Who We Write For

I have a very simple post for you today. It’s a scan of a letter written by my grandson to his mother, my daughter. All I want to say about it is that my grandson is like so many kids we write for – whole-hearted, loving, passionate, living in the moment, a little tremulous. Kids throw themselves at their wishes  -large and small – with terrifying force. They’re vulnerable. They’re courageous. They’re scared. They’re willing to work hard for what they want. They dream big, they beg big, and they imagine big. We can’t give a cute black Dutch bunny to everyone who wants one.  After all, some families (like my daughter’s) already have one bird, one dog, and several fish, not to mention wild deer and wild turkeys wandering through their gardens. So no, the bunny might not be ours to give.  But as writers, we can give kids stories. And stories, too, change lives.

Could Boredom Become a Guilty Pleasure?

We once went to a Guilty Pleasures holiday party. My husband wrapped up a pack of Q-Tips for the gift exchange. Another guy brought one of those Safeway roasted chickens in the tinfoil pack. My favorite was a pair of giant underpants that had four leg openings. The guy who unwrapped it said, “Guess I’ll be carpooling home tonight.”

My guilty pleasures are simple: relaxing in a hot bath while watching an episode of Friday Night Lights on my iPad, or listening to an audio book on my iPhone while gardening away a Saturday, or even just playing WordsWithFriends and checking email on my phone while waiting at a traffic signal.

I know it’s wasting time, but I didn’t realize there was a bigger cost to my technology-filled approach to downtime. That’s because I didn’t know about the correlation between boredom and creativity.

I learned about it Monday on NPR. In a segment called Bored and Brilliant – the Lost Art of Spacing Out, New Tech City’s Manoush Zomorodi reported on “studies that suggest we get our most original ideas when we stop the constant stimulation and let ourselves get bored.” In fact, one study showed that subjects who were assigned the most boring task – reading the phone book – came up with the most novel ideas.

Manoush spoke with cognitive neuro-scientist Dr. Jonathan Smallwood who studies the relationship between mind wandering and creativity. “There is a close link between originality, creativity and novelty on the one hand and the spontaneous thoughts we generate when our minds are resting,” he said. In short, he said creativity is dependent on daydreams which are dependent on boredom, the default resting state of the brain.

When you turn to your phone to avoid boredom, you also miss out on the creativity that bubbles up from your resting brain. Further, Smallwood said, when we use cell phones to fill every moment of spare time, we don’t have a chance to “see and learn where we are in terms of our goals,” what scientists term “autobigraphical planning,” a form of positive, constructive daydreaming. Without sufficient autobiographical planning, people get stuck in a rut.

The New Tech City podcast is aimed at cell phones, perhaps the most harmful interrupter of boredom. Who is not familiar with what Smallwood calls the “easy, lazy junk food diet of the phone?” I’d include its hussy big sister, the iPad, so seductive with NetFlix and audio books and games. I realize I often scroll and swipe to fill the silence in the nooks and crannies of time that used to be prime for daydreaming. There was a time when it was pleasure enough to take a hot bath, or weed and spread compost, or drive along the coast without connecting to the internet. Was I more creative then?

Luckily, the folks at New Tech City are leading a program to help people decrease cellphone use and thus rediscover the art of spacing out. I am curious to see how it might impact my creative life, so I signed up.

And I made a resolution for 2015: Get bored more. I think I’ll start with a hot bath…

• • • • •

You might like to listen yourself: Bored and Brilliant – the Lost Art of Spacing Out. http://www.wnyc.org/story/bored-brilliant-project-part-1/

E-Z does it

Happy New Year!
I am ! and ? about the upcoming year.
As we leap into 2015 here are some thoughts about punctuation, communication, letters, typoglycemia, texting and disemvoweling. K?

Texting is convenient when you are on the go, and emoticons are convenient when texting. But I don’t particularly like them.
I do like emoticons that are made with punctuation, such as this double-chinned wink from Laura Kvasnosky,this mouse from Margaret Chodos-Irvine, or a shruggie from the internet.

I just love punctuation. Period.

Ampersands can be especially lovely.

Marc Johns wants them to be portable-

If you have created something interesting with punctuation please put it in the comment section! Thanks.

But why stop at punctuation? Much can be said with just letters. These are from the book C D C? by Wm. Steig.

Letter play is often seen on vanity plates.

Vanity plates (and businesses, musicians and content managers) sometimes disemvowel words, but you still knw wht they are saying. It is amazing how much you can understand even when letters are scrambled. Gary Sweeney illustrated this idea, called typoglycemia (which is the opposite of C-D-C.)

