Stolen Time

One technique I use is to steal time. For example, I am supposed to be working on revising the NEH grant, but instead I am taking the morning to work on the six Lorca lectures. Thus I get two advantages: it is always easier to work on something that is a side project, ignoring what you are supposed to be doing.  At the same time, the stolen time is also productive. The third or fourth book on Lorca will be the lectures, and the music book will still get written.

Lorca and Me
Lorca par Lui-Même
Modernism and the Death of the Subject
The Avant-Garde Dramatist
The American Reception
The Musical Imagination

Authoritative

I like writing in the voice of someone who knows that he's saying, but addresses the reader as an intellectual equal.

So one can avoid the problem of faux-humility, having to over-qualify things that should obvious, hedging every statement in fifteen different ways.

But if the reader is an intellectual equal, then the writer does not condescend either.  Arrogance is equally avoidable.  It's not: t"his is what I know and you'll never understand the half of it," but, "this is what I've found, and you can do the same thing I'm doing." This is coming from my re-reading of Turner and Thomas, Clear and Simple as the Truth.

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I find myself becoming more conservative in this respect.  My politics have not changed per se. I am opposed to Trump and all he represents. But the idiocy of much of the forms that the opposition to Trump takes gives me pause. Surely the answer is not narcissistic identity politics.

But anyway, in academic terms I am conservative in that I like the theology of the classic style more than academic modes of over-qualification and specialized writing. I recognize that this theology is fiction that allows the work to be done. In this sense, I practice the classic style a bit ironically, and probably imperfectly as well.

An end run

By putting the "death of the subject" chapter in my book of Lorca lectures, I no longer have to write the "death of the subject" book on Lorca. At the same time, I can write two books on Lorca for the tetralogy.  Lorca: The Musical Imagination and Six Lectures on Lorca. That will complete the tetralogy and my career as a Lorca scholar.  I'd like to do the lecture book as a podcast.  !!!  Been discussing it with Thomas.

So much in writing is managing your own emotions. I have been noticing this with piano playing: how my goal has to be an emotional one: to establish a relaxed and positive relationship to the instrument. To do that with woodworking would be another step. I feel intimidated just walking into the hardware store.

Playback

Barthes says that when he records himself playing piano, and listens back, he can hear the composer himself, whereas listening to other recordings by virtuosi players he hears the performer, not the composer. He is not bragging about his pianistic skill, but saying that his own amateur recording corresponds to the way he hears the music in his head.  I feel the same way.  As long as the recording has no wrong notes, the recording is pretty much the way I understand and interpret the piece. I might not be good, but it is still my interpretation.

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This is the kind of insight from "theory" that I value. Let's contrast that with the kind of understanding of "theory" that uses a buzzword in a non-explanatory way.  

The Blackmail of Theory

Barthes talks about this in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The avant-garde text that is written to serve theory, and that thus the theorist (like Barthes) is blackmailed into accepting.  Of course he doesn't!  By denouncing this kind of text he is saying that the avant-garde text cannot be written to order. The avant-garde must come first, not be written by someone who has read a theory of the avant-garde.

One door opens another

The idea is that doing one thing, like building a chopping board, opens up other possibilities that are unforeseen.  You have to go through that one door first, then you will be somewhere else and other things will become manifest as possible. You don't know in advance what those other things will be.

For example: playing piano = writing a book about Lorca and music.