August 26

Triceratops vs. T-Rex: Which Would Win?

Gabriel, my muse, is on vacation this week. Mary Jane Philbert, of Edgecomb, Wyoming, will be filling in for him while he hides out deep in the Borneo rain forest.
This accounts for any changes in the quality of content, tone, and lack of humor you might see, as Mary Jane took on the muse gig while still being the mother of three kids.

Oh, and this week seems to be talkin' about ideas week, so if you've been out in the August sun too much, you might want to consider joining Gabriel in Borneo

Trodding the worn path.

I've mentioned before how inspiration can sometimes resemble a game of tag. One article or book you're reading presents a new idea or inspiration, and also references a source of their inspiration.

But sooner or later, the winding trail becomes a loop, where you bump into an old idea but from a new source.

The old idea? A flash of insight, the solution to a problem, is most likely to occur when you least expect it and you aren't pushing toward it.

I first encountered this idea in 2007 when visiting a Yeats exhibit in Dublin. One exhibit featured Yeats' response to a questionnaire sent to him by Elliott Hutchinson about his creative process. The questionnaire intrigued me, and so I chased down Hutchinson's book, which I've been referencing ever since. The basic premise is 'when you bump into a problem that refuses to give, walk away. Your brain will continue to work on it, and will give you the answer.'

Billy Collins' The Genius covers a lot of the same territory, when he says:

the kind of moment when a brainstorm
is very likely to roll in.
Not when you are concentrating
under a lamp in your study
but when you are up in the woods
lifting a stone onto a wall,
or washing a glass in the sink.

Great minds and all that good stuff.

Rethinking my place on the food chain.

Apropos of the previous entry.

About ten a.m. this morning, Belle the Collaborator Cat became Belle the Manipulator Cat. She decided that she wanted her head scratched, and so began swatting at the pen I was holding. I tried to keep working, but she insisted (that is, she kept swatting). So I complied, put the pen down, and scratched her head and under her chin. After a few moments, I picked the pen up and went back to work.

Belle was having none of it, and resumed swatting until I put the pen away, scratched her head, and paid attention to nothing except her.

This is not a bad thing, this enforced work break. Even when 'distracted' by something, in this case soft cat fur and purring, my brain can continue processing what I was working on, or jump around to different thoughts, topics or problems. New connections are formed, new problems refined, all because Belle insisted I had better things to do than write.

The head spins.

Someone proposed a dress code for the Libertarian Party National Convention.

I got nothin'.

What goes around comes around.

According to The Wall Street Journal, 'Go West, young man' is doing a 180°, at least for the big Hollywood studios, lured by New Jersey's tax breaks for moviemakers.

It's sort of a 'welcome home,' as New Jersey was the original home of the filmmaking industry, until Thomas Edison tried to use his chokehold on cameras and film to monopolize filmmaking, or at least squeeze all the profits out of it. This in turn forced other moviemakers to get as far away from New Jersey as possible, which turned out to be southern California.

Circling the questions.

The DePree Center asks Will I be remembered after I'm gone? Does it matter? BBC has a slightly different question: Why do we want to be remembered after we die? Even Psychology Today gets in on the action: 5 Reasons We Want to Be Remembered.

I saw the BBC question first, and my immediate gut-level response was 'fear.' Fear of the unknown. Fear of losing support structures. Fear of anonymity, of meaninglessness, of irrelevance.

Fear that we wasted not only time, but our life, and may have caused harm along the way.

The Psychology Today piece is a natural follow-up. Of their answers, two are fear-centered, although they don't say that directly.

Which brings us to DePree and the money question: Does it matter? I'm sure it matters to lots of people on this side of the Great Divide, as so many of us spend so much time and effort building a legacy, transferring wealth, in philanthropy, etc. In fact, that's #1 on the Psychology Today list: the need to be loved.

On the other side? Well, I haven't been, so I can't say definitively, but I guessing not so much. I would think it's like moving to a new town. You still have ties to the old town, but you start building new relationships, new interests, and a new life, and the old ties slowly fade. Plus, you (might) get a clean slate and a chance to repair things you didn't get right the first time around. Ot it doesn't matter—it's a clean slate, remember? No baggage.

