An Obscure Place

Welcome to the home page of Timothy Ballan. If you came here without knowing much about me, I am a writer working on music, poetry, different types of essays, and different types of stories. This site currently hosts a sampling of poetry, visual art, and (finished and unfinished) musical pieces.

So why the title "An Obscure Place"? Well, it represents my tendency to favor strange and absurd paths in my creative pursuits. It is also the title of a story that I am working on (that I am also writing music to accompany). Being grand in scope, this story samples many of my styles found in many of my smaller-scale works.

Also feel free to check out my Myspace Music page for higher-quality recordings of my music, myspace.com/timothyballan.

This site is updated often, so check back again soon if you wish. Hopefully you'll find this place to be a pleasant diversion, even just for a one-time visit.

--9/3/09: In the "Essays" section, I replaced "Fundamental Beliefs" with a new version of it, entitled "Highest Gratification, Highest Social Effectiveness". I then added a link to a related article composed mostly of material lifted directly from the old "Fundamental Beliefs" article, entitled, "Points Supplemental to 'Highest Gratification, Highest Social Effectiveness', Extracted from Old Drafts". I also deleted "Defining to Then Pursue 'Happiness'".

--8/24/09: In the "Essays" section, I uploaded an outline to "Fundamental Beliefs" and added a summary of it entitled "Defining to Then Pursue 'Happiness'". I also replaced several music files with updated versions while adding three new clips: "Nayef's Song", "The Conception of Life", and "Fall in Sturbridge, Massachusetts".

--8/3/09: I once again redid "Fundamental Beliefs" and added another new article, "Anti-X".

--7/29/09: I redid "Fundamental Beliefs" and a new article, "An Overconfident Person Replacing Their Overconfident Religion".

--7/13/09: I've come to find the original article entitled "A Basic Articulation of a World-View", its simplified version, and its summary to be unclear in the ordering of their ideas, so I took them off the site. I've come to feel that I communicated the same ideas more clearly in "Fundamental Beliefs", which I think I'll make a more detailed version of soon.

--7/2/09: I added a link to a new article still basically summarizing "A Basic Articulation of a World-View".

--5/31/09: A link to a summary of "A Basic Articulation of a World-View" at one-tenth its length was added.

--5/28/09: A link to a simplified version of "A Basic Articulation of a World-View" entitled "A Simplified Articulation of a World-View" was added.

--5/26/09: A major crux of "A Basic Articulation of a World-View" was removed, decided to overreach. Also, the old music file for "Score to 'Positive Images'" was replaced, as several other old music files were last week.

--5/19/09: Two new pages, "Stories" and "Essays", with links to google documents of mine were added. Updated versions of some musical pieces were posted in place of older versions, and some new-to-the-site recordings were added, along with new poems, photographs, and drawings. (As an interesting note, the photograph "The Soul of a Computer" was taken of a random printer "test page" that seemed too beautiful to be labelable as such.)

--8/27/08: Several musical pieces (two piano improvisations and two MIDI realizations of chamber works) were added.

--6/21/08: On the music page, I added a link to a Youtube video of a performance of a showtune I wrote––which accompanies no specific real or imagined show.

--6/2/08: A short improvisation based on an intensely bittersweet experience was added to the music page.

--5/25/08: Several photographs were added (albeit cell-phone-quality, unfortunately) as well as a farcical song about Christian nationalism, and an actually serious poem loosely about the possible superior intelligence of tortoises. I've also added a link to the site of my friend's who is a marvelously talented illustrator.

--12/9/07: Site was pretty much reworked.

--9/24/07: Several poems were added and some empty pages were deleted.

--9/15/07: A link to youtube of a humorous music video has been added to the music page.

--6/23/07: A new page entitled "Drawings and Paintings" has been added (with a link to it on the bottom of all other pages). It presents some of my drawings and paintings from over the years.

--6/22/07: A new clip has been added--"Meditation--A Beginner Playing the Shakuhachi; Dedicated to Perry Yung".

--6/06/07: A new poem has been added entitled "An Unfortunate Event, Described to Matt on the Phone".

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Drawings and Paintings