Brian Frank » art

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Brian — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:38:18 +0000

I decided it was time to improve my writing. It felt both forced and stifled: artless, lifeless, joyless and uninteresting.

And my reading was falling off too, both in quantity and quality.

The two problems — with writing and reading — seemed connected. I hoped reading more (and more importantly, reading better) would help me write — and maybe vice versa. Like the way David Remnick said it a couple weeks ago:

You have to learn to read like a writer, in the same way that a doctor looks at a human body maybe a little bit differently or a painter looks at the human form differently than the rest of us.

So “I’m going to read more books that people who read books read,” was how I phrased it: my New Year’s resolution: a deliberate reference to Richard Posner’s famously hostile review of Malcolm Gladwell:

Blink is written like a book intended for people who do not read books.

So no more over-simplified and monosyllabically titled books about “surprising truths!”

By “books” I guess I mean literature, or “literary books” — or perhaps just “respectable fiction.” I was getting too stuck in a marketing mode: too comfortable, gradually losing my imagination. I felt like a car that’s been driven the same safe speed for to long and had lost its ability to pass on the highway.

On the other hand I already spent years reading high-quality stuff — some of my favourites: Jacques Barzun, José Ortega y Gasset, William James, A. N. Whitehead, John Dewey — and it’s been great and challenging and very fulfilling for me personally but isn’t in fashion with the type of audience that’d be willing and able to read what I’ve produced from it. The stuff I really love, the stuff I “curl up with” and lose track of time when I read, the stuff I’m most inclined to emulate (and have in the past), doesn’t endear me to many readers.

So I have to keep reading and working away…

The first name on my reading list this year was Borges. I certainly wouldn’t say I “get” Borges now but even after our short acquaintance I found myself writing differently (or thinking differently when I write). I could suddenly withhold important details to create surprises later on in a story (i.e. actually creating a story) instead of just laying out all the information in the most logical, predictable order.

Writing is about not-telling as much as it’s about telling (or moreso, not-showing as much as it’s about showing). Working the balance between what’s known and what’s not-known is what makes it joyful and interesting.

Something similar happened when I read a couple of Chekhov‘s short stories. I was struck by how much he left out of them. He gives us a few seemingly casual but skillfully sketched bits of info; our minds fill in the rest: enriching the story with a sense of relevance within a larger unknown narrative without quite making us feel deprived at the end.

Recently Robin Sloan shared something that captures this notion pretty well, quoting William Trevor:

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

At the other end of the spectrum is David Foster Wallace, whom I (like a lot of people) have been trying to catch up on before reading The Pale King. I’ve been infatuated with his journalism for a while but I’ve found it tougher to get into his fiction (mainly because almost all fiction is tough for me to get into).

I’ve got Infinite Jest here (the precise location of my bookmark is a detail I’m happy to leave out of this story) but what I really loved was a Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. It’s essentially just a transcript of five days of interviews and camaraderie between Wallace and Lipsky at the end of Jest‘s promotional tour in 1996. Beyond being about David Foster Wallace it’s a glimpse into the business of writing and publishing, and simply just an insightful and fun conversation between two guys I’d like to have a beer with.

(Like most books I’ve ended up loving, I didn’t go looking for it. It caught the corner of my eye — the newest, shiniest object on a pile strewn on a desk — part-way between two points in the library.)

Unexpectedly, I found myself less inclined to want to write like Wallace. I love his style, I admire his skill, his creative process interests me and I’ve adopted some of his influences (lately becoming a fan of Don DeLillo), and I sympathize with some of his experience. But instead of emulating him I’ve found the net effect has been to emulate his courage and confidence — courage and confidence to write like myself.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses for not finishing Infinite Jest.

Yeah, I’m not afraid to give up on a book (though I rarely quit altogether; I just put them aside, hoping for a better time, e.g. perhaps after I’ve read more of what Wallace read). Mainly I feel like I’m a bit too old for the intense romantic devotion it requires but still too young to have read enough of what I need to have read first…

I guess that’s just the nature of wanting to read excellent books. Geoff Dyer describes this dilemma in his wicked essay on reader’s block:

The strange thing about this is that at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov:I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought—and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.

Dyer is another writer who’s helping me write more like myself. Though whereas Wallace helps me by being different, Dyer helps me by coming close to what I’m already trying to do on my own.

Read Out of Sheer Rage, for example. It’s a book about procrastinating from writing a book, and in the process of doing everything except write the book, he ends up writing the book in a different but probably more interesting way.

Like Dyer, most of the more creative things I really want to write are that same type of paradoxical, ‘tried doing one thing and failed but by the time I recognized my failure I turned out to have succeeded at something better.’

I’m especially sympathetic to what motivates him:

I wanted to know more – and the best way to find out about anything is to write about it. If I’d known what I needed to know before writing the book I would have had no interest in doing so. Instead of being a journey of discovery, writing the book would have been a tedious clerical task, a transcription of the known.

I’ve been trying to explain that to people for years, but after reading him say it I was like, ‘ok, now I don’t have to, because I know I’m not the only one who thinks and feels this way,’ and more importantly, ‘oh crap, it’s already been done.’

But what’s funny is that the realization of non-originality wasn’t a disappointment; it was relieving. It freed me to move forward and find new things to write about — to find joy in what got me into writing and reading in the first place: not just writing what I know but trying to put together the pieces of what I don’t.

For me, not-knowing is what makes the writing process joyful and interesting — like the experience of reading. It’s most compelling as a sequence of glimpses waiting to be found — glimpses not just of a story or a book but of an author or creator.

We keep compiling influences and references but ultimately it’s how we synthesize and represent them through ourselves, in our own, way that matters most.

Update: This is too relevant not to tack on: Geoff Dyer on David Foster Wallace and “literary allergies” (via @newinquiry) — sometimes there are writers we respect and want to like but can’t read without getting a rash and watery eyes:

Maybe in some homeopathic way reading Infinite Jest would cure me of my allergy. Perhaps I just haven’t consumed him in sufficiently large doses. But even a small dose is, in my experience, an overdose. He’s funny, he’s hip, he has this whopping supply of verbal energy. His braininess and virtuosity are as hard to avoid as a 747 on a runway—and almost as noisy. He’s one of those writers who won’t let the reader get a word in edgeways.

But we’ve all got to try, at least — not just Wallace but anyone. What works out and what doesn’t is often a surprise.

See Who’s Using the Internet to Make Life Less Meaningful

Brian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:59:26 +0000

I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link.

The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing collection of crafted pieces by good writers who don’t get it.

I used to agree with Lanier, for one, but here’s what happened: I stayed open, I was still curious, I kept looking for bright spots, I kept trying things, I adopted the best and rejected the worst, I found ways to make it work for me, I kept learning from mistakes; I cultivated a productive, rewarding and meaningful way of working and living with the internet.

Like everyone else who actually understands it.

What works will be different for everyone. Facebook works for some but not others. Twitter works for some but not others (or not even most). Even within Twitter there are as many different ways to use it as there are users. The people who know the most about the hazards and challenges are the people using this stuff and learning from mistakes.

I went along with the skepticism for a long time and I appreciate ongoing criticism, but these people (Gladwell too) who are standing around outside, watching us instead of jumping in and learning how to swim, fretting, “OH NO, we all might drown!” keep looking more and more ridiculous.

Smith tried Facebook and didn’t like it, so she quit after two months. Well same here. It wasn’t right for me at the time but I’ve changed, Facebook has changed, the world has changed, I went back and approached it differently. It’s working ok for me now.

