Yet He Placed Brick Upon Brick

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montaigne_Essais_Manuscript.jpg

The beginning of Montaigne's "Of Friendship":

"Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way.  He chooses the fairest place and middle of any wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques, which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes.  And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?                 

"Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne."            

["A fair woman in her upper form terminates in a fish."           --Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 4.]  

In this second part I go hand in hand with my painter; but fall very short of him in the first and the better, my power of handling not being such, that I dare to offer at a rich piece, finely polished, and set off according to art."

"To put one brick upon another"

http://www.2torialblog.com/

To put one brick upon another,
Add a third and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.

But to sit with bricks around you
While the winds of heaven bawl
Weighing what you should or can do,
Leaves no doubt of it at all.

Philip Larkin

Friend and colleague D recited this from memory today.

The Commonplace Book as Essay/Assay

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montaigne-Dumonstier.jpg

I started reading Montaigne's essays, in the context of a two-week exercise done with others, so I know I won't stop until these two weeks are up. The structure will help me not to flag.

Montaigne was a proto-blogger, of the mind-cast variety. Each essay is really a little anthology of related anecdotes, drawn together into a category (e.g., people worrying about their bodies or their reputaitons after they're dead.). Montaigne's own commentary is brief, often inserted in a later edition, and often at odds with the spirit of the anecdotes. So far (I've only barely begun) the genius seems to be in the curating: the individual anecdotes each is charged with meaning.

Is "still" a diphthong?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Perfect_fourth_on_C.png

High school-age students tend more toward generalization, and have to be reminded to get specific, and I sometimes worry that I'm hurrying them into adulthood when I tell them, as I do constantly, that specifics make their work more informative and persuasive.

But when do specifics become minutiae? In a recent recording session, people discuss whether the word still is a diphthong; whether a fourth can ever, physically, be perfectly in tune.

One thing I do if my attention wavers during such a discussion is remind myself that I can imagine that many comments we make on our singing ("just a touch slower") can be translated in my mind to an amorous realm, in a way very similar to the way one can read a fortune cookie (as people used to do) and insert the words "in bed" after the fortune, thus making the fortune much less insipid.

grammar

http://www.amazon.com/Warriners-English-Grammar-Composition-Course/dp/0153118822

a later edition of one of the grammar books of my youth

My son, who is teaching grammar to eighth graders, calls and tells me that he has decided to do verbals with his students after all. He asks, in the sentence "He wants to survive," is it better to think of the infinitive "to survive" as a direct object, or to think of it as an adverb modifying "want"? I opine that it's a direct object, and give my reasoning. This mini-event makes me happy.

"Quiet is Freedom" by Kenneth Maue

http://www.lrn.usace.army.mil/op/cen/rec/

While looking for Maue's Water in the Lake, I found a PDF of an article he wrote about silence. I found it pleasurable, as I have had some of the same reactions to the kind of silence he is talking about, and it's nice to find kindred spirits; admirable, because he is articulate about this kind of silence in a way that I have never been; and possibly important, theoretically, in its argument that silence of the kind he's talking may indeed aid people in getting along and functioning in a more equal, democratic way, such that the erosion of this kind of silence in our culture may have important consequences. The link:

http://interact.uoregon.edu/Medialit/WFAE/library/articles/maue_quiet_freedom.pdf

The Aleatoric

http://www.serenapowers.com/dice.html

The aleatoric appeals to me and has been part of a project I've been doing with one of my classes lately. The following is the beginning of the Wikipedia article on "aleatory" (the link to "potentiality" leads to a discussion of Aristotle, in case you were wondering, as I was):

"Aleatoricism is the creation of art by chance, exploiting the principle of randomness.^{[citation needed]}The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice. It should not be confused with eitherimprovisation or indeterminacy.^[1]

An example of aleatory writing is the automatic writing of the French Surrealists involving dreams, et cetera. The French literary group Oulipo for example saw no merit in aleatory work and its members altogether eliminated chance and randomness from their writing, substitutingpotentiality as in Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems).^{[citation needed][clarification needed]}[edit]Literature

Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man tells the story of a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who, feeling bored and unfulfilled in life, starts making decisions about what to do based on a roll of a die.^{[citation needed]}.^[2]

Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his book The Virtual Muse.^[3]

a book unique as to genre

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?

There is no image of this book on the internet that I can find, and that's part of my point.

I have located my copy of Water in the Lake: Real Events for the Imagination, by Kenneth Maue, a unique book in my opinion. I occasionally have spasms of conscience about it: an out-of-town friend gave it to me, but did he give it, or lend it?--and I found it so useful that I never could bear to return it. At one point I realized, it's the age of the internet, there must be another copy somewhere for me to buy so that I can return this copy to my friend. Not that I've done it yet.

The book is full of exercises, activities in which groups collaborate in a playful, improvisatory way, creating structures that might be art of an ephemeral, performative kind, somewhere in between "aleatoric" and "potentiality," not like conventional improvisation (although improvisation depends on rules as these exercises do). The book is an odd treasure, one that very few know about, and I happen to be one of them.

