Johnnie Walker | Paths Are Made By Walking

Laye

 Some  left-wing young poets in Barcelona in the 1950s wanted to escape censorship for their magazine, so they somehow took over a magazine that happened to belong to some branch of the government itself, the ministry of education perhaps. It was exempt from censorship, since it was a government publication, and they could do what they wanted with it. 

A Night of Dreams

 I was in Africa. I was surprised by how fast I got from South Africa to Morocco on my way to maybe Egypt. Our friend T. was part of the trip. I was worried about losing passport. 

***

I was teaching a seminar. The students started having conversations among themselves instead of addressing the entire class. I told them not to, but they continued. I became very angry and stood up and threatened them with a long pole I happened to be holding. (I knew I would be in trouble for this.) The next meeting, they did it again, and the male students were starting to argue with each other. I didn't know there names because it was the beginning of the semester. I stopped them again, and had a female student explain why it wasn't good to do this. She said that the whole class needed to reap the benefit from their brilliant remarks (something like that) and that it was discourteous, etc... 

***

There was a dinner party at the house of S and B (real friends of ours). It was some special occasion, and the placemats or menus had all our names printed (8 of us). It was the "Friendship Dinner." I was wondering why we were invited and many others in our friend group were not.  (Normally at their house there would be as many as 30-40 people.) 

Schuyler

 "under the French horns of a November afternoon"

I just found that line by James Schuyler.  On facebook many were celebrating the work of a recently deceased poet. I said nothing, because I always get irritated by celebrations of mediocrity, yet also know that you can't say anything negative, as in de mortuis nihil nisi bonus dicendum est, or something like that.

It is the moment to celebrate the work of a poet who many people liked and admired. My objections to him are just that he isn't very good. He never wrote anything like that Schuyler line.  

Some people here in town organize a yearly reading of William Stafford, someone who lived in Kansas and was well liked.  Once again, why do people love this mediocre stuff?  

***

I've been reading some Ammons. Not my favorite, but kind of an interesting mishmash of prosaic and colloquial language with keen observation of nature. There is a fearlessness I like, in that he is not trying to prove he is a great poet with every line or even every poem. "Corson's Inlet" is a wonderful poem.    

I can teach you to improvise

 I could teach you to improvise like this.

First, play a triad CEG on the piano with your left hand.  I will show you the notes if you don't know them. Then you would just play ideas based on that triad, as well as the scale from C to C (all the white nots on the piano) with your right hand. Every phrase should end in a C. There, you are improvising!  

Now, you would be doing this for a while until you felt you could improvise over the C triad. You will notice that you have found certain cadences to end each phrase, like EDC or GEC.  Now, I will ask you to notice how you want naturally to play phrases that answer each other.  You have invented the question answer structure, which you probably already know. You will notice too that you are playing in a certain rhythm, and the phrases will take up the same number of beats. Set a timer and improvise over C for 10 minutes. You will have ideas you like and others you don't. You will get bored and so will have to invent something not so boring, or you will find something you like a lot and delve into that.   

I never said I could teach you to improvise well, or that your ideas would be great or compelling or original. Right now, you just want them to make musical sense, and they do: they end in a logical way, they have a parallel structure. There is logic and symmetry. There is melody, because melody is just movement in the right hand of any type. Notice that you can have simplistic melodies or ones that are slightly not so simplistic. This second step is just noticing what you are doing and how easy it is. You already knew how to improvise before you started. You just didn't know you knew. 

Now, I would show you that this works in D Dorian. Play DFA in the left hand. Play phrases from D to D on the white notes and make your phrases end on D.  Now, you could do the same in A minor.  Play a G triad, and then add the F to the left hand. That is a G7. Improvise over that.  

The next step is to play a chord progression, using the four chords you know.  You can do DGCC, or CADG. All the rest is just adding new chords to what you know, and doing all of this in other keys.  

  

 

 

Multi billion-dollar industries

Just saying. A "billion-dollar industry" is $3 a person. (US population is a third of a billion.) So practically everything is a multi-billion dollar industry, except for writing poetry, say, or wildly unpopular genres like jazz. People who throw around this phrase a lot are not really thinking about it very much.     

Don't do this

 This is not a big deal; even otherwise good interviewees do this, but don't greet every interview question with "That's an excellent question." There are a few problems with this:

*It sounds insincere.  If the question is a boilerplate "tell me about your dissertation" kind of question, then there is nothing "excellent" about it, and everyone in the room knows it.   

*It is mechanical, as though someone had learned that this is the thing you had to say, every time.

*It sounds a bit immature, professionally speaking, to do this excessively.  

It is ok to acknowledge a question after a job talk is if it truly excellent, but don't say that after every single question. Then you are not distinguishing between great and average and even poor questions, but simply covering your bases. If it is really a perceptive question, then you can something say, "I like that question because it gets to one of the things I had to work out at a turning point in my research." Then, answer the question in a way that makes your compliment to the questioner sincere.  

Asking a good question is also an art form. You can ask someone to elaborate on a point they mentioned in the talk. I'm not fond of questions that try to bring it back to the questioner's own obsessions. (I've been guilty of this, I'm sure.)  Or ones that don't really have much to do with speaker's main point. The point of a question is to let the speaker talk about their stuff off the cuff in an engaging way.