“Thou takest the pen – and the lines dance. Thou takest the flute – and the notes shimmer.
Thou takest the brush – and the colors sing. So all things have meaning and beauty in that space beyond where Thou art.
How, then, can I hold anything back from Thee.”
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
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The University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum re-opened earlier this month after being closed for a year due to an expansion project. My husband and I went to the public reopening event to check out the new galleries.
I saw a mother holding hands with her young son (maybe 7 years old?) and overheard her say to him: "That's what art does. It makes you go 'huh?' And then you stop and think."
Michael Paulus has a good piece today over at Curator magazine on the defense of a personal library and physical books:
I recently moved and repeated a routine that has accompanied every move I have made since I got married defending my personal library. Every time we move, and are confronted with the effort and expense of moving so much paper, my wife asks the quite fair question, Do you really want to keep all these books? Since I am a keeper of books both professionally as well as personally, I consider this to be a serious and profound question. It goes beyond my personal preferences and peculiarities and gets to a fundamental question being asked of libraries in the digital age: Do we need to keep all these physical books?
Keep reading "Defending My Library."
A couple weeks ago I took a writing class and the instructor pulled from her bag an armful of postcards.
"Pass these around and use something on the front or back for inspiration," she said.
Postcards of all kinds came our way–touristy, artistic, promotional, thematic–all bright and colorful with writing on the back (hellos, musings, quotes) from her correspondents near and far. Short snapshots of writing and contact is made. That plus the picture to hold in your hand, a gift!
It reminded me that in high school and college, a good friend whom I had left behind in a cross-country move would send me frequent postcards, a sentence or two or three. They were like the notes we had passed in class or the 5-second conversations at our lockers. They were a joy.
I watched the instructor with her postcards and wanted to pull a similar pile from my bag. A year ago–one full year ago–I bought a couple postcards to send friends and they finally now got in the mail.
This summer, my husband and I made a day trip to Stockholm, Wisconsin, a tiny town on the Mississippi with a population of about only 100, but many art galleries and shops. I found this mug at one of the shops.
In the current issue of First Things, editor R. R. Reno writes about the danger that arises when critical thinking operates more in fear of error than desire for truth.
Some excerpts:
Clear-minded and scrupulous analysis clears the underbrush of error—a very good thing to do—but it cannot plant the seeds of truth; it burns away the weeds but won’t fertilize the fields. To do so we must be receptive rather than cautious. We need to develop the habit of credulity, which literally means the capacity and willingness to accept or believe, for that is the only way truth can enter into our minds.
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A mentality too quick to find reasons not to nurture convictions runs the risk of ending up more empty than accurate.
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If we see this danger—the danger of truths lost, insights missed, convictions never formed—then our approach to reasoning changes, and the burdens of proof shift. We begin to cherish books and teachers and friends who push us, as it were, onto certain trains of thought, romancing us with the possibilities of truth rather than always cautioning and checking our tendency to believe. Errors risked now seem worth the rich reward of engrossing, life-commanding truths—the truths that are accessible only to a mind passionate with the intimacy of conviction rather than coldly and critically distant.
Read the entire piece here: "Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking." Scroll down; it starts in the middle of the page.
For my last birthday my son gave me a copy of Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. He knows that I have long daydreamed about squeezing a little writing studio into the backyard of our city lot. A Place of My Own is about Pollan's building of a one-room writing house on his wooded Connecticut property. Into the narrative of his personal project, Pollan weaves the story of architecture and construction to explore why our houses are the way they are. The book has certainly fueled my daydreams, but it's also given me other things to think about as well. I'm looking at my own humble house differently, finding in the window design, the roofline, the front entrance, some rationale that links to an architectural and philosophical chronology and not just to a decade. It helps answer the question, Why is it the way it is?, when I hadn't even really thought to ask the question before. I love when a book does that, posits a new question in my brain and thinking about the answer opens up new ways of seeing and understanding. I'm looking at other buildings with that question now. Plus I'm thinking about the people doing the building. Strangers once worked where I now eat and sleep and type this post. I know nothing about them, yet everyday I benefit from their careful measuring, sawing, pounding, leveling, and sanding.
Discipline is not a mystery.
Its elements are so simple they can seem mocking. Put down the extra slice of bread. Run one more mile. Pick up the pen, or brush, or violin.
It's no more complicated in the creative spheres. But it's every bit as elusive there as it is in the world at large. "I want to make work," people often confess to me when they discover I'm a working writer. "I just never seem to get to it."
The practical solution to their problem barely amounts to a paragraph. Choose a time to make work and hold that time inviolate, I tell them. If you lack inspiration, wait. Don't do anything else. The work will come.
via www.cardus.ca