Curators of the Particular

This was originally posted to the "The Best Thing This Year" (TBTTY) list, but I wanted to share it more broadly, too. There's a nice write-up on the TBTTY project at Mother Jones (http://m.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/05/the-best-thing-this-year-dan-shapiro) and you can sign up for the list at http://membership.thebestthingthisyear.com.

Since being introduced to TBTTY by Dan Shapiro (through the Robot Turtles Kickstarter), I've wondered what I might use this virtual soapbox to talk about. 

I thought about using it to promote the work done by my friend Brad Blauser, who provides pediatric wheelchairs for children in poor an war-torn regions. Brad was a finalist for the 2009 CNN Heroes program, and has provided wheelchairs for children in Iraq, Haiti*, and South America (http://kidChairs4Life.org).

I've also thought about using TBTTY to promote Mercy Project (http://mercyproject.net), a program started by my friend Chris Field to help rescue children from slavery in Ghana and help address the underlying economic problems that contribute to a culture of child slavery. Chris is a runner and started a marathon in my hometown to benefit Mercy Project. This proved pivotal I. My life because--while I am not naturally a runner--running for a cause has helped me learn discipline and improve my health. Chris is currently in the running (pun intended) to be featured on the cover of Runner's World and share the work of Mercy Project with the 3 million readers of the magazine (if you'd like to help, vote at http://covercontest.runnersworld.com/entry/1013/).

Instead of focusing on either friend (see what I did there?), I decided to talk about something they've both helped me to realize: true success and making a difference in the world depends on figuring out my unique set of interests and abilities, and focusing my time, energy, and resources in that space. 

This advice comports with what I've heard from successful entrepreneurs so all stripes. Find what you love and pursue it. 

The way I think about it is that we're each curators of the particular. We all have an overlapping set of interests and abilities that lend themselves

To a niche product. The trick is to become an expert in that niche and learn how to talk about it intelligibly to the rest of the world. And, it helps to remember that you don't have to catch everyone's interest. Roughly paraphrasing Derek Sivers, even if you only capture 1% of the population, that's still a huge number of people (http://sivers.org/proudly-exclude-most).

My own intersecting set of interests and abilities seems to deal with art, food, and education at human-scale. That is, supporting local artists, farmers and restauranteurs, and figuring out how best to engage learners' curiosity to ignite a life-long love of learning. 

I'm not in the same league as the friends I mentioned, but I'm still working on curating my cause. If be interested I hearing about your cause. Hit me up on Twitter @jkotinek. 

* My original post to TBTTY incorrectly listed Cuba instead of Haiti. 

Ladder for Booker T. Washington

I have seen the Martin Puryear sculpture "Ladder for Booker T. Washington" several times at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, even spent a good deal of time contemplating the piece when I visited the museum with my infant son while my wife attended a professional conference.

In a recent post contemplating the contradicitons of southern black folk art, Roger Reeves elucidates the meaning of this piece in striking relief. I am especially taken by the line he quotes from Terence Hayes' "Arbor for Butch":

This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing.

I imagine that I'll spend a considerable amount of time in the kind of Keatsian rumination Roger describes in this post re-ordering my understanding of Washington, black art, and performance of identity. As Finnie might put it, "I'm still proccessing it."

Second Guest Post Up at St. Lydia's Book Club

My second invited post at St. Lydia's Book Club is up.

When Melinda first asked for a guest post, I wasn't certain if she wanted to hear about my creative process since that seemed to be the theme of her previous guest post, or if I was free to consider a more esoteric subject. So, I wrote both and Melinda liked both. The first, One Thing is Needful, was published first and I was gratified by the generous response.

This one, Reverse Perspective, doesn't begin with the same kind of narrative hook. While the read might be drier, I think I'm even more pleased with this piece of writing because of the focused nature of my reflection. Give it a read and tell me what you think.

