Self-Compassion

On the one hand, I want to be badass about learning a lot of piano music and writing a lot of pages on the book. On the other hand, I want to have a feeling of self-compassion toward myself, forgiving all.  These sound like contradictory goals, but then again, does beating myself up make me better at anything?

For example, I am a terrible piano player and a very, very good literary critic (let's say!).  But the attitude I take toward these two activities is very similar. The frustrations and small triumphs I feel produce the the same variety of emotions, whatever the activity is. If you begin to play the piano, you will likely be terrible at it for a while, so the inability to accept that fact will deter many people from even starting. Either they suspect, rightly, that they will be terrible, or they start out and realize that they have to start out from that place of utter incompetence, and aren't very accepting of that situation. By the same token, being very, very good at something just means that the frustrations will be of a different, and more advanced sort.

So the idea of being good at something, or terrible at it, is kind of meaningless, at the phenomenological level of doing the activities from the inside, what they feel like to you. It's ok to know you are horrible at something, but in a humorous, constructive way.

 I am horrible at meditating, I could think, but I've gained these insights from my practice, so maybe I'm not so horrible after all.

Edmund Wilson

I'm reading Axel's Castle.  The surprising thing is that he never uses the term modernism, in a book published in 1931, and dealing with Yeats, Valery, Proust, Joyce, and Stein. So modernism was not (yet) the term for this literary movement the Wilson describes, while modernism was still going on. There is an appendix, a memoir of Dada by Tzara, that had a substantial impact on me when I first read it around 1975. So the avant-garde seemed to exist for Wilson, but as an appendix.

I'm sure modern was used, by Laura Riding for example, and I think modernist too around this time. It would be useful to track it down.

In which I continue to be happy

The Lorca / music project opened up to me a whole world of music I was barely if at all aware of. Nono, Revueltas, Mompou. And to a whole world of research.  A lot of the music / poetry books are very recent, like Englund on Celan, Abbott on Baudelaire. This is an exciting time to be in this field. It is also the culmination of my own career (to date).

Someone should do a book like this on Wm. Blake, I'm thinking.

January Goals

January goals:

Practice 5 standards I already know somewhat.

Finish intro to Lorca IV.

Record book I of Música callada.

***

Feb.

Practice 5 standards.

Add one more standard: "All the things you are."

Begin work on Mompou book II.

***

Later in the year:  other standards

"There will never be another you"
"Body and Soul"
"Giant Steps"

1 more, to be determined...

If I can discipline myself to learn only ten standards, then I will know those.  If I try to learn 20, I won't even learn the first 10.

Revision

I don't at all disdain revision. I frequently start a writing session by going over what I have written so far, on the chapter, and make minor tweaks. If I find a sentence I don't like, or that doesn't express an idea in the way I want it to sound, I rewrite it. If it looks like I've written a paragraph too quickly, or I need to develop a sub-idea in that paragraph, in a paragraph of its own, then I will do that.

I make an effort not to repeat words. I will see if I've used a word more than once in a paragraph, or twice on a page. Of course, my current book has LORCA LORCA MUSIC MUSIC LORCA MUSIC LORCA... I can't quite avoid that. But I do attempt to take out a few of those too.

What I object to in the idea that nobody can write a decent first draft, though, is that when pen and ink were expensive and cumbersome to use, people, not even professional writers, wrote fluent letters with few if any blot-outs. They just did. An ordinary college student can write an email with normal grammar and it is fine. Anne Lammott could presumably write a spontaneous email to her editor and not revise it, and it wouldn't be shitty as a piece of writing.

Everyone should be able to compose mediocre prose on cue. A good writer will produce first drafts that are good. A superb writer, first drafts that are a bit better than good.

***

I don't revise poems, because they tend to occur to me whole.  I don't like to make my poems sound "written." If they are over-written, even worse.

5 Standards

For my 2020 goal of learning 10 standards, I will start with 5 I already know to some extent.

Rhythm Changes
Bemsha Swing
One Note Samba
Satin Doll
Autumn Leaves

I will practice those in January, then I will go on to 5 others that I don't know as well.  TBD....

A Dirty Secret

The dirty secret of productivity is that you only need an hour a day on writing. It is almost impossible to spend an hour a day writing and not produce 200 words. 200 x 365 equal the length of a scholarly monograph. Since nobody writes a book a year, this means that nobody is doing this all the time, or even a considerable amount.  

Now you don't want to be doing this all the time, only when you want to be writing a book. You need time to do some research on what you are interested in, or simply rest between projects. Some projects won't work out, of course, and life gets in the way.

The secret is consistency; that's why the Seinfeld chain works so well. Two books that took 10 years each to write, I did without the Seinfeld chain. The one that I wrote in a year, well, you know how I did that.

When you wrote yesterday and the day before, and the day before that, then you wake up today full of ideas and you immediately write them down in your book manuscript. If you didn't write in the last month, it will take some time to get back into it. Working through weekends and holidays is easy, because it is just an hour. You never get burned out even; you just live the project all the time.  Taking every Friday and writing seven hours doesn't work, because I can't write for seven hours at a stretch.

It is dumb not to do this during a sabbatical, but it is harder to do, because you aren't at a desk. Writing while teaching is actually brilliant, because the writing fits into the daily schedule of work. '

I am setting an absurd goal: to write the book in 2020 and to learn all 28 of the MC by Mompou and come up with a decent recording of them.  I also want to learn 10 jazz standards to a point where I an improvise on them. Not only that, but those are my only goals for the year. There is nothing else. Later on, I will blog on which standards I want to learn. I've learned that goals should be ambitious yet realistic, and finite in time.

***

I sometimes view myself as underutilized by the University. I could do so much more. And yet my salary is low too... But instead of focussing on the salary, I need to focus on how my talents can be used, which means looking beyond my employer. I shouldn't worry about the money part of the equation, but on the utilization of talent part. Of course, everything we do in this respect is unpaid labor, or too sporadic. I think I just have to not care, and do more, and see what happens. It can't be bad.