Category Archives: logs

Week 8 Log

May 18th

20 minutes: Morning Transcendental Meditation session
2 hours: Glassblowing Documentary
2 hours: Readings Rosenthal’s Transcendance
1 hours: Drafting poetry
1 1/2 hour: Drafting Holdrege: Abstract finished and more detailed outlined completed
1 hours: Reading Mahesh Yogi
1 hour: Google Lecture: Rick Hanson
20 minutes: Evening Meditation session
(7 hours, 40 min)

May 19th

20 minutes: Morning Meditation Session
2 hours: Various Glassblowing videos on Youtube, Notably:
2 hours: Reading Rosenthal’s Transcendance
2 hours: Drafting poetry
1 hours: Reading Psychoanalysis of Fire
2 hours: Reading Neuro
20 minutes: Evening Meditation Session
(7 hours, 40 min)

May 20th

20 minutes: Morning Meditation session
2 hours: Drafting/Posting Neuro Reverie
1 hours: Drafting Holdrege
4 hours: At Mountlake Terrace High school working with Mark Walker
2 hours: Reading Mahesh Yogi
20 minutes: Evening Meditation Session
(9 hours, 40 minutes)

May 21st

20 minutes: Morning Meditation session
3 hours: Drafting Holdrege
2 hours: Dhammakaya Meditation class at Seattle Meditation Center
2 hours: Reading Rosenthal
1 hour: Google Lecture John Kabat-Zinn
20 minutes: Evening Meditation Session
(8 hours, 20 minutes)

May 22nd

20 minutes: Morning Meditation session
1 hours: Reading Queneau’s Exercises of Style
1 hour: Drafting/Posting Queneau’s Exercises
2 hours: Reading CP Weekly reading
2 hours: Looking through Glassblower’s sites/pieces
1 hour: Draft and posting of CP weekly Poem
20 minutes: Evening Meditation Session
(7 hours, 40 minutes)

May 23rd

20 minutes: Morning Meditation session
6  hours: Working with Mark at MTHS
2 hour: Drafting poetry
1 hour: Reading Bachelard
20 minutes: Evening Meditation Session
(9 hours, 40 minutes)

May 24th

20 minutes: Morning Meditation session
2 hour: Reading Rosenthal’s Trancendence
2 hours: at Dank Tank in Seattle, A glass piece shop with its own studio in the back. Will return Monday
1 hour: Reading Mahesh Yogi
20 minutes: Evening Meditation session
(5 hours, 40 minutes)

Totals

This week: 56

Cumulative Total: 134

Reading List:
Transcendence Dr. Rosenthal
Science of Being, Art of Living Mahesh Yogi
The Psychoanalysis of Fire Gaston Bachelard

lp- week 7 log

May 12th

3 1/2 hours reading Damasio

favorite quote —>  “We all have free access to consciousness, bubbling so easily and abundantly in our minds that without hesitation or apprehension we let it be
turned off every night when we go to sleep and allow it to return every
morning when the alarm clock rings, at least 365 times a year, not
counting naps. And yet few things about our beings are as remarkable,
foundational, and seemingly mysterious as consciousness. Without
consciousness-that is, a mind endowed with subjectivity-you would
have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone know who you are and
what you think.” – Damasio

3 hours working on holdrege style paper

daily total: 6 and 1/2 hours


May 13th

1 hour meditation session using chan meditation

3 hours working on holdrege style paper

2 hours listening to sublime self entitled album

daily total: 6 hours

May 14th

1 hour reading Cuda

2 hours writing poetry

1 hour listening to 40 oz to Freedom album

1 hour meditation using Zen meditation

daily total: 5 hours

May 15th

3 hours working on holdrege style paper

2 hours reading Damasio

daily total: 5 hours

May 16th

3 hours writing poetry

4 hours reading Cuda

daily total: 7 hours

May 17th

3 hours working on holdrege style paper

2 hours reading Damasio

1 hour listening to Sublime Second Hand Smoke

1 hour reading Cuda

daily total: 7 hours

May 18th

1 hour meditation Chan style

1 hour meditation Zen style

3 hours working on holdrege style paper

Totals

This week: 41 1/2 hours

Cumulative Total: 82 hours

Reading List:

