This week as it was to me

No major themes to this week, apart from the great weather. It’s the world cup but so far I haven’t been engaged with it.

Went to a couple of events: one run by the Curious festival about gender identity and the arts, and the North East & North Cumbria HIV Network AGM, for work.

Jump started my housemates’ car.

Had a lovely rabbit stew cooked by the new lady, and pimiento padrons.

Visited a picturesque pub today – I probably should have taken photos!

Building

Getting set for the job about to start. To kit myself out with work clothes I visited a personal shopper at a department store; it’s free and they can limit your choices to manageable levels while you hang out and drink tea!

Art and improv

A fun coulpe of rehearsals hacking games and songifying them.

We had a good jam night on Sunday, last one for the summer, including a total newbie who just dropped in intending to watch, but stepped up to try it.

Also Adam has been updating Brainwrap Comedy and put together a great poster for our promo film:

And here’s the film.

Recommendations / Reviews

Watched The World’s End, which felt a bit like a fairly good character study/ensemble comedy which suffered under the need to carry out its body snatcher twist. Certainly, there were lots of fun action/pulpy sci-fi moments and tropes, but it tried to do too much and tripped at the end.

Branches outward

Photographer captures dramatic pictures of birds hunting in Scotland

The ever-cheery John Gray: How we entered the age of the strongman

The denial by liberals of any responsibility for the conditions that have fuelled rising anti-liberal movements is the cardinal fact of contemporary politics. What this denial presages is not any higher phase of history – a revamped liberal order, or some purer version of socialism – but a new authoritarian era. The world has reverted to a condition not dissimilar to that which prevailed towards the end of the 19th century.

… Here a weakness in the public doctrine that has guided the West since the end of the Cold War becomes clear. For at least a generation, Western thinking has been shaped by the theory that law can trump politics. Such was the message of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and their multitudes of academic followers, whose rights-based version of liberalism dominated political philosophy for much of the past 30 years. Always far-fetched, this liberal legalism has as much contemporary relevance as a dated crossword puzzle.

… Liberal regimes are not free-standing structures of law and rights but political constructions that depend for their survival on hard power and popular acceptance. No constitution can prevent liberal forms of government being overthrown when these supports are lacking.

Thinking through

Had a chat with Alan about  how/whether spirituality stuff can actually head off any of the political trends (á la John Grey). One thing we talked around is whether Jordan Peterson is as successful as he claims at picking off people heading towards the far right, or whether he is a gateway into it as alleged by his critics. I think he has a major sampling bias, in the people who discover his stuff, stay there, and connect with it enough to come to his talks and thank him. As Alan pointed out the youtube algorithms mean that if you engage with his stuff, you will be pushed a lot of conservative content, and you’re a few steps away from really right-wing stuff. This is partly a technology thing, and also partly the result of the polarisation, with the left only engaging with the phenomenon – he’s more an avatar right now than an individual success story – in hostile terms. His videos are some of the hottest things on the internet for people searching for new ideas, and the right gets this, and is happily piggybacking on his momentum. The left has entered purge /purity mode, squandered an opportunity to pace and lead the conversation and is now shut out of it.

Shrug. It’s a shame, because the left activist circles I ran in were non-orthodox, smart and complex: dark green environmentalists, social democratic wonks, anarcho-sharp punks, people who could cut through the chaff and still find the worthwhile. Take his cheerleading for recent progress, his critique of immature activism, his take on postmodernism, his views on gender; for some of these topics,  his argument is coherent but incomplete, and others contain barely a grain of truth fortified by his rhetorical skill. He’s prone to conceptual synecdoche, which means he shouldn’t be the one left alone to develop all these ideas to his millions-strong audience.  And that can’t be achieved through derisive dismissal; it needs participation and rebuttal, ideally with a more capacious and charitable take than JBP himself affords his critics.

Or take the issues he’s framed more as questions than as positions: how does a modern individualist and atomised economy that prizes individual contribution in cognitive/expressive domains provide meaningful roles to those on the lower end of the cognitive spectrum (absent structures of meaning such as church or traditional institutions)? There are almost certainly some left-infused explorations of this (unless, god forbid, the blank slate rot has sank so deeply that these issues have entirely escaped attention) – so why not exploit the algorithm to get this stuff out accessibly? You’d probably have to swallow the impulse to denounce – the reactions of the JBP fans would quickly push you out of the orbit of his video ecosystem – but maybe it’s healthy to spend a little less time denouncing, and more addressing and developing the ideas that matter to you.

