Advice on Life, Creativity, and Making Meaning, from the Creator of Calvin and Hobbes

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not as well-versed in the iconic comic Calvin and Hobbes as I should be. What little I've seen of it has moved me, and I mean to read more, truly. Bill Watterson is a rare talent. And he gives some pretty inspiring advice, too, both for creatives and for everyone else:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3027095/4-tips-on-creativity-from-the-creator-of-calvin-hobbes

The four maxims Watterson presents are by no means comprehensive, but they do form a solid foundation for a creative life. And, even though it's clear from context that he uses "creative" to mean "artistic," I believe his advice holds true for any field involving passion and productivity, which is most of them.

Essentially, it boils down to: "Do something you love (no field is too small or esoteric), stay true to your vision, and give it 110%." Sensible for anyone, but especially for creatives who face a long, risky, uphill battle with no surety of success and with little but their own belief to light their way. It's true of artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators of all stripes -- one hopes to have the cultural impact Watterson did.

And then there's this, which was illustrated by Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/27/bill_watterson_s_cartoonist_s_advice_in_comic_form_by_zen_pencils_aka_gavin.html

In its narrowest reading, this graphic interpretation of Watterson's words vindicates stay-at-home parenting -- for either gender. While challenging normative views of masculinity and patriarchy is daring and important, it isn't quite innovative today. Rather, the broader readings of this comic are more interesting: in a society where status -- as defined by a widely accepted slate of value judgments -- is in part determined by income and prestige of employment, Watterson and Than assert that one can viably choose not to take part in that hierarchy (or at least, choose to ignore it). If your idea of meaning and fulfillment cannot be met within the traditional system, it's legitimate to create your own. You shouldn't let society influence or shame you into pursuing a traditional path towards conventional markers of success.

It's an almost Thoreauvian way of living -- not necessarily the most practical or accessible, but a worthy goal nonetheless.

Cover-a-Week #22: "One Tin Soldier" by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter

This week's ukulele video, a tribute to the 60s:


http://youtu.be/xorad7fLzkA

I've always thought this a rather wistful piece. I hope you all like it!

Cover-a-Week #20: "City Hall" by Vienna Teng

In celebration of the recent Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, United States v. Windsor:


http://youtu.be/lkrvnkgKTu0

The song was originally written about the 2004 same-sex marriage initiative in San Francisco, but it's just as relevant today; it commemorates the victory of love, justice, and human dignity over the prejudices of a shrinking minority.

Also, Oscar Wilde's two pence: http://www.gocomics.com/thenewadventuresofqueenvictoria/2013/06/27

Cover-a-Week #16: "Lullaby for a Stormy Night" by Vienna Teng

This one's for Mother's Day.


http://youtu.be/w9AL7-pdOCA

I can imagine playing this for a small child on a dark and stormy night...

Cover-a-Week #15: "Scarborough Fair" (traditional)

For May Day (a week ago, yes), I thought I'd dial a few centuries back in time and play a seasonally appropriate song from 1600s England:


http://youtu.be/O8BnL41eN08

It was originally written as a duet, consisting of two lovers making impossible demands of each other (in the true spirit of courtly love!). Since it would probably sound a bit schizophrenic with a single vocalist -- not to mention, that version is twice as long -- I've cut a few verses.

This would be a great song to waltz to, I think.

Girls Who Read

A moving, thought-provoking pair of essays on literature and love:
"You Should Date an Illiterate Girl"--
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/dont-date-a-girl-who-reads/
"Date a Girl Who Reads"--
http://littlemissdorkette.tumblr.com/post/3118512524/date-a-girl-who-reads-by-rosemarie-urquico
(Read these first, if only for context. I don't completely agree with them -- the bit about lying, for instance -- but I share the general sentiment, quite deeply.)

I don't think I could love someone who doesn't appreciate books. Words are love; words are life (and livelihood -- I'm in publishing, after all). Literature lends one's love the richness of a thousand loves, imbues one's life with the joys and sorrows of a thousand lives. There is a reason why love poems have lost none of their power over the centuries, why stories continue to move readers to tears and laughter. There is a reason why books still burn. They are dangerous -- and so is love.

