the unprofessional development reader

Great teachers inspire students

to be brave and think differently.
But professional development rarely acknowledges or inspires the courage and curiosity
that educators bring to their own classrooms. Unprofessional Development is based
on the belief that teachers must be celebrated as professional learners who find truth in
discovery and joy in taking bold risks. It is a call to ignite a rigorous and personal creative
habit. It is a challenge to resist judgment, perfectionism, discomfort and procrastination,
and to put creativity at the root of all learning.
Fortunately, many of our creative heroes have written about these very themes, and their
essays are collected in this reader. Twyla Tharp explains the importance of rituals for igniting
a creative habit. Cheryl Strayed discusses the imperative to generate work in Write Like
a Motherfucker. Sol LeWitt urges us to just do. Lynda Barry addresses the danger of
judgment in On Liking and Not Liking, and Audre Lorde implores us to transform our
silence into action. These essays, and more, are collected here for reference and nonprofit
educational use.
Unprofessional Development is a charge to write, weld, cook, construct, jury-rig,
sketch, stitch, bend and build both in and out of our classrooms.
Emily Pilloton and Christina Jenkins
January 2016

01: Get Started

On the power of beginning with a ritual, from Twyla Tharps The Creative Habit: Learn It
and Use It for Life
Just Do, Sol LeWitts letter to Eva Hesse
To Be of Use, by Marge Piercy
Novice Mind, from The RZAs The Tao of Wu
Write Like a Motherfucker, from Cheryl Strayeds Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on
Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Ira Glass on the gap between doing good work and having good taste
On the importance of short assignments, from Anne Lamotts Bird by Bird: Some
Instructions on Writing and Life

02: Prompts and Protocols

Your Creative Autobiography, from Twyla Tharps The Creative Habit: Learn It and
Use It for Life
On turning limitations into opportunities, from Ronda Rouseys My Fight / Your Fight
Embrace the Shake, by Phil Hansen
On classroom rules, from Lynda Barrys Syllabus
Richard Serras Verb List (196768)
Map Piece, from Yoko Onos Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions
The worst assignment I ever gave, by David Levine in Draw it with your eyes closed:
the art of the art assignment

03: Collaborate and Critique

Creativity Is In All of Us, from Christian Puglisis Rel: A Book of Ideas
On learning about critique by watching Tim Gunn, by Dan Saffer
On the ueslessness of liking and not liking, from Lynda Barrys Syllabus
A critique protocol, from Jessica Abel and Matt Maddens Drawing Words and Writing
Pictures
Leah Buechleys 2013 FabLearn keynote, A Critical Look at MAKE-ing
Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

04: Get Better and Keep Going

Bruce Maus An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
Anthony Bourdain on praticing jiu jitsu, in Sweep the Leg, Johnny!
Diana Nyad on Why 66 is Better Than 28
On cooking with integrity, from David Changs Momofuku
Haruki Murakami on endurance, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
On perseverance, from Elizabeth Gilberts Big Magic
On practicing the hard parts, from David Perkins Making Learning Whole
Seymour Paperts Hard Fun
The Creative Process, by James Baldwin from Creative America, 1962
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, from Audre Lordes Sister
Outsider

01: Getting Started

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, 1965

April 14, 1965

Dear Eva,
It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your
state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every
minute of it. Dont! Learn to say Fuck You to the world once in a while. You have every
right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting,
fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itchin,
scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling,
gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning,
groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose
sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting,
small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding,
grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!
From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and you [sic] ability;
the work you are doing sounds very good Drawing-clean-clear but crazy like machines,
larger and bolder real nonsense. That sounds fine, wonderful real nonsense. Do
more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts,
whatever make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your
weird humor. You belong in the most secret part of you. Dont worry about cool, make
your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you
draw & paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as to
decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistant [sic] approach to even some impossible
end or even an imagined end You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty.
Then you will be able to DO!
I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work
you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work the worst you can think of and see what
happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell you are not responsible for the
world you are only responsible for your work so DO IT. And dont think that your work
has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it
to be. But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working then stop. Dont punish
yourself. However, I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to
DO!
It seems I do understand your attitude somewhat, anyway, because I go through a similar
process every so often. I have an Agonizing Reappraisal of my work and change
everything as much as possible = and hate everything Ive done, and try to do something
entirely different and better. Maybe that kind of process is necessary to me, pushing me
on and on. The feeling that I can do better than that shit I just did. Maybe you need your
agony to accomplish what you do. And maybe it goads you on to do better. But it is very

