Catalog Partially Organized: Poetry

There’s quite a lot of poetry on this blog, most of it written in the early years of this blog, and an earlier blog I kept on LiveJournal.  And, thanks to a lengthy effort this evening (amazing what coffee too late in the evening will do), there is now a partial catalog available.  You can reach it either through the link just shown, or through this one:

• Link to the Poetic Catalog

Or through the button along the header of this page.  There is still QUITE a bit to catalog — I wrote two sonnets a month dealing with the Moon cycle for three years, and a similar cycle three times a month for the Solar cycle as I observed it in New England.  All of that poetry is in here somewhere, but it has to be dug out and organized.  Even this catalog is not completely organized yet, but at least it’s possible to find everything in one place now.  Maybe it needs better organization still? Something to work on.

Halloween Storm

Once is coincidence;
twice is bad luck,
three times is enemy action.

This of course is the second storm to come in at the start of Halloween weekend and make a mess of things.  I usually have an open house connected to my membership in AODA, but this year I may have to cancel due to the ongoing expectations of bad weather through Wednesday.  If it happens next year, I think we can say — even if we don’t actually believe — that Mother Nature is officially angry at us.

There was a massive spike in visits today to this blog from Spain of all places… I’ve never had so many visitors in a single day from a country that wasn’t the US before. Welcome, Spain! The astonishing thing is how that sudden spike in visitors changed my statistics for this month — It looked like I was going to have an under-average number of visitors this month, and instead, I’ve suddenly had a record-breaking number of visitors this month, and it’s the second such month in a row.  Startling changes afoot.

Due to the storm, classes tomorrow have been canceled, so I’m going to some friends’ Samhain ritual tonight in Northampton, MA, rather than heading directly home as I usually do on a Sunday night.  I’m looking forward to the day off, because I have an amazing new idea about how to advance the goal of teaching my fellow teachers to teach design thinking, and design thinking process, to middle schoolers.  But it will take some time to implement… in text, and graphics. Now all I need is enough power to run the computer to do the graphic design tomorrow….

60,000/18,000

Sometime in the last half-hour, this blog passed 60,000 all-time views.  I usually get between 35 and 100 hits in a day, so sometime in the next 24 hours, I’ll also hit 18,000 views this year — a new record for me, and one which makes it very likely that I’ll break 20,000 views for the whole year. Which means that a third-ish of my readership has shown up in the last nine months.

None of this necessarily means much of anything, but now is as good a time to make a shout-out as any.  Thank you to you, the readers.  If you’ve thought about introducing yourself, or saying hi, or just wanted to say thanks, or even “Andrew, stop writing now,”… now’s your chance:  I’ve turned off the Like and share buttons for this entry, and you’ll have to show appreciation or criticism some other way, by actually writing something.

From the Archive

I promised some occasional looks into the archive of this blog, partly for my own purposes, and partly to bookmark what I’ve been thinking about and writing about in the last almost-decade of this blog.  I decided to do this entry today, though, because it’s likely that in the next 24 hours I’ll reach 60,000 all-time views, and in the next 36 hours I’ll cross the 18,000 views in a single year milestone (might make 20,000 views this year).  On the one hand it’s just numbers, and on the other hand, it’s an indicator that I’ve been in this “writing on the Internet” game for a long time.  A long time.  And so here’s a sample of what I’ve been doing on October 9th through some of the last 10 years.

• Today, of course, the Moon was in the tenth Mansion (seeattached image of the Mane of Leo, and various recurring efforts to recreate this particular sign’s image).
  

  The Mane of Leo

• Back in 2009, I was discovering what a hand-built Labyrinth could teach students about oral tradition.
• In 2008, I was musing about the potential power of the Fourth Screen.
• In 2006, I was writing poetry about the changes I saw in the natural world in October.  It was not only Nones, but also a Full Moon. There was also a debate for the Senate race here in Connecticut that year, and I heard a candidate push for Ned Lamont as senator.
• In 2004, there’s a rare Summative Post that shows I was deep in the poetry scene, worrying about a mock Bush-Kerry debate at my school, and running a roleplaying game.

There’s a bunch of stuff to take away from this.  In 2006, before I ever became a druid, I was much more deeply enmeshed in the natural world than I am now.  In 2004, I was more of a political creature than I am now (although I still care deeply about what goes on in Washington DC, I’m less enamored of the political scene than I was when I could still remember working there).  In 2008, I was entranced by the educational possibilities of technology; four years on from that, I’m using a medieval list of thematic pictures to teach memory and visualization arts to sixth and seventh graders.  In 2009, I was already thinking about the potential of physical structures to encode memory, as opposed to digital structures to reorganize data.  And today, I’m more likely to call myself an artist than I ever was at any time in the last ten years.

There’s a progression here.  There’s a person undergoing transformation here, however slowly, however unusually.

I’m less enamored of politics or technology than I used to be.  I’m more inclined to use drawings than words to persuade; more inclined to use both words and drawings to explain or uncover truth.  I’m more interested in nature than I used to be, but often find I have less time for it than I want.  I have fewer opportunities to be a poet, but I care more about quality words than I used to.

I’m older.  That much is certain.

Kavad 4.5 — two foamboard sheets later

 

Rather than make another video, this time I made some photographs to show Kavad 4.5 in various stages of openness or closed-ness. At first, I was going to take the pictures on my desk, but that proved impractical. The doors didn’t open properly, and I couldn’t get around it on all sides. (The wonderful painting in the background is by my friend Sou MacMillan, an amazing artist and a wonderful poet and writer).

