Map Out Your Holiday Gifts

map, Paris

(photo: author)

OK, Santas’ helpers, if someone on your list loves New York, loves maps, loves travel, or just loves to get down with the details, that person might enjoy this wildly popular book of personal maps: Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers, by Becky Cooper, illustrated by Bonnie Briant, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik. Pointing to this book as a bellwether, The Guardian says hand-drawn maps are in. So much so, their creators even have their own association. “All maps tell stories,” Cooper says, and proves it with the creative contributions in this very book.

Alternatively, The Guardian story says Wellingtons Travel spent three years creating a map of modern London full of hand-drawn charm, using the 1800s style that shows individual trees and buildings. The photograph accompanying this article is similar to the Wellingtons approach, but it’s a portion of a map of Paris from a favorite poster of mine that’s so realistic, I’m sure I can pick out that little hotel I stayed at near L’Etoile.

Many people have participated in Cooper’s Mapping Manhattan project, contributing their own unique memory portraits, like the map of “My Lost Gloves.” (That one is available as a print from Uncommon Goods, which has an array of intriguing map gift ideas, including the “Single Malts of Scotland” or “Great Wines of France” tasting maps—bases for a couple of good tours, there.) Contribute to the collective mental map of the city by downloading a blank map of Manhattan on which to show the places where you took your own favorite bites out of the Big Apple. Download another and stick it in your love’s Christmas stocking.

Keep Your Edge – 33 ways

notebook, list, diary

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

These lists of how to stay creative keep coming around, and they’re always worth a glance. Staying fresh in our own world is important, no matter what world that is. “Make lists, carry a notebook everywhere, write your ideas down”—those suggestions are all of a piece, and I do that. Of course, later the urgent items I scribbled don’t always make sense.

“Go somewhere new, listen to new music, watch foreign films”—those suggestions are different ways of saying “Break out of your routine.” I could do that by following suggestion #31—“Clean your workspace,” which, if I did would probably turn up some of those mystery notes. #29, “Stop trying to be someone else’s perfect,” reminds me of the Steve Jobs admonition pasted above my computer: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Don’t quite know what to think of “be otherworldly.” That’s the kind of obscure directive I might write myself. For this weekend, just “Do more of what makes you happy!” (#25).

Creativity and the Brain

brain, creativity

fMRI brain images (photo: en.wikipedia)

Lots of articles about creativity in the current issue of The Atlantic, including a fascinating long report by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen who studies the origins of creativity in the brain and its association with mental illness. She started out in the 1960’s studying people involved with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who had a multigenerational family history of mental disorders and suffered from depression. (Moving interviews with Vonnegut’s son Mark were included in PBS News Hour’s coverage of Andreasen’s research.) Indeed, for many of the writers she studied, “mental illness and creativity went hand in hand.” Suicide was not uncommon. We think Hemingway, Plath, now Williams. Philip Seymour Hoffman was also far down that self-destructive path.

Andreasen began her academic career clutching a doctorate in literature, taught in the University of Iowa’s English Department, and published a book about the poet John Donne. But she chose to return to school in the sciences, hoping that study of the brain would lead her to understand why authors she admired had gone off the rails—and maybe even to help future writers.

She’s worked on two vital questions: “What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?” As in many areas of neuroscience, the development of scanning technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled her to watch the brains of creative people “at work,” and these scans reveal tantalizing clues to her hitherto unanswerable questions.

Earlier work has shown that high IQ is not particularly linked to creativity—“above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity,” she says. If she couldn’t predict creativity from IQ measurement (with all its flaws), she had to find other ways to find subjects for research. She looked for external recognition, which led her to the distinguished faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Interviews rather quickly revealed that mood disorders (depression, mostly) were common among the writers and often ran in families. In fact, about 80 percent of the writers she interviewed had such a mental health history, compared with about 30 percent in her control group and in the population at large.

But how to measure creativity in the brain? After years of pondering this difficulty, Andreasen finally arrived at this insight: “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

She has expanded her study to include creative individuals from the sciences as well as the arts. This inclusion has brought her George Lucas, mathematician William Thurston, and six Nobel laureates from the sciences, in addition to novelist Jane Smiley and a group of young creative achievers. Despite their diverse fields, all these individuals show similar brain processes, revealed in the scans, that differ from the workings of control group members’ brains.

