Archive for December, 2007
Harlem jazz club: 1988
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Thou Shall Have Balance: The Ten Commandments of Teaching Creative Writing
With so many writers seeking the mfa credential, I wanted to take a look at how teachers and writing programs might balance the needs of so many within the demands of a professional program. Is it wrong to encourage those who clearly will have a difficult time achieveing any success? Is there a place in the $25,000 workshop for “writing for its own sake?” In giving this some thought, I realized that in my workshops, only careful attention to balance will reconcile my goals with those of my students.
Read More..>>Technology for Art’s Sake
While covering a supercomputing conference in San Jose, California, I stumbled upon an exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art that I found infinitely more interesting than supercomputers. Sure enough, two stories came of it that began to change the course of my career, though I’ve never revisited the subjects again. I’m grateful to the editorial staff at IEEE Spectrum for humoring me in my discovery; it certainly wasn’t what they bargained for!
Read More..>>“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”: A Prosody of Jazz
Sometimes you start to write something and it grows out of control, like this essay. Still, I know there is something to it because poetry and music share genetics. The music notation images are kind of blucky on the Web, but if you are researching this topic, leave me a comment and I’ll send you the originals.
Drummers and poets are used like ashtrays YES
–Howard Hart
The Engineer as Catalyst: Billy Klüver on Working with Artists
This article first appeared in the July 1998 issue of “IEEE Spectrum Magazine.” It was a real privilege to interview Billy and to see his passion for work and his delight that people were still interested in what he had done. He died in 2004.
Billy Klüver has a lot in common with the more accomplished electrical engineers of his generation. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, is a veteran of Bell Laboratories, has been an IEEE member since 1943, and holds several patents. Unique to Klüver, however, is the almost surreal story of a quiet scientist, thrust from the serenity of the lab into the burgeoning art scene of New York City in the 1960s.