I want to live life gloriously, in many colours, with as much passion and splendor as any of the heroes of story and myth. Yes, introduce me to books I haven't yet read, places I haven't yet seen, words I can't yet wrap my tongue around, and I will do the same for you. I don't mind sharing a bed with lords and ladies, Victorian gentlemen in morning coats, bonneted midwives, princesses, admirals, magicians, demons, lovers. They're the distant cousins whose faded features we see etched in black and white, whose stories we know through irregular letters, whose children we have never kissed but love already. When we close our books and turn off the lights, they recede into our minds again, a trick that flesh-and-blood house-guests never seem to have mastered. And yes, when they make me cry, hold me. This, too, shall pass.

I want to die without regrets, or failing that, I want to die regretting only what I have done, rather than what I never did. I want to die having learned something new every day of my life. I want to die doing something I love, something I've never done before, or perhaps something I've enjoyed doing every day, every week, with the people I love most in the world. I want to die between the pages of a book, or in the arms of a loved one, or perhaps both at once. It's possible. With the right book, and the right person, they are much the same, after all.

I believe it's possible. Do you?

Love Stories, State by State

In celebration of St. Valentine's Day, Amazon posted this fun list of love stories set in each of the fifty states:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_369934762_43?ie=UTF8&docId=1000990781&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=086299APP4PDE6PV437H&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_p=1479457942&pf_rd_i=1000990781#TN

I'm so pleased that they picked John Green's The Fault in Our Stars for Indiana -- it's a lovely, heartbreaking book. For West Virginia, though, I would have chosen Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam (it was subsequently adapted into film as October Sky), which they list as an alternate. There are so many good books on the list that I haven't yet read -- Gone with the Wind (Georgia), for example, is a classic that I feel I ought to have read a long time ago.

Here's to a love- and literature-filled Valentine's Day!

NYTimes: A Religious Perspective on the Newtown Massacre

I have, on occasion, made my views on religion known to readers of this blog. (I don't think religion and politics should be taboo topics of conversation, so long as disagreements are civil and rational.) I consider myself secularly spiritual.  I personally think of religion as a blend of mythology and morality, but I have great respect for religious people who live by the true tenets of their creed (which I don't think include holy wars, persecution of minorities, or evangelism), and I believe that the hearts of most religions are benevolent and peace-loving. I appreciate the value of the moral guidance and comfort that religion can bring to believers in difficult times. This is an example of such:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/opinion/dowd-why-god.html?hp&_r=0&gwh=02A7DB3DBD76598A7F25B51569ED6491

This man reminds me of Victor Hugo's Bishop of Digne, one of the first and finest examples of religious men I'd encountered.

Merry Christmas.

Abstruse Goose: In Cabin'd Ships at Sea

Whitman in the modern age (courtesy of Brett):

http://abstrusegoose.com/477
(You may have to click on the image to make the font a more legible size.)

It frustrates me to no end when people claim that poetry written long ago is irrelevant to life today. Part of the appeal of literature is its timelessness -- that while the specific time and place depicted might be past, human nature has not changed over the centuries. (I maintain that the Oedipus Cycle is one of the original family dramas. Would anything that messed up air on modern television? (Wait, A Game of Thrones is now on HBO. I take that back.))

Seriously, if you think poetry is outdated, quote your girlfriend some Yeats or Neruda or Shakespeare. Or, if you have a boyfriend, some Anne Bradstreet or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Candy Heart

This is wonderful:

http://scienceroll.com/2007/11/26/anatomical-heart-made-from-candy-hearts/

It's a model heart made from (if you can't tell from the picture) those candy hearts with the pink messages on them.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that this would make a really cute St. Valentine's Day present (especially in the case of broke college students)? (Of course, there's the question of what to do with such an object. If it were made of entirely edible materials, I suppose one could eat it.)

