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Work Report - This blog originally focused on work, but it's now focusing on the collection of quotes I've accumulated.
Mike Crowl blogs in two places on Orble, and more than two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
I used to work in what I thought was quite a pressured situation, a public office where we handled inquiries about people's electricity accounts. Several phones might be ringing at once, and you'd have irritable people at the counter demanding to know why their account was so high...when they never turned the heater on...!
But all this pales into insignificance when I look at the written examination for GP speciality training at stage three. The GPST stage 3 requires you to imagine a situation where you have to be at a certain place by 3 pm - and you can't miss this appointment. It's now 1 pm and the following situations have to be prioritized, and your justifications for prioritizing them in this order needs to be stated, in a reasonable amount of detail
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I'm reading a book called Techniques of Acting, by Ronald Hayman, at the moment. In discussing various ways in which actors approach emotion and technique, the author quotes the 19th century actress, Fanny Kemble:
The curious part of acting to me, is the sort of double process which the mind carries on at once, the combined operation of one's faculties, so to speak, in diametrically opposite directions; for instance, in the very last scene of Mrs Beverley, while I was half dead with crying in the midst of the real grief, created by an entirely unreal cause, I perceived that my tears were falling like rain all over my silk dress, and spoiling it; and I calculated and measured most accurately the space that my father would require to fall in, and moved myself and my train accordingly in the midst of the anguish I was to feign, and absolutely did endure
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In Patrick McGilligan's excellent book on Alfred Hitchcock and his films there's an interesting passage on the way Hitchcock worked on his scripts. Hume Cronyn, an actor who appeared in some of Hitchcock's movies, was also a writer, and was working on the script for a film when Hitchcock kept interrupting what seemed to be a vital creative moment with an infantile joke.
One day, Cronyn asked the director challengingly: "Why do you do that
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The following quotation is from a book on memorization that I'm reading at the moment - Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. I've read quite a few books on memorization over the years, and have practiced memorizing poems and Scripture quite a bit, so the subject always interests me. Some of Foer's material is very familiar, but he presents it in an interesting way, in a narrative form, with some intriguing characters, including the 'Ed' mentioned below, who's one of the world's champion memorizers.
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The musical I've written, Grimhilda!, opens tomorrow night at the Mayfair Theatre in Dunedin. It's been a long road, and an especially busy one this year, when I've not only been continuing to work on the music (updating material that needed resorting because of production requirements) but running around finding people to do this job or that, and spending a lot of time on advertising, a job I haven't really done much of before (apart when I was in the bookshop). Advertising is quite a skill, and I've learnt quite a bit!
We've made use of every avenue we can think of, and rejected some that didn't seem suitable for our show. This morning I'm off for a brief interview on the radio (part of the package they offer) and, as well, this morning's paper has a feature article on the Arts page on the musical. This is quite an achievement, since it's often difficult to get a feature there, so I'm grateful for contacts I've had within the paper through being one of their book reviewers for many years
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I don't know about you, but the phrase non-profit organisation always seems to me to indicate that you won't get paid. In fact, there are actually plenty of nonprofit jobs (or non profit jobs, depending on how you like to put those two words together) that pay very well.
With titles like President, CEO, Finance Manager, Director, you can guarantee that these won't be jobs that pay peanuts. In fact some people spend their whole working lives in nonprofit careers
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I recently read Hannah's Child, by Stanley Hauerwas, the American theologian. A very quotable book: here are some from early in the book for starters.
1. Charles Taylor has characterized "our age" as one of "exclusive humanism." God is a "hypothesis" most people no longer need - and "most people"
includes those who say they believe in God. Indeed, when most people think it "important" that they believe in God, you have an indication that the God they believe in cannot be the God who raised Jesus from the dead or Israel from Egypt
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My mother owned the book this quote comes from: it had been on her shelves for years before I got round to reading it. Basset is a Catholic (Jesuit) priest, and wrote a number of very readable books on theology for laypeople.
We Agnostics - Bernard Basset SJ - chapter 2
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At various times in my life I've read more books written for children than ones written for adults. I enjoyed Lois Lowry's books about a girl called Anastasia at one point because they were sharply and wittily written, and didn't see the parents as idiots...always a plus.
Here's a brief moment from chapter one of Anastasia at Your Service
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One last quote from Joy Cowley's book, Navigation. This time from pages 141/2.
It's not until we travel overseas that we become aware of New Zealand as a nation of readers. Here, even the smallest town has its library, its bookshop, its school where children are not merely taught to read, they are taught to love reading. Our education system makes full use of children's delight in story, their natural curiosity, sense of wonder, creativity and their expanding interest in language. It caters fro the different ways children learn, and is child-centred rather than teacher-directed. There is early emphasis on reading and its overflow into creative writing and art
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454 Posts dating from December 2006
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