Practical procrastination and combinatorial creativity

Chain Reaction is Radio 4's long running hostless chat show where last week's interviewee becomes this week's interviewer. Last week's interviewee Graham Linehan said in his sit down interview with this week's interviewee Adam Buxton on Radio 4:

"I try to use practical procrastination... The real work is actually being done by your subconscious. Your conscious mind is sitting there thinking I suck. But your subconscious Is actually getting to work on stuff... Your best ideas come to you when your walking or something. Not when you're thinking about the idea. Your subconscious is this huge glacial thing under water that's just doing a lot of work when you don't realise it. Unfortunately it doesn't let you in on the fact that it's doing that, so you just feel perpetually stupid."

Adam Buxton added:

"You've got to have the skill-set to respond to those ideas when they come."

Show in full here. My Tumblr note on the tyranny of procrastination and perfectionism here. Read the famous New Yorker essay on procrastination, 'Later - What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?'
by James Surowiecki here. Samira Ahmed wrote a piece on procrastination here.

Phil Mickelson on Facing Adversity

Phil Michelson won the British Open 2013 at Muirfield, Scotland thanks to his unbending determination to win, work hard and never give up. This victory in particular contrasts with his coming runner up only a month previous in June 2013, when he sat second in the US Open for the 6th time. On the day after his Sunday 22 July victory, Radio 4 played a clip of the winner Mickelson who reflected on his win. He said:

"You have to be resilient in this game. You have to accept losses. You have to use it as motivation as opposed to letting it defeat you. You have to use it as motivation to work harder and come back strong and these last couple of weeks, these last couple of months I've played some of the best golf of my career."

Can we replicate Silicion Valley in Northern Ireland?

The younger brother of YouTube founder Chad Hurley, Brent Hurley (@BrentHurley) recently attended Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford and also spoke on Radio 4 here. He was asked: "Can the entrepreneurial success of Silicon Valley be replicated here [in the UK?]" Brent responded here:

"For me Silicon Valley is more a state of mind. It's a mentality among entrepreneurs to look upon the world and see problems they want to change. If you see a pain point, then you try to develop a solution, a product to address that."

Listen to Chad Hurley on Radio 4 here. Sebastian Payne wrote in The Spectator here:

"Trying to clone Silicon Valley has been a cornerstone of this coalition’s business policy. Rohan Silva, until recently the PM’s policy guru, spent several years in government and opposition creating the ‘Silicon Roundabout’, an attempt to provide a new leg for the UK’s economy in East London. 

Depending on who you believe, the East London Tech City project has either been aroaring success or a waste of time. Despite all the encouragement from the government, the main challenge is recreating the enticement of Silicon Valley in Shoreditch — something that may be impossible."

I want to ask: Can we replicate the Silicon Valley state of mind and mentality in Northern Ireland?

Previous posts on creativity here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

[Writing and art] is Theft, Ctd The Sins of Literature

In the Radio 4 series The Sins of Literature Robert McCrum casts an eye over the literary codes of our time. In the third episode, Thou Shalt Not Steal Robert McCrum was joined by Malcolm Gladwell, Will Self, Sarah Waters and Howard Jacobson who helped him to consider the history of literary theft.

Here's how Radio 4 summarised the show on the website:

"Plagiarism is perhaps the gravest of literary sins and yet writers steal all the time and sweat away their lives under the anxiety of influence. This program looks at the shifting sands of plagiarism, theft, influence and borrowing. The Romantics may have worshipped the original genius of Shakespeare but he merrily lifted whole sections of Anthony and Cleopatra from Holinshed's chronicles." 

I felt Radio 4 put things beautifully here:

"In the internet age true creativity appears to reside not in what you write yourself but in the ways you can remix, mash up, parody and generally mess around with the work of others." 

Every young writer has models. You don't invent yourself. You become a writer because you've read books. And some of those books make a very deep impression on you, and they in some way launch you into the whole project of becoming a lawyer. But then you really have to get away from those influences; it's paralysing and ultimately very destructive. 

I just read somewhere and it's unclear who said this, it was either John Cage or Wallace Stephens or Phillip Gustand the painter. They said: 

"When you go into your studio, whether you're a writer or a painter, the entire past is with you. Al your influences are there and then as time goes on, one by one they start leaving and then in the end you're there alone."

And then I think John Cage said, ideally then you too disappear as well."

Will Self said he had it, full blowm "kleptomania". He asked, "How would that be possible to avoid? That would be impossible." Adding that, "The thing is, you've got to be pretty sharp to spot it."

As Einstein said: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

Will Self responded to the question of why Ernest Hemingway is so prevalent in people's writing style and said:

"Hemingway has crept into the entire American creative writing programme, disseminating through it like some kind of monstrous virus."

Paul Auster said that "voice is a curious thing. No one really knows where it comes from. Somehow it's inside you." He continued:

"The most important discovery I made was that I was not going to find that voice by thinking about it, sitting in an armchair thinking where is my voice or by walking along the street. You find it in the act of writing. Only by sitting there and writing do you recognise what's authentic, what's not authentic, what feels good, what feels like you. For me, it truly was a discovery. You don't go out and find your voice. It finds you and it happens by you just doing it and doing it."

