writing

/ˈrʌɪtɪŋ/

noun

1. the activity or skill of writing.
“parents want schools to concentrate on reading, writing, and arithmetic”
2. the activity or occupation of composing text for publication.
“she made a decent living from writing”

notepad-2015-weeks-39-41

| Paul Greer

IMG_1644

As always more for my benefit than yours.

That’s a picture of the recent Supermoon over the front hedge.

We were lucky enough to see Dismaland 3 days before it closed on Wednesday, I felt like I was going because I ought to rather than wanted to.. But, no, it was wonderful, for several reasons. Firstly because the visitors there were not your average gallery goe, there were all different kinds of people engaging with what was there.. Secondly because it was like going to a rock concert rather than an art show. Thirdly the range of work there (most of it not by Banksy) was for the greater part technically excellent as well as engaging. But mostly because it didn’t feel like it came out of that art world, it felt fresh and relevant. (Some good animation on show at the cinema bit too!).  An uplifting experience, not empty or even dismal in anyway.

wintertwigs
Winter Is Coming

News

https://twitter.com/joannaq/status/652295694259200000

 

Bookmarked

An analysis of #ThisIsACoup – with data via Visibrain Focus/A physicist considers the appeal of miracles/Jim Le Fevre Interview/Micachu and The Shapes: The Art of the Happy Accident/The Perfectly Looping Mini-Trips of Hayden Zezula/Weird Facebook is a subculture of meme pages, secret groups, friend networks, and personalities/Essential Crowdfunding Campaigns You Need to Support  from Art Aid Nepal, 2D Cloud and Off Life/Frank Krause: Mining the Internet’s Fears/BlenderVR/Music video for Karma Fields by ravenkwok is presented entirely using animated Voroni tesselations/artists are using Google’s Deepdream in virtual reality/Bereavement and Grief Powerfully Examined by Cj Reay and Black Lodge Press/Sunny 5 by Taiyo Matsumoto: to be unreachable, by kindness or hope/

Social

So I nuked the Facebook page I made. I was a nice experiment, but quickly became apparent that using it for a sole artist would require more money and work than I can spare, just to get people to see it. So I reactivated the Follow option on my standard profile, so if you don’t know me IRL you can follow my public posts there. I’m trying real hard to love Facebook, I understand one has to work it to really hard turn it into the space you want. So I am going to give it a go.

Been trying Flipboard in the hope it would give me the curated link feed we use to get in Google Reader, but it doesn’t seem to be responding to the information I give it. Also been trying Pinterest, but I always go back to Tumblr just because.

Playlist

Chromatics – Tick Of The Clock

Eccentric Man – Groundhogs

Kate Tempest – ‘Stink’

Mo-Dettes – White Mice

Smaller Than My Mother – The Overcoats

 

Leo Abrahams – Chain

Envelopes – Free Jazz

Reading

Post-Capitalism by Paul Mason

Emma by Jane Austen

Miracles Of Life by J G Ballard

Back Up

Everything, all the time.

 

notepad-2015-week-38

| Paul Greer

Ethel The Notebook is getting very full. It might time for retirement soon.
Ethel The Notebook is getting very full. It might time for retirement soon.

It’s been a beautiful weekend, like the summer’s not ready to let go, I’ve been outside, mostly, hacking at the hedges. Pleasant but very tiring.

Within the space of a week UK politics has changed completely which is a breath of fresh air whether you agree with the direction or not. You can tell how much it has changed by the level of hysterical outrage in the old school press. It can be difficult to take your eyes off the news. Fun times.

If your not watching This Is England ’90, do yourself a favour and get with it. When it’s done, it’s done.

Social Media-ed

https://www.facebook.com/burningfp

News


Listened

Emily Hall – Ode To The Pylon

Deerhunter – Snakeskin

Kathryn Joseph – The Bird

Bookmarked

Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot from a 1920s journalist – Paul Mason/A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation by Mari Naomi/Meet the Artist Making GIFs to Ridicule All the Shit Women Deal With: Isabel Chiara/The Tsarnaev trial: Drawing a line/Hunter S Thompson on Now, from the Past/Jeremy Corbyn’s new PMQs has Tory MPs turning to tranquil pursuits like sketching MPs/’Ukraine’s Banksy’ on his time imprisoned by separatist rebels – in pictures/Megan Nicole Dong – “I’ve been doing a series of comics about men being deceived by makeup.”/Judy Pfaff/

Always Tumbling at TheElectronicalRattleBag

I can relate to this:

“Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin’?”