painful I know. It would be better if you had the confidence just to do the stuff and not
even think about it. Cant you leave the world and ART alone and also quit fondling
your ego. I know that you (or anyone) can only work so much and the rest of the time you
are left with your thoughts. But when you work or before your work you have to empty
you [sic] mind and concentrate on what you are doing. After you do something it is done
and thats that. After a while you can see some are better than others but also you can
see what direction you are going. Im sure you know all that. You also must know that
you dont have to justify your work not even to yourself. Well, you know I admire your
work greatly and cant understand why you are so bothered by it. But you can see the
next ones and I cant. You also must believe in your ability. I think you do. So try the most
outrageous things you can shock yourself. You have at your power the ability to do
anything.
I would like to see your work and will have to be content to wait until Aug or Sept. I have
seen photos of some of Toms new things at Lucys. They are impressive especially the
ones with the more rigorous form: the simpler ones. I guess hell send some more later
on. Let me know how the shows are going and that kind of stuff.
My work had changed since you left and it is much better. I will be having a show May 4
-9 at the Daniels Gallery 17 E 64yh St (where Emmerich was), I wish you could be there.
Much love to you both.
Sol

To Be of Use
Marge Piercy, 1982

The people I love the best

jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

The Tao of Wu
The RZA

Write Like a Motherfucker

Cheryl Strayed

Ira Glass on Storytelling

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this
to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But its like
there is this gap. For the first couple years that youre making stuff, what youre making
isnt so good. Its not that great. Its trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but its
not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good
enough that you can tell that what youre making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot
of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where
they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasnt as good
as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal
and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.
Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know youre going to
finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that youre going to catch up
and close that gap. And the work youre making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone Ive ever met. It takes awhile. Its
gonna take you a while. Its normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through
that.
Watch at https://goo.gl/bXIVrB

Bird by Bird
Anne Lamott

02: Prompts and Protocols

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

My Fight / Your Fight

Ronda Rousey

Embrace the Shake

Phil Hansen
So, when I was in art school, I developed a shake in my hand, and this was the straightest
line I could draw. Now in hindsight, it was actually good for some things, like mixing a can
of paint or shaking a Polaroid, but at the time this was really doomsday. This was the
destruction of my dream of becoming an artist.
The shake developed out of, really, a single-minded pursuit of pointillism, just years of
making tiny, tiny dots. And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking
more like tadpoles, because of the shake. So to compensate, Id hold the pen tighter, and
this progressively made the shake worse, so Id hold the pen tighter still. And this became
a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues, I had trouble holding
anything. And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left
art completely.
But after a few years, I just couldnt stay away from art, and I decided to go to a neurologist
about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage. And he actually took
one look at my squiggly line, and said, Well, why dont you just embrace the shake?
So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just started letting my hand shake and
shake. I was making all these scribble pictures. And even though it wasnt the kind of art
that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great. And more importantly, once I embraced
the shake, I realized I could still make art. I just had to find a different approach to making
the art that I wanted.
Now, I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism, seeing these little tiny dots come
together to make this unified whole. So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment
images where the shake wouldnt affect the work, like dipping my feet in paint and walking on
a canvas, or, in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours, creating a 2D image by burning
it with a blowtorch. I discovered that, if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials,
my hand really wouldnt hurt, and after having gone from a single approach to art, I ended
up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons. This
was the first time Id encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive
creativity.
At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford
new art supplies. I had this horrible little set of tools, and I felt like I could do so much
more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have. I actually didnt even
have a regular pair of scissors. I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the
office that I worked at.

So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I
just went nuts buying supplies. And then when I got home, I sat down and I set myself to
task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box. But I sat there for
hours, and nothing came to mind. The same thing the next day, and then the next, quickly
slipping into a creative slump. And I was in a dark place for a long time, unable to create.
And it didnt make any sense, because I was finally able to support my art, and yet I was
creatively blank.
But as I searched around in the darkness, I realized I was actually paralyzed by all of the
choices that I never had before. And it was then that I thought back to my jittery hands.
Embrace the shake. And I realized, if I ever wanted my creativity back, I had to quit trying
so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it.
I wondered, could you become more creative, then, by looking for limitations? What if I
could only create with a dollars worth of supplies? At this point, I was spending a lot of
my evenings in well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks but I know
you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50. Surprisingly, they
just handed them right over, and then with some pencils I already had, I made this project
for only 80 cents. It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be
limited in order to become limitless.
I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas, and wondered what if, instead
of painting on a canvas, I could only paint on my chest? So I painted 30 images, one layer
at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life. Or
what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? So Id dip
my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised
a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks.
Or, what if instead of relying on myself, I had to rely on other people to create the content for
the art? So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam. I slept on the floor and I ate takeout,
and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment.
Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas.
Or what if instead of making art to display, I had to destroy it? This seemed like the ultimate
limitation, being an artist without art. This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project
that I called Goodbye Art, where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its
creation. In the beginning of Goodbye Art, I focused on forced destruction, like this image
of Jimi Hendrix, made with over 7,000 matches. Then I opened it up to creating art that
was destroyed naturally. I looked for temporary materials, like spitting out food, sidewalk
chalk and even frozen wine.
The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didnt actually exist
in the first place. So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out,

