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There could not have been a more perfect day for a festival: a dazzling blue sky, spring foliage coming into its own, and a light breeze wafting in from the ocean. And people – lots and lots of people – about fifty thousand of them, all gathered to celebrate the written word. Yesterday, I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, held each year on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. The Festival is two days full of panel discussions and interviews, readings, book signings, community crossword puzzles, musical and dance entertainment, cooking demonstrations by cookbook authors, and publishers and authors hawking their books. All the activities at the Festival are free. One just needs to come with a love of the written word and a convivial spirit.
In past years’ attendance at the Festival, I have had the opportunity to see interviews with and readings by the likes of Ray Bradbury, Madeleine Albright, Joan Didion, Maya Angelou, Jared Diamond, and Maria Shriver. This year I decided to attend a themed panel discussion instead of an interview. The panel discussion I chose, for which I stood in line almost an hour to obtain a ticket, was about a topic that is near and dear to my Soul Food Café heart. It was entitled: “Status Update: Social Networking and Media.”
The panel discussion was moderated by Andrew Nystrom, the senior producer of social and emerging media for the L.A. Times. The panelists were Otis Chandler, the founder of Goodreads.com, a book-oriented social network, Sara Wolf, co-editor of Itch, an interactive e-zine for people in the dance profession, and Wil Wheaton , book author, blogger, and social commentator who ranks thirty-third in the number of people following him on Twitter. (If you are a Trekker, you know who Wil Wheaton is).
The discussion revolved around the impact of social networking and web-based media on reading. Chandler commented that books are not essentially a form of mass media because book reading is something that is done alone. With his network, Goodreads, he is trying to make reading a more social activity, with conversations revolving around books. Thousands of people can be reading and discussing a book at the same time. He cites, for example, the popularity of the Twilight novels are in part due to this type of social interaction. Wheaton commented that social networking has been criticized for shortening attention spans. Not true, he said. It is, in actuality, television entertainment that has been most responsible for the “dumbing down” of our society. Technology, to the contrary, is a motivator for getting young people to read and, similarly, getting people to write. He, for example, publishes mostly through LuLu.com. There is no financial risk and all he needs to do is write the book and then broadcast its availability to his Twitter followers (all 400,000 of them). It makes both economic and marketing sense.
(I need to comment that while the discussion was going on, many people in the lecture hall were twittering back and forth with each other and with one of the panelists about the discussion — very weird to watch).
If I were to boil the discussion down to one sentence it would be: The book is not dead, but literacy IS being greatly impacted by emerging media and it is too early to say how and to what extent yet.
After this panel, I spent the rest of my day at the Festival wandering the vendor booths, listening to outdoor speakers and readers, and enjoying a lovely Spring day with people of common interests and deportment. I came away bubbling over with creative ideas.
Here are a few images I brought home:
Text and images: L. Gloyd © 2009
A friend sent this to me. This is so cool.
“Demeter Rising at Wheatsheaf”
a digital composition
This is a little housewarming gift I made for my creativity mentor, Heather, who just moved to a new house in the country near a town called Wheatsheaf.
L. Gloyd (c) 2009
I am presently caught in a creative block and have have engaged in the Artist’s Way program to pull myself out of it. Julia Cameron, the creator of the program, writes about creative blocks in her book Walking the World. “Often we experience a sense of powerlessness because we do not see any direct action that we can take to concretely alter our sense of being stuck…sometimes we need to exercise just a little elbow grease in any creative direction we can find.” (pp 246-247) Then she offers a directive to start listing “small creative actions” to prime the pump, such as painting a windowsill or making a collection of favorite poems.
None of these particular creative actions appealed to me, but I began considering doing something creative in the kitchen. I’m not certain what got me thinking about cheese except perhaps a recent episode of Tony Bourdain’s No Reservations where he snarkily eats his way through Greece. Greek food made me think of goat cheese, and I wondered if I could make this type of cheese in the way Greek farm wives have made it for thousands of years.
So I began researching recipes and “how-to” videos on fresh cheese-making. The first batch was a disaster resulting in my dumping a half gallon of expensive goat’s milk down the drain because I could not get the curds to separate from the whey. (This is when I realized that cheese-making is an ART). Rather than give up, I went back to my computer and started research how NOT to make fresh cheese. After tweaking my separating agents and getting a finer weave of cheesecloth, I was able to triumphantly hang up my first bag of cheese to drain.
Furthermore, I dovetailed my weekly “artist’s date” with this endeavor by going to my favorite spice and herb merchant (Penzey’s), sampling appropriate herbs for this batch of cheese, and finally selecting a sweet California Basil. When I got home, I blended the basil with garlic and coarse sea-salt and worked it into the cheese at the proper step of the process. The finished product was about a cup of fresh cheese that was sweeter and creamier than the most expensive chevre I could ever have purchased in a store.
So, I know you are asking “What’s this got to do with the creative process?” Everything. The action of making something is almost as important as the inspiration to create. That’s why a painter will write or a writer will play a guitar or a poet will bellydance. Action busts through the creative block the way a sledge-hammer breaks through a brick wall.
All that and a great tasting cheese on top of it.
Text and images: L. Gloyd (c) 2009
I’ve been looking all over the internet for this and I finally found it. This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Enjoy and let it lighten your day.
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