Numbering Sands: Ambitious Observation

William Shakespeare writes in Richard II "The task he undertakes is numbering sands and drinking oceans dry..." His meaning is that a given task is near to impossible, too ambitious for the limitations of the human world; it is possible to write some beautiful and glimmering prose or verse by examining ways in which people persist in their attempts to achieve immensely complicated or seemingly unreasonable dreams, on which they depend spiritually or emotionally... [See also the forthcoming book, by Casavaria/Elindulnék founder, Joseph Robertson: Numbering Sands]

Water Verse

Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur ends with a poem that relays the sound of waves crashing against the cliffs, as if they were a kind of speech. Virginia Woolf's The Waves offers a very lyrical prose, which moves in time and portrays time and circumstance in language infused with a liquid kind of energy. Try to capture water, or the meaning or movement of water, in a language that feels elemental, evocative of nature...

Redacted Inventions

Go back to other pieces you've written and extract phrases that interest you. Try to piece excerpts from various works together into one new piece. Add or remove words where you want; invent based on what was there and how it works as a new whole. If you use lines from another writer: don't pass them off as your own, never plagiarize (you can use another writer's words, but do that exercise only for yourself).

Essays in Miniature

The best essays contemplate a particular topic, while testing the rational viability of related ideas and achieving literary artistry in their own right: craft a poetic work in sections which act like short essays, and which follow a common thread...

Project Quipu: an Integrated Economic Atlas for the 21st Century

. . . INTRODUCTION

Examining the manner in which financial news is reported in the popular media, the HotSpring collaborative innovation initiative proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, come together to produce a reliable up-to-the-minute resource for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices.

It is often thought that in order to organize ideas or to put some kind of order to any analysis, one needs uniformity, a limited number of generic categories and a single system of uncomplicated parameters by which to categorize each subject under review. But the truth is, this uniformity is not and will not be the rule of any part of lived reality.

To emerge from the fog of flawed, incomplete and opportunistically limited economic and financial analysis, means we need to come to grips with the fact that all resources, all functions or 'services', be they natural or the product of human ingenuity, figure somehow in economic values at all levels. There may be no clear way to quantify their contribution or mercantilize them, but they are there, and nothing can be fully understood in economic terms without seeing this. [Complete Text]

Lyrical Numbers

Written numbers (nineteen hundred..., "five in the afternoon") can provide a unique lyrical hue which expresses the crisis of mortal creatures facing time, a nostalgic sense of history. Focus on the meaning of dates or the weight of a particular time of day...

Emotional Landscapes

Explain a terrain known through experience, places which incite vital emotional realities, a personal mythology, cherished burdens, unique sources of inspiration. Develop a sort of metaphysics of spiritual pursuit, or trace a beloved community...

Elegant Verses

Try to compose verses in short, agile lines, but with a prolonged thematic exporation. No more than 4 words per line, no rhymes to end any verses, with a current that flows from metaphor to imagery, down to an original discovery of wisdom...

Politics of the Apocryphal, or Unsaid

Explore themes that are difficult to express or to unfold in language, the political effect of those themes which escape description; treat the unspoken as an expression of complex psychological anxieties, not necessarily as points of controversy...

Driving Events

Does an event find its impetus in any preceding occurrence? What is the precise motivation one employs to confront the everyday? Is there something which drives us to develop the formal shape of our circumstances, or our perception of them? Often times what makes the narrative of one event so stirring, poignant and captivating is that it approaches occurrence through the lens of seemingly unconnected realities that feed into it; this can apply to poetry, prose, fiction or to non-fiction reporting...

Ocean / World / Life

Delve into the energy of oceans, that ceaseless coming and going that shapes our maps; with that idea, explore the artifice of what we call "the world"; touch on, or search for, the pulse of life as such, that basic energy which keeps us all going...

The Urgency of Flowers

Lay out in verse, or in prose, examples of the urgent relevance of a bouquet of flowers: why in a given moment should a simple bunch of flowers carry so much meaning, so much weight? What is it that manages to express that humanity which wouldn't otherwise reveal itself effectively?