Creativity depends on community and solitude

Janna Malamud Smith:

We look with awe upon groups of great thinkers or artists who came together in the past — the transcendentalists in mid-nineteenth-century Concord, the cubist painters in early twentieth-century Paris, the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, to name only a few of these many pairings and groups. We realize that people seek out each other to find sympathetic spirits. But that’s only half the story. The other half is that even when we are not geniuses, our own thinking and creativity are often better catalyzed and stimulated in discourse, not in isolation. We need to work alone; we need to have privacy — sometimes a lot of it — and closing the door and returning to our pens and paper or keyboards or brushes and easels can be bliss; but we also need to be stirred up, stimulated and challenged by others, especially others who share our interests and with whom we feel some modicum of mental respect.

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Discoveries of the day

Perhaps I shouldn’t put these two items together in one blog post. It’s possible (if not probable) that the Venn diagram showing the overlap between the parties interested in one and those interested in the other is rather small. But they come together in one day for me, and I’m both excited and inspired by both of them. Who knows? Perhaps someday someone will find themselves landing on this page after searching for emacs and United States Senate.

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Living with instead of living from

I listened yesterday to Nate Hagens’s conversation with Xiye Bastida. Bastida is a climate activist who, though only in her early 20s, has already spent years seeking to motivate others to do what we can to avert a climate disaster. She organized an environmental group at her NYC high school and later worked with others to organize a NYC climate protest involving 300,000 people. She also wrote “Calling In,” the introductory essay in the book All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. One of the points from that essay that I find particularly compelling is that, while young people see climate change differently simply because they will be living in a decaying world longer than we older people will, the response to the challenge must be intergenerational:

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Emacs Carnival: This year, I'll …

The theme for this month’s emacs carnival, hosted by Christian Tietze, is this year, I’ll…. I’ve not written for any of the indieweb carnivals. But since I’m all in on developing elaborate plans for what I’m going to do, this seems like a good time to jump in. This year, I’m thinking, I’m going to move beyond making plans to doing more with those plans. Moreover, I think that emacs will be central to my doing that. So, here’s what I’m going to do:

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Celebrating imperfection

The water cup sitting on the desk before me is now one of a set of four such cups. At one time it was one of a set of six. The cups were made for me over 30 years ago — a birthday gift that my wife commissioned to be made by a dear friend of ours. I love the way it looks and the way it feels. I love the thought that it was thrown and glazed by a woman who is still a dear friend, even though we’ve lived in different cities for almost all of those 30 years.

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Toward utopia: the moral and psychological prerequisites

George Scialabba:

Utopia is impossible unless, among an overwhelming majority, solidarity and trust are nearly instinctive; responsibility, self-reliance, initiative, honesty, and other civic virtues are practiced much more widely than now; and democratic habits of self-confidence, candor, and tact are far better developed. Channels of communication and public information are as yet rudimentary. And let’s not forget rhetorical skills like wit, fluency, and concision: without a vast improvement in the general level of these, attendance at all the necessary meetings on the way to utopia will result in an epidemic of premature brain death. With all these moral and psychological changes in place, we can make a start on the technical problem — no less complex, probably — of reconciling equity and efficiency in production and distribution.

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A tiny experiment: daily blogging

Anyone who has been reading my meanderings for any length of time might have noticed that I’ve been rather active here over the last two weeks. Surely today marks the first time that I’ve posted my writing on this blog 14 days in a row, and it happened because I made a pact with myself. My inspiration for this pact came from a book by Anne-Laure Le Cunff called Tiny Experiments and a blog post by Joan Westenberg called Failure vs. Success is the Wrong Frame. The book’s title characterizes my project over the last two weeks: instead of setting lofty and linear goals (first I’ll do this, and then I’ll do that, etc), one should take on a tiny experiment. Set a goal to do something — make it a small something — but think of the process of doing it as an experiment. The central point of Westenberg’s blog post, as captured in its title, helped me to see how my default approach to trying new things gets in the way of my doing them. The book and blog together pushed me to take this step.

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Commodified Community vs RSS

A sports writer for the Boston Globe has an occasional column with the introduction “turning the bag upside down to see what falls out” or something like that. He then presents a potpourri of brief observations and sports reports. This post is something like that, a collection of quotations from books I’ve read over the past year or so. I suppose I could have posted each of them separately with the commonplace tag, but they grew together in my mind as I thought about the sense of community I have each morning while reading the day’s RSS feed.

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Old things, and the people behind them

Yesterday, David’s post detailing the oldest items he owns came through the RSS doorway. David was inspired to do this by a similar post from Thomas. The thought crossed my mind that I might do the same. But that thought was followed rather quickly by the thought that I’m more than a little uncomfortable by how much I own and my how much my sense of myself is informed by the items that I own. And that thought was followed just as quickly by the thought about a certain president’s ruminations about how it’s important to his psychological well-being that my country gain ownership of Greenland. (I know that said president has since apparently moved on from this position, at least for the moment. Stay tuned.)

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Creativity: Where it comes from and where it leads

In a recent post I admitted the challenge I face coming up with things to write about here in the blog. I don’t see myself as being particularly creative. That’s why this passage in Karl Ove Knaussgaard caught my attention:

What does it mean to create? What does it take? How does an artist open up a creative field for a work, how do they keep it open, and how do they enlarge it? What do they consider, what do they look for? How do they ground their work in their own lives and at the same time make it relevant to others too (In the Land of the Cyclops, p. 194)?

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