Don’t just give up if you swallow a big gulp of water the first time you jump in. You can either keep trying or leave it alone. But if you walk away you can’t come back with a diatribe that basically argues what we already know: it isn’t perfect…

These sentences from Smith’s NYBooks piece finally put these fears into perspective for me:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

I think I see where the problem is now.

Have you ever met anyone who has been reduced to data? Do you know anyone who’s had their desires, their fears and messy feelings get swallowed up by Facebook? No. What happens is, when some aspects of our lives become data, we expand — we use that as part of a platform or framework to create new opportunities and objects for new kinds of fears and desires.

In other words, humans will always find new ways to be human.

We’re not just resilient, we’re ingeniously assertive. Our species has been surviving for ages: crawling through deserts, trudging through swamps, climbing over mountains, hacking through jungles, sailing across oceans, careening down rapids, launching into space, clawing in the dirt, driving as deep as we can into any visible challenge, making our mark on the world however we can, fabricating tools with whatever we can find, etc.

After all that and more for thousands of years, do you think Facebook is really so dangerous?

If love and friendship are so delicate that Facebook can undermine them and consequently tear apart the fabric of humanity, would they be worth saving? Or is this just about particular kinds of love and friendship that happen to be near and dear to some people at one particular place and time?

Whatever makes us special is too deeply engrained in our nature to clearly distinguish and articulate. Facebook and Twitter aren’t going to take it away from us — nor, conversely, is it so adjustable that Zadie Smith or Malcolm Gladwell or any philosopher can swoop in and save it.

They’re not against technology being used to objectify and reduce human behaviour; they’re merely against any new kinds of reductivism emerging to surpass their own favourite brand of it.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of people who’ve become “gadgets” — reduced and enslaved by two-hour movies and two-hundred-page books.

Elsewhere people have feared that photography and the written word would steal souls. But instead of reducing the breadth and depth of human experience, technologies keep creating opportunities for expansion and enrichment. I don’t see any reason to assume this time will be any different.

Here’s our choice: moan about the inevitable and miss our chance to grow, or look for the bright spots and make the most of our opportunities. Pretty easy, I think.

Part of me wants to be diplomatic, but another part is getting tired of so many fussy, timid, whiny, precious complaints coming from otherwise intelligent and talented people.

Pushing forward into the unknown, using the internet won’t reduce the meaning in life; it’s in many ways the most meaningful thing we can do.

The Social Network Movie as a Social Application

Brian — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:07:10 +0000

I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin:

I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.

I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort of a wannabe screenwriter myself — just enough to have wrestled a lot with attempts to balance accuracy and meaning. I look at this as just being the Internet’s turn to be misrepresented by Hollywood. I mean, does Hollywood even get itself right?

Sadly, truth isn’t as important as we like to believe. If truth was important, Hollywood wouldn’t exist. What matters most in the long run is a compelling story.

Apply a kind of Darwinian principle to it: there’s no iron law dictating that the stories that survive have to be true; they just have to be coherent, attractive, adaptable, resilient, and reproductive (of course truth helps most of those, but it isn’t necessary and is sometimes counterproductive when based on complex facts that the audience isn’t familiar with).

“Fidelity to storytelling” essentially means giving the audience something they can take home with them and use in their own social interactions. That’s what makes stories and movies successful: people can “remix” them into their own personal, social stories and conversations (think of how much meaning can be communicated with a single quote from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, or Shakespeare).

Here’s the irony: this is pretty close to the principle on which the social web works. It’s the insight that Zuckerberg understood early on: content is merely a means for people to connect; create a platform where people can exchange social objects and “likes” and the network generates its own value.

If The Social Network was absolutely true to reality, far fewer people would see it and even fewer would have much to say about it. It would lose its social function. It would only serve a small elite that simply wants to preserve their authority and control, afraid that the ignorant masses might make things impure and imperfect…

Sound familiar?

There’s a bit of “what goes around comes around” here. Some of the most outspoken proponents of blogs, wikis, and creative commons — e.g. Jeff Jarvis and Lawrence Lessig — are also the most outspoken critics of The Social Network’s creative liberties.

As far as I’m concerned, creative liberty is creative liberty.

Either we let ignorant, bitter trolls comment on news articles and write Hollywood pictures or we don’t. Either someone has to be an expert to participate or they don’t.

We could say, “fine, they have a right — but then we have a right to challenge them with criticism,” which I 100% approve of.

But there’s another irony here. Read this post by John Hagel — with lots of interesting points and a conclusion with which I sentimentally agree — and see if you pick up the dissonance:

… the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity. It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

But the new media’s caricatures of the filmmaker’s motives seem every bit as distorted as the caricatures described in the film’s reviews, and both sides are advocating on behalf of a revolution or regime. It isn’t one constructed old media narrative vs. the righteous Internet; it’s two narratives clashing with each other — both resorting to simplistic cause-effect explanations and two dimensional characterizations.

Jeff Jarvis accounted for the filmmakers’ motives with statements like ”old media resists change” and “these guys want to deny the internet credit for it.” Scott Rosenberg quotes Mark Harris’s description of the movie as “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media,” and added he thought “it’s more than that — it’s a big lunging swat of the old-media dinosaur tail.”

I think those are fairly valid, but far from the whole picture. I can’t imagine Sorkin single-mindedly rubbing his hands together in anticipation of sticking it to the Internet any more than I can imagine Zuckerberg creating Facebook simply out of spite.

They’re handy caricatures for telling more compelling stories. We couldn’t do much without them.

Of course a Hollywood movie isn’t the most generative platform — but then again, neither is Facebook.

If we keep working at it, eventually we’ll stumble on the right story.

What’s the Future of Reading & Writing?

Brian — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 06:56:52 +0000

“Books are being replaced by reading,“ to borrow a phrase from Jack Shafer. Digital technology “distances us from the old magic conjured by books” by giving us better ways to get what’s inside them.

Of course the tactile experience is lost, but that’s only a sentimental attachment — not without genuine value, but not without considerable influence from purely subjective historical and sensory biases either.

We seem to be at the same stage of this discussion that we were at about music when the iPod really took off: we’re finally certain that the new hardware will be with us for a while, but not quite ready to let go of the old, and not sure what implications the change in distribution and storage will have on the content itself. I was still buying lots of CDs in 2005 — I “liked the experience” of looking for them in music stores and displaying them at home — but that ended abruptly.

I’m still buying a lot of books (almost all used, for a few bucks each) because I’m poor and haven’t invested in a digital reader yet, but based on my shift in music consumption I have to assume that my book habits might change pretty suddenly, pretty soon — which isn’t to say I’ll completely stop buying them. There are books that are about more than just reading.

For example, a few months ago I stumbled on a used, two volume edition of Plato’s complete works — in inferior translations I struggle with, and with expired copyrights that enable them to be available freely online. But that big old block of atoms pays me back in the form of inspiration, decoration, and meditation, even if it’s an inefficient way to store and find information.

Pertaining to the points of inspiration and meditation, I often find myself pacing around, trying to generate words and ideas; picking up books, physically looking for pieces of information and insight, turning and scanning pages can occupy the conscious mind just long enough to clear the head of whatever’s blocking the way. The manner of interaction in those instances is more important than the content, so I expect I’ll always have books — but then again, I can get rid of 99% of my current library and still enjoy the same tactile benefits with a few essential, personal selections.

