Jenny Spadafora

Some email subject lines, like some return addresses on envelopes, create an
excitement and anxious anticipation I can feel in my chest. This afternoon’s “Cell Phone Show Jury Results” was that kind of email.

It contained good news: four of my photographs were selected for inclusion in Stonecrop Gallery’s “Can You Hear Me Now?” group exhibition of cell phone photography.

When I see calls for entry I often think of responding, but something usually gets in the way. Sometimes it is what I consider a questionable entry fee, but most of the time it boils down to not wanting to take the risk. Reframing so it isn’t about rejection (who wants to sign up for that?) but about hey, I created this stuff, and one of the reasons I did that was to share it (so why not try and see what happens?) means I actually submitted this time. Yeah, it feels good to be picked. It feels great to be willing.

I recently read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. Among other things, it offers a manifesto and advice for creative types. The big message is get off your ass and make stuff.

I liked this list, because I think it applies equally well to starting a new job. Which I am. A few weeks ago I joined Blackbaud, in a new role on the Products Ops team — Innovation Catalyst. As one of my friends put it, “so you make awesome?”

After laughing, I corrected her: no, I will help other people make awesome :) When you think about it, that is really the job we should all have, to help make awesome. Awesome products and experiences for customers, awesome places to work with each other, with an awesome sense of purpose that helps us get out of bed in the morning.

A few weeks after I started my last job (back in September 2005) I wrote a post that for years was a top Google result for smartass people, and as of this writing, is still the first hit for anyone looking for smartass people at work. (It isn’t what it sounds like, except of course saying that kinda means it is.) I am surprised that old post still shows up so highly, it isn’t as if there is a shortage of smartass bloggers, even in this new school twitter/facebook/pinterest no one blogs anymore age.

I like the idea that now I’ll come up when people search for “responsible for the awesome” because seven years later I’m less snarky, and possibly a bit less of a smartass.

I took it as a good sign when a friend said to me the big change she noticed when I left my job was I that it took me longer to respond to email. 

This new behavior wasn’t automatic on my part: I was checking for email on my phone when I realized my behavior was absurd. I mean, I didn’t have a forcing function (such as a job) so why was I bothering with any frequency to check my email? 

Habit. There is power in routine. Having set defaults to get to bed on time, or drink enough water, or sit and meditate help me to accomplish these things on a daily basis. The rote email checking, just like my tendency to always say yes to dessert, is a bad habit. 

So I should probably change my default. I suppose this is where mindfulness comes in, improving my ability to make the distinction between useful and necessary activity and vague feelings of responsibility to be doing something. Too often, I think checking email offers the illusion of paying attention in a meaningful way.

Starting a new job is a good time to reset defaults. I would love to claim credit for this idea all on my own, but the truth is I got locked out of my new work email account. Which should not bother me in the slightest over the weekend. That’s absurd.

From Marilynne Robinson’s Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred:

Simultaneously, and in a time of supposed religious revival, and among those especially inclined to feel religiously revived, we have a society increasingly defined by economics, and an economics increasingly reminiscent of my experience with that rat, so-called rational-choice economics, which assumes that we will all find the shortest way to the reward, and that this is basically what we should ask of ourselves and — this is at the center of it all — of one another. After all these years of rational choice, brother rat might like to take a look at the packaging just to see if there might be a little melamine in the inducements he was being offered, hoping, of course, that the vendor considered it rational to provide that kind of information. We do not deal with one another as soul to soul, and the churches are as answerable for this as anyone.

…

Two questions I can’t really answer about fiction are (1) where it comes from, and (2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute. There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell.

Apparently this is an excerpt from her newest book, When I Was a Child I Read Books, which I’ll admit I’d be interested in just from the title, and am now interested in for so much more.

Are my stories true, you ask? No, they are imaginary tales, containing fantastic characters and events. In real life, a family doesn’t have a child who looks like a mouse; in real life, a spider doesn’t spin words in her web. In real life, a swan doesn’t blow a trumpet. But real life is only one kind of life — there is also the life of the imagination. And although my stories are imaginary, I like to think that there is some truth in them, too — truth about the way people and animals feel and think and act.

