Susan Cain, author of the recent book Quiet: The Power of Introverts, presented a 19-minute TED talk in February 2012. Cain’s book offers a refreshing look at introversion.
URL: http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html
Alex Soth interview
Alex Soth is an American photographer and filmmake. The theme of his most recent exhibition “Broken Manual” is hermits, mentioned previously in this blog. Soth is currently exhibiting at New York City’s Sean Kelly Gallery. Soth was interviewed by the Blouin ArtInfo website. The article is titled: “How to Run Away: Alec Soth on What He Learned From His New Series of Hermit Portraits,” printed Feb. 17, 2012. Additionally, the mainstream Huffington Post also features Soth in an article titled “Alec Soth’s Photographs Capture Males Outside Of Society” (because the hermits Soth photographed are all men).
Here is an excerpt from the interview, followed by a quoate from the Huffington Post article.
ARTINFO: Hermits aren’t exactly easy to pin down. How did you actually find your subjects?
SOTH: In many cases, I found people on the Internet, which always seems like a contradiction. The whole thing about this project is that it’s a contradiction. One of the resource materials that I looked at a bit… there’s this blog that I read on hermitry. And I just think that’s really funny. All these people reading this blog–
ARTINFO: A blog on hermitry seems like the ultimate irony.
SOTH: Yeah, exactly. …
Huffington Post:
What is the inner life of a hermit like, you ask? There is something unsettling about the men in Soth’s images; they quietly address the interior struggle between savagery and civilization, between masculinity and sensitivity. It is clear that the men place great trust in Soth; the natural urges for both bold masculinity and sensitivity lurk in the shadows of their honest faces. Their haunted, faraway expressions create equally haunting imagery, the wilds of the woods mirroring the recesses of the mind.
URLs:
ARTINFO: http://artinfo.com/news/story/760382/how-to-run-away-alec-soth-on-what-he-learned-from-his-new-series-of-hermit-portraits
HP: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/alec-soths-hermit-photographs_n_1285167.html
“Hermit of Lost Island,” Bahamas
Article in “Island Notes,” a feature column of Bahamaislandinfo, titled “Sadly Lost to the World: The Hermit of Lost Island,” about the American Trappist monk Gerald Groves.
Groves spent time at the Abbey of Gethsemani and knew Thomas Merton, then spent a little while in Martinique, followed by six years as a hermit in Bahamas beginning in 1960, a period described by the article. Groves lived in an abandoned and dilapidated Baptist Church built in 1902 until development drove him out, returning to the U.S. to study and teach. Groves died in 2003.
(Groves published an article about Merton in a 1979 issue of American Scholar.)
An updated URL (2014): http://www.thebahamasweekly.com/publish/author-historian/Sadly_lost_to_this_world_-_the_hermit_of_lost_beach33846.shtml
URL (no longer available): http://www.bahamaislandsinfo.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10087:island-notes-sadly-lost-to-this-world-the-hermit-of-lost-beach&catid=113:island-notes&Itemid=228
NYT article on “shyness”
Susan Cain writes an article titled “Shyness: An Evolutionary Tactic” (or the more tentative version of the title “Is Shyness an Evolutionary Tactic?”) in a recent edition of the New York Times.
Shyness is here a synonym for introversion, which is examined as a means of observation and assessment by “sitters” versus the extrovert (“rovers”) curiosity and attraction to novelty that often ends in a rush into danger. Mentions introversion as a tool for creativity, contemplation, workplace stability, and psychological well-being. Important point, too, is the medical and pharmaceutical industry’s attempts to make introversion a disease in need of a drug.
The author has a blog titled “Quiet: The Power of Introverts” and a forthcoming book with the same title.
URLs: article – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26shyness.html
blog – http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com
Alec Soth’s “Broken Manual”
Alec Soth is a Minneapolis photographer and publisher of Broken Manual, a collection of documentary photographs which, as its Vimeo preview puts it,
investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization. Soth photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways, but this isn’t a conventional documentary book on life “off the grid.” Instead, working with the writer Lester B. Morrison, the authors have created an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives.
The book is presently only available in a limited special edition.
URL:
website – http://alecsoth.com/photography/projects/broken-manual/
blog entry – http://littlebrownmushroom.wordpress.com/broken-manual/
Vimeo preview – http://vimeo.com/14759277