Edit: And here's how to actually make something along these lines (especially with regard to preservation of the specimen) -- http://makeprojects.com/Project/How-to-Preserve-a-Candy-Portrait/395/1#.T9cQ6uLMAys

The Oven Bird (by Robert Frost)

I'm taking a Poetry and Poetics course this quarter, and I just finished writing a paper on this particular Frost poem. I'd never read it before this class, but I've come to really like it. (That's the funny thing about papers/assignments; by the end, you come to either love or hate whatever it is you've been working on.) Anyhow, I thought I'd share:

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost (1916)

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Frost, here, is lamenting the end of an era, which I thought was eminently appropriate to our impending graduation. (Does putting it in writing make it real?) Perhaps that's why the poem resonated with me so, more so than it might have at another point in my life. I know well that Frost is writing about being a middle-aged poet, thinking he's past his prime or being eclipsed by the younger generation of more experimental contemporary poets, but it's a similar sentiment. There's this sinking feeling that accompanies the idea of leaving the Stanford bubble, of being a continent away from the people I've come to know and love. It does feel like the best few years of my life might be slipping through my fingers -- though of course, I hope I'll do greater things with myself in future. I have regrets, I have anxieties, and I have the deep-seated, overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a passing age that Frost portrays so well in "The Oven Bird."

St. Valentine's Day Cards from the Seven Kingdoms

This was on George R. R. Martin's blog, and just in time for St. Valentine's:

http://blog.chrisbishop.com/post/17554357179/game-of-thrones-valentine-cards

I thought they were particularly clever. If I had a decent color printer around here, I'd print them out for my fellow A Song of Ice and Fire enthusiasts. :D

Happy National Hug Day!

Yes, it's that time of the year. So go hug someone -- a friend, a family member, a random stranger who might need a hug. Spread the love and increase the total happiness level in the world!

NYTimes: New York Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage!

Happened just yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/nyregion/gay-marriage-approved-by-new-york-senate.html

Needless to say, it's a triumph for my home state. I'm still a little shocked that it happened in New York before it did in California (that Prop. 8 fiasco, and all). But mostly, I'm proud. I'm proud that after the long, hard-fought struggle, they -- we, the people -- made it happen.

A brief history of said struggle: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/nyregion/the-road-to-gay-marriage-in-new-york.html?ref=global-home

I have to hand it to the governor, to those Republicans who voted in favor of the bill despite their party line, to the Democrats (all but one), to the donors and organizers and everyone who worked so hard for the dreams and natural rights of a downtrodden minority. I wish I were here, then. But that's small potatoes.

Sarah's Miscellany: A Year in Reflection

Happy May Day.

It has been a year since I first started this blog. I've learned a lot in the preceding 342 posts (That's almost a post per day!), even though quite a lot of them have been random, spur-of-the-moment amusements and trifles (there are 103 posts tagged "humor" to date -- that's nearly a third).

I've learned a lot about myself this year. I've gained a sense of direction, methinks: I've figured out some of what I want, which is rather better than the self-knowledge I had a year ago, when I only knew, mostly, what I didn't want. I have a better grasp, now, of who I am and who I wish to be, rather than living daily in the shadow of the person whom others thought I should be. Part of it comes of articulating (some of) my views publicly, in a venue anyone can access. (Part of it, of course, comes of being in college.)

Thank you, friends, for reading, commenting, and being part of the process. You are wonderful, and I couldn't have done this without you.

BBC: Royal Roses Planted at Windsor Great Park

It seems like everyone is terribly excited about the upcoming nuptials of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. (I can see how it's exciting, even though the British monarchy has no real power anymore.) Related to the hoopla, I found an article on an interesting botanical tradition behind royal weddings:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-13152315

The Catherine rose is quite pretty, though I think the breed name really isn't quite distinctive enough. There have been so many British princesses and queens named Catherine (Henry VIII alone had two wives of that name) that I don't think, in a few decades, anyone will remember that this rose was named for this particular Catherine. (The Royal William rose, methinks, is only slightly less drably named.)

