August moon (photos)

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

I am still figuring out how to use my camera, but I’m happy with these two pictures I took last night.  Hasn’t the full moon been beautiful the past few evenings? 

The photo above was the first I took, when the moon still had that reddish-yellow color.  Then I fooled around with the camera settings and took the second photo, below, a couple minutes later.  By then the moon had risen higher and had lost its color.

In watching the Olympics on television the other night, I saw the beautiful full moon in the London sky atop the Tower Bridge.  It still amazes me that the moon over London is the same moon I see here in Milwaukee. 

The world is so big, yet so small and interconnected at the same time.

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Going for Olympic gold . . . in art!

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

It was once possible to get an Olympic medal for art, according to an article in The Atlantic this week.  From 1912 -1948, gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded in five categories of art: architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music.

Actually, these modern Olympic competitions were surely inspired by the original Olympiads of ancient Greece.  In addition to exercies like running, leaping, wrestling, boxing, and throwing the javelin, the games also included contests in “music, poetry, and eloquence,” according to my old friend, Bulfinch’s Mythology (Chapter XX, “Olympic and Other Games”).

The arts were, in fact, so esteemed in ancient Greece that poets were privileged to reside alongside gods, warriors, and holy priests in the Elysian Fields, that most upscale of all neighborhoods in Hades.  (You can tell a lot about a culture’s values by how their afterlife is depicted.)

So why were the Olympic arts competitions done away with?  The Atlantic article cites the clash between the Olympics’ amateurs-only participation requirement and the fact that practically all of the arts entrants were professionals.  Beginning with the 1956 Games, the arts have instead been showcased in a Cultural Olympiad that runs roughly at the same time as the Olympic Games.

The London 2012 Festival began June 21st and extends through September 9th.

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Learning without teachers: “The Doubting Game” versus “The Believing Game”

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Back in the early 1970s, the college writing classroom was a touchy-feely environment, occasionally subject to instruction through experiential events called “happenings,” which were basically instances of hippie-era performance art.

In a “happening,” students engaged in random, unorganized activities like flicking the classroom lights on and off, tapping on a desk with a pencil, marching around the room, or maybe opening a window and repeatedly shouting out a word or phrase.  The idea was to disorient students and make them freshly aware of their surroundings – so that in writing about the experience, they would use language with an organic connection to reality instead of the distance (and emptiness) created by the usual freshman composition clichés.

Although such an exercise may seem ridiculous today, those teachers may actually have been on to something.  After all, every cliché was once fresh.  An expression becomes clichéd only as it loses contextual immediacy and assumes a new function as cultural shorthand.

How often, for example, have I seen the phrase “a hard road to hoe” in the writing of students who have never hoed a row in a garden and have no idea what the original expression means?  Yet, despite the spelling error, they DO understand the meaning of the cliché itself because they have heard it in context so many times.  “A hard row/road to hoe” has a meaning that transcends its meaning . . . sort of a “meta”-meaning, you might say, that indicates something similar to but different from its literal meaning.  (Maybe clichés are a topic to blog about on another day.)

What made me think of these 1960s/70s-era “happenings” now was an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago, titled “In This Online University, Students Do the Teaching as Well as the Learning.”  The institution discussed is Peer 2 Peer University, or P2PU, an online nonprofit, unaccredited forum in which participants work through “challenges” by posting their work on blogs and critiquing each other.  Participants (not really “students” in the usual sense of the word) work at their own pace, and their online discussions are unmediated by professors.  Learning occurs both within courses and outside of them, through the friendships and mentoring-type relationships participants form with one another.

This idea of learning from peers was also central to Writing Without Teachers, by Peter Elbow, which was possibly the very best book in my field (rhetoric and composition studies) to emerge from that early-1970s countercultural – hence, the “happenings” – period of writing instruction.  Writing Without Teachers emerged from a “declaration of independence” Elbow made for himself after having his own writing life “ruined” by institutional strictures, and the book was based on the central premise that

[L]earning is independent of teaching.  I had come to notice a fundamental asymmetry: students can learn without teachers even though teachers cannot teach without students.  The deepest dependency is not of students upon teachers, but of teachers upon students.

