Ideas Are A Bucket of Eels

By: | April 23, 2018

In the past year I’ve gotten extremely interested in books about creativity and creation. I used to hate these kinds of books. I thought they were self indulgent and annoying. And many of them are. But I’ve found a few I really like, and I like them because they don’t actually talk all that much about how to come up with ideas. In fact, they are blunt and sometimes cruel about ideas. They don’t matter, they say, they only matter if you can use them. In fact, some go so far as to say that ideas are not even yours unless you do something with them.

If I may brag for a moment, ideas are almost never my problem. Whenever students or audience members at a talk ask “how do you get your ideas” I always struggle. I can’t really imagine having trouble thinking of ideas. Which means I’m one of those surely insufferable people who goes on about how ideas are everywhere, in everything. I’m sure it sounds incredibly annoying to someone who is stuck trying to come up with ideas. We’re not trying to be annoying, I promise. It’s just a hard question to answer. (And in the moments when I do struggle, I have some tricks, which I’ve written about here before).

Ideas aren’t my problem, figuring out which ones to use and what to do with them is. You can have a million ideas and if you do nothing with them then what good are they? And, for me at least, ideas are often like glow sticks. You know the kind you have to break and shake to make glow? They only glow for a certain period of time. After a while, they fade, and become dull plastic sticks that I’m gathering in a pile in the corner of the room.

This isn’t always the case. I have a few ideas right now that are still glowing, radioactive almost, in the pile. They’re so alluring they’re a little bit scary because they might cause terrible cancer or I might not really be able to truly pick them up and do them justice. I’ve rambled at my friends about these ideas, but they remain scribbled notes in a notebook. Drawings and scenes and tree diagrams, thoughts about how to best execute them, character sketches and coding questions.

Which is what led me to these books about creativity. Because in my mind, true creativity isn’t about ideas, it’s about execution. And I was struggle to even begin. Some of the books were incredibly useful! But as I was reading them, I kept getting stuck on something. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 21, 2018

April 16-20

For much of the country, spring warmth is too long in coming this year. Much too long. But we are well past the equinox and the days are getting longer, and that means the running and buzzing and frolicking is under way. Some of the heightened activity means animals are getting busy, Ann recalls, but some of it is just jumping and leaping and boinging because it’s spring, and there’s just something about spring.

Traveling can be exhausting, but staying anchored in one place can also bring on a sense of restlessness. After frenetic months of globetrotting, Sarah is not traveling for a while, and instead stares out the window in an effort to conjure words and meaning. But she remembers why it’s important to keep the possibility of distant places close at hand, and close in mind.

Meanwhile, the Earth itself moves, in a destructive act of creation. Or maybe a creative act of destruction. Lava flows consume homes, structures, living things, entire swathes of rainforest on the islands of Hawaii. But as Craig learned, molten rock moving over the face of the Earth leaves something new in its wake.

Guest Emily Underwood tells us how some types of spiders move around: By paragliding, using wispy sails of their own making. Spider ballooning is still not well understood. Sometimes spiderlings do it to escape cannibalizing siblings; adults might do it to flee floods or other hazards. They don’t overthink it, or worry about where they’ll end up: They just let go, and sail away.

In a similar way, preteen cheerleaders may be less concerned with how they are perceived than we might expect. Jessa stumbles upon the international Sea to Sky Cheerleading Championships and realizes the glitzy girls are not sexualized prepubescents, but serious competitors who are in their element: Memorizing and performing long routines, just as any child would at that life stage.

See you next week, when spring will have finally arrived, we hope!

Cheerleading and the Latin Trivium

By: | April 20, 2018

Convention centers are funny places. They create insular worlds during any given symposium, but on the margins between those events they hold space for some random intermixing of cosmologies—the kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination that open-plan architects could only dream of. Such a confluence occurred the weekend before the TED conference in Vancouver this year.

I arrived early to prepare a workshop and get over whatever slight jetlag exists between North American coasts, but the moment I stepped in the elevator I knew there was more happening here than TED. Four children of different heights stood in boredom with their parents, their hair variously sprayed into a strange high pony tail or woven into a hair piece.

Their eyelashes looked like the rays on a child’s drawing of Mr. Sun. The blood-red lipstick was disturbing, and outlandishly large bows that were not really bows adorned the tops of their heads. These children were cheerleaders, and they were here for the international Sea to Sky Cheerleading Championships. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Ballooning Spiders

By: | April 19, 2018
My favorite walk. Of course the paragliders hid today.

