How does an artist survive and thrive in a highly competitive creative environment? Produce a book like Doggerel by Martha Paulos. More than thirty years after publication, it seems fresh and holds interest.
The linocuts in this book are compelling and well-executed. The poems written by their respective (famous) authors add to the linocuts. Nothing about this book is a hagiography of dogs and that seems to be the point. The book is funny, and based in a society the reader can understand. Who hasn’t been chased by a dog while riding a bicycle?
Linocuts take more time to produce than other media. Paulos’ high level of technical craftsmanship made it worth our time to appreciate her art.
Recommended for people working toward a career in creative endeavors. Also for anyone interested in linocuts. If a person collects dog stuff, they should get a copy for Doggerel’s uniqueness.
Most Iowans don’t value art like that displayed at the University of Iowa. Increased public awareness of this attitude is part of the coarsening of Iowa culture in its current wave of neoliberalism. As a writer, how should art and art history be incorporated into my work? Should they be?
Debate in the Iowa Legislature after the 2008 Iowa River flood permanently damaged the University of Iowa Museum of Art was whether to sell Jackson Pollock’s Mural. Scott Raecker, Republican chairman of the House appropriations committee, introduced a bill requiring the university to sell the painting, then valued at $140 million. The ideas were the asset held no equivalent value for the university museum, and the money could be placed in a trust fund with the interest funding undergraduate scholarships. The bill was written about in news media, yet failed. When the new University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art opened in August 2022, Mural had been restored and returned as a centerpiece of the permanent collection.
Arguably the three most famous paintings in the museum, Mural, Joan Miró’s A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb and Max Beckmann’s Karneval were in the collection during my undergraduate years. I discussed and wrote about them in art history class. They made an impression on me, one that would follow until I had an opportunity to see Miró work in person at a French gallery in Saint Paul de Vence in 1979. Art occupies part of my life today.
I attended major retrospectives of work by Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper and others. While traveling in Europe I visited major museums where the so-called great master paintings were in permanent collections. I spent a lot of time at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris where the Claude Monet exhibition captivated me. I experienced art in a way most Iowans have not. Revered artwork holds a place in my world view even if I not more generally where I live.
In Davenport after Father’s death I spent time with artists, both my age and older. I didn’t demonstrate any talent for drawing, painting, or other visual arts. At university I took a class in ceramics where I explored the medium and produced a few good pieces. Most of those were sold, given away, or have otherwise gone missing. I also tie-dyed fabric. Since graduation, I haven’t done either at all. I saw how much work went into being an artist, the level of financial reward, and doubted I could make that commitment.
Is there more than art in the background for my writing?
The immediate problem is I am running out of shelf space and some of my art and art history books will have to go. Some stack-trimming is in order. Major books containing reproductions of an artist’s work will stay. Some of the secondary and all tertiary analysis will go. The challenge is there are so many books to read and so little time. That I need to be writing, rather than studying, is a basic fact of life.
Beyond the space problem, finding a link between writing and the visual arts has been something for me to avoid. I don’t like artistic name-dropping (or any kind of name-dropping) in writing. There are few circumstances where a description of a work of art could play a role in a narrative. The use of works of art and artistic theory must lie in the creative process.
The challenge in art is process is often visible. For example, in 1974 I wrote about Beckmann’s Karneval, “The main actors are merely broad areas of paint bordered with heavy black lines, and what is more, the bodies do not correspond to the anatomy of the human body.” While such description helped me understand the work, in narratives there is little use for words that don’t get to some existential point directly. We seek bodies that do correspond to human bodies because the narrative may depend upon such understanding among readers to further the story.
The next time my long-time friend from Missouri visits, we’ll spend time at the Stanley Museum. I will put Vasari’s Lives of the Artists on my reading list. I will revisit Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, John Berger and Roland Barthes. These good intentions are designed to help me be a better writer. The next part of following through is harder.
On the corner of my sorting table rest piles of recently read books. I am shocked at the level of retention from the experience. It is not as much as I want. Is there an issue with reading while aging, or not?
In an article titled, “Reading in Normally Aging Adults,” authors associated with the American Psychological Association present the following article abstract which describes the physiological and cognitive process. Sorry, it is a bit long, yet everything in it is important.
