Good Writers

From Anne Lamott:

Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That's the secret of life. That's probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it. They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little.

. . .

This brings us to [item] number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.

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Greed for Ever More Knowledge and Experience

Two days ago I returned from hiking/photographing Yellowstone National Park for a week. Being in such an immense beautiful place, I was able to turn my mind off of the many things I do or attempt to do in my normal life. Hiking in Yellowstone, I merely walked about, noticing  beautiful things and trying to take photos that hit the sweet spot, a task that is largely intuitive. I looked for images that would work as pretty photos or as works of art (I blend some of my photos with numerous texture and blending layers on Photoshop). As I hike and take photos, I tend to think of only those few things and I tend to not think much in words, which is a wonderful change of pace from my normal life. Somehow I don't think of much other than what is in front of me and it calms my ADD-ish monkey mind).

Now that I am back home, I am tempted to think in many directions at one time, whether it be processing the photos, reminiscing about the trip, planning another trip someday, reaching out to treasured friends, working as an attorney, trying to understand the culture wars, writing an article (or two or three), working out, walking in the nearby park, playing or composing music and many other things/distractions/opportunities.  I am lucky to live a life where these things are realities.  But what should I do when there are so many things I want to think about and do?  I am in my mid-60s, which lends a bit of urgency to this quest, because I don't know how many more active years I will have, physically and mentally. This quandary/opportunity reminds me of the following quote by Frederick Nietzsche (aphorism #249 from The Gay Science):

Oh, my greed! There is no selfishness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands—a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” --Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

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Ham-Handed Skin-Deep Diversity Effort by the Art Institute of Chicago

How did the Art Institute of Chicago encourage "diversity"? Fire 122 highly skilled "white" volunteer docents and replace only a smaller number of them by hiring (paying) inexperienced new workers who look "diverse" based on skin color. Jerry Coyne describes the situation in detail:

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), one of the world’s finest art museums, harbors (or rather, harbored) 122 highly skilled docents, 82 active ones and 40 “school group greeters.” All are volunteers and are all unpaid. Their job is to act as guides to the Museum’s collection of 300,000 works, which they explain to both adults and schoolchildren. I’ve seen them in action at the Museum, and they’re terrific.

Despite the lack of remuneration—they do this to be helpful and because they love art—their training to be docents is extremely rigorous. First, they have to have two training sessions per week for eighteen months, and then “five years of continual research and writing to meet the criteria of 13 museum content areas” (quote from the docents’ letter to the Director of the AIC). On top of that, there’s monthly and biweekly training on new exhibits. Then there are the tours themselves, with a docent giving up to two one-hour tours per day for 18 weeks of the year and a minimum of 24 one-hour tours with adults/families. Their average length of service: 15 years. There are other requirements listed by the Docents Council in the ChicagoNow column below (first screenshot).

Many of the volunteers—though not all—are older white women, who have the time and resources to devote so much free labor to the Museum. But the demographics of that group weren’t appealing to the AIC, and so, in late September, the AIC fired all of them, saying they’d be replaced by smaller number of hired volunteers workers who will be paid $25 an hour. That group will surely meet the envisioned diversity goals.

This is entirely a matter of race and “optics,” though you wouldn’t easily discern that by reading the back-and-forth communications between the AIC and the docents. The latter, of course, strenuously object to being let go, and in their letter to the AIC point out their many contributions to the Museum. (The AIC, in a hamhanded gesture, offered them two-year free passes to the AIC as a measly “thank you”.)

I invite you to read the Coyne's entire article as well as the comments posted by Coyne's readers.

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