Thoughts on Art & Fear: 1

Posted on by Dale

I have begun rereading Art & Fear, by Bayles and Orland. If you have not read this book, stop reading this blog and do not rest until you have your own copy in your hands. Do not borrow it, do not check it out of a library. Buy it. You need it.

My Lichtenbergian nature will not let me plunge directly into the artmaking that I have promised to do. I must have something to distract, to postpone. Cras melior est. So here’s the first of personal responses to my reading.

Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue, or more precisely, have learned how to not quit. [p. 9]

That’s what I like about this book: it states what is obvious once it’s been stated. Learning “not to quit” seems like a truism, a statement so clearly true that it needs no explanation, like “the sun rises in the east,” or “Dick Cheney is the embodiment of evil.”

In my Arts Speech, I make the equally unassailable case that not only do all children in every culture constantly draw, sing, dance, and pretend without let, so did all of us. Why is it that some of us, most of us in our culture, stopped?

In my own case, I know that I never did. I never stopped creating. So why is learning “not to quit” an issue for me?

For me, the answer lies in a subsequent statement in the book: “Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.” It’s not that I believe necessarily that the next painting is doomed, or the next composition, but I know that I am more than likely facing a series of small, unrelenting disasters. I know that when I’m finished, the painting or the music will work just fine and in fact will probably be better than I first thought. It’s just that all the successive approximation I am going to have to hack my way through is just another way of saying, “Oh look, another failure” over and over and over.

That’s tiresome, and it’s no wonder that I fear it. For one thing, I have to assure myself that I have time to hack my way through the mini-failures on the way to success. I am not, at this point, a person who can just drop into the Flow. It takes a while for me to unhook the split focus that comes from sitting down to work when I know that any minute I’m going to be called back into the Real World to Pay Attention to Something. If I don’t sense that I have a sufficient block of time to go past the boundaries of everyday life into what Dissanayake calls the “liminal phase,” then I hesitate, fearfully, even to start the process.

A part of this is not having a space permanently set up for my activities, so that if I choose to compose, I have to clear a space on the desk for the keyboard, get out the score paper, etc., etc. If I want to paint, I have to set up all my painting crap, and since I’ve started using the labyrinth as my studio, it means hauling it all to the back yard, and then saving enough time to break it all down.

I know, that’s foolish, and one of the good things about this Summer Off is that I will be able to set up a regular schedule and have my space set up for that schedule. I think probably that I will compose in the mornings, because I can do that with my coffee; and paint in the afternoons, despite the heat.

To be continued…

Musing & planning

Posted on by Dale

People have assumed, with reason, that my separation from GHP this summer must be emotionally trying for me.

It’s not. From the moment I decided last summer that I needed a break, I have not had second thoughts. I awoke one morning a couple of weeks ago from a dream about the opening meetings during preplanning that caused a twinge, but this past week, as I helped everyone get the program up and running, I had no regrets nor waves of bittersweet nostalgia.

On the contrary, it was a very good eight days, omitting always the glitches that recur every year no matter what we do to try to prevent them. I was happy to see all the returning staff and to meet the new ones. I discovered the pleasures of CJ’s Pub & Pool. The students arrived on Sunday, and it was as marvelous as always. “Good,” I thought, “the kids are here. But they’re not my kids.” And I was totally OK with that.

It was very odd driving out of the campus and passing West Hall as I left Tuesday morning. There was a sense that I was not supposed to be doing that, that strands of my being were being pulled back towards the campus. And of course being at GHP is like the best dramedy series ever, so I felt as if I were turning off the TV in the middle of an episode: you always want to know what happens next.

But that soon passed, and it wasn’t even a major twinge, to be honest. No, my decision to stay in my labyrinth this summer was the right one, and now I’m getting ready to do all those things I said I would do.

It was with some alarm, therefore, that I looked at the calendar in the kitchen this morning and realized that it seemed that many days were taken up with out-of-town duties (some back at GHP), which would preclude my getting any work done at all.

