Tag: creativity

Expatriates and Creative Bitching

gordsellar3 Comments

I’ve often got this song on a loop in my MP3 these days when I ride the subways: Before you read the following, seriously, listen to this song, check out the lyrics, of which the following passage grabbbed me (hard, by wrist) when I first heard it: I understand the culture’s Of a different kind, But here [the] word celebration Just doesn’t come to mind! This resonates with me in the context of the story the song tells: a band that describes itself, in its early days, as “a bunch of immigrants jamming” who met at “a Russian wedding in …

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Could I Get a Class To Do This?

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I wonder. Saw a link on Boing-Boing for the product of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, a graphic novel titled Shake Girl which is online for free here. Read it in one sitting. True story. Very sad. Good stuff. Make me wonder whether I could get my students to do something that good in a semester. Too bad I don’t have an elementary writing course anymore, it’d be a cool project. Perhaps I’ll pitch it for next semester, though I think it’s too late to get approval for such a thing, and this is my last semester here.

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Oddunout: On the pain and pleasure of creating

gordsellar3 Comments

In Laura’s post Oddunout: On the pain and pleasure of creating, I found something quite interesting. She discussed the offensiveness to her of sneakily using others’ creative works within her own works: So I had this conversation with the Dutch about the picture I was/am working on, and I was saying how I’d already spent like 20 hours on it, and I still didn’t have the map the way I wanted it to be. Being a programmer (or whatever it is he does, exactly), he suggested I could find a map I liked and just steal it for my own …

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What is Art? What is an Artist? Does It Matter?

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I posted about this over on New Sophists’ Almanac, but I cannot resist also posting about it here. There’s a woman named Judith Scott who produces all kinds of “fiber art”, which isn’t really remarkable in itself (unless you happen to find that the artworks speak to you in a wway that they simply don’t speak to me…). Nothing remarkable at all, actually, can be said about her, except… she’s got Down’s Syndrome, severe mental handicaps, some physical handicaps too. And she very likely has no concept of art that would be recognizable to us. And yet she works at …

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