Tag: creativity
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In the arms of the angels: How To Be An Artist and On Connection
Courage and the imagination ‘Every good work of art has courage in it somewhere,’ writes Jerry Saltz in his How To Be An Artist (Hachette, 2022). He also claims that ‘Courage is a desperate gamble that will place you in the arms of the angels.’ (p. 81) Is the concept of courage relevant when we’re…
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It will be like doing a PhD in one year…
It is very hard for me to narrow myself down to focus on only one thing. I have two jobs, I do Argentine tango dancing, I’m a film fanatic and I love theatre. I swim and do tai chi and yoga. And I always want to read as widely as I want. This week…
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Eliminating the Inessential
‘Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.’ Helmut Jahn. That’s out of a book by Alena Hennessy called Cultivating Your Creative Life. I buy these things but never have time to read them. But I can flip through them and get a lot from the gorgeous…
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Measuring our lives
In Seneca’s time, ‘Elite, literate Romans were discovering the great paradox of information: the more of it that’s available, the harder it is to be truly knowledgeable. It was impossible to process it all in a thoughtful way. So there was a tendency to graze, skim the surface, look for shortcuts.’ (William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry,…
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How to be Idle and The Two Percent Solution
It was the old days of telegrams. You paid per word for the speedy delivery of your message, so they often had a particular tone of terse urgency. They had a tendency to contain either very good or very bad news, news that could not wait for the post. Robert Hughes, late with his commissioned…
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Some favourite books I’ve read recently
Non-fiction By Hook or By Crook David Crystal. Harper-Collins, 2007 Anything by David Crystal is wonderful – he writes erudite and funny books about the English language. This one has entertaining snippets such as the following. A best words competition in The Sunday Times in 1980 came up with: melody and velvet (tied in first…