Elbow was a teacher himself, so he was not anti-teacher.  But he understood that the impulse to write comes from the need for a writer to communicate an idea and have it be understood by others.  Writing improves naturally . . . on its own . . . when writers make a connection with readers and hunger to repeat that experience again.

And again.

And again.  (Kind of like blogging 🙂 )

While a writing teacher evaluates content, judges it and tries to figure out how to make a text better, a peer writing group tries to appreciate, understand, and experience the text instead.  Said Elbow of the peer writing group (which is now a standard feature of composition classrooms):

When the process is useful, the benefits seem to come not from hearing right reactions or getting good advice from readers, but rather from being understood and from hearing readers’ experience of one’s words and trying to have their experience.

This is the key to writing – or any learning – without teachers.  At the end of Writing Without Teachers, Elbow included an appendix essay, titled “The Doubting Game and the Believing Game – An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise.”

Absolutely brilliant essay.  I don’t know why it has never gotten more notice in my field, except that it is an appendix, and most of us pay no attention to appendices.  This essay’s premise is that there are two ways to learn: the “doubting” game and the “believing” game.  Elbow doesn’t reject the doubting game; he just wants us to make a place for the believing game.

The doubting game is the one we all know best.  You learn (or find the “truth”) by looking for error.  You apply critical thinking and analysis.  You tear something apart, find its weaknesses.  Whatever is weak must be incorrect, or “false”; and, conversely, whatever does survive rigorous examination must therefore be correct, or “true.”  The doubting game has a long and honorable history.  The Socratic method is basically the doubting game manifested through dialogue.  The scientific method is also an example of the doubting game, formulating hypotheses in order to disprove them.  Ironically, however, despite our reverence for its logical precision, the doubting game doesn’t actually show us what is true, only what is not true.  We assume that whatever is not “not true” must logically be “true.”

The believing game is less familiar and is therefore suspect.  It seems “soft” and intellectually lax to people used to the “rigor” of the doubting game.  Whereas the scientific method involves “controlled” experiments where all variables are accounted for and carefully monitored, the believing game is like a party.  The more, the merrier.  Diversity and serendipity are good; you want to shake things up and see what happens.  The believing game is inclusive and “uncontrolled”: it involves taking everything in, accepting everything on its own terms, and trying to believe in everything instead of being skeptical.  It also involves empathy, as in that old proverb about not judging a person until you’ve walked in his shoes.  Instead of looking for errors and weaknesses, you look for strengths.  Instead of tearing something apart, you pull together incongruous elements in an attempt to see a complete whole.

The doubting game, says Elbow, is one of propositions . . . of symbols and deduction and argumentation.  But the believing game is one of language and experience and persuasion.  It involves entering into an idea completely and then experiencing it respectfully, trying to inhabit and live inside of it for a while.  If the idea doesn’t “feel” right after you’ve done this, you reject it.  Otherwise, you hang onto it, at least until you encounter another idea that you can believe in more strongly.

In a later book, Writing With Power, Elbow uses the following analogy to help readers understand how “believing” works:

Eat like an owl: take in everything and trust your innards to digest what’s useful and discard what’s not.

What a striking image!  I’ve often read interviews with athletes, military or government leaders, and top executives in which they talk about being guided by their “gut.”  While they probably aren’t visualizing owl-pellets  with their metaphor, the idea they’re getting at – trusting their feelings – is exactly what Elbow’s believing game promotes.  People who practice becoming attuned to their emotional, intuitive, and non-rational (not ir-rational) responses to situations develop a discipline that allows them not only to analyze the facts of a given case but also to discern their feelings about it.  The believing game is an important complement to the doubting game – like yin and yang, shadow and light.  Once we know how to use the doubting game to cull through data, the believing game becomes our best tool for making good judgments and decisions.  It helps us find meaning in complex, chaotic environments.

The doubting game is the dominant methodology found in today’s classrooms and requires a teacher (or a Socrates-like guide) to ensure that the blind are not leading the blind, as critics would charge.  The believing game, on the other hand, often occurs outside of a formal classroom setting (like the Peer 2 Peer University, for example).  It is a good fit for self-directing your own learning, and its methodology can involve peer relationships and connection-making strategies like joining clubs/organizations or social media groups, reading novels, watching YouTube videos, etc.