If ability to focus is the issue . . .

http://www.free-scores.com/boutique/1448_Morten-Lauridsen_sheet_music.htm

(from the actual piece of music in question)

We are recording a CD. During a pause, I give an alto a shoulder massage--her shoulders have felt tense all evening, she has reported. A soprano, who is from England, remarks (obviously not objecting to this particular act of massage) that choirs in which group massages are the norm are not to her taste: "Suddenly a man whom one hardly knows is giving one a MASS-ozh" (English pronunication: heavy stress on the first syllable, which is pronounced like "mass," as in the approximate syllable for weight).

We get back to singing, and it's the hardest song we're doing, and it's at the song's emotional peak, and all I can think about is the soprano's funny remark about the MASS-ozh.

I think to myself, I may be too ADD to take part in a recording. But I persist.

memory v. ability to focus

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/category/the-internet/

"David Dalrymple, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,thinks human memory will no longer be the key repository of knowledge, and focus will supersede erudition. Quote:

Ignacio Rodriguez

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally."

From Edge via The Daily Dish via

http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/the-age-of-external-knowledge/

Organizational Schemes

http://sdotg.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

A young friend has been blogging, most entertainingly, and organizing her posts around her daily commute to work by bus (from Manhattan to somewhere in New Jersey).

Another friend has started work on a memoir based on food, and at the moment is organizing her memories on foods in alphabetical order.

The alphabetical approach to organizing material I find attractive. It removes the pressure of plotting, but there's still the slightest narrative pulse provided by the fact that the alphabet has a beginning and an end. Our brains will find pleasure in narrative even from the most meager elements. Maybe our nostalgia for a time when learning the alphabet and learning words as children is part of the appeal. The bus-organization scheme doesn't have even the beginning-middle-end structure that the alphabet has, but even that somehow is enough of a narrative frame.

poem in the form of a sonata

http://www.classical-composers.org/img/guidi_score_sonata1.jpg

I've just discovered, via a student, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "Sonata." It's funny, super-smart yet accessible, cagey, moving; and as a love poem, unique. The rhymes thrill me, not because they are surprising but because they are are so skillful and assured, as if English weren't a language challenging to rhyme in:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177964

this is me

photo taken by a Facebook friend at the Brooklyn Museum; she tagged it as being me.

I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity.

--a Facebook friend's status description.

I didn't know there was a name for it

http://www.french-places.com

Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome, Hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome, is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.

from wikipedia

Rhyming Exercise

http://en.easyart.com/art-prints/artists/William-Holmes-Sullivan-11487.html

I wish that Mark

were the Noah of my Ark

(or is that “I think that Mark

is the Noah of my Ark”?

Is that hyperbole?)

I’m terribly

grateful

it’s my fate, full

many times a year,

to hear

his King Lear-

like fulminations

and illuminations

cut with the humor of Lear’s fool,

very cool;

cut, too, with a triumphant and consistent kind of

love--

sent by email,

never stale.

an endless beautiful comic strip

"http://0-www.aucklandcity.govt.nz.www.elgar.govt.nz

John Ashbery said reading the Faerie Queene was like reading an endless beautiful comic strip." Kenneth Koch

quoted at uspoetsabroad@wordpress.com

a pleasant lifestyle

http://harperjohn0.tripod.com (Beerbohm cartoon of Matthew Arnold)

"Max Beerbohm once wittily remarked that the only thing wrong with the life of a poet is figuring out how to spend the other 23 and a half hours of the day. What’s wrong with life for the rest of us is perhaps to be found in that missing 30 minutes each day."

John S. O'Connor, one of the current bloggers at

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

from a friend and former student

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/Public2/About/AnAmericanParadox/index.cfm

from www.unitedstatesartists.org:

A country that loves art, not artists
In a survey of attitudes toward artists in the U.S. a vast majority of Americans, 96%, said they were greatly inspired by various kinds of art and highly value art in their lives and communities. But the data suggests a strange paradox.

While Americans value art, the end product, they do not value what artists do. Only 27% of respondents believe that artists contribute "a lot" to the good of society.

Further interview data from the study reflects a strong sentiment in the cultural community that society does not value art making as legitimate work worthy of compensation. Many perceive the making of art as a frivolous or recreational pursuit.

From the political and cultural perspectives, this seems like a valuable thing to report. I'm thinking about the psychological perspective, or the consciousness-related perspective: it's strange that people can have such contrary perspectives at the same time, and about such pervasive phenenoma as the arts.

Plot Idea

http://mrpeacockstyle.blogspot.com/2009/09/eccentric-talentdavid-hockney.html

High school boy gets to know girl who embodies all the wisdom and and warmth of the author Ursula LeGuin; if there were a deity who represented, in looks and every other way, LeGuin's oeuvre, that's who this girl would be, only she's probably a mortal, not a deity. He also gets to know a girl who embodies all the brightness, the melancholy beauty, and the jazziness of the author Wallace Stevens. He pursues them maybe they pursue him, nothing gets consummated, because I've been reading Henry James (The Awkward Age).

The Problem, Or Not

http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sunrise/50-00-1/ar-mclk7.htm

"One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another." Keats, quoted in "Undermining Keats," a review of Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, in The NYR of Books, December 17, 2009.