Keith Jarrett on music and time

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

We all need variety sometimes, but when every channel has nothing, shouldn’t we notice?

I came across this 1992 op-ed by pianist Keith Jarrett called “Categories Aplenty, but Where’s the Music?”

Jarrett wrote it in the year after Miles Davis’ death. It’s cranky, and it might make some folks roll their eyes. (Jarrett was notorious for being difficult and “proud to be difficult” — in a 1997 NYTimes profile he was quoted as saying, “There are some ages, I think, that don’t deserve art as much as others. I almost think we live in a time now when that is true.”) But for a 30-year-old piece of writing, it feels state-of-the-art to me in that it still describes the state of the arts today. (Plus, I tend to like cranky musicians. Musicians have to be too nice today!)

“We live in an age in which only results seem to count, not processes,” Jarrett writes. “We need to hear the process of a musician working on himself. We don’t need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in…”

Elsewhere, Jarrett has told the story of his first encounter with music as a young kid: banging on the kitchen table with celery sticks. He asks us to “try to imagine the first musician,” who was “not playing for an audience, or a market,” but was “playing out of need, out of his need for the music.”

The original musician was not looking for his image; he was using his voice to learn about the world. He knew the world to be liquid (i.e., not made up of discrete entities). We see the world as ‘bits’ of information, either/or, yes or no, digital. We seem to have no desire to experience time. We trade this experience for the ‘accuracy’ of ‘bits’ of time: it’s either 9:19 or 9:20, never almost 9:20. So we think that time is a straight line and, eventually, that everything has edges. Something stops here, something starts there. But the natural world is essentially circular; our heartbeats are not like a click-track or a drum machine; there are different kinds of time, and we don’t only die when we are dead.

“Life is liquid, not solid; a process, not a result; the present, not the future,” he writes. “Life is a process. We’re losing the concept of ‘becoming,’ because this, too, is circular.”

He quotes a canto by Ezra Pound (“Nothing counts save the quality of the affection”) and paraphrases Emerson’s Self-Reliance:

This is a good place to mention that ‘Do your own thing’ came from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually said, ‘Do your thing, and I shall know you.’ In other words, you reveal yourself to others through what you do. Emerson’s statement was not meant to be a kind of carte blanche to follow our shallowest whims: it’s not about life style or fashion or technique or casual choices. His statement contains a warning: I will only recognize you if you have your voice; I will not recognize you otherwise.

The actual line from Emerson is “Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

(Surely, Emerson read Thessalonians: “Do your own work.”)

Jarrett still plays, btw, but due to chronic fatigue and two strokes, he can now only play with his right hand.

Here’s an interview with Rick Beato from earlier this year:

Related reading: “Tomas Transformer at the piano.”

Diving in

Thursday, July 22, 2021

In Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, he laments the deterioration of his reading habits due to his time online:

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Dividing creative work into “deep” and “shallow” seems fairly harmless until you start assigning one more value than the other. There’s a time and place for both.

In my own practice, I often get far more ideas in the “shallow” mode, poking around twitter and skimming articles, than I do in “deep” mode, staring at a blinking Microsoft Word cursor with my noise-canceling headphones on.

That said, my brains feel just as scrambled as anybody’s. But as much as I like to blame my problems on the internet, if you go back a few years, dive a little deeper into history, you find that the sense that life is getting shallower is not just a contemporary phenomenon.

In a recent essay, Hari Kunzru points out that there’s an ancient history of people being worried about the quality of our thought and attention. (Plato, for example, thought writing would cause us to lose our memories.)

“[T]he proliferation of early print publications changed reading habits,” Kunzru writes. “Instead of devoting one’s attention to a small library of precious books, it was now possible to dip into things, to divert oneself…”

Distraction can sometimes be a good thing. In the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot wrote:

Distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, which allows the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another. It is the opposite of that stupor of attention, which merely rests on, or recycles, the same idea.

Writers are unique kinds of readers because, for them, reading is rarely an end in itself, but a means of generating more writing.