Or, perhaps, meditating on a work of art.  One of my personal favorite Ernest Hemingway quotes comes from the first few pages (p. 13 in the 1963 edition) of A Moveable Feast, the memoir of his time in 1920s Paris, where he talks about how he would go to the museum every afternoon after he had finished his writing for the day:

I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have dimensions that I was trying to put in them.  I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone.

What Hemingway learned from “experiencing” the impressionist painter’s art was how to leave things out and thus create the “impression” of something more.  Presence through absence is a hallmark of Hemingway’s work.  In one of his more famous short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants,” the characters never actually state what they are talking about.  You have to fill in the text’s empty spaces and make intuitive leaps as a reader to realize that the woman is pregnant and feeling ambivalent regarding the abortion she is about to get and which her boyfriend/husband is so certain will solve all their problems.

The believing game is messy and nonlinear . . . very inefficient.  Playing the believing game requires self-awareness and a willingness to “follow your bliss” (as Joseph Campbell so aptly put it).

In Steve Jobs’ now-famous commencement address to Stanford University’s graduating class of 2005, the late Apple co-founder recalled how, after dropping out of Reed College in his freshman year, he stuck around campus and “dropped in” on a calligraphy class that had piqued his imagination:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.  Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.  Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.  I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.  It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.  But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.  And we designed it all into the Mac.  It was the first computer with beautiful typography.  If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.  And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

Jobs ended his story with a conclusion that sounds a lot like playing the “believing game”:

[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.  So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.  You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.  This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Trusting that the dots will somehow connect – moving forward despite not knowing exactly where you are going – requires something Romantic poet John Keats (who wrote “Ode to a Grecian Urn”) termed “negative capability”:

[A]t once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . .

The believing game helps us develop this “negative capability” by encouraging us to feel more comfortable with ambiguity, more able to accommodate multiple potential truths at a time.  We become better able to postpone that “irritable reaching after” the refuge of the doubting game’s precision – an impulse that would prematurely end exploration.

Learning to move ahead with confidence – without the guidance of a teacher who knows the correct answer and despite uncertainty about how the dots will eventually connect – is important for anyone whose work requires synthesis and meaning-making.

It will be an essential skill for anyone who expects to innovate or lead going forward into the 21st century.

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Who writes the songs that make the whole world sing? (Barry Manilow, for one)

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Walking on the treadmill earlier today, I kept skimming through my iPod to pick out whatever suited my workout fancy of the moment.  At one point I idly wondered whether the song I was listening to had been written by the group singing it – and that’s when I realized for the first time that iTunes doesn’t identify songwriters.

Vinyl has always listed songwriters, on both LPs and 45s.  I even dug out some of my old 78s – and found songwriters credited on the labels of those brittle, old records, as well. 

When The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, everyone already knew that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote most of group’s songs.  But there on the cardboard circle in the center of my vinyl copy are their names (Lennon-McCartney) listed beneath the title of every single song except “Within You Without You,” which George Harrison wrote . . . and which I know because his name is beneath the title.

The exclusion of songwriter identification on iTunes’ “labels” may be a remnant of digital music’s Napster origins, which were all about file sharing . . . getting songs for free.  Maybe piracy is easier if you pretend that music sort of spontaneously generates itself, and just “is.”  Then you don’t have to feel guilty about robbing the songwriter of royalties.  The beauty of iTunes, though, is that it’s so easy and inexpensive now for people to do the right thing and pay for music.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Apple could also figure out a way for songwriters not only to be acknowledged but also once again to be visibly linked with the music they created?

UPDATE: (October 23, 2021) I wrote this post in July 2012. Today I noticed that someone had visited it, and because it has been a long time since it has come up in my stats, I decided to pull it up to read through. Then I was curious to know if this situation was still the same. And no, it is not! As of the past year or two, at least two music services (Spotify and iTunes) actually do make it possible to see the songwriters’ names. Look on your screen for the three dots that mean “more” info and click on those. You’ll see lots of song “details,” including the composer(s). YAY!!!

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The making of a “reader”

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Are “readers” born, or are they made?

If they are “born” then no amount of instruction is going to make a difference.  But assuming a reader is “made,” how can schools best accomplish that objective?  In 1955 readability expert Rudolf Flesch published a seminal text that highlighted opposing educational philosophies, Why Johnny Can’t Read, and America is still bickering over how reading should be taught more than fifty years later.