Reflecting the Spotlight

The recent warm reception of my guest post, "One thing is needful" at St. Lydia's Book Club has helped me appreciate how much grassroots effort plays a role in introducing new writers to a wider audience in the digital age. Say what you might about mutual appreciation societies, but it is useful in any field to expose your work to the criticism of your peers and receive encouragement from them; that's what professional conferences are for (not that I'm claiming to be peers with those who have responded). And while I'm certainly not a professional writer, and a blog is not a professional conference, the collegial interaction of writers in the blogosphere serves much of the same purpose.

One responsibility of engaging in a collegium is giving back. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a couple of authors whose work I find authentic, compelling, and highly enjoyable, but whose work is not likely to show up at St. Lydia's Book Club.

I've recently highlighted the Foy Davis fiction of Gordon Atkinson, but wanted to recommend his new blog Tertium Squid, too. Tertium Squid is Atkinson's new blog chronicling his continuing search for truth. I was first "introduced" to Atkinson when he blogged about visiting St. Anthony the Great Orthodox Church in San Antonio at Real Live Preacher. His appreciation for the beauty of the Divine Liturgy sparked a flurry of conversation in the Orthodox blogosphere, some of it merely appreciative of the fresh perspective, some of it speculative that Atkinson was headed for conversion. In addition to blogging about his faith perspectives at RLP, Atkinson writes fiction that is refreshingly raw and honest.

Raw and honest might also describe the non-fiction that Claudia Mair Burney wrote on her blog Ragamuffin Diva, and while her Amanda Bell Brown Mysteries are informed by that grittiness, they are decidedly romantic fiction (and quite enjoyable). I discovered Burney when I stumbled across her write-up of the Ancient Christianity and Afro-American Conference. As is the case with Atkinson, the thread I think I enjoy most running through Burney's work is a diligent and honest search for Truth. Burney's latest project, The Sunshine Abbey, continues this trend. Her latest post "A Simple Shaft of Light" recalls some of the same ideas I wrote about in "One thing is needful" with respect to looking for and finding salvific beauty in the world around us.

Both Atkinson and Burney have had their flirtations with Orthodox Christianity, but are not Orthodox (Burney was--and is still little-"o" orthodox--read about that story here). So while both might be better qualified to be profiled at St. Lydia's Book Club, it is not likely that either will be. I hope that I can use my little bit of spotlight to shine some light on these excellent writers, too.

Orthodox Writers and Readers

My guest blog post is now up at  St. Lydia's Book Club. Melinda Johnson, who authors the blog, invited my guest appearance after an exchange initiated by my comment on her post "Poets and Artists..." In my post I consider how art can be a vector for grace and how I regularly fail to appreciate the rich blessings I have. Here is an excerpt:

Christ told Martha, “One thing is needful.” If I took this to heart I would arrange my whole life around this weekly judgment. I would live a coherently Christian faith. I would order my thoughts, my actions, my interactions with others so that I would prepare prayerfully and fully, instead of distractedly and in haste. God, in His grace, grants me to grow a little in this manner every week, every month, every year. The Church is not only a spiritual hospital, it is also a school of repentance. I am learning how to want and need that one thing: communion with God.

Keith Massey's "Iguanadon likes this" mug

I was humbled to be asked to contribute to this excellent project in the first place, but feel even more so after receiving very kind comments on my post from much more accomplished bloggers. I hope if you visit St. Lydia's, you'll also take the time to check out the cool Orthodox children's books at Jane Meyer's blog, solid parenting advice at Molly Sabourin's blog, and a very nice write-up on my post from Keith Massey, who is a language scholar, novelist, and novelty designer (I'm putting this mug on my wish list).

Please take the time to visit St. Lydia's Book Club, comment on my post, and check out Melinda's Letters to St. Lydia.

Creativity as a Transcendent Act

Over the last year I had the opportunity to "teach" two groups of University Scholars in a Faculty Mentor Group for the first time along with my good friend J. Vincent Scarpace. This seminar program is not new, it has been a cornerstone of the Texas A&M University Honors Program developmental scholarship program for some time, and is often cited by students as one of the most rewarding experiences of their undergraduate careers.

