Reporter working on "Indiana Breweries"

My friend John Holl, late of The Star-Ledger and The New York Times Co., is working on a book about Indiana beers and is looking for some tips. Contact him at johnholl@gmail.com or www.facebook.com/john.holl if you want to help.

Here's John:


"Indiana Breweries" will join the Stackpole series pioneered by Lew Bryson.

I'm working on it with Nate Schweber of the New York Times (he's also the frontman of a band called the NewHeathens - www.newheathens.com).

It's scheduled to be published in June 2011. We'll spend the next few months reporting and writing from the Hoosier state. Indiana boasts more than 30 brewpubs and breweries and I'm really looking forward to revisiting many of them. This book is a bit of a homecoming for me. As you know I was a staff writer for the Indianapolis Star in 2003-2004 and spent a lot of time driving the state and visiting a lot of fine breweries. It will be also nice to reconnect with some friends and family who live in Indiana.

Indiana beer is often overlooked by people, who focus on beers from Missouri to the West and Michigan to the northeast, but the Hoosier state has some really great places. We're hopeful that this book will encourage people to hit the road and visit not only the breweries but the towns and attractions in the area.

I think there is such a diversity among the Indiana Brewers that even people with very particular tastes will be able to find what they want.

We already have the list of breweries and brewpubs in the state and are ready to hit the ground running. What we're looking for is suggestions for other great bars in Indianapolis, Ft. Wayne, Bloomington, Kokomo, Evansville, etc. That way, we can flesh out the guide a bit and give people some variety.

And, since books don't pay a lot we're looking to get Nate Schweber into some live music bars to he can play for a new audience. He's the frontman for a Roots Rock band called the New Heathens. Their second album will be released in the spring.

Here's what the village voice has to say about the band:

"Local root rockers the New Heathens make the best with keeping their music focused, but simple. They sound familiar at first listen, some Bruce, then a bit of Graham Parker and the Rumour creep in. You're getting jangle in your guitar and smarts in your lyrics, but that's why you love bands like this in the first place, right?"

Anyone with suggestions is welcome to contact me at johnholl@gmail.com or www.facebook.com/john.holl

-30-

Internet mythology

People are increasingly weaving their own views of the world from strands of fact and fancy using email and the Web.

Thomas Friedman’s Nov. 28 column, “America vs. The Narrative,” gives a vivid example, based upon the reaction to the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

Friedman notes Hasan’s support for Muslim suicide bombers, a seminar presentation he made entitled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and his contacts with a Yemeni cleric who supported jihad violence against America.

All that, Friedman writes, makes him believe “that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by ‘The Narrative.’”

“The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand ‘American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy’ to keep Muslims down.”

Friedman notes the persistence of this belief despite U.S. efforts on behalf of Muslims “in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Many Americans assume the jihadists are deluded, but carry their own persistent misconceptions. A favorite uncle has me on his email list for every crackpot chain-letter he gets.

I say “crackpot,” because nearly every claim I’ve checked from these – usually some lurid story about President Obama, Speaker Pelosi or some other liberal enemy of the conservatives, is wrong.

Here’s a typical chain-letter, titled “Pelosi’s jet,” which features a picture of a large military aircraft and this caption:

“This Jet is the USAF C-32, Boeing 757, that MADAME PELOSI uses. And the Democrats want to talk about Sarah's dress??? Conservatives! Are you out there? Madame Pelosi wasn't happy with the small jet USAF C-20B, Gulfstream III, that comes with the Speaker's job...no, Madame Pelosi was aggravated that this little jet had to stop to refuel, so she ordered a Big Fat 200-seat USAF C-32, Boeing 757 jet that could get her back to California without stopping!”

There’s much more, but most of it is false, according to Snopes.com, the authoritative fact-checker of Internet lore. Snopes reports that the House speaker, third in the line of succession to the president, has been assigned military transport since 9/11, and that the jet in question was not routinely used.

Another chain letter is simply titled, “NFL or NBA?” and recites the supposed list of crimes and personal problems of a group of people:

36 have been accused of spousal abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
19 have been accused of writing bad checks
117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
… And so on.

