dougist.com

A few months ago a writing pal passed along a link to Dennis Cass’ post discussing his version of an idealized MFA program, an alternative MFA. Cass’ point of view was that traditional MFA curriculums were filed with blanks, specifically outside of craft development, as done through workshops, and outside (perhaps) literary criticism, as done through massive reading work.

This struck a cord with me, it sounded about right, so I went off and built one of my own, what I call myMFA, it’s outlined in detail, along with the schedule of how I implemented it in 2009 and 2010, after the jump…

I’ve posted a complete outline of my File System Based Info Manager. It’s the tool I use to manage all my writing, notes, reference material, bibliographies, and records. It’s based on Alex Payne’s architecture ideas, Noguchi Yukio’s organizational systems, and input from my pals over on the Scrivener Forums.

So far it is one of the most popular posts on dougist.com.

Sharon Mesmer is on the short list for the next Brooklyn Poet Laureate to succeed Ken Siegelman.

It really isn’t a contest is it? She has to get the nod.

In a story Gene Kuntzman did for the The Brooklyn Paper he wrote:

<

blockquote>”Mesmer will get the vote of anyone who likes a randy dame who’s not afraid to write poems with titles like “Annoying Diabetic Bitch” and “Holy Mother of Monkey Poo.”

“If anyone is suggesting me [as poet laureate], it must be because I slept around so much,” she said. But she’s being modest: Mesmer, who studied under Allen Ginsberg, teaches at the New School and, this fall, at Brooklyn College.

David Pogue, the Technology Editor at the New York Times, has caused a stir with his last email update. In it he described a short list of his productivity secrets and to the gasps of GTD/David Allen proselytes the world over he declared that he uses his email inbox as his todo list.

I thought I heard the followers of Merlin Mann and his 43 Folders InboxZero program clutch their collective chests.

I joined in by posting…

<

blockquote>I love todo list so much I had dozens – Omnifocus, iGTD, iCal, Things, legal pads, 3×5 cards, all of it. Then I relized the wonder of the one inbox, and I have made my email that box. Like Pogue, anything that comes in is filed, replied to, or tossed a la basic GTD principles. What is left over are todo/project emails.

The problem with using the inbox…

West 24th Street. It’s not even a street, or at least it wasn’t till recently. Around 1970, it was an old alleyway, off 11th Avenue, left over from the better violence of 23rd or 14th street. Even 27th had more action, with at least a bar or two for the Irish toughs to bust each other’s heads. But on 24th, nothing. At best it was the place for a drag away crime. In other words the assault occurred on 23rd and the victim was dragged over to a building on 24th for the slow completion of man’s love against man.

Today, that is oh, so different. Now in gallery after gallery, 24th street can, in a proud moment, claim to be a center of the modern art world, such as it is in the depression of 2009. After a few – how many, too many – Martinis this afternoon, I decided that no, a nap was not appropriate, but a slip out the back door of my apartment to the street that girdles my block was better. Just one block, just one stretch, that even with the Gagosian closed for rehanging (of the fabulous, shamed that you missed it, Piero Manzoni, exhibit) still has more, and better, art than all the halls of the Whitney, shame on them. This was how I would spend my afternoon…

I was all excited. I thought I had found a solution to my vexing Journler problems. Crashes, freezes, all manner of frustrations had pushed me away from the love of my life application. Journler was the app I had been immersed in for the first year of my writing, my first crush, but the application’s solo developer had gone off, and it was clear, the bugs that existed would be problems forever, so I went looking for another.

I wrote “Bye, bye, Journler. DEVONThink is my girl now. She’s not beautiful like you, kind of clumsy actually, but she is smart and will be here for the long haul…”

Now I’m starting to wonder. DEVONThink is an application best described as inattentive to its appearance. It is messy in the way it interacts with others and is more worried about the mad scientist, artificial intelligence core of the program than in adding any real value to how users create or manage data…

All these writing exercises, many under time constraints – “Please do a character development using dialogue and no description for the next 12 minutes” – become like unconstrained mini-therapy, without the benefit of professional interpretation.

“You are not the narrator…” Sure I’m not. I’m supposed to connect with my “conscious, make friends with it” and “take a stand in your work”. If I really took a stand everyone in the room would fall down.

I’m learning that artists stand naked. Perhaps that’s why they are hunched over all the time.

Is this the end of cynicism?

Obama’s soaring victory speech in Chicago last night was an oratorical flourish of positivism, such as has been missing in public discourses in America for years.

But what does this victory mean to the future tone of discourse in America? Is this the end of cynicism, the tone of voice which has become the best way to identify one as an American? Now that the revolution is over how will we speak, casually and formally, without the ability to mock, snark or deride the archetypes built since the 1960’s?

Certainly the old rebellion is over, so what will replace its messenger, which has been the sound of sarcasm in our voice?

It’s human nature; we find the quickest way to apply a map to a simple fact and extrapolate from it grand conclusions. The biologists say it’s evolutionary. It’s hard wired in us, they say, and it’s part of what makes us greater than the apes.

“We are in an ontological pickle” a friend told me recently, and she was right.

To deal with this I suggest a “Rule of Three”, but be careful that you don’t eat the pickle along the way…

For about a week now my Macbook has been at the doctor’s having its failed hard drive replaced. Since I do most of my writing in Journler, I’ve taken this little interuption as an excuse to play way too much Ogame.

Along the way, between launching space fleets and building colonies, I’ve been thinking about whether this simple but wildly popular game is a harbinger of the future of gaming environments or a remnant of the past, and what it tells us about the formation of the Web 2.0 organizations that will increasingly be in our lives.

I wrote

“The inflection point of web 2.0 is not about the progression along a path of increasing functionality, where each subsequent development leads to more and better. Web 2.0 is about a whole new way of interacting, with conection and interpersonal interaction trumping the output of processors and their supporting databases. At its core the technology has gotten powerfull enough that we can be simple again, and in that simplicity find a vastly new level of complexity.”

Oh, and I’ve certainly increased my level of Ogame addiction, because well, what else am I going to do? They don’t cal it O-crack for nothing….

A lot of people have lists of questions they want asked at tonight’s (or any) Presidential debate. Most center on the current economic crisis.

I’d like to add five questions that I’m not sure are in many people’s list…

I lost Saturday, Sunday and Monday to the cutest little game called Tower Defense. It completely mesmerized me for three days. I was told that during that period I hardly moved and there is no question that on Friday when I looked down to start playing it was morning, and when I again looked up, it was night. I haven’t been this engrossed in a game since Stronghold devoured weeks of my life back in 2002.

What is it about this game and why is it so cool…

As reported in Touching History by Lynn Spenser, Major Billy Hutchison of the 121st Fighter Squadron, DC Air National Guard was the only military jet between United 93 and the populated city of Washington DC on September 11, 2001. His jet was diverted from training with limited munitions and he was given orders to keep United 93 from crashing into the city by any means necessary. He was minutes from intercept before the passengers on the hijacked jet succeeded in their second assault on the cabin.

After I read his story, and thought about being in that cockpit, I wrote this poem…

Productivity consultant Matt Cornell starts a conversation about “Blogruptcy”. It’s really all about the metaphor we use of being on “the shiny edge of an ever expanding bubble of posts”. But that can change…