On moderate giftedness

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Tom Hart emailed me the other day, asking if I remembered a Kurt Vonnegut passage where he talks about how “we all are all dispirited because we feel like have to compete with the world’s best, not just fulfill a role (say artist, writer, storyteller) in our tribe or extended family.”

I did, believe it or not. It’s from his (underrated, IMO) novel, Bluebeard:

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives – maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.

That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an ‘exhibitionist.’

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, ‘Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

Of course, Bluebeard was written in 1987. I think the internet, for better or worse, has meant that quite a few moderately gifted people — people like me! — have managed to eke out livings based on our weird work and building an extended family out of the fellow weirdos who find us.

I shall enjoy it while it lasts!

Book walkthroughs

Sunday, March 17, 2019

If you make the kind of visual books I do, they really have to be seen to be understood. I came across these “art book walkthroughs” by Graeme Franks a few days ago. Simple, perfect online advertisements for my kind of books. Here’s the one for Steal Like An Artist and here’s the one for Show Your Work!

I had my six-year-old do (a more hurried & shaky) one in the trailer for Keep Going:

And way back in 2010, I did one for the Newspaper Blackout trailer. I think I used some sort of HD camcorder, but now, of course, you can just use an off-the-shelf iPhone. (And get better quality, too!)

UPDATE: Graeme made one for Keep Going, too!

Why wasn’t I consulted?

Sunday, February 3, 2019

Every single time some stranger online says something dumb or rude or completely beside the point to me, I think of Paul Ford’s “Why wasn’t I consulted?”:

“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

I’ve taken it to appending the phrase (and acronym: WWIC) to all random tweets and Instagram comments and it instantly turns them comedic. “You suck,” becomes, “WHY WASN’T I CONSULTED? You suck.” See how much easier that is to deal with? WWIC highlights that here is a lonely soul lost in the cosmos, shouting into the void, reaching out for any kind of contact, or sign that they exist.

Scroll down, swipe left, “thank u, next.”

Surf’s up

Friday, December 21, 2018

“You just have to know where to go when.”
—William Finnegan, Barbarian Days

In 1992, a librarian named Jean Armour Polly was asked to write about the internet for the Wilson Library Bulletin.

In casting about for a title for the article, I weighed many possible metaphors. I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the Internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well. I also needed something that would evoke a sense of randomness, chaos, and even danger. I wanted something fishy, net-like, nautical. At that time I was using a mouse pad from the Apple Library in Cupertino, California, famous for inventing pithy sayings and printing them on sportswear and mouse pads (e.g., ‘A month in the Lab can save you an hour in the Library’). The one I had pictured a surfer on a big wave. ‘Information Surfer’ it said. ‘Eureka,’ I said, and had my metaphor.”

She named the article “Surfing The Internet,” and the rest is history. (What’s interesting to me, re-reading the article, is that it also contains another metaphor: mining. “Tunneling through the network matrix in search of gems and ore is not far from fact. Sometimes it is hard work, and a lot of it is working in the dark.”)

I thought a lot about the surfing metaphor last year when I read William Finnegan’s surf memoir, Barbarian Days. I was completely new to surfing when I picked up that book, and I quickly learned how the sport isn’t really about “going with the flow,” it’s about finding waves. You catch waves when you surf, but you don’t take just any garbage water that splashes up on the shore. You seek out just the right one to ride.

How much better off we’d be online, I thought, if we went back to truly emulating surfers: leaving the crowded beaches, seeking waves in obscure locations, etc. Social media has “streams” (you can’t surf a stream) or worse, “feeds” (like pigs at a trough). I want the sea, man. I want to surf again!

Open tabs are a time machine

Sunday, November 11, 2018

GIF by Jennifer Daniel | via GIPHY

In Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet, he writes that “Our Browser History Is the New Memoir”:

If you want to know anything about me, what I was thinking, what I was interested in, exactly what I did or was going to do, check out my browser history: my passions, my hatreds, my crushes, my hopes—my intellectual and emotional life—all there before me, going back years and years, in all its embarrassment and all its riches.

I have a laptop that I use sporadically, so every time I open it, the tabs in my internet browser show me who I was 24, 48, or even 168 hours ago. It’s a tiny form of (unexpected) time travel. (When you dip into an old diary, you’re expecting to take a little time trip…)

Years ago, I figured out a way to help my future self:

1. Put a Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard in the freezer
2. Forget that it’s there.
3. Open the freezer.