Nonetheless, it seems like a particularly beautiful thing to have a rose named after you. In this case, it's within the dictates of royal tradition, but I imagine that, for a botanist, to name a rose after someone she loved would be much like writing him a love letter or buying him a ring, only orders of magnitude greater -- like an astronomer naming a star for someone.

NYTimes: The City

An ode to my hometown, or rather, an analysis of its continued prominence in the collective consciousness:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/opinion/08judt.html?src=me&ref=general

I've always known that I wanted to come back to New York -- that wherever I went, for school or work or pleasure, I would never find a place that quite compared. Where else would you find world-class museums, a fantastic theatre scene, an equally fantastic classical music scene, Broadway, and just about every major culture and language on earth (and some not-so-major ones too) -- not to mention that it's the hub of so many different industries, one of which is the publishing industry. It's a bittersweet fate, I must admit -- I have made some fast friends here at Stanford, and I'm not looking forward to the day I graduate and leave them all. (Most of them are computer scientists, and likely to remain in Silicon Valley.) And yet, it's a homecoming.

The magic of the City, methinks, is that it's secure in its brilliant, often-conflicting identity. New York has never sought to prove anything, never tried to claim any dubious superlatives, never really defined itself, or attempted to. The best analogy I can think of would be classical Rome -- the center of the world in its day, comfortable subsuming other cultures, or coexisting with them, or ignoring them, as was expedient. It required assimilation, but only to a point. So long as Roman subjects accepted its legal and political jurisdiction, so long as they also adopted aspects of Roman identity, they were allowed to retain their own languages, customs, and beliefs. They were, within a generation or two, accorded the rights of a citizen of Rome. Rome did not fear its immigrants, did not shun the unusual or the foreign, but kept them all until they became no longer quite so strange. And this is how Rome endured for centuries as the foremost city in the (known) world. And so, too, does New York.

One Art (by Elizabeth Bishop)

I haven't posted any poetry in much too long. Here's a villanelle (a famous and much admired one) for your consideration:

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop (1979)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The beauty of this poem lies not only in its masterful use of a difficult form (the villanelle is really hard to do well; I've tried), but also the interplay of its text and subtext. I'll leave that for you to admire and figure out. ;-)

Music Video for Vienna Teng's "Gravity", and the Making Thereof

Despite it being the weekend before finals, I spontaneously went to a concert yesterday. I think I was justified; I had just finished two papers, my first final isn't until Wednesday, and it was Vienna Teng. I've mentioned her here before. One of my all-time favorite musicians, and one of the few "modern" musicians whom I really love.

Anyhow, she has one music video (that I know of, at least, but I checked), for her song "Gravity", and it's beautiful -- too beautiful not to share, so here it is:



And then, I found this (the making of the "Gravity" video):



Enjoy!

Sonnet 130 (by William Shakespeare)

I haven't posted any poetry in a while, so here's some more Shakespeare. This is another one of my all-time favorite sonnets:

The 1609 Quarto Version

My Miſtres eyes are nothing like the Sunne,
Currall is farre more red, then her lips red,
If ſnow be white, why then her breſts are dun:
If haires be wiers, black wiers grow on her head:
I haue ſeene Roſes damaskt, red and white,
But no ſuch Roſes ſee I in her cheekes,
And in ſome perfumes is there more delight,
Then in the breath that from my Miſtres reekes.
I loue to heare her ſpeake,yet well I know,
That Muſicke hath a farre  more pleaſing found:
I graunt I neuer ſaw a goddeſſe goe,
My Miſtres when ſhee walkes treads on the ground.
    And yet by heauen I thinke my loue as rare,
    As any ſhe beli'd with falſe compare.

And a modernized version, with the typesetting and spelling "cleaned up" a bit:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

At first glance, it reads as though the Bard is complaining about his mistress's rather plain looks -- but upon closer inspection, the poem is really about love in spite of, or in acknowledgment of, one's beloved's flaws. It's about love as acceptance of all of another person, not just the appealing parts. Everyone has a dark side, however small or non-apparent. Love that embraces that dark side is love with eyes wide open, a truer love than the rose-tinted infatuation that poets are so inclined to extol. Such is a love I would wish for myself.