Court
A heart-achingly lovely visual poem about depression. The woman attempts to engage in self-care: sleeping, yoga, eating, getting dressed, and leaving her apartment, but shadowy hands sabotage her at every step; disrupting her sleep, pulling at her during yoga, knock over her blender, fell her wardrobe, distort time, and when she tries to leave push her into bed.
Depression does these things; it makes the simplest things difficult, it makes one isolate.
Read at: http://www.infosurvey.com.my/The%20Art%20of%20Failure.pdf
I forget which book Gladwell talks about choking vs panicking, so most of this was familiar. But Gladwell is such an excellent writer I don't mind rereading.
“Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Pilots crash and divers drown. Under the glare of competition, basketball players cannot find the basket and golfers cannot find the pin. When that happens, we say variously that people have “panicked” or, to use the sports colloquialism, “choked.” But what do those words mean? Both are pejoratives. To choke or panic is considered to be as bad as to quit. But are all forms of failure equal? And what do the forms in which we fail say about who we are and how we think? We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail.
“Choking” sounds like a vague and all-encompassing term, yet it describes a very specific kind of failure.”
Love that he then talks about implicit and explicit learning; “These two learning systems are quite separate, based in different parts of the brain.”
“Panic also causes what psychologists call perceptual narrowing.” It why we remind people on planes that exits may be behind them.
“Panic, in this sense, is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.”
Yes! Stereotype threat is a type of ‘choking'.
“sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.”
The art is fantastic and I was delighted to come across some new tales and myths or different versions. It left me wanting more, but I understood Yoshitani wanting to do a specific number to reflect the motifs of Tarot.
I also appreciated her listing the region and culture for each story covered as well as going into how some tales overlap, such as the phoenix and fairy godmother. Although for the fairy godmother I wish she had mentioned more than just Cinderella.
This book was a difficult read for me. I wrote a long review and then was so frustrated when there was an error in posting it.
I think that Brené Brown's editor (Ben Greenberg) might be to blame for my biggest frustration, unless of course she wrote STET next to it. This simile pissed me off: “It's not just global and domestic terrorism that embeds fear in our cultures. Pervasive, random gun violence, and systematic attacks against groups of people, and the growing vitriol on social media— all of these send fear, like hot lava, flowing across our communities, filling in the holes and eventually working to ravage already fragile and broken places.”
That's not how lava works, when lava fills in holes it fixes the hole; it fills it in and when it cools it become sediment. This is an antithesis to her intended point; it baffles me.
I disliked the biographic technique she used to write it (although a few members of my book club appreciated it), as I found it to be somewhat kind of manipulative and unbelievable (such as her story about not being accepted to the drill team; I'm not into sports and even I know you at least wear school colors to your tryout, then she says her dad was captain of his football team and her mom was a cheerleader). I did like her story about pulling over when learning about the Challenger explosion, however I would have found it more interesting had she cited an additional source rather than just her anecdotal experience. I looked up what she described and found a few newspaper articles that corroborated her story.
She never comes out and says it, but this book is about America, she only uses American examples.
I did like the concept of “give yourself permission”.
read at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/04/22/blowing-up
“he could not escape the thought that it might all have been the result of sheer, dumb luck... Warren Buffett was known as the “sage of Omaha” because it seemed incontrovertible that if you started with nothing and ended up with billions then you had to be smarter than everyone else: Buffett was successful for a reason. Yet how could you know, Taleb wondered, whether that reason was responsible for someone's success, or simply a rationalization invented after the fact?”
I am not a murderino, but there are some true crime things that I love, find fascinating, or can't look away from (Catch Me If You Can, documentaries about theft, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood...).
I also identified with Campbell as my mother and I will talk of cases such as Andrea Yates, Laci Peterson, and other morbid happenings, such as the news. Campbell mentions something along these lines: talking about a somewhat taboo subject with someone you trust and exploring concepts that cause anxiety, tension, unease, etc can be freeing, can release some of the tension the topic causes. My mom would often ask, how could a person (often a parent) do such a thing? It's partly rhetorical but also not. Sometimes the answer is a controlling partner/family member, trauma, abnormal psychology, sometimes there is no answer and you value the safety that you've experienced.
Also I grew up really close to a CA prison, which I knew had housed someone related to the Manson family, but damn it was actually Charles Manson for a number of years as well as Bobby Beausoleil, a former associate of Manson. Just learned: Timothy Leary served time at CMF in 1973–1974 “for possession of marijuana and escape from a minimum-security prison at San Luis Obispo”
Campbell comes across to me as authentic, funny, relatable, and reliable as she cites her sources, even if it's just the phrase ‘light googling'. I laughed at: “not Napa, Sonoma”
Some things I didn't love: sometimes is was hard to read due to the lettering or occasionally the flow of panels were confusing and the use of jk/lol, sometimes it worked for me and other times not so much.
I liked the second half much better than the first, although I am not sure if that's due to the subjects discussed, getting to know Bell, or a mixture.
Bell lives in New York City, while her mother lives in Ukiah, CA with a population under 20,000. Her mother's home is lost in a fire and much of the story is about recovering from that.
Very slice of life, although one that has been doing work to overcome traumas. I appreciated the female familial relationships (daughter, mother, grandmother), interesting and meaningful friends, the open talk of mental health and honest feelings, covering the use and frustrations of bureaucratic aide in both states, the commentary on glamour. I also related to Bell not driving and have also ridden Amtrak trains and buses and BART; she mentioned ‘the crazies' on BART and have to wonder how it compares to the NYC metro.