then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled
the videos into the larger image. So the end image was never visible as a physical whole.
It was destroyed before it ever existed.
In the course of this Goodbye Art series, I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to
physically display. What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to
be the ultimate liberation, as each time I created, the destruction brought me back to a
neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project. It did not happen
overnight. There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground, or, even worse,
after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing. But having
committed to the process, I continued on, and something really surprising came out of
this. As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of
failures, and let go of imperfections. And in return, I found a process of creating art thats
perpetual and unencumbered by results. I found myself in a state of constant creation,
thinking only of whats next and coming up with more ideas than ever.
When I think back to my three years away from art, away from my dream, just going
through the motions, instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream, I just
quit, I gave up. And what if I didnt embrace the shake? Because embracing the shake
for me wasnt just about art and having art skills. It turned out to be about life, and having
life skills. Because ultimately, most of what we do takes place here, inside the box, with
limited resources. Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best
hope we have to transform ourselves and, collectively, transform our world.
Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life. Now, when I
run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped, I sometimes still struggle, but I continue
to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities, like using hundreds
of real, live worms to make an image, using a pushpin to tattoo a banana, or painting a
picture with hamburger grease.
One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that Ive
learned into something others can replicate.
Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity, but perhaps one of
the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted
norms. And instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves
every day to seize the limitation.
Thank you.
https://www.ted.com/talks/phil_hansen_embrace_the_shake

Syllabus
Lynda Barry

Verb List (196768)

Richard Serra

to roll
to crease
to fold
to store
to bend
to shorten
to twist
to dapple
to crumple
to shave
to tear
to chip
to split
to cut
to sever
to drop
to remove
to simplify
to differ
to disarrange
to open
to mix
to splash
to knot
to spill
to droop
to flow

to curve
to lift
to inlay
to impress
to fire
to flood
to smear
to rotate
to swirl
to support
to hook
to suspend
to spread
to hang
to collect
of tension
of gravity
of entropy
of nature
of grouping
of layering
of felting
to grasp
to tighten
to bundle
to heap
to gather

to scatter
to arrange
to repair
to discard
to pair
to distribute
to surfeit
to compliment
to enclose
to surround
to encircle
to hole
to cover
to wrap
to dig
to tie
to bind
to weave
to join
to match
to laminate
to bond
to hinge
to mark
to expand
to dilute
to light

to modulate
to distill
of waves
of electromagnetic
of inertia
of ionization
of polarization
of refraction
of tides
of reflection
of equilibrium
of symmetry
of friction
to stretch
to bounce
to erase
to spray
to systematize
to refer
to force
of mapping
of location
of context
of time
of carbonization
to continue

Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings

Yoko Ono

The Art of the Art Assignment

David Levine

03: Collaborate and Critique

Rel: A Book of Ideas

Christian F. Puglisi

Everything Ive Ever Learned About Giving Design Critiques

I Learned from Tim Gunn
Dan Saffer

I went through two years of studio critiques while getting my Masters degree in design, and
have been through dozens of them in the five years since then, but I can honestly say Ive
learned more about how to appropriately give design criticism from Tim Gunn, one of the
hosts of the US television show Project Runway.
For anyone not aware of the show, it basically puts 16 clothing designers together and gives
them challenge after challenge, with judges voting one designer off a week. The challenges
can be anything from designing eveningwear for pregnant women to make swimsuits out of
trash bags. Its pretty harrowing on the designers, but luckily for them, Tim Gunn comes into
the middle of their design process to offer a critique.
Now, Im sure he doesnt really have these, but Tim Gunns principles for critique seem to be:
The purpose of a critique is to make the design better. Its not to make the designer feel
bad, or to make the teacher feel superior. Its to provide guidance using an outside,
experienced eye.
Be supportive. Even if you dont like a designer (and Tim hides this pretty well), you can
objectively look at the work and try to make them a better designer through gentle steering
in the right direction. Never say you hate a design unless you can also (gently) say why
and offer suggestions for improvement.
First, figure out what the designer was trying to accomplish. Tim tries to get a sense of
what the objective was. If theres a problem here, if the designer doesnt know, then the
overall design is going to be a mess. If Tim cant figure it out, the judges wont be able to
either.
Offer direction, not prescription. Tim doesnt often tell the designer how to fix the design
(although he will say what specifically isnt working for him.) But it is up to the designer to
come up with a solution (Make it work!).
Humor and metaphor work better than criticism alone. Tim often chooses references from
pop culture to make a point. This looks like The Golden Girls, for example. Which is
devastating, funny, incisive, and instructional all at once. The designer understand where
the design has to go (or where to move away from) next.

