Selling myself short

I now officially know how to improvise.  I just did it enough over a few tunes so that the harmonies became second nature. Then I learned "Autumn Leaves" in twenty-four hours and I can improvise to that. So I could theoretically do that with any song that I learned. Whether I can improvise well is another question, but what I mean is that I don't play wrong or unintended notes and don't get lost in the form, and that I can even camouflage mistakes when I do make them.

I can figure out a walking bass line for a chord progression.

I still play too basically in terms of left hand technique and putting extra voicing notes in the right hand. I am still at the level below mediocrity but I can play things that sound ok to people who don't know jazz very well or are not over critical. On Easter I played at a family gathering for a while and people thought it was good.

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I have noticed that I sell myself short in a lot of respects. I have a desire not to seem arrogant. But this desire also causes me to not excel in certain areas or to take full ownership of everything I do, even in my scholarship. It's very odd. I imagine that many people also sell themselves short in many ways, perhaps not even realizing it.

Dream of Black Cats

We were in a large building with many black cats, trying to find our own. We would approach each one to try to see if it was the right one. Some responded aggressively and were definitely not him. Finally, I had the idea of calling our cat by its name, which I did, and he came to us immediately.

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Real life context: I was cat-sitting for a month, the black cat that was the subject of the dream.  My friend is back now and we were sleeping in her house when I had this dream.

The Ripple Effect

I found this concept in a drumming book (Secrets of the Hand) and am applying it to piano. If you start a phrase with a few fast notes, the whole phrase will appear faster, so you don't have to lay four sixteenth notes, you could play just two and shift to 8th notes, and the effect will seem almost as fast because the listener's ear will be lagging behind.

You can also play explosively by moving suddenly into a faster sequence of notes and then resuming the slower subdivisions. I hear this a lot in Coltrane, when he plays at a slower tempo. Really fast runs in the context of a slow tempo have an explosive power to them that's a little different from the steamroller effect when everything is super fast.  Having space between phrases also can make them more explosive.

The postulation of reality and the classic style

Borges defined the classic style in an essay called "The Postulation of Reality." He even uses the word "classical" several times in this essay and contrasts this style with the romantic style. I discovered this yesterday (I knew the essay before but hadn't made the connection) in my weekly conference with Thomas.

As is typical with Borges, he makes something very ordinary into something deeply strange-sounding. The classical trick of representing reality is not to represent or describe it, but conjure it up out of purely abstract schemata. This works because you don't actually need to paint with words or be expressive to make the reader imagine things.

Mediocrity (ix)

Perhaps other people are simply interested in other things than I am. What seems to me to be mediocre cultural / literary studies might be excellent history.  Not that I'm uninterested in history, but I think writing history through plot summaries of a lot of novels isn't the best approach.  Still, I extend that benefit of the doubt to research that is ok but not breathtakingly interesting.

Mediocrity (viii)

So the psychological costs of living in a mediocre environment are very high. Arrogance, resentment, hypocrisy, inauthenticity, depression. Complaining about how hard it is for me to be smarter than other people is not likely to evoke much sympathy. I also have to be careful when I lash out in frustration.

But consider the opposite situation. You are surrounded by intelligent people. They consider your ideas and don't make dumb objections to them. They might have points where they don't agree, but the level of discourse is high. Then all that resentment dissolves.

Mediocrity (vii)

I read something today for work, something I wouldn't have otherwise read except for a work requirement, etc... I was probably above the "mediocre" level, more of a B level. I could skew it either way, talk it up and explain why it is ok, or look for every flaw in it.

I guess what I would say: no imaginative flair, no "brilliance" in evidence.  Quotes dull (or wrong) things from other critics. A few obvious mistakes, but very few. He quotes someone else who talks about someone's reaction to an imminent historical event, something that hadn't happened yet, and that presumably nobody would know would happen. I would have to track down the original quote to see what the first critic said.

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Whenever I talk about something like this I make sure I alter some identifying details to make it unidentifiable.  If I say I read something today, it was a year ago.  If I say it was a year ago, it was today. If I say he, I  mean she, etc...