Now I don’t want to float too many predictions but it’s worth reading Kevin Kelly’s description of the sensory experience of his own fresh physical book — exhibiting his proposal that embodiment is a quality that’s “better than free.” I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rise in “collectible” publishing, like the increase in vinyl record sales. Not an original suggestion but there it is anyway.

More interesting to me than buying and reading is the way books will be written.

Kelly developed What Technology Wants over the course of years putting ideas together on his not-quite-a-blog. I’ve noticed Eliezer Yudkowsky deliberately taking the same approach (to very difficult, complex subject matter); I did the same to develop my own book; Seth Godin’s Linchpin was largely composed of advice that first appeared on his blog. David Weinberger is currently taking a slightly different but related approach: not developing the content of his book on a blog, but thinking out loud about the process of writing it.

And it isn’t just the books themselves that are being developed in public, but their readerships — in some cases (e.g. Godin’s) consisting of a core group of fans who buy multiple gift or loaner copies, and are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to hear the author speak in person.

I’m not that kind of fan — at least not of Godin’s — but after following Kevin Kelly’s progress for years I’m intellectually and emotionally invested in his book. It’s as if I watched it grow up: I want to see it do well — and I’d love to own a physical embodiment to display and thumb through from time to time.

I’m not suggesting this is an original line of thought. I’m just trying to probing and re-synthesizing, hoping to turn over an insight…

There’s a lot of brain power going towards figuring this stuff out. Godin notably announced he’d published his last traditional book and would move on to explore new formats. I’m also thinking about bookfuturism, recently described by Tim Carmody as “not just about books as such, but a kind of aesthetic and culture of reading, literacy, history, in connection with (only rarely in opposition to) other kinds of media culture.”

Note that we’re not just developing more formats and distribution channels for books as we know them; we’re reconceiving what we mean when we say “book” — perhaps from something completely static to something more dynamic, or at least from something anticipated and aimed for to something that’s gathered up and left behind as a landmark, like an Inukshuk…

I don’t know.

Unlike a lot of what I write, there’s almost nothing abstract about this for me, or you. We’re both engaged in an experiment by writing and reading this.

We’re into a phase in which every act of writing and reading is affected by uncertainty and speculation.

The sooner we discover opportunities and make all the necessary mistakes, the sooner we can get back to stable traditions — albeit different traditions than we have now.

Cee-Lo Green: Quality vs. Hype

Brian — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:57:29 +0000

Bob Lefsetz wonders whether Cee-Lo’s “F**k You” is going to be another here-today-gone-tomorrow novelty. He uses the song as a jump-off to appeal for music with more staying-power and quality.

His point of comparison is the popular series of TED talks:

These TED talkers didn’t start yesterday, most have spent years dedicated to their field, to the point where they could be selected for a TED speech. That’s the new paradigm. Don’t ask how you can accomplish world domination right away, but keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

It’s the right sentiment but I think he picked the wrong analogy.

We can’t compare “F**k You” to the whole series of TED talks; we have to compare “F**k You” to one TED talk — and there have been a few instant sensations, if memory serves. I saw more links in my Twitter stream when Jamie Oliver’s talk came out then I’ve seen of Cee-Lo’s song so far.

In fact people make the same complaints about TED that Lefsetz makes about “F**k You.” Nassim Taleb comes to mind (most recently: “I am starting to get uncontrollably angry when I encounter TED-style phony humanitarians.”)

Photo by Scootie

And isn’t Cee-Lo Green’s career a model of this advice?

… keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

He started releasing critically acclaimed music in 1995 with Goodie Mob (a group known to me for years mainly as ”that other group from Atlanta,” being close with OutKast). There was some attention and maybe some minor hits (“Closet Freak“?) but it took more than a decade for him to find the mainstream with Gnarls Barkley and “Crazy” in 2006 — the same year he released a greatest hits album!

Now I know Lefsetz probably knows all of this, and he doesn’t explicitly say Cee-Lo exemplifies shallowness, and I agree with his overall sentiment, so I’m not going after him. I’m trying to develop something here.

I think what we ought to take away from this is that we don’t have to be the same artist or the same creative person/group/organization all the time. We can accomplish different things with different projects: we can use some projects to cultivate enduring quality and then we can use others to, you know, pay the bills and get people’s attention so we can keep making quality stuff.

There’s nothing wrong with silliness and hype. Getting excited about things once in a while is good, even if the excitement doesn’t last.

It’s only a problem for people who can only generate hype.

But contrary to a lot of fears, I don’t think the Internet is going to make things worse. I don’t think it will diminish long-term quality. I don’t think it will increase the volume of “mere hype.” Counterintuitively, it’s the proliferation of mere hype that’s going to eventually kill it.

At some point (if we aren’t there already) it’s going to be too costly to keep up with constant turnover: it’s too chaotic; it’s fatiguing. Once we cross that threshold, people who know how to develop long-term value will be the ones getting and holding people’s attention. I think we already see this with emphasis being placed on reputations and relationships online, rather than merely focusing on the last thing someone did.

We ought to let ourselves love the last thing someone did without fixating on it — without sitting there waiting for more hype to fall in front of us. We can use the rare successes as opportunities actively get into what they did before and explore the stuff they like and so on…

And so now speaking of which — this f**king song is awesome:

“Discovering Narrative and the Value of Beginner’s Mind”

Brian — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:54:41 +0000

Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]:

Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to write it, either. In fact, I try to preserve that state of mind. There’s this teaching in Zen called “beginner mind,” which says if you want to be original and creative, then you have to approach each new project as though you were an amateur, as though you had never done this before. And obviously, it’s not completely possible — or Zen would be easy, but I try to approach a story without knowing how I’m going to — often I honestly don’t know how I’m going to report it; I certainly don’t know how I’m going to write it…

That’s Mark Bowden, a well known long-form journalist and the author, most notably, of Black Hawk Down. His remarks resonated with what I’ve been thinking lately about writing and reading and life in general.

Last night I finally read “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” (a.k.a. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) and before that I LMAOd through “Big Red Son,” a rather over-informative forty-eight page account of Wallace’s trip to the annual porn convention and Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Like Bowden, Wallace wasn’t sticking to a strict plan when he researched and told those stories. No doubt he had a timetable and a sense of what he might come up with, but both stories exude innocence (and no lack of discomfort) as he finds himself participating in episodes he apparently would have preferred not to have been a part of.

The obvious precedent is the “gonzo journalism” popularized by Hunter S. Thompson. He tended to insert himself so far into a story that his presence there became the story — or created the story by taunting hapless bystanders with lies and incapacitating his associates with whiskey and Mace (e.g. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved“).

When Gay Talese used the buffer around the subject as his angle in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” it must have seemed radical. Now I wonder why Gay Talese didn’t spend more time on himself. Now we expect celebrity profiles to include the reporter’s account of calling on the phone to set up an interview, dealing with publicists, driving up to the house, ringing the doorbell, getting hassled by security, being peed on by the dog and having to borrow pants from someone in the entourage, etc.

I wouldn’t say it’s “self-absorbed” (at least not in a derogatory way), because they’re also giving us what we want: we identify with the naive outsider trying to find a way in.

And a lot of us want to be the outsider — an impulse that draws a lot of people to journalism and writing (and science and art and entrepreneurial endeavors) in the first place. There’s something about the human spirit that thrives in the face of the uncertain and unknown…

We’d do well to let this impulse run a little more freely, both for motivation’s sake and for improving the quality of our shared experience. Exercise the beginner’s mind instead of hiding it, learn to discover through adventure and self-discipline instead of locking it in an office [or a fixed plan].