Wearing her psychiatrist’s hat, Andreasen talks with her subjects (creatives and controls) about their growing up, family life, relationships, and creative activities. From these interviews, she’s learned that “Creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work.” She’s studied 26 people so far—13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—and validated the link between mental illness and creativity as well as the evidence that creativity tends to run in families, though it may not confine itself to a single field.

Other traits of the creatives include a personality style that leads them to take risks, confront rejection, and persist. Of course, she says, “Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path,” and may in itself contribute to mental illness. Many creative people are autididacts—they love to teach themselves—and polymaths, with a wide variety of diverse interests. This holds true despite out education system’s persistent separation of the arts and the sciences. “If we wish to nurture creative students,” Andreasen says, “this may be a serious error.”

She closes by referring to the case of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who has schizophrenia (and who lives around the corner from me), profiled in the book and movie A Beautiful Mind. “Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.”

Jennifer Egan’s Organic Writing

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad, Pulitzer Prize, writing, novel

Jennifer Egan (photo: upload.wikimedia,org – David Shankbone)

For a long time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan hadn’t consciously intended to pull together the stories that eventually formed A Visit from the Good Squad into a novel. A recent Glimmer Train interview with talks about the completely organic way of writing she employed in doing so.

The set of stories that form the book’s chapters focus on people who circle the lives of the main characters—Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and recording executive, divorced, and trying to connect with his nine-year old son, and Sasha, a kleptomaniac who has worked for him. Thus, we learn about Bennie’s and Sasha’s past indirectly through these confederates.

Each of these individual stories is told in a unique, technically different way. It wasn’t a matter of just selecting a character and some different approach to telling their story, it was more the challenge of creating stories that actually required different manners of telling. As a result, for example, one is written as a slightly cheesy news story (“Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!”), and another, in the unsettling second-person, begins, “Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it.”

Janet Maslin in The New York Times called the book “uncategorizable.” It wasn’t until Egan had the idea of treating the book like a concept album that its ultimate form suggested itself, she says. She had no desire to write a set of linked short stories with “a similarity of mood and tone.” (An example is Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction.)

“I wanted them to sound like they were parts of different books,” Egan says. “Because I felt if I could do that and still have them fuse, that it would be a much more complicated, rich experience.” Sticking with the record-industry theme, she says, “You would never want to listen to an album where all the songs had the same mood and tone.” The group Chicago comes to mind.

Chapter 12, structured as a PowerPoint presentation titled “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” (you can read it here), plunges into previously uncharted literary territory. This unlikely format her interviewer calls “destabilizing,” as well as beautiful and haunting. The challenge in using it, says Egan, was that it is basically a discontinuous form being manipulated to create a continuous narrative. In another writer’s hands, such a deviation from the expected might seem gimmicky, but in Egan’s view that particular chapter demanded to be told in a fragmented way, which PowerPoint enabled. Something unlikely to happen again, she says.

While the books experimentation was praised by critics and has baffled readers, Egan believes that the only legitimate way to experiment in writing is to let the content dictate the form. And that’s where the author’s creativity has to come through. Otherwise it’s an intellectual process laid on top of a story, which from the discerning reader’s point of view, never works.

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Have an iOS 7.1 Device?

Stan Douglas, Circa 1948

Stan Douglas’s exquisitely rendered mystery (photo: docubase.mit.edu)

If you do, you can explore an art project/mystery tale entered in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Circa 1948 is a 3-D film noir-inspired multimedia project by Canadian Stan Douglas, who set the work—which was meticulously rendered, not photographed—in two post-war Vancouver neighborhoods. The project lets the viewer to pursue the narrative, where “you’re sort of always in the middle.” Unlike a game, there is no externally defined goal; it’s an exploration of the case of a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband. A mystery, like life. It’s getting ***** on the iTunes app store.

 

Robot Language

 robots, communication, Luc SteelsA meditation by Visual Thesaurus’s Orin Hargraves on how robots might develop language. He includes an enlightening TED talk with Luc Steels (Vrje Universiteit Brussels, Artificial Intelligence Lab) on experiments with robots’ learning to speak on their own through networks and the complex connections between ideas, rather than through a programmed language provided by humans. Descriptions of some of Steels’s work are embodied in this review.

