You wrote four paragraphs yesterday and last night you decided you had nothing to say so you didn’t post. – Amorella
It was just stuff from my head, Amorella, as you well know. Sometimes – you know, I do lead a very regular boring kind of life and my head doesn’t have much to say. I feel like some of those people who talk all the time and little of what is said is really relevant. My writing is the same. I go on and on, nervous energy I suppose – I want to see if I have anything to say (to myself mostly); and I don’t always. Thoughtless running the fingers across the keyboard doesn’t make one ‘writing’. I keep thinking of that movie, forget the name, of a man and his family out in Idaho in the winter in this big house and he is suppose to be writing a novel and all he writes is something about Jack being a dull boy or some such thing. Madness collects itself in his head – I don’t remember what all goes on but the concept fits here if you take the setting and madness out.
You did forty minutes of your modified aerobics and had your 281 calorie breakfast, oh, and you read the Saturday paper. That’s it so far and it is one minute until noon. – Amorella
I procrastinated on mowing the lawn yesterday thinking it would be cooler today, which it is. It rained though, so I have to wait until the grass is a bit drier. I am in a grumpy mood and am not sure why – “Cheer up, things are bound to get worse!” still makes me smile though so not all is at a loss. I need to go do some chores; perhaps then I’ll feel better.
To each their own, boy. Later dude, post. - Amorella
You feel better after having lunch at Chipotle/Panera. While there Gary Popplewell came up to say hello. His mother is in the hospital across the street. He did not know about Brennan and called once when you were in Cleveland. You made a lunch date at Tommy’s on the Monday after Easter.
Gary was a good colleague and friend at Mason. He helped me survive (psychologically) during the eighties, nineties and on to my retirement. It helped that he was a school counselor (rightly suggesting Kim apply for early admittance at Miami at Oxford) and although he said I was the most arrogant man he has ever met, we get along well. I had all four of his kids – all are in public education. He has a great wife who is also a hearing specialist. We are both from education-oriented families of like profession. We have an understanding between us. He read my books but discounted the notes though he was given all the notes (similar to these notes) on the development of the three books. He and the others who have been mentioned in this blog at one time or another have had access to all my notes since 2005 because I sent them to them as the scenes and chapters progressed – an attempt to keep my notes and work honest.
Seeing Gary brings a rush of memories – some of which you would just as soon forget – and sometimes do. – Presently, it is after twenty-two hundred hours. Let’s get down some of your Lehrer book notes and comments. – Amorella
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Comments on Lehrer’s Imagination: Chapter Five: “The Outsider”
“The practical advantages of youth were first identified by Adolphe Quetelet, a nineteenth-century French mathematician. Quetelet’s project was simple: he plotted the number of successful plays produced by playwrights over the course of their careers. That’s when he discovered something unexpected: creativity doesn’t increase with experience. The playwrights weren’t getting better at writing plays. Instead, the curve exhibited a steep rise followed by a long slow decline, a phenomenon of creative output now known as the inverted U curve. According to Quetelet, his curve demonstrated that creativity tends to peak after a few years of work – when we know enough, but not too much – before it starts to fall, in middle age.” p. 123
And,
“The moral is that outsider creativity isn’t a phase of life – it’s a state of mind. . . . We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who do not know what we’re talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.” p. 125
And,
“Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons when the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new. In fact, the only way to remain creative over time – to not be undone by our expertise – is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don’t fully understand. This is the lesson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the nineteenth-century Romantic poet. One of his favorite pastimes was attending public chemistry lectures in London, watching eminent scientists set elements on fire. When Coleridge was asked why he spent so much time watching these pyrotechnic demonstrations, he had a ready reply, “I attend the lectures,” Coleridge said, “so that I can renew my stock of metaphors.” He knew that we see the most when we are on the outside looking in.” p. 135
From: Lehrer’s Imagination, “Chapter Five”
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Having played the ‘outsider’ detached role much of my life so that I might observe what is at hand, I have a sense of this material. Living life fully and independently in Brazil with Carol for two years allowed me to see what I was capable of doing – easily adapting to a culture different from the United States – and enjoying most every minute of it. The language was one of my weakest problems but I found that if I spoke slowly in Portuguese and directly to the person I could be mostly understood. The Brazilians watched my facial expression and body language. I was an open book so I was easily read even without fully knowing the language. I could somewhat understand the native speakers by observing tone, expression and body. Humanity readily understands basic humanity – it is a state of mind we have already developed no matter what culture we are born and raised in.
By picking an esoteric theme for the books I put myself, particularly in The Rebellion, a problem that has caused me to spend much more time digging into heartansoulanmind and existential setting for the Place of the Dead, HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither. I have to work through the concepts and ‘become’ them within. I have to be the characters and I have to see and feel what I imagine they would see and feel being physically dead. These online notes in the blog demonstrate the problems I have had to deal with this, plus not consciously ‘knowing’ what is going to happen in the next scene and next chapter as far as that goes. I enjoy the challenge even though at times I feel it is all imagination without reason – yet so far, as in the other books, once a chapter has been completed it makes sense in context – at least to me. Otherwise, I couldn’t put my name on the book even though Amorella may write it from my perspective, I am the legal writer. I take the credit. I have no choice as long as I have my sanity. Mother always said, “Don’t write anything you cannot willingly sign your name to.” We didn’t always agree, but on that we always did.
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