Emerson, for example, read voraciously, but he read in a way that was useful to him, a way that generated his own writing. In Robert D. Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire, he recounts how Emerson skipped and skimmed and sped through books, looking for things to steal, learning to “divine,” books, “to feel those that you want without wasting much time on them.” He told other writers to “turn page after page, keeping the writer’s thoughts before you, but not tarrying with him, until he has brought you the thing you are in search of.”

And when you come across something that seems worth stealing in a text, one way to absorb it and really extract the meaning of it is to copy it out by hand.

Here’s Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street, saying that reading is like flying over a road in an airplane and copying is like walking it on foot:

The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin used a land metaphor there, but in her introduction to Illuminations, Hannah Arendt used a sea metaphor to describe Benjamin’s method of appropriation, or building up texts using quotations:

Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate it the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,” and perhaps even… everlasting…

Which reminds me: yesterday during an interview, someone called me a “minor poet.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “I’m an extremely minor poet.”

“No, no, no,” they said. “A MINER, like a coal miner, digging for the poem in a text.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That, too.”

We had a good laugh.

* * *

More reading: “The fishes of thought.”

First we read, then we write

Monday, May 24, 2021

I don’t read a lot of long biographies — I usually hate anyone after about 250 pages — so it is remarkable that yesterday I finished my month-long project of reading Robert D. Richardson’s trilogy: Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.

Richardson originally set out to write about William James, but he didn’t feel like he had the intellectual firepower, so he decided to do Thoreau first. It took him ten years, as did all 3 books: his method was to “read everything his subjects had read, in the sequence in which they read it, tracing their intellectual development.”

One of his mentors, Walter Jackson Bate, taught him his 100 chapters of 5 pages each method of composition:

I had a wonderful teacher at Harvard, W.J. Bate, who wrote very great biographies of Keats and then of Johnson, and his advice to me when he discovered that I was daring to write a biography was to write in short takes; if at all possible, to write in short pieces so that the reader feels that he or she is getting somewhere. I mean, that’s a big, heavy book. And people have busy lives and they have lots else to do, and if you can sit down and read four or five pages and feel like you’re getting somewhere instead of these big 30 or 40-page or 50-page chapters, it makes a book readable that might not otherwise seem so.

He passed that advice — be kind to your readers and respect their time — on to his students and other biographers: Write 100 pieces of one to two thousand words on the parts of the life you care about the most, and don’t worry about what order they’re in until you have the pieces.

Now, imagine writing a book so good that Annie Dillard sends you a fan letter, and after “two lunches and three handshakes,” you get married and spend over 3 decades together. (Richardson died last year of complications after a fall. A posthumous book comes out next year.)

Emerson is dedicated to her, and, I could be making this up, but there are several sentences sprinkled here and there that I swear are him showing off for her. (Or, you know, just being really good.)

Here’s his answer to how being married to Annie Dillard changed his writing:

What changed? Everything. I could write a book, but I won’t. I learned from her that you have to go all out every day, every piece. Hold nothing back, the well will refill. She gave me the key to Emerson in one word: Wild. Emerson is wild. I also learned you don’t have to write every day, but you have to go in the room with the piece every day. She told me she looked at submissions from her students for any two words together that she’d never seen together. And finally, I learned I needed to read more. I read maybe 50 books a year that are not part of what I’m writing. She reads many times that. Most days, I’m not even good enough to get into one of her classes.

Adorably, he wrote a short biography of her, too: “She is, like Thoreau, a close observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocket-maker.”

If you haven’t read any of his books, before tackling one of these bad boys, I might start with his slim but dense volume of Emerson on the creative process, one of the better books about writing I’ve read, whose title also sums up his method: First We Read, Then We Write.

Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you have

Thursday, May 20, 2021

John Locke’s system for indexing commonplace books

“A good idea is not of any use if you can’t find it.”
—Logan Heftel

When I was working on Keep Going, I wrote about “the importance of revisiting notebooks,” detailing the notebook method I’d learned from the Two Davids — David Thoreau and David Sedaris — how to get down daily thoughts and mine them for material for larger pieces. At the end of the piece, I wrote:

I have no index for the notebooks (unless you count my logbook), and no way, really, of knowing what’s in them, a condition worsened by my terrible memory, and the fact that one of the reasons I like keeping a diary, as Henry Jones, Sr., said, is because I don’t have to remember what’s in it. I plan on starting an index in the coming weeks, and updating it for each new notebook.