Read the rest of Bowden’s talk. HT The Browser. There are more great magazine articles via Kevin Kelly’s collectively compiled list.

My New Favourite Phrase

Brian — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:52:00 +0000

I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!”

But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become famous?”

I soon realized that famous quotes are famous thanks to the person or the work they came from, not simply on their own merits. There’s no committee accepting proposals for “ideas for a good quote.” So I let go of the dream — though I wasn’t the least bit discouraged. Learning the truth and moving on was more gratifying than clutching a few random, pseudo-profound utterances.

My entire life’s narrative is pretty much like that: a few spontaneous thoughts will build me up with high hopes, then after recognizing how absolutely delusional those ideas are, I’ll work them out into a more realistic platform for further growth. All of the divergent, harebrained ideas become material to analyze and practice being critical on, and once all that’s straightened out there are suddenly new opportunities for open-ended experiments, and the cycle keeps going around and around.

A few years ago I even stumbled on a quote to describe this whole process, from Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana:

The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and conquest is for the sake of self-possession.

It probably isn’t something that works for everyone, but it became my motto for a few very pivotal years, marking the moment I stopped inquiring about things separately — finding my bearings, basically — and started reading more systematically, towards long-term goals.

Now I’m due for another change.

The phase of self-disciplined reading and rumination has run its course. Now that the objectives of that phase have been met there’s nothing to provide structure for ongoing discipline, and I seem to be casting around somewhat arbitrarily, trying to find possible uses for my ideas.

The process has become divergent again. I’ve got all of these ideas, but my ability to communicate them persuasively isn’t up to the task. All of my practice and thinking about writing has been focused on precision and clarity — though since I’ve been blogging I’ve worked hard at being more relevant and meaningful as well (losing a bit of precision by doing so) and I’ve always followed and absorbed the main conversations around business and marketing, but since I got deeper into philosophy I lost the habit of thinking with persuasion or “stickiness” foremost in mind. I want to get that back.

For the sake of being consistent with the big strategic shifts I’ve made in the past, this calls for a new motto to mark another turn towards discipline.

But here’s the thing: if I’m supposed to be learning to think about writing more persuasively — i.e. constantly trying to develop better turns-of-phrase to capture and express ideas — then I probably shouldn’t settle on a single quote. Instead, I should aim to improve on today’s motto with a better one tomorrow, and so on…

So my new favourite phrase hasn’t been written yet. Instead of something already written, it’ll always be something I’m working on.*

* See “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”**

** See “fake it until you make it.”

The Indispensable Amateur

Brian — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:34:24 +0000

How much do I love Jacques Barzun?

The exemplary historian and teacher, proponent of the Great Books tradition, Dean of Faculties and Provost at Columbia University for over a decade, who also graced the cover of Time magazine for a feature on American intellectuals, etc, etc, etc… wrote this about amateurs:

A world of professionals is an image to shudder at; it would not be a world peopled, and hence capable of novelty; it would be staffed and rolling in accredited grooves. We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateur’s natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.

Taken from “The Indispensable Amateur,” 1949; published in Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940 – 1980.

No doubt professionals are equally indispensable, and Barzun spent much of the essay on professional merits — just as he spent much of his life instilling them in his students. But as a sensible observer, he appreciated that the best ideas, inventions, and works of art (virtually every innovation of lasting value) came out of the dynamic interplay between the two types:

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius—inspired heretics—and orthodox professionals.

Amateurs can do great things but they have to work hard to overcome their limitations:

[The amateur] wastes time, rediscovers what is known, and makes colossal blunders.

(Don’t I know it.)

But professionals shouldn’t show too much scorn for those shortcomings. Professionals have limitations, biases, and blind spots to overcome as well. They can learn from what amateurs bring from other perspectives (perhaps even from their professional experience in other disciplines: e.g. journalists can stand to show a little more respect for bloggers, many of whom are subject matter experts). And as Professor Barzun put it:

No one but a mediocrity has ever been heard to approve his own education…

Characteristic of Barzun, there’s too much good material in the essay for excerpts or a summary to do it justice. I intentionally left out some of the best quotes.

Looks like you can probably read all 8 pages via Google Books.

What I’m Reading

Brian — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:02:47 +0000

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration.
A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which are cut-and-pasted and paraphrased from others (in most cases the reader has to flip to the end-notes to learn who).
My must-read list has grown by at least a dozen books after this…

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail

I picked this up from the library a couple of days ago while wandering aimlessly through the stacks, kind of frustrated that I’m having trouble being interested in anything. I gravitated to the shelf of “big history” something I’ve wanted to read for a few years and finally got nudged towards after watching the doc based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel last week (excellent, btw).
It combines history, anthropology, neuroscience (and other disciplines) into a very fascinating account of how we cope with “deep time” — i.e. all those hundreds of thousands (or millions, or billions, depending on where you decide to start your story) of years of so-called “pre-history.” The notion of a Deluge was a way to deal with all of that uncertainty: people didn’t have to explain much of what came before (other than the cause of the Deluge itself) because it wouldn’t have effected anything that happened since. More recently, historians talked about the Dark Ages as a point at which history was apparently reset. I’ve noticed the First World War can be presented with Deluge-like qualities in some accounts of 20th century history.
No doubt the time we’re living in right now will have the same sort of effect on future people’s historical consciousness…

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

I skimmed this at the book store enough to know I’ll have to sit down and actually read it. It isn’t merely a rant or an expanded version of his famous Atlantic essay. The takeaway from most of the reviews I’ve read is that Carr makes a fairly good case, but he leaves some very big questions open: “So what?” and “What should we do about it?”
Ultimately I think when we try to answer questions like those, we’ll end up discarding much of Carr’s argument as essentially moot. At the very least it’s supposed to be well written and apparently a pleasure to read, and I’m grateful we have at least one source of lucid and somewhat sensible dissent…

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Not out in Canada until next week, so I can’t say much about it.
Shirky’s concept of “cognitive surplus” (which he presented at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo) was a great boost to my general point in Truth, Will & Relevance. I get a sense that my thinking is very close to Shirky’s — albeit lacking his brilliance in formulating simple phrases to convey complex, moving ideas.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

The promotional push behind this book focused on their “obesity is contagious” idea.
The single-word title led me to expect Connected to be a the kind of non-fiction book that only needs to be 25 pages long but stretches out with + 175 pages of anecdotes and repetition, but there’s a lot of sociological substance in it — more like Bowling Alone than Blink.

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida

Skimming the book and reading the reviews suggests it brings together much of what Florida was blogging around the worst of the economic crisis in 2008 (much of which I re-blogged here).
I’m honestly having trouble motivating myself to read something I assume I’m already in full agreement with — though I certainly recommend it to anyone else…

Notes on Satire

Brian — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:42:17 +0000

I worry I enjoy ambiguity, irony, “meta” and satire a little too much.

I’m worried my last post about copyright laws might seem too resentful (it is somewhat resentful — regretfully) because I genuinely sympathize with all sides.

In the case of copyright, I appreciate the economic [and social!] stability it enables, and I want to explore ways to sustain that in the most generative way possible.

I usually resort to satire when I want to take a side in a debate but I also want to recognize the contradictions and negative aspects of what I support (as well as the other side’s positive points). To really commit to something requires a kind of blindness: a willingness to lie to oneself, or circumscribe and settle on an arbitrarily small selection of imperfect knowledge.

