Trying to find myself back to literature

So, almost five years on, I´m back. The blog that was supposed to be (One Sketch A Day on Wordpress) is totally gone from the internet, and I have been completely buried in studies, going for a degree in nursing, which I accomplished. I am now a certified nurse working at an old folk´s home.  During this period of going back to school I also had to go through treatment for breast cancer, which went well, considering. On top of that, my mum-in-law and my best friend Marie passed away, from old age and cancer, respectively. Oh, and two summers ago I broke both my arms. And the husband broke his leg, and had some trouble with high blood pressure. In the end, I had to take 4 months off (doctor´s orders) to just process all my stress before I could finish my final practice round. But, I reached my goal in the end.

They say that you can completely change your life in five years, and that is certainly true. Five years ago I wouldn´t even have been able to imagine the life I´m having today. The work is endlessly satisfying, but also endlessly demanding. One could easily be present and useful 24/7.

My problem right now is to find a healthy work-life balance. For so long I poured all my energy into studies and surviving, that now I find my spare time empty of meaning and connection. This leads to me thinking too much about work when I´m supposed to be resting from it. What to do?

I do miss writing. I let go of my ambition to write a novel when I decided to go into nursing, but I now find that the novel is still calling me. However, I can´t seem to even be able to read any more. Studying so hard and all the stress has somehow damaged my ability to read for pleasure, and I feel frustrated about that, since literature has always been my deepest love.

So, bottom line: I´m back blogging about reading because I need to find my way back to my love of literature. I need to get reading again.

The Creative Licence

Ever since 1992 I have been in the habit of keeping a diary. For the first ten years, it was mainly a therapeutic tool, helping me to unveil some not so healthy structures and behaviours in myself and people around me. After that, however, I felt that the habit was restraining me rather than helping me forward but I didn´t know how to break out of the mould I had created. I tried to quit, I tried other ways, but always came back to the same thing I had been doing; it was kin to an addiction.

I wish I had stumbled upon Danny Gregory´s book "The Creative Licence" a few years ago. (Actually, I would have needed it before it was written, probably!) The subtitle is "Giving yourself permission to be the artist you truly are", and it is an enthusiastic class in how to do an illustrated journal, whether you think you can draw or not. It is about seeing your world differently, challenging your perceptions and bringing impressions to the page, mixing it around and creating ideas for whatever you are into, not just the visual arts.

Drawing is seeing [...] looking is a language [..] In Genesis, God has Adam name the animals. Labels make abstract thinking possible. But because we overdo it, looking replaces seeing, and we soon stop seeing things for what they truly are. We say "tree" and stop saying "elm" [...]. This is where drawing comes from. You can look at something slowly and carefully [...] you stop thinking about bills and aches and grievances and chores. You, your pen, your paper, your subject, you just are.

This is drawing as mindfulness practice. And being mindful is the door into the state of creativity. It´s like that old cliché: the nutty professor/inventor who gets lost in his own thoughts and work, forgetting all about sleeping, eating and the world around him.

Gregory has a story of his own, of course, about the creative person who got lost in advertising and found his way back and now wants to share and encourage others. Personal experience is always a good place to start. He also has several suggestions on how to start a journal, how to re-start, challenge yourself to "draw ugly", "be specific", "draw negative space", and such things. Lots of illustrations, naturally, not just from his own journals but from other people´s journals as well. He also encourages the reader to experiment with writing, arguing that writing is drawing too. My only objection to this book is, actually, that at times, it is very hard to read, because the writing is so awkward and wonky. A challenge, perhaps, but also a source of irritation. But it´s a minor objection.

I´d like to finish with a quote that made me think, not because of what is said, but because of who says it:

"I cannot tell you how happy I am to have taken up drawing again. I´ve been thinking of it, but I always considered the thing impossible and beyond my reach." - Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother.

If you are bored and don´t know what to do, or you know what you want to do but don´t know how to do it, this can be the book for you. You don´t have to be wanting to learn how to do art, just wanting the courage to put your impressions and ideas on anything down on paper. That´s what Gregory is teaching: courage to create.