There is something delightful about reading letters, words or punctuation and only being able to understand them with a little mental leap. That leap is XLR8N.

Here is a poem for today which lives in those leaps:

 

And to close here is another image by Gary Sweeney. In this piece he doesn’t scramble the letters, but he deep pens the meaning through typography.

May you have a wndrfl & xi-10 year to come.
;^)

 

Library Love Revisited

Two years ago I wrote about my deep appreciation for my local library in Seattle. Now I live in London, where public libraries as we now know them got started.

Founded in 1753 as part of the British Museum, The British Library is the grandmother of them all. It was originally intended as a kind of national museum created to build on its initial collection of books, manuscripts and prints. Over time, as it’s collections increased to include drawings, scientific materials, maps, music, stamps, coins, periodicals – anything printed with historic significance – it became clear that it needed its own facility to house and exhibit its treasures. The current British Library was formally opened in 1998 near St. Pancras station.

In planning my first visit to the British Library, I scheduled myself a (free) tour of the Conservation Center. There, I saw the staff working on a number of current projects: preparing 19th century maps for an exhibition in India; repairing the disintegrating bindings of letters of state from Oliver Cromwell’s era; building boxes for a Franz Kafka award for magic realism and a torch from the 2012 London Olympics; mounting original, handwritten lyrics by John Lennon. Sorry, no photos allowed, but I did take pictures of some of the Royal binding stamps in the hallway.

I also visited the library’s permanent exhibit on the first floor. There it displays some of its most impressive treasures. These include a Gutenberg Bible, pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks, and Shakespeare’s first folio. The Magna Carta is usually there, but it is off display for a future exhibit. Some of my favorite items there are: Jane Austen’s writing desk; a page from the 11th century Beowulf poem; a letter from Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII to Cardinal Wolsey, dated 1528; a Kufic Qur’an from AD 850;

The Guthlac Roll, a 12th – 13th century scroll showing events in the Life of saint Guthlac of Crowland;

The various scripts and handwriting were fascinating to see all in one room. From Florence Nightingale’s wispy report on her nursing staff in the Crimea (1854-56), to John Lennon’s lyrics for “A Hard Day’s Night” scrawled on the back of a birthday card for his son, Julian. Sorry, no photos here either.

In the center of the building is the King’s Library, a towering glass-encased structure that houses the foundation of the library – King George III ‘s book collection. It consists of 65,000 printed books and 19,000 pamphlets from Britain, Europe and North America from the mid 15th to the early 19th centuries. I guess he was a bookish sort of king.

Then there was the “Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination” exhibit which ends later this month. The history of British Gothic literature from its beginnings  in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, to present day Whitby Goth culture. It appears to be true that Goth with never die.

The items chosen for this exhibit included some I expected, and others I didn’t. I took a few photos of pieces that intrigued me. If there was a no-camera sign posted, I failed to see it…

“The Nightmare,” by Henry Fuseli (1782). It combines “the supernatural, the macabre and the erotic to brilliant effect” and “highlights the importance of the unconscious,” all classic Goth elements.

William Blake’s Time “in his character of destroyer, mowing down indiscriminately the frail inhabitants of this world.”

The Wicker Colossus of the Druids from a 1771 travel guide to England and Wales, illustrating the legend that the Druids made human sacrifices by burning people inside giant wicker effigies. Is this where the idea for Burning Man came from?

Caricaturist James Gillray’s “Tales of Wonder!,” (1802) is a satirical look at the excesses of Gothic novels and the “excitable imaginations of those who read them. “

The original manuscript of Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, with comments in the margins by Percy Shelley.

Arthur Rackham contributed to Gothic literature, as in this illustration for Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Oval Portrait,” (1842).

“The Man of the Crowd,” another short story by Edgar Allen Poe, here illustrated by John Buckland Wright (1932).

Oh abhorred Monster! Frankenstein, illustrated by Lynd Ward (1934)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in lurid technicolor!

No Terror and Wonder show would be complete without zombies.

Even Gothic drama has its humorous side. “The Curse of The Were-Rabbit” (2005), is described by co-creator Nick Park as “the world’s first vegetarian horror film.”

I finished my full, bookish day with a round through the British Library Bookstore. I bought a dozen or so postcards to send to my American friends (and some to keep for myself). The world of books is a place in which I am quite happy to linger. If you are a library lover, you will enjoy it too.