I have exactly seven weeks before I have to report for preplanning at school. Of those forty-nine days, ten are unavailable as work days. (Four more days I’m out of town, but I’m with my painting teacher from GHP: she’s going to teach me all those things I failed to learn forty years ago.)

That leaves thirty-nine days to do my work. I should probably do a daily post cataloging in boring detail what I accomplished each day. It won’t interest you, necessarily, but it will help keep me focused. We’ll call it Summer Countdown. Unless you can suggest a better name for the series in the comments.

I’ve already emailed the director of the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra to ask if it’s OK for me to include some solo work in our piece, and a piano if we provide the pianist, and he’s already responded affirmatively to both. My plan, in case I haven’t said, is to work up five fragmentary sketches so that he can choose which one would be most interesting and most playable, and then I’ll compose that piece.

Of course, I’ll also have four other sketches that I can eventually turn into full pieces, so that’s all to the good.

Also yesterday I did a couple of sketches, just to keep going with that project. Mike will be glad to know that they actually look like him. Either I’m getting better or Mike is just easier to draw.

So there we are.

Nostalgia

Posted on by Dale

[Note: I wrote this a week ago. I just now got internet access.]

Today I bought an expensive bottle of Champagne and at the end of the day gathered my friends Marcie, Daniel, and Mike around me in the lobby of Brown Hall to make a toast to commemorate my first day at Governor’s Honors, forty years ago today.

I asked them to salute with me the program that for nearly fifty years has changed so many lives, and to honor all those who have come before us who have sustained it, as well as those who will come after us, come what may.

On the way down to Valdosta, Mike and I stopped by Wesleyan College in Macon, where the seventh GHP occurred. I asked his indulgence as we parked and walked all around the campus. I took photos everywhere — the main building with its arcade, the fountain, the long walk — my dorm down by the lake — the faculty dorm — the dining hall — the infirmary — the auditorium — the art building.

All those ghosts of memories, so many lost to my fading brain, but so many that still remain–and above all, the conviction that what happened there on that campus during those eight weeks altered who I am forever, and for the better.

I remember people: Forrest, Jason, Melissa — what an impact they had on me, letting me see that I was not a freak, or that if I was, there were other, wonderful, exciting freaks out there with me. The hours we spent walking around our summer city, or lying on the grass and talking talking talking laughing and talking.

The boy on my hall who was the fantastic flutist, better than I had ever dreamed of being and certainly better than anyone I had ever heard before. The girl in painting class who was so good at everything we did. The boy who played the organ in the auditorium during breakfast before classes started — and we would sneak in to listen to him practice.

The music students that composed incidental music for the three theatre productions, including a rock musical version of Antigone for which I painted the signs of the Zodiac on the stage floor. My fellow theatre minors, working on improvised scenes that veered between surreal and maudlin and witty. Playing last chair flute in the band as we hurtled through the Overture to Candide.

Donovan’s “Atlantis” on the jukebox in the snack bar and the resonance it suddenly had for us. The awful food in the dining hall. My science major roommate who for some reason sneered at the size of my family–how would we pay for college for so many children — but then had the good manners to apologize when we received our test scores on the Ohio Psych and I outclassed him by seven percentile points.

The hippie-dippie creativity assignments from Dianne Mize, our painting teacher, mimeographed epistles of instructions which I dutifully tried to do, although without any real grasp of the tools she was handing me. The day she looked at my sketch book and forbade me to “design” anything else for the rest of the summer. The battle over the nude, which she was smart enough to realize that the way to win was to give me back that dreadful painting and make me realize how bad it was.

The late night walk Forrest and I took with Mize, talking about art and life and the universe — God knows what nonsense he and I were spouting or what wisdom she tried to impart to us — and realizing that we were out past curfew. Ms. Mize had to escort us to the dorm and try to explain our absence to the dragon lady dorm mother.

The French major who played flute next to me and who I showed the musical score collection in the library. She and I were playing through the 4th Brandenburg together when I seized the opportunity at a page turn to kiss her, my first.