Skilled reading requires coordination of knowledge about language with a broad range of basic cognitive processes. While changes due to aging have been documented for many of those cognitive processes, the ability to read declines little during healthy aging. Aging is associated with slower reading, longer eye movements and more regressive eye movements, but the qualitative patterns of older adults’ eye movements in response to lexical characteristics (e.g., frequency) and sentence characteristics (e.g., word predictability) largely resemble those of younger adults. The age-related differences in reading behavior are due in part to older adults’ reduced visual abilities. In addition, they may result from compensatory strategies wherein older adults rely more on their intact semantic intelligence and less heavily on perceptual processing of text, or alternatively they may be a consequence of older adults being less adept at effectively coordinating word recognition with processes of oculomotor control. Some age-related declines are seen when reading comprehension and text memory are assessed at lower levels of representation for complex sentences. However, older adults perform as well or better than younger adults when higher-level meanings of a text are assessed. These high levels of performance reflect older adults’ ability to draw on crystalized semantic intelligence that provides well-organized structures in long-term memory of the patterns that tend to occur in natural language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Reading in normally aging adults by Gordon, P. C., Lowder, M. W., & Hoedemaker, R. S. APA PsychNet.
My take away is that while my vision has somewhat deteriorated, mental capacity remains strong, and I can draw on information and experience gained in my past to better and more quickly understand what I am reading. According to other articles I read this morning, reading can maintain mental functioning, and stave off common mental illnesses among the elderly like Alzheimer’s disease.
The money quote is, “However, older adults perform as well or better than younger adults when higher-level meanings of a text are assessed.” In theory, these psychologists say, since I have visual acuity, I retain the potential to be as good a reader as anyone.
Why am I worried about the piles of books read yet little remembered?
The abstract points to a borderline area of reading: the interaction between read text and the stored intelligence in my brain. To what extent am I processing what I read in context of past reading experience, and to what extent am I taking in text to gain new experiences? My fear is it is the former. If we read, it should be to expand our knowledge and experience, not to intake words and sentences as a form of confirmation bias.
Because I curate a large home library, I plan to continue reading for as many months and years as possible. My daily reading goal is 25 pages from a book. For the most part, I exceed that amount depending upon how engaging the writing has been. Importantly, I want more than to check off the daily reading goal box on my to-do list. I want to gain knowledge and experience that will help me better cope with society. I want to read to become a better writer.
By year’s end I will have read almost 60 books. If the text is being assimilated into my existing cognitive capacity, there is nothing wrong with that. I take up each new book with hope it will reveal something about society, something specific in life, an answer to a question or something about myself. I also read to see how other authors write. As long as I take a few minutes to appreciate each book after finishing it, I am of an age where everything read becomes part of my world view.
The garlic rack converts to a table by using a remnant of a 4 x 8 sheet of 3/4-inch plywood used to build our child a loft bed for college. I laid it down on top of the two by fours used to hold garlic as it dries. The rack is tall enough so garlic leaves don’t touch the floor. As a table I can work without bending over. It is a useful space to sort things out.
I read 50 books thus far this year. They are listed on the Read Recently page which is updated after I finish each one. Here are the highlights of this daily activity.
By far, the most interesting book was Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong. She was born with spinal muscular dystrophy and her book stands out as a tale of living an active life with a disease that confines her to a wheelchair. In her discussion of Twitter, she describes how the social media platform is used by disabled persons who may have no other public voice. As Elon Musk acquired and is changing the platform, I hope he improves the disability community’s ability to participate in this aspect of society.
Memoirs and biography were too small a portion of the books I read. As someone writing their own autobiography, I should be reading more in this category. Each of the four I read was important. I enjoyed Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter more than Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell and Like a Rolling Stone by Jann S. Wenner. Lynn’s book was relatable in a way Kennedy and Wenner are not. A person can take only so much of the life story of rich people. I associated Joan Liffrig-Zug Bourret, who died in the care center in town this year, with the many cookbooks she published at her Penfield Press. Her memoir, Pictures and People: A Search for Visual Truth and Social Justice tells a story that goes well beyond her chronicling of the Amana Colonies in Iowa.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut seemed unique and necessary. The Chilean author presents, as The Guardian put it, “an extraordinary ‘nonfiction novel’ that weaves a web of associations between the founders of quantum mechanics and the evils of two world wars.” It was unlike anything else I recently read.
I read fiction for diversion and to see how other writers do their work. Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway was the best of the lot this year.
In poetry, how did I miss Mary Oliver in my life? I don’t know but Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver was well-written and engaging. I’ll be returning to this excellent volume.