Creative Procrastination

I am struggling with Proust - it is going a little bit faster now, since I have switched to Swedish. I usually imagine myself a pretty fluent reader of English, but some authors, like Proust and A S Byatt, humbles me. As we, my friend and I, started this read, the local library had removed Proust from the e-book collection, but we found a free English version online and started that. Since, however, the Swedish version has been reinstated at the e-book library. Good for me; I am now half-way through the first volume.  And no, we are not reading all of them - not now, at least.

The most inspiring read during my hiatus was probably Austin Kleon´s two books on creativity, art, and publishing: "Steal Like An Artist" and "Show Your Work". Kleon works as he teaches, and books like these are all about the personality of the author, the right place, and the right time, I think. It´s not like they tell you anything new - but it´s the way they tell it. They were perfect for me a couple of months ago and really got me out of my slump.

I love the way Kleon works visually, and he reminded me that I was an enthusiastic mind-mapper from my early teens until I started History A at the university in 1994. That course was so packed with chronologically presented information that I just had to write as fast as the teacher talked; we had to learn the entire history of the world (more or less) in six months (priming for further history studies). For some reason, that threw me off mind-mapping, until now. I have now started to draw again, and play, which is good for me, I think. I certainly sleep better, and that must be a good sign.

Kleon has also published a book of Newspaper Blackout poems, and includes a few in his other books. Inspired, I made some based on Proust (ok, I was procrastinating reading him).

Amazing Notebook Pages

Just came across this at Pinterest. Such amazing pages! I have been wanting to rejuvenate my diary for a long time, almost giving it up; this is really inspirational. I feel the urge to explore new expressions!

Applying Science to Music

I have to start this post with a spoiler: you can´t buy this book. It´s listed at amazon, but unavailable for purchase.

Update, June 24:

I just heard that the book is now available on amazon for Swedish readers - and I understand it has been for American readers (and others, perhaps) all along. (Those who don´t have the Kindle reader can download a free app from amazon for their computer or smartphone or read it in their browser. All is explained on the amazon website.)

The author, Nyssim Lefford, is a collegue of my husband, and he happened to mention one day over fika that she had written a novel. I googled it immediately, and the name, "The Music Box", and the description made me curious. I asked him to pass along an inquiry about where to get it. Next thing, it was in my mailbox. It´s a great book, by far the most interesting thing I have read in years. I don´t think I have underlined a novel this much since I read my first Kundera in the 80´s.

First of all, it has a forked plot. At some twenty places in the book, you have a choice of two to four versions of a chapter. The choice isn´t context related, you just get to choose a, b, c, or d. Hyperlinks are the doors you go through to get to the right place in the story. It is a kindle e-book, and you have to have a kindle reader or kindle software on your computer to read it. This is what the author says in the introduction:

"At every juncture, decide. Reading all the options at each fork leads to outcomes that are not as interesting, not as musical, as they might be. Our agency comes from choosing. To avoid choosing is to abdicate the part of us that is most worth recording."

And I haven´t. I made my choices and read my story. I imagine that someone else´s choices would give a slightly different story, although I suppose the foundations are the same. Exactly what levers the readers are allowed to (blindly) push, only the author knows. The whole structure is just like the mixing console that this story takes place at, for this is a story about music production, and a discussion about the creative process and what art really is, and is for.

The story revolvs around four people. First, Leo Nolden, star music producer. 

"Cass sighed. "Something will have to happen soon." "It will," said Leo, "and when it does you´ll realize that the distance between here and there was not as great as you had imagined.""

Second, Cass, his trusted and brilliant engineer, who has producer dreams of her own (and a severe shortage of confidence). 

""Beauty isn´t a one-sided thing," said Cass. "A painting isn´t beautiful unless we take part in viewing it. It just is without us. We choose to see it a certain way, the eye of the beholder thing. It´s a relationship... and we each have different ways of participating..." She drew a breath. "...which is terrifying." "Why terrifying?" asked Leo. "When no one else gets it. Sometimes, Leo, the sound is so clear in my head and no one else hears it.""