Most spring days on my favorite walk, I watch a small group of people wearing packs trudge up a grassy hill. Once they reach the top they spread out colorful sails, put on harnesses and jog forward. The wing behind them fills with air and lifts them up, and they glide like birds above the California foothills.

Last week I saw a paraglider climb into the sky until his sail was a black dot wavering against bright-white cirrus clouds. Was he ok? Could he land safely?  I never found out. But watching him disappear reminded me of a story I recently wrote about flying spiders.

The first person to describe flying spiders was a bewigged 17th century English naturalist named Martin Lister. A bit of a curiosity himself, Lister described how more than 30 different species of spiders molt and court. He counted their eyes. To give you a taste of the level of detail he captured over years of observation, here are a few chapter titles from his 1638 book The English Spiders:

Of the two-eyed spiders

Of the eight-eyed spiders

Of the diet of spiders, and their means of hunting; and also of wasps, the spiders’ enemies

Of sheet-web spiders that are satisfied with a very small web for catching prey within which they also build their nests

Of medicaments from spiders: For earache Lister recommended spiders steeped in olive oil or rosewater; for hysteria, wax salve of spiders applied to the navel. He also believed you could catch syphillis by eating venomous iguanas. You would not have wanted Lister to be your doctor. Continue reading →

Redux: What Destruction Has Wrought

By: | April 18, 2018

Craig on lavaIn 2014 I wrote about backpacking through live lava flows in Hawaii. The experience was remarkable, and the man who showed us the way has since watched his own house burn, its remnants consumed by molten rock, something he said he thoroughly enjoyed. On that journey, I threw a penny into live lava, expecting it to melt like the ring in the fires Mordor, but instead it pinged against a bright, liquid bulb and bounced off. That’s when I realized what we were dealing with, not an easy liquid like water, but molten metal. Here is my report from that trip, moving from the hot interior of the earth to what comes after…

On Monday, a slowly-creeping lava flow claimed its first house on the Big Island of Hawaii. The iron-heavy pahoehoe flow crossed the house’s yard and moved through a wall, sending flames into the 1,100-square-foot structure before continuing on to take down a nearby corrugated shed. This flow has been on the move since it first erupted in June from the Pu’u O’o crater in the East Rift Zone, the surface hardening and swelling, and breaking through sometimes day by day.

Lava flows have been frequent in this area since 1983 when the Pu’u O’o crater opened in the previously forested East Rift Zone, which now looks like the smoldering plains of Mordor. A few years ago, I backpacked with photo and science journalist JT Thomas across part of the East Rift Zone, walking over lava flows only a few days old. The fluid and hard black ground glistened in the sun, some places as hot as the surface of a woodstove where you had to shift from foot to foot. Tumuli, which are upwellings from molten rock immediately below, were busted open like miniature volcanoes, the air above them rippling  with heat.

JT and I had visited the next house standing in the path of that particular flow, and the owner had us in for tea. Out his kitchen window was a smoking wasteland, columns of sulfur gas rising from cracks miles away. He said he loved the lava and couldn’t wait to see it claim his house. He watched the elegant, glowing shapes ebb and flow, noting how what looks like a solid, hardened surface can inflate 30 feet overnight, basalt hills rising and falling to the molten rock pulsing below. When he laid out maps and photographs from years of watching the flows, other houses burning, roads covered over, I said, “You’ve seen a lot disappear.” He replied, “No, I’ve seen a lot created.” Continue reading →

Redux: The Map Box

By: | April 17, 2018

My November, December and January were a blur of travel for family and story and art. Maine. Utah. Colorado. Tennessee. Chile. Now, I’m in the thick of a long stretch of what might be best described as Desk Time. Neighborhood walk time. Hours of staring out the window, there but not there at all. All the things that translate those months of near constant, frenetic activity into something beyond facts and action and piles of notes, and hopefully render some meaning from them that transcends my own experience.

In these quiet hours, I am reminded, over and over, just how much easier it is to lose my way when I’m sitting still. And so I tacked a map to the wall. It is a tattered half topo that marks the route to an alpine basin in Colorado. It was given to me by a friend who later died suddenly in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. He was not someone I knew well, but he was someone who I admired, and who followed my work. Over the years when I made my living almost exclusively by editing magazine stories, he would chide me gently by email. What about my own writing, he would ask. Didn’t I know that I was just as good as the people I spent all my hours helping? And that, if I gave myself time and space, I could be so much better than I was?

When I finally made the leap into freelance writing, it was him I thought of with gratitude — that he believed in me enough to help me believe in myself — and some terror — that my life would be so uncertain. Now, four years after my departure from fulltime editing, I look to the map to remind myself: Not all journeys are afield. Sometimes it is the interior ones that cast us farther into the world than we have ever been.

