the genius of play

Psychology Today published this article on playing and creativity that suggests that it’s a good idea (the doorway to genius?) to step away from the lab, workshop, or stage frequently.

Robert Root-Bernstein, Ph.D., a professor of physiology at Michigan State University, recently compared the hobbies of 134 Nobel laureates in chemistry to the hobbies of a control group of scientists in the Sigma Xi society. Root-Bernstein found that the Nobelists were highly accomplished outside the lab. More than half had at least one artistic avocation, and almost all had an enduring hobby, from chess to insect collecting. One-quarter of the Nobelists were musicians, and 18 percent practiced visual arts such as drawing or painting.

And also:

The Root-Bernsteins maintain that the key is not to just slave away at the piano or the easel, but to “find the links between everything in your life, the connections that others miss.” You may not unlock the origins of the universe, but you’ll see the world in a different way.

comic sans gets drunk, mouthy

From McSweeny’s: I’M COMIC SANS, ASSHOLE.

garrison keillor gets it all wrong

Garrison Keillor recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on the end of publishing as we know it.

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.

There are so many things that are wrong with what he’s written that it’s hard to know where to start, although Brian Spears over at The Rumpus took a good run at it.

Maybe that’s how it worked for you, Garrison. If so, count your blessings, because you’re lucky beyond all belief. Most writers don’t make enough solely from their writing to survive, much less thrive. That era of martyrdom isn’t disappearing (though I wish it would–the stereotype damages a writer’s ability to make a decent living), and self-publishing won’t kill it because it’s not rejection that creates the stereotype of the starving artist–it’s the economics.

The thing that seems to pass Garrison, and Brian … didn’t exactly miss, but didn’t hammer home was this:

It’s never been easier for an artist to get her voice out there. As a result, there’s an explosion of creativity happening RIGHT NOW, and it’s ultimately great for writers and readers.

It is hard for a new artist to find an audience. This is not new. But, just like every other industry that’s had its gates opened by modern technology — desktop publishers, font designers, television programmers, film editors, and electricians, just to name a few — the addition of new talent into the field is a win for every one of us. More people get interested in the field, more people start doing work, more good work gets done.

Further, the more work that’s out there, the more opportunities seem to appear. People begin to value the art, and want somebody good to do it. Just take a look at font design, for instance … or how much better visual storytelling got after cable, or MTV, or computerized video editing. New techniques and languages and histories are formed, audiences get smart to them, and the art continues to improve.

Screw you and your tired old gatekeepers.

Viva la revolution.

10 principles

Frank Chimero over at AisleOne wrote this list of “10 Principles That Might Make Your Work Better or May Make It Worse.“

My favorite is:

9. There is nothing keeping you from doing the sort of work that you wish.

What do you want? It’s a hard, yet crucial question. We all do creative work to get happy. It’s why we let it beat us up, and it’s why we keep crawling back to it. Figure out precisely what you want, and realize that if no one will pay you to make it, you can still make it for yourself. And you still win, because you’re happy.

cory doctorow on giving away his work

Cory Doctorow, author and BoingBoing co-editor, was interviewed by the Guardian. He had this to say about giving away his work:

You’ve released For the Win using a Creative Commons licence, giving it away for free. Why?

I give away all of my books. [The publisher] Tim O’Reilly once said that the problem for artists isn’t piracy – it’s obscurity. I think that’s true. A lot of people have commented: “You can’t eat page views, so how does being well-known help you earn a living as a writer?” It’s true; however, it’s very hard to monetise fame, but impossible to monetise obscurity. It doesn’t really matter how great your work is; if no one’s ever heard of it, you’ll never make any money from it. That’s not to say that if everyone’s heard of it, you’ll make a fortune, but it is a necessary precursor that your work be well-known to earn you a living. As far as I can tell, these themes apply very widely, across all media.

As a practical matter, we live in the 21st century and anything anybody wants to copy they will be able to copy. If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission, your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?

