★ News from May 2005:
Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics Steve Stockdale and President of the Institute's Board of Trustees Andrea Johnson have kindly awarded me a scholarship to attend this summer's Seminar-Workshop on general-semantics at Alverno College in Milwaukee, WI.
I have studied general-semantics on my own since my freshman year of college, and have been a member of the International Society (now merged with the Institute) for about ten years.
I am excited to attend the seminar this year. Recently, I attended the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture and Colloquium held at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. My interaction with people who have even heard of general-semantics has been quite short and limited in the years since I discovered the fascinating journal, ETC.: A Review of General Semantics. It blew my mind to associate with others who knew general-semantics and made connections with other disciplines in their lectures that weekend.
In college, I wrote many of my papers in E-Prime, a way of writing that restricts the use of be-verbs in an effort to increase the use of process-oriented verbs, thus making one's linguistics more closely reflect the dynamic (rather than static) universe-as-we-know-it. I also wrote in college several papers on the actual discipline of general-semantics, as originally formulated by Polish engineer Count Alfred Korzybski.
Barely a professor or student at my college with whom I shared general-semantics had heard of it, a reality that caused me a lot of frustration as well as a proportionate amount of eagerness to discuss its ideas. In writing my current book, I'm realizing yet again how the non-aristotelian logic of Korzybski aids my analysis of long-form improvisation, to look at it in ways differently than how I had been taught to look at it, helping me to overcome obstacles I had in doing long-form improv in the way I'd been taught.
My primary aims in taking a formal seminar on general-semantics are to "accredit" my training in the discipline and reacquaint myself with principles I may have forgotten over the years. During the colloquium, I surprised myself with how much I remembered and how many of the principles are deeply "ingrained" in me.
For more information on general-semantics, I hope you'll visit the Learning Center on the Institute of General Semantics' website, http://www.time-binding.org, and peruse some of the articles.
May 26, 2005
(Thursday)
This afternoon I had an audition for a Degree commercial at Downstairs Casting.
May 31, 2005
(Tuesday)
I did it! I entered the lottery for this year's ING New York City Marathon! Assuming I get picked for the race this year, it will be my third marathon. The time to beat is 3:50:24, which was my net time in 2003.
Eventually I will get around to editing my old marathon training blog, http://marathon.benhauck.com. For now, you can look over my training "story" from 2003.
Wish me luck! Over the weekend, I ran two laps around Central Park--12.5 miles. And I haven't really started training yet!