I did enjoy books as a very young child.  My parents always took us to the library, subscribed to the newspaper, and had some books in our home – all factors that studies regularly cite as important for shaping reading behavior.  Coincidentally, my name also came from a character in a book, Mrs. Mike.  But I think that two key formative events, both of which happened around the time I was ten, were probably most responsible for turning me into a serious reader.

The first event was our neighbors’ gift to me and my siblings of their grown daughter’s old books.  A whole summer’s reading in a box!  Many of the books were about dogs and horses, two of my favorite subjects.  Several were Walter Farley novels (The Black Stallion, etc.), in which I completely lost myself.  Others were children’s novels that had been popular ten or twenty years earlier – a fact I discovered while visiting the home of a woman about ten years older than me and finding those familiar titles on the bookshelf that held her favorite childhood books.

The second important thing that happened was the habit of my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Fritz, to read aloud to us every afternoon for the last fifteen minutes of the school day.  The book was Treasure Island – a very exciting tale of pirates and adventure.  When the school year ran out before the book ended, I found it in the public library and finished it on my own.

Then I made a fortuitous connection that was really the starting point of my serious reading path.  We had the Authors card game, which was basically a packaged version of the “Old Maid” card game you could play with a regular deck.  (Now that I think about it, we played a lot of card games when I was a kid: “Slap Jack,” “Crazy Eights,” “Go Fish,” “War,” “Euchre,” etc.)  In Authors, instead of the usual sets of all four Aces, Jacks, Queens, etc., you had sets of four cards for each author.  Each author card had the writer’s picture and a list of titles at the bottom.  Instead of collecting sets of Aces or Queens, you would collect “books” of, say, all four William Shakespeare cards.

I knew that Treasure Island was one of the titles listed on the Robert Louis Stevenson cards.  That meant it was a “classic.”  You know: IMPORTANT.  But Treasure Island was also really, really fun to read.  And it made me wonder: Could maybe some of those other “classics” be good, too?

The Authors card game became my “shopping” list for trips to the public library, where my mom took us every couple of weeks.  I read the other Robert Louis Stevenson titles first, then moved on to Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the rest of the authors featured in the card game.

Not long ago my hair stylist asked me how I find the books I read.  The question took me by surprise . . . because books sort of find me!  My list of books stretches way off into the future.  I should live so long 🙂

But she got me thinking.  Why do so many people not read?  Maybe because they don’t have anything interesting to read, and they don’t know how to find a book they would enjoy.  I was lucky to have discovered a “book list” that was meaningful to me at an age when I was ready to advance to a higher level of reading.  But what if I hadn’t?

One of my former students, a returning adult in a couple of the classes I taught as a teaching assistant in grad school, told me that she had never been a reader until one day she bought Downy fabric softener that came with a Harlequin romance novel shrink-wrapped to it.  She had young children, didn’t work outside the home, and if I recall correctly, had not even finished high school.  She was not a strong reader, but she loved that book.  She bought more fabric softener and read another Harlequin.  Then she went to the library and got more Harlequins.

“Once you’re a reader,” she said, “you start meeting other people who read.”  Soon she was buying her own paperbacks, exchanging books with other women, and engaging in discussions about their shared reading experiences.  Then came huge leaps forward: she began reading books that weren’t romance novels and she decided to go to college.

Reading proficiency scores for school children remain dismal.  What if – instead of funding scientific studies about reading instruction or putting dollars into classroom technology like computers or iPads – what if, the government invested some of that money toward supporting talented authors of children’s and young adult books?

The first three Harry Potter novels occupied the top slots of Amazon’s bestseller list long before I had even heard of “The Boy Who Lived.”  During the Pottermania years, children convinced parents to take them to bookstores at midnight so they could buy the newest J.K. Rowling novel the minute it was allowed to be sold.  Even “poor” readers were devouring those books.  Like water seeking its own level, good books find their audience.

What if we focused on getting truly engaging books into the hands of children instead of putting our faith in the latest technology or arguing curriculum politics (i.e., phonics versus whole language)?  What if a significant part of every school day was set aside for kids to select and read whatever appeared interesting to them, including graphic novels?  What if students looked forward to that time as the best part of their day, as I did when Mrs. Fritz read us Treasure Island?  Suppose reading was . . . fun?