The concert at which the string players were playing the 3rd Brandenburg and I was gobsmacked to realize that they were leaving out the third violin part — because I was following along with the score in the audience. (Years later, at a GHP planning weekend, I told that story at lunch with fellow teachers. Buddy Huthmaker said, “That was me. I was the string teacher.” Then he told a story from that same year about the weird kid who was such a gifted physical comic in the last night skits, and I got to say right back at him, “That was me.”)

Running up the aisle of the auditorium that last night, pumped at the huge audience response to my theatre minor team’s collection of gags and puns, searching for Dianne Mize, and feeling a little hurt when she said, “Have you considered pursuing theatre?” (Six years later, in the bookstore at UGA, one week before I graduated with a BFA in theatre, I was able to tell Dianne Mize, whom I had not seen in five years, that I had taken her advice.)

Not being able to get into the car the next morning to go home, but running here and there to make one last goodbye, to people, to places, to that world we had created and which now was vanishing before my eyes. And being unable to uncurl from a racked, sobbing knot in the back seat of the car all the way home, unable to bear that pain.

Awakening, later, truly awakening, and realizing that I was now seeing the world with different eyes. The world was different because I was different, and that all of who I was or ever would be was because of the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. It is more than I can comprehend, and certainly more than I deserve.

Hm.

Posted on by Dale

I awoke at 4:10 this morning, my brain awhirl. It seems that the reality of the summer began to click with me. It’s all been rather Promised-Land-like, a hazy summer of sitting in the labyrinth, sipping Xtabentun and painting, or shambling up to the study to knock out another dozen measures or so on the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra piece. The countdown app on the iPhone still has another 10 days and 1 hour until my actual summer begins.

But yesterday it occurred to me that it would be necessary at some point today to pack for my eight-day stay in Valdosta starting tomorrow, and I guess that set off my reality alarms.

In my state of semi-sleep, I was surprised to find myself observing some events from this coming week with what was almost a frisson of sadness. You would think that would include the arrival of the students next Sunday, but mostly it was images of the staff meetings on Friday and Saturday that gave me pause. I think perhaps it’s the “drawing of the circle” nature of this week that affects me, both in actual execution and in the prospect of missing it.

It’s not that I’ve gone maudlin on myself. I have absolutely no regrets about taking the summer off, other than that I’ll not be able to stand in front of an audience of parents and say, “Forty years ago, my parents sat where you sit today.” That would have been cool. No, I needed a break, and I have work to do. But it will not do, either, to try to deny that I have given up something that is one of the most wonderful things on the planet, howsoever temporarily.

At any rate, I’m awake way earlier than I needed to be. Might as well blog.

A scathingly brilliant idea

Posted on by Dale

In a dream last night, I had a scathingly brilliant idea. For real. Let’s see if I can remember it.

It’s called STAMP, and that stands for Standard Time, Alarm, and Map Protocol. Here’s my thinking: every gizmo, every application that schedules events or alarms could encode a bit a packet of metadata, the STAMP, that could be recognized and used by every other gizmo or application for its own purposes.

Essentially, every scheduling application does this now, but the STAMP would be the bedrock that would allow the communication between different flavors.

For example, if I sent out an invitation to gather in the labyrinth at 8:00 tonight, and the STAMP included data about travel time, I’d set that to 0. But when Kevin got it and sent it to iCal, it would use whatever GPS was available to it to reset that to 15 minutes. (Heaven knows what Mike would get.)

I can see how if I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled and forgot about it and decided to drive up to Atlanta instead, my iPhone would keep upping that drive time until finally my distance away from PAPP Clinic intersected with the necessary time to drive back, and the alert that would have gone off at 3:45 goes off at 3:15 instead, giving me enough time to get back.

Other kinds of things that STAMP might include would be due dates/times, alerts (multiple, perhaps), etc.

I have no clue why I dreamed such a thing. Does it make any sense? I’ll try to remember other advantages of it if I can.

