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Who runs this blog?

  • The Saunterer. That's me, H. Charles Romesburg, Professor in the Department of Environment and Society, Utah State University. As part of my research I saunter through the writings of especially creative people, keeping an eye open for insightful ideas on subjects that are joined with great goodness and creativity. I will in this blog present ideas from the writings of more than three hundred of these creators: painters, scientists, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, writers, poets, naturalists, actors, rock climbers and more. Among the subjects that will be covered: How workers in most every vocation and avocation can work as artists do, creating use, beauty, or both, of rare note. How regularly experiencing wild nature makes us better creators. How it is that the more all forms of life come to be revered, the more creative society will be. For some of the other subjects that will be covered, click on cnr.usu.edu/romesburg

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December 16, 2009

Comments

Hi, just found your blog. Love it. We run a site dedicated to Northrop Frye -- The Educated Imagination -- and will be linking to this post.

You can find us at www.theeducatedimagination.com

Here's Frye on the city from The Modern Century (1967):

The traditional city is centripetal, focused on market squares, a pattern still visible in some Ontario towns. Its primary idea is that of community, and it is this idea that has made so many visions of human fulfilment, from Plato and the Bible onward, take the form of a city. To the modern imagination the city becomes increasingly something hideous and nightmarish, the fourmillante cité of Baudelaire, the “unreal city” of Eliot’s Waste Land, the ville tentaculaire of Verhaeren. No longer a community, it seems more like a community turned inside out, with its expressways taking its thousands of self enclosed nomadic units in a headlong flight into greater solitude, ants in the body of a dying dragon, breathing its polluted air and passing its polluted water. The map still shows us self contained cities like Hamilton and Toronto, but experience presents us with an urban sprawl which ignores national boundaries and buries a vast area of beautiful and fertile land in a tomb of concrete. I have had occasion to read Dickens a good deal lately, and Dickens was, I suppose, the first metropolitan novelist in English literature, the first to see the life of his time as essentially a gigantic pulsation toward and away from the great industrial centres, specifically London. And one notices in his later novels an increasing sense of the metropolis as a kind of cancer, as something that not only destroys the countryside, but the city itself as it had developed up to that time.

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Books by H. Charles Romesburg

  • H. Charles Romesburg: The Life of the Creative Spirit

    H. Charles Romesburg: The Life of the Creative Spirit
    Practically all of the quotations in this blog's posts are collected in "The Life of the Creative Spirit."

  • H. Charles Romesburg: How About It, Writer?

    H. Charles Romesburg: How About It, Writer?
    Based on a study of more than 12,000 essays from the very best literary magazines, this book provides writers with lists of thousands of classic forms of opening sentences, titles, transition sentences, ways of saying "for example," and ways of closing nonfiction pieces. When you are writing an essay and want a hint for a better or fresh way of saying what you mean, looking through the lists acts on the imagination, stimulating your creativity. From Lulu Press (ISBN 1-4116-2862-4, 194 pp., softback), it's $16.95 when ordered from Lulu.com/Romesburg , and $22.95 from bookstores. To view its cover, click on www.cnr.usu.edu/romesburg/how_about_it_writer.htm To view its title page, contents, and first two chapters, click on: www.cnr.usu.edu/romesburg/how_about_it_writer_preview.pdf

  • H Charles Romesburg: Best Research Practices

    H Charles Romesburg: Best Research Practices
    The Saunterer’s new book (2009), Best Research Practices explains how to plan and carry out reliable experiments, how to conceive and circumstantially support research hypotheses, how to test research hypotheses with the hypothetico-deductive method, how to discover cause and effect, and more. It’s based on his examination of 5,000 top scientific articles, studying the methods used to produce reliable knowledge. Preview it on-line by going to the following link: http://print.google.com/print?isbn=9780557017836

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