“You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion. More on this in the next few bullets.” —
What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? - Quora via kottke
I think this is equally true of artists, and is related to what Keats called negative capability:
when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
When you are a artist of any stripe (I am reliably annoyed by the word “creative”—or maybe just the people that use it; ditto “maker”), you spend so much time between the much glorified inception of a project and the much lauded finish. It’s mostly middle, and middle is muddle, and you have to accept that. You have to accept that you live with a certain level of mess all the time.
There are useful and not-useful kinds of regimentation in an artist’s life. The useful kind (and the kind I have the hardest time with) is routine: you must return, every day, to the blank page, undeterred by whatever terrors or frustrations you found there yesterday.
The not-useful kind is a sort of interior, conceptual regimentation, which manifests itself as a kind of knowingness: “Oh yes, I’ve seen this before.” The longer you are able to live with the (perhaps delusional) belief that this could be something new, the greater your chance that it actually is new.
via dooce
Gottfried Leibniz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Just awful.
And, clearly, not the best of all possible wigs.
Am I crazy, or does Leibniz look just like Leo Laporte?
(via PostSecret: Sunday Secrets)
[video]
[video]
This is what the Google results for “english literature graduate school programs” should be.
If Google Search Results Had A Sense Of Humor | someecards.com
Photo Opportunities : Corinne Vionnet (via kottke.org)
From the LA Weekly, it’s the “Top 10 Amateur Teenage Girls Playing The Runaways’ ‘Cherry Bomb’ in their Bedrooms.”
“According to an alarming new study released Monday by the University of Chicago, children raised in households where alcoholism is present are at a significantly greater risk of writing and performing a one-man show than those who grow up in a more stable environment. The study found that males raised by alcoholic parents are 40 percent more likely to someday force their friends to attend a self-penned theatrical production about their life experiences, and the same painful behavior is eight times more prevalent in women over the age of 30 who have alcoholic fathers than those who do not.… A report released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that alcoholism is the third leading contributor to one-man shows, outpacing having immigrant parents, surviving cancer, and having an ex-girlfriend.” — The Onion via Playgoer