Best of Brain Pickings 2012

Have you discovered Brain Pickings yet?  It's an intellectual's brain candy!  I love it, and I follow it and creator Maria Popova on Facebook and Twitter.  She gave a great, thoughtful interview on NPR too.

So for your enjoyment this Friday, her best of 2012.  I loved the John Steinbeck and John Cleese and Dear Sugar (of course) and 100 ideas that changed graphic design.  And there are some I haven't read.  I can't wait to catch up!

Virtual Plane of Existence

The Plane of Existence, by InsidiouslyJake (via)

When you blog or write or are an artist or public figure of any kind, you have a private face and a public face, a public life and a private life. 

The private life is the lived life.  We all have one of those, and it’s so complex and nuanced and challenging and wonderful and horrible, even if some people don’t recognize it or run away from it or whatever.  I take it as a given that everyone has a rich inner life (although apparently some people don’t ~ see SA on HN). 

Depending on the nature of your public life, there are layers.  Even if you aren’t a public figure, you have a life you live out in public ~ at your job, at the grocery store, even among family.  If you are a public figure, you may have people helping you create aspects of your public life. 

I like to think of these different levels as planes of existence.  We live in a physical real world. That’s one.  We have all this stuff going on inside us.  That’s another.  We have a world of words we live in, whether we speak them or someone else or we read them, a plane of pure language.  We live on the internet, a virtual us on the electronic plane.  And there is the us that lives in other people, a sedimentary self.

I was thinking about, when you make the choice to have an online personality, you make the choice to create a you on another plane of existence.  You take your life and you offer it up to (often) complete strangers.  Yes, it is a selfish gesture ~ look at me! ~ but it is also a generous creative gesture.  You’re saying, “Here. Look at my lived experience, my humanity, flawed though it may be.  I offer it to you so that we can connect, you and I but also you with your friends and acquaintances.  I am laying myself bare so that your thoughts and feelings and life is validated by someone else’s experience.”

With all this comes responsibilities and benefits.  Of course you use the people around you ~ artists do that all the time ~ but you need to be responsible in that use.  You don’t betray your family or your job, although that does not mean you leave them out entirely.  You have responsibilities to those who follow you ~ post regularly, do your best, all related to an artists responsibilities.  Benefits, of course, include validation and friendship and finding your tribe. 

And, I like to think, if I make a difference with just one person, made someone feel less alone, I’ve done my job.  I need to be brave and generous and kind.

Here’s to a brave new year of writing!

Words, Useful and Useless

Childhood Depression, by Richard Wilkinson (via)

I’ve been working my way back around to blogging every day.  I know I’m about ready when everything I come across sparks an idea for a blog post.

But then, yesterday, a relative committed suicide.  I won’t go into specifics or mention his name, but know that he was a beautiful young man.  By beautiful, I mean he might have been a male model.  Tall, with an athlete’s build.  Large soulful blue eyes and a sensitive mouth.  He was outgoing and gregarious and charming.  And he had a darling little boy.  I did not know him well, and I have never met his son.

But I’ve been thinking about words ~ what they mean, what they do, in a case like this.

My first reaction is that words do not cover a situation like this.  They do not encompass the set of feelings that comes up.  And I didn’t know him that well.  Imagine what it is like for those near and dear to him.

But, really, words are never enough.  They never encompass the full breadth and depth of experience, do they?  Especially in times of crisis, but also in ho-hum everyday existence.  Can you use words to describe what it’s like to wake up late from a dream that left you uneasy? You can’t quite remember it, but you know that it was deeply important.  Can you describe that feeling you have moving into a new place, how that place is not locked in your mind, but then after years that a feeling solidifies about the place, but it’s not the same as when you first walked into it?

But words are all we have.  That and violence, whether it’s turned outward or turned inward.  Maybe words are the lifeline that sometimes keeps us from turning to those other evil twins.  It’s how we get what’s inside us to come out.  To speak our truth.  And if we don’t, it festers and turns into a ticking time bomb.

But I’m also thinking about truths versus family loyalty.  Should I even mention the suicide?  By not mentioning it, I’m being loyal to family, but also in a weird way, it’s as if this young man never existed.  If you don’t witness out loud, that person’s life is back there in the silence.  The only way, now, he can live on is in the hearts and words of the people who knew him. 

I’m working my way toward writing a memoir, and so this is very much on my mind.  If it’s going to at all approach “the truth” or my personal truth, I have to be honest, but then I’ll be telling family secrets.

But my strong feeling is to talk about everything, to get it out in the open. Use discretion, of course, but also do what you have to. Secrets have the most power when they are held.  They can destroy you.  When you keep your family’s secrets, the toll is taken not on the family but on you.  And that’s something I think this young man would have known very well.

PS Someone just made an excellent point!  Words aren't the only thing we have.  We have Art, expression in all its forms.  Music, painting and drawing, dancing, embroidery, cooking.  Great point.

Merry Christmas!

A (belated) Merry Christmas!  Happy Holidays!