 Accept multiple styles. Tims style is, in all likelihood, very far away from the aesthetic of
most of the designers. But he doesnt try to impose his style on them, just sharpen their
own while still applying some universal principles of good taste and design.
Know the domain. If you know whats been done and whats being done, youre better
able to offer suggestions (and to alert designers as to what seems dated or out of style).
If you dont understand it, be cautious in critiquing it. If Tim doesnt understand where a
design is going, he openly admits it (Im puzzled) or (if he likes it) says things like Im
intrigued Know your limitations as a critiquer.
Dont take it personally. Tim rarely gets upset or angry, even when designers refuse his
advice. Its not his design, after all.
Seasons of watching Tim Gunn work have been extremely instructive in forming my own
teaching style. Everyone who reviews the work of designers could learn a thing or two from
him.
http://www.kickerstudio.com/2010/11/everything-ive-ever-learned-about-giving-design-critiques-i-learned-from-tim-gunn/

Syllabus / Lynda Barry

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden

A Critical Look at MAKE-ing

2013 FabLearn Keynote
Leah Buechley
Leah Buechley is a designer, engineer, artist, and educator whose work explores intersections and juxtapositions--of "high" and "low" technologies, new and ancient materials,
and masculine and feminine making traditions. She also develops tools that help people
build their own technologies. Her inventions include the LilyPad Arduino toolkit. From
2009-2013, she was a professor at the MIT Media Lab where she founded and directed
the High-Low Tech group.
In 2013, she spoke at Stanfords FabLearn conference about diversity in the Maker movement as popularized by Maker Media, the publisher of Make: magazine and producer of
Maker Faire.
Her talk, which can be viewed in full via the link below and which cannot be properly transcribed because it references her slides throughout, is a seminal criticism of MAKE-ing as
a branded activity defined by its association with STEM (technology and engineering in
particular) and with a predominantly white audience.
Im going to now throw some rocks at making, she says at 18:10.
http://leahbuechley.com/wordpress/?p=60

Infinity Net
Yayoi Kusama

04: Get Better and Keep Going

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Bruce Mau
1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from
something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for
growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by
them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth
is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not
yield to our research. As long as you stick to good youll never have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we
will only ever go to where weve already been. If process drives outcome we may not
know where were going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth.
Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts,
trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different
question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to
study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone
criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common
form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn
to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment
to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a
high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success.
Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities
may present themselves.
14. Dont be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of
this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fuelled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer,
not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict,
friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you havent
had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when youve gone too far, been up too long,
worked too hard, and youre separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other
than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the
parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you dont like it, do it again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple
tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember,
tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23. Stand on someones shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplish-
ments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Dont clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you cant see
tonight.
26. Dont enter awards competitions. Just dont. Its not good for you.
27. Read only lefthand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount
of information, we leave room for what he called our noodle.

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of
thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates
new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not devicedependent.
30.

Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in

context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise.
Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can
deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between creatives and suits is what
Leonard Cohen calls a charming artifact of the past.

31. Dont borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehrys advice. By maintaining financial
control, we maintain creative control. Its not exactly rocket science, but its surprising
how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32.

Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a
world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By
listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold
their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or
the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object
oriented, realtime, computer graphicsimulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isnt my ideaI borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy
Grove.
35.

Imitate. Dont be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. Youll never get all the
way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard
Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamps large glass to see how rich,
discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else but
not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38.

Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the
technological pack. We cant find the leading edge because its trampled underfoot.
Try using oldtech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich
with potential.

39.

Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of
where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaceswhat Dr. Seuss calls the waiting
place. Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of
the infrastructure of a conferencethe parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivalsbut
with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many
ongoing collaborations.

40.

Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are
attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts
to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the
fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since Ive
become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing
ourselves.
42.

Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory,

innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is
never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous mo
ment or event. Thats what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present.
It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source,
and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over
their lives. We cant be free agents if were not free.

Sweep the Leg, Johnny!

