📑 It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside trying to get in

3 responses on “📑 It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside trying to get in”

1. This is a fascinating insight into the music and the mind of Tom Waits. There is something mesmerising about the myths that he spins. It is a reminder of our tendency towards narrative.
   Marginalia

   “Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful. Like a clever kid with a new toy, Waits is always willing to play with a new song, to see what else it can become. He’ll play with it forever in and out of the studio, in ways a real grown-up would never imagine. He’ll pick it apart, turn it inside out, drag it backward through the mud, ride a bicycle over it- anything he can imagine to make it sound thicker, rougher, deeper, different. “I like my music,” he says, “with the pulp and skin and seeds.” He’s always fighting for new ways to hear or perform things. (“Play it like your hair’s on fire,”(8) he has instructed musicians in the studio, when he can’t explain his vision any other way. “Play it like a midget’s Bar Mitzvah.”)

   I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, “What happened to your hand?” And you don’t even know. When you’re in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.” That’s a good day of work. A bad day is when the right sound won’t reveal itself. Then Waits will pace in tight circles, rock back and forth, rub his hand over his neck, tug out his hair. He and Kathleen have a code for this troublesome moment. They say to each other, “Doctor, our flamingo is sick.” Because how do you heal a sick flamingo? Why are its feathers falling out? Why are its eyes runny? Why is it so depressed? Who the hell knows? It’s a fucking flamingo- a weird pink foreign bird. And music is just that weird, just that foreign.

   via Austin Kleon

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2. Things have been a little quiet here of late. I have started jotting down a few thoughts, but never quite finished anything. This feels a bit strange having written nearly 400+ pieces since starting this blog in 2013. I have been wondering if this is simply about time and energy, as work and home have been a little hectic lately. Although, this has never stopped me before. I have been wondering if maybe this is a part of the development of the blog, with a move to collecting and curating, rather than longer pieces of reflection. However, a recent post from Austin Kleon had me rethinking my reason for blogging.
   Discussing the work of Tom Waits and Nick Cave, Austin Kleon argues that songs are best understood as coming from the outside, rather than from within. The challenge we have is being open to receive the inspiration when it comes. Thinking about ideas in general, this had me wondering about blogging as an exercise of being open to the outside. For example, Clive Thompson’s book Smarter Than You Think, he talks about the way the same ideas have occurred to different people at the same time:

   The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand.

   These opportunities are there if we are willing to accept them.
   Activities, such as #28daysofwriting, #Blimage, DS106 Daily Create, Ontario Daily Extend, Microcasts and #LookDown can be helpful in providing structured opportunities to let ideas in. However, it is also about being a flaneur. As Ian Guest explains:

   The flâneur is more of a serendipitous explorer, receptive to whatever comes along. They are a combination of curious explorer (having no goal other than to experience city life), critical spectator (balanced analyst, seeing beauty, but aware of social inequities), and creative mind (an interpreter who renders the urban landscape legible).

   Rather than worrying about letting blog posts out, I wonder if my issue lately has been a confusion about what to actually let in. As Kin Lane touches upon,

   [Blogging] is an essential part of making sense of the world as it moves by me so fast, putting it somewhere that I can continue to reference and learn from in the future.

   Moving forward, I think my challenge is not reading, viewing, listening and walking, but being open to ideas on offer. As I write this, I am reminded of Bjork’s song All is Full of Love:

   Maybe not from the sources
   You have poured yours
   Maybe not from the directions
   You are staring at

   Twist your head around
   It’s all around you
   All is full of love
   All around you

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   Twist Your Head Around, It’s All Around You – a Reflection on Letting Blogs In by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

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3. Welcome to another month of Read Write Respond, a newsletter of ideas and information associated with all things in and out of education, mined and curated for me and shared with you.

