I guess I don’t mind being a lake being rippled. My eye likes some things. I try to make something my eye likes. I get nearer or farther from it. If I manage to get close, it feels good, like solving a puzzle.
-Jennifer Michael Hecht, On Creative Inspiration
Cut Your Dementia and Stroke Risk
“When you take the time to sit alone with your thoughts, you can find who you want to be; not who your parents want you to be, not who your friends want you to be, and definitely not who some shyster on Instagram or TikTok wants you to be.”
5 Rituals To Keep You Happy All The Time - Barking Up The Wrong Tree
How to be happy forever and ever and ever…
Positive Emotions: We only ask the question “Having fun yet?” ironically. So savor the good times. Take a mental snapshot.
Engagement: Flow can debug your happiness code. Spend more time doing the things that make time stop.
Relationships: A fortress of solitude can be a fortress of loneliness if you’re not careful. Do a gratitude visit with someone and spread the joy.
Meaning: It’s smelling salts for life. Be the person you want to be remembered as.
Accomplishment: All too often our mediocrity is self-imposed. Go accomplish something. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of a job well done. Corny, but true.
only a comic sensibility can grasp the character of our country and our national myths.”
-Simic on Steinburg
I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.
-Octavia Butler
The Science of Getting “Unstuck”
One of my favorite examples of this “action above all” principle is something Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of [rock band] Wilco and a writer, explained about his own process. Like most creatives, he’s felt stuck from time to time. His solution, as he describes it, is to “pour out” the bad ideas as though they’re scum sitting atop a pond of fresh water. When he feels he can’t write or compose, he’ll actively try to write or compose bad songs or sentences, metaphorically pouring out the bad ideas to make way for the good. Sometimes those bad songs and sentences turn out to better than he expects, which is an added bonus, but even when they’re not useful products themselves, they seem to liberate other ideas that sit beneath the surface of these inferior or unoriginal ideas.
“I continue to be fascinated by how slow, seemingly inefficient methods make my self-education more helpful and more meaningful.
Example: This week I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, and I wanted to see the lives of all the composers on a timeline. Instead of googling for one, I decided to just make one for myself with a pencil in my notebook. It was kind of a pain, but I had a feeling I’d learn something. Pretty much immediately I was able to see connections that Swafford wrote about that just hadn’t sunken in yet, like how Haydn’s life overlapped both Bach’s and Beethoven’s while covering Mozart’s completely. Had I googled a pre-made timeline, I’m not completely sure I would’ve studied it closely enough to get as much out of it as the one I drew.
Another example: I copy passages of text that I like longhand in my notebook, and it not only helps me remember the texts, it makes me slow down enough so that I can actually read them and think about them, even internalize them. Something happens when I copy texts into my notebook that does not happen when I cut and paste them into Evernote or onto my blog.”
A journal is a magic space to hang out - Austin Kleon
“this active space where a kind of magic happens… it’s not a scrapbook, it’s not a diary, it’s this place.”
“The journal is not so much a way of diarizing one’s life, but a portable studio, a place where you can hang out, with your imagination, your intuition, your inspiration.” -Paulus Berensohn
The Imperfectionist: How to choose sanity now
“Likewise, striving toward sanity means “clearing the decks” before getting down to business on a project you care about, or reading another how-to book about it, while operating from sanity means “paying yourself first”, making a start even though the decks aren’t clear – because you understand that even five minutes spent Actually Doing The Thing are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours at some point in future.
Or maybe what you need in life is more fun? In that case, the striver-toward-sanity will buckle down and grind harder – making life less fun – in order to make space for fun at some other time. Whereas the operator-from-sanity will make sure to do something fun, however briefly, today.”
“I love being in that place where everything is just coming in, and everything is potentially important, and I’m underlining every great sentence that John McPhee has ever written and then I’m typing it up into this embarrassingly long set of reading notes, documents, organized by books. And then when you sit down with it as a writer who has a job, and his job is to fill a little window of a magazine or website, all of that ecstatic inhaling has to stop. You realize that you’ve collected approximately 900,000% of what you need or could ever use.”
“I just love to work,” he said. He’s a process guy. He’s often compared to Warhol, but Keene feels more in line with Robert Rauschenberg, and with the installation artists of the nineteen-seventies. “They set about to do a series of tasks, and the performance was the art work,” Keene said. When Keene shows his work in a gallery, he often makes arrangements to paint there, too. “My paintings are the residue, or the souvenir, of the performance,” he explained
-Steve Keene
Mile-a-Minute Plywood Painter Steve Keene Has a Retrospective
“I love the idea of doing sixty paintings a day, and finishing them, more than the idea of trying to make one that I think is perfect,” he said. “The whole system is based on trying not to beat myself up.”
The imagination is the creative force of the individual. It always negotiates different thresholds and releases possibilities of recognition and creativity that the linear, controlling, external mind will never even glimpse. The imagination works on the threshold that runs between light and dark, visible and invisible, quest and question, possibility and fact. The imagination is the great friend of possibility. Where the imagination is awake and alive, face never hardens or closes but remains open, inviting you to new thresholds of possibility and creativity.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, 145
“i feel in this time of trump it is a necessity to have a plan, a manifesto, an alternative. it’s a question of life and death for our species. as a musician i feel i can suggest the musical poetic angle which is that after tragedies one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. it’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it, it doesn’t work that way. you have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. it’s a territorial hope affair. at the time, that digging is utopian but in the future it will become your reality.”
— Björk
How Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
By the time Dillard decided to write Pilgrim, she had filled dozens of journals with passages from what she had been reading, anecdotes from her walks, facts about natural history, and dreams about luna moths mating. She had started writing in journals to help her quit smoking, but by the time she was writing in her second spiral notebook, she’d realized writing down her thoughts gave her physical access to the contents of her mind, as if everything she had ever read were fresh in her mind.
She decided to use her journals to write the book and set about copying what she thought was most interesting onto notecards. She ended up with a 17-inch box filled with 1,100 notecards that she shuffled and reshuffled, trying to divide the anecdotes, facts, quotes, and ideas into chapters.
The glee of coming up with the idea for the book soon gave way to the struggle of putting the book together. She asked in one notebook, “What the hell am I going to do with these notecards?” Pages later, she wrote, “I am going nuts over this book. What kind of book is it?”
I’ve never read the book, but this was a really fascinating read. Thanks to cgronlund for pointing me to it!
Filed under: index cards
TAG YOURSELF!
Titanic: OK BUT IF IT’S SET IN THAT TIME PERIOD THEN EVERY STITCH NEEDS TO BE FROM THAT TIME PERIOD BECAUSE OF AUTHENTICITY! IF YOU HAVE TO USE ALL YOUR BUDGET TO GO BACK IN TIME TO SNATCH SOME TIME ACCURATE PANTIES. THEN SO BE IT! BECAUSE AUTHEN👏TICI👏TEEEE!!!👏
Shakespeare in Love: Well, I really appreciate when costume designers really try to be true to the period you know? But if there’s an eye liner here or obvious hair dye job there then no problem desu yo 👌
Gatsby: Hear me out, work with the silhouette but hear me out now…have the clothes made by modern fashion designers. Nobody wants to see those ratty old clothes from the museum. THEY FALLING APART! Also throw JAY-Z and Lana on the remix soundtrack cus that ol’ jig non music putting me to sleep 😎
Marie Antoinette: CONVERSE!!!!!
