7/31/2021
Bedtime drawing, some newsletters, lucid dreaming, walking, migrating, Las Cholitas (climbing), Kleon & Carey (writers who draw) . . .
ART
I’ve been looking at ways to counter social media’s mind-sucking influence. For example, I’m going to take a break from Twitter, starting next week. In order to resist my tendency to scroll through social media before sleep—and sometimes even first thing in the morning upon waking—I’ve started keeping a sketchbook and pens next to the bed, so I can make ink drawings and doodles (to music, usually from one of my favorite sites, MyNoise.net). Thus, I “book-end” my sleep period with drawing and music. Nice, huh?
My partner also introduced me to the Internet Archive’s treasure trove of sound, the Audio Archive (you can search by genre), so I’m sure those sounds will also influence future drawings. This drawing strategy is working well, and I don’t go to bed with my head full of the usual catastrophe and angry tweets. Here are a few of those drawings:
I do wonder how this (combined with music) is going to affect my dreams, and vice versa—especially since I’ve been a pretty active lucid dreamer. That started by accident when I was in my twenties. Long story. If there’s any interest out there on this topic, maybe I’ll write about it in a future newsletter. If you’re interested in learning about lucid dreaming, there’s a lot of information out there, some of it silly, some of it useful. A good place to start is Stephen LaBerge’s research at Stanford.
NEWSLETTERS
I’m coming to appreciate breadth and depth of various newsletters that I encounter on Substack (or even its competitor—Revue). I enjoy the thought that writers put into their posts, and love the learning process that comes through reading more long-form writing, as opposed to the emotive bleeps and blurts of Twitter. The following are a few newsletters I’ve been checking out recently:
Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study
LindaLay is a local artist whose life and clothing is vibrant with bright color, sound, and movement. Check out LindaLay’s Newsletter and art website.
Edmund Lee’s Cleverly Painted Mules. Lee is a reporter for the New York Times, and he writes some interesting and thoughtful articles about the Asian American experience:
Sam Roberts’ newsletter is Ghost Signs: Words on Walls. And indeed, there are many signs, ghost words, and haunted walls in this newsletter. It’s kind of a niche thing…
ART TOOL?
I’m giving the art tool history section a break right now; I realized that it can become a “rabbit hole” of historic information. In other words, once I start writing about some aspect of this huge topic, be it pencils, graphite, erasers, ink, etc., it can be difficult to put on the brakes, and I start researching and writing for hours. So I need to give more thought to how I want to approach this.
SIX
We now approach the second wave of Covid-19—The Delta Variant. And we realize that we may be dealing with this for some time. These situations, whether they demand lockdown or just more vigilance, always seem to make me think, perhaps a bit obsessively, about mobility, walking, hiking, traveling, bike-riding, and migration—juxtaposed with ideas of “home” and “healing.” It’s reflected in the links I chose today:
1. Whether it’s wrestling, climbing mountains, or giving birth, Bolivia’s Cholitas redefine what it means to be female and indigenous.
Las Cholitas Summit Mount Aconcagua (lovely video):
2. Aube Rey Lescure: At the Bend of the Road. A tale of pilgrimage and PTSD. In Guernica Mag:
3. Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Urgessa’s first solo show in Italy addresses his and his family’s experiences of migration.
4. Guadalupe Maravilla on migration, trauma, and the sound of healing (Art21):
5. Jessica Gianelli: Photography as a means of connection and introspection
6. Austin Kleon and Edward Carey talk about writers who draw (yes!), being fathers and raising children, and the creative process:
OK, now this is making me think that I’d like to make my next chapbook something that includes by writing and art. That chapbook will be published by Old Capitol Books in Monterey (where, btw, I’ll be doing a poetry reading on Oct. 1st).
That’s it for this issue. By next Saturday, I will be Tweetless. Have a great week . . . I’d love to read any comments or ideas for future issues.
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