Thinking Inside and Outside the Box Newsletter 004 May 9, 2024
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures are warming, there are increasings amount of daylight each day, and we are rapidly approaching the summer solstice.
VISUALS
In learning more about doodling (see last month’s newsletter) I somehow stumbled across something called Zentangling. Zentangles are abstract doodles, often geometric patterns, and seem to be descended from the mindless drawings that I and my classmates did in middle school. Read more here
I found some stenciled poetry on the sidewalks of my neighborhood. A quick search showed this to be the work of a woman named “Boots”, who was visiting town and displaying her street poetry. She seems prolific and posts often on Instagram. She also has a book.
I watched an inspiring film about a small typewriter store in California, with associated comments from writers, actors, musicians, and sculptors on using typewriters (instead of a digital medium) to create their art.
WRITINGS
The more you produce the more likely that creative lightning will strike. Here’s an original poem, with an interesting metaphor for our mortality.
TILT! (An original poem)
What if our Life
Was like a pinball machine?
Would we bounce
from bumper to bumper?
Would we score points
here and there?
Would we use our flippers
To return the ball to the top?
Would we then re-experience Life
And score more points?
Eventually
We miss a flipSubscribe now
Or just have some bad luck
The ball drains out the hole in the bottom
GAME OVER!
And we've run out of quartersBOOKS (LOTS OF BOOKS!)
I’ve been an avid reader all of my life and I am rarely stuck in a certain kind of style, or genre. I’ll read anything from the recipes on the back of an oatmeal box to a book on ethics written by Aristotle. Here’s some of what I’ve read in the past month or so.
A book on how to improve writing
A biography of Benjamin Franklin, with Part 1 here and Part 2 here
Some of the notecards where I captured ideas from the book A book of essays by several writers that were originally published in the New York Times. Each author of the essay discussed a specific part of the writing practice that is important to them. One essay in particular really hits home. The author explains how important it is to match the right pen to the right notebook when writing something. That essay, and my commentary, are here.
Doodling (and Zentangling) are both subdivisions of something called Visual Thinking. Here is a book on the significance of using Visual Thinking to solve business problems.
And finally, an introductory philosophy book by Michael Huemer. Unlike many academics, Huemer writes with a conversational style. He also provides excellent, and easy to understand, discussions of some of the more challenging concepts in the book. He is especially interested in the philosophy of knowledge, a field called epistemology, so I’ll probably read another of his books in the coming months.