Anthony Bourdain
I am 59 years old and a Brazilian jiu jitsu addict.
I used to hang around cold stairwells first thing in the morning waiting for dope. Now I
hang around cold stairwells waiting for Jiu jitsu.
Every day Im home in New York..every day, I head down to the cellar locker room of
the Renzo Gracie Academy and put on my gi. Then, barefoot and ready to meet my
fate, I head out onto the mats. Usually, I take an hour long private lesson with my
principal instructor, Igor Gracie, followed by an hour long class with the general population
of mixed belts taught by John Danaher. About half an hour of techniques and drilling,
then, the last half hour of class is spent sparring. Four five minute rounds with 60 seconds
in between.
Invariably I do not win these rounds, meaning, I do not tap anybody. As much as I
might like to, I do not compress anybodys neck in such a way as to restrict oxygenated
blood flow to the brain (thereby causing them to submit or pass out). I am almost always
unsuccessful when attempting to bend an arm, shoulder or extremity in ways that God
did not intend. Instead, I fight as hard as I can to delay the inevitable to fend off my
training partners younger, often larger chested and more heavily muscled almost always
more skilled from passing my guard, crushing my rib cage in side control, getting an
arm under my head and pressing their shoulder into my jaw. Every second, every minute I
can prevent that from happening is a victory to me.
When Im not in New York, when Im on the road shooting PARTS UNKNOWN, I go
to whatever local gym, yoga studio, garage, cellar claims to teach Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
places where the term parts unknown can really apply. Until I walk in the door, I have
no idea what Im going to face; what the local custom is concerning techniques like
face-cranks, heel hooks, can openers, knee-on-neck, what the acceptable level of aggression
is, whether my training partners will be amiable blue belts, giant Slav white belts with 10
years of wrestling experience, or huge, heavily tattooed Pacific islanders none of whom
even remember having a neck. Will the facility be an austere, Japanese style dojo,
a freezing garage, an airless, 110 degree closet, a military base, a boxing ring? I have
trained in all these places: Glasgow, Maui, Istanbul, Beirut, Budapest, Kuching, Kuala
Lumpur, Okinawa, Marseille and all over the US.
As I say at the top of this episode, as I tape my fingers (in the forlorn hope that it might
mitigate the osteoarthritis and Heberdens nodes associated with grip fighting), I will never
be a black belt. I will never successfully compete against similarly ranked opponents half
my age, I will never be great at Brazilian jiu jitsu. There is an urgency to my training because

Im sure as shit not getting any younger, or more flexible. Im certainly not getting any
faster. And as I head down the highway on my jiu jitsu journey, the likelihood of the wheels
coming off the car grows stronger every day.
But I am determined to suck less at this jiu jitsu thing every day if I can.
It was to this end that I chose to do a San Francisco show.
Yeah, I know: The San Francisco bay area is awesome. Its a restaurant mecca. But this
is not a Best of San Francisco episode. Over the years, Ive done many hours of television
on the Bay Area and hope to do many more. This episode is more about what San
Francisco is in danger of losing, what some people are doing about it, whats hanging on,
whats disappearing and what might be next. Right now, theres a struggle for the soul of
the city going on as battalions of techies, engorged with tech bucks invade, driving rents
up and infusing perfectly good coffee with pumpkin flavor. Its a pattern we see nearly every
place where the food is good, the views uniquely beautiful: people from elsewhere replacing
the people who made the place desirable and awesome in the first place. Whether that is
a natural, inevitable and irresistible process or something to be fought tooth and nail remains
to be seen. Personally, Im pessimistic. Time, and change as I feel, literally, in my bones
every day after training are like the ocean, they wash over you, eventually washing you
away entirely.
I want to stipulate up front, however, that this episode in particular is a selfish enterprise.
Its all about me, me, me and Im running out of time.
I wanted to train at San Franciscos Ralph Gracie Academy with their legendary black
belt, Kurt Osiander and I built this whole damn episode around that ambition.
It wasnt a casual decision. Ralph Gracie (Renzos brother) is notorious for his grueling
warm-ups. Back in New York it had taken me six months to get up to speed enough
physically to be able to keep up with the pre-instruction calisthenics in white belt classes.
But Ralphs, everybody I spoke to told me, was worse. Black belts at Renzos would smile
pityingly when I told them Id be going out to train there for a week.
You are not going to enjoy the warm ups, theyd say, describing a near half hour regime
of jumping jacks, squats, burpees, sprawls, push-ups, crunches, sprints, fireman carries,
forward and backward rolls, monkey and bear crawls, leg lifts, and other fiendish strategies to thoroughly exhaust the human bodybefore live training involving six 6 minute
roundswith 30 second breaks in between. (Ralph, armed with a kendo practice sword,
has been known during these short breaks to demand Give me twenty! of his students,
requiring a quick 20 push-ups before continued sparring).
While this whole episode was a cynical means to fulfill my jiu jitsu dreams, I would,

