life, which is what is happening to me right now. I am writing about subjects and events that are difficult for me to face, feelings for which I have tamped down tightly for most of my life--I'm letting them out, and all the order I have imposed upon these disorderly feelings is coming out all over the place.

Which seems to be making for good (hopefully), and prolific amounts, of poetry.

What it's doing for my life so far seems good, some resolution and all that, but check back later when I've consulted those whose feelings will also be disturbed by what I'm writing.

Writing takes what you have, either order or chaos, and undoes it, replaces it with its inverse, it seems to me.

What do you think?

Go Figure!

Bored of my own last few self-indulgent posts, I am today happy to recommend to you, via Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, literary action figures, including Edgar Allan Poe (whose birthday was last week):

Other figures include: Austen, Dickens, Wilde, and Shakespeare.

Popova also showcases a line of non-pose-able collectibles in three categories: artists (Dali, Picasso, van Gogh, and Warhol), scientists (Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Tesla), and writers (Twain, Joyce, Shakespeare, and again the inimitable Poe). Check out this link to see them all.

Happy Birthday, Agnes Martin!

This week was artist Agnes Martin's Birthday. She would have been 101 years old. Celebrate over at Maria Popova's Brain Pickings with quotes and an interview with Martin.

On a side note, I've been trying to get a copy of Martin's Writings, but it's priced at $75 used and $150 and up new....I found it on Scribd, but am not sure how I feel about the ethics of downloading form Scribd. If anybody has an opinion on that they want to share, please do....

What's Neat on the Net, Part III


1) First we have a typeface in which every single letter is an optical illusion. It's called, rather amusingly, Macula. Brought to you by Co-Design.




from fastcodesign.com

2) Jeff Goins blogs about the most important part of creativity. And finds that it is...(drum roll please)...space. I love space, all kinds of space. I love to talk about space and think about space, and wonder why I ever moved to Japan where one can never get enough space.

Goins breaks his topic down into 3 kinds of space: physical, mental, and spiritual. And I was so glad to read that someone else has to do his housework and chores before writing. I'm an afternoon writer, as I've mentioned before, in a world where we are repeatedly told that the best creative work is done in the early morning or late at night. But I do my best work when I can concentrate because all the niggling little things that partially occupy my mind until they are done are actually done. And that's what Goins calls mental space. Read about all three types of space and how they affect your creativity at his blog.


3) The Atlantic has the sweetest movie video from Bianca Giaever, called the Scared is scared. It's inspired by a story told by a six-year-old, and the clever filming doesn't overwhelm the message of how to cope with disappointment and fear.


4) Also from The Atlantic, what is this detritus being found on Mars? Looks like stuff I might find under my couch, if I went and looked, but I won't because that's not on my radar of things to do today---not clogging up my mental space right now, but I need to change the subject or it will.....But before I do, pictures at the link!


5) From Neels Castillon, this Bird Ballet. This is what wonder looks like.


6) Finally, Brain Pickings has a few pages from the interesting children's book Ounce, Dice, Trice by Alastair Reid. It explains unusual words in a most engaging way. Check it out.

Two for Today

Two fun things from two of my favorite websites.

First, from  Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, the first print ads for some classic books, including this one for Joyce's Ulysses:

These print ads come from Dwight Garner's book Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements. See more such ads at Brain Pickings,  including some from books by Didion, Hemingway, Plath, Delillo, and more. Enjoy!


Second, Flavorwire has literary quote tattoos.

And that's it for today.

Unblocking Creative Block

Here's what writer Douglas Rushkoff (over at Brain Picking's review of Alex Cornell's book Break Through!: Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination:) has to say about writer's block:

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I don’t believe in writer’s block.

Yes, there may have been days or even weeks at a time when I have not written — even when I may have wanted to — but that doesn’t mean I was blocked. It simply means I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, as I’d like to argue, exactly the right place at the right time.

The creative process has more than one kind of expression. There’s the part you could show in a movie montage — the furious typing or painting or equation solving where the writer, artist, or mathematician accomplishes the output of the creative task. But then there’s also the part that happens invisibly, under the surface. That’s when the senses are perceiving the world, the mind and heart are thrown into some sort of dissonance, and the soul chooses to respond.

That response doesn’t just come out like vomit after a bad meal. There’s not such thing as pure expression. Rather, because we live in a social world with other people whose perceptual apparatus needs to be penetrated with our ideas, we must formulate, strategize, order, and then articulate. It is that last part that is visible as output or progress, but it only represents, at best, 25 percent of the process.

Real creativity transcends time. If you are not producing work, then chances are you have fallen into the infinite space between the ticks of the clock where reality is created. Don’t let some capitalist taskmaster tell you otherwise — even if he happens to be in your own head.

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Writer Michael Erard, quoted in the same review, questions the metaphor we use: "... block implies a hydraulic metaphor of thinking. Thoughts flow. Difficulty thinking represents impeded flow. This interoperation also suggests a single channel for that flow. A stopped pipe. A dammed river. If you only have one channel, one conduit, then you’re vulnerable to blockage."

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Which brings me to this (seemingly unattributed) article over at Good, entitled "One Way is Not Enough: Why Creative People Need Multiple Outlets."  The writer notes "...increasingly I've realized that for people like me, one creative outlet isn't enough. The most interesting, creative people I know express themselves in a variety of ways. I call this practice informing practice ..." 

Furthermore, (s)he finds that "The key is finding a form in which the final product matters less than in my professional work..." because "Without the need to produce a polished project because I'm on the clock, the creativity process feels more fluid. I explore more ideas more freely and don't feel the pressure to turn them into complete package."

Although the author doesn't currently engage in multiple forms of creativity, (s)he asserts that "Finding a secondary creative outlet would allow my creativity, not my craft, to define me. "

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Creativity can be found in writing in more than one form, in managing your life problems creatively, in tweeting brilliantly. Or in trying a new art form altogether. In letting our creativity, not our craft, define us. I can't help but think that would also be good for our craft, "practice informing practice." We who have so little time to follow our primary creative interest will need to be creative in finding out secondary creatives interests, but here's what I think: even thinking about how to do this is a start to creativity.

The Marginalia of Monks

The always-amusing people at Brain Pickings have a collection of marginalia from illuminated manuscripts, written by complaining monks and scribes. Have a look to read gems such as "This page has not been written very slowly," and "As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe."

Or the inimitable "Thank God, it will be dark soon."

Which it will.

c. 1300, A Female figure, possibly a personification of astronomy showing the stars to a group of scholars from the ancient world, from Anthology of Grammatical and Scholastic Texts, Paris, France.

Building Books

If you have somehow arrived at this blog, there's a good chance you love books. And if you do, you'll want to head over to the blog at Brain Pickings, where they have assembled four videos showing the processes used to make books anciently (AD 400), mid-20th century (1947 and 1961), and in this new century (2011). Enjoy.