The group that has achieved such low distinction turns out to be members of Congress, the email says – “The same group of Idiots that crank out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.”

Snopes reports that the email dates to 1999 and is problematic because, since none of the people are identified by name, it’s impossible to verify the claims. It’s also odd that the email does not claim any of the lawmakers was actually convicted of anything – but only arrested. Criminal convictions are reported on all the time in the news. Why go to all the trouble to compile such a list, one might wonder, without adding the specifics necessary to make it believable?

Obama is the subject of numerous bogus Internet claims, including the contention that his birth certificate was forged and he should not legally have been allowed to take office. The latest turn in the story occurred in August when a Kenyan birth certificate was produced allegedly showing Obama was born in that country. The document was quickly proven to be a forgery.

What’s this mean? Rumors have always been part of politics, but never has a lie – or any other information – been able to take flight around the world with such speed. The real concern here might lie not in the existence and spread of these rumors, but the way in which some people who believe in them increasingly isolate themselves from fact-checked sources of information.

Newspapers are hardly perfect. But they adhere to standards of fairness and accuracy that require stories to be checked before they’re printed. But my good uncle and many others have given up on the “mainstream media” and instead get much of their information from talk radio, internet chain-letters and other unreliable sources that serve mostly to reaffirm their readers’ and listeners’ beliefs.

Country music's great lyrics

David Allen Coe

Working on a piece about "The Creative Spark of Country Music."

I once wanted to be a songwriter. I even ended up in Nashville as a news editor. I told our country music writer about my desire to one day write songs, and his reply was pretty deflating:

"Yeah, you and about 12 other people who got off the bus today."

He was right. But I still love a good lyrical hook - like the famous "mama" stanza from David Allan Coe's "You Never Even Called Me By My Name."

Coe gained fame as one of country's "outlaw" singers, and among other hits wrote the Johnny Paycheck anthem "Take This Job and Shove It."

Here's that memorable section from "You Never Even..."

Midway through the song, Coe starts talking...

"Well, a friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song

"And he told me it was the perfect country-western song

"I wrote him back a letter and told him it was NOT the perfect country-western song because he hadn't said anything at all about
mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin' drunk.

"Well, he sat down and wrote another verse to the song and he sent it to me

"And after reading it, I realized that my friend had written the perfect country-western song.

"And I felt obliged to include it on this album. The last verse goes like this here:

"Well, I was drunk the day my Ma got outta prison.
And I went to pick her up in the rain.
But, before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train. "


That's a great lyric and a great story.

Here's a more recent picture of Coe in full outlaw style:

The psychology of creativity

This is a video about some thoughts prompted by the reading of "Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind" by Dr. Andrew Storr, a British psychiatrist who took an interest in the psychology of creative imagination.

Storr's essays amount to a kind of long-distance psychoanalysis of famous figures like Isaac Newston, Franz Kafka and Winston Churchill.

He says Churchill’s depression was actually part of what made him so productive.

"To avoid this state of misery is of prime importance; and so the depressive, before his disorder becomes too severe, may recurrently force himself into activity, deny himself rest or relaxation, and accomplish more than most men are capable of, just because he cannot afford to stop."

Churchill's personality fits the description of the personality type known as "extraverted intuitive," in C.G. Jung's "Psychological Types." This is a person who has strong powers of intuition, but is less inclined to think things through carefully.”

This theme of the role of depression and mental illness seems to show up with some regularity in books about creativity.

Storr's main question is this: Why do people devote so much time and energy to creative invention. There may be rewards of fame and money eventually, but "many artists and scientists struggle for years without attaining either, and some win recognition only posthumously," he writes.

Creative work, which he also calls "imaginative activity," is inspired by something beyond material reward. Freud thought that imaginative activity came from dissatisfaction: "A happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one...."

Dr. Johnson called this "the hunger of imagination." From Storr: "It is surely this hunger which accounts for man's supremacy as a species.

"If man, like some insects, was preprogrammed to be more or less perfectly adapted to his environment, he would live ... with neither the need to look for anything better nor the capacity to imagine it.... Because he has only a few inbuilt responses, he is capable of learning, of invention, of assimilating novelty and of creating symbols... We are never content with what is; we must always strive after something better."