– E.B. White, in a letter to his young readers
[via Heading East]

[Click on the grid to see a larger version, or click on these links to see larger versions of individual photos: 1. snowy (8/365), 2. snow day, again (32/365), 3. starling (62/365), 4. gray day (90/365), 5. prowling (150/365), 6. indigo and orange, 7. evening, maverick square (195/365), 8. stacked (223/365), 9. electric, 10. fall, high line (273/365), 11. windows, 12. eastie lights ]

Though at times I was not sure I would, I did complete a 365 project this year. I’m glad I did; many of these pictures are from that project.

I used my trusty Canon 40D, my android camera phone, and my new crush the Fujifilm X100 to take these pictures. Most of them were taken in my neighborhood and a few were taken on really good vacation trips. (Repeat locations from last year: Rockport and NYC.) Conspicuously absent are photos taken looking out a plane window: I spent way, way too much time traveling earlier in 2011 and those mostly aren’t the parts that made me happiest.

I’m not sure what photo projects I’ll find myself working on this year, but I believe there will be projects. I love spending time looking and photographing, and I’m too much of a geek not to turn that into a project or two.

Inspired by the The Millions Year in Reading series, I decided to post my favorite reads of the year. Narrowing it down to just a few, here are the books I enjoyed most in 2011 year:

Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination has such a compelling idea as its central premise that I kept thinking about it, long after I finished reading the book. What would happen if our injuries, our illness, our pain started to glow? How would the world be different (would it?) with that sort of shining?

Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest is about obsession, discovery, longing, dreams, and sex. Valente’s imagination is extraordinary: a lesser writer would never get to you to believe in what she can see.

Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang is one of the funniest stories about one of the most fucked up families you’ll ever read. Funny as in haha, as in something off, as in weird: the Fangs are all kinds of funny. The Fangs are performance artists who raised two children (as props? as performance?), so what does it mean, now that they are grown?

Wolf Erlbruch’s Duck, Death and the Tulip is an unusual children’s book. It’s about death (not a common topic for picture books) and it isn’t preachy, sugarcoated, or evasive. The quiet illustrations are beautiful, evoking the right balance of sadness and acceptance. This books serves as a reminder that picture books are an art form.

But speaking of art, we are really talking about a cultural shift, and it is art that is so important when you want to change a culture. We doctors can talk pathology and disease forever, but what really causes change is when art — the narrative, the music, and the things that add value and joy to our lives — is directed in a way that is congruent with what’s healthier for us. That’s where we need to be going.

I first read and bookmarked Our Ailing Communities five years ago. Going through some older digital files I rediscovered it. As the spirit seems aligned with the ongoing #Occupy protests, I thought I’d share it.

I’m not working on my really needs to be updated portfolio site. I’m not catching up on book reviews, even though I owe one for LibraryThing Early Reviewers and I read another novel I think was amazing (Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination).

I am not taking new photos, even though I don’t have my shot of the day for my 365 project yet. I am also not posting the last few days of shots that I did take with the vignette app on my android phone. Still haven’t gotten around to vacuuming the living room (which I picked up yesterday) or putting away the clean laundry.

For a little while, it looked like I was going to take a nap on the couch, but now I don’t know. There are two new voice mail messages for me to listen to. There’s another room to pick up; there are stacks of reading material. There’s the personal email I haven’t responded to yet, and the work email I am trying not to think about. 

It is a Sunday afternoon, the first in two weeks I haven’t been on a plane during, and instead of doing any of those things that are a supposedly good use of my time, I’m lounging around, pecking this out on my iPad.

Tomorrow will be my last day at home until Friday evening, and I am trying not to think about that. 

I keep coming back to something in Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen, where she is talking about what practice is:

Our interest in reality is extremely low. No, we want to think. We want to worry through all of our preoccupations. We want to figure life out. And so before we know it we’ve forgotten all about this moment, and we’ve drifted off not thinking about something…

Sometimes, if I can do it, just sitting is the right thing to do.