Or maybe that’s crazy. Again, shrug.

Maybe this stuff is happening already – if so, I’d love to see it. The people who are habitually engaging and benefiting from these discussions are spiritual folk, the self-help movement,  conservatives of various stripes and of course the IDW. The only people more identified leftwards who productively link in are establishment entities like the National Gallery of Canada – which was fairly constructive but tame.

Reading

Still enjoying the Gary Lachman book. Currently introducing Owen Barfeld, an Inkling who spent his life exploring the poetic nature of language. It’s undeniable that outside of poetry itself, our modern language is far more factual and literal than it was in older times. Barfeld thought implausible the notion that language began factual, then experienced a phase of infestation by a wave of poets, before gradually shedding the poetry once more. It’s far more parsimonious to theorise that if new language is unpoetic, older language more poetic and ancient language extremely poetic, that language began poetically. But if so, why? Barfeld argues – and this is one of Lachman’s routes to developing his central thesis –  that the way our ancestors perceived the world was fundamentally poetic, concerned with interiority rather than facts perceived at a distance. Perception attributed aliveness and agency to things that we consider inert, and overlap between aspects. It seems that Lachman is going to unpack how this was a valid way of thinking, rather than a sloppy and appropriately discarded inheritance, and I’m looking forward to seeing that thesis developed.

 

This week as it was to me

Front of mind for me is my trip to Germany, back to my old stomping ground of Würzburg. I don’t love travelling much at the moment, and the sagging sinkhole that is British rail at the moment really adds to the suckage – cancelled trains, hours of delay on the alternatives, some trains icy cold and others steaming hot. Add in nearly missing a flight due to mad queues, and there’s no surprise I crashed out asleep at 10ish last night…

On the bright side, this is where my travels took me:

 

The city was buzzing, both due to the music festival (see below) and the world cup – Germany winning by the skin of their teeth  launched a shriek that could be heard wherever you were in the city.

We were in the middle of Schafkälte, which is a traditional German (and I believe pan-European) term for when the temperature drops precipitously late in June, well after the sheep shearing season, hence Schafkälte – sheep’s cold.

Art and improv

I was in Germany for a meetup with Der Kaktus, my old group who I love very much. We spent two days working on new skills with Antonio Vulpio:

who has a nice format where he plays with performers who aim to destroy the scene through bad habits that he needs to counter. We were training these counters, it was pretty interesting!

Then we went on to play a show at Umsonst und Draussen, the music festival that we do every year to close out the main indoor stage.

Big show. This year was especially fun. Got to sign a massive cassette, too.

Building

Writing stuff and also prepping for the new job which starts this week. One thing I’ve begun is mapping out all the duties that seem to come with the job (not simple as it’s actually two part-time jobs with different managers and teams) and starting to tease out articulations of why they actually matter, inspired by the maybe apocryphal JFK story with the NASA janitor.

Perhaps if I can elucidate it enough I can link some of these things into saints or mythic heroic figures, to really put juice into tasks that in themselves feel tiresome.

Connection

The silver lining of my crappy journy home was a meeting on the final leg. An older man entered the train with me and when I helped him with his bag, said “I’m old and weak”. We laughed about this and shared terrible travel stories, and I learned he was a retired priest heading back from Liverpool from a funeral for a friend. We talked about what I do, improvisation and psychology, and my thoughts that in another life I would have perhaps chosen to take the path of priesthood; he shared stories about the different parishes he served, including the rough one that he dreaded when he begun but hated to leave at the end when asked to move on. We talked about the dogma of the church and his disaffection with it all, his interest in liberation theology and his time in the Philippines, and how at the end of everything, people are interesting and good. And how much there was in the church that was worthwhile, despite all the dogma and institutional baggage. We even leant into apophatic theology and chatted about Plotinus and the ineffable for a bit. Thanks, John. God bless.