It's hard to know what to conclude from Storr's essays - especially for a person who is generally upbeat, hopeful, positive.

I’m afraid I may be just too happy to be very creative by this standard, but maybe these gray, rainy days of winter will spur me into a useful - if gloomy - productivity.

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Palin coverage and the phantom quotes

Sarah Palin and her supporters complain bitterly about her treatment in the news.

And while it's not uncommon for controversial public figures to take issue with their critics, she has a point in one regard.

In her new book, Palin points out that she never uttered the most famous quote attributed to her - the great spoof on SNL in which Tina Fey chirped in wide-eyed excitement: "I can see Russia from my house!"

What Palin actually said was, "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska."

You can decide for yourself whether that's one of those differences without a distinction. Collections of Palinisms, like Daniel Kurtzman's "The 25 Most Devastating Quotes About Sarah Palin," are part of the landscape.

But Palin's shortcomings aside, any public figure deserves fairness. Deliberate misquotes aren't new, however, as Wisconsin blogger Ann Althouse notes in this post.

When she asked her readers to make up a sniglet for deliberate misquotes, two Althouse followers came up with real gems.

Someday, if they're not already, "malapropaganda" and "substiquote" could describe tactics in the Playbook of Dirty Politics.

- John Strauss

Flight instructor

A former airline pilot who's now a flight instructor at Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport talks about his love of flying. This is a test of video storytelling techniques using inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras, in this case a Panasonic Lumix TZ-5 ($238).

Staying creative for life

People who work in creative fields have to find a way to keep growing as innovators, an author and design executive said Thursday during Ball State’s digital media conference.

Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO, the design and development firm responsible for the Apple mouse, the Palm V and other products, said he met famed architect Frank Gehry recently and was impressed to see him still active and creative at age 80.

“It’s not hard to be an innovator at your age,” Kelley, keynote speaker at this week’s iDMAa Conference, told students in an informal afternoon talk.

“But what happens is, as you go out into the work force, it’s almost as if circumstances conspire against you, to drive some of that innovation out of you.

“It’s like, ‘No, we do it this way.’ That kind of wide, broad, creative thinking you do now, over time there are pressures that narrow that down.

“I talk to students about how to be innovators for life.”

Kelley is author of “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” and “The Art of Innovation,” which describes IDEO’s "deep dive" approach to brainstorming and teamwork in creating new products. Fast Company ranked IDEO fifth in its 2008 list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.

The International Digital Media and Art Association’s conference, "@ the Digital Edge: Innovations and Challenges," began Thursday and ends Saturday at Ball State.

Thursday afternoon’s meeting with students leaned heavily on advice for people about to enter the workforce. Kelley recommended the Jim Collins book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t.

Collins, he noted, said people should think of their abilities and personalities in three circles – the things they are good at, the things others will pay them to do, and the thing they are so passionate about, that they know they were “born to do.”

Kelley said he uses “reverse mentors” - younger colleagues to advise him on trends - to keep pace with a rapidly changing world.

“There are trends - there are new emerging things happening in the world that do not start with 50-year-old bald males,” he laughed.

Kelley said he also has a “regular” mentor, “and I encourage you to find one, someone who is five to 10 years older than you to share their life experiences so you can take advantage of that. “

But he said IDEO relies on its interns to help stimulate fresh thinking, a process he calls, “the eggs teaching the chicken.”

Kelley said some of the best advice he had heard about dealing with creative people came from film director Francis Ford Coppola.

“When you’re working with super-creative people, you don’t tell them what to do – you invite them to the party,” Coppola told him.

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Ford luxury brand targets Gen X

You know that Gen X consumers have finally arrived when they get their own Lincoln commercials.

Sharon Silke Carty reports that new ads for the MKS sedan feature a space-age look with popular songs from the 1980s.

"To my fellow children of the '80s, I'm sure you'll recognize the music, but we've done it in a fresh, new way," Thomais Zaremba, communications manager for Lincoln Mercury, tells Carty.

