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The Prelude

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

It’s Bach’s birthday (well, sort of), so I celebrated by playing the Prelude in C Major, my favorite piece for warming up on the piano. (It’s also the piece that pianist James Rhodes uses to teach beginners how to play.)

The alleged bomber blew himself up last night, and I thought today that I was going to sit down and blog about violence, about how hard I am trying to cleanse my house of violence, how violence is not just guns and bombs and knives and fists, but how many kinds of touch can be violent, how words can be violent, how you can stab your salad violently. How I’m not just trying to raise “gentlemen,” I’m trying to raise gentle men, men who have a full range of emotions and expression available to them. But it’s just so hard. Even if they’re home with me all day right now, I can’t protect them. They were born into a country steeped in violence. A country where killing machines are sold in convenience stores. A country that has a longtime habit of dropping bombs on innocent children just like them. A country that sees kids their age shot to death in classrooms and won’t do a thing about it.

The only thing I feel like I can do is make my home a haven, a place where we celebrate things of beauty and rationality and love and peace. Bach’s music is one of those things. James Rhodes went through unspeakably ugly things as a kid, and he has said when he heard Bach on a cassette tape, it “acted like a force field.” When I’m playing Bach, and when I’m listening to Bach being played, the world makes sense, if only briefly. After I play a Bach piece, I feel as though somebody has scrubbed my brain with a Brillo pad.

His music is so amazingly beautiful, but Bach didn’t grow up in some idyllic setting. Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who’s written a biography of Bach, says that previous Bach biographies have painted rosy portraits of the composer, not allowing that a mere human could create such heavenly works. But his research has turned up evidence that Bach grew up in a “thuggish world.” (Don’t we all?) Bach was able to do what all great artists do: take their pain and despair and channel it into works of such beauty and truth that they turn us away from our own despair and towards the light. Artists like Bach do us the greatest service of any true artist: they give us encouragement to keep living, to keep going.

The benefits of singing

Thursday, March 8, 2018

In Daniel Pink’s newest book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, he writes that “Choral singing might be the new exercise.”

Two years ago, Sarah Manguso wrote a letter of recommendation for singing in the choir:

…in a choir, I can make sound, focus the mind, enjoy myself and forget myself, all at once. There is an old choristers’ adage that goes, “When the music is marked forte, sing so you can hear yourself; when it’s marked piano, sing so you can hear the others.” After enough practice, you can learn to feel the vibration in your skull and tell by the sensation whether your pitch is right, your timbre true. It is a kind of listening without hearing. Perhaps this combination of experiences is as common as what psychologists call flow, a state of complete absorption in an activity.

I feel an additional pleasure, though, greater than flow, when I sing in a choir. It’s a mode of singing that strikes a balance between feeling necessary — each voice must participate to achieve the grand unified sound — and feeling invisible, absorbed into the choir, your voice no longer yours. I can work hard, listen hard and disappear, let the ocean of sound close over me. It is comforting to disappear into all that sound and to know that no one else will hear me, either. The performance feels like a secret.

A year before that Oliver Burkeman wrote in The Guardian:

Group singing is a perfect case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. For entirely non-magical reasons – such as the averaging out of flat and sharp voices – a choir can sound far better than its individual members’ talents might suggest. The result is self-transcendence: the thing only works on a level bigger than oneself. “As long as I’m singing,” writes Stacy Horn in Imperfect Harmony, her memoir of singing in a Manhattan amateur choir, “it’s as if I’m inhabiting another reality. I become temporarily suspended in a world where everything bad is bearable, and everything good feels possible.”

And way back in 2008, Brian Eno wrote:

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor….there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don’t for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Sing, sing, sing.

Write your own sequel

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

My kids and I are big fans of Jon Klassen’s hat trilogy. Our current favorite read is Triangle, his book with Mac Barnett. My 5-year-old was thrilled when I told him there’s going to be a sequel called Square, but when I told him it wasn’t out yet, he got so impatient that he decided he’d write his own sequel, Rectangle.

It reminded me of the Bradford Cox story in Steal Like An Artist:

Bradford Cox, a member of the band Deerhunter, says that when he was a kid he didn’t have the Internet, so he had to wait until the official release day to hear his favorite band’s new album. He had a game he would play: He would sit down and record a “fake” version of what he wanted the new album to sound like. Then, when the album came out, he would compare the songs he’d written with the songs on the real album. And what do you know, many of these songs eventually became Deerhunter songs.

When we love a piece of work, we’re desperate for more. We crave sequels. Why not channel that desire into something productive?

I posted the Cox story on Twitter and novelist Austin Grossman said of his book Soon I Will Be Invincible, “I got tired of waiting for a Watchmen sequel so I wrote one.”

Tired of waiting on a sequel? Write your own and see where it goes.

PS. My 2-year-old hasn’t drawn a sequel yet, but he is working on fan art:

Card games

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Yesterday I had tacos with The Dead Milkmen and I was asking them how they worked. I mentioned how boring I found “jamming” when I was in bands, and Dean quoted a friend of his: “I don’t mind jamming… as long as everything’s worked out beforehand!”

Then I remembered a little card game I came up with to make jam sessions more interesting:

Have each band member list 10 musical acts they’d like to play in
Write each musical act on an index card
Shuffle the cards, and, without revealing the cars, deal one to each band member. Keep the cards secret — the game is no fun if you can see the cards before you play.
Just like any other jam session, it helps to pick a key and start with the rhythm. Everyone has to pretend like they’re playing in the act written on their card.
Jam until it gets boring.
At the end, everybody gets to guess which card each person was dealt.
Repeat until you’re out of cards

The cards were inspired by Jessa Crispin’s The Creative Tarot and, of course, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s famous Oblique Strategies. Here’s the original deck, as seen in Eno’s Visual Music:

I’d forgotten all about it until I started writing this blog post, but a couple of years ago, I was inspired by the Oblique Strategies to try making my own deck of “Steal Strategies,” using prompts from my books. (I really need to update the deck — there’s only 16 cards!)

As an experiment with Tumblr’s shuffle feature, I turned it into a little mini site which serves up a random card when you click the deck:

Here’s the card I got when I clicked today, which is funny, because my wife and I had already planned a trip to the library with the boys…

A renewable energy

Friday, March 2, 2018

I have been working like a maniac lately, cranking out words. I expect a crash soon, but for right now, I’m trying not to lose momentum. When I’m working like this, I feel like my brain is on fire, and I remember why so many writers are alcoholics: when you’re thinking so intensely all day, sometimes booze is the only thing that will calm you down.

Something else I’ve noticed in this frenzied state: my creative energies aren’t really sapped if I switch over to other projects. My son will ask me to draw a new page in the book we’re writing together, or I’ll need to write a blog post for the day, and it just doesn’t faze me. I finished a first draft of something this morning, and I was up and looking around for something else to do, Hulk-ed out, like, “WHAT NOW? COME AT ME!!”

I’m also internalizing, finally, what Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life:

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

Creative energy is a renewable energy. Right now, I’m all charged up. I know that soon I’ll need to recharge again, but for now, baby, I’m burning, burning, burning.