Here's a few more quotes from the show:

One: "All writers are pickpockets with an eye for a shining phrase or sparkling smile."

Two: Malcolm Gladwell said that "words belong to the world once they're published."

Three: Modernism made writers feel OK for writers to "ransack the museum of the past."

Elsewhere Noel Gallagher put it rather bluntly when confronted about his musical influences:

"There's twelve notes in a scale and 36 chords and that's the end of it. All the configurations have been done before."

Aleks Krotoski on Combinatorial Creativity

On a recent BBC Radio 4 show, 'Last Bus to Serendip' Aleks Krotoski (@aleksk) discussed serendipity (her blog runs some stuff on it here and here as well). Serendipity being that delightful learning moment or moment of discovery, encounter or chance meeting that can change the course of your life. That happy accident we've nearly all had. We're all like lightning conductors to everyone else's lightning. The term was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th Century man of letters who created the word after the Three Princes of Serendip who made great discoveries whether through chance or sagacity.

 

Aleks Krotoski explored serendipity its role and effect in building networked knowledge and fuelling combinatorial creativity. She asked the poet Richard Price, "Do you think about serendipity during the creative process and when writing poetry?" He responded by explaining the two types of serendipity. The first kind of serendipity:

"Very much so. There are two kinds of serendipity for poets. One is serendipity of influence. A good example is, I'm in a second hand book shop in Brighton. I come across the biography of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and I'm very taken by his WW1 poetry. 15 years later, I'm working on my last book 'Small World' which is just about parenthood. There is no connection there. Yet Apollinaire's style - that became really careful for 'Small World'."   

Aleks interjected: "The reason why people talk about libraries as sources of serendipity is that 2 books next to one another could have completely different topics but could bump well against one another. But you're talking about war and parenthood - some people may not see the connection. To be able to see that connection is quite a skill."

"Maybe but it's also to do with the industrial process of reading tonnes and tonnes of things."

Will Self - "Eventually the relationship between words and money will be reconfigured, I can be sure of that."

Robert McCrum recently ran a series on Radio 4, 'Sins of Literature' and in the episode, 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' discussed with Will Self the very pressing, monetisation of words question. Will Self explained his position on the matter:

"I personally feel that the big impact of electronic reproduction and dissemination on print has got a long way to go yet. You talk to people in the industry and they seem to my way of thinking, bizarrely calm. They seem to be like people in the phoney war in 1939/40. They don't seem to have quite realised what very possible will happen. They don't seem to see an equivalence between the music industry and print; whereas I certainly do. And they don't even seem to see an equivalence between news print and book print, but I think there certainly is. That yes we're in the interregnum between the print era and something else and I think the publishing field have yet to really understand that there will necessarily be a period between which the relationship between words and money is going to become very problematic and tenuous." 

Presenter Robert McCrum then said: "That's the key: until we work out how to monetise that relationship, we're going to be in this limbo." Will Self responded bullishly, saying:

"Eventually it [the relationship between words and money] will be reconfigured, I can be sure of that." 

Writing is hard Ctd Neil Gaiman on writing on paper

On a June 23 episode of Open Book on Radio 4 Mariella Frostrup talked with Anglo-American writer Neil Gaiman. One of the first writers to blog and one of the most prolific on Twitter, Neil is well known for his children books and his famous commencement speech, 'Make Good Art.' So good it is that it's been turned into a book.

Anyway, Mariella asked Neil: "You seem like a very linked-up, Twitter friendly 21st Century writer, so I was amazed to read that you still work your first draft by hand. Is this right and why? Neil Gaiman responded:

"I absolutely write first drafts by hand. And in fact, in this linked up age when your computer is not just something you work on but something that your plug into the world through and the world can get to you through.  

It's almost for me an act of defence.  

When I'm sitting there and writing by hand with a fountain pen in a notebook nobody can put message on my screen. Nobody can tell me important things. I I get the urge to go and check how a particularly unfamiliar word is actually spelled, I'm not going to look up an hour an a half later when I've just bought something I didn't even want on eBay wondering how I got there through a particularly incantation of web pages.   

All of which I'm completely capable of doing on my computer. So for me I like the pace or writing in a notebook. And also I noticed in the early 90s that I felt that my writing was starting to bloat a bit. And I realised if I was writing anything directly into a computer I never seemed to delete things. I would just add things. 

The pieces grew and grew. Whereas if I write in a notebook and am transcribing it as a second draft I can find  2 or 3 pages that aren't very good. Then I just leave them out. I feel like I've saved myself a bundle of work. It's a fantastic feeling. And I'm the kind of writer who like to feel that he's making every word count."

"Bring back Polytechnics" says Think-Tank

Lord Baker who was in the the Thatcher government welcomed calls for bringing back the Polytechnics that had been abolished by legislation in the 1990s. Lord Baker speaking to Eddie Mair on BBC Radio 4's PM show said that the move to remove Polytechnics from the UK's educational landscape was all down to "status".

He went on to say that there is a patent and latent need for traditional vocational training and for the skills that well trained technicians and tradespeople bring.

Read more in the Telegraph here and on the BBC here.