week 5 follow-up

Today's warm-up music, chosen for our class on "Thinking Through Writing," was a nod to someone who proves that there's always value to revisiting the basics of your craft. By the 1990s, Rush's drummer, Neil Peart, had won a bazillion best-drummer awards and yet still singed up for drum lessons with a master jazz drummer named Freddy Gruber, whom he met while doing a tribute for another great jazz drummer, Buddy Rich. After studying with Gruber, Neil changed his grip, his playing style, and even started adding Buddy Rich songs to the ends of his live solos, like this one. Someone like him taking drum lessons is a little like a first-rate novelist taking writing lessons, but that's exactly the point: good writers, regardless of their level of ability, never stop being students of their craft, and neither should we as information researchers.

Here are the slides:



The first slides show Charles Darwin's own revisions to his writing, which you can go see in the Fisher Rare Book Library if you're interested. Here are the details:

Charles Darwin. [proof sheets for] The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: J. Murray, 1872. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/1773956]