Recommendations

And courtesy of Jay:

Branches outward

Eight graphs rebutting Steven Pinker’s progress narrative

Nixon versus Leary – I might buy this book sometime.

Still trying to follow this narrative since covering it for work: When Children Say They’re Trans

Alan getting on the Crowley tip:

Reading

While I was travelling I took with me Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman. Just read the intro so far but already a lot of good stuff.

This week as it was to me

Hanging out with the new lady and eating a lot of cake at the moment. Pistachio macaroons are a yes. Also burning more petrol than usual, taking my car around Northumbria. German friends visited and we headed to Alnwick Castle, run by the Percy lineage from Harry Hotspur (yes that one) onwards.

Now it’s more known for Harry Potter, which is the reason Aylin so badly wanted to go. She told me I was probably a Griffendor – that’s good, right? – and we watched broomstick lessons taught by an exuberant jobbing actor who reminded me a little of Ollie from Legz Akimbo.

 

Go inside, and be seriously impressed – the shack is still inhabited by the Percy family for part of the year and it’s got serious pomp and luxury going on, together with some not-quite-right art (like a sculpture of a cloud of horses fighting). No photography allowed, sadly.

We also went to Brinkburn Priory which has great acoustics and is tucked away in the back end of nowhere. Cool creepy manor house too. Getting the most out of my English Heritage membership.

And on Saturday I went for my first church crawl – rocking around the west with the Shape Note Newcastle singers looking for unlocked country chapels to sing in. We even ended up drinking in a Pele tower.

Building

I’m trying to write up accounts on a ton of psychology reviews at the moment, and the trickiest is this one on psi (parapsychology). Tricky partly because it’s capacious, partly because it’s contested, and partly because I can’t shake the premonition (yup) of the hassle I’ll get in the comments for posting about it even partly uncritically.

Art and improv

Went to a Flim Night in Newcastle, which was, synchronistically, based on the first Harry Potter film. A couple of my friends did some great bits and there was a hilarious and well-rendered Youtube consumer review of an invisibility cloak, worn by a creeping Slytherin looking for paternal approval as he got lost and sweaty in the non-breathable and obscuring fabric.

Also caught a play written by someone who has been part of a bunch of my improv classes, Dragon, about a soldier returning from Afghanistan with PTSD. It was intense and surprisingly lyrical in the text, and communicated an experience of a modern war that I had very little feel for.

And yesterday I saw Me Lost Me, my mate Jayne doing her spooky loop-pedal folk thang. I love it. Also cool on the bill was Howie Reeve, solo bass skipping between finger-picking and thrashing out to muted, keening vocals.

Recommendations

Matt Higgins is a wonderful improviser and human being and has a (modest) Kickstarter for funding a filming of his solo show.

I watched some funny things: Deadpool was surprisingly good and I am enjoying getting back into Brooklyn 99. Oh and I rediscovered Scarfolk Council.

Branches outward

This is a Bully’s Language

I don’t think it should be the job of self-declared socialists to reproduce the same deadening mental helplessness that people suffer at the hands of the healthcare industry, and the Republicans, and the shittiness of capitalism in all its murderous forms. But I guess not all socialists agree.

This is pertinent after watching someone I know on Twitter flame massively against the left and basically conclude they are no longer fit for purpose to actually get anything done on this crisis world.

Reading

Still Retrosuburbia. I’ve just got to a point where Holmgren is citing Engwicht, the activist/innovator who comes up with ways to transform car-dominated spaces, like street corners, by re-enchanting them into liveable and participative spaces, like some kind of witch of underloved spaces. Don’t believe me? “Eng” means “cramped” in German. Still don’t believe me? Check out his Wikipedia photo. (Also, when I say Holmgren lazily it sounds like Home gern, or home with pleasure, which seems legit.)

This week as it was to me

Especially the tail end of this week I have been feeling a bit grumpy and low, hard to put my finger on. I’m increasingly a believer in emotional climates, and it’s a week with a couple of high profile suicides. It could also be the post-singing hangover, which a few people have told me is a thing.

On the plus side I had a really nice weekend, hanging out with the new (and very cool) lady friend. Weather was great, and we spent Sunday at a lovely ecofair at a church in Durham. We checked out the transition town network, a time bank exchange system (sadly I live outside the catchment area) and some cool garden furniture from an organisation that employs disadvantaged people to build things using recovered and recycled wood.

