Reviews

The Habit of Noticing: Using Creativity to Make a Life (and a Living) by Darden Smith, Warren Zanes

charliemudd's review

4.0

This would be a normal 3-star book if it weren't for the foreword by Warren Zanes. I have been searching for years, trying to figure out where the magic in art comes from: why some some songs aren't just chords and lyrics and give you chills, why some novels are more than well-written stories and change the way you feel about the world, and why some paintings can haunt you forever. I have called it "magic", "a turn", I even came across the term "rasa" in Hindi that means the essence or juice of something, many times used to describe art. These are all close to the same idea, but not quite right. However, Zanes nails it in the foreword of this book when he talks about how good art needs a sense of not-knowingness, how magic appears when the artist is searching within the work of art, adept at his/her form but not exactly sure how it is going to turn out, everything not planned out and thought through. It's this vague waywardness that gives the art its magic. You can't pin it down, so it grabs you. If you understand exactly what the art is doing and how the artist did it, there is no magic. This is it; this is the definition of art that I have been looking for. Thank you so much, Warren Zanes, whoever you are.

As far as the rest of this book goes, I don't read poetry, so I am not sure how people read poetry books. Do they read one poem and stop to let it sink in, think about it, ruminate, make its meaning important to them, and then read the next one? Does that mean one poem a day? I don't think this book is a poetry book -- it is more like "Darden Smith's Advice to Himself". I decided to read it as a bathroom book, to naturally kind of enforce the stop/think/ruminate/glean process. It worked. Warning: In the wrong mood, this book could be a 1 or 2, but as I get older and more sentimental, I get less critical of corny platitudes. Oh yeah, and it has the best foreword of all time.