If students were regularly immersed in enjoyable books, might they not become more fluent readers – naturally?

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“Westworld” (Boy, have we got a vacation for you!)

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Over the weekend my older daughter and I watched Westworld.  Again 🙂

Although we always enjoy this film for the story itself, we also get a kick out of deconstructing its “high tech” symbolism and noting anachronisms and things so commonplace and taken for granted in the early 1970s that their appearance onscreen is entirely unselfconscious.

For example, the accommodations on the hovercraft ride across the desert to Westworld, are reminiscent of the Pan Am 747 first class lounge (the one with the spiral staircase and fancy dining – video here).  It’s hard to imagine now that air travel could once have been so pleasant, even glamorous.

The scientists/engineers/technicians running the three “worlds” of Delos (WestWorld, MedievalWorld, and RomanWorld) all wear white lab coats and sit at monitors in an underground area that looks a lot like NASA’s Mission Control during the Apollo era.  The computer system that manages both the androids and all other power is characterized by whirring tape drives and blinking lights.  I don’t know if mainframes of the day actually looked like this, but that’s how computers played to 1970s movie audiences.

The “prostitute” and “sex model” androids have 1970s hairstyles, and one is wearing obvious, 1970s-fashionable blue eyeshadow.  When “slain” or otherwise damaged robots are taken in for repair or maintenance, the “shop” resembles an operating room, with all the technicians gowned and masked as if they are performing surgery instead of installing circuitry in machines.

Once the androids start killing human guests, and technicians in the central command center realize they have lost the ability to control robot behavior,  the decision is made to shut down all power to the three theme-park worlds.  Unfortunately, many of the androids continue to run on stored power – like Yul Brynner’s chilling gunslinger, whose purposeful thumbs-hitched-to-gunbelt stride contributes to one of the most memorable chase scenes in film history.  

The technicians try to turn the power back on again – only to realize that they can’t.  They are trapped (air-tight power doors that no longer open) and doomed to die (no air conditioning and no oxygen) as the temperature rises.  Apparently no one tries to contact the outside world for help, even though every computer monitor station has a phone (land line) that ought to operate even if the electricity is cut off.  When Richard Benjamin’s character is running for his life in the tunnels below Delos (brightly lit, despite no power), he finds the central control center and looks in through the unbreakable glass to see everybody dead at their posts.  The computer is busily whirring and blinking away.  Is that a metaphor?  The room is full of dead people, victims of their own hubris, while the technological monster they have created continues to function – apparently without needing electricity, without which both air systems and exits have shut down and the control station has plunged into darkness?

Speaking of computers, a couple of television shows in the early 1970s had episodes built around the premise of errors made by unreasonable computers.  There was The Partridge Family episode, for example, where 10-year-old Danny is drafted into the army and nothing can be done to halt his conscription because computers never make mistakes.  Was the general public of the pre-PC era really so gullible?

At the very end of the Westworld credits (and I like to watch the credits . . .), there is a note that the RomanWorld scenes were filmed at the estate of Harold Lloyd.  Harold Lloyd, the silent film star? 

Yes!  And what incredibly beautiful gardens he had, if what little we see of them in RomanWorld does them justice!  Thinking about Lloyd’s gardens then reminded me of Norma Desmond’s fabulous Mediterranean Revival mansion in Sunset Boulevard . . . and Don Lockwood’s similarly fabulous mansion in Singin’ in the Rain.  Silent film stars really must have lived like royalty, their melodramatic film performances but a pale imitation of the glamorous reality of their offscreen existence.

Which brings me to my main reason for posting about Westworld today.  Travel gives me perspective – just seeing that there is a bigger world and that so many other people are living their lives in it at the same time I am.  Watching movies, likewise, gives me a more expansive outlook. 

So there it is.  Westworld’s tagline is right: “Boy, have we got a vacation for you . . .”  I watched the film this weekend to be entertained, but at the same time I did some “traveling” of another sort – back to the era of jet-setting and “beautiful people,” to the early days of modern computing, to the larger-than-life film stars of the 1920s, and (last, but not least) to the hot-roller hairstyles and blue eyeshadow of the 1970s. 

A real change of scene, in so many senses of the word!