Quote | | Paul Greer

“I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me…. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks… As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory—my own or anyone else’s. As a matter of fact, I’m completely ready to junk any statement I’ve ever made about any subject if events don’t bear me out, or if I discover it isn’t contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences–until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.”

— Marshall McLuhan

 

Notebook Organisation:

Aside | | Paul Greer

reblogging study-well:

There are lots of different ways to oraganise a notebook so here’s a quick guide to some options:

Date pages and entries. Write today’s date on the page and start writing. This is helpful if you want to a time record of your ideas, and notes.

Prepare a table of contents. Leave a few pages blank at the beginning of the notebook and write “Table of Contents” on the first page. Save this space for a place for you to jot down the major sections of your notebook as well as any accompanying page numbers. Some notebooks, such as the  leuchtturm1917notebooks have built in blank table of contents.

Create your own sections. Divide up your notebook into as many different smaller sections as you need. You could use sticky notes or tabs. You could combine this with a table of contents.

Dedicate specific pages of the notebook for different needs. You could keep the left page of a journal for your diagrams and charts and the right side for your notes, and thoughts.

Make an index. Flip to the back of the notebook and set aside about ten blank pages for an index. Mark the first page of this section “Index” and then write three letters of the alphabet to each page. As you take notes in your notebook, you can jot down specific or general subjects in this index to help you find items.

Use a tagging system. Make your entry into your notebook. In the example, they have recorded a Chinese recipe.  Go to the back of the notebook and add a tag or title, e.g. “Chinese” on the left edge of the page. Go back to the first page where the entry was, and on the same line number as you wrote “Chinese” make a black mark on the edge. You make this mark so that even when the notebook is closed, the mark is visible. After repeating this for various recipes, you now have various tags visible on the notebooks edge. If you ever wanted to find a Chinese recipe, you simply look at the index, locate the label, and look along the visible edge which has been tagged as Chinese. Then just flick to each marked page. You’re not limited to one tag per page. You could tag a page 2 or 3 times. So if you jot down a chicken stir fry you could tag it as “Chicken” and “Chinese”. This is described with pictures here.

Sources; 1, 2

Frightened Control Freaks

Quote | | Paul Greer

    “Whenever I’ve had to write prose I always find writing the description is really frustrating, because I think I could just draw this. And also there’s always so much more content to a drawing than to a prose description. I feel like there’s always so much more to be done with that. Plus when you’re writing prose you’re competing against Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and it’s very difficult to do anything that would be ultimately satisfying in terms of really differentiating yourself. At best I could write a halfway decent novel. That’s all I could ever hope for and that would be quite an accomplishment.”

 

    “It sometimes seems like that’s the overriding trend in comics right now, beautiful drawings and empty stories.
I can’t tell if that’s just the result of a generation of kids who are raised with this different form of receiving media. Is it that or is it just that they’re coming out of the art world more than they used to? I don’t know, but there is something very strange about that. It doesn’t seem to be attracting people who just want to create stories and aren’t that visually oriented. You would sort of think that would be a part of the comics world that was opening up. At least I haven’t really seen that. Or they could just be doing stories I’m not very interested in.”

– Daniel Clowes

Notes, writing, diagrams, and index symbols by Walter Benjamin

| Paul Greer


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes


Walter Benjamin notes

(source)

reblogging austinkleon:

Alan Wall’s reflections on Benjamin:

“Of all writers Benjamin was the most aware of the technologies that made writing possible. Although there had been ‘reservoir pens’ of one sort or another for centuries, the nineteenth century delivered the first true fountain pens (and a little later ball-point pens). These eliminated the need for the nib to be kept in close proximity to an inkpot, thus making the activity of writing more itinerant. And Benjamin was certainly an itinerant writer, writing in apartments, libraries, cafes and bars. He carried his pens and his notebooks around, as he often did copies of some of the images that most engaged him. He was a mobile intelligence unit moving through the streets of a city. ”

On his notation system for The Arcades Project:

“[Benjamin] attempted “to integrate the principle of the montage as an epistemological technique.” Color charts, schemata, and diagrams act as guiding principles to navigate the thicket of excerpts and quotations. Benjamin’s personal color-coding shows an attempt to make order within the vast constellation of his own notes—a tension between an impulse toward structure and the potential of the open field of his interests.”

Books are Sharks

Quote | | Paul Greer

“We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said, No it won’t be. Books are sharks.

And I must have looked baffled at that because he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. He said, Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very, very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs. And the reason sharks are still in the oceans is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark is.

He said, Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in them in microseconds. They’re really good at being books, he said, and books, no matter what else happens, will always survive. And of course he’s right.”

– Neil Gaiman, giving the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2015