Sublime’s Brad Nowell: Crazy Fool(Portrait of a Punk) by Heidi Siegmund Cuda

Self Comes to Mind Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio

 

Pi week 7 log

April 12th – 18th

8 hours  – reading Neuro The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, Dali, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, The Notebooks of Leornardo

2 1/2 hours – watching From Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers

5 hours – observing at Olympia Waldorf School and interview with Tim Morrissey

30 min – online interview with Anita Lenges

4 hours – Calculated Poetics

In perhaps the busiest week of my life, I unearthed some startling revelations of the connection to our origins of numbers, the origins of modern math systems, and where they intersect as intuitive math manifests itself in the application of modern math class in a group of 10 year olds at the Olympia Waldorf School.  I’ll begin with the interview and sit in with the 4th grade class at Waldorf that I attended on Friday.  By recommendation of a friend, I found myself in contact with Tim Morrissey who got his masters in Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T. and worked as a Software Engineer, Environmental Consultant and Hazardous Waste Specialist, before beginning a farm in Olympia, which eventually led him to teach at Waldorf starting in 2005.  He invited me in to observe the classroom and fit in time for questions between activities.  I arrived at 7:45 Friday morning, him  orienting me on the day’s progressions before joining with the morning greeting and assembly.  I then sat and watched as he began a morning lecture reviewing the 3 day field trip they had just returned from on Whidbey Island for a potlatch hosted by the 4th graders at that Waldorf School.  They then began writing ‘thank yous’ to special persons involved that made the trip wonderful.  I offered help or advice when I could as they scrawled in cursive across their custom cut pieces of paper.  They declared what animal tribe they were apart of, what its characteristics are, and how they will embody those characteristics as they return to their daily lives.

Mr. Morrisey then transitioned to the next activity by presenting a few math problems on the board. After working silently for some time, he then took answers from the audience, allowing others to jump him to help solve a part of the problem.  The problem had something to do with dividing a group of 145 students into 7 groups of somewhat equal numbers as best they could (without dividing any students in half!).  We then increased the number to 1325 students!  Mr. Morrissey encouraged the students that “there are many paths to take to get to the right answer, all that matters is that you can get there.”  At the conclusion of the exercise, he offered me a wink since I had come in on a day when they were not focusing on math when that was my focus.

During snack time, we sat down in the back and I asked him some questions.  I began by asking him how old he was when he realized he loved numbers.  He remembered having an affinity for them before even really having an idea of what it was; stacking legos, ordering things like toys in different arrangements (4s and 5s).  His dad noticed his precocious number sense and then supported it by intellectualizing it, introducing formal math equations and problems, teaching him the rhetoric of the ivory tower elite.  He said that probably his formal realization of his love of numbers came in high school with a teacher he was lucky enough to have for nearly every math class during that time.  The teacher had a great sense of humor, acknowledging the important implications of math while also not shying way from its sometimes pointlessness and redundancy.  His teacher supplied more math than he could get a hold of, always fueling his fire for more complex and more interesting problems.  This carried him on into college in pursuit of engineering.

this teacher was also imparitive in his journey with math.  Though he knew he loved math, his grad school professor introduced and explained it in such a way that Mr. Morrissey said one day it just clicked – this ‘intuitive’ sense of the numbers, patterns, and equations he’d been working with his whole life just came into focus and he could see how and why things were being done they way they were.  This concreted his love for math and it led him to several jobs in civil engineering where he utilized these skills very well, and continues to do so today as a teacher.

I went out to recess with the kids and played a few games along with Mr. Lee before returning for second session just before lunch.  Here, the kids continued work on some more thank you cards and I sat down with Mr. Morrisey for a few more questions.  I asked him of the most notable or unique problem solving techniques that students had come up with themselves that he had seen.  He relayed how he’s always fascinated by the way children will pick up and reassemble seemingly common sense ideas for adults into clever new iterations, sometimes producing the right result and sometimes not.  He also told the story of a teaching exercise that shows the pattern of how to add all the digits between 1 and 100.  It is revealed at the end that you can visualize it by writing out each number and then folding the piece of paper in half to see the correlating digits.  At this point they are supposed to see the pattern of which numbers always match up, so he asks the class to add up the numbers up to 1000.  he said a kid who was having some trouble exclaimed in astonishment, “We’re going to need a really long piece of paper!”

