The Year of Creative Reading continues, although not quite as I anticipated. I have been sidetracked by four books that aren’t on my original list of creative books to read for the year. Strike that. As a creative soul, it should not surprise me that I’m getting sidetracked. Because, you know, the library. Because, you know, it’s hard for a creative person to color (or read) within the lines. What books have taken me away…
In continuing my year of creative reading (note the abbreviation in the title), I dipped into Jackie Battenfield’s “The Artist’s Guide.” While I did not read it cover-to-cover, I read several big chunks of it. This is a fabulous reference book for anyone serious about creating their own arts career. It’s the book I wish I’d had in college in the 1980s. Art majors concentrated on their art during my college days; they did not…
For my year of creative reading, which technically started in December 2014, not today (I’m not that fast a reader), I read David Lynch’s “Catching the Big Fish“. It is by THE David Lynch of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet fame. It contains mini-essays by Lynch about his experience with transcendental meditation and how he thinks about film making and the creative process. My surface impression of the book was, “Meh.” Perhaps it would have done more for…
As the New Year barrels in on us, it’s time to set some goals. I don’t do resolutions because a resolution feels so resolved, so I-have-to-get-this-done-no-matter-what, not taking into account that life continually throws curve balls at us, knocking us off our resolution game. Instead, I set goals, which I don’t see as being pinned to the New Year. They are rolling goals and I check them periodically to see how I’m doing or whether…
Amanda Palmer is a musician, but that’s not how I know of her. I first heard of her through Neil Gaiman’s online journal. Neil is a writer of strange and glorious tales of gods come to earth and secret doorways to places and beings outside of this world. (Hard to capture his work in a brief sentence, but that’s my stab at it.) My intro to his work came not through his acclaimed Sandman series,…