Just a sliver of electronic tidying here, to mention a couple of new projects, or new foci anyhow. Now I'm officially tasked with leading the Signum Academy, I'll be reaching out to people for ideas and suggestions on a number of fronts, but especially for advice about publicity and funding, as those aspects of the endeavor are to me the most mysterious. I suspect a great deal of luck is involved, and having awesome content and teachers, which we do, will help us to seize the opportunity when it comes. But hints about how to prepare in the meantime are appreciated.
The other area of focus is with interview guests for our Night School programming. Alex and I are looking for more people to talk to, so if you know someone who'd like to discuss American poetry, recurrent events, video games, neuroscience, or education, let us know! We're always shooting for the moon, too, with contacts found at the heights of their profession via academia or google searches who turn out to be willing to talk. A number of anime and gaming scholars and luminaries will hopefully be recording with us shortly. With that said, we still haven't been able to get a reply from anyone at MIT's Media Lab or Vox media, but we'll keep trying, honing our craft in the meantime.
A fun game to play, when listening to interviews by the pros, is to try to think what you would ask next in the interview, or to try to guess what they're likely to say next, and see how those things compare. It's a little like how Ben Franklin describes learning to write, in his autobiography:
About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact of me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, thought I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.
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| Birthplace of Franklin. Milk Street, Boston. |
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