Rob Walker on curiosity

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

I drew my friend Rob Walker on Zoom today making the case for curiosity. Do check out his book, The Art of Noticing, and his excellent, excellent newsletter. (I drew in pencil in my notebook, so I had to perform a few photoshop shenanigans to make them legible.)

My favorite part of the talk was Rob’s idea that curiosity is not a luxury or a bonus or an add-on to life — it’s vital tool that makes our life and work richer.

Like creativity, curiosity might be better thought of as a verb, not a noun — not something that some people possess and some people don’t, but something everyone can do and get better at.

It’s possible to get curiouser, or to become, like the title of Nina Katchadourian’s art show, a Curiouser.

Onions and peppers

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

Here are some printing experiments with a leftover red onion and blue ink stamp, a la Bruno Munari’s Roses in the Salad.

https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1422287841380478978?s=20

I’m also a big fan of using peppers. (Or whatever leftover vegetables happen to be on the cutting board and the mood strikes.)

I’ve started incorporating some of these prints into my collages:

Rovelli and Mann

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

The physicist Carlo Rovelli and the filmmaker Michael Mann have become entangled in my mind.

When I was reading The Order of Time I couldn’t help but think of Heat.

And after I finished Helgoland, we happened to re-watch Collateral.

Clichés, puns, and hooks

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

kay Ryan limelight

This morning’s copied and marked-up poem is Kay Ryan’s wonderful “Lime Light,” collected in The Best of It.

Ryan’s poems will often start by thinking about clichés:

Her poems, she says, don’t begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as “It’s always darkest before the dawn” or “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“I think, ‘What about those chickens?’” she says, “and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés.”

Some do, perhaps, but many wouldn’t dare to enter such familiar territory. Ryan, however, adds depth and so many surprises that the silliest clichés become fertile ground.

She expanded on this rehabilitation of clichés in her interview with the Paris Review:

I often find myself thinking in clichés. I’ll urge myself on with various bromides and chasten myself with others. When I want to write they’re one way to start thinking because they’re so metaphorically rich. For instance, take the word limelight, or being in the limelight—not really a cliché but a cherished idiom. Before electric light, they heated lime, or calcium oxide, to create incandescence for stage lights. In my poem, “Lime Light,” the limelight comes from a bowl of limes. It’s ridiculous, but it’s not nothing, not just a joke. It’s thinking about how limelight doesn’t work very well. You can’t do anything by limelight.

(Emphasis mine.)

After I copied out “Lime Light,” I found this clipping of George Clinton talking about recording Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain:

Dragonflies and The Twisties

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Crimson pepper pod
add two pairs of wings, and look
darting dragonfly
—Matsuo Basho (1644–1694)

Today I saw the dragonfly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
He dried his wings: like gauze they grew;
Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.
—Tennyson (1809–1892)

Dyed he is with the
Colour of autumnal days,
O red dragonfly
—Hori Bakusui (1718–1783)

Last week I spotted a beautiful “neon skimmer” (red dragonfly) out in our backyard, by our little quarantine pool:

I’d never given dragonflies much thought or attention. They are remarkable to watch. Powerful. They can fly in six directions. “A continuous turning and returning,” wrote H.E. Bates in Down the River, “an endless darting, poising, striking and hovering, so swift that it was often lost in sunlight.”

Like all living things, predator or not, dragonflies are vulnerable. Just a few days ago, I found a dead dragonfly floating in the pool. I fished it out with our net, and laid it on a piece of notebook paper to dry. I decided to memorialize it with a few sun prints, which I later made into the collages you see at the top and bottom of the post.

I wondered what happened to the dragonfly, if it got disoriented or flew too close to the water, or died in the air of some other cause in the air and fell.

I’ve since found out that if you see a dragonfly drowning, you can rescue it and hold it in your hand until it gets its wings dry.

“They do not bite or sting people… They are nothing but good and fair, a sufficient reason for summer to exist.”

When its wings are dry, it will fly off.

* * *

“We have to protect our minds and our bodies, and not just go out and do what the world wants us to do.” When I was reading about how gymnast Simone Biles’ walked away from her Olympic event in order to protect her mental health, I became intrigued with something gymnasts call “The Twisties.”

Here is how Emily Giambalvo described the phenomenon in The Washington Post:

The cute-sounding term, well-known in the gymnastics community, describes a frightening predicament. When gymnasts have the “twisties,” they lose control of their bodies as they spin through the air. Sometimes they twist when they hadn’t planned to. Other times they stop midway through, as Biles did. And after experiencing the twisties once, it’s very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.

The first two paragraphs from that article were so poetic, I broke them into verse in my notebook: