http://chronicle.com/article/Thinking-Bigger-Than-Me-in/148739

Thinking 'Bigger Than Me' in the Liberal Arts

By Steven J. Tepper

"Me experiences" are different from "bigger-than-me experiences." Me experiences are about voice; they help students express themselves. The underlying question they begin with is, "What do I have to say?" BTM experiences are about insight; they start with, "What don’t I know?" Voice comes after reflection. Me experiences are about jumping into a project and making something—an idea, an artifact, a piece of media. BTM focuses on John Dewey’s notion of "undergoing"—making something happen in the world, which requires, first, a shift in our own subjectivity. We must anticipate problems, struggle with ideas, seek some resolution. It’s a process.

"Me Experiences" v. "Bigger than Me Experiences"

In college society, creativity has become defined as self-expression. There's much more to it.

ME	BIGGER THAN ME
Voice: What do I have to say?	Insight: What do I need to know?
Expression	Reflection
Doing	Undergoing
Pleasure (Hedonic)	Purpose (Eudaimonic)
Identity	Identification
Egoistic Imagination	Empathic Imagination
Entertainment	Enlightenment
Everyday	Sublime

http://chronicle.com/article/Thinking-Bigger-Than-Me-in/148739

Haruki Murakami & JM Coetzee on Discipline

The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html?pagewanted=all
by Sam Anderson, Oct 21, 2011, The New York Times.

“Full time,” for Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.”

“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.

I've never read the work of Murakami, but the journalist's description struck me as very similar to the way author JM Coetzee, who I would recommend to any reader, was described in 1999. . .

The New Statesman Profile - J M Coetzee

The ideal chronicler of the new South Africa, he deserves to make literary history as a double Booke

http://www.newstatesman.com/node/135933

Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.

I do not particularly believe a life without laughter is a necessity to the pursuit of great art, but I do want to draw attention to the focus, repetition, and discipline of professionals in the creative industries.

Read the full articles when/if you have the time. The important info has been cited here.

Demetri Martin on Learning

http://www.maximumfun.org/sound-young-america/demetri-martin-author-book-interview-sound-young-america

listen to this interview- it’s only about 20 minutes.

There are quite a few pretty insightful remarks and it includes some stand up jokes- so a little more engaging of a listen than an academic lecture or a lot of other public radio.

I've posted some relevant sections from the transcript below. . .

JESSE THORN: That process of learning a trick has always fascinated me about dudes that are into skateboarding, because skateboarding is this culture that is built around being slightly dropped out. It's like the classic slacker culture, possibly second to weed culture, but interrelated; and yet, when I think back to the people I knew when I was a teenager who were into skateboarding, what they did with their time was practice over and over, work so hard, fail so much, to learn to do something that at the end of it, outside of the context of skateboarder culture, wasn't even that cool looking or anything.

DEMETRI MARTIN: It's true, and for me that's a big similarity to standup. It might be because I'm a joke teller, but there's a diligence to it. All these comedians I look at from the outside might seem like slackers or guys who are kind of barnacles on the real world of work and stuff, but when you’re in there with them, you're seeing guys and girls - - women, I'm not trying to be a sexist comic here...you're seeing people who are working really hard at their craft, at what they do. It could be fart jokes, it could be very personal stories, it could be one liners that are kind of absurd. But by in large, you're going to find people that are like these skaters.

That's what I mean almost with the repertoire, you see this guy trying to land this trick over and over again, and then he gets it, and you think oh cool, this guy can do a double kick flip. For two weeks every day he was sitting there kicking the board, picking it up, trying again. It could be just some random bit about dogs or something, but you see this guy one night, oh, he's prepping this thing about a dog, then oh, he's doing it again, there he goes. You either get it or you don't. But there's a similar diligence which to me is great, because I'm over 13 years in standup now and I'm not bored yet. I still like it.

. . .For me, possibility, progress, growth, those things are very - - they feel very good. It doesn't usually come with negativity. I don't really mind sucking at something as long as I'm getting a little bit better at it along the way. I don't know if I'll ever be a master at anything, but I think that's a mistake for me personally. I don't know how much it's about the journey, but it's more about the process. I like short jokes, I like puzzles, there's an incrementalism, I say, to that stuff. You get into one little problem, and then you get your way out of it, you find a solution, or maybe you don't, but you can move on to the next one. Over time, maybe the goals, the results, are just the by products of approaching things with a certain process, a certain approach.

Rakoff on Creativity

David Rakoff was a critically acclaimed humorist/writer. Here he is speaking about creativity. Rakoff discusses the dominant narrative on creativity as simple expression verse a practiced skill. He uses the example of "Rent" and storytelling podcasts.

This is an excerpt from an interview on the radio show/podcast "The Sound of Young America" which now goes by "Bullseye with Jesse Thorn." You can hear a memorial podcast put together of two separate interviews with Jesse Thorn from 2005 and 2011 at. . .

https://soundcloud.com/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/david-rakoff-a-retrospective