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America by John M. Barry tells a story essential to anyone who is from or is writing about life in the Mississippi basin.
Related to my autobiography was The Trader at Rock Island: George Davenport and the Founding of the Quad-Cities by Regena Trant Schantz. This is an essential book about the settling of the Midwest. What was most surprising is it was just published in 2020. I would like to have read this when I was a teenager in Davenport.
There were no real clinkers in this year’s books. What made a difference in reading more was setting a daily goal of reading 25 pages in a book. I hope readers find my review of 2022 reading to be useful. I’d love to hear what you are reading in the comments.
In The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy, author Thom Hartmann focuses on Big Data and its consequences for all aspects of our lives. In the framework of surveillance and social control, Hartmann traces the history of surveillance and the threat of violence to control behavior, thought, and belief by our political and social masters.
Referencing George Orwell’s book 1984, Hartmann wrote, “Orwell was only slightly off the mark. Big Brother types of government, and Thought Police types of social control, are now widespread in the world and incompatible with democracy.”
What makes this book timely is the way Trump campaigns used Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to scrape personal data about tens of millions of voters from the internet, and then custom targeted them with tens of thousands of distinct daily ads designed to either persuade people to vote for Trump or not vote at all. On the day of the third presidential debate in October 2020, Hartmann wrote, team Trump ran 175,000 variations of ads micro-targeting voters. These ads were, for the most part, not publicly seen.
Here in Iowa the Republican legislature seeks to control our behavior with legislation intended to address perceived constituent needs. Iowa Republicans approach it with a dull knife. For example, because of feedback and paranoia about transgender girls, Republicans introduced legislation to ban trans females from Title IX activities. This legislation would create discrimination for sure, and potentially a bullying environment for children. They seek to control our behavior and even such crude attempts at social control are anti-democratic. By using bludgeoning methods, Iowa Republicans were not nearly as effective as Trump’s use of Big Data to spy on voters and use what they found to influence their decisions.
Thom Hartmann
Whether one is liberal, conservative, libertarian or whatever, we have concerns about how Big Data firms like Google, Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, and others surveil and use data we consider to be private. In the beginning we considered such data collection and use to be for advertising like generating sales for a brand of energy drink. Whether it is conservatives who have paranoid feelings that “Big Data” is collecting personal information, censoring and manipulating people, liberals who see companies like Cambridge Analytica violating their privacy, or Amazon Ring customers concerned about law enforcement gaining warrantless access to video from the camera at their doorstep, Big Brother is watching us, eroding our privacy, and threatening our democracy.
In The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, Hartmann uses extensive examples to highlight the consequences of Big Data on our lives. He traces the history of surveillance and social control, looking back to how Big Brother invented whiteness to keep order, and how surveillance began to be employed as a way to modify behavior. “The goal of those who violate privacy and use surveillance is almost always social control and behavior modification,” Hartmann wrote.
Big Data threatens privacy and enables surveillance, Hartmann wrote. The lack of alternatives to lifestyles that involve feeding into Big Data leads to almost forced participation in surveillance by Big Brother. Surveillance and lack of privacy are a threat to freedom, he wrote, because the information gathered can be abused, people have a right not to be observed, and being observed is an intervention that can affect those who are observed.
Are we doomed to live under Big Brother’s watchful eye? How much social and political control should corporations have in society? How much Big Brother will modern people tolerate? For discussion of answers to these timely questions and more, I recommend the Hidden History of Big Brother in America.
Thom Hartmann is a four-time winner of the Project Censored Award, a New York Times bestselling author of thirty-two books, and America’s #1 progressive talk radio show host. His show is syndicated on local for-profit and nonprofit stations and broadcasts nationwide and worldwide. It is also simulcast on television in nearly 60 million US and Canadian homes.
To buy a copy of the Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy, click here. The book is available March 8, 2022.
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Photo Credit – The Guardian
The effort to disrupt the Electoral College vote counting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was appalling. It was made worse by the fact a sitting U.S. president, in order to overturn a legitimate election and cling desperately to power, organized, led and encouraged a mob. When events turned deadly, the president failed to call off the demonstrators in a timely manner. By any definition, what happened that day was insurrection.
Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa is the first draft of historical narrative of events leading to that day and its aftermath during the first months of the Biden-Harris administration. The authors interviewed more than 200 people for the book and it reads like history. It’s not that. It is more like an extended newspaper article. Discovery of new aspects of the events leading to Jan. 6 have been released almost daily. The pace of new information is expected to accelerate in 2022. This book is what we have now to provide an overview of what happened.
