Learning From Others

Multiple Notebooks

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I read Dorris Lessings’ The Golden Notebook decades ago.

This book is an experiment of sorts. The structure is: A main story (which can be sufficient by itself) and then four other notebooks Anna Wulf created in order to keep her sanity. Then there is the “Golden Notebook” where everything is supposed to be assembled together and should help her make more sense of her chaotic life, mental break-down, including the severe writer’s block she had.
In the basic story “Free Women” Molly and Ana(a successful novelist) are best friends, they are both divorced and have children. One of the ex-husbands has a difficult relationship with his wife and lovers.
Additionally:
-the Black Notebook is about Anna’s experience in Central Africa, during and before World War II.
-the Red Notebook is about Anna’s experience as a member of the Communist Party
-the Yellow Notebook is a novel she is writing about her failed love affair
-the Blue Notebook is Anna’s journal about her emotional and personal life. Most importantly the analysis of her dreams by her psychoanalyst. At times the dreams take over her real life.

Summary from the Multnomah County Library

The concept of having a different journal or diary for different aspects of life was appealing and stuck. Until this year, I never implemented it. It always seemed difficult enough to keep up a single journal. Over the past couple of years I’ve developed a strong habit for Morning Pages. 365 Photo Projects, and an excess of Facebook and Twitter posts. The Morning Pages and 365 Projects have enriched my life. The social media posts seem to be a black hole that do little more than be a distraction.

Because Morning Pages and 365 Projects work, this year I’ve embraced the multiple notebooks. Both sets of work embody paying attention. They include:

  • Morning Pages – ala Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way
  • Week Book – a page each Saturday about the week that just went by
  • Sketch Journal – heavily influenced by and following ideas in Lynda Barry’s Syllabus
  • Face Book – a 6×9 inch book filled with faces. Initial work using the exercises found in Andrew Loomis’ Fun with a Pencil
  • Hand (and foot) Book – goes with the Face Book and because Carlos Villa recommends one
  • Exercise Log – a page a day of what I’ve done physically. I strongly suspect I’ll be motivated to not have blank pages

I’ll update this entry in 2019 with how all the notebooks are working out.

Blood Meridian

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The subject of beautiful depiction of disturbing things rises again as I read McCarthy Cormac’s Blood Meridian.

All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of rain miles away on the prairie. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlight advanced up the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.

The novel relentless floods the reader with beautiful prose. Prose that describes a band of violent men riding murderously through Mexico and the American West. Sometimes they are mercenaries. Mostly they are a swarming pack of malevolence.

If you’ve read The Road you have an idea of what this book is like. However, Blood Meridian makes The Road seem hopeful and cheerful.

How are your savings?

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Pondering American’s net savings, in essence how much wealth households have accumunated, might lead you to this article from TheBalance.com, a finance site with the slogan “make money personal.”US Census Bureau household wealth

This should be an easy example to take your own advice and save. It’s what will make retirement possible. Or if you save enough it will enable an employment optional life.

Monkey Grip

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In (this excellent read) Teaching Spoon Fed Students How To Really Read is a reference to Monkey Grip a 1977 novel from Australian Helen Garner. In the article author INSErT NAME writes:

The second thing that struck me was how difficult my students found the 10-page extract. They didn’t know who Helen Garner was, the 1970s were too far away to mean anything to them, and they couldn’t locate themselves in the story. They didn’t know who was speaking, and who she was speaking to. How old was she, where was she, what was happening?

Here is the book’s opening sentence:

In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives.

That sentence, and the description of a 10-page excerpt being difficult, led me to get a copy.

It is a difficult and rewarding read. If you require a plot in your novels, stay away. If you are comfortable with an undulating narrative about Melbourne life in the 1970s, enduring love, and life with a junkie take a look.

My highlighted passages include:

My ears were full of confusion and the sea thumping.

The hoses flick silver strings on to the drying grass.

Terminal naivety was my disease.

Lillian, blight on my life. She broke into it, once, years ago, before any of us had heard of sisterhood; she looked round to see what she could take, sampled Lou and quickly put him back on the shelf, saw the weightiness of Jack and decided to take him with her. And did. And that was the end of everything, between him and me. She had it, the knack of engulfing, of making sharing impossible.

There was some shadow in his face, a strangeness across the narrow cheek-bones, a self-consciousness about the wide thin mouth, that might have sounded a warning had loneliness not echoed more loudly in my ears.

But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I’m left out.

Creative Learning

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I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here. William Gibson

Find that via his website (not found anymore…) or Serendipity35

Ira Glass advice to creatives

Robert Roriguez in 10 Minute Film School says “You want to be a film maker? Wrong. You are a film maker.” “You’ll learn more by picking up a camera and making your own mistakes.”

Or consider this, from David Bayles and Ted Orlund.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
David Bayles and Ted Orlund, Art & Fear

To learn: Do. The rest will follow.

Think not? Consider this advice JK Rowling wishes she’d been given.

WARNING: quote what you link. The internet if ephemeral.