It’s hard to admit that I love to be “creative” when the word sounds like something from Pinterest or a corporate leadership workshop. It’s practically become a professional label in corporate America — you can call someone a “creative” if they do anything that involves freelance work, and can call anyone a “creator” who has posted a monetized social media post. That’s how that works, right?
Instead, I like to use the word in a deeply earnest way. I like making stuff with my friends. I want it to feel fun and natural. Here’s some of what I’ve read on the topic of creativity.
The Artist’s Way: Technically, I wasn’t supposed to consume anything this week, since I’ve been on Week 4 of the Artist’s Way. The practice (and the book that accompanies it) was founded by a screenwriter and artist named Julia Cameron. The book is truly, to quote the NYT article reviewing it, the least cringe and the most gentle self help book you’ll ever find. It’s deeply sweet and sincere. As a result, all of my recommendations are actually things I read *last* week. Go figure.
Starting Point: 1979-1996: The biography of Hayao Miyazaki, from his earliest years. He describes the feeling he wants his movies to create as “nostalgia for a lost world.” I loved this quote: “I often refer to this feeling as one of yearning for a lost world. It’s a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it’s this feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about animation.”
The Idea Factory: The story of Bell Labs, an incredible place for creativity and taking one’s vision from the invention (the telephone!) all the way to the outcome for the world (everyone is connected in a usable way!) Did you know that Bell Labs invented the telephone, the radio, the radar, the nuclear reactor, the transistor, the satellite, the solar battery, the wireless phone and Unix? A quote I liked: “The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct.”
The Origins of Creativity: A beautiful Louis Menand piece on creativity, which included the fact that…creativity was invented post-WW2? Franklin thinks that “creativity” is a concept invented in Cold War America—that is, in the twenty or so years after 1945. Before that, he says, the term barely existed. “Create” and “creation,” of course, are old words (not to mention, as Franklin, oddly, does not, “Creator” and “Creation”). But “creativity,” as the name for a personal attribute or a mental faculty, is a recent phenomenon.
Rewatching the movie “Burning”: A film by Lee Chang-dong based on a Murakami short story which is in turn based on a Faulkner story. There are such nuanced layers. Maybe the best movie I have seen, and so inspirational for creativity. It’s an excellent example of how others’ work can inspire you. An excerpt from the director: When I read Murakami’s story, what really interested me was how it follows a singular mysterious event, manages to maintain that sense of ambiguity throughout the entire story and then ends without being resolved. I wanted to expand this mystery through cinematic means into a commentary on the mysteries of the times we are living through, and how ambiguous our lives actually are. I had read Faulkner’s story long before. Faulkner’s story is about this man who has a very clear, unambiguous subject that gives him this sense of rage, and it’s told from the perspective of his son, who sort of watches his father’s rage unfold. I thought precisely because these two stories are very different, I could connect them into a film. Ultimately, I wanted the combination of these two stories to discuss the ambiguities of the world we live in and how there seems to be no answer to the questions that we have today — especially for young people. I feel like young people these days have realized that there’s something wrong in this world, but it’s very difficult to figure out exactly what is causing the problems and what lies underneath.
Creativity, Inc: The classic! Adding it here so that anyone who hasn’t heard of it can pick it up. It’s the tale of how Pixar was run internally, and includes gems for people who manage creative teams.
What’s the price of a childhood lost to content?: Back to “creators” instead of creativity! My main argument with one of my friends is about child influencers — do we think that they’re cute (and watch the baby video?) or do we shun them altogether because we’re participating in exploitation? A quote: “As a former content kid myself, I know what it’s like to grow up with a digital footprint I never asked for,” Barrett told the Maryland House of Delegates Economic Matters Committee in February. “As my mom posted to the world my first-ever menstrual cycle, as she posted to the world the intimate details about me being adopted, her platform grew and I had no say in what was posted.”
Online discourse hasn’t gotten worse: And speaking of, a new study in Nature challenges the assumption that online discourse is bad and getting worse. A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more "toxic" today than it was in the early 1990s.
The Poetic Web: Have you heard of the poetic web? If you use are.na, you might have. It’s a “movement of small, handcrafted websites and online communities that imagine other, quieter, weirder modes of digital existence.” Here’s an example. It’s very “I went to art school, live in Brooklyn, and listen to bands you don’t know” vibes.
Help, my husband is trashing my book on GoodReads!: Unmitigated chaos. I’ve been thinking about power couples lately — what happens when both people want to succeed and be creative? — and know that the default mode seems to be that couples writhe in jealousy as one person’s career outstrips the other’s. This seems like the perfect example of the worst possible outcome?!