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Just got back from the third Vizthink Austin meetup. Daniel Saltzman of Enspire Learning gave a terrific presentation on visual metaphor. An excellent subject, as one of the most important and helpful bits I’ve learned about drawing and writing is that all marks on paper are metaphors.

Some equations:

• the unknown <– metaphor –> the known = learning
• love ≠ mediocrity

His steps to using visual metaphor in a design setting:

1. Start with the content
2. Find the emotion
3. Consider your audience

Saltzman talked a lot about using metaphors from nature, and so I asked about clichés—whether they were good or bad. His answer impressed me: “when you’re short on time, use clichés.”

(And Kay Ryan popped into my head—”Poets rehabilitate clichés.”)

At the last meeting, I mentioned that visual thinking is nothing new: it’s a forgotten art, something we have to rediscover:

Tonight Saltzman said the same thing: This is not something new, this is a return.

Also: something weird happened while I was drawing—the first thing I drew on my notebook was the awful Austin traffic I had to sit through to get to the meeting…as I drew (roughly) counterclockwise, towards the end, I made a note about giving users the illusion of freedom by allowing them to move through space within a linear narrative (Saltzman was showing us an Enspire training module, but I immediately thought of the LucasArts adventure games of my youth). Anyways, just I drew the word freedom, I realized it was pointing at the traffic:

What’s maddening about traffic? The lack of freedom! What gives the illusion of freedom? Weaving in and out of traffic—moving through space—while still following a linear path!

Behold, the power of mindmapping and visual thinking! The connections otherwise not made!

Other subjects touched on that merit further reading:

• Ensō
• Simonides
• constructivism

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The Business of Being Born is a great watch. This map doesn’t do it justice. From IMDB:

While the United States has perhaps the most advanced health care system in the world, it also has the second-highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation, and many have begun to question conventional wisdom regarding the way obstetricians deal with childbirth. While midwives preside over the majority of births in Europe and Japan, fewer than ten percent of American mothers employ them, despite their proven record of care and success. How do American doctors make their choices regarding the way their patients give birth, and who is intended to benefit? Director Abby Epstein and producer Ricki Lake offer a probing look at childbirth in America in the documentary The Business of Being Born, which explores the history of obstetrics, the history and function of Midwives, and how many common medical practices may be doing new mothers more harm than good.

If you have Netflix you can watch it online. There were 2 or 3 water births
in the film, which Meghan and I had to go back and review because they were so amazing-looking.

All that said, Meg and I are going to go celebrate NOT being pregnant, and NOT wanting to be.

Pictures and words in space:

• Comics = pictures and words diagrammed in space
• Blackout poems = words in space
• Mind maps = pictures and words diagrammed in space

What I’m trying to do when I make a mind map: I’m trying to construct a 2-D memory palace on paper. By making notes in a non-linear manner, by arranging images and words in space, I can SEE connections that would otherwise be impossible with just words written in sequence.

I use mind-maps for several things:

1) Brainstorming

Generating ideas, rather than just preserving them.

2) Taking notes on books

(Oddly, I have only attempted non-fiction, never fiction. Not entirely sure why this is.)

3) Taking notes on documentaries

4) Recording meetings and events

5) Remembering conversations

See all of my mind maps.

Note: this post was a response to the Vizthink prompt, “In what unique way do you use Mind Maps?“

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Last night my wife said, “No more Joy Division. No more.”

This last week we watched both Anton Corbijn’s biopic Control and Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division. I’d recommend both if you’re a fan.

Some notes:

• How essential Manchester was to the sound, and how much Joy Division’s music was rooted in place. One interviewee called their music “ambient noise” for the Manchester environment. Another said they took the landscape of Manchester and “made it cosmic.” Make it cosmic. That might be a good rule of thumb for writing about place…
• Ian Curtis had a box of words that he’d bring to rehearsals, and when they needed lyrics, he would pull words out the box.
• Remembered David Lynch talking about the myth of the suffering artist: in order to portray suffering, an artist doesn’t need to BE suffering, he just has to UNDERSTAND suffering. Suffering is often counterproductive to creativity. (Ian Curtis killed himself on the eve of their breakthrough US tour.)