Zaremba knows her audience. What late-20s-something wouldn't want to be decribed this way as the MKS target audience:

"They are fiercely independent, and they don't care what other people think," Zaremba says.

"We feel like we've found a distinct voice for ourselves."

'Dealing' a novel with index cards

Writers looking for a creative jump-start might take note of the new book from author Vladimir Nabokov, best known as the writer of “Lolita.”

Nabokov died 32 years ago, and there’s a question over whether this new work, “The Original of Laura,” should be published because Nabokov, a perfectionist had not completed it and wanted the manuscript destroyed.

Details are in this story by Robert McCrum of The Guardian.

Whatever the merits of the new book, some writers will be intrigued by Nabokov’s creative technique.

As McCrum describes it:

“Writing on index cards, in pencil, had become Nabokov's preferred method of composition.

“He would fill each card with narrative and dialogue, shuffle the completed pack and then, in the words of his editor, "’deal himself a novel.’"

Others have used the technique and recommend it as a way to get organized and start writing.

Stuart Brown in his article, “How to Use Index Cards to Write a Novel Outline,” points out that the cards are small, easy to carry around and update as new ideas arrive.

Index cards are easy to sort, Brown notes. And because rewriting and revision are so important, “They are easy to discard,” he writes.

“If you change your mind about an idea, you can throw it away without having to throw away the entire paper.”

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

The latest on status updates

A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that the use of Twitter and other status-update services has more than doubled since the summer of 2008.

The study, “Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009,” shows that nearly 20 percent of people with Internet access use Twitter or another status update service.

Status updates are short messages broadcast to all users of a service. The messages can also be targeted more narrowly – to “friends” on the Facebook service, for example.

Twitter use has exploded in the past year. The Pew report said that besides its data, continuous surveys and real-time network data by comScore show that Twitter logged more than 17 million unique visitors in May, compared with 2 million per month in December 2008.

A sliver of Twitter users is responsible for most updates, according to research from Harvard Business School cited in the Pew report: “A random sample of 300,000 Twitter accounts found that the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets,” Pew reported.

The Pew research found that 19 percent of Internet users send or receive updates on Twitter or another status-update service. That is up from 11 percent in December.

Other findings about those who use Facebook, Twitter and other status-update services:

- The median age for Twitter users is 31. For Facebook it is 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

- Women (21 percent) are more likely to tweet than men (17 percent).

- Blacks (26 percent) lead whites (19 percent) and Hispanics (18 percent).

- Ages 18-29 use those services (33 percent) most, followed by 30-49 (22 percent).

- College graduates and those with some college (both 21 percent) are heaviest users.

- Twitter use increased from 6 percent of Internet users in August 2008 to 19 percent last month.

Mobile users are increasingly more likely to send updates. About half of Internet users have wireless connections via laptops, cell phones and other devices. Of those with wireless connections, 25 percent do status updates, up from 14 percent in December 2008.

Pew interviews show that mobile users wish to stay in touch with others and post content online.

The Pew report triggered several news stories, including a report by Associated Press national writer Martha Irvine writing from Chicago with the headline: “Grudgingly, young people finally flock to Twitter.”

“They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is,” the AP story begins.

“Even so, more young adults and teens — normally at the cutting edge of technology — are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.”

The AP story includes comment from David Silver, a media studies professor at the University of San Francisco who teaches a class on how to use Twitter and other services.

"Every semester, Twitter is the one technology that students are most resistant to,” he told AP. "But it's also the one they end up using the most."

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

BSU student paper wins national award

The Ball State Daily News has won the prestigious Pacemaker Award for general excellence from among more than 200 entries in a contest sponsored by Associated Collegiate Press.

The Daily News joins student papers from Yale, Michigan State, Minnesota, Kent State and the University of Oregon in the awards, announced Saturday at the 88th Annual National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas, sponsored by ACP and College Media Advisers.

Ball State was the only Indiana winner among the 228 entries from across the country. The contest was judged by the Poynter Institute.

Entries were judged on the basis of coverage, writing and reporting quality, in-depth reporting, layout and design, photography and graphics, and leadership on the opinion page.