   June is always an interesting time in the the school year. With end of semester, biannual reports and the cold and flu season. This year did not disappoint.
   Due to a change of circumstances, my wife has stepped up in regards to her responsibilities at work. Along with being more involved within the leadership group, she has been organising replacements teachers each day. Along with study, this has left her with very little time for anything else. Subsequently, this month, even more than usual, I have been taking the ‘second shift‘ balancing meals, pickup, cleaning and general runaround.
   On the work front, I was posed with a question: do you want to do on-boarding of new schools or consultation where I would work collaboratively with schools to solve their problems. Although I was torn with where I see myself long term, I said that onboarding was more of an imperative right now so that is where I needed to be. So I have been progressively moving to the PreFlight team, although in many respects I already was in that team. This is all while guiding a few schools through the reporting season.
   Personally, I have continued to take Friday’s off on leave to stay home with Ms 3, which is a priceless opportunity in my opinion. (She is only 3 for one year.) I have been listening to quite a few records, including Art of Fighting’s Luna Low, Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back, Radiohead’s MINIDISCS and Kirin J Callinan’s Return to Centre. However, the album I keep coming back to has been Mark Ronson’s Late Night Feeling. I finally saw Dr Strange, which helped make a bit more sense of Endgame. I finished reading Mike Monteiro’s Ruined by Design. In regards to workflows, I finally got around to adding my social media feeds to Inoreader. I also wrote a couple of longer pieces. One a response to Austin Kleon arguing that blogging is about letting ideas into your world, not vice versa:

   Twist Your Head Around, It’s All Around You – a Reflection on Letting Blogs In

   The second post about the importance of trusting teachers:

   On Trusting Teachers

   Learning and Teaching
   Banning mobile phones in schools: beneficial or risky? Here’s what the evidence says
   Neil Selwyn suggests banning phones overlooks the immediate measures to deal with cybersafety, ignores the digital distraction associated with all devices and misses the opportunity for a conversation.
   Using debating and Socratic Seminars to improve my students’ critical thinking
   Bianca Hewes documents her use of Socratic Seminars to support students in engaging with the critical frame.
   How to study (for English)
   Deborah Netolicky shares some strategies and suggestions to support the study process.
   School Growth: Small Changes Lead to BIG Impact
   Chris Wejr reflects on his experiences of using learning sprints as a means of making small and meaningful impact.
   How (and why) to roll your own frameworks in consulting engagements
   Tom Critchlow on co-creating a framework to inform decision making.

   Technology
   The “Privacy Policy” Policy – IRL Podcast
   Manoush Zomorodi leads an exploration of what we mean by privacy by taking a dive into privacy policies.
   Decades of history could be ‘erased from Australia’s memory’ as tape machines disappear, archivists warn
   James Elton discusses the demise of tape machines and the memories kept on them.
   #Domains19: Minority Report – One Nation Under CCTV
   Martin Hawksey takes a look at privacy and security associated with our digital futures.
   Why Most Marketing Emails Still Use HTML Tables
   Ernie Smith discusses the problems with email and the need to move forward.
   AirPods Are a Tragedy
   Describing the Apple AirPod headphones as if from the future, Caroline Haskins breaks down the impact of the device on the world at large.

   Reflections
   I live-tweeted the raids on the ABC — and it was a first for the AFP
   John Lyons reports Australian Federal Police’s raid on ABC and what this means for democracy.
   Research: Women Score Higher Than Men in Most Leadership Skills
   Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman discuss research into women in leadership. What was interesting was the influence of self belief.
   After a near-death experience, Andrew Denton has a new intensity
   Konrad Marshall provides a profile for Andrew Denton and his talk show Interview.
   The mindfulness conspiracy
   Ronald Purser argues that paying closer attention on the present is not revolutionary, but rather magical thinking on steroids
   We Need a Data-Rich Picture of What’s Killing the Planet
   Clive Thompson discusses the power of big data to support making clearer decisions around climate change.

   Read Write Respond #042
   So that is June for me, how about you? As always, happy to hear. Also interested if anyone has any thoughts on the changes I made. Rather than including a range lengthy elaborations, I have provided a short summary and linked to my bookmarks.

   Cover Image via JustLego101

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