I’m Just Walkin’... Matt Green

... those who walk for the sake of walking are called on to distinguish themselves from ordinary pedestrians. In Teju Cole’s recent novel “Open City,” the narrator, a psychiatric fellow at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, takes aimless walks “as a release from the tightly regimented mental environment of work.” The British novelist Will Self — who has published two books on psychogeography, or the effect of topography on the human psyche — once trekked 20 miles from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. “I walk,” he said, “in order to somatically medicate myself against the psychosis of contemporary urban living.”


Mr. Green’s reasons are less succinct, though similar in spirit. “People tend to narrativize neighborhoods in New York, saying such and such a place is hip, or poor, or ugly or barren,” he said. “This walk is a way of understanding a place on its own terms, instead of taking someone else’s word for it.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/nyregion/matt-greens-goal-is-to-walk-every-street-in-new-york-city.html?_r=1

Georgian Bay

Getting ready to paint the Western Islands in Georgian Bay.

autopsies of seeing

All words occur after looking; they are autopsies of seeing. In the best cases, these perceptual post-mortems can sharpen our understanding of what must have occurred in the moments of seeing (including clues about how and why seeing stopped); they build the experience retroactively, or they go on building it, by reformulating it; and, when they reach their limit, they provoke the viewer into more looking. 


Mike Barnes | http://notesandqueries.ca/lascaux-bull-on-savage-liberations-and-their-tamings/

Don’t worry, work

I’m a person who has always done a lot of thinking and worrying and planning and strategizing vis-à-vis my writing, but as I look back at the last 20 years, I can see that all the real big leaps, such as they were, took place in a sort of extra-conceptual place—they came at-speed, while writing, or over many days of writing—but in any case, through work, through the hours and hours of work, when the subconscious is being given free rein and hence can do the crazy things only it can do. That is, I never “decided” anything about writing that did me much good, that I can remember.

George Saunders | http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/4996

The urgency of slowing down

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

...

A series of tests in recent years has shown, [Nicholas] Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

Pico Iyer | www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2