More at:
http://www.studentpress.org/acp/winners/npm09.html

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Dreams, Dracula and Creativity

Great ideas sometimes come from a good sleep – a dream, or even the period between wakefulness and sleep.

It's Halloween, and a good time to note the mysterious way that we're sometimes inspired during dreams and semi-sleep. In fact you can credit dreams for two of our best-known Halloween images – Frankenstein and Dracula.

Mary Shelley wrote about how a dream helped inspire her vision for Frankenstein:

“When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”


Bram Stoker’s Dracula arose from a similar well of creative power, according to his biographer, Harry Ludlam, who said the inspiration came from a dream in which Stoker saw:

"’a vampire king rising from the tomb to go about his ghastly business.’" This dream was reportedly brought on "from a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper." It was the dream that led Stoker to research extensively Balkan vampire legends, basing Dracula upon Vlad Tepes the Impaler, a fifteenth-century Transylvanian ruler also known as "Dracula," or, "Son of the Devil."

Creative opportunities also come during hypnagogia, the dreamlike state experienced as a person is falling asleep or waking up.


Andreas Mavromatis wrote “Hypnagogia: the unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep.” She reports that Thomas Edison, when reaching a sticking point in his research, would take a cat-nap to tap his creative power. He would hold steel balls in his hand, and when he fell asleep the balls would fall into a pan. It's said he would often wake up with an idea to continue his project.

More of us could tap the power of dreams and semi-wakefulness if we remembered two points:

First, dreams are perishable. As lucid as an idea may seem at the time, it’s not remembered later on. So a dream diary or a creative journal kept on the nightstand can help preserve those ideas. It’s good to use a felt-tip pen for ease of writing, and the light from a clock-radio nearby so that the result can be read in the morning.

Second, any idea is only the starting point. Hours of writing and polishing lay ahead to turn it into something useful.

Edison knew this. As he famously said, genius is only 1 percent inspiration – and 99 percent perspiration.

What's the source of your inspiration? How do you get ideas? And once you have them, how do you make sure to develop the good ones?

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Is "Paranormal" the new normal?

Scene from the creepy, intense "Paranormal Activity."


News accounts suggest that the spooky new thriller “Paranormal Activity” is on track to become one of the year’s most profitable films because ticket sales are strong and the movie cost only $15,000 (some stories say $10,000) to make.

“A month ago, few people outside of Paramount and select cities knew about "Paranormal Activity," Advertising Age says. But producers changed that “by letting consumers play distribution chief, and taking more than a few cues from the 'Blair Witch Project' playbook.”

It makes sense that the cost of production would directly affect a film’s profitability – the lower the cost, the greater the potential profit. But should the cost affect our perception of the movie’s quality – that is, should we judge a $10,000 film on a different scale than a blockbuster made on a megamillion-dollar budget?

Here according to published news accounts are the top five films with the largest recorded budgets:

- Spider-Man 3 (2007) $255 million (Internet Movie Database)

- King Kong (2005) $207 million (BBC)

- Superman Returns (2006) $204 million (Entertainment Weekly, others)

- Titanic (1997) $200 million (USA Today)

- Spider-Man 2 (2004) $200 million (IMDB.com)


At that cost relative to “Paranormal,” should Spider Man offer 25,000 times the entertainment value?

Director Peter Jackson’s 2005 take on the King Kong saga was “the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping movie epic we've been waiting for all year,” Rolling Stone reported. Roger Ebert called it “magnificent entertainment.”

What would you expect, for something that costs 21,000 times this new flick?

That’s not fair, of course. Still, one gauge of success – how far along the scale toward “Big-C” creativity that produces lasting works of art – ought to be a measure of the inputs.

That’s the implicit agreement that users of most online video make – the lower quality (but getting better) image is sometimes offset by “real,” raw engaging content.

“Paranormal” makes the same bargain with its audience. Because it’s “real” we don’t expect expensive production values. But we still buy into the narrative, jump out of our chairs and feel the chills because the film works exactly as it’s supposed to, delivering the same jolt that other films spend millions achieving as it taps the flight-or-fight neurocircuitry that makes a bump in the night so alarming.
Superheros take a bit more explanation, not to mention CGI.

