Search Results for: log book

I can’t stop looking at the moon

Thursday, October 12, 2017

This morning I took another picture of the moon. It was at the top of the sky — I couldn’t see it without breaking my neck — so I lied down in the driveway on my back, lining up my iPhone camera with the eyecup on my binoculars, fiddling with the exposure and focus on Camera+.

A neighbor drove past on his way to work, and I wondered if he saw me, and, if he did, what on Earth he thought I was doing.

Back in the house, drinking my coffee, I checked my camera roll and tried to pick the best shot. I started thinking about how I like looking at all the little moons together more than any single moon.

Taking one picture of the moon isn’t all that interesting, but seeing all the pictures of the moon you’ve taken together, that’s a little more interesting:

The artist Penelope Umbrico, of her gigantic collages of moon photographs uploaded to Flickr, says the opposite: “Seen individually any one of these images is impressive. Seen as a group, however, they seem to cancel each other out.”

We disagree on that point, but I sure do like what Umbrico has assembled in these pieces, especially when she starts sorting by color:

The moon actually doesn’t give off its own light, it only reflects the sun’s, so add that fact to the atmospheric conditions and the time of day you happen to see it, and it’s always taking on some interesting color. (I have started to prefer morning moons to evening moons.) When you read books like Bernd Brunner’s Moon: A Brief History or watch movies live Moonstruck, you realize how much of that reflective quality is essential to how we feel about it: the moon reflects our own light back at us, in a way.

I can’t really remember when I started going so nuts for the moon. I think it started when we moved into this old house. We used to live in a townhouse that didn’t have much of a view of the night sky from any of its windows. Then we moved into our current house, which sits on a bigger lot, surrounded by suburban ranch houses, so there are better sky views to be had. But I think it really has to do with our master bathroom, which has a window you can look out of while you pee. I get up in the middle of the night and peer out into the backyard, and when the moon’s out, it always makes me feel a little wild. A bit mysterious. A bit less willing to go back to bed.

When it’s my morning to get up with the boys, one of the first things we’ll do if the moon is out is run out the front door into the driveway to take a look. They’ve grown up on books like Papa, Please Get The Moon for Me, and The Moon Seems To Change and The Moon Book, so they share in my joy, for now. And one of the best moments of any day is when, unprompted, my two-year-old will stick his index finger in the air and shout, “Moon!”

The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for

Monday, October 9, 2017

In the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesn’t want his file boxes of source material organized too much, that he specifically avoids organizing them, so that he can find unexpected things when he starts searching. “He depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.”

“Keep your folders messy,” Steven Johnson says in Where Good Ideas Come From. This is also the secret to what he calls his “spark file,” the document he keeps on his computer to generate ideas:

The key is to capture as many hunches as possible, and to spend as little time as possible organizing or filtering or prioritizing them. (Keeping a single, chronological file is central to the process, because it forces you to scroll through the whole list each time you want to add something new.) Just get it all down as it comes to you, and make regular visits back to re-acquaint yourself with all your past explorations. You’ll be shocked how many useful hunches you’ve forgotten.

Film editor Walter Murch, in his brilliant book, In The Blink of an Eye, writes about how different kinds of editing machines affect his process of piecing together movies out of hundreds of hours of film. The most convenient and efficient machines — the “random-access” machines that can pull up any individual scene with a few keystrokes — are not necessarily the ones that are the most helpful to him.

“The machine gives me only what I ask for,” he writes, “and I don’t always want to go where I say I want to go.”

Like Letscher with his collages, Murch wants the material to guide his work, to tell him what to do next. Linear editing systems, in which he had to load a whole 10-minute reel of film in order to find what he was looking for, gave him many more moments of serendipity:

[I]n the mechanical, linear search for what I wanted, I would find instead what I needed—something different, better, more quirky, more accidental, more “true” than my first impression. I could recognize it when I saw it, but I couldn’t have articulated it in advance.

There are several paragraphs in Murch’s book about the importance of fighting against the touted “features” of digital tools, such as speed. “The real issue with speed,” he says, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”

Here’s writer Irving Welsh, on why he doesn’t organize his record collection:

“I don’t organize my CDs and vinyl by genre or alphabet anymore…. Having it all haphazard means I can never find what I want, but the benefit is that I always find something else, which is cool. I believe that art is as much about diversion as focus and planning.”

In her Autobiography, Agatha Christie talks about the importance of messiness when re-visiting her chaotic notebooks:

[I]f I had kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled, it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot—do it yourself—girl and not really sister—August— with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.

The theme, again, is that speed, efficiency, and convenience (a.k.a. the opposite of “trouble”) is often at odds with creative serendipity.

This is exactly why I still keep paper notebooks and make time in my writing process to dive back into them time and time again: because I often don’t know what I’m looking for, and even if I do, what I actually find is more often than not better than what I set out to find. If I was simply able to execute a full-text search on my notebooks, and pull up exactly what I was looking for, that’s all I’d find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didn’t know I was looking for.

Why I love my paper dictionary

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Free tip for young writers: Go to Goodwill and buy a gigantic used paper dictionary for $5 and keep it on your desk. Here’s mine:

All sorts of interesting, serendipitous things happen when you use a paper dictionary, because when you look for a specific word, you have to brush past all sorts of other words before you find the one you’re looking for.