Then, Liam, Leo´s best friend and agent, a clever and smartly dressed lawyer, who is also a devoted art lover.

"I don´t shop for relationships. It´s like music. Music, art, they take you. Relationships, at the end of the day, it´s not about the size or color or the name romantic on the label. Like art, it´s the quality of the experience. I don´t care how that experience comes packaged. It can be pop music or a painting. Does the experience deliver, that´s all that matters."

And, Gabe, owner of the studio where much of the action takes place, super-kind, quietly writing his own music by his desk when he has a minute to spare.

"Great players, in Gabe´s humble opinion, players like Thurston Moore or Jonny Greenwood, their music reflected most clearly when it was at its dirtiest. Players like that zeroed in on a specific emotion, like a parametric equalizer. They boosted or cut emotion until hearing it and feeling it was the same thing."

Cass and Leo gets involved with AI software developer and scientist Andrew Singh, in a project where Leo´s musical preferences are recorded and programmed into what they call The Music Box, an expert system that mixes music, and learns (or programs itself) at the same time. 

"Andrew loved this problem. He was smitten with the notion that some goals could not be sufficiently described, and that humans faced those sorts of problems a lot. Humans produced things without having a specific goal in mind all the time, and they did it extremely well. They produced great things. Andrew wanted to find out about that process, how did humans make decisions when they did not know where they wanted it to lead."

This is a novel of ideas. The character´s lives are fairly simple, they don´t have relationships that complicate the story, no spouses (except Leo´s wife who is a very minor character), no children. There is Gabe´s mom, but she is there to make a point, I think. Often, these kinds of novels can feel a bit fakey. I felt this very much with "Sofie´s World" by Jostein Gaardner, a novel I couldn´t even finish because I found the dialog so awkward. But Lefford really is a good writer of dialogue. People who concern themselves with ideas really do talk like this (I know a few), and I found myself very much drawn into the discussion.

"Leo observed the rhythmic structure of Andrew´s intellectual arguments. Andrew paused for preplanned moments of reflection. Key points, whether made by him or others, were given a moment to establish themselves in the mind. Threads closed. There were dominant chords, dissonances and resolutions. Leo wondered how Andrew worked out his timings. It was a tight, if nuanced, performance, and it brought them to Andrew´s main interest in record producers, not knowing what will ultimately be produced."

There are long bits where the actual work of producing records, mixing music, is depicted. It can be hard to follow if you (like me) have no clue about music recording. I am grateful that the Kindle has a built in dictionary, I can tell you! but it doesn´t explain everything just to get the words translated. What I did was read those parts at a good pace and have in mind some creative activity where I find myself in the zone, as Cass and her friends are. Like knitting and designing a sweater from scratch, as I go. It´s not as fast paced, but I think there may be similarities of experience. Or writing. Or baking a loaf from left-over stuff in the pantry. Photography, if that´s your thing. Painting or drawing. Or speaking, like in the quote above. 

"Why make the process artificial? Why put it in a Box?" he asked. "In the studio, the piecing together of combinations, the decisions, they race by so fast. There´s no way to hang on to ideas. No way to think about them. It almost feels like the decisions are made for you by something external. The Box was a way to look at those choices and to make the instinct tangible.""

Tragically, before they can start testing the box, Leo dies, and the others are left with the box and the project he started. Cass, Liam, and Gabe are all idealists, all good guys working for art and the benefit of artists and their audiences. The evil forces are represented by a big record company trying to get their hands on the box (which they seem to think is Leo´s brain in a bottle!) (even Liam kind of feels that way, which makes him particularly protective of it) and put it on a website to make money.  