necessarily have to appear on camera, and I did not want to look like that guy, gassed
out and sitting against the wall while the rest of the class do hip escapes across the room.
So, a month prior to the show, I took to vomit inducing strength and endurance training
back in New Yorkjust so I could make it past the warm ups at Ralphs. (As it turned out,
they were not, during the daytime classes anyway, as bad as Id been told).
Most of you reading this will have little to no idea what Brazilian jiu jitsu is. I understand.
Until a couple of years ago, the idea of rolling around on the floor in a slick of human
sweat was about as foreign a notion as anything could be. When I tell people I train, they
often do a little chopping motion with their hands that every practitioner has had to endure
silently without correcting (there is no striking, much less chopping, in jiu jitsu). So, at the
top of the episode, my professor Igor Gracie, and his brother Rolles demonstrate the
basic principles. Hopefully this will help you avoid embarrassment and as importantly,
will prevent you from joining the meatheads in booing next time a UFC fight goes to the
ground.
Jiu Jitsu makes me very happy regardless of how good or bad I am at it and how dim
my prospects of ever excelling at it. Its become a family tradition: my wife does it pretty
much as a profession, seeking to tear knees and ankles off people or occasionally,
helping to teach others how to do same. My daughter does it because its fun and
because every young girl, if possible, should be free of ever being physically intimidated
by a boy (I pity the first little boy who shoves my daughter to the ground).
I do it because its hard. Because its the hardest thing Ive ever done. And because it
never ends. Every day presents me with a series of problems that I spend the rest of the
day thinking about how I might solve or at least chip away at. Next day same. And the
day after that.
Its like being the newest, worst cook in the kitchen all over again, looking up that impossibly
steep learning curve to the broiler station. I liked that feeling then. I like it now.
The first day, all those years ago, when my chef addressed me by name at the end of the
shift, was a golden moment.
When I recently got my blue belt, after over two years of training, it was, other than the
birth of my daughter, pretty much the greatest day of my life. That belt doesnt mean Im
any good at jiu jitsu, by the way. It just means that I worked really, really hard at something.
And that presumably, I suck at it just a tiny bit less.
https://medium.com/parts-unknown/sweep-the-leg-johnny-2004ad77ec1#.3rmj2z5t2

Why 66 is Better Than 28

Diana Nyad
What I Will Do For the Rest of My Life
My mother says that her father lived to be 79. Her mother is still living. And my fathers parents are still
living. It would probably be a good guess that I will live to 80 years. Which means I have 70 years left to go.
I want to see all the countries of the world and learn all the languages. I want to have thousands of
friends, and I want all my friends to be different. I want to play six instruments. I want to be the best in
the world at two things. I want to be a great athlete and I want to be a great surgeon.
I need to practice very hard every day. I need to sleep as little as possible. I need to read at least one
major book every week. And I need to remember that my 70 years are going to go by too quickly.
An essay Diana Nyad wrote at age 10, reprinted from Other Shores, published in 1978

I was 64 when I became the first to swim the 110.86 miles from Cuba to Florida, something
I failed at when I was 28. The truth is, I am a better athlete in my mid-60s than I was, even
as a world champion, in my mid-20s.
The cliche is that we reach our prime in middle age because we are mature; we have
found patience and perspective. We recognize that our time is more and more valuable
with each fleeting year. We tap into a well of experience and open-mindedness.
All of this is true, but I also believe we can retain our physical vitality into our middle and
even older years. I point-blank refuse to cower in the face of weak and faulty statistics,
geared for the masses, that pay little respect to the will and potential of the individual.
There is no doubt that I am breathing the life force of my prime physical self now, at age
66. I am more resilient. My immune system is a stronger fortress. I can summon a brute
strength I never had back in the day. I was a thoroughbred then, more finely tuned but
also somewhat fragile. These days Im more of a Clydesdale, sturdy and stalwart. If you
told me Id be left stranded in the wilderness for many months and could choose at which
age I would attempt to survive the ordeal, Id pick this very age, 66.
Yes, this is a one-way journey were all traveling, and it has an endpoint. We have to get
real. I cant pretend Im not a whole lot closer to the end than ever before. I accept the
lines on the face, cartilage thinning in the knees, the breasts riding lower and lower.
What I rail against is the blanket limitations put on us by whom? Who has done the irrefutable calculations that say were too old to work in our professions? Who decrees the

