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.

Dialog Tutorial

If you want a tutorial on dialog, may I suggest reading Ivy Compton-Burnett's A House and its Head? Published in 1935, it's the sixth of Compton-Burnett's twenty novels, and is one of her two favorites from her own work.

The story is told almost entirely in dialog, and yet you hardly notice this fact, as the writing flows so beautifully. You never get descriptions from the author, only from the characters as they talk to one another, and yet there is no awkwardness, no stilted conversations or observations put there more for the reader's benefit than for the speakers'. Very natural talking, and yet so much ground gets covered. And so much snark too! Hilarious snarkiness.

Compton-Burnett was one of twelve children, none of whom produced an heir. In fact, none of the eight sisters married at all. This fact fascinates me.

A few quotes from her work:
 "It is a pity when we cannot judge by the surface, when it is so often arranged for us to judge by it." — from Mother and Son

"People cannot really give at all. They can only exchange."
  — from Daughters and Sons  (Note: this is a truly Japanese sentiment!)

"All institutions have the same soul."
 — from A Heritage and Its History

"It is the future we must look to," said Constance. "It is useless to pursue the past."
"It is needless," said Audrey. "It will pursue us."
— from A Father and His Fate


All but two of her titles follow this pattern: A and B. She must have found it tried and true.

MoMath

I just found out that the National Museum of Mathematics recently opened in New York City, and I am so jealous of those of you who can go and visit.

See this slide show by TimeOut to see some of the activities you can do there, including a hyper hyperboloid, a fractal wall that makes fractals of your shadows call The Human Tree, a racing track called The Tracks of Galileo, and a pixelated floor that shows you the shortest distance between the people standing on the floor, calculating new pathsways as you move about. This  last exhibit is  called Math Square.

And here's a New York Times article on how fun math can be. And another.

I've got to get to New York soon!

MoMa^th!!!!!!

Wild

Last week I read that crows will remember, for quite a long time, the faces of people who have harrassed them. I've never harrassed a crow, but I have had the suspicion that the crows in our neighborhood recognize me, the lone foreigner, in much the way that the neighbors, even ones living a few blocks away whom I've never formally met, recognize me. So this week I wrote a poem about crows (but I'll bet most people who write poems have a poem about crows).

I was also once recognized by a fox. We were living on the base of a mountain, and one day I was walking down the mountain on our narrow street, houses on the left side, woods on the right. I was the only one on the road and it was very quiet, when a fox came out of the woods, probably thinking the road was deserted. He saw me and came to a dead stop, as did I. We stared at each other; I was frightened but told myself that he was likely more frightened of me than I was of him. Then the fox walked towards me, directly at me. I considered running away, but thought that would encourage him to chase me, so I just started walking down the mountain, acting as if he wasn't there. He fell in step right beside me. I looked down. He was looking up at me as he walked. I stopped walking, thinking maybe he would trot ahead, but he stopped and waited for me. I began walking again and so did he, all the while gazing up at me.

Okay, I thought, the fox and I are apparently going to walk down the mountain road together. He never took his eyes off me, and was clearly not afraid of me, as I would have expected him to be. Then I realized--he had probably never seen a foreigner before, probably never seen a redhead before. He probably thought I was part human and part fox because of my coloring. In any case, he certainly seemed to recognize me. We continued down the hill till we came close to a crossroad that had cars whizzing along it. The fox then veered right, going back into the woods, but not before turning and giving me one last look.

When I told my husband about the fox, he reminded me of a wild animal we had nursed back to health. It had been living under a bridge in our neighborhood, and it was completely hairless and emaciated--so much so that I thought it was a tanuki (an animal indigenous to Japan that looks like something like a raccoon or an oppossum) while my husband had thought that it was a fox. It was so sick that we couldn't really tell what it was, and of course it kept far away from us. We brought food to the bridge and tossed it down to the poor creature, until one day it wasn't there anymore. My husband thought the fox from the woods was the recovered animal that we had nursed, and that's why it wasn't afraid of me.

I don't know why the fox didn't fear me, but it made me feel so much less alone, living as a foreigner here in Japan, to be recognized and honored by the fox. And also the crows, who I feel sure know me.

The Comfort of Cannot

The other day blogger John Biesnecker posted about "The Joys of Having a Forever Project," a project that he describes as one that "despite its audacity and seeming impossibility, simply will not put itself to bed. . . . that is hard to imagine actually embarking on, but whose mental cost of abandonment is far too high to even consider."

The next day he wrote another blog post about "Why the Forever Project Hit a Nerve," as it had--getting over 45,000 hits in 18 hours and becoming a focus on Hacker News and Reddit.

When I (finally) found out about Biesnecker's forever project, I was immediately reminded of the quote by Henry Moore: "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

I have loved this Henry Moore quote for years, have turned to it when I have wondered why I spend so much of my life writing poems, never getting written what I really want to write. And I turn to this quote when I wonder if I have wasted my life, which I wonder quite a bit...

There is something that cheers me to work on what I know is impossible but what I know I will never stop trying to do.

And then I started thinking about the beauty in all the things that cannot be:
 
"I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert," Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), "and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control."

". . . The aim is to become / something broken / that cannot be broken further . . "
from Jorie Graham’s Overlord

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve. " Max Planck

The Pieces That Fall To Earth                           Kay Ryan

 

One could

almost wish

they wouldn't;

they are so

far apart,

so random.

One cannot

wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding way they matter.

Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Iris Murdoch once wrote, “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.”

 

…you cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.  Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

40. Wind cannot blow the wind away, nor water wash away the water. From James Richardson's Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

 

207. Sometimes I hate beauty because I don’t have a choice about loving it. I must be wrong in this, but whether because I take freedom too seriously, or love, I cannot tell. From James Richardson's Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

 

 

The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle. Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

Contemporary poets have for the most part forgotten about symbolism, especially its one great insight that Being cannot be stated but only hinted at.  Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

Girder                                                 Nan Cohen

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward,

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.