We pick a side and then we find the facts and arguments to support it, unconsciously overlooking contrary evidence and considerations. Then we argue. Nuance gets trampled and kicked aside. We get pissed-off and energized by the confrontation, and the confrontation itself generates a sense of justification for our original ideas, and we come back harder.

A Huntsville area man was on the CBC news last week saying he was going to join the protest against the G8 summit because he didn’t want protests in his quiet community. Activists are seeing security efforts as verification of their cause — or rather, the barriers become a focal point that galvanizes a broad variety of grievances.

Then security folks point at that sentiment and say, “See, this is why we need all of these barriers.”

I have to laugh…

Some of us see these ironies and nuances and have trouble picking a side. It makes us awful leaders — and even worse followers. So we criticize and try to triangulate positions towards some kind of resolution (or dissolution) of the conflict.

But sometimes I find myself already within the conflict — as is the case with debates about the Web (see my first attempt at satire) — and I feel obligated to defend or promote my own interests. I have a hard time doing it with blinders on. The urge to articulate the nuances is still too strong.

It isn’t necessarily due to a higher degree of integrity; I think I just enjoy identifying and describing situations that are paradoxical or otherwise absurd.

And then again, maybe that sense of enjoyment points towards a deeper love of truth.

Satire Humour helps sweep away stock ideas. Occasionally events happen that either, in their purity, can’t be rationalized — like a guy getting hit in the balls – or create tensions that compel us to reconceive our stocks of ideas.

Sometimes the process hurts. The instinct to laugh and satirize ideas is like an intellectual anesthetic: it helps us work through these painful episodes, rather than letting wounds fester until they’re inoperable.

Besides, ultimately our victories afford us the freedom to share laughs. Let’s make time to pause and laugh along the way.

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

Brian — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 06:09:04 +0000

» … besides news about Haiti, Google, #teamconan (awesome!), prorogation…

» How Fiction Works, James Wood — not so much a how-to as a brilliantly curated conversation across time between some of the greatest authors about subtleties I’d never noticed, e.g. how characters are efficiently “got in,” etc.

» The Design of Business, Roger Martin … who has been busy:

“The Age of Consumer Capitalism“
“Wall Street’s Rigged Bonuses“
and not by him but, “Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School?“

» The Journal of Evolution & Technology (via 3qd) … the latest issue is on Nietzsche and posthumanists … also got me wanting to revisit Nietzsche and read more of Nick Bostrom‘s articles.

» The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain — which is cc so I’m reading it on-screen.

» Here’s another article on Geoff Dyer … I need to read more of his books. The library here only has a few. Used bookstores have none.

» Also listening to the new Vampire Weekend album. Quite the unit. I’m finding myself saying “I need to listen to that one again” after a few of the up-tempo numbers e.g. “Holiday,” “California English” and “Cousins” (listen here).

» Have a great weekend!

What happens after you read a book?

Brian — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 09:25:52 +0000

With me it varies a lot.

Sometimes I’ll write a blog post about it. Depends though. For the last couple of fiction books I wrote little reviews immediately after I finished them. I think I was trying to articulate “what they were about,” or something.

Sometimes I’ll write a post that isn’t exactly about the book, but which uses ideas I got from it. When I finished The Craftsman I wrote an essay about learning, which I plan to post later to coincide with something else. When I finished re-reading History as a System last week I made a list of my “core curriculum,” which I want to blog or vlog about.

The other thing that happens almost every time I finish a book (or not finish a book) is I end up with another 5 – 10 books I want to read.

And I don’t even like reading…

These wobbly stacks beside my desk, my bed, and my big ‘comfy’ chair keep getting dangerously close to killing me.

Favourite Rainy-Day Albums of the 00′s

Brian — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:16:45 +0000

Being that it’s a rainy day where I am right now and I’ve been meaning to do a few “Best of the 00′s” lists, when I found myself making a playlist of climate-appropriate musical selections it seemed like a good chance to collect some impressions.

Starting with Badly Drawn Boy‘s Hour of the Bewilderbeast in 2000 — winner of the decade’s first Mercury Prize. It opens low-yet-still-warm with cello and french horn on “The Shining.” Conversely, “Once Around the Block” is a jaunty-yet-genuine picker-upper.

Then I’ve got Sparklehorse in 2001 with It’s a Wonderful Life. The langorous title track [don't ask me about that fan-made YouTube vid] always bothered me by seeming to try too hard at nothingness, but the damn thing stuck in my head and would come back sometimes a year since I’d heard it. A couple of rockers, “Piano Fire” and “King of Nails,” kept me interested enough early-on.

Then I’m going to go with South‘s From Here on In, released in the UK in 2001. I loved this album from start to finish — not so much as an all-around great album, but for certain times, i.e., rainy days, it suited me perfectly. Whenever I put this on, inevitably, by the time it finishes I find I’ve lost track of time (flow!). I don’t know anyone else who liked it, nor did I make any effort to introduce anyone to it — especially not after American Eagle adopted “Broken Head” for their massively annoying advertising campaign (and I definitely kept it to myself after The O.C. got ahold of another one).

Fortunately for that didn’t happen with The Last Broadcast, released in 2002 by Doves (more Brits). I think this is the strongest album of all of these picks so far — not necessarily my favourite, but the best I’ve listed so far — and critics largely agreed… Oops, spoke too soon about The O.C. – looks like “Caught By the River” was the show’s “best music moment #37.”

I think I might be showing my age by assuming there’s a stigma attached to a song that’s featured on a show like The O.C. There was a time when that meant a song had officially ceased being cool, now TV music directors (whether for shows or advertisers) have displaced radio DJs and programming directors as arbiters of cool.

Either way, I started losing interest and my tastes sort of settled while I tried figuring out what “these kids these days” are up to.

Next up is 2004′s Love is Hell, by Ryan Adams. I only just started listening to this a couple of years ago, even though I already liked Adams in theory and I loved Gold and almost put it on this list (but it’s more break-up blue than rainy-day blue). Since then this has remained one of my favourites, and I certainly think it’s the best on this list. I’m not even a huge fan of “Wonderwall” [insert requisite O.C clip which I just found and will add no comment to].”

Out of what passes for me as “recent,” I’m a fan of Bon Iver‘s For Emma, Forever Ago . I thought the ”Skinny Love” performance on Letterman was pretty awesome; then his Black Cab Session with “Creature Fear“ is what finally sold me.

The only other recent ones I can think of are maybe Band of Horses, who I’ve come to really late and haven’t fully decided on yet. Seems like I should mention Wilco too — if only because I know the Amazon and Last.fm recommendo-bots would… And I’m tempted to say Radiohead too, but I think I’ll save them for a “Late-Night Reflection Albums” post or something.

Another honourable mention goes to PJ Harvey‘s Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea, which I stumbled on late and was only just now reminded of when a few dots in this post started to connect (won Mercury Prize, she did guest-vocals for Sparklehorse, and her album had Tom Yorke as a guest). It’s more ’between-moods’ than ‘rainy-day.’ There’s some haunting sort of stuff but there are also one or two that rock even harder than any of these dudes.

After all, the point of rainy-day music isn’t to stay in a rainy-day mood forever.

[Final note: I know there are a lot I should've mentioned -- mostly in my 2004 - 2007 gap of pop culture apathy. These are my own picks, I welcome yours [also I can tell you I'm already kicking myself for forgetting a couple].]

Object Bias

Brian — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:14:21 +0000

This is part of my attempt to outline my thinking about thinking. Consider it a proposal, open to revision and refinement. Even after years of work, it will never be perfect or final.