More to the point tho, he said he attempts to create flexibility with numeracy, the ability to see tendencies and then work in from their to a more precise answer.  This utilizes intuitive number sense of proportion, and then supplements it with our more acute number sense of modern times.  By working in groups and with diverse materials (from paints, to blocks, to treasure hunts outside) he says the kids get to work together, so that overlapping strengths and weaknesses supplement each other and the kids get to see many ways of working around a problem.  This is valuable not only for learning math skills, but it shows us how to value each other as resources that can help us with our problem solving, therefore working together and having shared goals.

The last question I asked was about how the Waldorf School teaches to developmental stages both physical and mental.  Through this conversation he explained Steiner’s (the founder of Waldorf) qualitative observation reasoning and I realized it resonated deeply with Goethean science, to which he replied that Goethe’s methodology heavily informed Steiner.  I was amazed and quite pleased.  I will be looking into the Why Waldorf Works texts online for further influence of how to articulate my essay’s exploration of this topic using Holdrege’s model of Goethean science.

Earlier in the week, I sat down with several textbooks I will be using to explore more personal ways to access and awaken our intuitive number sense.  I looked through the books Dali , Leonardo’s Notebooks, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, and The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher for segments that related to their methodologies and inspirations that informed their work having to do with multi-dimensions, proportion, and perspective.  At this point, I think I will be able to relate how by using fractal geometry and Goethean science, we can develop an understanding of perspective and proportion as it relates to 2 dimensional portrayals of 3 dimensional plains (or objects).  From here, we can see how the use of logarithms and proportions that are completely intuitive and observable physically guided the creations of great works of art by Escher, Dali, and daVinci.  This will relate to the experience at Waldorf and my research on their curriculum with the art integration and visualizing problem sets as a means to establish and hold onto an intuitive sense of numbers as it integrates with the modern system.  This will relate to Holdrege’s exact sensorial imagining section, and be a segway (or methodology) for how adults (or someone who has been tuned out of their intuitive number sense) to reawaken it through a series of multidimensional visualizing techniques to create art.  And I sincerely hope that I am able to better articulate these thoughts at that time.

F ~ Week 7 Log

May 13th, Monday

4 hours reading Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf, reflecting upon my own body, note taking, and drawing.

30 minutes connecting with our peer group, touching base and deciding to do solo work for the day.

2 hours working on the Holdredge paper, organizing ideas and formatting.

2 hours reading Neuro by Nikolas Rose, conjuring a reverie.

May 14th, Tuesday

2.5 hours in class lecture on Perloff reading, sharing poetry and inspiring work found in our projects.

3 hours reading The Naked Woman by Desmond Morris

Breathing, stretching, tending to my body’s needs.

May 15th, Wednesday

3 hours reading Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf. Turning inward, I had a difficult time reading this specific section titled the “traumatized vagina” I took frequent breaks and a lot of breathing, realizing this is very real to people and needs to be recognized.

2 hours reading The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used Against Women by Naomi Wolf.

2 hours creating poetry, moving my body, talking with women and reflecting upon my findings.

May 16th, Thursday

2 hours reading Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf

2 hours with the Calculated Poetics, creating a sento with our small groups, Brain vs. Brane.

2 hours reading reading The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used Against Women by Naomi Wolf.

May 17th, Friday

4 hours reading The Female Pelvis Anatomy & Exercise by Blandine Calais-Germain

1.5 hours drawing vaginas and multiple views of the female body

May 18th, Saturday

2 hours reading The Naked Woman by Desmond Morris

The rest of the day I drove up to Seattle for Dream Dance, a night filled with acro yoga, dance, tea serving, enlightening conversation, connection making, community love time! Then I made 2 rhubarb pies!

May 19th, Sunday

coming back to Olympia then,

3 hours reading The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used Against Women by Naomi Wolf.

4 hours reading Body of Wisdom: Women’s Spiritual Power and How it Serves by Hilary Hart

2 hours reading The Female Pelvis Anatomy & Exercise by Blandine Calais-Germain, performing the exercises, breathing, getting to know my body.