When you really take the time to explore a bit, you see words in context alongside words with similar roots and it can give you a bunch of different ideas. For example, did you know that “patina” comes after “patient”? One word about enduring time, the other describing its residue:

Google won’t help you discover that.

When you’re looking for a word to replace a word in your writing, John McPhee suggests skipping the thesaurus and going straight to the dictionary:

With dictionaries, I spend a great deal more time looking up words I know than words I have never heard of—at least ninety-nine to one. The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.

The dictionary not only gives you a gives you a list synonyms for the word you’re looking up, it also gives you a deeper understanding of the meaning of the word, and sometimes the definition can lead you to a better way of phrasing altogether. (Stephen King: “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.”)

I love paper dictionaries so much I take pictures of them out in the wild. Above is a dictionary I saw in the hallway when I visited the offices of The New Yorker. Below is the little dictionary corner upstairs at City Lights in San Francisco:

The first paper dictionary I remember was this big red Webster’s that my dad kept in a kitchen drawer. When I posted about my love for dictionaries on Twitter, folks sent me their beloveds:

When Alan Moore was asked what was the best book he ever received as a gift, he replied:

That would be the second unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, one of the first of many marvelous gifts from my wife, Melinda. Aleister Crowley once stated that the most important grimoire, or book of magical instruction, that anyone could ever conceivably own would be an etymological dictionary, and in my opinion he was exactly right. I keep it right here by my desk, and just 10 minutes ago it confirmed for me that I had the spelling of “proprioception” right all along, even though my spell-checker had raised a crinkly red eyebrow. Quite seriously, this is the one book in my collection that I’d save in the event of a fire.

Paper dictionaries are magic. Go get one and use it!

Learning how to learn again

Thursday, August 10, 2017

I continue to be fascinated by how slow, seemingly inefficient methods make my self-education more helpful and more meaningful.

Example: This week I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, and I wanted to see the lives of all the composers on a timeline. Instead of googling for one, I decided to just make one for myself with a pencil in my notebook. It was kind of a pain, but I had a feeling I’d learn something. Pretty much immediately I was able to see connections that Swafford wrote about that just hadn’t sunken in yet, like how Haydn’s life overlapped both Bach’s and Beethoven’s while covering Mozart’s completely. Had I googled a pre-made timeline, I’m not completely sure I would’ve studied it closely enough to get as much out of it as the one I drew.

Another example: I copy passages of text that I like longhand in my notebook, and it not only helps me remember the texts, it makes me slow down enough so that I can actually read them and think about them, even internalize them. Something happens when I copy texts into my notebook that does not happen when I cut and paste them into Evernote or onto my blog.

A lot of this way of studying has been inspired by my son, Owen.

Even before I had kids, I wrote, “We learn by copying… Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.” Funny now that I have a four-year-old budding mechanic, who actually spends a great deal of his time copying photos and drawings of cars, taking them apart in his mind and putting them back together on the page to figure out how they work.

What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.) Milton Glaser says that “drawing is thinking.” I think that drawing is learning, too, and one thing Owen has taught me is that it is more valuable as a verb than it is as a noun.

I felt sure that my children would teach me more than I taught them. I was not anticipating that they would actually teach me how to learn again…

Never pay for wi-fi

Thursday, August 3, 2017

never pay for wifi

One of my favorite discoveries this year was Nina Katchadourian’s Seat Assignment, an ongoing project she started in 2010, in which she uses long plane rides to make art using only her camera phone and materials on hand. She’ll build shelters out of snacks, she’ll make gorillas out of sweaters, she’ll go into the bathroom and dress up like old Flemish paintings. (My favorite pieces are from the “High Altitude Spirit Photography” series, where she’ll use a little sprinkled salt or the glare from an overhead reading light to spookify in-flight magazine photos.)

Seat Assignment has taken place over 100 flights. Lots of things interest me about the project, including, of course, these lines from her statement: “the artistic potential that lurks within the mundane” and “the productive tension between freedom and constraint,” both ideas that have obsessed me ever since I started making my blackout poems.

I’m especially interested in how Katchadourian refers to her camera phone — usually bemoaned as a device for distraction —as not only a kind of sketchbook, but a “camouflage.” From Curioser: “Once you pull out a real camera, it screams, ‘I’m making art!’” She doesn’t want to be observed making the work, she just wants to look like another bored traveler killing time. It works: only three passengers over the years have asked her what she’s up to.

The title, “Seat Assignment,” makes me think of my writing teacher’s advice for getting writing done: “APPLY ASS TO CHAIR.” Because you’re literally buckled into a chair, I’ve always found planes a terrific spot to do a lot of writing and reading and drawing and thinking. (Business class is like a dream scenario for the writer: you have a comfortable seat, a window to stare out of, and you’re occasionally brought water & snacks.) But, as in-flight wi-fi speeds and entertainment options keep getting better and better, the temptation to be distracted on planes becomes greater and greater. Just like on the ground, it now takes an act of will to be bored enough on a plane to actually enter that good headspace where you can make something. For now, I stick to my rules: turn off the seat-back TV and never pay for wi-fi.

PS. The comic above was one of four I drew on my iPad during a recent (coach!) flight from Austin to San Francisco. To see more like it, check my Instagram.

PPS. This post turned into chapter 2 of Keep Going.