The shape note crew did a short singing demonstration and the whole thing was a mix of jolly vicars and eco people. Plus I saw this text from my favourite saint.

Building

This week I’m trying to get on top of my taxes, before the new job starts. So much to do.

Art and improv

Saw an uninspired show and played an uninspired show, one after the other. But one highlight was working with Will to do our mask format that we developed in Austin Texas, which is a kind of advice column where the mask meets with petitioners who bring to him sincere problems they would like solving. It was funny and moving and exactly what I want from this mask work.

Giving and receiving

It was nice to be at the eco fair, helping out at the sing as part of a skeleton crew of regular hands (and boy is it hard to take the lead for a part you’re not used to singing), setting stuff up, etc.

Recommendations

I watched Infinity War and I don’t have opinions, really. It was what I expected and done fairly well. Some of the villains were nicely creepy.

Branches outward

I need to take a look at this, maybe you do too: Grandma’s trauma – a critical appraisal of the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans

Ditto, although Lomborg is a bit of a contrarian who is always undergirded by an uncritically pro-market perspective. So heads up. But the topic is pertinent to me. Do Children Cause Global Warming?

Jay’s talk in Rotterdam is online:

And a talk with David Holmgren on RetroSurburbia (see below):

Reading

RetroSuburbia. And it’s great. Really love the use of Aussie Street, a hypothetical set of neighbouring houses that see changes in occupancy, carbon emissions and above all land use over the decades, to paint what is possible as well as show how permaculture principles are often simply recapitulating what was done as a matter of course decades before.

Thinking through

Did this happen a) this week, b)  a decade ago c) neither, it’s fake news?

This week as it was to me

I’ll keep it short, it’s only been a few days.

Had a great time at the Newcastle day singing on Saturday, and the bonus day on Sunday. Met nice people up from Oxford, down from Scotland, and over from Australia. We ended up on Sunday drinking outside in a pub and singing bawdily mispelt songs to the pleasure and bemusement of normal punters. Clearly I am becoming a shape note nerd. Current state of affairs: sing comedown, hoarse throat.

 

 

I had a really nice date with a nice person on Friday. Yay.

Building

Making some practical changes for how we ticket events and starting to turn our head to other business model stuff.

Art and improv

Besides the singing, we ran our jam night on Sunday, with a small but lovely group of performers up for jumping up into the unknown.

Mutual aid

The sing weekend was a lot about donating time, food and money to make the weekend work and I was happy to be a part of that.

Recommendations

Loving The Expanse atm. Still dipping into Kimmy Schmidt from time to time, which is real good too.

Branches outward

It’s the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Photos.

Patterns of neuronal firing captured in gut, our second brain.

This week as it was to me

(I missed another weekend, gotta get this locked in a little!)

This was a pretty fun but hectic week. I spent a long weekend down in London, mainly to pack up all the belongings that have been squatting my mum’s house since… well since forever for some of it, but certainly a ton of stuff I brought over after selling my flat in 2010. Now it’s in here:

I also hung out with friends and took a fun clown course, and had an outstanding pistachio gluten-free vegan cupcake (I know). No pics, but it did happen.

Building

Turned out this book required a crazy tight turnaround on the edits – you think that this could have been mentioned up-front, but no. So I have been trying to get that done – and an introduction for the book, also unmentioned until this week. So this has all had to be smuggled in amongst all my scheduled and deferred tasks, belongings-moving, etc.

I got some headshots done, which will be handy in all sorts of ways. Here’s one I like:

Also still grappling with identity-check hassles for the new job. With the train journey to the interview, overseas postage, German good conduct check cost and notary fee, it’s the most expensive job I’ve ever gotten.

Art and improv

Took a top-notch class with Deanna Fleysher, performing at the London Clown Festival as Butt Kapinski. I have done a bunch of clown stuff and I think she comes out as one of my favourite teachers: firm and no-nonsense, but keeps things light and rolls it forward. She was all about working from the body, mainly the torso and especially those “personal muscles”. As should be in any good clown workshop, I laughed a lot and at times made others laugh a lot. The purpose of the class is to put clown elements into improv, which is definitely a journey I’m already on and put some cool stuff in my toolbox.