Here’s my favorite performance — “Transmission” live on the BBC:

No language, just sound, is all we need know
To synchronize love to the beat of the show
And we could dance
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio

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Here’s a little map I did during the second-ever Vizthink meetup in Austin last night. Local graphic facilitators Marilyn Martin and Sunni Brown moderated, and they did a great job. Met some good folks, learned a few things…it was a good time. If you’re an Austinite interested in visual thinking, keep your eyes and ears open for the next meeting at the Vizthink site.

Oh, and by the way: my post “For Successful Powerpoint Presentations, Look To Cartoonists” was chosen as the winner to the Vizthink prompt, “PowerPoint: A powerful tool poorly used or a poor tool overused?“

They said,

He not only had an interesting take on the topic but his post actually spun off a good amount of discussion on his own blog and beyond.

So thank YOU, my brilliant readers. Your comments make everything posted here much smarter. Cheers!

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“It’s not just a story about numbers, it’s a story about people and about how good people go bad. Our system not only allowed it to happen, but also almost encouraged it.”—Director Alex Gibney

I’m always amazed by how a documentary film can pack so many ideas and so much human drama into 2 hours. This one has it all: compelling story, great characters, and a kick-ass soundtrack (excellent opening and closing songs by Tom Waits).

In a company drowning in such a macho culture (Lou Pai had strippers in his office, Jeff Skilling organized these ridiculous daredevil excursions on motorbikes…) I think it’s no coincidence that the whistleblowers were women (Bethany McLean reporting for Fortune Magazine, and Sherron Watkins as Vice-President of Corporate Development).

Watch the whole thing on Google Video.

My question to you: if the most relevant fable in our times isn’t “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” what is?

Do ever feel like when you’re reading, you aren’t really learning anything, but you’re re-discovering what you already had inside you? That’s how it felt after reading The Power of Myth, a book companion to the PBS mini-series featuring Bill Moyers and mythologist Joseph Campbell in conversation. Having never read any Campbell (I’m starting on The Hero With A Thousand Faces next) I found it to be a great introduction to his worldview.

Campbell had a lot of wisdom for artists, but here are two of the more practical excerpts.

On having a “sacred place”:

[A sacred place] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen….

[O]ur life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects.

On how to read:

Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people….When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don’t say, “Oh, I want to know what So-andso did”—and don’t bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem—but he hasn’t said anything to you.

(This is something that both my friend Brandon and George Saunders have suggested.)

Great book. Highly recommended. Here are some other excerpts.

Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Why describe it when dozens of reviewers already have:

Bageant mixes a reporter’s keen analysis, a storyteller’s color, and a native son’s love of his roots in this absorbing dissection of America’s working poor. Returning to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, after 30 years of life among the elite journalistic class, Bageant sought to answer the question of why the working poor vote for Republicans in apparent opposition to their own interests. (Booklist)

This is a great book. Like Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, it sets out to explain why democrats just can’t capture the hearts and votes of working class America.

There was a particular passage that I thought synced up nicely with Barack Obama’s recent “race” speech, where Obama said:

As imperfect as [Reverend Wright] may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The passage from Bageant quote concerns religion, but it has the same theme—your people are your people, and they’re a part of you, no matter what:

Only another liberal raised in a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish circumstance it is — how such a family can despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of Satan, yet still love you and be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. How they can never fail to invite you to the family’s Thanksgiving dinner.

It must be plain that I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually, my family and I may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist. There is talk but no communication. At times it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a sort of high, eerie, mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all yet acknowledged by none.

After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that these are my people — by blood, even if not politically or spiritually. I have prayed with them, mourned with them, and celebrated their weddings. I share their rude tastes and humor, and I am marked by the same fundamentalist God-instilled self-loathing. No matter how much I may change or improve my condition, I cannot escape their pathos. I go forward, yet I remain. I wait anxiously and strive for change, for relief from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art, and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus.

Highly recommended. Thanks to Jessa Crispin for the tip.

Links:

• Buy it on Amazon
• Joe Bageant’s site

This documentary was so good and so long (145 minutes!) that I made two pages of notes. Particularly great were the monologues by Noam Chomsky and Ray Anderson.

Link:

• An excerpt from the film dealing with the relationship between American corporations and Nazi Germany

Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
by Ellen Lupton.

This is a really great book for folks wanting to get into typography. It not only teaches the basic principles (what’s an x-height? what’s a descender?), it also gives a good bit of the history and theory. I really dug it, and for $14, I’m thinking about adding it to my library.

Links:

• On-line companion to Thinking With Type
• Ellen Lupton’s Website
• Ellen Lupton, “Reading Isotype“