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[Music]
MAIRA KALMAN: I am off-kilter a lot of the time and emotions are very intense. I'm pretty
much off-kilter all the time, but the good news is that I have work to channel it into.
[Music]
Half the time, I don't know what's going on. But I love it.
[Music]
The principles of uncertainty happened because the New York Times wanted me to do an online
blog and the notion of that kind of institution saying to a particular person, just really
do whatever you're thinking about… it's a very pleasant memory for me. So every month
I would just kind of follow whatever topics came up over and over again that engaged me.
It gave me a wonderful platform to just wander around and talk about stuff that I really
like from books and theater and despair and fruit bowls, and things like that.
[Music]
So when the editors of the times said, do you want to do another year I said, sure,
but let's do something different. Send me out on an assignment of something I really
don't know about or don't care about and politics is number one on my list. Number one through
fifty. No, no. Number one through a thousand is politics of things I don't care about and
things I'm allergic to. It was an assignment about politics and history and democracy and
all the things I knew very little about. There's a way of looking at an assignment and saying,
okay well then what would make it interesting to me and clearly Obama being elected was
something that was monumental, but when I'm given an assignment—go and cover the inauguration
in Washington—well, I want to tell you about the music I listened to on the radio and I
want to tell you about what the people were singing in the church that weekend. And then
I'll get to the point at some point. But I think that you want to see, well what is this
story that I want to tell along the way?
[Music]
I think when you set out with a target, if you don't at the digressions, if you don't
look at the things that catch your attention along the way, than you really haven't—I
don't think you've had any fun.