Miscellany – Page 220

Man in hole

Friday, August 24, 2018

“A visitor to the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Serralves museum in Porto was hospitalised this week after falling inside one of the British artist’s installations, which features a 2.5-metre-deep hole. It is not clear whether he fell into the hole or beside it.”
—The Art Newspaper

“Attendees of previous showings of the work have questioned ‘whether there really was a hole in the floor or whether it was simply a circle painted with an extremely dark black paint.’ Presumably there will be no doubts going forward.”
—Gizmodo

“Ladies and gentlemen: I invented the portable hole for the good of humanity. But let us all hope it will never be used for evil purposes.”
—Professor Calvin Q. Calculus, “The Hole Idea,” 1955

“On Sunday, May 30, 2010, an enormous hole, 60 feet wide and 30 stories deep, opened up in the middle of Guatemala City, swallowing a three-story building, a home, and local reports claimed that one man was killed when the building was swallowed.”
—Atlas Obscura

“Images of the crater, 20 metres across, 30 metres deep and nearly perfectly round, were published around the world — prompting complaints that the picture had been manipulated. But city officials said the crater was both real and round.”
—The Guardian

“HOLEY TERROR STILL ON THE LOOSE.”
—Newspaper headline, “The Hole Idea,” 1955

“You will see this story over and over again. People love it and it is not copyrighted. The story is ‘Man in Hole,’ but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

School yourself

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Some advice from the 2018 *Steal Like An Artist* Calendar

It’s back-to-school season. This line from a Frank Bruni op-ed caught my eye: “how a student goes to school matters much, much more than where.”

Here’s what I wrote in the “School Yourself” section of Steal Like An Artist:

School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else – that’s how you’ll get ahead.

Like the RZA said, “Whether I went to school or not, I would always study.”

Whether you’re going back to school or not, learning is the verb of life, and it’s always time to school yourself.

The season of fruit, a harvest of thought

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Henry David Thoreau wrote of a melancholy he felt in late August for the year which was quickly passing. His diary entry for August 21, 1852:

The sound of crickets gradually prevails more and more. I hear the year falling asleep.

And a year later on August 18, 1853:

What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now,—as if the rest of the year were down-hill, and if we had not performed anything before, we should not now? The season of flowers or of promise may be said to be over, and now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! It matters not by how little we have fallen behind; it seems irretrievably late. The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life.

He was one of our great chroniclers of seasons, and felt, very strongly, that we had seasons within us. Here’s what he wrote the next year, on August 7, 1854:

Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness? How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?

Book advertising

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

The 5-year-old has been coming out to the studio with me while I finish up the back matter for the new book. He wrote about it in his diary (above) and then I came back from working the other afternoon and he had drawn an ad for his books. (Including the classic, How To Make Your Life Go On Forever.)

Creative is not a noun

Monday, August 20, 2018

Here’s video of a 40-minute keynote I gave during the Scratch Conference at MIT’s Media Lab last month. It was one of the most enjoyable talks I’ve given — it’s a kind of mashup of my books, and it was received by a great room full of enthusiastic people. (Followed by a Q&A with the wonderful Karen Brennan.) If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, check out my speaking page.