I'm on guitar class hiatus until late September, the community education classes being pegged to the high school's schedule.  So I've been trying to make this summer the Summer of the Chord and have been working to get comfortable with a lot of different shapes and trying to move between them with a degree of fluency.

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A week or so ago I was listening to NPR and heard a man talking about learning a string instrument as an older man.  He spoke about how a child struggling to play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" or some other rudimentary song tends to get a lot of support and encouragement, but that a grown ass man (not his vocabulary, by the way) tends to get a wholly different sort of reaction.  That really struck, uhh, a chord with me.

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This summer I'm also hoping to up my musical skills into some sort of rudimentary song.  But none of that Twinkle stuff.  I'm just saying...

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Check out Eileen Tabios' latest chapbook, 44 Resurrections.  It's terrific.  That it's dedicated to me is an honor.  An even greater honor is that it is a text which works with and expands the "I forgot" structure which ( I guess) I pioneered in my book Dipstick/Diptych (available through Amazon and SPD).

It has taken me over 2 weeks but today I finally managed to figure out how to write  fragment 300 of Appearances.  65 more fragments to go and then I have to re-imagine the manuscript into its final form. Unless I get really lucky, I probably have at least another year of work to do on this project.  It's the most difficult piece of writing I've ever worked on.  I routinely veer between doubt, frustration, depression and joy when considering the thing.

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My father has cancer.  He's 84 years old and, otherwise--all things considered-- in good health.  Last week he was at Sloan-Kettering in NYC for some procedures.  One of the procedures involved the injection of a nuclear material.

Dad and Mom live in Connecticut.  After they finished up at the hospital, they were at Grand Central Station racing to catch a train.  Someone tapped my Dad's shoulder. Dad turned around to face a uniformed policeman.

It was a subway detective. He told my Dad that he'd set off a detector!  And proceeded to ask if he had  been in the hospital.  My Dad explained his situation, the cop photographed my Dad's driver's license and thanked him for his cooperation.

Of course, Mom and Dad missed their train.  But the cop helped them to get their bearings and figure out what to do next.

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My love affair with Jack White's CD Lazaretto only continues to deepen.  I'm obsessed with it.

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It's muggy.  I should be practicing guitar, but my motivation is flagging.

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When writing goes well everything seems possible.  But the truth is that the life of an artist is about failure as much or more than it is about success.

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Onward...

Yesterday I watched It Might Get Loud for the third time.  It's a fabulous documentary in which Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White talk about electric guitars.  Oh, and they play together, too..  There is so much good stuff in this film.

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Writing not going well.

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Three people in my extended family have serious health issues at the moment--my Dad, my sister, and a grandson.

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Winter was relentless.  Spring was a soaker and Summer's looking like it might be a soaker too.

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Guitar work?  I might have one day a week when I play in a way that doesn't make me unhappy.

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Last Friday I walked downtown in the drizzle to hear my guitar teacher's band, The Bluestones.  I sat at the table closest to the stage so that I could study fretwork and the interplay between the musicians.  I was surprised to be joined by a friend, Fred, who is a more practiced and advanced guitar player than me, but who has many of the same frustrations with the instrument that I do.  It was a fun night.

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Virtually the only CD I've listened to in the car for the last 3 years is Robbie Robertson's How to Become Clairvoyant. I'm obsessed by the recording.  Here's one of the songs played on late night television with The Roots and the amazing Robert Randolph.  And here's the title song as presented on the album.  Isn't that fucking great?

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Not sure if I'm going to do this blog much longer.  Shout out if you have any thoughts.

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This morning I saw a man about my G string.  (It was about tuning issues, not underwear.)

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I was given an Amazon gift card for Father's Day.  This is what I bought.  It arrived in today's mail.  And wow!  It's pretty cool.

The acoustic guitar is away--at Woodsy's--waiting in line to be restrung.  I miss her, but she should be home tomorrow.  In the meantime, I've gone electric and am playing the Stratocaster. Here's the main lyric from my forthcoming hit:  "I'm on a Fender bender/I'm on a Fender bender/And I'm just about--to CRASH!"

