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The Zone: No. 15 – Jan 28, 2020

28th January 2021
The Zone
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  1. Welcome To The Zone!
  2. The Zone: No. 2 – Oct 22, 2020
  3. The Zone: No. 3 – Oct 29, 2020
  4. The Zone: No.4 – Nov 5, 2020
  5. The Zone: No. 5 – Nov 12, 2021
  6. The Zone: No. 6 – Nov 19, 2020
  7. The Zone: No. 7 – Nov 26, 2020
  8. The Zone: No. 8 – Dec 3, 2020
  9. The Zone: No. 9 – Dec 10, 2020
  10. The Zone: No. 10 – Dec 17, 2020
  11. The Zone: No. 11, Dec 31, 2020 – Special Edition
  12. The Zone: No. 12 – Jan 7, 2020
  13. The Zone: No. 13 – Jan 14, 2020
  14. The Zone: No. 14 – Jan 21, 2020
  15. The Zone: No. 15 – Jan 28, 2020
  16. The Zone: No. 16 – Feb 4, 2020
  17. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!

Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work, the Library Explorer, radiators and the pandemic (true story), a squirrel getting tipsy, and much more in The Zone No. 15.

Another Thursday, another Zone! Are you ready? Here goes!

  • Milton Glaser‘s 10 Rules for Life & Work. Difficult to pick any favorites, but I’ll give it a try.
    • Some people are toxic. Avoid them
    • How you live changes your brain.
    • IT DOESN’T MATTER.
  • Internet Archive, the non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, music, websites, and other treasures, offers now a thrilling way to browse their library shelves in 3D through their Library Explorer.
Layers and exposed bedrock on Mars
Still photo from Spirited Away (2001)
  • You’ve probably guessed how much I enjoy Studio Ghibli movies; it seems Studio Ghibli is one of the standing points in The Zone. Here’s a good introduction to the Japanese animation studio.

My Zone

A Quote I’m Pondering

Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

Maria Popova

From My Photo Archives

The Angel Musicians, sculptures by Carl Milles. Photo by Mihaela Limberea
The Angel Musicians, sculptures by Carl Milles at Millesgården, Stockholm.

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Hindsight Is the Cruelest Adviser

27th January 2021
Life
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My head hurts. I’m not awake yet, not really. I fight to stay asleep, my throbbing head a harbinger of the day ahead; no deeds will be done today. Not with a jackhammer drilling the top of my head.

It doesn’t work, of course. I know that but hope does die last.

I go about my business in slow motion. I know better than to try to do something important. Years of excruciating headaches taught me that there weren’t many things I could do. Low priority tasks on my to-do-list such as website maintenance (but nothing major), cleaning up the photo library (a Herculean task), or vacuum cleaning (now you know why my house is spotlessly clean). Note to self: never, EVER, upgrade the operating system of your computer if you have a headache!

A distorted tree image to illustrate a headache. Photo by Mihaela Limberea

I’m thankful that this is only the mild variant when I can still do something. The other one I don’t argue with; I just go lay down in the dark, earplugs in, sleep mask on. And pray that it’ll only last a few hours.

My worse headache moments involve the other one, of course.

  • Holding an online demo for over a hundred participants. I had scheduled the demo early in the morning when I’m at my best; training sessions are taxing. I woke up with the other one and it was too late to cancel, not with so many people, not on such an important matter (controls and compliance stuff, how could I ever think it was so important??).
  • Presenting to a senior executive. You don’t cancel on them. Unless you’re dead, or almost. If I could talk, I would walk.
  • Traveling, especially on long intercontinental flights. I still have nightmares, walking zombie-like in a busy airport, running late, being at the wrong gate, not being able to think clearly, etc.; you get the idea.
  • Holding a workshop with participants from the whole world after traveling on that long intercontinental flight. We usually had two to four days workshops, and the agenda was down to 15 minutes points. I couldn’t take the day off.

I have to admit that this doesn’t happen as often as before, i.e., since I left the corporate world. Hindsight is a great adviser, “the cruelest and most astute” (R.J. Ellory). I can see now that a whole lot of it was stress. It was high tempo, aggressive commitments, unrealistic expectations, and perfectionism. It’s a wonder it didn’t get worse. Well, actually, it did, but that’s a different story for another post. 

