I love this 1931 photo of Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Mary Reynolds lounging around on the French Riviera. Calvin Tompkins, in Duchamp: A Biography, gives us the context: “For several years [Duchamp and Reynolds] spent the month of August in a villa that Mary rented in Villefranche-sur-Mer, on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. Brancusi came to stay with them there in 1931; he set up his big camera on the terrace and took the photograph…”
In 2014, Damon Krukowski (do check out his podcast, Ways of Hearing, and his book, The New Analog) wrote “Back to Mono,” on why summer and mono listening go hand in hand:
The transistor radio sounds right to me in summer. Monaural AM radio reception changes with the weather, the temperature, the time of day, and just as we expose our bodies to the elements more in summer, it makes sense to me that audio should do the same. Plus, mono suits summer broadcasts so well: baseball games, violent storm warnings, the local oldies station (which plays mostly mono records anyway). How would stereo improve any of these?
I saw The Beatles in Mono box set at the library last week and checked it out. Not sure how many people know, but The Beatles saw stereo as a fad, and spent almost all of their time mixing their records in mono, leaving it to the engineers to make the stereo mixes. Brian Wilson mixed Pet Sounds in mono partially because he was deaf in one ear — he literally couldn’t make sense of stereo. (Mono also gave him control over what listeners would hear.) Later, Bruce Springsteen would mix Born To Run in a way that emulated that mono Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” style.
Related: Have you ever noticed how wonderful music from the first half of the 60s and earlier sounds on your tiny iPhone speakers?
Stuart Kells, author of The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, took his young children on a library world tour:
From our home base of Melbourne, Australia, we would build the trip around highlights. In Switzerland: Zurich’s Bibliothek and the wonderful 18th-century Abbey Library of St. Gall. In London: the British Library and Lambeth Palace. At Oxford, the Bodleian. In the U.S., the Morgan, the Folger, the Houghton, the Smithsonian, plus the great public libraries of New York and Boston, and the “head office” of them all: the Library of Congress.
A lovely idea: library tourism!
Even if you don’t plan a whole trip around them, libraries are excellent spots for weary travelers: free, quiet, cool, full of locals, and staffed by people whose job is to help any visitors who walk in the door.
Wherever I travel, I research the nearby libraries and try to pop into any I happen to come across while walking around. In Milan, I stumbled onto the Braidense National Library and saw an excellent exhibit of book art. Driving the California coast, I discovered that the public library in Encinitas has a view of the Pacific. This summer we’re planning a visit to the brand-new Eastham Public Library during a week on Cape Cod.
Of course, I’m also a big proponent of being a tourist in your own town. Here in Austin, we have a glorious new central library, and yet, I still meet people in town who haven’t seen it!
When friends visit, I say, “Let me take you to the library!” They think I’m nuts, but it’s really the best this city has to offer right now. (Especially in the sweltering summer.)
Above: inside the APL, below: outside the library, on the pedestrian path under the bridge
Last weekend I saw this sign on Brian Beattie’s recording studio door pointing the way to Valerie Fowler’s art studio. (Brian told me the musicians he works with find it pleasantly encouraging.) Almost too perfect, considering I’m working on illustrations for the book inspired by my talk, “How To Keep Going.”
A few days ago I suggested “What do you want to learn?” as a replacement for the question, “What’s next?”
One response I saw could be summarized as: “Ok, fine, but if what you want to learn isn’t tied in to your career somehow — if your boss doesn’t see value in it or if you can’t squeeze value out of it for your customers — it’s not professional development, it’s a hobby.”
Sometimes I don’t even know where to begin.
First off, I’m trying to imagine Thoreau or Leonardo limiting their interests to “professional development.”
Second, I am so tired of hearing “hobbyist” and “amateur” thrown around as pejorative terms. It’s such a lame, macho move. God forbid we ever do anything for pleasure or love.
On top of that, there’s a long history of amateurs making huge contributions to their fields of interest. A recent American Masters, for example, tells the story of how bombshell actress Hedy Lamarr helped develop a crucial technology for wi-fi and GPS. (I write more about the amateur spirit in Show Your Work!)
As for the importance of hobbies, it’s well known how many great thinkers practiced an art or a craft or some kind of tinkering outside of their profession. Take Hedy Lamarr, again, as an example: She kept a little lab on set during filming, and her fascination with how remote controls worked made her think that maybe you could control torpedoes the same way.
Setting aside the importance of hobbies and the amateur spirit, what worries me the most is this faulty idea that you should only spend time learning about things if they have a definite “ROI.” Creative people are curious people, and part of being a creative person is allowing yourself the freedom to let your curiosity lead you down strange, divergent paths. You just cannot predict how what you learn will end up “paying off” later. Who’s to say what is and what isn’t professional development? (An audited calligraphy class winds up changing the design of computers. Etc.)
This is the trouble we often have with schools, of course: When education is seen as an investment, we decide what students should be spending time on based on what is shown (or believed, rather) to have a return on investment in the marketplace.
As Milton Glaser says, sometimes personal development and professional development are at odds. What’s good for business is not always (not often?) good for your soul. There’s always a balance between making a living and making a life.
The lives of great thinkers teach us that learning is the verb of life. The trick to lifelong learning is to exercise your curiosity as much as you can and to let it guide you where it wants to go. To pay attention to what you pay attention to. To not worry too much about where things are going to lead. To learn for learning’s sake, not because it’s going to get you something, necessarily, but because you have faith that the things that interest you will help you become who you need to be.
Your interest and your desire and your instincts are your compass. They show you the way.
It’s a hard thing to internalize, but once you do, it’s one of the most powerful things. It sets you free.
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