01 April 2012

Notes - ch5imagination / comments / the community of the Dead

         Late Sunday morning. Breakfast eaten and the paper read earlier. You attempted to switch to ‘Pages’ instead of ‘Word’ but it is too much trouble.

         Mid-afternoon. A filling lunch at Five Guys Burgers and Fries on Tylersville and a stop at Kroger’s on the way home. Then you are dropping Carol off and heading to Kenwood’s Casual Male to return two shirts, 3XB that you thought would fit because you have a 3X that does fit from when you had you stomach banded, alas, the style is right and they don’t, so for now, back to a 4XB.

         A bit depressing. I thought it would work. The 3XB that I have makes me look thinner but hey, too much expectation. I haven’t been 3XB since college days in any case so I’d have to lose another thirty pounds I suppose. That would be a total of a bit more than four bowling balls. Very doubtful. The only way to do this is to go to a 1000 calorie diet rather than 1500. Very unlikely.

         Home, you spent the next two hours or so cleaning out and up the garage. You are not done but will be tomorrow. You did go to Big Lots and bought twelve plastic carriers for a variety of yard and car care items, so far you have used six but have the other half of the garage to clean and/or material to sort and rearrange. Both cars are staying out for the night.

         It is a needed project and we put out a lot of trash for tomorrow’s pick up. We will work through cleaning up the house this week because Sunday, Easter, Carol (I discovered today) also invited Mary Lou down for dinner with Kim and the boys. As far as I know, honey baked ham is on the agenda for Sunday. Tomorrow the tech representative for PDQ Garage Doors in Milford will be out at noon to check on ordering the carriage style and so forth for our new southeast facing door. We have seen three similar styles in our neighborhood and like the new look. Now on to the next chapter in Lehrer’s Imagine.

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Quotes and Comments on Lehrer’s Imagination: Chapter Six: “The Power of Q”

“Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” Anton Ego, in Pixar’s Ratatouille p. 139 [Quotation below the chapter title]

And,

            “The computer scientist Christopher Langton once observed that innovative systems constantly veer toward the ‘edge of chaos,” to those environments that are neither fully predictable nor fully anarchic. We need structure or everything falls apart. But we also need spaces that surprise us. Because it is the exchanges we don’t expect, with the people we just met, that will change the way we think about everything.” pp. 155-156

And,

            “The power of dissent is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer – red is called pink – you start to reassess your initial assumptions. You try to understand the strange reply, which leads you to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so your comfortable associations get left behind. The imagination has been stretched by an encounter that you didn’t expect.” p. 163

From: Lehrer’s Imagination, “Chapter Six”
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         Much of this chapter was on the team operation via casual social gathering places within Pixar when Steve Jobs was running the company. I read much more detail in the Jobs biography. The chapter may not appear important to a novelist but it is. Amorella has set me straight many times by bringing up things I had not taken into account myself in terms of plot, scene, theme and character development. Many examples of ‘surprises’ handed me by Amorella can be found here in my blogged notes. Also, when I check to see what postings my readers are checking out, I read over them myself and am reminded of material I may want to use at the present time – my readers jar my memory and see significance in posting I have long forgotten. It is interesting. Many times I have no idea why one posting will get more ‘hits’ than another – they are pretty much all the same to me except when I am actually working on a book scene or a chapter revision. The ‘Q’ in this chapter relates to the number of people connected to a project or like projects. Surprising to, for me, is checking with Doug Goss, PhD in physics and listening to what he has to say about my concepts on the similarities physics of thought and light. We are and have been interested in hypotheses, and science and astronomy since grade school. We are interested in the ‘unknown’ out there from the possibilities of aliens to dark matter. So, Doug jars me into a plausible reality rather than just imagination. So does reading the BBC science material every day. Doug and I send each other science material every week. He is the expert. I value his thoughts and opinions greatly.

         I know a few of my former students read my blog from time to time also, as well as daughter, Kim. This is important to know and it helps keep me on a deeper keel while sailing along in the day-to-day existential sea and breezes. My friends help me write. I know a few of them will read what I have to say (or rather what Amorella has to say). It is a surprise to realize that writing novels is not a completely lonesome occupation, at least not the way I write. I need my friends whether they realize it or not.

         It is important that you first recognise and then realize this in your own sense of creativity. – Amorella

         It shows me that if consciousness (our humanity, our heartsansoulsanminds) exists in some sort of individual form after dead then a gathering of dead is almost a necessity because the human spirit demands community. Resisting the community may be near futile for some, but the majority need other people, either the dead like themselves or the living.

         Post. Good night, orndorff. - Amorella

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