“Teacher” – a short documentary

In the spring of 2017, I was searching for a new creative project to take my mind off of work upheavals. I signed up for a Durham Arts Council short course called “Make a 5-minute Documentary in 7 Weeks.” I’ve done screen capture edits at work with Camtasia Studio, but had never worked with capturing or editing digital video. I thought this would be a good enough challenge to get me making something.

The final product took longer than 7 weeks to create (lessons learned to follow!) and it turned out to be about 8 minutes long, but I was pleased with the result. The documentary is of my banjo teacher, J. Michael Pope of Beautiful Music Studios, and I think it captures the heart of his teaching and its deeply spiritual underpinning. I captured the video, edited it in Final Cut Pro, and uploaded it to YouTube.

The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

Sarah Manguso (via austinkleon)
Source: The New York Times

Some Lesser-Known Truths About Academe

One thing my professors told me early in graduate school: You absolutely must condition yourself to fail. Constantly. For every small success I had in graduate school, I am certain I had at least a dozen failures: rejected articles, brutal conference reviews, unexpected flaws discovered in something I’d just spent days working on, etc.

These iterative failures are, at a very deep level, the essence of creating new knowledge, and are therefore inseparable from the job. If you can’t imagine going to bed at the end of nearly every day with a nagging feeling that you could have done better, academe is not for you.

Some Lesser-Known Truths About Academe

The very beginnings of both technologies, however, could be found at an institution that had been Einstein’s academic home since 1933: the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The institute was the brainchild of its first director, Abraham Flexner. Intended to be a “paradise for scholars” with no students or administrative duties, it allowed its academic stars to fully concentrate on deep thoughts, as far removed as possible from everyday matters and practical applications. It was the embodiment of Flexner’s vision of the “unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge,” which would only show its use over many decades, if at all.

We Need More ‘Useless’ Knowledge – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Source: chronicle.com