The idea for this seminar had its genesis in a conversation that J. Vincent and I started on Facebook. The topic of this conversation was a quote from Madeline L'Engle's book Walking on Water: Reflections of Faith and Art in which she quotes Bishop KALLISTOS Ware from an undated issues of Sobornost magazine:

"...an abstract composition by Kandinsky or Van Gogh’s landscape of the cornfield with birds… is a real instance of divine transfiguration, in which we see matter rendered spiritual and entering into the 'glorious liberty of the children of God.' This remains true, even when the artist does not personally believe in God. Provided he is an artist of integrity, he is a genuine servant of the glory which he does not recognize, and unknown to himself there is “something divine” about his work. We may rest confident that at the last judgment the angels will produce his works of art as testimony on his behalf." - p. 30

L'Engle further develops this concept of being a servant to a greater truth:

If the work comes to the artist and says, "Here I am, serve me," then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, "Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolsoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."

To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant. Servant is another unpopular word, a word we have derided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you're not fit for anything better or higher.

I have never served a work as it ought to be served; my little trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn't matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often know more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully. The great artists, the rivers and tributaries, collaborate with the work, but for most of us, it is our privilege to be its servant. ---
When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.
When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens. p. 23-24

J. Vincent, in our original conversation, had taken exception to the audacious notion that the talent of an artist, regardless of belief, was supposed to be co-opted for a purpose he might not support. For my part, I read Bp. KALLISTOS' commentary as incredibly generous in its orthodoxy. Since we all know that a contentious argument is perfect to draw interest, we figured this would be the place to start

We asked the students in our seminar to consider the following questions: can good art provide a transcendent experience? What agency (if any) does the artist have in expressing something transcendent?

We spent time in our early discussions laying the groundwork for exploring these concepts by asking the students to come up with a working definition of transcendence to inform future discussions. We engaged the idea of transcendence from the perspective of several different faith backgrounds, as well as a perspective of non-belief, and the students came up with the following:

Transcendence - The subjective experience of moving beyond one’s current state. - Fall 2010

Transcendence - the convergence between universal truth and human experiences. - Spring 2011

J. Vincent provided the students with instruction in the seven basic elements of art (line, shape, color, value, texture, perspective and composition), and then we turned them loose in his studio. Their mission: to produce an a work of art at the end of the semester that expressed their concept of Transcendence.

We had the good fortune to have a show for the students' artwork this past May at the Village Cafe in Downtown Bryan. It was truly rewarding to see the students take pride in their work and share it with their peers.

They had this to say about their experience:

This course was designed to allow us, through discussion and actual painting, to discover our interpretation of Transcendence and really understand the different motivations behind art. We also studied different types of art and postulated about some of the different motivations and goals of the artist. Overall, this was a very enriching experience of how the other side lives. - Fall 2010

As social animals, humans seek to share experiences. However, humans are to some extent handicapped by languages like English or Mandarin that lack universality. The elements of art, as they are not situated in any one culture, may instead serve as the grammar of a universal language. This semester, we have sought to understand how artists have employed this universal truth system to express diverse human experiences (transcending communicative limitations) and ultimately, how we too may employ this universal language to share our own experiences. - Spring 2011

One student went even further and wrote his own essay summarizing the experience. He has continued to process the ideas from our seminar and turned his essay into a blog post about the experience here.

This is my summary of the experience:

One of the most satisfying aspects of participating in a University Scholars Faculty Mentor Group is the concrete realization of what it means to be in a “community of learners.” The topics and discussions we visited in our meetings were subjects that I revisited throughout the last year: at work, with my children, and in my own scholarly and creative production.

I’ve realized that education is providing access to new technologies, machines—yes—but also processes, theories, literatures, all of which have idiosyncratic languages. At our best, educators demonstrate that these technologies exist, introduce their use, and perhaps even engage discussion about whether they should be used.

When we are really successful, our students are aware that technologies might exist to solve questions they have not yet asked, how to find those technologies, and begin critically evaluating the ethics of those technologies. None of this would be possible without pushing the students to explore an uncomfortable subject or situation in the relatively safe setting of a classroom to give confidence so that they can do more of that exploration on their own.