Of course, there's Mark Twain's view, as expressed in Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. In it, people are remembered for their accomplishments and character on earth, but not always in the same way or with the same celebrity as they are known here. So things do cross the line.

But like I say (about a lot of things),'I dunno.' It's fun to think about. Nobody ever steps up and says, 'I was there. You're wrong.'

Celebrate!

Here's a variation on an Abraham Lincoln saying:

Everybody is an expert in one thing; somebody is an expert in nothing; but nobody is an expert in everything.


word of the week

stentorian

poetry bonus! recent augie sez

Quoted.

You can be cautious or be creative. There is no Cautious Creative.

--Wordpress

 

Bonus!

Back to school.

I'm sure that in some places, 'back to school' is old news, as students are already boarding yellow rat boxes for their five-day-a-week slog back to academe. For those places, like where I live, we're still a week out, and still looking at back-to-school sales, reminders, sales tax holidays, an so on.

But in spite of the common meme that kids hate school and dread going back, lots of kids actually like school and look forward to returning. Some like it because summer has totally bored out; others, because they get to see friends they haven't seen in three months; some (like me) because they like learning, are good at it, and as The Boss sang, 'that's where the fun is.'

In the meanwhile, we still have the advertisements and 'warnings' that the start of school approaches. We were fortunate that most of the preliminary hoopla this year waited until August to ramp up, somewhat unusual in a culture where I expect to see Halloween candy on shelves on my next visit to the store.

But the yelling and yammering is all still there. Sales on everything, including couches and dining sets. Districts short x bus drivers and y teachers. Reports of cameras to catch speeders in school zones. High school football practices. Collections of school supplies for kids. One advertisement for a charity organization collecting school supplies showed a laughing child clutching school supplies with the tagline, Remember when you felt this way about school supplies?

I never felt that way about school supplies. Now textbooks, that was my thing.

Through grade school, I never knew where the textbooks came from. I'm presuming now the school got them, and our parents paid for them, and they got to us somehow. I remember my first grade teacher suggesting to my parents that they acquire the extra-curricular Reading with phonics book for me (although I don't remember if that was during the period that Sr. Mary Martha assigned me, who was reading at a fourth grade level, to the Bluebirds, the group with the 'starter readers,' but then later forgot why she put me in the B.B.s). Logistics didn't matter—once the new books hit my hands, I was just too enthused about the source of the new reading matter. For all I knew or cared, they could have been spit from the very bowels of hell itself.

Sometime in third or fourth grade, there was a big push to put covers on the books. Directions were distributed, showing how to cut, fold, and tape the covers. Some girls in my class found (or had their parents buy) pieces of wallpaper or wrapping paper to make festive covers for their textbooks.

Most kids, though, especially the boys, went with the traditional brown paper grocery store bags to make covers. The only question was that if the bags that had grocery store logos on them whether the logo should show or not. The consensus was that unless your family owned the store, no.

I was resistant to any book covering. I took very good care of my books (and still do. Sometimes my wife will borrow a book and ask if I've read it, as there are no marks on it. Yes I have–but very carefully). Why mark up a good friend, make it hide its face in a brown paper bag like it's a New York Jets fan, and erase a distinguishing mark that showed us as a higher lifeform compared to the sniveling toddlers in second grade (Oh. I see you're still doing just addition and subtraction. Hang in there, kid. Someday you'll advance to multiplication and division, if you're lucky.).

My mom, probably under pressure from the powers that be, suggested I put covers on my books. I explained in a series of cogent, well-organized arguments, why my books should remain free of brown paper.

That night, I found myself at the kitchen table after dinner, my textbooks lined up, a stack of brown paper bags, scissors, and tape at the ready. When I was done, my mom suggested putting my name and the book's name on the paper. I agreed to my name, but didn't need the book name. The cover might be hidden, but I still knew what was under the brown paper.

The next morning, the names of the books had been added to the new covers. I guess that was alright—her handwriting was better anyway. Not much I could do about it then.

Anyway, I survived, thrived, even. Still reading, still love playing with words.