I’m grateful that a headache is just a mild annoyance nowadays. Mild enough, apparently, to write a blog post about it.

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column

Here’s a poem I wrote over ten years ago when my head had almost exploded with pain. It was inspired by Frida Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column. The poem appears in my first poetry book in Swedish, this is a quick translation I made for this post. A complete translation of all poems is on the way.

The Broken Column

(Frida Kahlo, 1944) 

Pain arrows 

piercing the body,

swirling in the blood,

hammering in the temples, 

sawing the ankles.

The wrists,

slashed

by glowing knives.

Pain

Never stops.

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Happy Australia Day!

26th January 2021
Life
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The flag of Australia. Photo by Mihaela Limberea

Happy Australia Day!

Moon Viewing at an Old Temple

26th January 2021
Poetry
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  1. The Rising Moon
  2. Tonight’s Moon
  3. Cicadas’ Voices
  4. At Yamei’s House
  5. The Bleak Wind
  6. Beads Of Dew
  7. Moon-Viewing At My Hut
  8. Fallen Leaves
  9. An Old Tree Was Felled …
  10. The Autumn Tempest
  11. Autumn Is Advanced
  12. To Ransetsu
  13. In Imitation of Kaku’s Haiku on Knotgrass and a Firefly
  14. On the Death of Issho
  15. Ice and Water
  16. The Lark
  17. The First Snow
  18. The Moon Of Tonight
  19. The Chanting of Buddhist Prayers
  20. Lightning
  21. The Quails
  22. Moon Viewing at an Old Temple
  23. In My Dark Winter
  24. Snow
  25. The Great Morning
Full moon, photo by Mihaela Limberea

No pretty face is to be seen

Among the group viewing the moon.

Matsuo Basho 

Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.

To read more poems, click here.

How to Write a Book

23rd January 2021
Writing
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How to Write a Book

I admit that “How to Write a Book” sounds like clickbait, but it’ll come to that – eventually. I’m planning on documenting the process of writing my first non-fiction book here, so you’ll see how to do it, post by post.

Or, to be more exact, how I do it. There’s, of course, no silver bullet, no handy manual on how to actually write a book. If anybody claims that, they’re lying. Or delusional. Sure, you can learn some of the technicalities: show, don’t tell; kill your darlings*; beware of adjectives and adverbs. And so on. But there are no shortcuts or miracle solutions; you learn how to write by writing and reading a lot. There’s no way around it.

I’ll document what I do here, on the blog, and I hope you’ll find it inspirational, if not instructive.

My Winding Path to Writing a Book

So (gulp) writing my first non-fiction book. It’s the book I needed to read myself, a (not always so) gentle push to live my creativity, let go of the fear and just do it. Write the book. Create the collage. Take the photo. Just do it!

I always thought that I didn’t have enough time or energy to be creative, to do the things I wanted to do while I was climbing the corporate ladder. Given enough time, I’d dazzle the world with my art.

And, lo and behold! November 2019 came and I resigned my fancy job at Microsoft. “Now I’ll show them!” Or not.

2020 was NOT the year my books would be written, or stunning photos exhibited. True, Covid-19 made everyone’s lives a misery, but even so, I thought I’d do more with my freedom. Instead, I agonized about every word, every photo; nothing I did was good enough, and the fear paralyzed me.

It took most the 2020 to figure it out. I dragged myself out of the hole I had dig myself in, found new routines and created a plan. Hence, the non-fiction book.

Close up of a vintage-style typewriter with the words "Just do it" typed on the page.

Getting Started

To start with, I need to do some research. I’m sorry I cannot say more about it. I don’t like being secretive, and I’m not afraid of somebody stealing my idea. Ideas are dozen a dime; it’s the execution that counts. No, what I’m afraid of is jinxing it. (It seems I haven’t conquered all my fears, after all.) I may share more later if I start feeling more comfortable.

Before diving into that pile of books (and it’s a symbolic pile since almost all my books nowadays are electronic), I do need to have a proper reading list. I’m sure my future me will thank me.