When researchers allow two robots, who see the world from their own unique vantage points, to invent a way to communicate, they must come up with their own concepts and vocabulary (video). (This sounds depressingly like humans, the “unique vantage point” part and malleable vocabulary.) How will they self-organize language? Will it develop in ways we can understand, that relate to the way humans experience the world? Fascinating.

 

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Planner or Pantser?

pantser, writing, author

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

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29 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

coffee, creativity

(photo: farm3.staticflickr.com)

My blog readers liked the infographic on becoming more productive. Well, before you get all Type A on us, kick back and enjoy this short video on increasing creativity. No problem for me with #8 – COFFEE!  And #11 is easy, too: Surround yourself with creative people.  That’s why you’re reading this, right? You’re one of them for me. This is a great reminder to nurture your creative spirit, wherever it appears—in art, writing, photography, social change—whatever!  You CAN do it.

The key to creativity, I think, is not to try to do all 29 at once—that’s a recipe for disappointment. Watch the video and do one or two. Get some good habits going. Then in a month or two, watch again, and do one or two more. It will get easier. Me? I plan to start by straightening up my office, the floor of which is only rumored to exist.

 

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Tim’s Vermeer

The Music Lesson, Johannes Vermeer, camera obscura, optics, Tim's Vermeer, Tim Jenison

Watching the meticulous recreation of Vermeer’s painting, “The Music Lesson,” by inventor Tim Jenison practically gave me hand-cramps. And the result? I urge you to watch this documentary (trailer) produced  by Penn Gillette, Tim’s friend, and see for yourself. The saga started when Tim read how optics technology—lenses and the camera obscura—may have been used in producing some of the great works of 17th century art.

As an inventor, not an artist, Tim attempts to replicate such a method and comes up with, or rediscovers, inventions of his own. In the film, he interviews British artist David Hockney and architect Philip Steadman who believe optics help explain Vermeer’s genius, but warn Jenison the art historians and critics don’t want to hear it. Tim even persuades Buckingham Palace officials to let him see the original painting.

Fascinating character, process, and insights. You’ll go away appreciating the “fathomable genius” of Vermeer more than ever, guaranteed. Great links here.

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Finding the Soul of the City

“The soul of a city can be found by talking a walk”—the premise and inspiration for generations of street photographers. In the February 2014 Metropolis, Jeff Speck, city planner, architect, and sustainable growth advocate writes about his book, Walkable City, claiming such visually rich environments are “better for your soul.”

Every Picture Tells a Story

Walking is certainly a better way to get a closeup look at the life going on around you. He illustrates that point with scenes of timeless urbanism captured by some of the giants of the street photography genre—Gary Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Vivian Maier, and others. The daily activities that animate city streets produce layered insights about both places and people. In a vital urban scene, “the presence of difference”—in ethnicity, race, class, income level, occupation—suggest endless story possibilities.

These images may require a second, even a third look, but it is clear why such photographs are often used as writing prompts.  What’s going on between those two? What are they looking at? What are they thinking? Why did he wear that?

 

Walkable ≠ Happy

Canadian journalist Charles Montgomery’s book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Though Urban Design, agrees that walkability may be a component of a healthy city, but alone it cannot make a city a happy one. A more complex set of elements contributes to people’s assessment of their own well-being. Photographers have captured these factors, too:

  1. elbow room (“People like their space”)—think about how kids tag every graffiti-friendly surface, it’s a way of claiming something distinctly, if momentarily, theirs; or consider the “reserved” parking place
  2. green space—and not just the occasional pocket park, but big swaths of it worthy of Frederick Law Olmsted, connected in continuous corridors, perhaps helping to explain the runaway popularity of the High Line, and
  3. economic justice. In other words, a city cannot be happy when a large segment of its population is much poorer than the rest.

Quality of life may be high in great, high-status cities, but that “does not translate into feelings of well-being . . . where social stratification creates a culture of status anxiety.”  Those tensions, too, are evident in photographs of many urban streetscapes.

walkability, streetscapes, urban life, High LineMore:

  • Jeff Speck’s TED talk on the walkable city.
  • The 10 U.S. cities having the most people who walk to work.
  • How cities are trying to become more walkable.
  • What’s the “Walk Score” for your address (U.S., Canada, and Australia)? Moving? Find walkable places to live.  My neighborhood’s Walk Score is 35, compared to New York City’s 88.
  • Many of Vivian Maier’s works can be seen on the Artsy website’s Vivian Maier page.