Morris Method

These pages deal specifically with the Morris Method. Click on the article title to view.

Overview

Training Tips

Not strictly the Morris Method, these are some smaller articles from the old website, but still relevant.

Fighters Notebook

Foreword:

Steve has always been a big note-taker. When I first started working with him to get some of his articles typed, he turned up one day laden with three black plastic bin liners full of handwritten notes. These were the recent ones, he said--he had more in the garage. There were written notes, sketches, diagrams--some readable, some not. I spent many hours trying to sort them out--I actually designed a filing system with the intent of organizing everything, then abandoned it in the face of the sheer volume. And all the while I was doing this, he was generating more. In his old apartment at Bourne Hill House there were seven double windowsills in the main studio room. All of them were half-obscured by stacks of current notes. There were more in piles on the sofa and chairs. A couple of times at Bourne Hill he had mass burnings, despite my protests at what was being lost. When we were hard up for cash a few years ago, he sold his medical books. In one of them he had painstakingly superimposed all the Chinese acupuncture points and energy meridiens over a Western diagram showing details of either the lymphatic/circulatory system or maybe the nervous system (or probably both), complete with Steve's scribbled addenda from trauma and emergency medical manuals. I am still bummed out about this; I'd never seen anything like it and now I probably never will again.

Steve has also written many articles that have never seen the light of day. What you see on this site are only brief snippets compared to several heavily researched pieces that have never been finished for one reason or another. At least one of them was over a hundred pages, typed, when we last worked on it--and I'm not talking about 100 pages of personal stuff, I'm talking about some serious research into all kinds of things you'd never imagine would apply to martial arts. With that particular article, there was a lot more that I hadn't typed but it, as well as the books Steve was using to put it together, got lost in the shuffle during one of our many moves since leaving Bourne Hill.

More recently, we have got stalled with the karate war crimes article, which is still around but needs whipping into shape. It seems to be a pattern--Steve goes at things very hard, but unless he has somebody following him around all day keeping track of his stuff, he doesn't put it together in an organized way. He writes to learn for himself, and then throws it away. Which is great for him, but a loss for anybody who might benefit from sharing in that process.

When the Morris Method jumped into Steve's head late in 2005, he decided to take a different approach to the documentation. Rather than attemping to put together a formal piece, he decided this time to simply post his notes, warts and all, in the interest of getting the information out there.

So here you go. Bear in mind, these are notes,literally scribbled on a bit of paper and then typed up afterward with no special editing. I'm aiming to post some every week as long as Steve cares to generate them. The newer stuff will go at the end, so you'll need to scroll down to find it. You can dip in and out of them at any point, and they're totally free.

Naturally, some things will be repetitive and some things may be a little ambiguous--you can't expect him to give away every detail over the internet! But you can get a lot out of them if you have a mind to.

Tricia, 15 March 2006