Gang of 15

Your Choice

Suppose you can't draw, or play the piano.  That, essentially, is your own choice.  If you would like to draw, or play, you can choose do to that, and at the level you want. This does not mean that you will be Leonardo or Art Tatum, or be able to win a game against Federer. What it means is that you get to decide what you want to commit to.

We are told that so much is beyond our choice, and that is true. But everything that is our choice, is the source of enormous power.

The Book

If I wanted to publish a book of poems, I would / could do it. It would involve putting effort into that, on a regular basis, and not giving up. The reason I have not done this is that I have not put effort into it consistently enough, and the reason for this is that I have given priority to academic projects. It doesn't have much to do with not being a good poet, because actually I am, or of not writing poems, which I do. I'm assuming that most poets are bad anyway, and that most books of poems are crap, so that this is not the issue at all. In other words, even if I were among the crappiest poets alive, that should not be an obstacle.  When I have tried, I have not been successful, but that is because I tried to do it rather than actually doing it. We only use the verb try when we make insufficient effort.  

The book of poems assumes different shapes at different times in my life, and there may be more than one book that I could publish.

The significant thing here is to take responsibility for the fact that I haven't published. If I directed attention in that direction, it would happen.  

Past selves

Imagine we could go back and tell our past selves something. So we could go back and avoid some mistake we were going to make. We think this is impossible because of the nature of time, only flowing in one direction and all that, but is that the real problem? We cannot listen now to our past selves either, very well. There are certain things we knew as children that we can no longer hear very well. For example, we know as adults that we have lost something, but we can easily attribute that to our superior wisdom as adults, and discount what that child-self knew. If we could really retain that knowledge we would be irritating Peter Pans, always insisting on not losing the magical view of the child. What could be more tiresome and grotesque than that?

The real problem, though, is that we cannot even listen to what our present self is telling us. This present self that could go back and tell the past self what to do, cannot even do this in the present.  

100 rejections

I've had some rejections, including one very discouraging one, but then some things that worked out to, to the tune of $16,000 dollars so far. I've had many poems rejected, to the point that I don't even feel those as rejections at all. (Applied for some internal things in the university that will give me some extra cash for the next three years.).

 I applied to be Associate Dean for Research. I might not get that, but I can just count it toward my 100 rejections. I applied for a conference, got accepted, and then decided I shouldn't go because it seemed slightly off in the way it was being organized.

The rejection therapy project is a kind of dumb thing, but I am modifying it to make it work for me. The way it was proposed was to ask strangers for dumb things, like asking them whether you can photograph yourself playing soccer in their back yards.  I'm not doing to do that.

The 3 musicalities

The first musicality is simply to see the poem as a song lyric.  There is nothing simple about it, but just consider that, functionally, that is what the text is, in this particular case, that it doesn't have much existence out of that context.  We could print the lyric and appreciate its craft, but we never forget that it is a song lyric.

The second musicality is the poem's prosody. This might be a secondary effect of the fact that it was written to be sung, or that it is written in a poetic form identical to that of song lyrics. Here, though, we see that text as musical in its own right, not simply because it happens to be a lyric.  With this case, paradoxically, singing the text might override the subtle effects of the versification, running roughshod over the poet's art. Or, a good setting might respond to that prosody, bringing it out in subtle ways.  

The third musicality is musicality as metaphor for poetics. Here we could distinguish between a merely conventional use of the metaphor, and a deeper poetics. The merely conventional reference to a poem as song-like, or the poet as singer, is simply a nod of the head to that musical connection, but may not involve anything deeper than that.

Update on blind rhythm changes

I've added two elements to blindfolded rhythm changes. One, to do the same thing with my own composition, improvising on it until I can improvise on it successfully, and secondly, to do the same thing on "Don't Blame Me." The idea is not to get stale, and not to learn improvisation in only one key. At some point there will be a breakthrough, in which the improv in these other tunes will be as good as in rhythm changes.

On the classical front, I played one of the Mompou "Música callada" series for my teacher, and she said it was very good, in very specific ways that she could tell me. She is not one for empty praise so I knew that she meant it, and of course she still had suggestions. It feels very good to master a piece at this level. It is not difficult, but I couldn't have played any piece that well last fall.  

I've thought about my goal on the piano as getting to 80%.  But 80% of what?  If I can be at 10% but play well, within that limit, then that is like being at 100%.