Funny in her usual way of interactions with animals, insects, nature and Victor and odd social mishaps. I especially ...enjoyed is not the right word... responded to letter to the insurance company. I was interested in her experience with TMS. Beautiful perspective such as seeing the fountain from her hotel room and seeing the snow melt transforming a tree into a rain cloud, being a magpie and her button collection, the truisms as she's edited them as I also have a distaste for meaningless/poor advice like ‘smile more', some of her shark tank ideas also made me chuckle. I also loved the conversation with her sister and her talking about editing.
I very much enjoyed the end of the audiobook where she talked about COVID, recording the book from her closet, owning an independent bookstore (https://www.nowherebookshop.com/) and being able to do things virtually that she has a hard time doing in person. The cat meowing on the closing track and the dog making a slight whine was also delightful.
Like any compilation or compendium, some aspects that are stronger, or more subjectively interesting, than others, but as I am a word nerd, so I mostly liked the topics covered.
A – Daniel Nussbaum – writes a book using CA license plates (meh, not my thing)
B – Jean-Dominique Bauby – gets locked-in syndrome and writes a book by indicating letters using blinks (super interesting and added The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to my reading list)
C – Thomas Urquhart – Descartes proposes that someone make a universal language, years later Urquhart responds with the tome Logopandecteision
D – Jessie Little Doe Baird – revives the language of the Wampanoag and gives birth to its first native speaker after seven generations
E – Marc Okrand –creates Klingon (did not mention that Okrand also created the Atlantean language for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire). I appreciated the mention of Philip José Farmer writing Venus on the Half Shell a book that Kurt Vonnegut had ‘invented' being written by his fictitious Kilgore Trout
F – Ignatius Donnelly – through ‘math' derived a code that Shakespeare didn't write certain plays (eh). Some of the math based wordplay is clever (if a=1, etc; all + vote= democracy), but when its applied to Shakespeare it smacks of conspiracy theory, I works to include this as it becomes a nice counterpoint in a later reference
G – Ross Eckler –more wordplay, this time shift pairs, ‘add' becomes ‘bee' but I thought that the ‘remodeling' (reordering) of the alphabet made the whole idea of the shifted pairs rather arbitrary and therefore moot. Also discussed isograms and self-enumerating sentences
H – Frederic Cassidy – lexicographer, wanted to document spoken English of the USA
I – Doris Cross – making art by crossing words out in a dictionary; erasure art and altered books. Also mentions of the Dadaists
J – Robert Shields – very long, perhaps overly detailed diarists, of which Robert Shields outshines by writing over 37 million words (so-so)
K – Sven Jacobson – Swedish professor who studied English, specializing in English's intentional misspellings (meh)
L – Mike Gold – calligraphy and I rather enjoyed the Larry Brady suggestion of coming up with 100 ways to make a single letter as I appreciate the creativity stretch – and Mr. Gold just ran with it, to creating over a thousand ‘a's
M – David Wallace – stylometry, uses statistics of literary style; figured out which Founding Father wrote which Federalist Paper and indicates that Gen. Pickett's wife wrote his letters that were published under his name. Stylometry also helps search engines, spam filters, and voice assistants.
N –Bohumil Hrabal – Longest sentences. Faulkner at 1,300 words, Joyce at 4,391, Jonathan Coe at 13,955, and then Hrabal for publishing a 128 page book that doesn't have a period (meh)
O – Corín Tellado – Most published books. Asimov published more than 400 books, and one of the only authors to have published widely; Georges Simenon 500 mysteries; Barbra Cartland 700 romance books; Ryoki Inoue and R. F. Lucchetti with over 1,500 books each; and then Corín Tellado over 4,000 and had issues with censorship at the time. Also mentions hypergraphia, of which Dostoyevsky and Lewis Carrol may have had.
P –Raymond Queneau –authored a book of poetry where the lines of the sonnets where written on strips so that lines of one one poem could mingle with others and create new poems.
Q – Georges Perec – wrote a book without using the letter ‘e', the most common letter in French (and I believe English) later he wrote another in which e is the only vowel used.
R – Simon Vostre – books used to be highly valuable items, and many had curses or warnings about theft or being damaged
S – Howard Chace – wrote a book called Anguish Languish, fairy tales and such written to sound like the words that are supposed to be there, eg Wants pawn term dare is supposed to be “Once upon a time there...” this makes me cringe, but glad to know that it exists.
T – Robert McCormick – was editor of The Chicago Tribune introduced respellings of words, some caught on (thru, catalog, dialog, etc.) others did not (photogtaf, sofomore, iland)
U – Mary Ellen Solt – made poems shaped like their subjects
V – A. A. Morrison – Strine, the Australian English accent
W – Ernest Toch – the musicality of language and Toch created Geographical Fugue wherein his chorus speak proper names from an atlas (here's a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZfSolxrLWo). The beginning of the section talks about saying a word twenty times and how it loses its meaning and only leaves its sound, this made me think of the psychological term: clanging
X – David Bryce – smallest writing and smallest books
Y – Allen Read – figures out the origin of OK, I had recalled the mention of how this might have somehow come from Andrew Jackson's nick name of Old Hickory, but he says it's Andrew Jackson's mangled spelling of ‘all correct' (oll korrect), eventually Read finds the first usage of OK in an 1839 newspaper as a comic abbreviation of oll korrect, OK.
Z –Ludwik Zamenhof – creator of Esperanto
Most of these are interesting, brilliant, fun, and great, others not so much. I had hoped that he might mention Sequoyah who created the Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible or code talkers (I'm more familiar with Navajo Code Talkers, but many other languages were also used). I feel that he briefly mentions endangered languages with Jessie Little Doe Baird, but wish he had listed some of them, many are Native American languages, but there are others such as Yiddish, Romani, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh (depending on who you ask), some Indian languages such as Malto, and many others.