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Music and Writing

Music and Writing

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There was a time in my life when writing and music were neck and neck. I loved to write and loved to play piano, and, for a brief and shining time, I loved being a member of a youth orchestra, even though it meant learning to harrumph my way through the string bass parts of Brahms’ First Symphony, the Leonore Overture and other pieces I can still remember even though I played them decades ago.

In the end it came down to this: I could make a living as a writer but not as a musician, and wanting a roof over my head and clothes on my back I made what I think was the wiser choice. But music was always out there, a grand passion, and lately, with the new piano, a more fully engaged one.

What has occurred to me recently is how well the two go together. How music takes over when words fail. How words crystallize the feelings that music engenders, how in my re-engineered life, music and writing can work together. They can and, I hope, they do.

 

A Pencil Post

A Pencil Post

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I’m thinking this morning of the pencil. The pencil I first used as a young school girl. A pencil fat and soft-leaded, a purgatory in which I would need to exist until I graduated to a cartridge pen. 

The humble pencil, which author Wendell Berry uses for correspondence, saying that he no longer has the courage to write unless he can erase. (Berry long ago eschewed the computer, which does pretty well in the erasure department, sometimes when you least expect or want it to.) 

The historical pencil, produced in a factory in Concord, Massachusetts, owned by the father of Henry David Thoreau. 

The mechanical pencil, which is not my writing implement of choice but is a dandy tool for making notes to myself in a calendar, especially if it has a good eraser.

The pencil, in short, has much to recommend itself, and is certainly worth a post—though not, of course, a penciled one. 

Walking Early

Walking Early

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I often have a little debate with myself in the morning: should I walk first or should I write? I’ll do both eventually, of course. They are the warp and woof of my day. Twenty-four hours without them is barely a day at all. 

But there remains the order. To walk early is to give the body precedence when the mind is sharpest. To write early is to miss the coolest and most pleasant hours of the day. 

Today, walking raised its hand, waved it in front of my face. Choose me, choose me, it said. 

And so … I did.

Golden

Golden

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It’s an idea they had for 10 years and it wouldn’t let them go. A trove of family papers they inherited. It’s a question, a notion, a curiosity. 

Over the weekend I hung out with 150 writers. And though I spoke with only a fraction of them, the conversations were all struck through with the same bright threads of humor, determination and yearning. 

We’re a greedy bunch, we writers. If we don’t have an idea, we want one. If we have the idea we must have the time and space to explore it: to research, write and revise. 

Of course, if we have the finished manuscript we need the agent. And if we have the agent, we need the publisher. 

But when the stars align, when we have the idea, the time, the space, the words, the agent, the publisher …. ah, then life is golden indeed. 

The Unwritten

The Unwritten

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In a recent class on feminist literary criticism, my professor talked about the push to find overlooked female voices, the letters and journals, the stories stuffed in sewing baskets or left behind in convent cells. 

I found that exciting: the newest works of the literary canon, the books that are out there but must still be discovered, that don’t yet have a readership, a home. 

But at least these works exist in some form, ragged and hidden, inchoate and incomplete.  

What about the books that were never written, the ideas that vanished before they could be jotted down, that fell victim to the cookstove, the washtub, the cradle? How do we recover those? 

3,700!

3,700!

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It’s a cool, rainy Easter Monday, perfect for catching the breath and putting away the good china.

Over the weekend, I realized that the blog hit a milestone: 3, 700 posts. I love it when the numbers sneak up on me. 

Blog writing is such a daily, piecemeal endeavor that I forget the dribbles and drabs add up to something. 

On milestone days, I remember that they do. 

Over Easy

Over Easy

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Too often I’m distracted. I wait too long to flip them over. But this morning the timing was right and the eggs were perfect: just runny enough to coat the whites.

Over easy has a nice, free-and-easy sound. It says flapjacks in the morning, a pot of tea brewing, the whole day ahead. 

Never mind that most mornings aren’t like that. So the words promise—but only occasionally do they deliver. 

Gallimaufry

Gallimaufry

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I picked up the book because I know the author and enjoy reading his work.  The title bewildered me until I looked inside and saw this definition: “Gallimaufry: a confused jumble or medley of things.” 

Joseph Epstein’s latest collection is all of that. There are essays on baseball (“Diamonds are Forever”), Julius Caesar (“Big Julie”) and the author’s defense of the Comic Sans font. Reading this plump and happy book is like devouring a hot fudge sundae smothered with whipped cream. It’s fun and filling and a bit of a guilty pleasure (the latter because Epstein recently angered the PC police).

I read Epstein because he’s brilliant; because he’s a dinosaur, an essayist in the model of Orwell, Hazlitt or Montaigne; and also because he was my teacher long ago. Our first assignment was to come up with our favorite word. Mine was “rhapsody,” which captured a moment in my youth when I was young and romantic and could still play the Brahms pieces known by that name. His was “deliquesce,” which means to melt away but which he admired, he said, because it contained the word “deli.”

Which brings me to the humor and low-key erudition in his work. Epstein, for all his knowledge, does not flaunt it. He’s clear,  cogent and refreshingly honest. He makes me remember what it was like to read and write before the age of Great Divisions. 

All of which is to say I’m enjoying Gallimaufry immensely. Maybe by the time I’ve finished reading it I will have learned how to spell it. 

Level of Effort

Level of Effort

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How many hours will it take to interview four people? To track them down first, of course, then transcribe and bring order to the notes that follow? 

How many hours will it take to turn those notes into an article with a beginning, middle and end; to tell a story which, in addition to the interviews, requires research, thought and creativity?

I was never very good at producing a statement of work or SOW, nor was I particularly adept at its project-management cousin, the LOE or estimate of the level of effort required to complete that work. Oh, I could estimate how long it took me to prepare for and complete an interview, or to organize and write a story. I could and I did. 

But so much of writing is the thinking that precedes and surrounds it. How do you account for the wasted effort, the dead-ends and sidetracks? How do you quantify a process that can never truly be quantified? 

How do you explain that the most effortful writing can be leaden and pedestrian — and the least effortful can soar above it all?

What Might Be

What Might Be

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I begin the day with moonlight, a bright waning gibbous that cracks a sweet gum branch in two as I glance at moon and tree through this window I call my own.

How companionable it seems, this moon. Not the cool, pale orb of rounded perfection, but a heavenly body that looks at bit battered around the edges. Knocked down, but still there. 

Meanwhile, daylight is gaining on it. Soon it will fade to a translucent disc. The sun will rise, strengthen, send shards of light through the prism, make rainbows on my wall.

But I’m starting early, in the cold darkness, and this is just a glimpse of what might be.