Sam Clemens

Posted on by Dale

I am also, via DailyLit.com, reading Who is Mark Twain?, by the same. It’s a collection of essays, etc., and this paragraph, from “Jane Austen,” made me laugh out loud:

Does Jane Austen do her work too remorselessly well? For me, I mean? Maybe that is it. She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

Middlemarch

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Through DailyLit.com, I have been reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I don’t know what I was expecting, because, honestly, the only thing I’ve ever heard about it was how wonderful it was. I’ve never read any of her other stuff, save Silas Marner of course, so I had nothing on which to base any preconceptions. (I didn’t even read the blurb on the sign-up page.)

It is highly amusing and highly entertaining. I did not expect at all a comedy of manners. Of course, I can see the seeds of high tragedy as well, so the suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

I highly recommend it.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Posted on by Dale

I just had a transcendent experience listening, to all things, Prof. Peter Schickele.

My iTunes had selected 1712 Overture and other musical assaults to amuse itself with, and I was only half listening to Bach Portrait, which Schickele wrote for the tricentennial of J. S. Bach’s birth in 1985. It is a hysterical (of course) parody of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, with majestic music interspersed with quotations from writings from the great man, tagged with the phrase “And this is what he said.”

Only with Bach, it was from his letters to his employers, constantly carping about his pay in escalatingly specific terms. The portrait is overwhelmingly of an underpaid, embattled, and cantankerous artist. We surely know what he felt like and what that kind of situation can do to our creativity.

Finally, Schickele narrates, “Johann Sebastian Bach, umpteenth musician of the Bach family, is everlasting in the memory of music lovers. For, surrounded by adversaries, this is what he said. He said:” and then Schickele starts to sing the melody from “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in its entirety.

And all you can do is weep in gratitude and awe, knowing that what any artist “says” is largely unrelated to the travails of his quotidian existence.

Rant

Posted on by Dale

Today at school we received one of those forwarded emails that are ludicrous on their face but which a certain portion of the population treats as gospel. It was this one, about the U.S. Mint removing the slogan “In God We Trust” from the new dollar coin.

IT HAS BEGUN! the email shrieks, and the person who sent it to the whole faculty prefaced it with “I know at least one of you will go to Snopes, and it has already checked out.”

Well, I can take stuff as personally as the next Teabagger, so with narrowed eyes and wrinkled lip I headed straight to Snopes, where of course the entire email is reproduced in its entirety and debunked as completely false. Quel surprise. I replied to all, which is what I always do. I never, but one day I’m going to, say, “I dare you to forward this!!!1!1!”

I also did not write nor send the following email:

Dear troops:

This is ridiculous. Every single one of these emails y’all forward so breathlessly is FALSE. Every. Single. One.

Has it not occurred to you that you are being lied to? That someone is lying to you? For reasons of their own? And those reasons include keeping you riled up, angry, outraged at what “they” are doing to “our” country?

I cannot be the only person on this campus with a BS detector. For Moloch’s sake, people, we are educators, and it behooves us to be more skeptical than it seems many of us are. You should immediately question any email that comes to you that contains anything that is “outrageous.” Because, as I’ve already stated: Not. One. Of. Them. Is. True…. Ever.

More than that, you should be teaching our students to be just as skeptical as you are. Hell, you should be teaching them to be as skeptical as I am. That is our job as educators in a free nation.

The people who create these emails are counting on your being gullible idiots. I don’t know who they are (although I have suspicions) and I don’t know what they want you to buy or vote for (although I have suspicions), but I know they want you to buy or to vote for something. And they’re willing to lie to you to keep you outraged enough to do it. The only question now is, how gullible an idiot are you?

Cheers,

Dale

Thank you, dear reader, for listening.

Grayson update

Posted on by Dale

Grayson and Ginny got home yesterday from Greensboro, and I am relieved to report that his face is mending nicely. Still stitched up, and still clearly the result of a horrific accident, but the swelling is down and daily it gets more normal looking. Nothing to worry about.

We can go back to the natural order of things, harassing him about getting a job.