Heart-shaped love

Friday, February 14, 2020

Here is a heart-shaped piece of cactus I found on yesterday’s walk. I’ve just finished Iain Gately’s excellent essay on the iconography of love, “A Heart-Shaped History,” all about how the ♥ became the near-universal symbol for love:

The ♥ in geometric terms a cardioid, is common in nature. It appears in the leaves and flowers of various plants, it is formed by swans when they touch beaks, by doves as they unfold their wings, by strawberries, cherries and beet-roots in cross section, and is suggested by various portions of the human anatomy.

Lots of tasty historical tidbits follow — the Egyptians, for example, left hearts inside of the corpse so the Goddess could weigh them in the afterlife, the Greeks’ Eros shot his arrows at people’s eyeballs instead of their chests, the ♥ replaced the grails in the first decks of cards, etc.

As far as accuracy goes, Leonardo da Vinci produced the first well-rendered depiction of the heart in 1498. (Scientists wouldn’t figure out what the heart actually did until a century later.) Leonardo drew a seed next to one of the drawings in his notebooks, and wrote, “The heart is the nut which generates the tree of the veins.” (Isaacson devotes a whole section to Leonardo’s heart studies in his biography.)

Isaacson points out this page, where Leonardo draws a heart inside of his longtime companion, Salaì:

At the top is a drawing of the heart’s papillary muscle and a description of how it shortens and elongates when the heart beats. Then, as if he were being too clinical, he let his mind wander and pen begin to doodle. And there, in loving profile, is a drawing of Salai, his beautiful curls flowing down his long neck, his signature receding chin and fleshy throat softly modeled with Leonardo’s left-handed hatching. In his chest is a section of a heart, with its muscles sketched in. An analysis of the drawing shows that the heart was sketched first. It seems as if Leonardo drew it, then sketched Salai around it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Listen to the voice

Friday, September 6, 2019

I’m still thinking about that interview with Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk:

The show’s most frequent listener these days might in fact be Ray himself. He said he still listens to the show “all the time,” mostly to hear his brother’s voice and remind himself about times they had together. To remind himself of the jokes they shared. To remind himself of the good times.

“I love to hear his laugh, and I love to hear his take on things,” Ray said. “It’s a rare opportunity that I’ve had to still communicate with my brother that most people don’t get.”

A few years ago at I heard Cord Jefferson tell a story at Pop Up Magazine about a voicemail his mother left him a month before she died of cancer, and about “the power of the human voice and what we lose when a voice goes away.” (At one point he cites a study that concluded a Mother’s phone call is as comforting as a hug.) “It seems increasingly worth considering what we’re missing out on when we neglect the voices of the people we love.”

My wife and I used to make homemade audiobooks with our phones and play them for the boys in the stroller. Now the boys can read on their own, and I wonder whether those recordings will survive, whether anyone will ever listen to them again.

My mom has an old tape of me at age 5, singing Christmas songs for her. A few years ago, I archived it onto a CD so she could play it on her boombox whenever she wants.

My first grader has recorded songs for several years now, and he’s so obsessed with recording everything around him that he asks me at least once a day to record something on my phone. Until this moment, I haven’t realized what a favor he’s been doing me. I can listen to his little voice wherever I am, whenever I want, as long as my hard drives last.

Negative self-definition

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

A page from *The Steal Like An Artist Journal*

Sometimes it’s much easier to get started when you define what it is that you aren’t going to do.

The page from the Steal journal above was inspired by this story I read in From Wilson Neate’s 33 1/3 book on Wire’s Pink Flag:

Wire’s aesthetic was built on subtraction, a consistent withdrawal of superfluous elements. “The reduction of ideas, the reduction of things down to the minimal framework—it just seemed completely natural,” explains Colin Newman. “By closing down possibilities, you very often open up possibilities. You have infinite possibilities of simplicity and subtlety within a frame.” Natural minimalists, Wire pursued a negative sensibility, defining themselves in terms of what they were not…

“The only things we could agree on were the things we didn’t like,” observes Bruce Gilbert. “That’s what held it together and made life much simpler.” Recalling some unofficial Wire rules, Graham Lewis summarizes this negative self-definition: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.”

(If that story sounds familiar, I used it in chapter one of Keep Going.)

In the book Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, David Levine tells of “The Worst Assignment I Ever Gave.”

Hoping to get the students to find their “artistic allies,” Levine passed out a bunch of art magazines to his students and told them to find an artist they liked that they’d never heard of and report back the next week to the class.

The assignment was a total failure: none of the students liked anything they saw.

So Levine told them to come back next week and give a report on an artist they hated. Bingo.

“The students performed totally engaged, specific, ten-minute critiques, followed by adrenalized argument… which inevitably led back to a positive discussion of each student’s own practice.”

What I found interesting about this turn of events was how much easier it is, as a first step, to define your own position negatively, and how the beginnings of articulating taste are almost always through discovering what you don’t like.