Archive for the ‘curiosities’ Category
Keith Sawyer: Surprising Questions Emerge
Where will you find transformative creativity?
–Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: the Creative Power of Collaboration (NY: Basic Books, 2007) 16
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Thai Life Insurance: Get All Good-n-Weepy
Pass the Tissues
Look: I know it’s selling me something. But I kinda want to buy. Not so much the life insurance as “witnessing happiness.”
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Via Adfreak/ Rebecca Cullers
Audiences Read an Actor’s Use of Space
Keith Johnstone: Impro
May Day Parade, South Minneapolis, 2013
When I was commissioned to write my first play I’d hardly been inside a theatre, so I watched rehearsals to get the feel of it. I was struck by the way space flowed around the actors like a fluid. As the actors moved I could feel imaginary iron filings marking out the force fields. This feeling of space was strongest when the stage was uncluttered, and during the coffee breaks, or when they were discussing some difficulty. When they weren’t acting, the bodies of the actors continually readjusted. As one changed position so all the others altered their postures. Something seemed to flow between them. When they were ‘acting’ each actor would pretend to relate to the others, but his movements would stem from himself. They seemed ‘encapsulated’. In my view it’s only when the actor’s movements are related to the space he’s in, and to the other actors, that the audience feel ‘at one’ with the play. The very best actors pump space out and suck it in, or at least that’s what it feels like. When the movements are not spontaneous but ‘intellectual’ the production may be admired, but you don’t see the whole audience responding in empathy with the movements of the actors.
–Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (NY: Theatre Arts Books, 1979) 57
Actors act on something the rest of us respond to without knowing why.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
“Do You Know Bob? You Should Meet Bob.”
Listen when your friend says this.
After your friend hears what you have to say and then responds with,
Hey—have you ever asked Judy about that? Because Judy talks constantly about that very thing.
Listen.
And then go meet Judy. Or Bob.
Because a friend’s recommendation—after seeing a similarity or spark of sameness—can be telling. The connection your friend saw to make the recommendation implies you have something in common with this other person. Some way of thinking that will form a third-rail for communication.
And that is worth following up on.
I think Keith introduced me to Steve—likely through some offhand comment. Steve is a C-suite communication guy who also teaches and we talk about communication strategy, corporate life versus freelance life, life in agencies and the demands of teaching. I’ve had coffee with Steve a couple times and I honestly don’t think I could find more wisdom and excellent advice and weathered perspectives if I paid Seth Godin’s consulting fee for an hour of talk.
We have no clue what might happen with a connection. No idea where a conversation will go.
This remains amazing to me.
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Image credit: Garry Winogrand via MPD
If you bet, bet with your head.
Or just don’t bet.
It’s still a gamble, after all.
But always use your head.
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To My Friends Who Have Abandoned Faith
Kathleen Norris: Acedia and Me
If you’ve been turned off by the excesses of evangelicalism or the big-business, industrial mindset of a megachurch, or if you’ve become weary of a clergy-centric approach to faith, or if you are tired of trite, pat answer to life’s really thorny questions, consider reading Kathleen Norris’ Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (NY: Riverhead books, 2008).
If you’ve turned your back on faith entirely and see no point in going back to the social club that seemed to promise transcendence, especially then, read Acedia and Me. If you’ve become weary of the automatic linkage between Republicanism and Christianity, well Kathleen Norris does not speak to that sorrow. But, patience: within a generation that unfortunate concatenation will be far less automatic.
Kathleen Norris is an engaging writer who addresses the life of one’s spirit wholly without the overweening sentimentality that usually comes with such discussions. Ms. Norris sought answers from an unlikely set of conversation partners: old dead guys who wrote when people could count the centuries on two hands or even one. Many of these old desert monks had abandoned the newly popular, powerful, and politically-connected church. Instead they sought the quiet of the desert to confront their demons.
Acedia, which is perhaps the heart of Ms. Norris’ book, is not easily translated. Some read it as depression. Some read it as sloth or boredom or torpor. Ms. Norris traces the word through the ups and downs of her own life as a writer. Her own marriage is a key player in the story and she seems to hold little back in illustrating her struggle.
I was particularly taken with her definition of sin, which had less to do with breaking a set of rules and more to do with recognizing that people are made in the image of God and there is something hopeful and fetching about aligning one’s direction to recognize that.
In the end, she has a fresh take on one’s faith. You may agree. You may disagree. But you’ll be engaged. And better yet, you may even hold off from tossing everything over.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 