In that spirit, I hope you’ll enjoy this essay I wrote back in 2016, about staying oriented through reminders of possibility: “The Map Box.”

Redux: Oh Spring!

By: | April 16, 2018
This first ran May 17, 2013. The running kids are thinking about college now and going to proms.  I don’t see them running any more, not in that way that looks like they’re powered by lighter-than-air energy sources.  That’s fine, they’re still astonishingly beautiful. And any racing around that needs to be done, the juiced-up robins are doing. 

Outside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again.  They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around.  They’re going flat-out on long skinny legs, hair flying and completely silent.  Sometimes they’re playing tag, but mostly they’re just running, they hardly touch earth, they’re all but airborne. What is it about spring? 

lambsHorses do the same thing.  I grew up next to a horse farm, and in the spring the horses would run for no reason whatever, flat-out and manes flying like the kids, across the pasture, wheel, turn, and back again.  They sometimes ran in pairs, right next to each other, synchronous at top speed.   Meanwhile in our own pasture the lambs were springing around stiff-legged like little pogo sticks, boing, boing.

I don’t think all this energy is going toward mating, though Lord knows that’s roaring around too.  Last night I walked into one of those floating columns of gnats which my stepdaughter-the-entomologist tells me are a mating structure with the bugs at the top being the alphas doing the most sex.   And I won’t mention the robins again, except to say that all summer they sit around frumpily in trees and cheerup, but right now they’re in love and flying like red-bellied bats out of hell at eye level.

So the springtime bugs and birds are pure sex and we’re no exception.  Jessa assures me (private communication) (and backed up with research) that men’s reproductive hormones peak in June, as do contraceptive sales and sexually transmitted diseases.  Other animals have annual peaks in hormones too, but the animals in different places have peaks at different times — yaks, for instance, have testosterone concentrations that dip in the spring.  I’m not going to dwell on how researchers measured hormones here, except that in men they took  blood and in yaks they were more intrusive.  The general idea is that lengthening or shortening periods of more or less daylight – called photoperiods — trigger the pineal gland in the brain to release chemicals which in turn trigger the reproductive system.

But I’m more interested in the springtime activity level, the jumping and running and flying.  And sure enough, changes in photoperiod also correlate with the activity level, energy expenditure, and feeding behavior of Siberian hamsters, and therefore of course how fat the hamsters are.  And in humans, changes in photoperiod affect, along with a whole litany of awful things (“depression, stroke, suicide, sudden infant death, cardiac arrest, infections, homicides, battering of women, rape, hip fractures among the newborn, multiple sclerosis, intracerebral hemorrhage”) the same feeding behavior and energy expenditure.  The researchers can’t explain the underlying mechanism for all this and admit to being disappointed and surprised.  I’m not: a list that long and various seems incoherent and meaningless anyway.

In the absence of convincing causes, I’m free to make stuff up.  Open the door to the chicken house in spring and the chickens come whizzing out, flapping their useless wings, ripping out new grasses, and scratching up busy clouds of dust.  I think all the running and scratching isn’t just photoperiods and chemicals; it’s also something else.  It’s the embodiment, the incorporation of whatever — regardless of  certain mortality, morbidity, and darkness — keeps you jumping.  It’s juice incarnate.  The winter’s over, it’s spring again, boing, boing.

_________

Photos:  坚硬的肉山;  Saparevo

The Last Word

By: | April 14, 2018

April 9 -13

What is it like to find yourself masticated by the outrage clickbait industrial complex? Regrettably, Michelle found out when her otherwise uncontroversial article about how to talk to your kids about climate change got “rebranded” for maximum outrage by an anti-climate change propaganda site. Warning: this is not an easy read. The comments are dire.

Do you ever get the sense that you’re surrounded by ass holes? In the Sonoran desert, you certainly would. These particular ass holes, Erik tells us, are proliferating around the US/Mexico border as donkeys dig their own watering holes to get away from having to share with the dirty cattle.

Cassie’s asshole-adjacent post reprises LWON’s immature penis fixation. This week’s Penis Friday: a giant bulging knob that resembles a saxophone. What’s to blame? Is it worms? Chlamydia? TB? It’s a medical mystery you won’t want to miss.

And you know that dejected feeling you get walking out of an amazing movie and back into monochrome reality? Emma returns to the “cinema hangover” – and explores why it fades as we age into cynicism and resignation.

The best news this week was the return of Christie from her sabbatical! She told us why she’s back, and got a hero’s welcome in the comments.

See you next week!