Creativity
The Design Squiggle
Begin with your work
A Quote by Edward TufteIn doing creative work, do not start your day with addictive time-vampires such as The New York Times, email, and Twitter. All scatter the eye, and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short-term memory. Instead, begin with your work. Many creative workers have independently discovered this principle.
The evolution of devices
All the first antecedents of man's devices were given him by Nature. Every one of his devices is traceable back to something in nature which suggested the first remote and primitive beginnings of its evolution. And every feature in art that man's mind conceived is conceived by a mind that has evolved as a part of nature: that grew out of nature.
The evolution of devices is as much a natural process as the evolution of organisms.
Leveling up aptitude
Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level.
This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck.
The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.
Thinking in situations
Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.To prove it in purity
The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect.
"I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler
Live your ten years
Artists are only creative for 10 years...we engineers are no different. Live your 10 years to the full.
We feel it in our fingers
In System A, there is no architect separate from the contractor. We are builders, simply. As builders, we have a direct feeling about construction. We feel it in our fingers, so it is down to earth. One result of this down-to-earth quality is that everything is somewhat experimental. We make experiments all the time. Sometimes we place a piece of wood this way. Another time, we may like to try it that way. Any time something new comes up in the design of a building, we are very likely to try and invent the best way of building it. This is not a great big invention. Just a simple invention, the way we might invent a way of tying a piece of string, to hold a broken toy together. It is just practical.
To stand independent of himself
The creator’s love for his work is not a greedy possessiveness; he never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work. The more genuinely creative he is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself.
Violence to the very structure of our being
If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.
Intense activity, then relaxation
The working style is based on periods of intense activity, coupled with other periods of more relaxed, reflective contemplation. This working style may not be a reflection of a particular personality trait, but a necessary aspect of creative work, which requires alternating intense effort with relaxation.
Mondegreen
A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.
American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".
Misinterpretation as inspiration
A lot of people think dreams and drugs involve some magical inspiration. I think otherwise.
I rarely get inspired by dreams or drugs, but I have my own secret source of inspiration: mishearing other people. Somebody says something, I misinterpret it, and the misinterpretation is quite interesting – more interesting than anything I would have come up with on my own if asked to generate an interesting idea. Maybe it’s a clever joke or turn of phrase. Maybe it’s a neat idea. Sometimes I misunderstand people’s entire positions, and end up with positions much more interesting than the ones they were trying to push.
Logjam
- That there is a big danger in working in a single medium. The logjam you don’t even know you’re stuck in will be broken by a shift in representation.
The fountainhead of beauty
It might be said that the carving of a woodblock encompasses the greatest restriction on freedom. Printmakers come under extraordinary natural constraints on their work. Strangely enough, however, it is this restriction that is the fount of beauty. Constraint and restriction themselves become a blessing.
...Many people see a lack of freedom as the death knell of art. That may be true in the case of the fine arts, but in the handicrafts, lack of freedom is the fountainhead of beauty.
The final architectural embellishments
The final architectural embellishments for the neighborhood should be the most exceptional, a kind of punctuation by relief, the last bursts of creative potential as the scene shifts.
Reduced to an act of selection
“The more exact and complete the criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative act is reduced to an act of selection.”
— Karl Gerstner, Designing Programmes (1963)
A normal wooden pencil
Aaron: You know that story about how NASA spent millions of dollars developing this pen that writes in Zero G? And how Russia solved the problem?
Abe: Yeah, they used a pencil.
Information remix
Effective writing stems from intelligently connecting the dots between the concepts you understand and can articulate. It stands to reason, then, that in order to generate more creativity you must not only add to a knowledge base, but deepen and expand the number of connections within the totality of the network. By establishing and explicitly mapping your knowledge, you allow yourself the freedom to remix information. You will often find that solutions come from previously unsuspected fields or topics—proving to be analogous in some shape or form.
Let the body wander
If the mind needs to wander, best let the body do the same. A short walk is more effective in coming up with an idea than pouring all the coffee in the world down your gullet.