Related: We did another Dreaming show, this time at the London Hoopla Saturday night show, and did a really fun set, although we were missing Alice, and Joe too. And got together in a pickup team at DDG on Monday, one of my favourite laid-back places to play.

Giving

This is just a note to myself that I can’t think of anything generous I have done this week. I’ve been affable but that’s really a cousin of being passive.

Recommendations

Just started watching The Expanse, which I’m late to the party for but what the hey. Really good. And The City and the City too, which is a great adaptation. Maybe I said that already…

Branches outward

I’ve been re-reading stuff recently:

Exiting the Vampire Castle; I read this ages back and didn’t clock it was Mark Fisher, nor did I know that he died. (Related: Understanding Victimhood Culture)

The Black Truths of Jordan Peterson: – one of the better critiques. (My take btw is that he’s too interesting to ignore, wrong on some issues, good on others, certainly doing powerful work in mass therapy. I like him least on politics. The weird non-materialist stuff he says that disqualifies him in most people’s eyes? That’s the stuff I come back for.)

The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. Paywalled but I’ll be covering this in the coming weeks.

Quote

This is pertinent to me this week 😐

The more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependent we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And – I could if you wished give you quite a few more examples of this – the more intensively a task requires our energies, arounsing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body.

The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task ior their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it’s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realises only after having gone astray.

The Glass Bead Game

This week as it was to me

First off, I missed a week. I was going to squeeze something out a couple of days late, but the reason for missing last Sunday was the killer book deadline that I’ve only just passed, so it needed to wait.

So there hasn’t been so much to report until the last few days.  Had a nice roast ham dinner in the workspace we use for improv. Went to the Newcastle Late Shows yesterday and saw some random arty stuff. And had a lovely day out at Tynemouth today and did some more coast exploring.

Building

Shipped the book on Friday. Already knee deep in revisions from the editor, but this is the lion’s share of the work done, and to contract. Phew! Feel like there is more I want to talk about soon regarding the writing process.

Art and improv

Singing at the Beamish Museum yesterday was a ton of fun. Got costumes and everything! If you want to give Sacred Harp a go, the UK resource page is here.

Also had a fun improv rehearsal this week where we introduced Annoyance Theatre-style catchphrases and gestures into the monologue work the guys had been doing in the past weeks.

Giving and receiving

Spent my celebratory night after finishing the book cheering up a friend cut up about relationship stuff. Was actually nice, I was too tired to do much else. And my flatmates had an barbecue yesterday that I swung by, and also mysteriously turned up at the late shows and gave me a lift home!

Recommendations

My mate Jayne I sing with also does cool electronic looping folk. She did her stuff at the Late Shows and it was great. Album crowdfunder here.

If you’re local to the North East and want a lovely harmonic barbershop quartet to charm you, Late Shows also introduced me to the fact that my mate Andy is in one and they are great.

Marvel stuff: Thor Ragnarok was really excellent. Black Panther was… ok? I remember being quite engaged at points but now I’m not sure why.

I’ve finally got the Key and Peele series on DVD and it does deserve the hype.

Branches outward

Scots believe they have met mythical creatures

Pat Kane on creative companions in an AI world, and work and play

Reading

Went back to start Origamy again (review here), as I left it a month and now can’t remember what’s what. It’s a science fiction book about circus-skilled reality weavers who travel through space-time and celebrate and protect life. There is a lot of science, especially heavy amounts of biology; the author is an academic of experimental architecture, which seems to involve a lot of chemistry and synthetic biology, so she knows her stuff and it shows.  It’s an overflowing, abundant book, fecund and alive; Sometimes I feel like it needs a stricter editor to cut down the proclivity for lists (over forty shades of black, 11 different kinds of material processed in this stomach, 9 in this one, etc etc) but I can understand that stylistically it feeds into the abundance vibe, overwhelming with richness and plenty. There is a question, of course, if that ends up grating for the reader; we’ll see.

Thinking through

Who this? Extended excerpts from a profile of an intellectual superstar, with gender and minor details edited to keep you guessing

A few years ago, XXXX was an obscure academic… and then, overnight, he/she was famous.

