The 3rd house in astrology is associated with writing, conversation, personal thoughts, day-to-day things, siblings and neighbors.
Friday, April 23, 2004Writing – personal junk and professional rubbish
Lorianne has a wonderfully written piece today comparing journal writing and meditation, and on not being so worried about airing the “junk” in your "junk drawer," i.e., your journal. An excerpt:
Some people like to hide their junk drawers, thinking that others will judge them poorly based on the random assortment of trauma and pain they contain. I, for one, believe that we all share pretty much the same traumas and pains, so showing you mine is not much different than looking at yours. Writing in this sense is like getting naked in front of other naked people: once you've seen one, you've seen them all, albeit in slightly different shapes, sizes, and colors. But if you've ever spent time with dancers, you know that people who are intimately familiar with their own bodies are typically unashamed by nakedness, seeing their bodies as the comfortable tools of their trade.
Turning from personal journal writing to professional writing…
I just read (via Arts & Letters Daily) a very entertaining essay by Joseph Epstein, whose byline reads that he is “the author of, most recently, Envy (stolen from linked content from other sites – so is this then hyperbloggia? Or, more likely, bloggerhea.)
Anyway, here’s the opening bit from Epstein’s essay (read the rest here):
I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go.
Shakespeare - the Bob Dylan and Steven Spielberg of his time?
It’s William Shakespeare’s birthday today. It also happens to be the birthday of Susurra de Luz (go wish her a happy birthday, will ya?).
NationalGeographic.com (via Arts & Letters Daily) has a piece on words coined by Shakespeare that we commonly use today. From that I put together a little quiz for you:
Which of the following are sayings coined by Shakespeare and which are “faux Shakespeare”? Answers are below.
a. Method in the madness
b. Neither rhyme nor reason
c. All that glisters (glistens) is not gold
d. One fell swoop
e. (To) give the devil his due
f. To play fast and loose
g. Fool's paradise
h. Seen better days
i. The long and the short of it
j. Strange bedfellows
k. The world's (my) oyster
l. It's Greek to me
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There’s an article in The Australian (also via Arts & Letters Daily) that says, “He really is a wonder, Shakespeare. He was the Bob Dylan and the Steven Spielberg of his time all rolled into one.”
And at Writer’s Almanac today, a poem and “literary and historical notes” on Shakespeare, along with a good link to the Shakespeare Resource Center.
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Quiz answers:
Coined by Shakespeare: a, b, d, h, j, k
Faux Shakespeare: c, e, f, g, i, l
Repetitive patterns
There’s another piece in the Boston Globe today on the Mills Gallery's “OCD” exhibit I posted about before. (Incidentally, it also mentions the DeCordova Museum's “Self-Evidence” exhibit I posted about another time.) The Globe also has profiles of four other artists working with repetitive patterns. One that I found particularly interesting, perhaps because I’m a writer not an artist, was Bruce Barry, who writes his thoughts on ceramics. Not about ceramics, on or in ceramics. On his website, he has this statement:
There's a guy in Washington state — I guess he's retired — what he does all day is sit at a typewriter and record his every thought, everything that happens to him, no matter how large, small, or mundane. He's been doing this for years and years. I feel a strange kinship with him: we share a goal to never "lose" a thought. We fear, perhaps, that it could be like water slipping through our fingers in the desert…
Now there’s a guy who needs a weblog.
One curious thing in the Globe profile of Barry is what he says about his writing on the inside versus outside of the pots: “Writing inside of pots, I prefer to be in that exhausted state. Those are inside thoughts; the person who is writing may not be completely familiar with them.” It sounds like writing in a dreamlike state, like when you wake up and try to catch the images of the dream you were just having before they evaporate. Maybe that's why he writes it inside the pots, where it's contained. And I suppose it's also like thoughts still inside the head, not yet formed and formatted for outside communication. It made me think of how when I’m trying to recharge my creative writing efforts, particularly when I’ve worked with poetry, I’ve made an effort to remember and write down my dreams to get at some of that imagery. Like thoughts that I’m not completely familiar with floating around inside my head.
Barry calls many of his ceramics pieces “Journals.” Another of the artists profiled, Tayo Heuser, says of her work with repetitive pattern drawing, “These are like journals. Every day there's a different choice of colors. You can see the pressure of my hand from day to day: shaky, strong, light. It's like writing, really.” Interestingly, Barry says he is influenced by the repeating patterns of Islamic art and Heuser by Arabic writing. (I couldn’t find a website for Heuser, but found some of her work here.)
Genzyme's green building
All of the offices have windows as well as glass walls overlooking the halls. I can sympathize with the employee the reporter talked to who said that since everyone passing by can see in she could no longer have a good cry in her office or stuff her lunch in her face either. The climate control takes some getting used to; in one meeting I was in the automatic window blinds seemed to be controlled by HAL, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But you can open the windows! I spent 12 years entombed in corporate buildings before I went home-based, where on nice days I can open the sliders in my office and get fresh air. I’ve been on the phone with clients and had them stop me to say, “Oh my God. Is that… is that birds I hear in the background?”
So I applaud Genzyme. They estimate it cost them 15% more to build green, but will save them 38% on electricity and use 32% less water. And they expect it will help retain employees – happy, productive employees. Here are some details from a recent Boston Globe article (also see photos and info on the corporate website):
Sunlight comes in through its outer walls of windows (more than 800 of which can be opened) and through the interior atrium. Atrium light is maximized by rooftop mirrors that move automatically to catch as much sun as possible, by mobile-like suspended acrylic squares, and by reflective pools at the atrium base. A portion of the roof is planted with vegetation to reduce storm water runoff and the "heat island" effect of paved surfaces. The company also wins green points by putting its site on a reclaimed brownfield near a T station, by recycling most of its construction waste, and by providing indoor bike storage and showers and lockers.