assigned ages for productivity and creativity and vitality? I accept the laws of the universe
when it comes to aging, but I point-blank refuse to cower in the face of weak and faulty
statistics, geared for the masses, that pay little respect to the will and potential of the
individual.
I was recently chatting with a couple. The husband happened to mention that he was
54. His wife corrected him to say he was really 55, as his birthday was coming up in two
days. He was adamant, all kidding aside: At that moment, he was still 54.
The ultimate irony is that the people most freaked out by the numbers, the wrinkles, the
widening of the midsection, waste more of their precious time denying aging than in pursuit
of living hard. Think of all the minutes well never get back, the minutes we spent arguing
with some stranger that we were not yet 55 but had two more days to go at 54.
This is the crux of it all: We rabidly pursue youth in the name of appearing young. Too
many of us arent exercising our bodies and carefully contemplating every morsel we put
into our mouths so that we can retain our youthful dynamism. We think our value lies in
what age we are perceived to be rather than in empirical measurements of how were
performing and what were experiencing.
We baby boomers are lucky. The concepts of middle age and old age are sliding upward.
We are feeling feisty at 50 and 60 and 70. At a recent White House Conference on Aging,
the central theme was the vast overhaul of assisted-living and nursing home models. The
next group moving toward old age is teeming with fierce independence. We are going to
radically redefine the golden years.
These days we can reinvent ourselves. We can embrace our second acts and be more
successful, more spirited, more equipped in all ways, big and small, than we were the first
time around. The machine of our youth society dictates that our talents are fading, even
our thinking is passe, but ironically its that very youth-driven tech culture that can provide us
with more avenues of creativity and entrepreneurship than ever before. Trust me, I know
we can still dream.
They say age is a state of mind. Age is, of course, a state of body as well. It is up to each
of us to live bold, vital days, free from subjugation to the mass, limited interpretations of
our respective ages.
What defines my age my strengths and weaknesses I insist be left to my own reckoning.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-nyad-no-limits-aging-20151021-story.html

Momofuku
David Chang

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami

In every interview Im asked whats the most important quality a novelist has to have. Its
pretty obvious: talent. Now matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing,
if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a
prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you dont have any fuel, even the best car wont
run.The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved cant
control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isnt enough and you want to
increase it, or you might try to be frugal and make it last longer, but in neither case do
things work out that easily. Talent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to,
and once it dries up, thats it. Of course, certain poets and rock singers whose genius
went out in a blaze of glory people like Schubert and Mozart, whose dramatic early
deaths turned them into legends have a certain appeal, but for the vast majority of us
this isnt the model we follow.
If Im asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, thats easy too: focus
the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatevers critical at the moment.
Without that you cant accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively,
youll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally
concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus
totally on what Im writing. I dont see anything else, I dont think about anything else.
After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance.
If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this,
youre not going to be able to write a long work. Whats needed of the writer of fiction at
least one who hopes to write a novelis the energy to focus every day for half a year, or
a year, or two years.
Fortunately, these two disciplines focus and endurance are different from talent,
since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. Youll naturally learn both
concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself
to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago.
You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make
sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day
and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually youll expand the limits of what
youre able to do. Almost imperceptibly youll make the bar rise. This involves the same
process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runners physique.
Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I
guarantee results will come.

In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed
that even if he didnt write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single
day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way
Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening
his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him.
Most of what I know about writing Ive learned through running every day. These are
practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate
and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and
consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be
aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent
should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that
if I hadnt become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have
been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would definitely have
been different.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Elizabeth Gilbert

Making Learning Whole

David Perkins

Hard Fun
Seymour Papert
I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don't blame them.
I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts
to introduce a more engaging, less coercive curriculum do indeed end up taking the guts
out of the learning. But it is not fair to hold me guilty by association. My whole career in
education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that will harness the passion of the
learner to the hard work needed to master difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different
from the "touchy feely ... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education.
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The
Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San
Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to
spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning
to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one
child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I
have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of
being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over
and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things
matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times
challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget)
ethic adults will need for the future world.
I have written here about adolescents in Maine's juvenile correctional facility overcoming
their long standing aversion to any sort of school learning by being given the opportunity to invent and construct sophisticated mechanical/robotic devices. Doing this requires
concentration and discipline. It requires learning to deal with things going wrong by finding out how to fix the problem rather than by giving up in frustration. And for some of
those kids it has meant experiencing for the first time the pleasure of writing because they
were encouraged to write about something they were doing themselves and doing with
passion.
The phrase "pleasure of writing" makes me pause. At this very moment writing is not
altogether pleasurable. The ticking of the clock telling me that the deadline is coming
close frustrates me. I am stinging from the pain of having to throw out a whole paragraph

because "it wasn't going to work" even though it had a phrase with which I had fallen in
love. So maybe "pleasure" isn't quite the right word. Nor is "fun." We need a better word
for it and maybe that first grader in San Jose provided the best one. We are talking here
about a special kind of fun ... "hard fun."
How do we make writing become hard fun? One way is to develop for kids "writable" activities that they love to do. The building of robotic devices acquires "writability" because
it lends itself to stage-by-stage description. Its writability is further enhanced by the use of
word processors and digital cameras. But beyond technology there is the attitude in the
learning culture. An example of what I mean was brought up by a teacher who objected
to the idea that children should be allowed to write about what they liked. "When they go
to work they'll have to do what they are told." Therein lies a source of many kids' failure
in reading. Of course we should teach children the skill of self-control needed to carry out
orders. But mixing up learning that skill with learning to write defeats both purposes.

