Act of God

 There was a video with Joe Pass saying his talent was God-given, etc... 

There's another one where he explains how he learned to play: he would listen to a Charlie Parker solo for hours in order to replicate it perfectly, and then do another, another after that, etc... with many solos by many players of various instruments.  He wouldn't just learn guitar solos.  

Let's say that both perspectives are valid from the point of view of the player, and there is no actual contradiction between being given a gift and putting in a superhuman effort to make that gift something real.  Maybe the gift is just sitting down and doing it for hours at a time for many years.   

They asks Ron Carter about his bass influences. He said his influence was a trombone player, J.J. Johnson, getting that agility moving from note to note efficiently while seeming to move the slide very little. Johnson was trying to play on a brass instrument with the grace agility of a saxophone, not emulate other trombone players. I think Roy Eldridge on the trumpet was trying to play like Coleman Hawkins, not other trumpet players.  

A movie dream

 I had a kind of disturbing dream.  It wasn't happening to me; it was more of a movie I was watching. A man was attacked and had to kill his two attackers. It was at a school where his daughters studied, but it happened off hours. I will spare you graphic details. I knew there were twenty minutes left in the movie, in which the police would interrogate the man. It wasn't clear whether he would be accused or not.  

I awoke with some relief that it was only a dream / only a movie and didn't concern me directly, though somehow I was the protagonist of the narrative, at one remove.  

I got another email from the pretentious poet

 It was similar but not identical to the first one.  There was no acknowledgment of my unenthusiastic response to his first message.  I'm not sure if the poems he is sending me now are different or the same from the mediocre ones he sent me last time.  It kind of feels like a joke or an AI thing. I'm not sure even if this person exists. Probably he or it is sending these messages to many people. Some new kind of spam?  

So this time I won't respond at all.  

A dream

 I was walking near some docks, and the memory came to me of having worked there. I remembered some nasty union officials and company bosses, and co-workers who nicknamed me "college boy" or "college." I was skeptical because it didn't fit in with anything I remembered or with my self-image. 

As I woke up I thought about other situations in which the dream world had a kind of self-consistency, as though it were a world that existed. One in which there was some kind of summer work and a particular bus to take to get to a coastal resort.  

A first?

 Alice Notley notes that when she was writing poems about being pregnant and then a young mother and taking care of kids, etc... that that kind of poetry, based on that experience, had never been written before. I'm not going to dispute that because what matters is her perception of this. She is probably right, and any counter example would be the exception that proves the rule.  

I mentioned that Cummings poem about Buffalo Bill is the first poem ever about the death of a pop culture celebrity.  I can't prove that either, and if someone has an earlier example I would stand corrected.  

Another first might be Keats' "This living hand, now capable of earnest grasping...."  This is the first poem I know that has that quality of emotional rawness to it. It's not even in other Keats poems. 

Of course, once you see that, you can go back and find precursors to any thing that seems to be a "first," like Borges's precursors of Kafka. Kafka is a first: there is not that particular feeling in literature before that.  

That would seem to be the important thing, because all the archetypes have always existed, the narrative structures of quest or homecoming, the particular rhythms of plots with up and down movements, problems being posed and resolved. You can't be original with that, but new kinds of feeling can come into being.  You can have the -esque of Kafkaesque.  (And I don't mean the Kafka cliché, but the feeling one gets from it.).  

What are some other firsts?  I associate this with writers who "cut through" and identify new forms of feeling, make them recognizable.  

What's wrong with this?

I was looking at this report:  

https://worldhumanitiesreport.org/report/

The humanities are a resource of critical analysis and interpretation. At the same time, this report reveals a tension between the humanities understood as core practices of national identity formation, imperialism, and dominance, and the humanities understood as the critical global humanities: resources through which nationalism, imperialism, and dominance have been questioned, analyzed, dissected, and displaced."

What's wrong with this?  

Monk Project

 I have a Monk project. consisting of learning as many tunes as possible. I know Bemsha Swing very well, and have learned Friday the 13th as well.  I purchased the Monk fake book and am working from there but listening to records as well.  My next tune is North of the Sunset, a blues in Bb.  A lot of the tunes are not in difficult keys.  

I will learn a ballad, Ruby my Dear, always one of my favorites.  

The nice thing about Friday the 13th is that is seems almost impossible to play wrong notes when improvising over it.  Yes, I can play "wrong notes," but I almost have to try to play things that won't fit. I tried the method of soloing over it with one note, using all twelve possible notes.  Some notes are more difficult to use, some easier, but it is a spectrum, not an absolute dichotomy.  

I use different methods of improvisation.  For example, a chorus of only very short phrases. Another of long phrases, then one mixing long and short.  Play only quarter notes, only quarter note triplets, only half notes, etc... Solo using only two notes, only three notes.  Use only the notes of the chord. Use mostly scalar movement, use mostly arpeggios.  Start every phrase on the and of 1.  

The goal of this project?  This will be revealed to me later.  Aside from the obvious purpose: to spend time with Monk and make friends and influence people.