Fun Friday Resources

This week we’re going to get some STEALING FROM THE BEST practice.

First, I must acknowledge my debt to the wonderful collators at Open Culture—they are a constant source of cool things that I steal on the regular.

So here’s a full post from OC that’s pertinent to our First Precept, TASK AVOIDANCE. How did medieval monks keep their focus? Read the whole thing for strategies you might want to incorporate into your RITUAL.

If you’ve ever wondered about the propriety of STEAL FROM THE BEST as a basis for your creative output, watch this video:

You know the tune, but now you know why film composers keep using it. In non-film work, you’ll find that Rachmaninoff had a fetish for the melody; it showed up in a great many of his works, especially those that are super popular these days like Variations on a Theme by Paganini.

(There is another video on the same topic at the original OC post, but I don’t recommend it. For one thing, the narrator’s vocal fry is unbearable; for another, their musicology is… lacking.)

Now that you’re convinced that you too can STEAL FROM THE BEST, check out this video on how e.e. cummings wrote a poem. It’s more a lesson on structure and stuff, but that’s the whole point. Nothing can show you how an artist MAKES THE THING THAT IS NOT (see Wednesday’s post) but we can always reverse engineer how they did it.

Happy stealing!