The Creative Process

James Baldwin

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state
which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. That all men are, when
the chips are down, alone, is a banalitya banality because it is very frequently stated,
but very rarely, on the evidence, believed. Most of us are not compelled to linger with the
knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world.
There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. None of these things can be done alone. But the conquest of the physical
world is not mans only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself.
The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that
vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all,
to make the world a more human dwelling place.
The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing beside
some silver lake. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth
or death. It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering,
whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so
many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or
ever really been able to control. I put the matter this way, not out of any desire to create
pity for the artistGod forbid!but to suggest how nearly, after all, is his state the state
of everyone, and in an attempt to make vivid his endeavor. The state of birth, suffering,
love, and death are extreme statesextreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know
this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to
which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge.
It is for this reason that all societies have battled with the incorrigible disturber of the
peacethe artist. I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better. The entire
purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, in order
to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive. And it is absolutely inevitable that
when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, the people, in general, will
suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and
indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without
those traditions that have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is suggested
that they can or that they must, is panic. And we see this panic, I think, everywhere in the
world today, from the streets of New Orleans to the grisly battleground of Algeria. And a
higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the
future, of minimizing human damage.
The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society the politicians,

legislators, educators, and scientists by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own
laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be,
and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he
can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being. Society must accept
some things as real; but he must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and
that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen. A society must assume that
it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable
under heaven. One cannot possibly build a school, teach a child, or drive a car without
taking some things for granted. The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted,
but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
I seem to be making extremely grandiloquent claims for a breed of men and women
historically despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead. But, in a way, the
belated honor that all societies tender their artists proven the reality of the point I am
trying to make. I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artists responsibility to his
society. The peculiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with
it, for its sake and for his own. For the truth, in spite of appearances and all our hopes,
is that everything is always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as
men is how well prepared we are to meet these changes, and further, to use them for our
health.
Now, anyone who has ever been compelled to think about it anyone, for example, who
has ever been in love knows that the one face that one can never see is ones own face.
Ones lover or ones brother, or ones enemy sees the face you wear, and this face can
elicit the most extraordinary reactions. We do the things we do and feel what we feel
essentially because we must we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand
them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would
damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and ones knowledge of oneself
is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social
creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are
a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of
these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet the forces are
there: we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot
leant his unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is
always at variance with what we wish to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities
into a relationship resembling reconciliation. The human beings whom we respect the
most, after all and sometimes fear the most are those who are most deeply involved
in this delicate and strenuous effort, for they have the unshakable authority that comes
only from having looked on and endured and survived the worst. That nation is healthiest
which has the least necessity to distrust or ostracize these people whom, as I say, honor,
once they are gone, because somewhere in our hearts we know that we cannot live without
them.

The dangers of being an American artist are not greater than those of being an artist
anywhere else in the world, but they are very particular. These dangers are produced by
our history. They rest on the fact that in order to conquer this continent, the particular
aloneness of which I speak the aloneness in which one discovers that life is tragic, and
therefore unutterably beautiful could not be permitted. And that this prohibition is typical of all emergent nations will be proved, I have no doubt, in many ways during the next
fifty years. This continent now is conquered, but our habits and our fears remain. And, in
the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and,
ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all ones interior, uncharted chaos,
so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in
our history. We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth
about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is
also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either
his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes the one for the
other. And this, I think, we do. We are the strongest nation in the Western world, but this
is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an opportunity that no other
nation has in moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class and caste, to
create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the New
World. But the price of this is a long look backward when we came and an unflinching
assessment of the record. For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed
in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never know it, but the
war of an artist with his society is a lovers war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do,
which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

Audre Lorde

The Workshop: Creativity 101

Painting in the Medium of Food, by Sara Greenberger Rafferty in
Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment
The Bowline Knot and the Transom Knot,
from Philippe Petits Why Knot?
The Unprofessional Development Credo

Painting in the Medium of Food

Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Why Knot?
Philippe Petit

Bibliography
Abel, Jessica, and Matt Madden. Drawing Words & Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic

Novels, and beyond. New York: First Second, 2008. Print.
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