It’s a measure of how much his/her life has changed that during a whistlestop few days in Britain he/she has had a private leadership session with banking executives in the City, an evening in front of a capacity crowd at Alain de Botton’s School of Life, an all-day workshop … and a whole string of interviews to mark the launch of his/her latest book,

On the one hand he/she’s now reaching the kind of audience that most academics can only dream of. On the other he/she seems, well, a bit exhausted.

Later he/she told a friend how embarrassed he/she was that he/she’d opened up like that and how terrified he/she was that … “up to 500 people” might see it. Or, imagine, a thousand. “My life would be over,” he/she said. But a few more than that did – the video went viral.

XXXX: ‘I want to be brave with my work and I want to be brave with my life.’ People will find a million reasons to tear it down, so you have to be really sure about what you’re doing, because in the end, if you believe in it that’s enough.”

It’s quite a speech – both heartfelt and a bit defiant – and it’s a reaction to a series of questions I’ve asked him/her. Doesn’t it put too much onus on the individual, I ask. Given that many people have problems – such as being poor – which they can’t necessarily fix? And has there been independent research into whether his/her theories actually work? Because as well as the books he/she’s written, he/she’s also spun two companies out from his/her research.

And while it’s understandable that you are uncomfortable with “the cult of personality”, people are buying into your personality, aren’t they? They believe you can help them.

And yet… and I struggle to put this diplomatically, the presentation of his/her work seems pretty gendered.

XXXX: “I think it’s something I wrestle with a lot, because if you go to my talks the majority of the audience is men/women. Let me go on the record and say if you want to put me in an a room with AAAA, BBBB, or CCCC, I’ll take that date any day of the week.

This week as it was to me

Said goodbye to London and headed up to Nottingham for the BPS annual conference. Saw some of my colleagues there and took some photos together. Then up to Newcastle again. Nice to be back.

Over the weekend I’ve had friends up, Alice and John. It was really great to see them, but the experience was marred by screwing up my digestion, badly. For years I’ve avoided milk and gluten-containing foods which does a lot for my digestive health, but every so often I get slammed, in a pattern I’m starting to tie to alcohol and spicy food. So I’ve been a bit of a ghost for the last couple of days, that’s also the reason I’m late with this.

We did manage to make a day trip out to Belsay Hall, though, which was really interesting. The gardens are built into a quarry to produce a microclimate sustaining unusual plants for the region.

 

Building

I’ve officially entered Beast mode for the book, as the scale of what’s left to do has become clear. As I write this section (Thursday) I’ve made 12 steps forward.

2 rounds of nothing to something

5 rounds of “something to first“

3 rounds of “first to second”

2 of “second to final“

I can break this down in fact I’ve done it at this post here.

(Update: since writing this the beast has had a thorn in its paw, so I’m now behind schedule. Eek.)

 

Art and improv

Saturday John and Al gave back-to-back workshops on two sides of improvisation, “Explore and Exploit,” and it was really fun to take a class from my friends and see their philosophies given a bit of time to be spelled out. It was also really great for our students to have new people about.

The only touch of sadness I have is how few of the local performers / improv students with the other school seem to have appetite to take new classes with different teachers. I don’t think I’m unusual in always being hungry to learn new perspectives, and especially when this is the first class from out of towners all year, I would think that would be an exciting prospect…

We also did a Dreaming show as part of the Newcastle night we run, and we had a great time, everyone else did great, and it was a ton of fun.

Giving and receiving

Mainly family stuff in London, and also ferrying around an unexpected family guest from overseas back and forth from tube stations and to the supermarket to buy my mum a gift.

My Newcastle housemate was a lovely co-host for my guests, and we wouldn’t have made it to Belsay if it wasn’t for her volunteering to drive; (I was too zombified to be trusted in front of a wheel).

Branches outward

Hostile architecture: definition, example, podcast.

Blogpost on advertising industry. A few gems, including the importance of sleeping on it – “Have you ever tried to have an idea. Any idea at all, with a gun to your head?” – and  on the entrapment of creative types: “The compulsion to create is unstoppable…Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context.. well that way, my friends lies misery and madness.”