Cal Newport has a great article on building a research database, and I think I’ll keep it simple with an Excel file. There are more advanced ways, but I feel an Excel file meets my needs. I don’t want to over-complicate things; I like to keep things simple.

That’s it for now. I’ll cover the research phase and building the research database in the next posts.

* About killing your darlings. The saying has been attributed to many authors, from Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner to G.K. Chesterton, Chekhov and Stephen King.

King leads this attribution game nowadays, very likely due to this sentence from his excellent book On Writing: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Most scholars point to British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.“If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’”, he wrote in his book On the Art of Writing.

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The Zone: No. 14 – Jan 21, 2020

21st January 2021
The Zone
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  1. Welcome To The Zone!
  2. The Zone: No. 2 – Oct 22, 2020
  3. The Zone: No. 3 – Oct 29, 2020
  4. The Zone: No.4 – Nov 5, 2020
  5. The Zone: No. 5 – Nov 12, 2021
  6. The Zone: No. 6 – Nov 19, 2020
  7. The Zone: No. 7 – Nov 26, 2020
  8. The Zone: No. 8 – Dec 3, 2020
  9. The Zone: No. 9 – Dec 10, 2020
  10. The Zone: No. 10 – Dec 17, 2020
  11. The Zone: No. 11, Dec 31, 2020 – Special Edition
  12. The Zone: No. 12 – Jan 7, 2020
  13. The Zone: No. 13 – Jan 14, 2020
  14. The Zone: No. 14 – Jan 21, 2020
  15. The Zone: No. 15 – Jan 28, 2020
  16. The Zone: No. 16 – Feb 4, 2020
  17. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!

Kevin Kelly on making life count, new books, Studio Ghibli artist Kazuo Oga’s painting process, porcupettes (say what?), and much more in The Zone No. 14.

The snow is gone, and the gray is back, but who cares? It’s time for The Zone!

Waltz of Winter, illustration by Jahna Vashti
Jahna Vashti, Waltz of Winter
  • Jahna Vashti is one of my favorite artists, and I just bought this illustration, Waltz of Winter, for my home office. I had it on my wish list for years, and I decided it was time to act.
A glowing green aurora seen from the International Space Station. Photo by NASA Flight Engineer Jack Fischer.
Expedition 52 Flight Engineer Jack Fischer shared photos of a glowing green aurora seen from the International Space Station.
  • A baby porcupine is called a porcupette!
  • Let’s stay in Japan: teamLab‘s new immersive art installation at the Kairakuen Garden is, of course, breath-taking. I’ve seen teamLab’s Planets during our 2018 Japan trip and I would have loved to see this one. Covid-19 put a stop to it. Fingers crossed for the next one.
Close up of a red squirrel eating a peanut. Photo by Mihaela Limberea
Red Squirrel
  • January 21st is the Squirrel Appreciation Day. Here’s a squirrel for you! We have several squirrels visiting our garden (read: raiding the bird-feeders), and this one is the bravest. She’ll tolerate me and my camera within a couple of meters, but only if nuts are exchangins paws.

My Zone

A Quote I’m Pondering

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance

James Baldwin, Paris Review Interviews II

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To read more The Zone posts, click here.

The Copenhagen Trilogy

20th January 2021
Books
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Parul Sehgal, the book critic at The New York Times, called The Copenhagen Trilogy a masterpiece, and her recent brilliant review pushed the book at the top of my wish list.

How does great literature — the Grade A, top-shelf stuff — announce itself to the reader?

Nabokov spoke of the shiver between the shoulder blades. Emily Dickinson required more persuasion. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” she wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”

I’m sorry to say that I occasionally experience it as the dishonorable and squirrelly impulse to hoard the book in question, to keep it my secret. This can prove difficult, as you might imagine, given my line. All of which is to say, I bring news of Tove Ditlevsen’s suite of memoirs with the kind of thrill and reluctance that tells me this must be a masterpiece.

