Brandon > Recent Status Updates

Chapter 10 feels divided by exasperation with the Bush-Cheney administration. Five fragments (95-102).

The lesson of Ignaz Semmelweis is life is thankless (84-85).

Is “persuasive guessing” one of my favorite satires of rhetoric (77)?

“The highest treason is to say Americans are not loved no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there” (74).

Addictive substances: liquor, tobacco and gasoline (47).

Chp 3: Vonnegut’s iconic lecture about how we can’t tell the good news from the bad news in great stories. We should value truth, and truth is ambiguous, meaning that while it doesn’t have the mass appeal of racial stereotypes or happy horseshit, it has the long shelf life of verisimilitude (43).

In Renée’s “Profound Thought No. 1,” she wonders “ if it wouldn’t be simpler just to teach children from the start that life is absurd” (13).

“Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while, these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was found in securely on a fairy’s wing” (89).

The press conference for Eagles Greatest Hits included a performance of “Tequila Sunrise,” which Felder calls “A brilliantly convincing performance of unity.” So is so much music.

Felder leans into “Long Night at Wrong Beach” and gives deep psychology to the well known recording of Felder and Frey talking smack on stage.

Felder praises Henley’s lyrics for making audiences “see images flicker on their own personal movie screens.”

Bernie Leadon played with Felder in the Maundy Quintet.

Lipham Music

Felder gigged with Stephen Stills and taught Tom Petty at Lippon (?) Music.

Chapter 2 is about growing up poor in Gainesville. There are couple references to music: music outside holy-roller churches and the radio on the polio award.

Felder makes an interesting association with the lyrics “still those voices keep calling from far away,” implying that the voices of distant fans around the world.

The opening line, “We could hear the rumble of the crowd in the dressing room,“ establishes the difference between the onstage perceptions and the backstage reality of the group.

It’s interesting that after the chapter on “Service“ Cameron follows up with Guidelines aimed primarily defining what creative clusters are NOT (241).

“Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little,” says Edna Ferber (225). My corollary to this is, “FOMO obscured my foreground.”

If women carry their creativity like a “pregnancy” (223), how do men carry theirs? Like bombs to drop?

“We find the creator by creating” (217). How we re-create in church often depends more on how we repeat than how we respond. How we respond depends on what we trust. We not supposed to trust people but the process of becoming.

Stature is not synonymous with success. For example, playing campfire with a half dozen of the residents at Sandstone was transformative in a way many Sunday mornings were not.

We must become creative about being creative.

By not reading this book on schedule, I think I might have missed something. I returned to it—specifically the chapter on encouragement—after finishing another book and found that it got me off the couch.

Process & Product: “Claude is reading out these pages. We have patiently extracted from the void every afternoon for the last two months (131).

Does Bauby’s “butterfly hearing” mean he’s getting closer to the inside and farther from the outside of the diving bell?

The speed of wit is not conducive to dictation…one letter at a time (71).

Doing creative work, “we need before, during and after friends” (190).

Ueland advocates for my liberation: “if you have a kind of cultured know-it-all in yourself who takes pleasure in pointing out what is not good, in discriminating, reasoning, and comparing, you are bound under a knave. I wish you could be delivered.” I have sniped.

Sandwich call: call a friend and tell of an artistic step that needs taking; call back to say’ “I did it,” or “mission accomplished.”