This is just a test cover, it made an enjoyable break in planning and writing!
After about eighteen months of planning and working on my material, everything is coming together now and now all I need to do is write it. It will include both texts and images, some of which appear in this blog, and cover some of the practical aspects in learning to be more innovative and the kind of mental blocks which society is so good at placing before us.
Earlier I sorted through this blog as it had some entries not relevant to the subject, while other blog entries had to be imprted from another blog. However, while time consuming, it has been interesting and I know now how to save my blog on my own computer. It would also help if I went through this blog and tidied it up a little (a lot).
Anyway, I have set myself six months to get it written, which should mean I will be ready around the start of May 2010. Not long at all, really.
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
058 - Giraffe
When I was a child I had a hobby horse, rather tired and secondhand, which given the lack of local horse riding in my village in the 1960s was a rather pointless toy, or so it seemed. If a squire had still been living in the big house and regularly mounted, or had I seen the local hunt from close quarters, the story may have been different. Hobby horses are a child's version of a real world wood and sackcloth scary horse, sometimes known as a 'hooden horse' that in earlier times had been used for traditional festivities, and reputedly a fearsome object with a large and clacking mouth. By my time, the only hooden horse I know was a dusty exhibit in Folkestone museum.
Other children from other backgrounds and times have found hobby horses a source of great pleasure, although I wonder how many are bought because of a soft spot for society's dream time of a yesteryear that never really existed, but for me running around with a stick between my legs was akin to you doing the same with a button in your pocket. What is or was the point? A plastic horse and cart was more fun, or a tractor with leaky batteries, or even a story book about a woman who polished a blackbird and painted his beak gold.
Horses arrived in my life at a much later, adult period, when I learnt to ride inside a ring and jump over small fences. Part of the pleasure was doing it together with people who I had never met before and who I would never meet again, and yet for a few months our paths ran side by side. While I could not be described as a confident horseperson, I feel I know the kind of people who are and how they view the world to some extent.
As to giraffes, I have no idea if anyone has ever ridden one, although I would be more surprised to learn that no one had than that someone had, but here I can ride one in my imagination. This is an important concept, although I am sure many people would regard it as childish, but here I can involve both my mind and body in a task I lack either the means or the skill to carry out in reality.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
057 - all-growed-up
Today I managed to get into contact with a friend from university, who I miss a great deal.
I like to try things that are new, but I do not see what is wrong with going back and trying some things from when we were much younger. It was quite fun to sit in the wash basin, although my was basin was far too small as we only intended it for washing hands and cleaning teeth.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Write by design
While standing in the shower the other day, I came to realize why my writing is so awful. I remember that my mum was so often distracted by what she was currently doing that she would forget a task that she had started earlier - and it seemed that hardly a week would go by without her burning some part of the dinner because she had become involved in another task while leaving dinner to simmer. Have you ever noticed that when a pan of peas boils dry, it leaves all the peas standing apart? I used to believe that she was simply forgetful, now I understand that it was not a case of forgetting but that she used her mind so intensely on her current task that it excluded memory calls to other tasks. So, standing there with the water pouring down my body I was able to forget whatever else I was working on and let my subconcious have access to some current resources - and there it was! When I write I focus on what I am writing about, and if I want the text to be readable then I need to do a separate edit job on it.
Here is an example of a sentence I added to someone else's article on uncyclopedia; grammar has to run hard to keep up and often trips up while tracking the undulations of my thoughts when I write. Try reading it aloud to yourself and feel how I have just banged a series of concepts together in a line:
"XXX is the kind of profitable organization that would undoubtedly bring you great pleasure to invest in, and may even turn you a profit if making money on investments is your game."
After editing my own work, I can still feel the concatenation of phrases spraying across the page like a highly focussed fire hose. It's a brutal style, but my way of handling my essentially minimalist nature. Here is another example, this time from one of my own entries on uncyclopedia and after I have edited it down to something that could almost be read by a human:
"The earliest that is known about this ancient village, for want of extensive archaeological research beyond that undertaken by Bob Perkins in the garden of 3 Church Lane during the potato harvest, is that it formed one end of the defensive line for the fair people of Kent against the foreign Romans."
After several years of trying to teach other people how to write in a foriegn language, I began to notice some typical patterns in how they created sentences. One of these I call the 'phrase drift', and it seems clear to me that people often write by concentrating on the phrase they are writing now with a vague idea of where they want to go, and are incredibly strongly influenced by the most recent phrase they have written. It is a bit like those games where you say a word, and then someone else says the first word that they think of based on your word. As the sentence creeps forward, phrase by phrase, it drifts away from the course the author originally plotted to take the words to their destination by the end of the sentence. At some point the phrase-trail peters out and the author suddenly becomes aware of by how far they missed their destination and inserts a final phrase to get back on course. Rewriting the sentence rarely seems to be an option, and a similar process also takes place on a paragraph and text level, often destroying the essential sense of the piece.
Here is an example of a sentence I added to someone else's article on uncyclopedia; grammar has to run hard to keep up and often trips up while tracking the undulations of my thoughts when I write. Try reading it aloud to yourself and feel how I have just banged a series of concepts together in a line:
"XXX is the kind of profitable organization that would undoubtedly bring you great pleasure to invest in, and may even turn you a profit if making money on investments is your game."
After editing my own work, I can still feel the concatenation of phrases spraying across the page like a highly focussed fire hose. It's a brutal style, but my way of handling my essentially minimalist nature. Here is another example, this time from one of my own entries on uncyclopedia and after I have edited it down to something that could almost be read by a human:
"The earliest that is known about this ancient village, for want of extensive archaeological research beyond that undertaken by Bob Perkins in the garden of 3 Church Lane during the potato harvest, is that it formed one end of the defensive line for the fair people of Kent against the foreign Romans."
After several years of trying to teach other people how to write in a foriegn language, I began to notice some typical patterns in how they created sentences. One of these I call the 'phrase drift', and it seems clear to me that people often write by concentrating on the phrase they are writing now with a vague idea of where they want to go, and are incredibly strongly influenced by the most recent phrase they have written. It is a bit like those games where you say a word, and then someone else says the first word that they think of based on your word. As the sentence creeps forward, phrase by phrase, it drifts away from the course the author originally plotted to take the words to their destination by the end of the sentence. At some point the phrase-trail peters out and the author suddenly becomes aware of by how far they missed their destination and inserts a final phrase to get back on course. Rewriting the sentence rarely seems to be an option, and a similar process also takes place on a paragraph and text level, often destroying the essential sense of the piece.
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