pantagruel

tortoise enclosure

John Cleese on creativity:

I like Cleese's metaphor of making a 'tortoise enclosure' to give creativity a safe space to emerge, which I wish more people understood. So I'm going to get on my soapbox about it.

Creating and maintaining a boundary of deliberate down time is difficult to do in a traditional workplace. I make a point of not answering the phone when I need a mental break, but there's fallout from that. People either get bent out of shape that I'm not immediately available to answer their call, or disguise their annoyance by breathlessly asking if I'm alright. Because I might just have been abducted by masked Tibetan throat-singers and whisked off to the icy mountains, where I will be forced to drink yak-butter tea for the rest of my days, all because I didn't answer my phone for a few hours. Or respond to my text messages. Or be online and visible via instant messenger.

There are some artists who can produce work that has discernible stages: you can see the start, the middle, the end, and the finished piece at any of its stages, and recognize it as work in progress. These are the designers and artists of the world who make control-freak clients very happy. At any point, the client can ask to see the work, and will be thrilled to be shown something that looks like a design or an illustration. Their creative process is methodical, workmanlike, and probably looks very professional from the outside. It has steps! Stages! You could use a Gantt chart to track their creativity! Those artists sit down at their desks and eagerly churn out product, don't mind being asked for updates, cope well with interruptions, and make any client who likes project management very happy. Their creative process is a mystery to me, but I suspect it involves a bullet list, outlines, and perhaps spreadsheets.

I am not one of those artists. My creative process:

Get given a project

Long stretch of apparently no work

Snarl at people who interrupt my thinking

Blindingly fast making-of-stuff

Show finished project to client

You see the problem, I'm sure. My creative process, from the outside, pretty much looks like nothing, for most of the time that I'm working on something. Until someone gets used to working with me, it can be rough on them if they're not a kindred spirit. My process can make a methodical person's head explode from frustration that I am not doing things the way they would; which is to say, The One True Way to Do Things.

For a long time, I felt badly for not being a methodical artist. Being methodical is seen as the path of the righteous: working hard, being diligent, a good student, a good worker. Working the way I do, on the other hand, smacks of procrastination, laziness, doing nothing, and not taking assignments seriously. Just last week, as I was leaving for the day, I waited for the elevator with some coworkers from departments that are seriously left-brained and methodical. One of them teased me about how much 'nothing' I do all day… not realizing that my workload is about five times what theirs is. But I kept my mouth shut, because a minute-long elevator ride is not the time to get into it. Incidents like that, driven by the assumption that I do 'nothing,' have plagued me throughout my academic and professional life.

Rands describes this nagging feeling over at Rands in Repose:

Up To Nothing

Go back to work and think about your average day. How often are you not clear what you're doing? How often is the goal of the next 30 minutes completely undefined? Yes, you've suffered through meetings where there was no clear agenda and you felt like you were wasting your time, but that's still a known quantity -- I'm currently in the poorly run meeting scenario. Been there, done that.

What happens when there is no meeting, no burning task, no one in your office? You wander, you surf the web, you stare at that calendar on the wall and think, "Why do we have leap years again? I forget." And then you feel bad. I should be working. I should be doing something. They're not paying me to reverse engineer leap years. I have things to do.

You've built this guilt into your office. It's why your screen is not facing folks who walk through your door. You're worried: "They might see me doing nothing".

You're not up to nothing. You're aimlessly mentally wandering -- an act made famous by every bright idea ever had in the shower.

It's taken me decades to accept that trying to work in The One True Way to Do Things makes me miserable, unhappy, and results in subpar work. I simply cannot start making something until I can see it clearly in my head. That goes for writing, design, or art: unless I've thought out each aspect, I can't make it happen on the page, screen or canvas.

Now, let me be clear: working this way is not procrastination. I have deadlines; I plan out how much time each project will take; and I deliberately allow time to think about a project when I give an estimate of how long it will take me to finish it. It's also not a way to overlook the importance of craftsmanship and practice: if you think you're so talented that you don't need to regularly practice your skills, you're deluding yourself. It's setting aside time for decompressing and letting my brain be creative. It's building John Cleese's tortoise enclosure.

smiting

"But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and king. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him."

Oh yes, there was smiting. I make a very bad enemy. Now for some Schadenfreude Pie!

smackdown, the female of the species, smiting

the female of the species

I have two things to say today. This from Tolkien:

But always I have let my horn cry at setting forth, and though thereafter we may walk in the shadows, I will not go forth as a thief in the night.

And this from Kipling:

The Female of the Species

WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations—worm and savage otherwise,—
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger—Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue—to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish—like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice—which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

---

Cryptic, yes. But if you know, you know. If you don't, you will soon.

poetry, riposte, the female of the species

sitzarbeit

Every morning that I'm in the office, I make coffee, then settle down to catch up on the news. I churn through my Saltmine U email, turning the flood of emails I get from 4 pm - 6 am into items on my to-do list. On sunny mornings, I watch the sun hit the Getty Museum on the hill across from my office. It almost makes up for being at my desk by 6 o'clock. I'm not a morning person at all; it takes an immense amount of willpower for me to get up at 4:35 a.m., and get my butt in my office chair by 6.

Sitzarbeit is a great word. Not only does it mean sedentary work, but it also means 'the effort it takes to keep your ass in the chair and working.'
I read about 100 RSS feeds every morning in the time it takes to finish my first cup of coffee, before my minion gets into the office. I don't understand why anyone would want to sit through a barrage of useless 'news' during the dreck that passes for television journalism in the mornings, these days -- why put up with all the segments on celebrities' latest liasions, when you can read exactly what you want to know more about in the world? Madness.

In the morning's news gazette was an apropos article in AIGA's blog: "Embrace the Strain," by Andrew Twigg.

Fewer resources, limited time, slashed budgets, rising costs. These restrictions require we work faster/harder/smarter to deliver the same results as before the economy collapsed in 2008 and ever since, while it’s struggled to gain traction. Add to that the competition of “name your price” logo operations and so many websites soliciting spec work, and the idea of delivering successful work while still managing to pay the bills can be daunting—and even a bit depressing. … Since 2008, I have heard many designers bemoan limited budgets, clients who hire the owner’s cousin’s teenage daughter to build their website, clients who opt for a pre-designed logo purchased anonymously online, or timelines that are unrealistic (“I know it’s Thursday, but can you have a 16-page brochure released to print on Monday?”). But these are the same kinds of challenges we’ve faced as designers for as long as there has been design. Even as close friends are laid off or design firms close up shop, the same challenge applies: Make do with what you have. There is no other option.

I imagine Twigg intended that to be inspiring, but it hits too close to home. Fewer resources? Check. Limited time? Check. Slashed budgets? Rising costs? Check. In the last couple of months, my client base has doubled because of a division merger. As a result, my group's workload has shot through the roof, as we rebrand… oh… everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything from technicians' trucks to fax cover sheets to service level agreements, not just the website and logos.

As a result, there's an awful lot of sitzarbeit lately. Which is killing me, according to this infographic:
<a href="http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/sitting-kills"><img src="http://images.medicalbillingandcoding.org.s3.amazonaws.com/sitting-is-killing-you.jpg" alt="Sitting is Killing You" width="500" border="0" /></a><br />Via: <a href="http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org">Medical Billing And Coding</a>

Perhaps a standing desk is in order. Or a treadputer.

blah, design, designing, Saltmine U, work, sitting, sitzarbeit

no wonder

My commute involves the third, fifth, and sixteenth most congested traffic corridors in the country.

This explains so much.

cars, traffic