""Creative freedom," she scoffed. "You either like the music or you don´t. Can´t we just get on with it? What´s the fuss?" "The fuss?" asked Liam. "What if someone does or says or represents something that I didn´t expect? What if I don´t know how to respond to it? What if I can´t sell this recording the way I sold the last recording? What if someone makes me feel something I´m not ready to feel? That´s why the business of music imposes so many limits on creative freedom. Creative freedom is threatening not just to the business model, but to the individual.""

Another enemy is Gabe´s mom, who sees art as a rival for the attention she feels entitled to. Really, the scenes with her and Gabe are quite spooky, and I think Lefford has done a marvelous job of dramatizing that manipulation that some people are so good at, particularly with their children. It´s so easy to feel just what Gabe feels in those situations. I mean, she really nails it. I´d love to give you a shorter, meaningful quote, but the scenes have a long build-up, and I´d have to quote at least a whole page. I think there should be a whole novel about Gabe and his mom.

As you have noticed, I quote heavily from this book. Partly because I can´t say anything more intelligent about it than what is already in there, and my small selection might be your only taste of it, so I am sharing. I hope to meet the author in person soon, and I intend to argue for it to be made available somewhere.

Lefford doesn´t give any definite answers, but she asks a lot of very interesting questions, and if I can make a guess, she answers them a little differently in all the versions she provides. It´s astonishingly clever. I´m blown away, really.  

 ""We don´t ever look at art objectively. We´re all biased. Each of us is open to some possibilities and closed to others." "At some point, you have to determine what´s good. Are you biased about my music?" "Yes." He was tickled by the question. "What´s wrong with bias? You built a whole Box of bias. Bias is interesting." "But, then how do I really know when I´m good?" "You don´t find out that way. If that´s your metric, you´ll have to find a different way to make your music.""

Street Photography

This entire weekend I have been totally wrapped up (and still is) in this amazing blog I stumbled into while writing my blogpost about Fotografiska´s exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson´s pictures.

Eric Kim is a street photographer and teacher (obviously a gifted one), who writes lengthy articles about his art, other photograpers, and what can be learned from them. The comments are also very interesting, most of the time.

I am really enjoying myself, even though street photography is not something I want to pursue. I always enjoy entusiasts talking about their art - I learn so much from them that I can apply to whatever I am doing at the moment, even if it doesn´t seem related. All creative pursuits have a lot in common.

Conversational Philosophy

I have just finished a book I started some time ago. It was the first book I bought in Kindle format, long before I got the device. The computer is good for a lot of things, but reading books on it just doesn´t work. I get distracted. The name of the book is "The Chairs are Where the People go - How to Live, Work, and Play in the City" by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti. I´m not entirely sure how I heard of it, but I´m sure it was on some excursion on the internet.

Heti writes in the foreword that Glouberman is her friend, and that she has always liked the way he speaks and thinks. She then had the idea to write a novel about him, but ended up collaborating with him instead. What they did was meet up, he talked, and she typed. The book contains 72 chapters, some short, some longer, on topics like:

How to make friends in a new city
How to be good at playing charades
Miscommunication is nice
Is monogamy a trick?
Seeing my friends drunk for the first time
A decision is a thing you make
Feeling like a fraud
Negotiation
Why computers only lasts three years
Who are your friends?

and many more. They don´t sound so profound, but the content often is. There is much talk of games, as Glouberman spends a lot of his time doing theatrical workshops for non-actors, or something like that. I don´t think that anything he does is very clear cut, actually. He seems to be a boundry-crossing cultural worker, and some of his ideas for getting people to talk to each other, like a concept he calls "un-conference", is really clever. I had to bookmark some bits for the husband to read, as he plans conferences now and then, and may even find these ideas useful in his teaching profession.

Three short, clever quotes that I picked:

"It´s both reassuring and frustrating to understand that, whatever you do, some people are going to like it and some people won´t."

"It´s useful to remember that friendship needs an activity associated with it."

"It seems to me that the most pleasing thing you can find yourself saying in a conversation is something you haven´t said before."

I have seen reviewers call this "conversational philosophy" or "pop philosophy". If it seems like a good idea to listen to (ok, read, but it feels like listening) a very clever person with a very interesting job, whom you are not likely to ever meet in real life, this is a read I can highly recommend.