Like “The Blair Witch Project” before it, “Paranormal” benefits from a rough documentary style. Another example from this genre is the low-budget (of course) Vietnam War drama, “84 Charlie MoPic,” the Army name for a combat photographer.

A better way to compare inputs and quality would be with films using traditional, non-doc storytelling.

Some of the most intriguing films from some of the best-loved directors were low-budget efforts. “American Graffiti” from George Lucas cost less than $1 million in 1973 ($4.8 million in 2008 dollars). Lucas’ less-known 1971 effort “THX 1138” is on many of these lists, including:
“Seven Best Ultra-Low Budget Films Ever Made,” and “Small Budget, Big Box-Office Bling”

Here’s a look at some great low-budget successes:

- “Blair Witch Project” Cost, $35,000; Gross, $296 million
- “Napoleon Dynamite” Cost, $400,000; Gross, $46 million
- “Slumdog Millionaire” Cost, $15 million; Gross, $364 million
(Source: TheNumbers.com box office data; Wikipedia)

A fair guess is that moviegoers are far more immersed in the story on any given film than in the balance sheet. It matters enormously to the producers, so we can expect more doc-style devices used to make cheap films. (Can a YouTube-based storyline be far behind?)

Nothing changes in the number that matters most to moviegoers, however:

The price at the ticket counter remains the same.

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Quick tour of sociology

Melinda Messineo, associate professor of sociology, gave us a short course in her discipline, from social class to structural functionalism and symbolic interactionism.

Augusta Comte helped found the study of sociology, believing that scholars could use the scientific method to study human groups.

Comte’s ideas became what the social sciences now refer to as positivism – described by anthropologist Edmund Leach as “the view that serious scientific inquiry should not search for ultimate causes deriving from some outside source but must confine itself to the study of relations existing between facts which are directly accessible to observation.”

In regard to creativity, we talked about the idea of periphery, one’s relationship to a social network. One idea, Messineo said, is that artists and creative types are frequently found on the periphery of society – not in the “connected core.”

“They are aware that change is occurring because they’re not constrained by the rules,” she said.

Some of the best work in that area has been done by sociologist Michael P. Farrell, who studied the French Impressionists, among others, in his landmark “Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work.”

We discussed the relationship between social class and parenting styles. People of higher socioeconomic status use more affirming statements to their children than reprimands; they read more to them and ask more complex, abstract, critical-thinking questions when talking to children about what they’ve read.

Messineo talked about social capital, the non-financial assets that involve educational, social and intellectual knowledge that are part of the socialization process.

“Your family is your primary source of social capital when you’re young,” she said. “The higher amount of social capital you have, the more opportunities you have and the higher likelihood for creativity in your life.”

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Further your affiant sayeth not

Billions of written text and email messages aside, the Web looks to be bad for the printed word.

Multimedia, video, interactive graphics get all the attention. Books, if they're mentioned at all, are usually discussed in the context of some tech breakthrough - the Kindle electronic reader, for example.

Will words matter by the time we've turned everything to pixels?

A vision of the text-hostile present gets humorous treatment in The New Yorker's Oct. 19 "Shouts & Murmurs," a fictional publishing-house memo to a new author from a young woman who explains: "I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department..."

"To start: Do you blog?" she asks in preparing for their promotional campaign.

"We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld... Make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent."

The barrage of social media esoterica makes the point that publishing now operates on such thin margins that the company's entire promotion department has been outsourced to an intern who's unclear exactly what book she is promoting.

People like the fictional young intern are "digital natives" in these buzzword-happy times.

The National Endowment for the Arts reported in a study two years ago that only 38 percent of adults said they regularly read for pleasure. The endowment said nearly two-thirds of college freshmen in 2005 said they did little or no pleasure reading.

Reading and writing increasingly occur in 140-character Twitter-bites. Argumentation or narration, not exposition, are often the preferred forms of discourse.

Some tweets use compressed narrative forms. Taken together, the messages from a venue form a telling description of the scene.

One of those narratives came from an Indianapolis beer garden recently in a series of Twitter messages sent by one of the group.

The gathering was livened by one member who grew increasingly chatty and loud.

