Wednesday, March 07, 2001
Morning Pages
Last night I attended the first session of the Artist's Way workshops being held at Inner Directions. Very different sort of group than the others I've been to, but I like the fact that all of the people there share the same goal -- to become more creative in their daily lives. I remember after doing check-in and giving my spiel on my artistic background (stint doing radio comedy, late father an amateur painter, teaching a course in Web Design and Functionality at the U. of T., written three books on HTML, etc etc etc), and then the co-facilitator out-of-the blue asking me if I knew the definition of the word "abstruse". I didn't (at the time), and neither did she. She then commented that I struck her as being "like a dictionary". At first I thought this something of an insult, but when I though of it later, in trying to put a positive spin on it instead of just leaping to the negavtive, I realized that dictionaries are essentially books of connections. Words only mean something by their references (i.e. connections) to other words. A very deconstructionist thought (and I took enough Lit Crit to know what that actually means ;-) I checked my feelings about that with her later, and she confirmed my latter thinking -- that I knew lots of connections and have the ability to be playful and yet recognize the underlying structures quickly. Me like. ;-) So this morning I began my first set of "morning pages". Haven't written several pages of long hand for a while, and was surprised at how long it took me to write them. Took at least 1/2 an hour to finish writing my allotted number of pages. Interesting exercise though. Am looking forward to reading more of the book and doing some of the exercises.
Last night I attended the first session of the Artist's Way workshops being held at Inner Directions. Very different sort of group than the others I've been to, but I like the fact that all of the people there share the same goal -- to become more creative in their daily lives. I remember after doing check-in and giving my spiel on my artistic background (stint doing radio comedy, late father an amateur painter, teaching a course in Web Design and Functionality at the U. of T., written three books on HTML, etc etc etc), and then the co-facilitator out-of-the blue asking me if I knew the definition of the word "abstruse". I didn't (at the time), and neither did she. She then commented that I struck her as being "like a dictionary". At first I thought this something of an insult, but when I though of it later, in trying to put a positive spin on it instead of just leaping to the negavtive, I realized that dictionaries are essentially books of connections. Words only mean something by their references (i.e. connections) to other words. A very deconstructionist thought (and I took enough Lit Crit to know what that actually means ;-) I checked my feelings about that with her later, and she confirmed my latter thinking -- that I knew lots of connections and have the ability to be playful and yet recognize the underlying structures quickly. Me like. ;-) So this morning I began my first set of "morning pages". Haven't written several pages of long hand for a while, and was surprised at how long it took me to write them. Took at least 1/2 an hour to finish writing my allotted number of pages. Interesting exercise though. Am looking forward to reading more of the book and doing some of the exercises.
Listened to Niven's Protector Yesterday
Spent much of the day yesterday at home tooling away on PhotoShop working on a mock-up for a new Web site on behalf of my employers. While doing so, I listened enjoyably to MP3s of Larry Niven's Protector. This is a change from my normal fare of listening to biographies and histories -- with the recent exception of the Harry Potter series of novels. I first read this book while a teen in high-school. I remember at the time being somewhat "worried" about the way in which the author tries to posit the origin of man off of the planet. I remember being keenly aware of Creationist doggeral at the time, and thought that this book obliquely tied into it. This time, in listening to it again, I heard it more for the story, and for the pseudo-intellectual romp it is. There's not much in the way of character development here, more a series of ideas and arguments. In a way, I think of the metaphor used in the book of the hyper-intelligent Pak not having much in the way of choices/free will, I kind of think that this book was written in much the same way. A fun read. Nice thing is that I read it so long ago that I only vaguely remembered some of its plot points. Ought to go back and search for more books from Niven's "Known Space" series (man there are a lot of cheesy scf-fi pages out there. The previous link rates high on the cheese-o-meter, but is still better than some of the other ones I ran across before hitting this site).
Spent much of the day yesterday at home tooling away on PhotoShop working on a mock-up for a new Web site on behalf of my employers. While doing so, I listened enjoyably to MP3s of Larry Niven's Protector. This is a change from my normal fare of listening to biographies and histories -- with the recent exception of the Harry Potter series of novels. I first read this book while a teen in high-school. I remember at the time being somewhat "worried" about the way in which the author tries to posit the origin of man off of the planet. I remember being keenly aware of Creationist doggeral at the time, and thought that this book obliquely tied into it. This time, in listening to it again, I heard it more for the story, and for the pseudo-intellectual romp it is. There's not much in the way of character development here, more a series of ideas and arguments. In a way, I think of the metaphor used in the book of the hyper-intelligent Pak not having much in the way of choices/free will, I kind of think that this book was written in much the same way. A fun read. Nice thing is that I read it so long ago that I only vaguely remembered some of its plot points. Ought to go back and search for more books from Niven's "Known Space" series (man there are a lot of cheesy scf-fi pages out there. The previous link rates high on the cheese-o-meter, but is still better than some of the other ones I ran across before hitting this site). 
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