The research agenda
Important connections are often made by accident, outside the bounds of our research agenda.
Use
I am pleading for the abolition of the word “use”, and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom.
A blue glow
The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
As something we have never seen before
A true revelation, it seems to me, will emerge only from stubborn concentration on a solitary problem. I am not in league with inventors or adventurous, nor with travelers to exotic destinations. The surest - also the quickest - way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.
Leave the road when you wish
The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well-traveled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose – if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead. That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.
If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individually chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.
From one Arte to another
New ideas would come about by a connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the uses of another, when the experience of several misteries shall fall under consideration of one mans minde.
The scale of human experience
It is the scale of human experience, from which thought and imagination take off, and to which they must return.
Memory & Fantasy
Memory and fantasy are related, as are recollection and imagination; one who cannot remember also cannot imagine, as memory is the very soil of imagination.
Flurry and lapse
"The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."
The world itself dreams
For Plato and many medieval philosophers, imagination was construed primarily as a mimetic act of mirroring, representing, copying. This approach was often associated with deceit and illusion, with confounding original realities with secondary substitutes. By contrast, for Kant and the romantics—including German idealists and existentialists like Sartre—imagination was hailed as a productive force in its own right, the source of all true meaning and value.
Bachelard resisted both extremes. For him, imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable. The world itself dreams, he said, and we help give it voice.
Babble and Prune
For those who read and listen much more than they speak (guilty), an overly-strict Prune filter is applied to their writing; when these people go to write something of their own, their minds don’t produce thoughts nearly as “coherent, witty or wise as their hyper-developed Prune filter is used to processing”.
Hence, my dilemma and an opportunity to break out of this trap. I recognised that if I attempted to write at the quality I was used to reading at, first time every time, my brain would promptly grind to a halt—like trying to brainstorm with a group that laughs at your suggestions.
Write the books you want to read
An Article by Austin KleonA few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”
It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.
Inheriting Froebel's Gifts
A Podcast by Kurt KohlstedtFroebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.
These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.
Don’t Play It Like the Flute
An Article by Matthias OttDon’t play it like the flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes.
No matter what you love to create, there is something to be learned from the way Hans Zimmer approached the Dune score. We are all striving to create work that is novel, innovative, memorable, and inspiring. To get there, however, we tend to focus on getting things right, on avoiding mistakes, on “being professional”. Yes, it is important to have the commitment, dedication, and attention to detail of a professional. But being right? That will only take you so far. What is much more important is to approach the problem in front of you with curiosity and an open mind. With an urge to explore what can be found beyond the ordinary, beyond the right way of doing things. If you want to create something that nobody has come up with yet, it is important that you try out all the crazy ideas others are afraid to try, that you build prototypes, improvise, and freely play with the materials and the technologies you have at hand.
Makers and Making
An Article by Alan JacobsThe [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”
And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.
The McDonald’s Theory of Creativity
An Article by Jon BellI use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.
An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!
It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory
An Article by Arno Rafael MinkkinenStay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.
Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.
The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.
...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.
Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.
Your vision takes off.
Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization
An Article by Brad FrostI’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.
In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked.
Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?
Input as collage
An Article by Austin KleonYour output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.
Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?
The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media.
...There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.
Touch the keys
An Article by Rach SmithIn his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.
This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.
Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.
To pick up my pen
An Article by Nick CaveThe most important undertaking of my day is to simply sit down at my desk and pick up my pen. Without this elementary act I could not call myself a songwriter, because songs come to me in intimations too slight to be perceived, unless I am primed and ready to receive them. They come not with a fanfare, but in whispers, and they come only when I am at work.
Chance favors the prepared mind
A Quote by Louis PasteurDesigner + Developer Workflow
An Article by Dan MallThe way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.
The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”
Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?
Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand
An Article by Herbert LuiIn the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:
“Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”
The right box to think inside of
A Quote by Aza RaskinDesign is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.
