Fun Friday Resources

This week we have a couple of reading assignments, and one art project idea.

In “Watercolor for the Anxious Mind,” author/poet Saeed Jones writes about breaking through that wall of fear keeping him from MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT. It is a lesson we all need.

A new book by Nick Fuentes, Exit Stage Left: the curious afterlife of pop stars, examines what life is like for those who made it big but whose fame has ebbed. Even the excerpts are thought-provoking: Would it be worth it to find fame and fortune if it didn’t last? More pertinently for most of us, I think, is the eternal conundrum of self. Is Dale Lyles a TEACHER? DIRECTOR? COMPOSER? Or is Dale Lyles a person who, among other things, TEACHES/DIRECTS/COMPOSES?

More: If Dale Lyles no longer TEACHES/DIRECTS/COMPOSES, who is he? Is he less than Dale Lyles now? (Short answer: He’s still the same. That’s the lesson I’m drawing from all this. Marcus Aurelius would agree. “To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.”

In that vein, I must admit that I had saved a blog post about serendipity that looked promising, but on re-reading it, I found that it smacked way too much of “ALWAYS BE CLOSING” to be helpful. I have a friend who’s like that, and they’re exhausting to be around. So yes, you can optimize your opportunities for serendipity, but to constantly engineer those opportunities… that’s not serendipitous.

One more from Marcus: “People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now.”

Over at Public Domain Review, in “Remembering Roy Gold, Who Was Not Excessively Interested in Books,” Nicholas Jeeves looks at the book collection of a man who redecorated (“defaced”) the covers of thousands of books. Sometimes the new art was purely decorative; sometimes it was a commentary on the contents.

At any rate, this would be an interesting art project. Buy some book at a used book place or thrift store, decorate the cover, and then release it into the wild, a la BookCrossing.