A short dispatch today, surfacing some of my reading as I dive into final semester projects.
Creativity is in deep connection—not just between ideas, but communities and traditions. Over at my blog this week I wrote about the importance of imitating models—which I don’t think is just for the young and beginners. I do this both as a polyglot, to learn languages and their literatures better, and as a writer, to apprentice myself to beloved master craftspeople I will (mostly) never meet in person.
Creativity is in world building—this week I gloried in listening to The Eye of the World while I cooked and baked, the first book in Robert Jordan’s long fantasy series The Wheel of Time. An outrageously generous used book store owner gifted me the whole series when I was 8 years old or so and I never read it, opting for Tolkien and Sagan and Asimov’s robots.
I’m grateful for all the things I never got around to as a kid that I can now move forward through—not retreat to—as a playful adult. I find that the worlds and maps of them I built as a child are often richer than the intellectual landscapes I make my way through now. And not because of some child’s uninhibited curiosity and imagination, that old bromide—more, I think, because I needed other worlds so much more as a surgery-riddled, trauma-afflicted child. I dissociated, and I needed to—now, having processed some of that and learned to work better with the self I have, I can, mercifully, associate to thrive.
Two intentional communities that are holding me right now
The “Listener’s Tribe” for Srini Rao’s Unmistakable Creative interview podcast, which I’ve been listening to devotedly since Fall 2018. Two of my favorite episodes are with Seth Godin on shipping creative work and with Austin Kleon, author of How to Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work, on creative influences, finding time for the work, and the combinatorial nature of creativity (very much in line with the piece on the role of imitation above). The community associated with the podcast helped me take my writing practice gently but seriously and ship this newsletter consistently, as well as getting my creative self through the early stages of COVID-19 life. I especially appreciate this group taking on social questions and exploring movements like Black Lives Matter, which I find many of the white, male-dominated productivity and lifehacking gurus out there shy away from.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s community Ness Labs. Anne-Laure is neuroscience-trained and a research nerd who attracts like-minded folks to her community and uses the research in easily accessible, but precise and careful, ways. Again, she has different takes on productivity, creativity and learning than many in cyberspace, focusing on mindful productivity and living more personally meaningful lives. I’ve linked to her “best of” articles, because there is so much good there, they’re short, and I urge you to browse for a few minutes and dip into the richness there.
What I read this week
Fritjof Capra’s magisterial The Systems View of Life. It is taking me back to my freshman-in-high-school days of inexplicable fascination with fractals, self-organization and the math of patterns without having the math to take them seriously. It’s pushing me forward to take another look and take a break from humanities with some trusted old geometric topology I haven’t touched in ten years, now that I do have the math (or did). And it’s a book that’s come at the right time, when I’m focused on intentional design of my own “life system” and the scholarly circles I move in are, many of them, in their self-critique, recombining the parts that they broke their fields into to look at the historically contingent whole again.
Anders Ericsson’s Peak, the classic on deliberate practice and “the banality of excellence.” I’m especially interested in how one continually improves and does deliberate practice in fields like writing: as Ericsson emphasizes, the research so far is mostly focused on areas like chess, music performance, and certain sports, like swimming, where expertise and excellence are easily recognized, measured, and widely agreed upon, it’s easier to break performance into its parts and isolate one part at a time for improvement, and skills take precedence over knowledge or understanding by far. For now, it’s up to me to set exercises for myself—luckily I have more than a millennium of solid attempts at targeted exercises from Latin rhetoric teachers to draw on!
Roman writer Sallust’s Bellum Catilinum. I can’t say I much care for his moralizing, aristocratic history, but his style is fun, and I am proud to the point of delight that I’ve worked my Latin to a point where I can read in one sitting things that were meant to be consumed in one sitting.
See you next week, and especially to you teachers—take care of yourselves! I see you. It’s so much—and reprieve is coming.
And, as always, just hit reply—I’d love to hear how you are in the world right now.
Jacobus