Notes from dissertopia

Currently

“The Practical, Non-extravagant way”

Most Recently

“The Practical, Non-extravagant way”

10:16 a.m. July 3 / Brent / Better Writing / No Comments

“I worry about people getting hurt, and regular worries.  Creatively, the work just flows.  When I want to do something, I think of doing it in a practical, non-extravagant way. I split up my time, so I do a lot of different things in a day.  It would be fun to spend a few hundred years on each medium, but it’s not going to happen, so I avoid certain difficult mediums, like oil painting.  I love the way oil paint smells, I stick to acrylic…

I take so many 5 minute naps it might add up to a regular night’s sleep.  I wake up every morning at 7:30 and read the paper and drink chocolate milk, then take my daughter to school.  I run errands during the day, and tend to get work done at nighttime, going steadily till three in the morning on different things.  I put my paintbrush down, and pick up my guitar ten feet away and try out my new flanger pedal for an hour, then I paint for an hour, and then I make something out of chopsticks and flexi-straws, and then I might write a short story.  I don’t find that hard to do, it’s just the way I do it.  I notice inspiration when it comes by. I don’t sit at my desk and try to write:  rather, I work at something else and then I’ll get an idea for a short story and make a note.  That’s how I jump from medium to medium.  If you keep pushing paint when you’re tired of it, you lose sensitivity.  I can only focus on painting for a few hours, so I’ll stop and work on something quite different.  Making art, I try to just gently persist, instead of having freak-outs where I’m like, Oh My God, I’ll never draw again.  You are going to draw again, so you might as well relax.

From an interview with Gary Panter.  From The Believer, which has posted the complete interview.

Archive View
Idea: Towards a musical baseball scoring system

Idea: Towards a musical baseball scoring system

A notation system for keeping track of a baseball game in which each event would be recorded with a note, a series of notes or a combination of notes. The game then , or rather the record of the game, ...
Reconciliation:  Writing the Suburbs

Reconciliation: Writing the Suburbs

"As land use patterns have changed over the last 40 years, the relations between city and country have been thrown into crisis. Land nearly everywhere today is subject to rapid changes brought about by alternating cycles of capital speculation, ...
Readings For Wednesday

Readings For Wednesday

Once the World’s Fair - The Morning News "Jade Doskow was born in 1978 in Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has spent the past year shooting World’s Fair ...
Fathers Day:

Fathers Day:

In a different context dad once wrote: Along with certainty, another modern characteristic of knowledge is objectivity.  In modernity, a person assumes one can know and act without being conditioned by extraneous forces.  Objectivity is an essential component of the modern ...
Discussion
  • MOM: Thank you Brent for this memory of your dad. He continues to inform us through the written word and story...
  • Claudia: Hi Brent – sorry I’ve been so “quiet” lately. Mainly that’s because I’m...
  • Brent: Just a couple of links to add to the discussion: Times Higher Education – The challenge: balance defence...
  • Claudia: Just a brief, brief comment, perhaps to get a discussion going? Here http://www.good.is/post/the...
  • Brent: You may have noticed that it crashed again. I promise, none of it was my fault. Glad you enjoyed Triple...
    Note: The writing on this blog represents thoughts in progress. It would be best to consider the things you read here as experiments, subject to revisision, retraction, and further refinement. What we write is meant to foster discussion. If you believe we are wrong or want to encourage us to pursue a line of thought, please add your voice to the conversation.