Sunday, November 17, 2013

Smithy's Writing: The end of a great idea

Smithy's Writing: The end of a great idea: Some while ago I discovered an interesting app for the iPad called tactilize - that allowed one to produce interactive content for the iPad ...

The end of a great idea

Some while ago I discovered an interesting app for the iPad called tactilize - that allowed one to produce interactive content for the iPad in individual 'cards' - but the name 'card' belied its depth.  I chose the word 'depth' as it describes how this innovative program worked.  You had only one page, yes... but you could embed content under the surface of the single 'card' - videos, sound, photographs, drawings, text.. and put text as a kind of main page as well as all these other elements.  They were hoping to improve the software to allow for multiple cards.  It was a truly innovative means to publish multimedia directly to the iPad.

I am a poet and wrote a number of multimedia poems - mostly different fonts and colours combined with photos - and yesterday was going to do my first with a video.... when I tried to publish, I got an error message from the company that hosted it in the cloud.  I found Tactilize.com's Facebook page.. and posted a query there.... and received the answer a little while ago.. the company is dead.

Requiescat in pacem.... for a truly interesting way to publish directly to the iPad....

https://www.facebook.com/Tactilize

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Creativity

Yesterday night on Facebook, I did one of those little 'are you left or right brained' tests... I came out right brained at 66-34... one poster noted that she knew she was right brained, but the test said otherwise... the woman who posted the thingie, a friend in Italy, came out 50-50.  As for me, I didn't know I was right brained, or even what that meant until about four years ago [and I am 62 years old right now]... but when I think back, I most certainly am right brained. I lived a left brained life until I was in my late 50s - a fake, false, failed life working in an office, then attempting to be a scholar.  I was rather more successful at scholarship, though the best part of my PhD thesis was a story I told in one of the chapters.  One of the examiners at my oral exam said he felt as though he had got to know those people from the 1890s, personally.

Well, another friend some months ago leant me his biography of Neil Young, the rock musician.  I don't much care for Neil Young - his voice is off key, reedy and high pitched.  But in skimming through the book as a duty of friendship, i noted that his words/lyrics confirmed my belief that lyrics are poems.  I just now skimmed to the last two short chapters where I encountered Neil Young's creative process - which involved drugs! [Quelle surprise!]  But which otherwise [my only drug being Scotch, or wine, or an occasional real ale] mirrored my creative process.  I am going to quote from page 492 [and here the scholar kicks in:  Neil Young. Waging Heavy Peace,  A Hippy Dream. New York:  Blue Rider Press, 2012]:

"The sound was cascading over me and all around me, and I was swimming in it."

He had just finished a song written and roughly recorded some time earlier without all the usual professional bits and pieces that make a song 'professional' - it was a product of his full blown right brain.. a work of art, not smoothed out professionalism.... what leapt out at me was this sentence.. as, when I write poetry, or when i write my long prose/poem book, 'The Man who fell from the Sky... is how the words feel to me... they cascade over me, around me..  I swim in the words.......

Thanks, Neil Young.