Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook. By Maria Popova “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” As a lover — and keeper — of diaries and notebooks, I find myself returning again and again to the question of what compels us — what propels us — to record our impressions of the present moment in all their fragile subjectivity. From Joan Didion’s 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem (public library) — the same volume that gave us her timeless meditation on self-respect — comes a wonderful essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which Didion considers precisely that.
Though the essay was originally written nearly half a century ago, the insights at its heart apply to much of our modern record-keeping, from blogging to Twitter to Instagram. Portrait of Joan Didion by Mary Lloyd Estrin, 1977 After citing a seemingly arbitrary vignette she had found scribbled in an old notebook, Didion asks: Why did I write it down? What, then, does matter? Virginia Woolf on the Language of Film and the Evils of Cinematic Adaptations of Literature. By Maria Popova “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.” “Cinema, to be creative, must do more than record,” Anaïs Nin wrote in 1946 in the forth volume of her diaries.
But the question of what this elusive, quintessential creative duty of cinema might be long predates Nin’s observation. In the spring of 1926, when film was still young and silent, Virginia Woolf found herself at once captivated and concerned by the seventh art and penned an essay exploring its perils and its promise. “The Cinema” was originally published in the New York journal Arts, and a slightly edited version titled “The Movies and Reality” appeared in The New Republic shortly thereafter.
People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964, Gets It Oddly Right. By Maria Popova How to walk the line between futurism and absurdity, or why the satellite is more important than the A-bomb. Earlier this week, we explored 5 vintage visions for the future of technology.
In this fantastic clip from a 1964 BBC Horizon program — the same series that to this day explores such illuminating topics as the nature of reality, the age-old tension between science and religion, how music works, and what time really is — legendary science fiction writer, inventor, and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future. A half-century before most of today’s technologies, he presages the digital convergence with uncanny accuracy and reminds us, with eloquence and lucidity foreign to most of today’s quasi-futurists, of the very essence and purpose of predicting the future in the first place.
The only thing that we can be sure of the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. One day, we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. Scott Belsky on How to Avoid Idea Plateaus. Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion. Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally. One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came from an unlikely source — the German poet, artist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1810 published Theory of Colors (public library; public domain), his treatise on the nature, function, and psychology of colors.
Though the work was dismissed by a large portion of the scientific community, it remained of intense interest to a cohort of prominent philosophers and physicists, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of Goethe’s most radical points was a refutation of Newton’s ideas about the color spectrum, suggesting instead that darkness is an active ingredient rather than the mere passive absence of light. YELLOWThis is the color nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces. Malcolm Cowley on the Four Stages of Writing: Lessons from the First Five Years of The Paris Review.
By Maria Popova “The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.” The kind of literary voyeurism that concerns itself with why great writers write and how, exactly, they go about it has long held especial mesmerism to aspiring authors and voracious readers alike. In 1953, a trio of literary enthusiasts founded The Paris Review. Spearheaded by George Plimpton, who edited the magazine from its founding to his death in 2003, it forever changed the face of literary journalism with its singular brand of incredibly in-depth, borderline existential conversations with beloved authors on the art and craft of writing. Five years later, they published the finest of those interviews — featuring such literary luminaries as William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, and James Thurber — in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (public library).
Malcolm Cowley There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. Georges Simenon. Grapefruit: Yoko Ono's Poems, Drawings, and Instructions for Life. By Maria Popova “A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality.” In 1964, more than a decade after the publication of her tender story An Invisible Flower, Yoko Ono collected a selection of her poetic meditations on life in a small but whimsical book published in Tokyo in a limited edition of 500. More than thirty years later, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono (public library) — part irreverent activity book for grown-ups, part subversive philosophy for life — was republished, with a new introduction by Ono herself. Here’s just a small taste of this immensely delightful tiny treasure: A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality.
AIR TALKIt’s sad that the air is the only thing we share. MIRROR PIECEInstead of obtaining a mirror, obtain a person. MAP PIECEDraw an imaginary map. CITY PIECEStep in all the puddles in the city.1963 autumn Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Today Yesterday: 5 Vintage Visions for the Future of Technology. By Maria Popova Instapaper circa 1981, or what medical wonderlands have to do with making cash entirely obsolete.
One of the things that sets our species apart from others is our ability to imagine the future in remarkable detail. We do this every day on a personal level and have been doing it since time immemorial on a cultural level, and do it across the entire spectrum of ludicrous misguidedness and uncanny accuracy. Revisiting these predictions in retrospect can be a source of both fascination and humor. After last week’s vintage versions of modern social media, today we revisit five such predictions for the future of technology, envisioning — with varying degrees of correctness and comedy — everything from the workplace to the wardrobe.
In this fantastic compilation of BBC clips from 1969, James Burke — who brought us the iconic Connections series on the history of innovation — experiences the automated office of the future and what it might mean for the evolution of work culture. Five Manifestos for the Creative Life. By Kirstin Butler How a numbered list can start a personal revolution. Some days everyone needs a little extra encouragement. The words or lines or colors don’t want to come, or worse, we don’t even want to sit down to create. That’s when we turn to these inspiring manifestos, any one of which is guaranteed to give our uncooperative creativity a sharp kick in the pants. Here are five of our favorite contemporary manifestos that nudge ideas out of your head and into the hands of the world. We’ve long been fans of the amazing work of Frederick Terral, the creative visionary behind design studio Right Brain Terrain.
You may not be a Picasso or Mozart but you don’t have to be. We can’t imagine more sound advice. Guidelines to get you from Point A to finished product, The Cult of Done Manifesto was written by tech guru Bre Pettis (of MakerBot fame) in collaboration with writer Kio Stark in 20 minutes, “because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.” This is your life. There is an enemy. Moonwalking with Einstein: How to Hack Your Memory. By Maria Popova One of the mind’s most fascinating — and, some nuroscientists argue, uniquely human — facets is memory. Why do we remember, and how? Is there a finite capacity to our memory reservoir? Can we hack our internal memory chip? These questions and more are precisely what science writer Joshua Foer sought to answer when he set out to cover and compete in the U.S.
Memory Championship. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything tells the story of Foer’s fascinating journey as he became enthralled by the secrets of the participants and learned how to play with the hard-wired quirks of the brain, optimizing it to remember information it ordinarily wouldn’t. The title refers to a memory device I used in the US Memory Championship—specifically it’s a mnemonic that helped me memorize a deck of playing cards. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.