The core of my practice of theory is an appreciation of [the "reification fallacy," or] what I call “object bias” — our tendency to conceive experience composed of distinct and permanent objects.

We identify patterns of more or less consistent phenomena over time and turn these into concepts which we talk about as if they’re concrete.

For example we notice the quality of redness appearing on many different things and we conceive there to be a thing called the colour red; we imagine it exists independently, in some pure form.

Likewise for concepts like “freedom” and “truth.”

People say “we found freedom” or “we’re bringing freedom to the people” as if freedom is an object that can be picked up and handed over (or taken away).

Freedom is not a thing in reality; it’s a concept we imagine and use to make life understandable, and in effect more manageable.

Concepts like freedom allow us to tie patterns of experience that are effectively similar into bunches.

These concepts are heuristics that are “close enough” to reality that they tend to work. They may break down in some situations, but most of the time their benefits let us (or compel us) to overlook their shortcomings.

The portions of experience that get associated with these concepts might meet explicit criteria or they might not. Much of the time (and ultimately, if you dig far enough) the terms of a concept can’t be defined; the process is largely tacit and felt — even involuntary.

It’s as natural and constant as breathing — and just as difficult to consciously control.

We think and talk this way because it generates results that have helped us survive and thrive as a species.

There’s no abstract proof to account for it.

In fact, our insistence on making it logically objective is itself evidence of object bias.

There is no logic that compels us to explain everything logically, there is no purely objective account of why or how we can be purely objective; instead we have deep undeniable feelings that we must make ideas objectively explained.

Start with that simple fact and work backwards: instead of obeying the rules of objectivity, account for them.

Evolution is the ultimate explanation for all of our knowledge and beliefs.

It’s about what’s practical — whatever works in the long run, whatever manages to survive and succeed.

We’re the species that happened to acquire imagination and memory capable of transposing the real world into a conceptual world of symbols — abstract objects that aren’t subject to the physical laws of change and motion affecting the rest of reality.

The impulse for manipulating abstract objects and transposing them back into real-world action eventually developed into principles and laws, which in turn provided frameworks for civilizations.

Civilizations themselves are conceived as objects that come into contact with other communities — “the barbarians,” etc.

History indicates that (at least where and when the environment allowed), civilizations which accommodated the most complex systems of abstract objects tended to persevere and succeed over those that used less complex abstractions.

Occasionally there have been exceptional disruptions, but in general the civilizations which dominated have tended to have the most effective systems of ethics and discipline, the most sophisticated mastery of science and engineering, and the most powerful religious symbols.

A hypothetical pre-historic group that wasn’t comfortable with abstractions like “freedom” or “justice” (or “me” or “us” and “them” — or truth itself) may have been more empirically sound but they wouldn’t have been as effective at communicating and collaborating.

Such a group would have found it more difficult to surviving — especially if they lived in the same area as proto-humans better-developed systems for working, living, and fighting together.

But eventually our objective systems reach a point of diminishing returns.

At some point, rather than expanding, the system starts to require more and more energy to merely maintain the integrity of the structures, rules, and information they already have.

Large empires find themselves with infrastructure and other resources that need to be protected. Monuments deteriorate and need to be rebuilt. Institutions acquire their own momentum, making them difficult to steer.

Meanwhile knowledge accumulates and becomes hyper-specialized.

One teacher might have a hundred students, each working in their own narrow sub-specialty. When the teacher passes away there’s nobody left who remembers how all the paths once parted — and anyone who tries to reunify the field will have to contend with ninety-nine accusations of ignorance and meddling.

I’m afraid this is the point we’re at now: earlier generations built amazing things, but as we work with the ideas and institutions they passed onto us, nobody knows how how it all works together.

It’s time we take a close look at all of our ideas and institutions with an evolutionary appreciation.

The ideas and institutions of the past aren’t permanently true and good, they simply worked for some time. Now it’s time to reassess whether they’re still as generative and sustainable as they once were.

But we also need to be careful of new ideas and institutions.

We may recognize a problem but then become attracted to the first new abstraction that occurs to us — and sometimes we might be attracted to a new abstraction even while the old ones still work fine.

We have to assess every idea that occurs to us by reminding ourselves how powerfully attractive abstractions can be to our imaginations — especially the simplest and most obvious ones — and evaluate every idea with the question, “What are the real effects of this idea?”

Even the idea of object bias is subject to object bias, we have to consider this as well.

By turning the idea of object bias on itself you might send yourself in seemingly endless circles.

It might seem meaningless and futile.

It isn’t futile.

It’s possible, with practice, to overcome the discomfort of uncertainty. It’s possible to cultivate the habit of doubting ideas without dismissing them altogether. The hard-earned ability to manage ideas is more valuable than any idea will ever be.

“Teach a man to fish…”

***

To be continued…

Needless to say a lot of citations are conspicuously absent. We can have a discussion about Hume, James, Wittgenstein, and whoever. In the mean time I’ll argue it isn’t wrong to prioritize vigorous thinking over rigorous scholarship [that's what this piece is about]. If you follow my blogging and twittering you’ll know who my influences are [start here]… still a lot more to be written and said.

Also, this post has referred to evolution in two different ways: biological and intellectual. I’ll have to clear that up (and anything else I may have missed) but for now I want to start getting these ideas out.

Essays That Help Write Themselves

Brian — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:19:52 +0000

I just reached 5130 words on a blog post… a little to long to still qualify as a “blog post,” methinks.

It’s an essay really, but still long enough I should explain.

When I’m writing an essay, I often start adding a sentence or a paragraph in the middle or close to the start, and that just keeps flowing into new sentences until I’ve written almost a whole new draft, pushing the first one down in the process.

After doing that a few times it turns into a cut-and-paste carnival, using blocks of text from all the different drafts — eventually becoming a very different essay than the one I intended to write.

Out of the 5130 words I have now, I’ll probably write a few thousand more and end up with something like 2000…

The idea of pushing the text down reminded me of the origins of blogging — when proto-bloggers simply started typing today’s updates above yesterdays, pushing the whole page down — before people started writing applications that presented a box to type into automatically added date and time stamps, separating entries into distinct posts.

Then I thought, instead of the box being what we use to type into, what if there were applications that made boxes for deleting?

Or exporting, I should say — or moving, or something.

I mean, it would be useful (for me) to have an application that removes blocks of text from view and organizes them with contextual metadata making them restorable and accessible for importing anywhere else back into the document.

In a way I’m already using an application for keeping the thousands of words I delete but don’t want to lose altogether — either plain old TextEdit or Google Docs — but it would be nice if it all that was better organized and associated with places in the essay.

I guess that’s basically what a wiki does — just maybe not as well for my specific uses. Google Wave might be better.

Then I wondered…

What if the application didn’t just keep track of placement within the original/final/whole text. What if it was continuously figuring out new semantic associations — i.e. “reading” text and interpreting the relations among the different parts — and making suggestions for fitting them together?

Creative Relationships

Brian — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:32:53 +0000

Jotted this down just before falling asleep last night:

As opposed to someone who thinks along conventional lines, someone who is genuinely creative constantly and actively looks for potential complementarity in everyone they meet — not just asking “who is this person and “what have they done,” but digging deeper to ask “what potential is there for us to co-create via a new sort of relationship?”

Not just how much potential do they have, but how do our qualities relate with mine — and what might emerge from that?”

The creative relationship is as much an original creation as the result it’s meant to produce.