The Quails

19th January 2021
Poetry
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  1. The Rising Moon
  2. Tonight’s Moon
  3. Cicadas’ Voices
  4. At Yamei’s House
  5. The Bleak Wind
  6. Beads Of Dew
  7. Moon-Viewing At My Hut
  8. Fallen Leaves
  9. An Old Tree Was Felled …
  10. The Autumn Tempest
  11. Autumn Is Advanced
  12. To Ransetsu
  13. In Imitation of Kaku’s Haiku on Knotgrass and a Firefly
  14. On the Death of Issho
  15. Ice and Water
  16. The Lark
  17. The First Snow
  18. The Moon Of Tonight
  19. The Chanting of Buddhist Prayers
  20. Lightning
  21. The Quails
  22. Moon Viewing at an Old Temple
  23. In My Dark Winter
  24. Snow
  25. The Great Morning
The sky at dusk, a sliver of the moon showing, with tree shadows in the foregrounds. Photo by Mihaela Limberea,

The quails are chirping in the dusk

Aware the hawks’ eyes are now dim.

Matsuo Basho 

Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.

To read more poems, click here.

The Dazzling Effect of Books

17th January 2021
Books
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Let’s have a book quiz, shall we? The only thing better than reading books is talking about books. Books = Life as everybody knows. 

The Big Book Quiz Part 1

  • Do you prefer reading old-fashioned books or e-books? 

Tough question. A few years ago, I would have answered “real books”, but I admit that I prefer e-books nowadays. Why? For several reasons: 

a) They’re cheaper. Swedish e-books are, in general, more expensive than paper books (and Swedish publishers are complaining e-books don’t sell!), but I buy them through the US Kindle store; thank God for deals of the day! I buy so many books that I can’t afford to buy hardcovers at full price. 

The only exception is the annual book sale, a big thing in Sweden. All bookstores (including online) would offer discounted books, starting the last Tuesday in February (prettily timed to around the 25th when the monthly salaries are paid out in Sweden) and until the beginning of March. Heaven for book lovers. Then I would load my book bag with hard-covers.

Books on bookshelves. Photo by Mihaela Limberea

b) They don’t take up any room. I have a library room, and it’s crammed with books, obviously. There are books in every room of the house, except the guest toilet. That last bastion will fall, too, eventually. If you have as many books as I have (we’re talking several thousand), you appreciate anything not requiring more storage space.

c) They’re portable. Nowadays, this is not an issue anymore, since we’re not traveling anywhere because of the pandemic. 

But back in the golden days, pre-Covid-19, when the only travel annoyance was the safety checks or flight delays, I would always bring at least a couple of books with me. 

In fact, one of my fears was that I would run out of reading material during the trip. I would read while waiting at the gate, during boarding, during the flight, and at the hotel before going to bed. You cannot imagine how many books I would need for a longer trip! Some people are terrified of flying. Me? Running out of reading material.

To say nothing about the weight or bringing the “wrong” book, you know, when you feel like reading a science-fiction novel, and all you have is a biography.

Enter e-books. Suddenly, I didn’t have to worry about luggage weight, running out of books to read, or bringing the wrong books. 

d) They’re not set in stone; or paper, rather. I love being able to customize the page color, font type, and size. I wear glasses, and I appreciate everything that helps my eyes, like larger fonts.

To cut a long story short, e-books are practical for several reasons. But I do miss being able to argue with the writer on the margins (I know you can add comments in e-books, but it’s just not the same), leafing through the pages to see what my old me commented on, or that unmistakable smell of a freshly bought book. Oh well, February 25th is almost here.

Books on bookshelves. Photo by Mihaela Limberea
  • Paperback or hard-cover?

Another tough question. A few years ago, it would have been hard-covers; they feel luxurious, like books should. But nowadays, I’m more for convenience (age may have something to do with it). Paperbacks are smaller, take up less room, and are more pleasant to hold when reading.

  • Genre or Nobel Prize winner?

Both. A good book is a good book, period. There’s this misconception that genre books are somehow the lesser literature. I don’t buy that. Good quality genre books are good books; forget the “genre.” Publishers and booksellers invented genres to help them sell books.

  • Do you finish reading a bad book or do you abandon it?

I struggled with this my whole life; I couldn’t NOT finish a book, no matter how bad or boring it was. I would feel guilty because that poor author had worked so hard to write a book, and I, the reader, simply discarded that effort. I felt the author’s eyes drilling on my back, truly I did. 

