The magic of the brush

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

In the Tuesday newsletter this morning I wrote about the magic of the brush pen. I also shot a video of me working with it in my diary:

I usually save everything Sam Anderson writes for print, but I highly recommend listening his recent profile of Laurie Anderson, because it contains a wonderful intro that’s not in the original piece, explaining how Anderson has a list of 5 questions she asks to figure out whether what she’s working on is any good or not.

A state of flow

Thursday, October 21, 2021

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has died.

Earlier this year my 8-year-old said, “When you’re making video games, you have to find that perfect balance between easy and hard?” And I told him he’d basically summarized Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, and drew him the diagram above to explain.

Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience was a big influence on me when I read it back in 2007. There’s a passage in that book about crossword puzzles that I thought could also be describing my newspaper blackout poems:

There is much to be said in favor of this popular pastime, which in its best form resembles the ancient riddle contests. It is inexpensive and portable, its challenges can be finely graduated so that both novices and experts can enjoy it, and its solution produces a sense of pleasing order that gives one a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. It provides opportunities to experience a mild state of flow to many people who are stranded in airport lounges, who travel on commuter trains, or who are simply whiling away Sunday mornings.

Csikszentmihalyi then goes on to talk explicitly about poetry and writing:

What’s important is to find at least a line, or a verse, that starts to sing. Sometimes even one word is enough to open a window on a new view of the world, to start the mind on an inner journey….

He also wrote about the joys of being an amateur:

Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet….Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.

(I wrote more on the subject in Show Your Work!)

Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk, “Flow, the secret to happiness”

Csikszentmihalyi also wrote a book called Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and he made an interesting list of “paradoxical traits” of creative people:

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

RIP.

I am a compost heap

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Ann Patchett’s short memoir of her writing life, “The Getaway Car,” collected in her book, This is The Story of a Happy Marriage, is one of the best things on writing I’ve read.

I particularly loved this bit, stealing like an artist meets a gardening metaphor:

You will take bits from books you’ve read and movies you’ve seen and conversations you’ve had and stories friends have told you, and half the time you won’t even realize you’re doing it. I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.

Of research, for example, she writes, “I try to shovel everything I learn onto the compost heap instead of straight into the book.”

I’ve often thought that an artist has to be like the Mr. Fusion device Doc Brown uses in Back To The Future, but I like the compost heap even better.

The cool thing about a compost heap is that you can throw whatever organic matter you want on it. (“Hold on to your anger,” Thich Nhat Hanh told bell hooks, “use it as compost for your garden.”)

If you’re just throwing stuff on the compost heap, you don’t have to worry about being pure, or perfect. (“Writing…always, always only starts out as shit,” David Rakoff said. It’s like “reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.”)

And, as Brian Eno told us, “Beautiful things grow out of shit.”