Anyway, back to Kavad 4.5. The original plan was to have the kavad be a double-cube, but this is proving complicated.  It’s going to involve a lot of geometry and weird angles, and I may not be able to put as many different panels into the completed object as I’d like.  As it is, it’s pretty sophisticated.

This prototype is built of two 30×40″ sheets of foam board.  They were cut with an Xacto utility knife, which is designed for this sort of work, and the hinges are all made of those duct-tape squares that you can get at Staples or Michael’s, usually on sale.

Fully opened, the kavad has (apparently) forty different surfaces for painted images or text, which means that it could serve well for a lot of functions.  Each panel could be subdivided into a number of scenes or particular images, in order to increase the amount of information the kavad could carry.  Additionally, in the ‘shrine area’ within the centermost space, there is easily space for two more doors, as long as they are on pivots and not hinges.  This would also make possible the appearance of pillars within.

The top part was a little wobbly without any internal structure, so for playfulness’ sake I assembled a cross-shape to mount within the shrine.  The cross suggested itself by the fact that I had one long bar that was long enough to go from top to bottom, but no cross pieces unless I assembled them in an odd way, which I did… and then discovered I had a cross if I moved them just so.  Not wishing to explicitly make it a Christian icon, even though it’s sort of unavoidable, I added some doors to the interior ceiling of the shrine, and to the sides of the uprights of the cross…. but these served only to maximize the “Christian aspects” of the story told, as I may show in tomorrow’s art efforts.  That’s not a disaster, but it does limit the particular value of this prototype… back to that in a moment.

Any of the photographs in this post will take you to the rest of the photo tour of Kavad 4.5, should you want to see them.  As you’ll see if you click through, it’s mostly a lot of white foam-board held together with duct-tape, and none of it particularly cut with any precision or accuracy. Towards the end of tonight’s efforts, I was actually just measuring ‘by eye’ and with rough pencil sketches, rather than being careful at all.  I’d already decided to ruin two foam-boards, so I might as well go  for it.

One of the challenges I now face is… do I consider this prototype “done”?

Not really. Because as my friend Daniel says, “build the whole prototype, out to its logical conclusion.  And since this is a storytelling device, I think it makes sense to build the whole prototype, including the story.  Even if all the pieces and parts aren’t in place yet, even if the doors and panels don’t stay open, even if the images I draw onto the kavad are crude or unimpressive, it’s still a good way of showing how the device is supposed to work.  And I can then make a video for you all, showing how the kavad could work in theory.  It’s more likely to get you all, my audience, excited about the possibilities, and maybe convince a few of you to build your own versions of this.

As for me, I’ve already got a clear idea of what story I’m going to be telling using this kavad.  The interior shrine contains a Cross, and so — love it or hate it — there’s going to be a rough-and-ready version of some Bible stories I know on this storytellers’ box, in sharpie marker probably, over the next day or two.  I can’t guarantee that it will be pretty, though, because the goal is not to produce great art, but to figure out some of the challenges I face in moving from kavad 4.5 (architecture) to 4.7-9 (architecture plus narrative), to 5.0 (an entirely new kavad that tells a story I’m maybe not as familiar with, but that I’ve decided needs to be the topic of the one that I build in wood…).

Thoughts, comments, friendly jibes, opinions and questions welcome.

 

Dressing for Success

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with my parents, and it was right after I got back from Colorado and the fencing program. They said I looked great, they praised me to the skies, they said all sorts of nice things, and they bought me a very nice dinner at a very nice restaurant.

At the end of the night, though, they got honest. “You look great. Your clothes look terrible.” I was indignant, but they were right. My shirt was all wrinkled and bent out of shape, my pants were stained in places, and the hems were ripped. The were also unflattering to a man of my build and proportions.
Going through my closet to prepare for the first days of school, I discover that what my parents said about my clothes that night applies to much of what I own.

Completed

My latest 20,000 word project for WWGS is finished in first draft. I’d say it’s at about 90% of what it could be, but that my editors and redliners will have to help me get the rest of the way there.

I think I could probably cut another 1,000 words out of it, and add another two sidebars, but I’ll wait until I get some advice about that from the folks at WW.

Revising and Rewriting

Word to the wise:

I’ve just gone through edited the first 2,040 words of my manuscript, and taken out removed 452 unnecessary words. That’s a lot, a little more than 22% of the total. almost a quarter of the total. Since 2,040 is 10% of the whole project, this means I’ve written only about 15,600 necessary words. I am trying to sell a product that’s only 78% as good as it could be.

‘s point in a recent post should be well-studied: nobody edits enough. Wade in with a scalpel and a weed-whacker. There’s crap in our writing. Get it out! Get it out!

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Creativity, Writing & Time Management

I’m at Victoria Station today, trying to write. Yesterday, in terms of writing, was a totally failed day. I didn’t get anywhere that I wanted to get in terms of writing. On the other hand, I had a lengthy conversation with a former student via iChat, a longer conversation with a potential student in person, and a couple of poems done. A good day’s work, even without much writing.

Both conversations I had yesterday revolved around issues of time management, creativity and excellence. I find that I’m really happy to have read Forrest’s book On the Four Powers while I was out in Colorado. Also Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The two together are proving really useful in having these conversations.