A Series of Studies
I’ve watched this video a few times, marvelling at the elegant and deceptively simple mix of art, body, and media that creates the illusion of understanding movement.
3 Great Things: Chocolate, Libraries, Pirates
These three links are simply the best of the best recipes, resources, and shops for the discerning writer who needs a good swift kick of inspiration and some chocolate goodness to power through another hair-tearing session of rewriting scenes as cooperative as a storm at sea. Whew! That was a breathless sentence.
Middle-Class Verbosity
Many of the assumptions, attitudes, and ideas in the 1972 article Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence by William Labov are prevalent today. If you’ve ever edited or read a college-level essay or dissertation, you know that verbosity is alive and kicking, and if you step outside the comfort zone of a middle-class university education, the diversity of speaking styles is awesome. But would you buy that the working-class may be more effective communicators than university students? Continue reading
Thank You But Knots
Sitting in literature classes, I recall being bored out of my mind, absolutely unappreciative, and sometimes mystified by what was considered Great and Literary. Some works I embraced wholeheartedly, forever welcoming insights I could only hope to experience in “real life”. Others? Well. I remember thinking the editor for T.S. Eliot’s poems did a sloppy job. And that my grade ten Shakespeare class was taught by an incoherent incompetent woman who probably was a frustrated aspiring writer who hated the sight of our blank faces. (I omitted the commas in honour of her.) Continue reading
Creating Time and Sparking Writing Ideas
After checking my email and prioritizing replies, mornings typically involve a tour through internet-land, with brief stops at Google+ or Twitter or LinkedIn. Yes, OR. Each fills a well-defined need, and not very well, I would say. Filtering through the data is a time-suck and the current solutions to this, personalized search results, can’t read my mind or predict what I want. Sometimes even I can’t! Continue reading