Enjoying the garden together
A Quote by Brian EnoAnd essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.
Hacking is the opposite of marketing
An Article by Tom MacWrightOne of my favorite definitions of “hacking” is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraft’s red bricks to create a calculator in the game.
The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan you’ll use to make omelettes, and you’ll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: it’s you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends.
Waiting around to write
A Quote by Gertrude SteinIf you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.
In defense of disorder: on career, creativity, and professionalism
An Essay by Chia AmisolaProfessionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.
Negative Creativity
An Article by Scott AlexanderComing up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.
10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki
A Documentary by Hayao MiyazakiAn exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the genius of Japan's foremost living film director, Hayao Miyazaki — creator of some of the world's most iconic and enduring anime feature films.
The Microsoft Sound
A Quote by Brian EnoThe thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Painting With the Web
An Article by Matthias OttSo much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
Early work
An Essay by Paul GrahamImagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.
The Small Group
An Article by James MulhollandLying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.
Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.
Scenius
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
You and Your Research
A Speech by Richard HammingThis talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?"
Don't think big
An Article by Ralph AmmerOne of the biggest mistakes you can make in your creative project is to pick a topic which is too big. Big topics often lead to small results, small topics foster great results.
And here is why: Your project is limited by the time and energy you have.
These are the boundaries of your project. If you pick a huge topic then there is not much room for your creative efforts. On the other hand, if you pick a small topic you have time and energy to make a great creative contribution.
The Pale King
We change them and are changed
"We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."
— Frank Bidart, Borges and I
Displacement
...the man fitted to his job like a man to the exact pocket of space he displaces.
What's wrong?
Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.
Narrative codes
The idea, as both sides' counsel worked it out, is that you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities, & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of 'Once upon a time...' or 'Far, far away, there once dwelt...' or any of the other traditional devices that signaled the reader that what was under way was fiction and should be processed accordingly. For as everyone knows, whether consciously or not, there's always a kind of unspoken contract between a book's author and its reader; and the terms of this contract always depend on certain codes and gestures that the author deploys in order to signal the reader what kind of book it is, i.e., whether it's made up vs. true. And these codes are important, because the subliminal contract for nonfiction is very different from the one for fiction.
An enormous machine
The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
Abstruse dullness
Consider, from the Service's perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it's interesting.
To hide or dissemble
Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble.
Distraction
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
The Manual
I don't believe I have anything to say that isn't in the code or Manual.
In a stare
Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involved gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intense concentration. And now I too do this.
We infantilize ourselves
Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don't understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.
Doubling
Obetrolling didn't make me self-conscious. But it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they'd taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, 'I am in this room.' It's difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it 'doubling', but I'm still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room.
Strings and clots
The walls' texture was mostly smooth, but if you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave when they're paid by the job and not the hour and thus have no motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.
More by accident
In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.
Wisdom
This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to his never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood that advice—even wise advice—actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path.
No-nonsense
Admittedly, though, however alert and aware I felt, I was probably more aware of the effects the lecture seemed to be having on me than of the lecture itself, much of which was over my head, and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute's presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or 'connecting' with the students. In other words, the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father's term 'no-nonsense', and why it was a term of approval.
The pie has been made
"In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentleman, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing."
Midwest sunset
For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun's appearance. It's just all of a sudden there.
Test anxiety
It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.
To fill in the gaps
It would be easy to impose on the office a whole welter of detail, explanation, and background that was actually gleaned only later and not part of my arrival and dazed scurrying about with the Iranian Crisis at all. Which is a quirk of temporal memory—one tends to fill in gaps with data acquired only later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord's exit through the back of the retina.
Every love story is a ghost story
What hell is
He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices.
No place it hadn't already been
He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn't already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners around him had heard it or were looking at him.
The word invents itself
Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.
Unborable
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Institutional structure
'That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn't realize, or like they couldn't realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn't a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution.'