I’m happy to report that I realized eventually that I couldn’t continue that way. You know, so many books, so little time … Nowadays, I curate my reading carefully; it’s not often I have to abandon reading a book. But if I have to do it, I’m quick and remorseless about it.

  • Do you read translations or original language?

An easy one. Original for the languages I speak (Romanian, Swedish, English, French), translation for the rest. I don’t count German here, although I’ve taken it for eight years at school and can manage some light reading. 

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The Zone: No. 13 – Jan 14, 2020

14th January 2021
The Zone
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  1. Welcome To The Zone!
  2. The Zone: No. 2 – Oct 22, 2020
  3. The Zone: No. 3 – Oct 29, 2020
  4. The Zone: No.4 – Nov 5, 2020
  5. The Zone: No. 5 – Nov 12, 2021
  6. The Zone: No. 6 – Nov 19, 2020
  7. The Zone: No. 7 – Nov 26, 2020
  8. The Zone: No. 8 – Dec 3, 2020
  9. The Zone: No. 9 – Dec 10, 2020
  10. The Zone: No. 10 – Dec 17, 2020
  11. The Zone: No. 11, Dec 31, 2020 – Special Edition
  12. The Zone: No. 12 – Jan 7, 2020
  13. The Zone: No. 13 – Jan 14, 2020
  14. The Zone: No. 14 – Jan 21, 2020
  15. The Zone: No. 15 – Jan 28, 2020
  16. The Zone: No. 16 – Feb 4, 2020
  17. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!

Creativity as a simple three-step formula, a free streamable Hayao Miyazaki documentary, the importance of music in movies, and much more in The Zone No. 13.

We finally got some snow, yay! It’s colder now, and it seems that the fine weather will continue if you’ll forgive me the pun. (I love Pink Panther, see it if you haven’t). Anyway, SNOW!

A red squirrel hiding nuts in the snow. Photo by Mihaela Limberea
A red squirrel in my garden, hiding nuts in the snow.
  • The Key to Creativity? Jootsing, meaning “jumping out of the system.” (Douglas Hofstadter coined the term). Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett breaks down creativity into a simple three-step formula:
    • Understand a particular system and its rules, for instance, painting.
    • Step outside the system and look for something that undermines those rules.
    • Create something new based on the findings.

For example, Picasso had started learning drawing and oil painting as a seven-year-old, tutored by his father, and studied at prominent art schools in Barcelona and Madrid. Then he broke the rules and created Cubism.

“Creativity, that ardently sought but only rarely found virtue, often is a heretofore unimagined violation of the rules of the system from which it springs.”

Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
  • Pablo Picasso‘s complete name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Mártir Patricio Ruiz y Picasso. That’s a mouthful (23 words).
View of Houses in Delft, Known as ‘The Little Street’ by Johannes Vermeer, 1658.
View of Houses in Delft, Known as ‘The Little Street’, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1658.
Stars in the outskirts of the dwarf galaxy Caldwell 18 (NGC 185) as well as distant background galaxies (which appear as extended patches of light). Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Ferguson (University of Edinburgh, Institute for Astronomy); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
The dwarf galaxy Caldwell 18 (NGC 185) and distant background galaxies (which appear as extended patches of light). Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Ferguson (University of Edinburgh, Institute for Astronomy); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
  • NASA has released 30 new space photos to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Hubble telescope’s launch, and they are awesome.
  • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a site and YouTube channel (and a forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster) that “defines neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term.” The site’s creator, John Koenig, makes up the words but partly bases them on “research on etymologies and meanings of used prefixes, suffixes, and word roots.” A few examples:
    • aftersome adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.
    • flashover n. the moment a conversation becomes real and alive, which occurs when a spark of trust shorts out the delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily grounding the static emotional charge you’ve built up through decades of friction with the world.
    • exulansis n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
  • Jack Pierce is a musician and movie and TV composer based in London. His video about how music affects characters or scenes in movies is short and to the point. Very educational.
Cat with tie and glasses

My Zone

A Quote I’m Pondering

There is only one time that is important— Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.

Leo Tolstoy, What Men Live By and Other Tales 

From My Photo Archives

Close up of deep blue sea. Photo by Mihaela Limberea
Deep Blue Sea

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To read more The Zone posts, click here.