Reader, I… never started that index. And four years later, here I am, my dumb ass, trying to write another book, staring at a crate of notebooks, literally thousands of pages, with no idea what’s in them, really:

a stack of my notebooks in a crate

I have filled pages, but I have missed a crucial step: indexing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks. He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.

Emerson called his notebooks his “savings bank,” and over four decades, he spent an enormous amount of time in the vault, not just writing, but re-reading what he’d written and indexing.

The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and give him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that interested him throughout his life.

As time went on, it took Emerson longer and longer to put lectures and essays together, simply because he had this vast trove to work with. He had no typewriter, no word processor, no computer. Everything was done with ink and paper. His indexes were massive, running hundreds and hundreds of pages. “These indexes themselves, never printed—with one exception—represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.” He wound up with 263 volumes on his shelf.

It could be dreary work, doing all this indexing, but it was crucial as he worked up to a new work. (Emerson’s creative process is so fascinating, Richardson wrote a wonderful slim volume about it, called First We Read, Then We Write.)

I am fascinated by the notebook and filing systems of other writers. In my experience, it’s very easy to write every day and get ideas down, but it’s not so easy to keep track of it all.

(A wild example, I’ll let you click through to read: In his excellent memoir, My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt writes about his father’s elaborate system of notebooks that allowed him to write hundreds of erotic novels.)

Comedian Phyllis Diller had “gag file,” which is now housed at The Smithsonian:

Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag.

In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comedian showed off a similar “joke bank”:

For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she’s written (at this point she’s amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: “Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?”

These filing systems are all analog examples, but one of my heroes, George Carlin, embraced an analog/digital system:

I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder… When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it….[In my filing system there are files for all kinds of subjects] but then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles….It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it’s just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let’s see, if I say “asshole” and “minister,” I then can find what I want find.

“A lot of this,” Carlin said, “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”

No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.

On Twitter the other day I saw someone point out that the longer you listen to Song Exploder, the more you discover that the Voice Memos app on the iPhone has probably had more of an impact on songwriting than any other piece of software. But recording things in Voice Memos is just one step. The next is listening back to things, finding diamonds in the rough.

Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants, aka the lead singer and songwriter for The Presidents of the United States of America, says he dumps all his raw song ideas into an iTunes playlist and then puts it on shuffle while he’s washing dishes. (I read that Brian Eno does something similar: he makes a tremendous amount of music, and then hits shuffle when he’s answering email, etc., and whatever catches his ear, he investigates.)

Like William Blake said, you either create your own system or get enslaved by another’s. In some sense, this very blog is a system for me to find out what I have: I take material from my notebooks and turn it into blog posts, and the posts become tags, which become book chapters, etc.

But I have a ton of material that never makes it online, and I need to get it out of my notebooks and into an indexed and fully searchable system. I think this will be easiest if I do it as I go, and keep it simple: the minute I finish a notebook, go back and type the whole thing into a .txt file and save it. (And back it up.)

I suspect that rather than being totally dreary, this transcribing step can also be a creative step, and I will see patterns of thought, generate new ideas…

Reading like a bird of prey

Thursday, April 29, 2021

William James said that our stream of consciousness, “like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

I wonder if our reading life — that is, for those of us who read to write — isn’t like a bird’s life, too.

Swoops and perches.

“Like most writers, I don’t educate myself sequentially,” says the poet Gary Snyder, “but more like a hawk or eagle always circling and finding things that might have been overlooked.”

In Emerson: Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson writes that Ralph Waldo Emerson read “like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use.” Emerson read to “nourish and to stimulate his own thought.”

“The glance reveals what the gaze obscures,” Emerson wrote. “Somewhere the author has hidden his message. Find it, and skip the paragraphs that do not talk to you.”

So the reader/writer hunts like a hawk or an eagle, but then, after we devour books, we must be like the owl: “Keep only what is useful. Regurgitate the rest.”