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"The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you."
As a lover of letters and famous correspondence, I was thrilled to stumble across this 1928 letter from Jackson Pollock's dad, LeRoy, to his son, uncovered by our very own Michelle Legro in the "Family" issue of the always-excellent Lapham's Quarterly. Culled from American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock & Family, the letter is a beautiful paean to what matters most in life, and how to cultivate it.
Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life."
Full text below, courtesy of Lapham's Quarterly:
Dear Son Jack,
Well it has been some time since I received your fine letter. It makes me a bit proud and swelled up to get letters from five young fellows by the names of Charles, Mart, Frank, Sande, and Jack. The letters are so full of life, interest, ambition, and good fellowship. It fills my old heart with gladness and makes me feel 'Bully.' Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance.
I think your philosophy on religion is okay. I think every person should think, act & believe according to the dictates of his own conscience without too much pressure from the outside. I too think there is a higher power, a supreme force, a governor, a something that controls the universe. What it is & in what form I do not know. It may be that our intellect or spirit exists in space in some other form after it parts from this body. Nothing is impossible and we know that nothing is destroyed, it only changes chemically. We burn up a house and its contents, we change the form but the same elements exist; gas, vapor, ashes. They are all there just the same.
I had a couple of letters from mother the other day, one written the twelfth and one the fifteenth. Am always glad to get letters from your mother, she is a Dear isn’t she? Your mother and I have been a complete failure financially but if the boys turn out to be good and useful citizens nothing else matters and we know this is happening so why not be jubilant?
The weather up here couldn’t be beat, but I suppose it won’t last always, in fact we are looking forward to some snowstorms and an excuse to come back to the orange belt. I do not know anything about what I will do or if I will have a job when I leave here, but I am not worrying about it because it is no use to worry about what you can’t help, or what you can help, moral 'don’t worry.'
Write and tell me all about your schoolwork and yourself in general. I will appreciate your confidence.
You no doubt had some hard days on your job at Crestline this summer. I can imagine the steep climbing, the hot weather, etc. But those hard things are what builds character and physic. Well Jack I presume by the time you have read all this you will be mentally fatigued and will need to relax. So goodnight, pleasant dreams and God bless you.
Your affectionate Dad
Find more everyday poetics in the fantastic collection of letters, from which this gem came.
Macaroon vs. cupcake, Proust vs. Salinger, bobo vs. hipster, bordeaux vs. cosmo.
For the past two years, graphic designer Vahram Muratyan, a self-described "lover of Paris wandering through New York," has been chronicling the peculiarities and contradictions of the two cities through "a friendly visual match" of minimalist illustrated parallel portraits. Today, Muratyan joins the finest blog-turned-books with Paris versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities – an absolutely charming collection of these vibrant visual dichotomies and likenesses. From beverages to beards, hands to houses, Muratyan captures the intricacies of cultural difference in a way that blends the minimalist and playful visual whimsy of Noma Bar's Guess Who? with the side-by-side parallelism of Mark Laita's Created Equal to deliver something entirely new and entirely delightful.
la romantique
le café
l'obsession
(You might recall the above from the excellent Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language.)
le roman
la barbe
le matin
les mains
la façade
le réalisateur
l'apéro
Many of these gems are available as prints on Society6, one of the best places to find affordable art. A set of postcards is being released shortly.
Why Tolstoy is 11.6% better than Shakespeare.
"Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work," Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers' success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity's greatest British and American writers – including Norman Mailer, Ann Pratchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates – "to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems."
Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list – so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.
In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:
If you're putting together a list of 'the greatest books,' you'll want to do two things: (1) out of kindness, avoid anyone working on a novel; and (2) decide what the word 'great' means. The first part is easy, but how about the second? A short list of possible definitions of 'greatness' might look like this:
1. 'Great' means 'books that have been greatest for me.'
2. 'Great' means 'books that would be considered great by the most people over time.'
3. 'Great' has nothing to do with you or me – or people at all. It involves transcendental concepts like God or the Sublime.
4. 'Great'? I like Tom Clancy.
From David Foster Wallace (#1: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis) to Stephen King (#1: The Golden Argosy, a 1955 anthology of the best short stories in the English language), the collection offers a rare glimpse of the building blocks of great creators' combinatorial creativity – because, as Austin Kleon put it, "you are a mashup of what you let into your life."
The book concludes with an appendix of "literary number games" summing up some patterns and constructing several overall rankings based on the totality of the different authors' picks. Among them (*with links to free public domain works where available):
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- Ulysses* by James Joyce
- Dubliners* by James Joyce
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- The complete stories of Flannery O'Connor
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 19th CENTURY
- Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy
- Madame Bovary* by Gustave Flaubert
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The stories of Anton Chekhov
- Middlemarch* by George Eliot
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Great Expectations* by Charles Dickens
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Emma* by Jane Austen
TOP TEN AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF BOOKS SELECTED
- William Shakespeare – 11
- William Faulkner – 6
- Henry James – 6
- Jane Austen – 5
- Charles Dickens – 5
- Fyodor Dostoevsky – 5
- Ernest Hemingway – 5
- Franz Kafka – 5
- (tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf – 4
TOP TEN AUTHORS BY POINTS EARNED
- Leo Tolstoy – 327
- William Shakespeare – 293
- James Joyce – 194
- Vladimir Nabokov – 190
- Fyodor Dostoevsky – 177
- William Faulkner – 173
- Charles Dickens – 168
- Anton Checkhov – 165
- Gustave Flaubert – 163
- Jane Austen – 161
As a nonfiction loyalist, I'd love a similar anthology of nonfiction favorites – then again, famous writers might wave a knowing finger and point me to the complex relationship between truth and fiction.
In my nearly six years of writing and editing Brain Pickings, I've used the word "awesome" as an adjective exactly once. Today, this is about to change -- because Three Primary Colors, a new collaboration between OK Go and Sesame Street explaining the basics of color theory in stop-motion, is nothing short of awesome. In fact, it might just be the finest treat for budding designers since Geometry of Circles, the fantastic 1979 Sesame Street animation with original music by Philip Glass.
Reader Jesse Jarnow points out the video was conceived and directed by his father, the legendary PBS stop-motion animator Al Jarnow of Celestial Navigations fame, and is his first PBS animation in a quarter century.
There's also a companion OK Go color game for your edutainment. For another color-lovers treat, don't forget the excellent PANTONE: The Twentieth Century in Color.
