“Raising a glass, he continued, ‘Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty and becomes instinct with life.’”

From a review of a new biography of Charles Dickens in the September 12, 2009 issue of The Economist (reporting Dickens’ answer to a dinner companion asking how he got the ideas for the characters in his books).

The New York Times of July 6, 2009, carried two stories about New York City’s aural life.

In “Sound Tunnel: Avant-Garde Park Portrait,” Randy Kennedy talked about the “found noise concerts” that were to be heard through September 10 in a pedestrian tunnel in NYC’s Central Park, near the Delacorte Musical Clock at East 65th Street.  No random big-city cacophonies, these were compositions by contemporary composer John Morton, derived from the park’s own unique natural and human-made sounds.

“(Mr. Morton’s) idea was to construct a kind of aural portrait of the park, using field recordings he would make over many months of wandering around it with a high-definition recorder,” wrote Mr. Kennedy.  The idea found favor with the public art program of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, and funding from state and non-profit arts organizations.

Mr. Morton’s musical work includes “rebuilding old music boxes and remixing their tunes,” and the Central Park tunnel idea made use of that precedent.  The sounds recorded over hundreds of hours were edited into a computerized sampling/mixing program that played 20-minute random “concerts” in conjunction with the Delacorte chimes throughout the day.

As planned-out as this project must have been, it still made use of a lot of serendipity.  Mr. Kennedy quoted Mr. Morton: “I  had a lot of sounds I knew I wanted to get, but then I just let my ear lead me.”

Meanwhile, across town …

“I had so many ideas … I had a really tiny apartment and it would be just a matter of time before my living space was filled with ideas I had three years ago.” From a story on the German artist Thomas Demand in the August 15/16, 2009 issue of the Financial Times (quoting Demand on the genesis of his mode of sculpting in paper, photographing the sculpture and then recycling the paper, so only the photo remains).

Write about what you know.  Advice typically given to writers.  JoAnn Dunaway modified this to — Write about what you see.

Among the many things JoAnn sees and therefore knows is Richardson Bay, where she lives in a floating home and rows often.  She knows what the bay looks like, in all hours and weathers and tides.  She knows the boats and the birds and the view across to San Francisco.  She knows the difference between a foggy day and a misty one.  So when cataracts made it difficult for her to see all these things she knows so well, she was distressed.

Having thrived in a long career of international business development, JoAnn is used to taking appropriate action, which sometimes involves waiting.  And while waiting for the right time for the right surgery, she wrote  – and the result was a poem that won a prize at the 2009 Marin County Fair.  (Yes, the County Fair has a writing competition.)

Called “Watercolor Sunrise,” the poem sets up what seems to be a gauzy, impressionistic view of a day’s beginning.  As a watercolorist, I began reading the poem thinking that, in fact, it would be a verbal landscape painting.  But I received a gentle shock when I got to the line — “This mist is mine, the haze internal, the veil in my very own eyes” — and realized what JoAnn had wrought.  A meditation, an extended metaphor, on vision lost and restored.

“(The workshops) did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about the things you make, and that makes it easier to care about the things other people make.”

From “Show or Tell — Should Creative Writing Be Taught?” by Louis Menand in the June 8/15, 2009 issue of The New Yorker (reviewing various viewpoints on the usefulness of creative writing programs).

“Like a lot of new ideas, Media Cloud started with a long-running argument among friends.”

From an article by Patricia Cohen in the August 5, 2009 issue of The New York Times (describing the genesis of a new database).