SF and the Human Imagination

by Margaret Atwood
ISBN: 9780385533973

I’ve been on something of a kick reading about stories/storytelling lately and this book definitely fits the theme. It is ostensibly about certain kinds of stories — science fiction — though is really about imagination, and how these kinds of stories are but one lens to examine ourselves and our world and to explore what makes us tick.

In some ways it’s an odd collection, mixing new essays with older review-type pieces and excerpts from longer, previously published work. Atwood has been a fan and creator from an early age: witness the flying rabbit superhero of her childhood. She’s also been a voracious reader, paying little attention to whether or not something was supposed to be good or bad. It didn’t matter to her if it was serious literature or seriously schlocky, she read it. (Though she does note “it’s always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like reading anyway.”)

She talks about utopias and dystopias, inventing the word ustopia to combine the two, because in her view “each contains a latent version of the the other”. She talks about cartography:

With every map there’s an edge — a border between the known and the unknown. In old medieval and early Renaissance maps, the edges were where the monsters were drawn — the sea serpents and many-headed hydras, which were, as we say, off the map. Monsters live under the bed when you’re little because you can’t see under the bed when you’re actually in the bed.

I loved that bit about it’s because you can’t see under the bed. Of course.

In her piece on Bill McKibben’s Enough, she brings up his point that just because we have a technology doesn’t mean we have to use it, and cites among his examples the Amish (“who examine each new technology and accept it or reject it according to social and spiritual criteria”). We might accept a higher level of technology than the Amish, but as Atwood reminds us, we should still be setting social and spiritual acceptance criteria for what we let into our lives.

The collection does move around, from the aforementioned flying rabbits to adventure stories, to Victorian “scientific romances” to Orwell and Le Guin, to mad scientists and H.G. Wells to pulp cover art. Part of the fun in reading this collection is following Atwood as her mind wanders — not so much off course, as making and remaking connections.

We need her clear voice, and recognition of the need to act with conscience.

…this is the beginning of Newspeak. Fancy verbiage is what confuses Boxer the horse [in Animal Farm] and underpins the chantings of the sheep. To insist on what is, in the face of ideological spin, popular consensus, and official denial: Orwell knew this takes honesty, and a lot of guts. The position of odd man out is always an uneasy one, but the moment we look around and find that there are no longer any odd men among our public voices is the moment of most danger — because that’s when we’ll be in lockstep, ready for the Three Minutes’ Hate.

Yes, you’d expect the author of The Handmaid’s Tale to see this — and continue helping us to see. It’s not that she has particularly high expectations for society, it’s that she has a sense of right and wrong. It’s an author’s place to explore all the ground in the middle, true, but I like to think there’s a greater point than just poking around in the dark. You have to know some monsters must really be there, and stories help us prepare for finding them.

by Yann Martel
ISBN: 9780812981545

This book should not work.

It isn’t that Martel can’t write: he clearly can. The early The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios is good, and Life of Pi is magical — a magically tough act to follow, one would think.

So, Martel follows it up with a novel that shouldn’t work. It’s too meta — the protagonist is a writer who stalls out after a major success. Henry has an idea, a powerful idea, but he can’t seem to write it in a way so that others can grasp the power of his idea.

How do you write about the Holocaust? How do you write about anything else in a world where the Holocaust happened? That’s right: Martel doesn’t go for easy questions, he goes for the big ones, and in this story he is Henry — writing not obviously but obviously about the Holocaust. See how it shouldn’t work? And I haven’t even mentioned yet that the main part of the story is a play featuring talking animals: a donkey (Beatrice) and a howler monkey (Virgil). The play’s author is a old man, a reclusive taxidermist, and it is his life’s work.

The language is what you’d expect from Martel, which is to say it carries you along and occasionally stops you in your tracks because it is so good. Taking a line out of context (“Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark”) risks robbing it of its power. Martel is a master of context.

That’s why he can write a book that shouldn’t work — because it is too meta, the subject matter is too difficult — and make it work. It works, from the opening pages, to recounting a little-known Flaubert story, to Henry working with the taxidermist on his play, to the twist that is surprising and a bit sickening, to the impossible games at the end. It’s about important questions, about matters of conscience, and how the answers are not easy — and they aren’t supposed to be.