Recommendations

I don’t need to point you towards the Donald Glover video that’s trending everywhere, but it’s good. (rough in places.)

Stan Rogers:

Other than that, I started watching Outlander with Alice as sick day solace. First episode is slow but still involving. It’s got action, history and some ideas but is unashamedly a romance story, and it’s interesting to see how it differs from a more male-centric genre in how it plays with desire, love, and tension.

Reading

As per the last few weeks, nothing much beyond work reading (I’ve nearly finished Slime Mould too).

But I brought a bunch of books back from my mum’s house, including Philosophy in the Flesh, Super Cooperators, and  my copies of EF Schumacher’s work. I have a feeling that I had a reason to re-read one his books for input on something I’ve been thinking about, but can’t remember what it was…

And also some books I inherited from my great aunt, including TH White’s The Once and Future King. So a big ole pile to get through.

Thinking through

I had a quick trip to Nottingham mid-week for the BPS annual conference, and sat in on an interesting late night session on open science and moving psychology forward. One proposal there was to move scientific authorship to a more horizontal approach, allowing people to build a scientific career without having to be first/last author on publications (which typically involves “having the idea”). Instead, people can use their strengths and participate as analysis design/delivery or method development. I wonder whether skilled science (or humanities) communicators could also take part in this process and gain academic credit for writing? Or can you be academically credible for putting someone else’s idea through its mathematical paces, but not for putting it into accessible and more understandable words?

I’m knee-deep in a big writing project with a really tight deadline. Perhaps during peak #nanowrimo I was banking more raw words, but this project is asking for a finished product rather than a first draft. I’m certain that for me this is a new level of text generation and re-tooling, and thought I’d share the process that seems to be working in getting it done.

Continue reading “From concept to submission: getting non-fiction writing done”

This week as it was to me

Mainly been hanging at the family casa as my mum’s foot heals. This is probably the last week I’ll spend here, as she’s going to put it on the market soon. I moved into the house over 30 years ago, so that’ll be the end of an era.

Thursday I had lots of nice friend catchups one after the other, including a nice walk in Postman’s Park with Jay. (And Jay links into me from his roundup; I love how blogging allows this reciprocal, parallel linking and conversations that are easily visible but brush past each other rather than being one chugging chain a la Twitter.

Friday me and Steve went for a dusk walk while it was mizzling, hopped the cemetery gate and having a good explore.

Today I had a fairly rare experience of my parents in the same room; they split up over 25 years ago and my dad has mostly lived in Spain since. It’s incongruous. It wakes up a memory of a life that feels a very long time ago, especially that the encounter isn’t in a wedding venue but the living room where we all used to live.

Building

In the fevers of book-writing. It’s a commissioned project, psychology told through a series of quotes. It’s the biggest popular writing project I’ve tackled, and working at this scale is gruelling but good. Also my writing is getting better. More when it’s done.

The improvisation festival I run in Germany also needed some energies, finalising our workshop descriptions and signing off on a bunch of decisions. It’s really a labour of love, so it’s great that they really are a lovely bunch of people.

Art and improv

Went to see my friends new improv comedy night, which was apocalypse bunker-themed and pulled off really well. It was nice to see London comedy folks I haven’t seen in years – some from the 2010’s era of weekly improv jams near Mount Pleasant, and also people from Edinburgh runs even further back. Nice to have that long history in this weird artform.

Giving

This week I’m trying to make sure I have change for homeless people and give it to those who ask without evaluation. It feels like the right thing to do.

Branches outward

Recommendations versus guidelines

6^th C Constantinople theological rap battles

Rachel Armstrong – Architecture that repairs itself

Recommendations

A couple of guitar bands, moodier I Heart Hiroshima  via Jay

and fun The Lovely Eggs via Ran.

Other than that, I’m mainly listening to the same stuff over and over to work to. At the moment it’s Keith Jarrett.

Reading

Confession: Nothing this week, beyond speed reading for the book. I guess working my way through this humungous Janet Malcolm article, The Impossible Profession, might count as a thing I’m reading?

Thinking through

“Fuck those moon rocks. It’s always the same sort of people who get to go on the space missions, so I’m not prepared to pay attention to the things they brought back.”

Someone said

All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking. 

Terrence McKenna