The only people who really think that it’s plausible to reduce copying in the future seem to be the analogue economy, the people who built their business on the idea that copying only happens occasionally and usually involves a giant machine and some lawyers. People who are actually doing digital things have the intuitive knowledge that there’s no way you’re going to stop people from copying and they’ve made peace with it.

street pianos in nyc

New York City is installing 60 pianos in public spaces, so that anyone can sit down and play a bit. Similar installations have been done in Birmingham, England; São Paolo, Brazil; and Sydney, Australia.

I love this idea, and wonder why music-rich cities like Austin, Memphis, Los Angeles, and Nashville don’t follow suit.

The BoingBoing article on this idea had this comment:

This is all kinds of awesome. There needs to be a some kind of Gov. agency in charge of awesome, that would do this kind of stuff all over the country.

The project is called “Play Me, I’m Yours”, and is being run by Sing for Hope.

doodling, or ‘i told you i was paying attention’

Chris Dummire wrote an article on doodling for CreativityPortal. He offers this great bit:

The April 2010 issue of Oprah Magazine features an article by Melinda Wenner (“Imperfect Harmony”) discussing the upsides to some common “bad behaviors” like anger, procrastination, gossip, and…doodling. Wenner charts both the “old thinking” and “new wisdom” of each behavior based on research showing how these qualities may benefit us after all. In the article Bryan Gibson, PhD, a professor of social psychology at Central Michigan University is quoted: “In certain situations, what is typically a detrimental trait can turn out to be a good one.” Here’s the old thinking and new wisdom Wenner shares about doodling:

Old Thinking: “Scribbling circles on a notepad while your company’s chief inspiration officer drones on about synergy means you have trouble focusing.”

New Wisdom: “Doodling can boost your mind’s ability to notice and remember mundane information by nearly 30 percent, according to research from the University of Plymouth. The theory is that the act of drawing makes use of visuospacial processes in the brain that might otherwise be used for daydreaming, thereby preventing your mind from wandering.”

Image courtesy of Dan Paluska. Look at the big version!

picasso, matisse stolen

On one hand, invaluable pieces of art have been stolen from the Paris Museum of Modern Art, and it’s a tragedy for the entire art-loving world.

On the other, I got to see the phrase “brazen overnight heist” in the paper.

I know. It’s a problem I have.

Among the stolen works, Picasso’s ’Le pigeon aux petits-pois’ (The Pigeon with the Peas):

11 essential indie comics

Ugo’s list of 11 Essential Indie Comics.

I can vouch for Bone, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Box Office Poison, The Goon, and (rightfully at #1) Hellboy.

the anti-novel

Fresh on the heels of my post about mash-ups comes this interesting piece from David Shields, who recently wrote (compiled?) the book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. In the piece, he writes:

I love literature, but I don’t love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition.

We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I’m on a plane, it’s all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent.

… I realized how perfectly the appropriated and remixed words embodied my argument: just as I was arguing for work that occupied a liminal space between genres, so, too, I wanted the reader to experience in my mash-up the dubiety of the first-person pronoun; I wanted the reader to not quite able to tell who was talking—was it me or Sonny Rollins or Emerson or Nietzsche or Frank Rich or, weirdly, none of us or all of us at the same time?

Whether or not you agree with him, the article is an interesting read.

Also fascinating, his reading list.

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage. This may sound unpromising: Dyer tries and fails to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence, but the book conveys Lawrence better than any conventional biography, and more importantly, it asks the question: how and why do we get up in the morning? In many ways, it’s a thinking person’s how-to book. How to live your life with passion when you know every passion is delusional, is drained of meaning. Dyer can’t commit to place, to relationship, to art, because he can always see the opposite position. Dyer’s conclusion: “The best we can do is try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence.” By getting up in the morning, we get up in the morning. By not writing our biographies of D.H. Lawrence, we write our biographies of D.H. Lawrence. I reread this book at least once a year.