My world on the web
With all the talk of educational technology in the era of social distancing floating around these days, I am reminded of Neil Postman, who said, “The act of reading a book is the best example of ‘distance learning’ ever invented.”
I know lots of parents are stuck at home with kiddos right now, so I thought I’d put together a big list of my favorite resources for drawing with kids.
Along with Mo Willems’ videos, he provides a number of resources and recommendations. It is a reminder that technology is more than just a computer.
Thread by @austinkleon: Suddenly faced with not sending your kids to school? Consider NOT trying to replicate school at home right now. One ogs that good homeschooling books talk about is how there’s a “detox” period in which kids & parents re-adjust…
I’d been so focus-driven for the last few years that I hadn’t bothered to plot a point beyond the one I was focused on, and for a person with my particular brain, that is a very dangerous place to be. My brain has two drivers. And when I’m not at the wheel, depression decides to do a little driving.
It’s time to plot a new destination. And, and, and… here’s the good news: I think I’ve got one. So stay tuned because we’re going to drive there together.
If the state of politics is wearing you out as much as it is wearing me out, here are some books that have helped me keep my head in the past few years (many of them come straight from the reading list in the back of Keep Going): Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death (written 35 years ago, this seems to me to be an absolutely essential text for understanding how we got to this moment in our culture); Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing; Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching; Alan Jacobs, How To Think; Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology and Pacifism as a Map; Stefan Zweig, Montaigne; E.H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World; and Henry David Thoreau’s journals.
Sticking clippings in your books turns them into little surprises for whoever opens them next.
Shared with Dropbox
How many things that blossom and bear fruit in one year were planted as seeds years before…
That’s really what we hope for … plant a few seeds and then we go. We are all just drawing in the dirt with a stick.
No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.
Liberty Hyde Bailey’s thoughts on gardening and how they relate to creative work.
I know poets who do not write poetry, artists who do not paint, architects who do not build. I know gardeners who do not garden.
It makes me wonder about teachers who do not teach and the importance of first and foremost caring.
Shall I repeat myself? Yes:
Problems of output are problems of input.
No input, no output.
If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.
Becoming a parent is an opportunity to think about who you’ve become, who you wanted to be, and, if you need to, course-correct. This is what’s so fucking hard about it: You not only have to take a cold look at yourself in the mirror and become the kind of person you want your kids to be, if you have biological children, you spend all day around little people who are living mirrors. And they don’t necessarily reflect back at you the parts of you want to see! (There have been several nights where I’ve turned to my wife and said, “Do you ever feel like they got our worst parts?”) Lou Reed’s song could be about a child instead of a lover: “I’ll be your mirror / reflect what you / in case you don’t know.”
In this week’s newsletter: art, secrets, uncertainty, neurodiversity, and more…
You don’t defeat your enemies, you just wait until they die.
Your son certainly has impeccable taste for someone so young. Aphex Twin. Kraftwerk. Carly Rae Jepsen.
Ear candy: I’ve mainly just been listening to New Order’s “Your Silent Face” and my New Division Joy Order playlist on repeat. Very autumnal.
Misheard lyrics, by the way, have a name: Mondegreens. Here’s Maria Konnikova on the science behind them in The New Yorker:
“Mondegreen” means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect… Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That’s a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn’t interpret it the same way.
With the publication of Yeats (1970), Bloom began to extend his critical theory, and in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), he systematized one of his most original theories: that poetry results from poets deliberately misreading the works that influence them. Figures of Capable Imagination (1976) and several other works of the next decade develop and illustrate this theme.(source)
What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
We however forget about stealing from our past selves.
This is what I like about Song Exploder, where artists break down the birth of an idea.
To be honest, I had a pre-canned newsletter of book recommendations ready for y’all because I’m in the middle of moving studios again, but in this death-filled week, I felt like I wanted to sit down, check in with death, and check in with you
What if you stopped thinking about your ideas as things you need to let out of you, but things you need to let in to you? Things you need to be ready to receive?
The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand.
“You can’t direct a 4-year-old…” Truer words never spoken! All you can do is set them up and hit record. And hang on for the ride…
