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