Weekend Reading: Fall Edition

One of the most interesting things you’ll read about Star Wars is Michael Heileman’s reconstruction of Chewbacca‘s transformations from script, through concept art, into the iconic character.  What’s fascinating about it is less its meticulously documented nerdery (awesome as that is) and more its reflections on creativity and originality:

Chewbacca didn’t spring to life out of nowhere, fully formed when Lucas saw his dog in the passenger seat of his car. That’s the soundbite. A single step. The reality is complex and human. From vague names floating around, the kernel of an idea, changing purposes and roles of characters, major restructuring, the design hopping from person to person, scrapping the existing concept and going down a different path, seeing existing things in a different light and having to conform a range of ideas to complement and enrich one another.

George Lucas’s creativity in Star Wars is real, but it lies elsewhere–in an ability to recognize that something isn’t right, and to work on it. Repeatedly. That’s a more interesting meditation, I think, on originality and creativity than harping on term paper mills. (Probably no Star Wars talk next week).

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Timothy Burke looks at the problem of how colleges can help students build cultural capital: When I hear a student describing a post-graduation ambition and that student plainly doesn’t know anything about the real-world contours and character of the professional world that they aspire to, I really want to step in, but supplying that information isn’t a matter of a single remark or correction. When I hear a student make an appeal, try to persuade a group, talk with an interviewer and every moment is catastrophically miscalculated, tone-deaf to the circumstances, I want to say something to them later: but what? It’s hard to do anything interpersonally, and doing something institutionally is nearly guaranteed to be a horrific snob-fest like some of the weirder rituals of elite British universities.
• Because writing is about more than snazzy, enhanced-focus writing software, Shawn Blanc explains how he does it: It’s during that first draft that I try to write until I’m absolutely spent and have nothing left to type. It would be better to write 5,000 words and edit them down into a 2,000-word article than to write 500 words and force more in an attempt to build it up.
• Jenaia Morane reports on a storytelling exercise in Second Life for GimpGirl, an international community supporting women with disabilities. Here’s the prompt: Now I’d like you to spend 10 minutes writing down all the ways your avatar expresses her or himself in unique ways. Try to include not just physical expressions but qualities, tastes, preferences, and ways of seeing and being in the world.
• Atossa Abrahamian points out that the destruction of ideas can be as important for free thinking as their preservation: If we want to encourage the exchange of ideas, we should not worry, at age 24, if what we say tomorrow will be of any particular consequence ten years later. The need for a private space for conversation without the weight of the web-wide world on our shoulders is more pressing than ever. We need a space to ask questions that Google already has the answers to; where it’s alright make comments only to later take them back; where it’s encouraged to agree, to disagree, to argue, and to play devil’s advocate, all for the sake of the argument.
• Alexandre Guiote reflects on “the historiography of a Wikipedia entry“: The collective improvement of a controversial article, like the “Iraq War” entry, is the result of a process of discussion and negotiation that generates a collective vision of the subject matter.
  Working on the same content, the group needs to deal with differences, check sources and refine concepts. Each discussion and argument evolving the edition of any article leads to the evolution of the texts and the behavior of Wikipedia, making it “alive” and linked with the today’s news.

Like The Hold Steady and The Wire, Steven Johnson brings out the fanboy tendencies in ProfHacker. Here’s his new TED talk (18 minutes) on where good ideas come from:

Bonus 1: The trailer for his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From.

Bonus 2: An interview I did with Johnson several years ago for PopMatters.

[Image by Flickr user Cristian Bortes / Creative Commons Licensed.]