Meta Music

The other night I saw this wonderful documentary,  "John Cage: Journeys in Sound", by Allan Miller and Paul Smaczny. I was so impressed by it that I watched it twice, and filled a couple of pages with notes. I find his story and his work so wonderfully inspiring.

If you have ever been at a performance of a piece of music by Cage, you are not likely to ever forget it. He is perhaps most know for "4´33´´", a piece for piano - or rather not playing the piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

A lot of people would argue, as does Chaim Tannenbaum (philosopher and musician) in the film, that if music is defined as organized sound, that is not what Cage is doing at all. Tannenbaum says that Cage is making it hard - impossible even - to respond to his work as one would respond to music, and therefore, it can not actually be music, but rather a sound performance. He says that Cage inspires interesting thoughts about the nature of music. Still, as unorganized as his sounds may be, he is apparently the bestseller among American composers!

Cage was very influenced by buddhism, and in 1952, he recieved a copy of the "I Ching" from a friend. He learned about its method of throwing coins to procure hexagrams. He says in the film:

Instead of sitting cross legged, I decided to continue sitting at my desk, but changing my work from the making of choices to the asking of questions, which would be answered by the means of chance operation."

He didn´t like improvisation, because he believed that improvisation takes you back to what you know, and he wanted to take his art beyond that, into territories you didn´t know. Composing by chance operations prevented his subconscious to interfere with the composition, and that´s what he was after. He was not into self-expression at all (as most artists are), he wanted to create as nature creates (or as he imagined that nature creates). He also said that he had "given up that whole idea of value judgement."

One of his teachers was Arnold Schönberg, and he advised the young Cage to seek his fortune elsewhere. He said Cage had no feeling for harmony, which I suppose is another way of saying he wasn´t particularly muscial. "You´ll come to a wall," he said, and Cage responded that "I´ll beat my head against that wall." I find the idea quite comforting, that it´s possible to devote your entire life to doing something you really don´t have any natural talents for, and because of it push the boundries of that field and create something of real importance.

The most interesting project right now is perhaps the performance of "Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)" in Halberstadt, Germany. It started in 2001 and is supposed to go on for 639 years (!) in the church of St Burchardi. I just put it on my list of things to experience before I die.

And, among his scores there are beautiful pieces of visual art. You can download some of them for free, and this is a page from his "1958 aria (voice) BW - useless without colors".

What I love about Cage is that he gives me lessons in music, in perception, in being even, expressed in tones. He really pushes me and makes me pay attention. He is simply exceptional.

The Journal as Art

I have boasted about my local librarians being so very obliging whenever I have an idea for a book I think they should buy. A book I want to read, but is too frugal to buy, that is. However, once they actually said no. I thought about it for a few days, and then I bought it. It´s Jennifer New´s "Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art". It´s an amazing book about creativity, focused on the visual.

Thirty-one journalkeepers have shared their pages, and I look in wonder at the talent, genious even, that some of them display on pages that are made for no one but themselves. Because, as New writes in her introduction:

Observations, by Jenny Keller, science illustrator.

Visual journals are created in a secret language of symbols. Intentional or not, they are private maps only their makers can follow. No one else can look at a page and understand the specific meaning of a punching bag or a set of arrows. And no one else can remember the moment of its making. Joni Mitchell blaring on the stereo. Sage wafting in a hidden garden. The discomforting echo of last night´s argument.

The journals are presented in four chapters: Observation, Reflection, Exploration, and Creation. Of course, most journal keepers use their pages for all these things, but some are more into one or two of these categories. Every time I leaf through these pages, I become inspired to do more with my own journals, to start drawing again. There is so much wonderful stuff going on here, I´d have liked to show you every page.

Reflection, by Anderson Kenny, architecht.

Reflection, by John Copeland, illustrator.

Exploration, by Sofie Binder, traveller.

Creation, by Mike Figgis, director.