In this year’s BBC 6 John Peel lecture, Brian Eno’s chosen topic was ‘The Ecology of Culture’, although his fascinating talk could equally have been entitled ‘The Economy of Culture’.
In it he attempted to set himself the task of answering two questions:
1. Is Art a luxury?
2. What are the conditions in which the Arts can flourish? Continue reading
Putting words to images.
I took this picture in Perugia, Italy.
I don’t know who the sculptor is but I can all too easily relate to the idea behind it.
To make progress with any undertaking there needs to be co-operation and communication. When this is absent you can never be sure who’s supposed to be pushing and who should be pulling. The end result is stagnation.
I’ve experienced this many times both in and out of my workplace.
Feelings of being stuck are enemies of creativity and wellbeing. Sometimes all it takes is the realisation that all the time you’ve been pushing hard when you should be pulling ( or vice versa).
And sometimes you just need to let go!
Today I’m feeling stuck with no sense that I’m making progress with anything.
This blocked state led me to explore thinkers who have studied what being creative means and, perhaps even more importantly, what makes us happy.
Higher income and personal wealth don’t create this state of bliss. As Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-eee) explains in his TED talk, it’s all about finding something that helps you get into a state where time seems to stand still and you feel fully immersed in a state of flow. The nearest to reaching this ideal place is being in control and getting stimulated – I’m working on it!!
The BBC Horizon documentary ‘The Creative Brain – How Insight Works’ written and directed by Kate Dart offered food for thought on how to get the mind working to its maximum potential.
One neuroscientist says that even though the creative ‘eureka moment’ may seem to be a flash of inspiration out of the nowhere, the process that leads up to it is actually more likely to be a slow and meandering one. The direct A to B route doesn’t allow enough scope for the kind of divergent thinking that gives the best ideas nor will it help in seeing problems or challenges from a lateral perspective. Continue reading
Even a flashy splatter rainbow image like this won’t increase my views.
Site Stats fluctuate all the time but I doubt that I am alone in noticing how the number of views of my blog posts has plummeted over the past week or so. In fact I know I am not alone because other bloggers have raised the issue on the WordPress forums.
Responses from the WP team suggest possible reasons are:
The first two do not apply to this blog but the third sounds like a probable reason. Google’s old interface meant that you saw where the image was imbedded but this is no longer the case. I used to get a lot of hits simply because people were searching for a picture and chanced upon my blog. My most popular post, for example, is still a short poem by Ivor Cutler that generated a lot of traffic simply because I used a photograph of a brick wall. (Why so many surfers are looking for photos of bricks and mortar is an intriguing mystery in itself!)
It’s a shock it see my stats looking so sad but , upon reflection, think this is quite a postive thing. It means that more people are viewing posts because they want to read what I’ve written rather than stumbling upon me by chance.
It also means I have to attract readers by good writing rather than depending on flashy images. That’s the challenge I have to rise to.
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