Day 364

One day to go, but before we get serious, a response to yesterday’s post on copyright and the flux of the Commons, from Jeffrey R. (for “Raline,” we think) Bishop: listen to this. Some of us have way too much time on our hands. As I said yesterday, I’m thrilled that the planet is mashing up William Blake’s Inn. However, if he starts getting rich off of it, I’m going to sue his ass off for an unauthorized derivative work.

Tonight, Kevin McInturff called to chat about a couple of things, but one thing he asked me in particular: do I think that having blogged about my 365 days of creativity has made me more creative?

Yes, I do, actually. It made me more conscious of wasting time, and even though there were plenty of days tagged “not” (39 to be precise, 11% of the year), usually those were days when real life simply left me no time to do any work. The days I actually goofed off were pretty few.

Though my audience was small, you guys were an audience. I was highly aware that you read what I wrote and followed my ups and downs, and that made me determined at least to write every day, whether I had accomplished anything or not. Kevin suggests that those days were often more interesting than the ones where I gloated about my triumphs.

Will I continue doing this? Let’s see tomorrow.

9 thoughts on “Day 364

  1. Holy freaking crap. I LOVED the mashup. I am inspired to riff on the Great Composer Dale Lyles as well. At first, I listened thinking: “This will be amusing.” It was so much more. I laughed. I cried. Dare I say… it was better than “Cats”.

  2. You still managed coyly to stay mum on the nature of your creativity. “Wasting time,” after all, is more in the tradition of Shakespeare’s sonneteer expressing anxiety over the immanence of death and, consequently, turning to art’s promise of a kind of immortality. Unless death is for you the end-stop on all investigations into the creative process.

    What your experiment has revealed for me, I think, is something about how the cyber-world can assure us of a certain presence which we can designate as “audience” for any expressive or communicative act. Ironic, if you see the internet as a phenomenon of the post-literate era. If you invest all communicative gestures you commit to cyber-space with a concern for some possible “audience” reception, you have founded a kind of creative ethics in which “literate” values still play a part. Yes, perhaps the metaphysics of presence has been deconstructed in the digital era, but we still have this desire to create for an “audience.” And we can be accountable to that “pressure” even as we tap our keys. Punctuation and playful (and, with luck, entertaining) dispersal of dependent clauses as categorical imperatives?

  3. Congratulations on finishing your “Year of Living Creatively”, if I may borrow a title from a rather fanous movie. I don’t exactly know what Mare’s problem with your effort was except you wrote about it on the Internet.

    I think this is something that should be tried by everyone, on a shorter basis perhaps, weekly, monthly or whatever may fit their lifestyle (living creatively that is). It’s a chance to see what we have inside us and can really do. And no, they don’t need to blog about it. To me those are two seperate issues since you were blogging before you took on your other creative challenge.

    I take the challenge in a slightly different direction and see what I can do to help someone or be of service with no expectation of anything in return. I also choose shorter periods of time, but I find that these acts quickly grow into habits. So maybe my periods will grow longer until they become permanent.

    If we were all taking some sort of challenge life could be a lot more interesting.

    Like Kevin I was interested in the blogging question also. I myself use a diary to myself to keep track of my efforts as I find writing things do make them more concrete and help me stay on track more. But putting it out there for everyone to see takes a little more courage and may just be inspiration to some or an irritant to others. Again well done on a tough project seen through to the end.

  4. Ah, Marc, opaque to the end.

    Let’s see. I have one more day to write, and I thought I might hold off on explorations of my creativity till then.

    Death certainly will end my investigations into the creative process, unless you all are planning on having séances. Not that I promise to cooperate.

    Persons who do not invest their cyberspatial scribblings with an audience, and you will have noticed the lack of quotation marks, are fools. You cannot think to yourself on the internet, as my son found out when his cousin forwarded photos from his FaceBook account to their grandfather, who forwarded them to us. Nothing shocking, of course (I’m assuming that Katie didn’t forward any such to Gerry), but if we weren’t shocked, Grayson certainly was.

    Why else would you write on the intertubes? It is called the World Wide Web after all. What you do there is for the entire planet. To think otherwise is disingenuous, like thinking that Edward R. Murrow was simply talking to himself in front of that glass lens.

  5. It won’t make a bit of difference whether folks tease at you, poke at you, stroke you, or ignore you, and in no way do you have to defend a thing you do; in the long run, this creative process that’s yours won’t stop no matter how you go about sorting it out. It is both very important and not important at all.
    Dianne

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