How funny that forgetting — something we mostly see as a bad thing — sets the stage for later surprise and delight…

You don’t have to live in public

Thursday, July 5, 2018

My book Show Your Work! was an attempt to answer questions my readers had asked me about self-promotion: “How do I get my stuff out there? How do I get noticed? How do I find an audience?” It is, as it says on the cover, a book about how to get discovered.

(Nowhere in the text do I address the question of why anyone should want to get discovered. There’s a little bit of that in the new book and chapter 6 of Steal Like An Artist: “Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.”)

It isn’t a book about living in public, it’s a book about working in public. It is, I think, about sharing your work with intention, and using the technology available to you to connect directly with the audience you seek.

I tried very hard in that book, when it came to social media, to be platform agnostic, to emphasize that social media sites come and go, and to always invest first and foremost in your own media. (Website, blog, mailing list, etc.)

I still stand by that advice, but if I re-wrote the book now, I would encourage artists to use much more caution when it comes to using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

It seems ridiculous to say, but 2013, the year I wrote the book, was a simpler time. Social media seemed much more benign to me. Back then, the worst I felt social media did was waste your time. Now, the worst social media does is cripple democracy and ruin your soul.

I’ve just got finished reading Jaron Lanier’s 10 Reasons for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It’s not a particularly well-written book (Franklin Foer’s review is worth reading — he calls it “less polished” than Lanier’s other books and, even, “hokey”) but it has an important message. And I can’t say I disagree with any of the points, especially the last one, in which Lanier argues that the social media machine “hates your soul.” Here’s Foer, summarizing:

He worries that our reliance on big tech companies is ruining our capacity for spirituality, by turning us into robotic extensions of their machines. The companies, he argues, have no appreciation for the “mystical spark inside you.” They don’t understand the magic of human consciousness and, therefore, will recklessly destroy it.

This was a point, I think, made much better in his earlier book, You Are Not A Gadget, which contained a list of things “you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others”:

Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.

Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

It’s about pushing against these mediums and using them in a way counter to the way they’d like you to use them.

Another book I might recommend to writers and artists worried about their social media usage is Cal Newport’s Deep Work. (Especially the second half.) Newport also wrote a popular NYTimes Op-ed, “Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It” and has given a TEDx talk called, “Why You Should Quit Social Media.”

Two caveats before you read Deep Work:

1) I’m not sure about the terms “deep” and “shallow”. Often in my work, what might seem “shallow” is often what leads to what is “deep”

2) Newport is an academic — he makes his primary living teaching computer science at a university, so he already has a built-in network and a self-contained world with clear moves towards achievement. People doing creative work have neither of those things. (For that matter, Jaron Lanier is already famous and well-respected and has a good gig at Microsoft.) One must always be beware of the advice-giver’s context.

I was struck, in Warren Ellis’s last email newsletter, how much he emphasized solitude, and carving out disconnected time for working:

The trick, for me, is carving out time for things and trying to do them with some wit…. I am not ready for the world until I’ve had my 45 minutes with four espressos in the back garden with earbuds in…. I spend a lot of time on my own, and mostly in my office. You can emulate these obvious role-model traits by excavating yourself a cave in your back garden or taking over a room in your apartment, fitting it with uncomfortably bright lights and way too many screens, filling all the spaces with books and skulls, playing nothing but music that sounds like it’s emanating from a dead moon, and waiting for everyone to leave you alone forever, and then dying in seclusion and being eaten by cats.

And this terrific advice he gave to people worrying about living online:

You don’t have to live in public on the internet if you don’t want to. Even if you’re a public figure, or micro-famous like me. I don’t follow anyone on my public Instagram account. No shade on those who follow me there, I’m glad you give me your time – but I need to be in my own space to get my shit done. You want a “hack” for handling the internet? Create private social media accounts, follow who you want and sit back and let your bespoke media channels flow to you. These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.

I still find value in being on Twitter (just yesterday I learned about a new-to-me artist from a follower) but it is increasingly hard to justify much time spent there and on other social media sites, like Instagram. (I have not deleted my Facebook account, but I rarely sign in there.) That’s why I continue to write here every day and keep up my weekly newsletter, both of which produce better thinking and better work from me and give me a stronger, more deeper connection to my audience.

I’ll be writing more about the need to disconnect in my next book, so stay tuned…