The Twitter account, written by a former courts reporter, mentioned the patron by name. But there were few specifics. Instead, the former reporter used a boilerplate expression sometimes found in probable-cause affidavits signed by police investigators - known as affiants when they are making a sworn statement.

The answer was an inside joke to lawyers, cops and courthouse veterans:

So what all happened during the rowdy gathering?

"Further your affiant sayeth not."

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Born to be Mild

Creativity Journal 9/30/09

Homer, credited with bringing the world Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus and the Proci...


Very cool class discussion today with Dr. Michael O’Hara.

We talked about the definition of creativity, Aristotle's "Poetics," Ayn Rand and the loss of literary diversity, among other things. On that last topic O’Hara mentioned Ishmael Beah, who wrote this year's Freshman Common Reader, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier."

Beah has been praised for his literary skills but has responded that he was only writing what he remembered, in his own language. From this has sprung many colorful expressions in his book, including how “the night folds its blanket over the sun.” Made me think of Homer, describing "when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more..."

On the matter of art and creativity, O’Hara said it was critical for creative work to have an audience.

“No song can be unsung, and still be a song,” he said.

In his view a person who would seek to produce creative works has to acknowledge the judgment of others.

“You don’t get to be the arbitrator (of whether your work is actually creative or not) and that angers us,” he said.

“You can have something that’s of value to you, but if it’s not valuable to others, then it’s not worth much.”

One student argued that perhaps the trained elephants who paint in India could be considered creative.

Not so, said O’Hara, because they’re only behaving in a way they think will earn them a treat. The true test, he said, lies in the ability of a real artist to create a work from his imagination:

“Unlike a person, the trained elephant can’t paint what it can’t see. That’s why the painting elephant isn’t creating art.”

Other interesting facts from this discussion:

- Fewer than half of those who begin their PhD’s complete the degree.

- Bette Nesmith Graham, mother of Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, invented White-Out

- The play “A Doll's House” spurred the women's suffrage movement across Europe.

- Something I might have known once and forgotten: Aristotle divided the persuasive appeals of rhetoric into three categories: Ethos, Pathos, Logos – referring to ethical appeals, emotional appeals and persuasion by the use of reasoning.

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Grasshoppers invade Indy

The vanguard of a bizarre alien invasion lands in a quiet suburban neighborhood...

The Joy of Travel

In class today we talked about possible creative projects. The professor expressed some skepticism about the suitability of video as a medium.

I think I understand the concern. Most amateur video is uninspired.

Whether this rises above the muck is something the viewer can decide.

Watch the video, then read the material below.





This was an exercise in using the most basic production tools -- a Fuji point-and-shoot ($90); voice track on an Olympus DS-40 audio recorder ($99) mixed with the music in Audacity (Freeware); video edited with Adobe Premier Elements ($80). Quotations from Saint Augustine, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, G. K. Chesterton, George Moore, Martin Buber.

Creativity Journal 9/16/09

BSU Museum of Art


I really enjoyed Professor Jill Christman’s appearance in our class, talking about creative nonfiction, the nature of creativity and what she thinks about when she writes.

Authors have to keep a fresh perspective, she said.

“Writers can’t afford to be bored - An overdose of irony can be an enemy to creativity.”

“One thing that life does to us is wear away at our capacity to look at things,” she said. “We just stop looking. We put things in categories instead of actually seeing something.”

She talked about Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who advised writers to “caress the detail, the divine detail.”

(Another good Nabokov quote, by the way: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”)

On the theme of details, Christman continued:

“Creativity is making something new in some way. The new thing is most likely to come from the most minute thing, and then become big… You begin to find meaning in those details. If you start with the meaning, then you can't do it. It's the process of discovery.”

Being a writer means training yourself to work at it regularly, she said.

“If you do it every day, your brain counts on you to come back to that thing. So much of creativity is linked to discipline.”

While she likes the idea of “divine detail,” Christman doesn’t think much of divine inspiration.

“Muses and me -- I don’t know. I haven't met one yet,” she said.

“For me, the inspiration comes when my fanny is in the chair. If I sat around waiting for inspiration I would never make a living.”

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu