I talked to Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder for Cool Tools, and it was some of the most fun I’ve had recording a podcast.
We laughed a lot but also went deep into how I feel about technology. (Basically: “The tools matter and the tools don’t matter.”)
The four pieces of my favorite gear I recommended:
You can read more and listen here.
A story about meeting choreographer Martha Graham for a soda, as told by Agnes de Mille in Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham:
I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.
Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”
“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”
“No artist is pleased.”
“But then there is no satisfaction?”
“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Creative maladjustment. Perpetually blessed and dissed, etc.
(Emphasis mine. Found via The Book Haven, copied from Brain Pickings.)
How do we know when we have something?
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Of his recording work on Thriller, Quincy Jones says, “We simply did what gave us the goosebumps.”
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“Goosebumps are the result of tiny muscles flexing in the skin, making hair follicles rise up a bit. This causes hairs to stand up. Goosebumps are an involuntary reaction: nerves from the sympathetic nervous system — the nerves that control the fight or flight response — control these skin muscles.”
* * *
“Frisson (French for ‘shiver’), also known as aesthetic chills or musical chills is a psychophysiological response to rewarding auditory and/or visual stimuli that often induces a pleasurable or otherwise positively-valenced affective state and transient paresthesia (skin tingling or chills), sometimes along with piloerection (goose bumps) and mydriasis (pupil dilation).”
* * *
“All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and purt science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
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“The tipoff for me is somatic. Whenever a project comes to me, one that is right, that is genuine, I feel a kind of ‘shiver’ in my body, and that tells me that it corresponds to something very deep in me, and that I need to pursue it. That has been my guide with literally every book I wrote. Trusting this kind of visceral reaction means that you are willing to let life ‘come and get you.’ It means who you are is defined from the inside, not the outside. In terms of what’s really important, we don’t have much choice, and that’s as it should be. The decision is made by a larger energy or unconscious process, and when it’s right, you know it… Goethe wrote: ‘Man errs as long as he strives.’ Sit still, meditate, just let the answer arise from the body. (It may take a while.)”
—Morris Berman
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“‘Oh, yes, father,’ he said. ‘I’d like to earn a living, I really would. I’d love to learn how to get the shivers. That’s something I don’t understand at all.’ […]
The father could only sigh. ‘Well, it won’t do you any harm to find out about the shivers,’ he said, ‘but you won’t get a living by shivering.’”
—Philip Pullman, “The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About The Shivers,” Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm
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“When I make a connection between two disparate subjects, I can almost feel my scalp tingle. I imagine the dendrites in my brain reaching out to make new connections to old knowledge. To me, setting my scalp atingle is one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing…”
—Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics
* * *
I’m waiting for that tingle in the scalp.
When reading Jane Friedman’s newsletter, I came across this great bit by writer Bill O’Hanlon, from his book, Becoming A Published Therapist:
In my view, there are four main energies you can tap into when you write your book. The main writing energy you discover may be just one or you may find that you have a combination of more than one of these energies that fuels your writing endeavors. The four energies are Blissed, Blessed, Pissed, and Dissed. The first two represent the positive energies; the last two, the “negative.”
The energies are split between “what you love and what upsets you”:
O’Hanlon goes on to say many of his early books were “written from a combination of pissed and blissed.”
(I can relate: much of my work comes from being a combination of angry and curious.)
O’Hanlon’s point is that ideas aren’t enough, you need energy to see you through a creative project, and if you can identify that energy and where it comes from, it can help your work.
In “less search, more feed” style, Clive Thompson recently wrote about “rewilding your attention,” or avoiding what the algorithm is trying to push at you:
The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.
My phone keeps trying to autocorrect “rewilding” to “rewinding,” and I’m choosing to take it as a sign: rewinding can be a kind rewilding.
Rewinding your attention, for many of us who grew up in the wilder days of the web, means going back to older ways of attending. (Clive’s solution is also the solution of Rob Walker and some of my other more interesting friends: cultivate weird RSS feeds in Feedly. And read weird books.)
For me, it also means going back to my beginnings, remembering the weird interests that brought me to my work, re-discovering and maybe re-investing in those interests, and sharing them in the way that has brought me so much…
Update: Clive has dropped a list of 9 ways to rewild your attention!
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