To the extent Peril recounts what happened, it is useful the way a newspaper article is useful. It left me wanting to know more. It is neither the best written political book, nor does it provide meaningful insights. Its narrative is believable yet incomplete.
The good news about Peril is that it took less than 48 hours to read. Combined with our first winter storm and in between snow removal, cooking, and indoor work, it made an engaging companion. There will be better books written about Jan. 6 once the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack finishes its work. For the time being, Peril can accompany us on the journey to determine what happened and what a voter can do to remedy the causes of this doleful day.
As an American the need for action is obvious. Reading Peril is an efficient way to get caught up after the end of year holidays. What comes next is an open question.
I beat my 2021 goal and read 54 books this year. I also developed a process to give prime time, early each day, to reading 25 or more pages. Either book reading is important in our lives or it isn’t, I reasoned. So I read books, almost daily. Book reading is an important part of any writer’s life. Here are those I found most useful and memorable.
Poetry: I re-read A Coney Island of the Mind after Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s passing on Feb. 22, 2021. An important part of my high school reading, it held up well. In addition, I read books of poetry by Amanda Gorman (The Hill We Climb), Gabriela Marie Milton (Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings), Charles Wright (A Short History of the Shadow: Poems), Gary Snyder (Turtle Island), and bell hooks (Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place). I read the memoir of poet laureate of the United States Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior.
Current Affairs:Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert stands out in this category. Her writing is compelling and this book is relevant now. Other current affairs books I’d recommend are Persist by Elizabeth Warren, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains by Lucas Bessire, The Decarbonization Imperative: Transforming the Global Economy by 2050 by Michael Lenox and Rebecca Duff, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E. Mann, and Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall.
Other Favorites:
Wilding: Returning Nature to a Farm by Isabella Tree Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald Turning Pointe by Chloe Angyal On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Poles in Minnesota by John Radzilowski What I Mean by Joan Didion
Check out my Goodreads profile for the complete 2021 list by clicking here.
Elizabeth Warren Meet and Greet in Tipton, Iowa. April 26, 2019
I was invested in Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for president and attended some events about which she wrote in Persist, her memoir published this year.
Like tens of thousands of others I waited in a selfie line and got my moment. I don’t recall what we talked about. Of all the things I thought about Warren during the campaign and afterward, the book is about something I hadn’t considered much: she’s a woman living in what largely was and remains a patriarchy.
The book is worth reading whether you are a fan or not. It explains some of her major policies in a way only a teacher could: clearly and rationally. For example, I didn’t understand the importance of child care to society until I read her explanation in Persist. When talking with friends and Democratic acquaintances during the run up to the Iowa caucuses, I heard the discussions about whether we should run another woman for president, whether a woman could win against Donald Trump. Those questions weren’t asked of men. Warren recounts these attitudes and what they meant in detail. I knew there would be wonkish policy stuff yet I didn’t expect the book to be as good as it was.
I couldn’t live the kind of life Warren does, mostly because I’m not as smart and don’t have the same kind of drive she does. The book serves as an example of a life worth living, an example of how to deal with prejudice, sexism, racism, economic injustice and more. It inspires us to dream big, fight hard and be better citizens.
We’ll never know what the United States would have been like with President Elizabeth Warren. For the time being we can be glad she’s in it with a position of power. We can also follow her suggestion and persist.
The challenge of creating work places that have inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility is everywhere. In her new book, Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives, Minal Bopaiah outlines how to turn lip-service about equity into a real world success story.
“Equality is when everyone has the same thing,” Bopaiah said. “Equity is when everyone has what they need to thrive and participate fully. Equity does not fault people for being different; it makes room for difference and then leverages it.”
The book covers a range of organizations, including for-profit companies and non-profit, non-governmental organizations. She has experience with both and leverages it to strip away buzzwords and conventions often used by management consultants. She reduces the narrative to easily understandable, succinct, and usable language.
Bopaiah introduces us to leaders who have overcome obstacles to equity and led transformative change:
Minal Bopaiah
Managing partners at a consulting firm who learn to retell their story of success by crediting the system that supports them.
News managers at National Public Radio who discover how they can create systemic support for diversifying sources on the air.
A philanthropic foundation that collaborates with grantees to better communicate the importance of equity in healthcare to policy-makers.