It’s the kind of book that will make you cry in public, if that is where you are when you are reading it. It is disturbing. It is absolutely worth reading.

How Stories Make Us Human

by Jonathan Gottschall
ISBN: 9780547391403

If you are going to write about stories, you should probably be able to tell one. Otherwise, you’ve got a credibility problem. Thankfully, Gottschall can tell stories and doesn’t hesitate to give color to his theories using examples from his own life.

Not that the book is all about him. It’s all about us, and how we are creatures of story. Human minds are wired for story, and this makes it possible for us to be in turn wired by story. Exploring this idea doesn’t destroy the magic — how our brains operate and what we believe is more layered than a trick that loses it’s power when it’s explained, after all. Science isn’t the enemy of story.

Story is a broader concept than at first you might realize. From the thoughts spinning through your head the moment your alarm goes off, to nearly every second of television you watch, to many of the conversations you have, to the shows in your head when you are sleeping — these are all stories. Fiction is “Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication” — there’s even and equation of sorts for stories. (Science is a story, too.)

Knowing something is “just” a story doesn’t change how the brain reacts to it, either: “the emotional brains processes it as real”. If you are thinking emotional brain doesn’t sound scientific, Gottschall is talking to neuroscientists about regions of the brain that show activity during a functional MRI.

Our mind working this way is “a crucial evolutionary adaption” — storytelling provides meaning and creates a coherence in our lives that we otherwise wouldn’t have. Think things are confusing now? Imagine for a moment that there’s no internal narrator in your head, no ability to sequence and relate events to others… doesn’t sound human, does it?

Not that the storytelling mind is perfect, it isn’t. Both in the ways that our minds in general aren’t perfect (we forget things) but in ways that make us susceptible to conspiracy theories. The drive to find meaning is so strong, we have a tendency to create it when it isn’t obvious, or isn’t there. It is in this way that conspiracy theories make sense: they are a “solution” to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen? It is hard for our brain not to know the answer, and when it doesn’t know, it is prone to make one up or believe a “logical” story that gives us a meaningful answer, so strong is our desire for meaning. It also means that we can lose ourselves in and learn from novels: “Good fiction tells intensely truthful lies.”

Storytelling is then, evolutionarily speaking, a tradeoff worth making. We might believe things that aren’t really true, but on the other hand, stories let us relate our communal experiences over space and time. Our memories are flawed, and our sense of ourselves as protagonist in the drama of our lives further erodes our adherence to literal truth, but these tendencies can still serve a greater good. Memory (which is a story we tell ourselves about the past) has a purpose: “to allow us to live better lives.” That we have the ability to forget or to reframe events isn’t a flaw, it is by design — one that lets us keep telling the story of our lives in ways that lets us grow and change.

We do seem to have some kind of need for redemption stories, don’t we?

I highly recommend this book. If you ever wondered why stories have such power, reading this book is a good place to begin your exploration of the answer.

Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales

by Chris Van Allsburg
ISBN: 9780547548104

I loved the idea of this book: the enigmatic Burdick tantalizes publisher with excerpts from illustrated stories, then vanishes. Different authors step forward to write the stories that match the images and snippets of text.

The authors include some major names inside (Kate DiCamillo, Louis Sachar, Lemony Snickett) and outside (Gregory Maguire, Sherman Alexie, Stephen King) the world of children’s literature. Allburg, of course, has provided all the illustrations and these are the most consistently high quality parts of the book.

As with most collections, the stories are a bit uneven. Not only are some more engaging that others, but they don’t seem to be aimed at a consistent age group. Not necessarily a problem, but something to be wary of — some stories may be too creepy (or too boring) for younger readers. I liked M.T. Anderson’s “Just Desert” the best, and would definitely put this in the creepy category.

I borrowed this book from a library. Given space constraints at home, we’ve reached the “book goes in, book goes out” stage. On that scale, I’d rate this as a borrow but not a keeper.