Wording, verb. to forget the verb "to write"
Words. Words. Come on words. Mostly I would like you to start to move again; asking you to flow is too much, but you could move about a little bit. Once I poked molten mud with a stick. It was grey on the surface but red hot beneath the crust. It moved like ripples in a pond of custard. Except it was school custard from the 1970s - before colour - so it was grey. The stick, breaking the crust of the Earth and making contact with what was effectively lava, burst into flames. I dropped it.
People still live in California.
Work continues to be busy and entertaining. The rhythms keep changing. I think my team is happy, although they are spinning plates and need regular attention. My boss seems less happy, although this mainly manifests via very long emails with twenty or thirty action points. Face to face he is fine. The plan for today is to resolve yesterday's 20 pointer and set up the necessary meetings and workshops to make him into a happy camper.
I have a date for my PhD interview. I have no idea how to approach it other than by reading some critical theory in an attempt to re programme my brain to 'think academic.' Those of you in academia probably haven't encountered this unless you have taken a long break between studies, but the transition into an academic way of thinking and communicating is not a simple one. It is like moving jobs. The culture shifts. From the commercial sector to the arts sector was hard enough; new buzzwords was the easy bit. In simple terms, I have forgotten how to *think*
If I have an idea today I justify it in terms of audience engagement and emotional investment in product. The only justification I need to provide to support my approach is not so much a warrant but rather an assertion. This is a case of knowing what part of the machine to hit with a hammer because I have been doing it for twenty years. In my professional world I can cite 'industry best practice' as a reason to go ahead and do something. in truth, we don't have a lot of time for academic rigour. Decisions need to be taken now, or sooner.
I don't think that approach will cut it in the academic world - it certainly didn't last time; it took six months, I think, before the neural pathways fired up and my arguments started to read well; arguably it was two years before I remembered how to write an essay; and a thesis isn't an essay.
What is it though? I'm not frightened of the size of the project; 100,000 words is only a hundred ideas explored over the course of a hundred morning commutes. Indeed with the state of the Piccadilly line this week I could probably cover two in a morning. The challenge - keeping me awake at night, along with many over things - is how to inter-link and develop those ideas to make a cogent whole. Given that the research is practice based, that adds a whole new complexity to the project. But I love complexity. I make things more complicated for the fun of it. Incomprehensible rope bondage for the mind.
The starting point, I think, is a taxonomy, rhetorics, or poetics; I might be able to give a one paragraph explanation of what I want to research; but I need to define some terms and frame the problem in more depth than that. I've missed Aristotle.
(Complicated brain suggests a nordic larp based on Symposium; exploring poetics and a participants engagement with meta narrative from within the text. It occurs to me that I need a clear and consistent definition of metadiegesis ... Argh)
And now, after all that semi-bullshit riffing, I need to shift my brain back into product mode. Perhaps coffee will help?
People still live in California.
Work continues to be busy and entertaining. The rhythms keep changing. I think my team is happy, although they are spinning plates and need regular attention. My boss seems less happy, although this mainly manifests via very long emails with twenty or thirty action points. Face to face he is fine. The plan for today is to resolve yesterday's 20 pointer and set up the necessary meetings and workshops to make him into a happy camper.
I have a date for my PhD interview. I have no idea how to approach it other than by reading some critical theory in an attempt to re programme my brain to 'think academic.' Those of you in academia probably haven't encountered this unless you have taken a long break between studies, but the transition into an academic way of thinking and communicating is not a simple one. It is like moving jobs. The culture shifts. From the commercial sector to the arts sector was hard enough; new buzzwords was the easy bit. In simple terms, I have forgotten how to *think*
If I have an idea today I justify it in terms of audience engagement and emotional investment in product. The only justification I need to provide to support my approach is not so much a warrant but rather an assertion. This is a case of knowing what part of the machine to hit with a hammer because I have been doing it for twenty years. In my professional world I can cite 'industry best practice' as a reason to go ahead and do something. in truth, we don't have a lot of time for academic rigour. Decisions need to be taken now, or sooner.
I don't think that approach will cut it in the academic world - it certainly didn't last time; it took six months, I think, before the neural pathways fired up and my arguments started to read well; arguably it was two years before I remembered how to write an essay; and a thesis isn't an essay.
What is it though? I'm not frightened of the size of the project; 100,000 words is only a hundred ideas explored over the course of a hundred morning commutes. Indeed with the state of the Piccadilly line this week I could probably cover two in a morning. The challenge - keeping me awake at night, along with many over things - is how to inter-link and develop those ideas to make a cogent whole. Given that the research is practice based, that adds a whole new complexity to the project. But I love complexity. I make things more complicated for the fun of it. Incomprehensible rope bondage for the mind.
The starting point, I think, is a taxonomy, rhetorics, or poetics; I might be able to give a one paragraph explanation of what I want to research; but I need to define some terms and frame the problem in more depth than that. I've missed Aristotle.
(Complicated brain suggests a nordic larp based on Symposium; exploring poetics and a participants engagement with meta narrative from within the text. It occurs to me that I need a clear and consistent definition of metadiegesis ... Argh)
And now, after all that semi-bullshit riffing, I need to shift my brain back into product mode. Perhaps coffee will help?