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Success through failure

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

The “Review” section of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contained an interesting short article by Ken Bain, titled “Flummoxed by Failure – or Focused,” which was primarily about the un-fixed nature of intelligence.  Most people are just about as smart as they think they are or believe they have the capacity to become.  In order to learn difficult things, you must be able to overcome failure (see it as a temporary setback) and keep moving forward with the expectation that you will eventually figure it out. 

In other words, you need to be resilient.  And not only is intelligence a more flexible, malleable quality than previously thought, but it also turns out to be less important to academic success than resilience is.

The idea of “lifelong learning” has intrigued me for about 15 years now.  Not in the sense of recreational programs for senior citizens, nor in the sense of professional development seminars aimed at keeping job skills current – but in the sense of perpetual curiosity and continual, purposeful learning.  Whenever I read about artists and inventors, I’m struck by their insatiable desire to learn, and I wonder if somehow establishing such a culture of lifelong learning within a company or society at large would nuture a parallel culture of innovation.

Because I also am a huge fan of Pixar films, I noticed several years ago that the company had an in-house “university” offering an array of courses for all employees.  Randy Nelson, the former “Dean” of Pixar University, is now the “Dean” of Apple University.  I am in awe of his wisdom and insights regarding learning, creativity, and innovation.  If you’d like to find out more about Pixar University and Nelson’s approach to in-house “training,” several articles and interviews are out there online (for example, this New York Times article).

While writing a conference paper a couple years ago, I stumbled across this video clip of Nelson talking about his work at Pixar.  Two things jumped out at me right away, one of which is relevant for this blog post. 

First, let me say a few words about the item that isn’t.  It concerns the idea of “collaboration,” which is very relevant for my teaching and possibly for anyone working on large creative projects.  Engineers in industry work on teams, but Nelson’s concept of how teams should function is quite different from the way “teamwork” is commonly understood.  I’ll post on this topic later in the week, actually, because it’s something I want to explore in more detail, and writing is often my best avenue for discovery.

But back to the idea of resilience.  The other thing Nelson says in the video caught my attention because it runs so counter to the fear of failure that most of us have internalized.  He says:

The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.

“Error recovery” is an interesting concept, because the larger culture certainly does not tolerate failure very well.  But failure (or, more specifically, analysis and then remediation of failure) is an important part of learning – especially for “innovators.”  When you’re involved in creative work, there often is no road map, no “best practices,” and no way to chart your path . . . except through trial and error. 

My job teaching future engineers has led me to the work of Henry Petroski, who writes frequently on the history of design.  More specifically, he highlights failure analysis and the crucial, yet undervalued and misunderstood, relationship between learning and failure.  I had never really thought of how important it is to fail well until I read his work.

Failure is not merely a mistake; its scale is larger than that, as is its associated cost.  Our fear of failure stems quite understandably from its disastrous consequences.

Despite the fact that every toddler falls many times before learning how to walk, getting up again doesn’t come so easily to most adults.  Internalizing the resilience to recover from failure requires practice, and unfortunately the only way to acquire that practice is to fail.

To err is human.  That much may be beyond our control, but how we respond to our errors is something we can take charge of.

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Creativity, “Mr. Patent,” Keith Richards, and me

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Following up on yesterday’s post on “Creativity and the importance of routine,” here is a link to a Fast Company article I recall reading ten years ago. 

Titled “Mr. Patent,” it profiles Marvin Johnson, a research fellow at Phillips Petroleum who has 212 patents to his hame.  (Or “had,” anyway, back in 2002.)

Why do I still remember this article?  Because of Johnson’s approach to innovation and creativity.  He said he looked for small, focused, solvable problems:

What’s really important is finding solutions to problems.  If you find a unique solution, then you have a patent.

Johnson likened his work as a chemist/engineer to another pastime he also enjoyed, solving the coded word puzzles called “cryptoquips”:

You have to have the patience to return to it.  Play with it for a while, go do something else, then come back when you have a new idea.  Each time you return to the puzzle, you pick up the same threads and weave a different cloth.  Eventually you get it right.

It’s interesting that a scientist/engineer would do this with a word puzzle . . . because it’s exactly the same thing I do (Ph.D. in English) with Sudoko, a number puzzle.  I pull out the page of the newspaper containing that day’s puzzle, fold it into a convenient size, and then work on it in tiny chunks of time.  When I get stuck, I quit.  Maybe I don’t get back to it for a couple of days, but when I do pick it up again, I can immediately see something I missed before.  As soon as that new piece of the puzzle is completed, several other parts of the solution fall quickly into place before I get stuck again. 