Social Media, Structure, and the Creative Cycle

Brian — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:57:14 +0000

Reflecting on last weekend’s talk on creativity I worried that probably emphasized the “open” aspect of the creative cycle at the expense of the “closed” aspect. My gist seemed to be, “Don’t worry about anything… try everything, and fantastic creations will magically appear.”

Given the circumstances, I’m happy I erred that way rather than the other. We need free & open experiments now more than ever — and London, especially, is not going to run out of closed-ended thinking any time soon.

Being comfortable with uncertainty is something we need to get better at. This is the 21st century; nobody knows anything anymore…

But I have to backtrack a little.

Ultimately we need a balance

Just as we can think of creative inspiration as a collision between two objects — or, as in the quote I used from Bruce Mau, “the third object” — the process of creativity is a conflagration of two impulses resulting in something new and independent.

These go by different names but the ways they break down are roughly similar:

open & closed
free & disciplined
divergent & convergent
dynamic & static
subjective & objective

Creativity seems to be essentially an effort to resolve an imbalance between the two conditions — the way electricity flows to resolve an imbalance negative and positive charges.

In ambiguous and wildly dynamic circumstances, creators take on a calming role; they’ll create convergent objects — stories and artifacts that bring everything together, concepts that make the world seem simpler than previously feared.

In settled and dormant circumstances, creators take on a more anarchic role; they’ll create divergent objects that challenge old conventions and reveal the world to be more chaotic and complex than previously assumed.

To use the “third object” metaphor, ideas and works of art are intermediaries or objects representing transformation. In times of chaos, creators build bridges to close gaps, drawing lines to show how things relate. In times of stagnancy, creators build wedges to separate things, drawing lines to distinguish differences.

Many creators are better in one mode than another; but as we learn more about the creative mind and how to manage the creative process, I’m promoting a more deliberate effort to use one mode to facilitate the other and vice versa.

The value of constraints & discipline

As George Santayana wrote in (one of the books that most influenced me) Three Metaphysical Poets:

The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and conquest is for the sake of self-possession.

Poetry demonstrates how structure aids freedom and freedom in turn keeps structures vital.

Whenever I try expressing something poetically, the challenge of fitting rough thoughts into a formal structure leads to fresh insights. It creates a frame in which the imagination can play safely with fewer distractions.

Excess opportunity stifles intellect, dissolves focus and escapes productivity; while via the strict constraints of metre and rhyme, the mind’s freed from an oppressive infinity, it inverts the universe into a new form, like a pore through which inspiration drips forward — concentrated, it penetrates like a laser, through masses and layers of ambiguity — proceeding in increments towards a design, refined through time by poetic dexterity; as if whispered by God, new meaning is expressed.

I very rarely try to write poetry — only when I have a kind of pseudo-profound thought germinating but I’m not quite sure what to do with it. By articulating half of it in a phrase two, then trying to complete the thought within certain constraints (i.e. with something that rhymes and has the same number of syllables) the possibilities are condensed from an amorphous cloud into a coherent, manageable stream of consciousness.

The structure keeps the process moving along rather than getting bogged down by endless possibilities.

Structures are human

Readers, listeners, viewers can more easily grasp the meaning (or use, or value) from creations that accord with familiar templates, patterns, formulas, and models.

Of course, to a substantial (but not un-controversial) degree, these templates and formulas are already given by nature.

Dennis Dutton’s Art Instict is a great recent summary of evidence of how deeply embedded our aesthetic dispositions are within the human genome. For example, people from many different cultures felt the same affinity for savannah-like landscapes featuring scattered trees, short grass, an open vista, and water — even if such an environment was foreign to their experience.

(Also see On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd; or more immediately, check out this clip from a recent chat between Steven Pinker and Robert Wright.)

As I discussed in an older (and more thoroughly researched) post on creativity, the process of evolution doesn’t just apply to our genetic dispositions, it applies to our ideas and creations themselves.

Human creativity is a kind of micro-evolutionary process that occurs not just biologically and physically but in our minds as well as in our organizations, industries, and fields.

The most successful creators and innovators don’t just produce more good ideas than everybody else, they produce more bad ideas too. It’s about maximizing the number of “third objects” generated — then aggressively testing, editing, and selecting (i.e. eliminating).

Call it survival of the fittest ideas.

Revolutionary structures

In terms of understanding this process, the stage we’re at now seems analogous to what knowledge of electricity was in the mid-18th century.

Back then “electricians” had developed a lot of tricks for generating sparks, storing charges in jars, and conducting shocks (e.g. through groups of people holding hands) but there was little agreement as to what electricity was — i.e. was it a kind of “fluid”? was lightning electricity too? — nor what to use it for and how to proceed with further investigations.

Then Benjamin Franklin and others after him initiated a paradigm that focused the field of research and turned the study of electricity into a genuine science.

As described by Thomas Kuhn in this Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

… the end of interschool debate ended the constant reiteration of fundamentals and partly because the confidence that they were on the right track encouraged scientists to undertake more precise, esoteric, and consuming sorts of work… Both fact collection and theory articulation became highly directed activities. The effectiveness and efficiency of electrical research increased accordingly, providing evidence for a societal version of Francis Bacon’s acute methodological dictum: “Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion.”

It’s like poetry: even the most arbitrary and artificial constraints serve to narrow and organize the field of options so we can at least start testing and eliminating them and keep moving forward.

Social media’s unsocial paradigm

Kuhn’s phrase “constant reiteration of fundamentals” reminds me of the discussions we see now about the web, creativity, design thinking, open innovation, social media, crowdsourcing, prosumers, the economies of attention and relationship, etc.

Everyone has a slightly different interpretation, with a slightly different vocabulary (that is constantly evolving). Batches of books keep coming out that say essentially the same things in different ways, suited to slightly different needs (which is natural). There’s a lot of corroboration and consistency but it’s mostly tacit and subjective, difficult to get an objective grasp on.

So when we find ourselves in disagreement — like Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble recently have (see here and here) — we have to be nice to each other, agree to disagree, and wait for new features to come along and reframe the disagreement or make it irrelevant. We lack the basis for objectively placing each other’s interpretations in relation to each other.

Most disagreements don’t even matter very much because people inhabit different spaces within the domain. That helps everyone get along, but a lack of friction also indicates a lack of scientific traction. There’s no rigorous, canonical framework for figuring out who’s right and decisively eliminating the bad ideas (other than watching them try and fail).

There’s little in the way of unifying structure — no definitive map, no architecture that shows exactly how everything connects.

We’re well into the digital age but still camped in tents.

That might be acceptable (and probably necessary for a time) but I don’t think it’s optimal or sustainable. It has to change eventually.

A new lightning rod

There’s a lot of electricity in the air.

It’s going to ground itself somehow — whether we wait for sparks to fly or whether we construct some kind of theory, structure, or apparatus for conducting it in the most generative (or least destructive) way.

To be continued…

What I’m Reading and Writing Lately

Brian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:50:34 +0000

Lately I’ve been more inclined towards long-form — both in writing and in reading. I’m back in the rhythm I had in 2007: writing actual essays at a rate of one-per-week.

Maybe that’s the last thing people want, but it’s where I perceive a need. It’s also where I’m most likely to add unique value and distinguish myself.

I’m also playing with formats a little: maybe, if I’m going through with more comprehensive pieces, it might be good to incorporate audio and visual elements so different types of learners have opportunities to get more out of it.

As for content:

I’m close to finishing an essay on creativity (expanding on Saturday’s talk).
I have a substantial portion of an essay on education (expanding on Monday’s EduPunk panel).
Following some discussion on Twitter about the local transit strike, I have some fresh insights into the question of unions — something that I’ve struggled to get a rational handle on for years.

As for reading:

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett – I’ve anticipated this for a long time. Finished it the other day and it didn’t disappoint — both for quality and appropriateness to what I’m working on:

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world. [Yale Press | interview]

Say Everything: How Blogging Began, Where It’s Going, and Why It Matters, Scott Rosenberg – I grabbed this for the sake of “covering the literature” — thinking I’d just peruse it — and I got sucked into the personality-driven stories of how blogging evolved.

Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World, Warren Berger – I mentioned this on Saturday. It’s about design thinking, specifically through the lens of Bruce Mau Design [interview], a studio I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from and was grateful to have visited last week.

What I’m really excited about is getting back into philosophy. The recent talks have drawn me back to José Ortega y Gasset, John Dewey, William James, and especially A.N. Whitehead. I also found a giant volume of Charles Sanders Peirce’s most important work, which I’m picking apart for the essay on creativity.

Ultimately, by revisiting those influences (and relearning how to read that stuff!) my feeling is that I’m moving another step closer to capping off (and capitalizing on) all the work I’ve done in the past 5 – 7 years… as I’ve said before.

Background: A Bunch of Stuff I’ve Read.

The ÜberCreative Web

Brian — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:05:25 +0000

Now that the talk on digital democracy is done I can focus on the one I’m preparing for the SMarts Conference at Museum London this Saturday.

I’ve started working on it here (but it may not look much like that when it’s done — specifically I’ve left out the most relevant bits).

It’s about how the web introduces another dimension to our creative endeavours, and in doing so, isn’t merely a supplement to whatever you’re already doing, nor is it separate from the real world; it changes the whole nature of what we’re doing.

It isn’t about offering alternative ways for people to buy (or otherwise obtain) your music or your books or whatever; the web creates new spaces through which to approach the whole notion of being a musician or a writer.

Why do you have to write books at all? Why not focus on the blog as the work itself… or tweets. Are tweets a genre? Could they become one? Why not?

Once upon a time it was radical for musicians like Glenn Gould and The Beatles to quit the road and focus on recording and experimenting in the studio. What will today’s and tomorrow’s performers figure out for streaming video or whatever that would not have been imaginable 5 or 10 years ago?

Should digital interactive games be classified among “the arts”?

I think so… Where might that lead?

It took decades for filmmakers to really learn what could be done with film (as I heard Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights point out at DIG London last week), and now gaming is still growing into new spaces in ways we can’t predict.

And as more and more of the old distinctions between atomic works of art and installations and performances become blurred (not to mention the distinction between subject-creator and object-created — if there ever was one) then does creating new forms, modes, genres and disciplines become a kind of art form in itself?

I think so… That’s what the meta factors concept is all about.

I want to take a megaphone and yell, GET CREATIVE WITH THESE NEW TOOLS — which means not just looking at what has already worked for other people, but experiment and play with stuff, really push boundaries, imagine new possibilities, stomp on old assumptions.

If not the arts community, who else is going to?

At the very least I’m hoping it opens people up a little more to the notion of using the web to cultivate communities that enrich the artistic enterprise (rather than just sell extra tickets).

This talk will be sort of a straight test-run. I’m trying not to let my love of recursion and autopoiesis run away with it.

I’m saving the full über for later.

Dress Rehearsal for Emerging Media at The Grand Theatre’s Annual Meeting

Brian — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:13:22 +0000

When Larry Cornies tweeted, “Attention, citizen journalists: Grand Theatre (London, Ont.) annual meeting,” for a moment I thought he was talking about an annual meeting of citizen journalists…

“Oh?” I thought to myself, “I wonder who put that together?”

No… Once I regained my literacy I realized the annual meeting was in fact for The Grand Theatre. It seemed like an appropriate time to step a little further out of my comfort zone. So nine months after Dan Brown issued his challenge to London bloggers to do our own reporting, I took him up (albeit shyly, and silently).

Cornies already mentioned some of the key facts in Saturday’s Free Press. What I’ve added is more along the lines of “citizen PR” than journalism.

But that’s ok, because this deserves the good PR.

(And as always, commentary will follow below.)

With lower revenues (attributed to wider economic downturn) The Grand Theatre also reduced costs to finish the past fiscal year with their 10th consecutive surplus: $9,047 — more than last year’s.

They also pulled off their most effective drive for new subscriptions in two decades, netting about 1600 new subscribers (minus a roughly normal amount of churn) — far surpassing the expectations of Board President Franco Paron — and bringing the total to around 6000.

That achievement is largely due to an initiative aimed at, “building relationships, getting people engaged again,” as Executive Director Deb Harvey put it. The business strategy nicely complemented Susan Ferley’s creative direction, which “focused on the humanity” and “tried to find ways to personalize [their] communication.”

Each existing subscriber was called and invited to the theatre to discuss the plan. They were encouraged to participate, get the word out, and sell subscriptions to friends.

Consistent with that, the students who performed in Grease [see behind-the-scenes part 1 and part 2] went out and staged short performances at places like London Life and car shows (fittingly). It became the most successful high school production at The Grand in recent years.

Everybody wins with things like that (unless you don’t like Grease… but let’s not go there).

While writing this I was reminded of the United Way’s recent GenNext launch at Museum London — another initiative to reach out and connect with people directly, on a more human level.

These social, personal, open and engaged approaches are becoming not just a strategy (and certainly not merely a short-term technique) but something that should be infused deeply into the institutional DNA.

To be honest, last night was the first time I had ever been in The Grand Theatre — never been in the building.

The vibe in the meeting was more convivial than I expected. I was impressed. Everyone there was very pleasant and upbeat (perhaps easy, when the news is mostly good).

The experience reminded me that an institution is not about the building it’s in — nor even dollars and cents. It’s about people.

Get the people-part right and the rest follows.

(Which isn’t to say it’s easy. The people-part is something I’m still working on in my own endeavours. We all need to keep nudging each other along…)

Btw if anyone locally is interested in social media for the arts, don’t forget to attend the SMarts Conference at Museum London on November 14!

[Note: I changed the term in the title from "citizen journalism" to "emerging media," it's more inclusive and I've never liked "citizen journalism."]

Brian Frank » art

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Related Posts:

See Who’s Using the Internet to Make Life Less Meaningful

Related Posts:

The Social Network Movie as a Social Application

Related Posts:

What’s the Future of Reading & Writing?

Related Posts:

Cee-Lo Green: Quality vs. Hype

Related Posts:

“Discovering Narrative and the Value of Beginner’s Mind”

Related Posts:

My New Favourite Phrase

Related Posts:

The Indispensable Amateur

Related Posts:

What I’m Reading

Related Posts:

Notes on Satire

Related Posts:

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

Related Posts:

What happens after you read a book?

Related Posts:

Favourite Rainy-Day Albums of the 00′s

Related Posts:

Object Bias

Related Posts:

Essays That Help Write Themselves

Related Posts:

Creative Relationships

Related Posts:

Social Media, Structure, and the Creative Cycle

Ultimately we need a balance

The value of constraints & discipline

Structures are human

Revolutionary structures

Social media’s unsocial paradigm

A new lightning rod

Related Posts:

What I’m Reading and Writing Lately

Related Posts:

The ÜberCreative Web

Related Posts:

Dress Rehearsal for Emerging Media at The Grand Theatre’s Annual Meeting

Related Posts: