Share your Trauma!

The writer Susan Shapiro has a nice piece about "grabbing your reader by the throat."   Called "Make Me Worry You're Not OK," it's about sharing your humiliation early and often, and always deeply.

Over 20 years of teaching, I have made “the humiliation essay” my signature assignment. It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.
You can’t remain removed and dignified and ace it. I do promise my students, though, that through the art of writing, they can transform their worst experience into the most beautiful. I found that those who cried while reading their piece aloud often later saw it in print. I believe that’s because they were coming from the right place — not the hip, but the heart.

 She adds a bit later:

The author Phillip Lopate complains that the problem with confessional writing is that people don’t confess enough. And I agree. The biggest mistake new writers make is going to the computer wearing a three-piece suit. They craft love letters about their wonderful parents, spouses, children and they share upbeat anecdotal slices of life. 

This assignment will be coming soon to your Newfield course.

K'naan on Commerce Vs. Creativity

K'naan has a nice piece in the New York Times on Sunday about an issue we've talked about all quarter- how to keep commercial success from wrecking the art underlying it. Before he started to record his third album, he says, the label called him to a brunch to talk about what he needed to do to stay on top:

And for the first time, I felt the affliction of success. When I walked away from the table, there were bruises on the unheard lyrics of my yet-to-be-born songs. A question had raised its hand in the quiet of my soul: What do you do after success? What must you do to keep it?

If this was censorship, I thought, it was a new kind — one I had to do to myself. The label wasn’t telling me what to do. No, it was just giving me choices and information, about my audience — 15-year-old American girls, mostly, who knew little of Somalia. How much better to sing them songs about Americans.

It goes on from there, with a pretty tough, good ending.

So Where's This on Our Creativity Scale?

This:

And this

and a bunch of Gangnam's, including flash mob versions

Plus Psy on the Process:

And a political version:

Overview of the Creative Class

Here is a link to the best single summary of Richard Florida's work on the creative class, its relation to college, and its importance to economic and social development.

On measuring the inputs of skill and creativity to the economy, Florida writes:

The debate is over how to measure human capital. Most economists operationalize this as education level. The creative class measure is an alternative measure of skill that operationalizes skill by occupation, using the occupational codes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I discuss my reasoning for this in numerous places including The Rise of the Creative Class and Flight of the Creative Class, in my response to Ed Glaeser’s review of Rise, and my essay “Revenge of the Squelchers” in Next American City.  The basic reasoning is that occupation captures not what people study but what they actually do . . . [emphasis added]

In the extract of his letter to a critic (toward the bottom of the page), Florida identifies three kinds of "human capital" skills.

The first is one we are all familiar with—basic physical skill of the sort associated with traditional work. Its attributes include good hand-to-eye coordination, strength, and dexterity.  

The second two types of skills are those associated with Creative Class work. This second basic skill type—cognitive skill—is reasonably well understood. It involves the ability to acquire knowledge, process information, and solve problems. This basic intellectual and analytical horsepower has been identified as the core skill underpinning the knowledge economy by writers from Peter Drucker and Daniel Bell to Robert Reich and Charles Murray. 

However, there is a third type of skill set that is even more critical. The O*NET data defines its core attributes as the “capacities used to work with people to achieve goals.” You can call it “social intelligence.” Its salient characteristics are discernment, communications abilities, leadership, awareness, and the like. Highly developed social skills include the capacity to bring the right people together on a project, persuasion, social perceptiveness, the ability to help develop other people, and a developed sense of empathy. These are the leadership skills that are needed to innovate, mobilize resources, build effective organizations, and launch new firms.

The humanities disciplines are central to forming the third type of skill and to linking the second and third types.

It's also worth pointing out that STEM fields comprise about 6% of the total U.S. workforce, while "creative class" jobs are at least one-third of the workforce. The gap of say 25% of the workforce consists of non-scientific creative jobs--in other words your future sectors, which aren't as small as they look.

The Question of What You Need to Know to Write Your Paper

Here are a couple of examples:

For the groups doing film adaptations of classic literature, and particularly for the folks interested in marketing and/or entertainment writing, here's a piece in The New York Times about a social networking marketer called Oliver Luckett (in the middle at left) and his new company theAudience (no space) that builds online fan bases.  The descriptions of (1) the state of the film industry and (2) the business interest behind it don't appear until paragraphs 9 and 10. They are interesting for both content and also for the fact that the author buried them later on, once the celebrity story about the celebrity marketer has gotten off the ground.

And here's a piece from the summer about a guy in Oklahoma who pumps out "reviews" of books on sites like Amazon.  Same idea.  Both of these are in the category of "need to know about shift to social networking to write about contemporary culture industries."

David and Adam are working on non-commercial or bottom-up-commercial alternatives to the current music industry. There are some comments about this in the piece about theAudience.  The issue also comes up around college textbooks.  See this blog post by a prominent blogger on "open source" issues for a good overview of types of non-commercial licensing, and some comments about "predation" vs. "production" models of creative output in the current economy.

First Meeting: Literature and the Innovation Crisis

As you know from the Course Description, the primal goal prompting the course was to organize, formulate, and develop the ideas present in academic literary and cultural study (LCS) about creativity and innovation. This task operates within some initial parameters.

• Other people's fields (OPFs) dominate public discussion of innovation: economics, management, and intellectual property law are three main examples.  "Innovation economics" sees one of our authors, Joseph A. Schumpter, as a founding thinker.  This is innovation as money.
• OPFs dominate public discussion of creativity as a group, social, public, or organizational phenomenon. Examples include cognitive science, behavioral economics, organizational behavior, and just about everything written about what we used to call the New Economy.   In class I'll do show-and-tell with some examples.
• Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
• Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn
• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational 
• Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

• Then there is the Social Network, a zeitgeist more than a theory or phenomenon that fuses creativity and innovation with technology, the Internet, information theory, telecommunications, Wired-Boing Boing production frames, and the flows and fractures of contemporary post-globalized society -- ongoing racism, resegregation, "continuous partial attention" in relation to other people's cultures--into a vision of how we live now.  Since society as an IT-mediated network is a kind of theory of everything, it functions as a contemporary form of Deism, a totalizing explanation of the social creation.

This raises the questions of Theory, Voice, and Divergence

• Has our home turf theorized creativity and/or innovation in or across its abundant theory-narratives? Can we gather these without  lot of trouble?
• Can we project and disseminate LCS narratives of creativity and innovation?
• Do LCS perspectives diverge from familiar, public narratives of creativity and innovation? 

Likely answers: yes, no, yes, and yes.  The no is why we need at least one course for this.

For Tuesday, I will bring a draft syllabus for us to finalize together, a list of the course's Three Premises, and some materials to discuss.

On your side, please be prepared to identify and discuss two things:

1. your own main academic project while in graduate school (need not be related to the course)
2. an author or text that you particularly like that does seem relevant to our course.

Feel free to be in touch in the meantime.