This is also how I work on writing projects.  When I wrote my dissertation, it was the longest thing I had ever written, maybe ten times the length of any single course paper.  I didn’t know how to do it.  In some ways, for me at least, the most valuable part of that final academic experience was coming to understand myself as a writer and accept the fact that my work style is quite different from most people’s.

It was very disconcerting back then for me to talk with the other grad students and hear them saying things like, “Yeah, I’ve finished Chapters 1 and 2.  My advisor has Chapter 3, and I’m working on Chapter 4 now.”  Because I had NOTHING “finished” until the entire thing was finished, all at once. 

This was the only way I found I could write: a little bit here, a little bit there.  I’d get an idea about a tiny little chunk of material, so I’d write it up.  Maybe it would be three pages.  Eventually all of my chunks started to organize themselves into categories, so I created “chapter” files in my computer and moved the chunks into their new neighborhoods.  But each “chapter” was just a jumbled mess of chunks.  Nothing that could really be called “finished.”  I was embarrassed to share anything with my advisor, and I have to give him a lot of credit for working with me on my terms.  He looked at my disorganized pages and gave me feedback but never made me feel ashamed of my discursive, nonlinear writing process.

Finally, by the end of the project, the entire “whole” of my dissertation began to make itself clear.  I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with my vision.  At the end of each day, I could see the path ahead of me so clearly that I could have written nonstop for days or weeks . . . if only I could have stayed awake long enough to do it. 

When I read Keith Richards’ memoir Life two years ago, I could totally identify with his reason for using heroin.  When he was producing the Exile on Main St. album during the Rolling Stones’ actual “exile” in the south of France, Richards said the heroin allowed him to stay awake for incredibly long periods so he could see his musical ideas through to completion.  (Interesting aside: I was just double-checking the spelling of “street” in the album title and discovered that a documentary film called Stones in Exile came out two years ago, just a few months before Richards’ book.  Sounds intriguing; I’m going to check it out 🙂 )

It never occurred to me to use something like heroin, thank God.  What I did instead was to take time at the end of each work day to write down what came next, just jotted notes that tried to capture the gap between where I was and the completed “whole” I was trying to reach.  Then when I sat down to work again the next day, all I had to do was read my notes from the night before – and I was mentally right back in the same place!  I could see the entire, completed whole again stretching out ahead of me in my mind’s eye.

I’m not sure how or even whether my experience has significance for anyone else. 

But if your working style is more linear, like the other graduate students who were able to move through their dissertations chapter by chapter, maybe you could try working my way if you ever get “stuck.” 

And if your working style is messy and indirect, like mine (and I suspect we are a distinct minority), know that you are not alone and that learning to work in the only way you can work will make you a lot happier and more productive than trying to be efficient and organized the way you think you “should” be.

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Creativity and the importance of routine

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

One of my favorite writers is Flannery O’Connor, a Southerner who lived and wrote for most of her life on a farm in rural Georgia.  Possibly you’ve never read her, or maybe you read one of her stories once and wound up, like me, repulsed and confused. 

Here’s what turned me into a Flannery O’Connor fan.  Several years ago, I had to read a whole slew of her short stories in about a week’s time because so many book clubs wanted to register for the same Great Books session on “Everything that Rises Must Converge” that I was asked at the last minute to come on board as a second facilitator.  When you read any writer’s work all at once like that, you start to notice little things.  In O’Connor’s case, I started seeing the word “sly” quite often in her stories, shading her characters and foreshadowing events.  Somehow in that one word O’Connor manages to summon up all the darkness of the human soul.

But what I want to talk about today is creativity, specifically the importance of cultivating a creative “practice” for anyone who aspires to be an artist of any kind.  Flannery O’Connor deserves mention here because of her disciplined work habits.  During grad school I first encountered this quote of hers:

I don’t know if the muse is going to show up or not on any given day, but by golly, I’m going to be at my desk from 8 to 12 every morning in case she does.

Don’t you love that image of O’Connor sitting at her desk, ready to greet the muse?  Although no one can forcibly will creative work into being, anyone can be present and open and attentive – poised to capture any glimmer of inspiration that may reveal itself. 

O’Connor called her work ethic “the habit of art,” which she explained more specifically as an artist’s worldview, or way of being: “The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art.” 

Writing is something in which the whole personality takes part – the conscious as well as the unconscious mind.  Art is the habit of the artist and habits have to be rooted deep in the personality.

O’Connor’s description sounds a lot like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which advocates personal growth through creative practice, as a way for “recovering” artists to find their spiritual center in a society that does not value art. 

It makes me happy to think of creativity as a “habit” or “practice” – an ongoing activity continually performed – instead of a personal attribute (as in a “creative” person).  Anyone can “be” creative if to be creative means engaging in creative activity.

Consider these words that come to mind when I think of creativity as daily practice:

Routine – derives from the French route, meaning “road” or “route,” with the –ine suffix indicating the diminutive.  So a “routine” is a small road.  I like that.  If you want to go somewhere creative, a routine is a road you take to get there.  But it’s not like driving a flat-out freeway, where you grip the steering wheel and concentrate on speeding along with traffic in the pneumatic tube of an interstate.  Instead, it’s more of a back road, like the “blue highways” driven by William Least Heat-Moon.  You drive it, but you can enjoy the scenery and meet people along the way. 

Discipline – derives from the Latin roots disciplina (“instruction”), discipulus (“pupil”), and discere (“to learn”).  So discipline is less about strength of will and forcing oneself to perform than it is about curiosity, teaching, and learning.

Perseverance – derives from Latin by way of French, with the original meaning coming from per (“by” or “through”) and severus (“serious,” “severe,” “strict,” “grave,” “dignified,” “earnest”).  My old American Heritage Dictionary describes “perseverance” as having a favorable connotation, suggesting patience and continuing strength in withstanding difficulty or resistance, whereas “persistence” and “tenacity” imply dogged resolve that is willful, unreasonable, annoying, and perhaps aggressive.  So “perseverance” is less about winning at any price or being grimly determined not to quit (grrrr . . .) than it is about just showing up every day with a calm steadfastness and doing the work.

Filmmaker Woody Allen is famous for saying that much of success in life is a matter of just showing up.  (Exactly how much is a little unclear to me.  Sometimes it’s quoted as 90%, sometimes as 80%.  But we can safely say “much” of success, in any case.) 

Showing up.  That’s what it takes to have a successful creative practice.  How simple is that?  (And hard, at the same time.)

Allen is an excellent example, in fact, of someone who shows up and does the work.  For close to fifty years he has methodically maintained an output of about a film a year.  And for thirty years now (1982-2012) he has released a new film every single year.  Not only does he direct, but he also often writes and acts.  Plus, he is a jazz musician (clarinet) who has toured the world with a New Orleans-style band for about a half-century as well.

Routine.  Discipline.  Perseverance. 

You show up and do the work – so if the muse appears, by golly, you’ll be there to meet her.

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Fun with the Periodic Table (and math)

Posted on July 7, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

What is it about the Periodic Table that inspires so many take-offs? Look at all these fun makeovers:

Actually, the real Periodic Table is pretty interesting, too, even for someone who hated chemistry class (me).

I bought this book, The Mystery of the Periodic Table, for my kids, but I ended up being the person who enjoyed it the most.  The history of how elements were discovered and the Table ordered is fascinating, especially its uncanny mathematical precision in prediciting the properties of as-yet-undiscovered elements based on their empty-square positions in the Table.

There’s a similar book for grownups,  The Disappearing Spoon (etc., a really long title), by Sam Kean.

The ancient Greeks were really on to something when they discovered the “golden ratio.”  If you can tolerate one more link in a link-heavy post, this old (1959) Walt Disney short, Donald in Mathmagic Land, has the nicest explanation ever of the mathematical underpinnings of the universe.  It shows the inherent mathematical structure underlying architecture, music, nature – and even games like billiards or pool.  Informative and very entertaining.  Used copies of this DVD can be found on Amazon for under $20, and you can also usually find this 27-minute cartoon on YouTube, too.  Here’s a link to the movie on YouTube, and if it has been removed by the time you click through, you can probably find it easily by searching for the title.  Someone else will probably have reposted it by then.

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