Living a creative life
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. As a lifelong insomniac, I looked forward to reading Benjamin Reiss' 2017 book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. I wasn't disappointed. Wild Nights is not a book about how to get a better night's sleep. Instead, it's a cultural study of the history of…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure We've all heard the phrase “Dance like nobody's watching.” It shows up in Facebook memes and on motivational posters. It has been credited to a variety of sources, including Mark Twain (it doesn't sound to me like something Twain would have said). The website Quote Investigator has an…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. If you're not familiar with the inspiration for the title of this blog post, please enjoy Charlton Heston's reaction when he learned that people are an essential part of the diet of the future: Clearly, I'm not here to advocate cannibalism. But I am here with a reminder…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I never get to travel as often I'd like, but I have had the opportunity to travel a little this summer. It reminds me how beneficial travel is to creative ventures and to life in general. Examples of creative travelers are well known. Van Gogh did some of…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been reading a history of western classical music recently. In a chapter on Johannes Brahms, I found this passage very interesting. It's from an 1859 letter Brahms wrote to his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, following one of the early performances of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 in…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. Earlier this year, I made a decision that involved what I call "jumping off a cliff." I left my conventional day job for a life of free-lance writing and photography. There was (and still is) a lot of risk involved, but my personal risk isn't the subject of…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been reading Dr. Maxwell Maltz's 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics. While the book occasionally strays into the neighborhood I call "crackpottery," there is a lot of useful information. I'm not a fan of the term "self-help," but it's the term that's commonly accepted, so we'll go with that. If…