Coca Cola Santa Claus, by Haddon Sundblom (via)

'Meditation XVII' by John Donne

In a dark mood, and so a poem.

Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887) (via)

Excerpt from "Meditation XVIII"

by John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The Techniques of Art



Oct. 1, 2012. An Afghan refugee girl stands next to her family's sheep
in a field next to a slum area on the outskirts of Islamabad (via Time Lightbox)


Since beginning the Project 365, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about art in the broader sense, art with a capital A, and how techniques from one medium translates to another.

Take this photo, for example.  It’s one of Time Lightbox’s best photos of the week for Sept 28 - Oct 5. What makes this photo so amazing?  Why is it any different from any girl standing in front of a herd of her family’s animals?

Well, first and foremost because she’s wearing red.  The eye loves red.  It is the most alluring and seductive of colors, and it screams, “Pay attention to me!”  But I don’t think it’s simply the red by itself.  It’s the contrast of the red against the natural colors of the background and also the contrast between the everyday job of tending goats with this beautiful red of her garment.  She is dressed to the nines, as if someone is wearing a beautiful evening gown to muck out the stables. 

It’s not only the red.  This is a beautiful and mysterious girl.  The way she looks at the photographer with this unreadable and cryptic expression.  She’s thoughtful and penetrating.  And her hands.  She holds them in thought, picking at her fingers. 

The late afternoon light coming full onto the scene gives it a glow that it wouldn’t otherwise have.  This is one of my favorite kinds of light ~ first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon.  It imbues everything with honey gold undertones.  What is it about this light that appeals to me especially?  I’m not sure.  The equal balance of light and dark, how it brings out undertones and makes colors richer.

The pastoral setting, too, brings something special to picture.  They’re goats, for heaven’s sake.  Not cows - expected and normal in America.  No, goats.  This lends it a bit of exoticism. And these are not puny ordinary goats ~ these are huge and rich in color and vibrance.

But this pastoral setting is marred by what seem to be plastic garbage bags, which means this has to be near a dump, where the winds have blown the bags away and they’ve become caught in the grass.  So the rural pastoral nature is contrasted so strongly to decay and garbage, and there’s this beautiful girl, this Cinderella.

Composition plays a part as well.  The eye loves thirds.  Yet this photo is set up in such away that it doesn’t portray the ideal proportions.  No.  Instead, it makes you uncomfortable.  By choosing to place the girl almost in the center, it puts you off balance.  Right in the center would be boring, but the human wants things proportional, so just off center gives it a bit of tension, just as edge anxiety ~ the figure right next to the edge ~ would make people nervous.  That’s horizontally.  Vertically, it is nicely proportioned into thirds, which somewhat counteracts the horizontal tension.

Then there is the depth of field.  We get such a sense of distance here. The tight focus on the girl to the fuzzy mountains in the background gives us room to breath.

All this makes me think about how these techniques translate into writing.  The red color.  We want something astonishing.  I say astonishing, not shocking, because (as the recent FB meme pointed out) shocking is boring.  Shocking means you haven’t given it enough thought or development. Astonishing means you’ve put so much of yourself and your art into it, it transports the reader. 

All the other elements also translate into fiction writing.  Contrast.  You have to set things up and then have a payoff in writing.  If you don’t, the reader will not believe you.  This is where contrast comes in.  You have use like elements and contrasting elements judiciously.  In literary fiction especially, you have to do the unexpected and contrast it with the everyday.

Composition.  Writing is a linear meeting you have to encounter through time, through a line of words.  In that way, it is a performance piece.  Therefore, it has to have a beginning, middle, and end (thirds again) or some structure that gives the reader an aesthetic pleasure.

You have to have a sense of depth.  There has to be setting and backstory and depth of character, even if they don’t immediately show up on the page.  The writer has to know.

I better stop.  I could do this all day.  It’s so fascinating.  All the different creative acts feed into each other.

Essays and Anger

(via)

I finished an essay this weekend and sent it off to a contest.  It felt great!

As I said the other day, a lot of what I’m writing now is preparation for writing a memoir.  Which, as I said, scares the dickens out of me, but then I’m excited too.

I also find that I’m angry.  Very angry, sometimes.  I have a long history of suppressing anger and having it turn in on myself in pretty unhealthy ways. 

This in and of itself is pretty scary.  I’ve had nightmares where I go on a murderous rampage because I can’t control my anger.  I of course would never do this, but it’s a testament to how much fear I have surrounding anger. 

What’s really funny is that everyone around me, to the man or woman, would say I’m this sweet passive person. Well, my husband might have something to say about me being pig-headed, but that’s different.

So I’m trying to find healthy expressions of my anger in any way I can.  I need to start running again.  I’ve even got a bunch of very zen-like plants.

But what’s going to happen when I start writing the memoir for real?  Blow my lid? 

Nah.  I believe I have the fortitude to work through it and hopefully emerge whole and much more healthy. Hence the purpose for it in the first place.