A shift in focus
Greetings
I used to write poems. Lots of them. Sometimes they were actually good, following a bunch of rewrites. Sometimes they would land on the page fully formed. Only sometimes. It has now been over a decade since I stopped writing and performing poetry regularly. And with that muscle not having been exercised in that period, sitting down to try and write a poem is a lot more trying and very little writing. I have always been a generalist. I have, jokingly but seriously, called myself a professional ‘jack of all trades.’
Despite this, I am a drawn to craft and people who focus singlemindedly on something. I often wish I could put everything aside and delve deeply into one thing, but I have come to accept that even trying to decide what the one thing is would be impossible. I like things. Lots of different things. There is an overlap, a way of having one space overlap with another that amplifies both. This is something else that I think about a lot.
A friend and I have had a long-running conversation about Instagram and how to use it creatively. We have debated the long or short caption and how, as a writer, I can use the caption to elevate my images.
I came to Instagram (and Flickr before that) as a hobby when iphoneography was all the rage. Spending my days writing, for a living, it was nice to simply take and share what I considered pretty pictures just because. Now, my IG account is all over the place.
I need to get my hands on the book Seeing Things which is basically about What Do Writer’s Do On Instagram.
The one person who gets it right is novelist, essayist, photographer, curator, critic and professor Teju Cole. To say I am a fan of his work is an understatement. After reading his collection of essays Known and Strange Things on Kindle, I went and bought the paperback and read it again.
In an interview in 2016, Cole said, “For me, the big break of Instagram was that it wasn’t just images. There was the possibility of captioning. This meant I could think of images as series. I could start to tell a kind of story that is emotionally connected over a series of images.… Because Instagram became my notebook. So it ended up being crucial for the composition of my next book. It became a notebook for the series of image/text pairing.”
The book was The Blind Spot, a combination of Teju Cole’s photography and writing. It is hard to explain how he is able to inject so much into what, on the surface, feel like random images. There is a surrealness to the path he guides the reader/ viewer/ participant down with each photograph and caption. This review does capture a bit of how I felt going through the book, which I will definitely dip into regularly.
The Japanese dedication to craftsmanship is something that we can all learn from.
Haven’t had time for podcasts much lately. A friend recommended the Apollo Robbins interview on Tim Ferriss’s podcast.
It is both entertaining and insightful. Also went back and watched his Ted talk from 10 years ago.
It feels like we are hitting an inflection point when it comes to social media, or perhaps it is just me. The two platforms I have been most active on in recent years are Twitter and Instagram and, to a slightly lesser extent, LinkedIn. Facebook has always been for family and friends. Not a day would go by without my logging onto Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is the platform that I logged onto nearly daily for the 15 years that I have been on the platform.
A few years back I started slowing down on it and, following Musk’s purchase of it, I have cut back drastically. When Threads launched, I activated my account but, as with Musk’s X, it isn’t top of mind and I forget to go onto it and, even when I do, I don’t know what to share. The next two years are going to be interesting in seeing where social media ends up. Why the internet isn’t fun anymore
Where do you draw the line? Do you have line? Are you clear on the things that you won’t do? Often, we know what we will do but spend very little time on figuring out what we won’t do, what we won’t compromise on. It can be an empowering exercise, figuring out what you won’t do. Defined by negatives.
I love the idea of this. A Free Digital Archive of Graphic Design: A Curated Collection of Design Treasures from the Internet Archive. I wish we had more of these kinds of online archives from the continent, by Africans. I have ideas, but no time.
That’s it for today. Please share, subscribe and/or comment.
Also, check out my podcast and book Listen To Your Footsteps.
Easy
Kojo