The Creative Act: A Way of Being by music producer Rick Rubin seems to be one of those books that brings out strong reactions in readers, good and bad. I’m on the very positive side of the argument and it was a great read for me. If you have a fear of books that seem on the surface like obvious, trivial recitations of cliche, it either may not be for you or just require some patience to get below the surface into the substance of the book.

I think that it’s fitting that a book providing advice to those who seek to create is itself a creative act. In Novelist as Vocation, the novelist Haruki Murakami asserts that to be a novelist you can’t be too smart. Or at least you can’t have crisp, well defined ideas to express. Because if you knew what you wanted to say, you’d write it in an essay as I’m doing right now. The novelist has to bring the reader on a journey of discovery, a journey the novelist travelled in the creation of the fiction. So too Rubin has an idea of what constitutes the right way of being to foster creation, but doesn’t have it down to just a few rules. So the book comes at the ideas obliquely over and over.

Rubin’s findings align with my own experience. Creation is a process and the audience is just the creator. It’s nice when others can also experience the work and take the journey, but the creative act belongs to the artist. It’s what keeps me creating here- photography, philosophy, book reviews, what have you. It’s the result of my process of discovery.

Rubin rightly starts out by asserting we are all creators in one way or another. Making this a worthwhile read for those who create at work, in their family or dabble in the arts.

The book probably doesn’t lend itself to a second reading and note taking. I think it will be more valuable to dip into it from time to time, seeking relevance in its own time.

Trying to keep up with my notes on books as I finish reading them. I’m alternating more literary fiction, generally with a SciFi, AI angle with the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron. Joe Country is the 6th book in the series. As of now, there are 8, the most recent published in 2022. The plan is to finish these and then try another series. The Gray Man series looks interesting and has been recommended by Warren Ellis, so I’ve got the first book in the queue.

The Slow Horses books can be a bit formulaic, where we’re all confused about what’s really going on until the action picks up in the second half of each book. With the Cold War over and terrorism an overused threat, Herron tends to make bad actors out of politicians, old spies and simple criminals, stirring them together in badly conceived plots. The Slow Horses, MI5 outcasts, always manage to solve the crime, but inelegantly in a way that never would permit their real redemption and return to the main game. Their boss, Jackson Lamb, is great literary creation- brought to life in the AppleTV series by Gary Oldman.

I’ve tagged this as reading, but was actually an audiobook listen, my first in some time. I found myself looking around for podcasts and being a bit frustrated, I opened the Libby app and borrowed Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy just because it was available and near the top of the list. I otherwise had no intention of reading the book.

It works great as an audio book, being written as a dialog between a psychiatrist and a patient. So to me it’s one of those trick books where the action takes place in a single setting, largely in the minds of the characters via speech. It’s subject is math, the nature of reality with a strong emotional charge. Mostly the math and physics seem to be pretty well represented. Some other subjects not so well, but par for the course really.

An interesting contrast with The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler which I recently read, as both are vehicles to discuss our response to scientific advances, whether math, artificial intelligence or neuroscience. Nayler’s book is a more conventional plot based exposition of the problem, McCarthy takes a more rarified intelectual approach. Yet both show how well fictional tales can be used to explore our world and our reaction to it.

I don’t remember where I saw Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers mentioned recently, but I immediately ordered a copy and read it slowly over the last few weeks.

It’s a slim book of about 100 pages with many pages having photographs rather than text. It’s said that Koren’s book of 1994 was responsible for introducing the idea of Wabi-Sabi into the aesthetic conversation in the Western world. I have no idea as I don’t remember when this idea of the veneration of the simple, imperfect and natural entered my own intellectual environment.

I’m reading books about aesthetics and creation these days. This may have been the book that tipped me over into the subject. I’m about two thirds of the way through Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, a book I’m savoring on first read and trying to digest a bit, chunk by chunk. As has been my recent practice, I take no notes on the first read, leaving notes for a review session with the book.

My photography has been casual over the last few years, but in a way it’s been a further embrace of a Wabi-Sabi approach to images. My aim has been honest capture, leaving behind some of the cinematic excess of some of my work. Now, evaluating my images of the last year, I see where I’ve pushed forward in just allowing light and exposure settings to create a relatively finished image, an approach that I’ve picked up from photographers like Phillip Penman and Greg Williams. Both work in monochrome with an approach of exposing using the dynamic range and live view that our current mirrorless cameras provide. It’s beyond pre-visulazation, it’s actual visualization at the time of capture.

For, embracing the imperfection of the casual has helped my push on with new work. Wabi-Sabi for Artists . . . has emboldened me to further embrace capturing light and nature as a simple path to creating images.

My contraints: The Leica M11 with 50mm APO Summicron ASPH lens. Capture images during breaks outside with the puppy. Images quickly processed in Capture One using the Mastin Tri-X style.

Ever since I took on Sniff and Shoot as a project, I’ve been regularly producing some pretty nice images. It got me thinking about how often we hear that constraints help produce work rather than hinder it. Maybe it is the paradox of choice where when you can do anything you end up doing nothing. Contraints remove choice and guide action.

But I think it’s something deeper than that. It’s that when faced with limitations, we have to become more intentional about our actions. There are hard limits that I have to overcome that force action to act in spite of the constraints. So I pick up the camera as I walk out the door and look around to find ways to use what I hold in my hands and the visual world in front of me. It’s not having a goal, it’s that the limitations provide traction, something to react to with my action.

Whether it’s imposing constraints simply by limiting equipment and technique or it’s setting up a project within which to work, the path forward at the moment and action is engaged.

While “mindfulness” gets a lot of attention, it is simply the passive act of being aware in the present. “Intentionality” builds on mindfulness in providing immediate purpose for action.