Totals

This week: 44.5 hours

Cumulative total: 88.5 hours

P – Week 7 – Log & Update

5.13.13:  1 morning pages, 1/2 Bodystories, 1/2 meditation, 2 nature hike, 1/2 Neuro reverie, 2 WordPress

5.14.14:  1 morning pages, 2 notes for paper, 1 writing poetry

5.15.14:  1 morning pages, 1 walking meditation around lake, 5 WordPress, 6.5 finishing Place & Experience and notetaking, 2 finishing Perloff (it seemed wrong not to)

5.16.13:  3/4 morning pages, 4 reading Seamon articles on KSU website, 2 WordPress, 3 notes on Poetics of Space

“…though the character and quality of the inhabitants shape their house, the house contributes to the character, experience, and world of the inhabitants, partly through its nature as a physical thing and partly through the history of earlier inhabitants who found comfort or discomfort there.”  (David Seamon’s article on Poetics of Space)

5.17.13:  1 morning pages, 1 writing poetry, 3 Perceptual Experience, 1 trailer meditation

“…in normal perceptual experience the ‘things themselves’ seem much closer to us than a ‘throng of sensations.’ This does not by itself imply that we are not in any way aware of a throng of sensations in perceptual experience…even if the things themselves are ‘closer’ to us than sensations, this still implies that the sensations are somewhere to be found…It is obvious that perceptual experience is sensory in a way that thought is not…” (Perceptual Experience,
127)

5.18.13:  day off–catching up on laundry and other housewifely duties including experimental brownie recipes and amazingly delicious pork chops (J has put on a little weight since I’ve been here)

“Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.” (Bachelard, 68)

5.19.13:  1 morning pages, 2 writing poetry, 2 notes and reverie from a boat on Lake Huron

Total:  46.75

P – Week 6 – Log & Update

5.6.12:  1 somatics/meditation, 2 Poetics of Space, 2 notes for paper, 3/4 Morning Pages, 1/2 revise seminar pass, 1 log/update, 2 poetry writing, 1/2 walking meditation

“It is a strange situation. The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory.” (Bachelard, 54)

5.7.13:  1 Morning Pages, 1/2 Bodystories, 1/2 meditation, 1 reverie, 1 WordPress

5.8.13:  1 Poetics of Space, 2 rereading The Midnight, 1 morning pages, 1 notes for paper, 2 Place & Experience, 1 catching up on Not Knowing Notebook (NKN)

“Concepts of place are often not distinguished at all from notions of simply physical location, while sometimes discussions that seem implicitly to call upon notion of place refer explicitly only to a narrower concept of space. Is Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, for example, really about place or space? It surely cannot be about the same space as that of which Newton or Einstein speak—or can it?” (Malpas, 19)

5.9.13: 1 morning pages, 1 somatics/meditation,

5.10.13:  1 morning pages, 1 tai chi, 3 Body & City, 3 writing poetry/workbook, 2 paper, 1 reading seminar passes

5.11.13:  1 morning pages, 1/2 meditation, 5 reading Neuro & Perloff, 1 sem pass

Total:  44.25

Ms – Week 7 Log

May 13th

1 hour Reading Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Stewart)

1.5 hours writing poems

1 hour researching/looking for Proustian writers in library (with much success)

May 14th

30 minutes In-class smell experiment with coffee and candles

30 minutes sifting class notes from experiment, arranging in ‘relevant’ piles

2 hours reading My Poets

1 hour reading Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

May 15th

1.5 hours at artist lecture series

3 hours reading Proust was a Neuroscientist

1 hour writing notes on Proust was a Neuroscientist 

May 16th

1.5 hours My poets

3 hours editing poetry

1 hour reading Proust was a Neuroscientist

30 minutes writing notes on Proust was a Neuroscientist

May 17th

4 hours writing poems from jotted notes and experiencing smells and writing them down

2 hours reading online articles about Proustian methods and theories

2 hours journaling prose poetry about smell triggers and stories

May 18th

2 hours editing journaled prose poetry from 5/17

3 hours reviewing note from A dirty smell of mangoes, Proust was a Neuroscientist, and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. 

May 19th

2 hours experiencing favorite smells and writing the many variations of what the scent means/triggers for me

3 hours writing poetry based on the variations

2 hours editing cumulative poems

1 hour journaling in prose poetry form

Totals

This week: 40 hours

Cumulative total: 80 hours

Reading List:

Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

Remembrance of things past

A dirty smell of mangoes

Proust was a Neuroscientist

My Poets

 

 

Ab – Week 7 logs.

