In Praise of Doodling
This post isn’t showing off a doodle, but rather this post is about praising them. @rewiredforsound sent us a link to this article in praise of doodles that I just wanted to share with everyone. Enjoy!
Russell M. Arundel, who in his 1937 book, Everybody’s Pixillated, defines the doodle as “a scribble or sketch made while the conscious mind is concerned with matters wholly unrelated to the scribbling.” Arundel makes the claim that civilized man’s natural state is one of “pixillation” — a condition of pixie-like enchantment that, though concealed by the lumber and business of modern life, emerges most clearly in the “automatic writing” he calls “doodling.”
To prove his point, Arundel catalogues the doodles of midcentury notables — the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Cab Galloway are represented — with thumbnail psychological workups of each one based on elements of doodling style. Arundel finishes with a “pixillation chart” that taxonomizes major doodling motifs, allowing the reader to gather an accurate picture of his own fey subconscious. Someone who scrawls rhyming words, for instance, is “poetic in nature and a lover of music”; the mere “repetition of words and letters,” on the other hand, “indicates you are cynical or morbid.”
[Read the full article: In Praise of Doodling]
