On this date

Brains in your tentacles

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Here are some diary pages I drew while listening to Alison Gopnik talk about her research and her books The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter on the podcast The Ezra Klein Show. Like Klein, I despise most parenting books, especially the “hey bro” tones of most of those aimed at dads, but Gopnik has not only helped me think differently about my kids, she’s helped me think differently about my own creative practice.

Gopnik was talking about childhood as evolution’s solution to explore-exploit tradeoffs and how children and adult are different kinds of creatures. The child mostly explores, the adult mostly exploits. (Children, she says are the R&D departments for the human race.) Then she brought up the octopus. The octopus has a split kind of brain. There’s a big brain in their heads, exploiting, basically, and then there are lots of little brains in their tentacles, exploring.

So, my thought is that we could imagine an alternate evolutionary path by which each of us was both a child and an adult. So imagine if your arms were like your two-year-old, right? So that you are always trying to get them to stop exploring because you had to get lunch. I suspect that may be what the consciousness of an octo is like.

After she said that, I thought, you’ve just described an artist.

The octopus has intelligence in its tentacles. When an artist (or a two-year-old) is drawing, there is intelligence in their fingers. The hand is moving beyond what the brain is telling it to do. The brain is being told as much by the fingers as the fingers are being told by the brain.

Later in the conversation, Gopnik says, “Going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake.” This was the very advice of the artist Corita Kent: “Borrow a kid.”

A podcast episode well worth your time.

I could talk about Corita all day

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

I was delighted that the Corita Art Center asked me to talk about Corita Kent and the impact that her art has had on my work. (She was a kind of guardian spirit for Keep Going: I wrote about her in two separate chapters.) In this video I talk about her unique way of looking at the world, her terrific book with Jan Steward, Learning By Heart, her advice to borrow a kid, and the way she thought creativity has seasons:

3 bits of Milton Glaser

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Milton Glaser’s poster for Olivetti, 1977

Designer Milton Glaser died last Friday on his 91st birthday. In addition to his visual work (check out these album covers!), here are 3 verbal bits of his that have stuck in my brain over the years:

1. “The model for personal growth is antithetical to the model for professional success.”

I have had that line tacked on my wall for years. Glaser, like many great creative people, got clued into the fact that success can mess your creativity up way more than failure, because if you succeed

people will continue to ask you for what you have already done and succeeded at. This is the way to professional accomplishment–you have to demonstrate that you know something unique that you can repeat over and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it. The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development.

In order to have a more meaningful and fruitful creative life, you often have to be ready to walk away from your career successes, or find a balance between what people want from you and what you want to chase after.

“I believe that Picasso as a model is the most useful model you can have in terms of your artistic interests,” Glaser said, “because whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it, and as a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist, the results were extraordinary.”

I quoted the emphasized part of that line in the last chapter of Show Your Work!

2. “My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, ‘Prove it.’”

In a 2003 interview with Chip Kidd, Glaser described the influence of his parents on his work:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

I quoted that story in my SXSW interview with Debbie Millman, a student and friend of Glaser’s.

3. “Can you imagine calling someone a creative?”

An aside from his talk, “10 Things I Have Learned”:

[C]reative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow…

I liked that so much I stole it for the “Creative is not a noun” section of Keep Going.

RIP. (For even more, check out this thread of advice to his students.)

And sandwiches

Sunday, July 1, 2018

My kids were watching Arthur and I made them rewind and pause so I could take a picture of Buster’s dialogue.

“This isn’t working. We need a plan. And sandwiches.”

It reminded me of Mary Karr’s poem “The Voice of God” (collected in Tropic of Squalor), which we have taped to the fridge. It ends with the words: “put down that gun, you need a sandwich.”

And Warren Zevon: “Enjoy every sandwich.”

FODDER

Thursday, July 1, 2010

(In context.)

I’ll be at the Austin Museum of Art next Thursday, July 8th. More info on my events page.

SAUL STEINBERG’S REFLECTIONS AND SHADOWS

Sunday, July 1, 2007

This book is the fruit of tape-recorded conversations held in my country house in Springs, East Hampton, during the summer of 1974 and the autumn of 1977, with my friend Aldo Buzzi, who later made a careful selection of all the transcriptions and arranged them in four chapters.”
—Saul Steinberg

Reflections and Shadows is a short book, but full of little gems. Here are a few of them:

SAUL STEINBERG HOLDING HIS EIGHT-YEAR-OLD SELF BY THE HAND

Saul Steinberg holding his eight-year-old self by the hand.

* * *

On Memory:

“Nothing that has been deposited in the memory is lost. Memory is a computer that all one’s life goes on accumulating data which are not always used, since man is often like an ocean liner that sets sail with only a single cabin occupied. We ought to be able to use this huge accumulation of data continually, keep it functioning, combine and multiply its elements and reintroduce them into the circuit of our thoughts….Maybe I’ll have the good fortune to find again other things that now seem forgotten. I’d like to be able to go back and see all the things that at the time I stored away without perceiving them, follow myself at the age of ten and judge, with the mind of today, the conditions under which I lived, thus discovering what, at that time, had been deposited in the computer without my knowing it.”

On Drawing Family Members:

“Nowadays I draw uncles and aunts from photographs and I recognize (looking at them for the first time as real people) parts of myself, an ear, an eye. Archaeology!”

A Definition of Family:

“…people I had neither invented nor found for myself.”

On Leaving the Past to Memory:

“[There] are places that don’t belong to geography but to time. And the memory of these places of sadness, of suffering, but above all of great emotions, is spoiled by seeing them again. It’s better to leave certain things in peace, just the way they are in memory: with the passage of time they become the mythology of our lives. I haven’t even wanted to see certain people again with whom I had been more or less friendly in terms of time and place: schoolmates, childhood companions. You can’t resume a dialogue that never was a real dialogue but rather a temporary complicity, the kind of complicity established among people occupying the same compartment in a train.”

On Americans and Food:

“In America you don’t ask passersby to point out a good restaurant, as you do in Italy or France. People don’t understand what a good restaurant is, because here one goes to a restaurant not to eat but to have a good time. To answer, they’d have to know why you want to go: to pick up a girl, to take the family and have an unforgettable evening with music and soft lights, to gorge yourself or have a quick snack. They wouldn’t even be able to say whether some diner is good or bad: a diner is a diner.”

On the Jukebox:

“…built according to the laws of the Catholic or Chinese or Hindu altar, a magical object to be worshipped because all good things come from it: music, dance, love, and joy.”

On drawing from life:

“It’s hard to do a portrait. You must first spend a critical moment in which you quickly — if you’re lucky — discard all the commonplaces about the subject of the drawing. More difficult than inventing is giving up accumulated virtues. The things you discovered yesterday are no longer valid. It’s impossible to find anything new without first giving something up.

There’s a moral in this. It’s stinginess that holds us back, especially when we’re not only enamored of what we’ve discovered but also convinced it’s good. There are those who, in working from life, continually use the baggage they picked up yesterday; they work from life without really looking, without working from life.”