Week 7:

Monday, May 13

1 hour – looking up Kenny Goldsmith’s Traffic and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend.

1 ½ hours – putting away type at Sherwood Press.

1 ½ hours – adding bibliography to anthology, figuring out footnotes/endnotes for quotes.

1 ½ hours – writing and posting Neuro reverie.

Tuesday, May 14

2 ½ hours – Seminar on Perloff and Neuro, students sharing poetry and projects.

½ hour – meeting with Sarah, going over feedback for anthology.

2 hours – making small edits on the anthology: consistancy with pronouns, numbering peoples quotes, adding Buhner to Introduction.

1 hour – Meeting about Slightly West budget.

½ hour – getting image of neuro map onto cover.

Wednesday, May 15

1 hour – scanning submissions for SW and making a calendar for next year.

2 ½ hours – working on anthology in Indesign.

1 hour – watching Indesign tutorials.

Thursday, May 16

4 hours – working along side Indesign tutorials and formatting anthology.

1 ½ hours – reading Neuro ch. 7

Friday, May 17

5 ½ hours – working on anthology in Indesign.

½ hours – editing anthology according to Sarah’s feedback.

Saturday, May 18

worked all day

Sunday, May 19

½ hours – finished reading Neuro.

Weekly Total: 28½ hours

Cumulative Totals: 216 hours.

v – Log week 7

Week 7:

– A week full of difficulty.  Questions pondered: How does the body appear in writing? Why do we Write? Can you write the body, or are words woven to remind of the body? A look at Cixous and Pinkola Estes, searching for the feminine body in writing.   As we experience a sense of failure in the body, how do we empty the vessel? (body) Coming home to the body, coming home to writing.  recognizing the fluidness that lies in pottery and in the body, cycle after cycle coming home into the heart.  Goddess’ bringing light to the darkness, motherless, wordless, images getting cut away, and yet laughter provides release to the body.  Words containing vessels of continuously shifting meaning, vessels continuously shifting form, empty, full, overflowing and emptied again.  The mind works in similar ways, shifting and changing patterns and form, creating space for new meaning by emptying out old memories, a vessel of the mind being flushed by constant morphing, holding on and releasing, the mind working on both sides.  Both sides creating harmony, using word and image. Body and Word. Word and Clay. Empty and Full. –

May 14th

class, perloff and neuro

searching for sources on somatic experiences of feminine body

writing outline for final paper

reverie and reading neuro

8 hours

May 15th

writing outline of paper

testing glazes on plant plaques

throwing vessels, watching process

6 hours

May 16th

Class (Justin Gere) speaking on plant spirit medicine of Peru.

2 hours

pottery, shaping, focused and intent.

1 hour

May 17th

Herbal apprenticeship, doug fir tips, speak of grandmothers and the need for women to take secrets to the grave, themes from women who run with the wolves this week.

each week i am finding syncronicitys throughout my readings, life and understandings of my female body.

6 hours

May 18th

reading shlain

writing paper

2 hours

May 19th

Pottery studio

writing/collecting quotes for final paper

reading “Neuro”

7 hours

30 hours

 

S – Week 7 Log

5/12: 3 hours NetLogo, 1 hour reading Caroline Bergvall’s poetry, 2 hours with Unoriginal Genius

5/13: 1 hour of class time, 2 hours reading Calculated Poetry, 1 hour w/ N. Rose’s website/lectures, 1 hour with E-Poetics, 1 hour writing final project

5/14: 3.75 of class, 3 hours with NetLogo, 1 hour with Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, 1 hour writing poetry

5/15: 3 hrs of class, 3 hours at Troubling the Line book release reading, 2 hours revising poetry, 1 hour with Neuro  

5/16: 2 hours of class, 1 with Neuro, 3 hours writing final project

5/17: 2 hours with Unoriginal Genius, 3 hours reading prose poems lent from John

5/18: 1 hour with Unoriginal Genius, 2 hours writing Bachelardian Reverie, 1 hr with Ron Silliman’s blog (check out the post on Leonard Schwartz, Evergreen professor, posted on 5/19!), 1 hr with Kenny Goldsmith’s work