And creative professionals who have begun weaving inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility into the content they create, thereby transforming how customers and audiences view the world.
As a person who spent a career in business with a company experiencing dramatic growth, I found Bopaiah’s discussion of the myth of “rugged individualism” particularly engaging. She defines rugged individualism as “the belief that individuals are independent and unaffected by the system, time, or context in which they live and that their success is the sole result of their hard work and no other factors.”
One truth about organizations, businesses, and society more generally is the “system” can have a tremendous effect on dividing people and promoting more privileged members among them. As Bopaiah wrote regarding her Indian-American parents, the myth of rugged individualism can cast us “as characters in some kind of Horatio Alger tale in which the world is fair and everyone can succeed if they work hard enough.” Our systems favor the rich and privileged. Bopaiah’s concept of equity provides a way to address what can be a false narrative that suppresses an individual’s ability to participate in an organization equally with others.
Time spent reading Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives will pay dividends in understanding how organizations in which we participate can be better through inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility. It is a fast read and moves along quickly to key points of Bopaiah’s narrative. Highly recommended for its brevity and focus.
Don’t have time to read Equity? Here’s a brief video in which Bopaiah explains one of the basic concepts of the book, IDEA: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility.
Minal Bopaiah is the author of Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives. She is the founder of Brevity & Wit, a strategy + design firm that combines human-centered design, behavior change science and the principles of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility to help organizations transform themselves and the world. Bopaiah has written for the Stanford Social Innovation Review and The Hill and has been a featured guest on numerous podcasts and shows. She has also been a keynote speaker for many conferences, inspiring thousands with her credible, authentic, and engaging talks. For more information, please visit https://theequitybook.com
My reading pace slows down in the summer. While I used to get summer started by re-reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story has become so familiar I leave it on the shelf now. It’s close by in case I change my mind. I wrote about it here on the occasion of its copyright expiration in January. Here are nine books on my to-read list for Summer 2021.
Weather for Dummies by John D. Cox. I spend part of each day studying the weather forecast and living in the climate. I’ve become adept at interpreting available, free weather radar in terms of how the forecast might impact mundane tasks like mowing the lawn, walking or bicycling on the trail, and gardening. I need a more thorough understanding and Bill Gates recommended this book in his recent How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. Gates’ book made me mad in a couple of ways, yet I’m taking his recommendation about this book.
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel. In case you missed it, I post about food and the food system quite often. I noted Mark Bittman referenced Patel’s book a couple of times in his recently published Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal. Since I already had purchased Patel’s book, I’m moving it into the top nine for this summer’s reading.
Devotions by Mary Oliver. A person needs poetry and there is so much from which to choose. I read Oliver’s American Primitive and liked it a lot, leading me to buy this collection of selected poems. I don’t think I can go wrong.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester. Winchester is among my favorite authors. Every chance I get to read for entertainment, I find one of his books and have not been disappointed. I particularly enjoyed The Alice Behind Wonderland but every one I read was memorable.
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt. There has been much discussion about how terrible Andrew Jackson was toward native and enslaved people. It’s time I learned more than the brief study I gave him in graduate school.
World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey. Of the many cookbooks in my collection what I need most is development of our vegetarian cuisine. I like Jaffrey’s writing and expect to explore her world this summer to find inspiration for our kitchen garden.
Trouble in the Stars by Sarah Prineas. I found this young adult book by my political pal Sarah Prineas surprisingly engaging. There is something about the style of young adult fiction that keeps the story moving quickly along. There is more to this book than the primary narrative. Take a look!
Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers is Saving Ballet from Itself by Chloe Angyal. Halfway into this book, I find it engaging and a bit of a stretch of my interests. (The only other book I read on ballet was Gelsey Kirkland’s memoir Dancing on my Grave). I met Angyal at a book event featuring Sarah Smarsh and Connie Schultz soon after she moved to the Iowa City area. Angyal spent most of her time here writing this well-researched and informative book. It’s my current read and I look forward to finishing it this summer.
Birds in the Morning, Frogs at Night: Sharing Life Along the Road by Maureen McCue. When Maureen and I met on the Johnson County Board of Health we started a friendship that led to public advocacy on the gravest threats to society: the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, and public health risks of how utilities generate electricity. This is her story. I’ll be sure to write more once I finish it.
What books are you planning to read this summer? If you’d like to share, please leave a comment. Happy reading!
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