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One of the things Thomas Fink and I talked about on the telephone yesterday was a Malcolm Gladwell piece called "Creation Myth" which appeared in the New Yorker.  Our conversation focused on this passage:

 Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient “The more successes there are,” he says, “the more failures there are as well” — meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult. The making of the classic Rolling Stones album “Exile on Main Street” was an ordeal, Keith Richards writes in his new memoir, because the band had too many ideas. It had to fight from under an avalanche of mediocrity: “Head in the Toilet Blues,” “Leather Jackets,” “Windmill,” “I Was Just a Country Boy,” “Bent Green Needles,”…  At one point, Richards quotes a friend, Jim Dickinson, remembering the origins of the song “Brown Sugar”: “I watched Mick write the lyrics. . . . He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing.”    Richards goes on to marvel, “It’s unbelievable how prolific he was.” Then he writes, “Sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. The odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you’re crowding the airwaves, boy.” Richards clearly saw himself as the creative steward of the Rolling Stones …, and he came to understand that one of the hardest and most crucial parts of his job was to “turn the fucking tap off,” to rein in Mick Jagger’s incredible creative energy.

Our conversation had to do really with our individual and collaborative practices.  Maestro Fink and I are engaged in yet another collab--we're 10 poems into this one.  

Individual creative work, let alone collaborative work, is messy.  We're going to fail.  Probably as often, or more often, than we succeed.  

"Patience is a virtue," the platitude goes.  Irritating to hear, for sure, when the comment is directed at you.  However, nothing could be truer in terms of my own experience.

Persist.  Be stubborn in the face of all the things, forces, people, voices who would bring you down.

   

Earlier today I had a very rich telephone conversation with my friend poet-critic-painter Thomas Fink.  (I'm writing that for the record and hope to come back with a reflective post later.)

I was talking to my grandson Andy (not quite 8 years old) yesterday.  He's become fascinated with time.

"You know what, Paw Paw?"

"What, Andy?"

"Did you know that this moment will never be repeated?"

"Yes."

"And did you know that we'll never say the same thing twice?"

"Well, we will, buddy; but it won't be in the same situation."

Listening to Jack White's Lazaretto.  Love it.

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Writing more difficult than usual lately.  Am at a point in Appearances where it's unclear which way to go.  I have a number of ideas but am unsure which to develop.  Obviously things need to steep.

I also have a start on a very spare sequence which started out strongly but which is now stalled.

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Guitar work proceeds apace.  Progress is slow but steady.  My speed is starting to pick up a little and I'm starting to relax enough to have some success with chords.  All those unnatural things I've been asking my old fingers to do are starting to happen!  It's a very slow process, but there's progress.  It's a stuttering sort of progress, but...

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I've been a little bummed out by the relative lack of response to DIPSTICK DIPTYCH so far.  Don't get me wrong, what response there has been has been good.  But...the book is particularly important to me and I'm wondering if it can find a wider audience.  Writing is tricky.  Getting it around and noticed is trickier still.  I'm just sayin'.

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What Hemingway called the "black dog" has been visiting lately.  But this Jack White concert perked me up.  Pretty fabulous.  Check it out.  Not sure how long NPR will keep it online.

I was prowling the hard drive today, looking for things to delete or repurpose.  And I found a poem called "Etudes" which I don't remember writing.  It is a longer thing.  About 15 pages.  Huh!?  And it's kinda good.

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I wonder sometimes about writing and writing and having that writing seem to just disappear into the void.

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Maybe everything is weather.  Now there's a metaphysics.

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Finished fragment 299 of Appearances today.

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Got an email from an old friend--a painter-- the other day.  Hadn't heard from him for a couple of years.  He said that he'd been reading my blog for a year and that it made him chuckle.  He went on to say that I wrote about weather a lot.

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Eileen can be forgetful too!

Galatea Resurrects 22 is Live!

Go here:  http://galatearesurrection22.blogspot.com

Another great issue.  I have two reviews in it.  One on Robert Fitterman and one on Dodie Bellamy.  Also, Thomas Fink has a terrific piece on my long poem "Overpainted Thresholds" (the opening text in Dipstick (Diptych)).

Listening to Miles Davis live at the Fillmore East. Fabulous recordings made in June 1970.  I had just finished my junior year of high school  that month.  The war in Vietnam was going  full blast and the shootings at Kent State had happened the month before.  I was living 12 miles to the north of Kent at the time.

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Just getting over a virus that had me in its clutches for 4 days.  Energy levels slowly coming back.

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Been working hard on Appearances.

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Poppies just started blooming in the front yard.

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A glass of sauvignon blanc.

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I should have gotten a stitch or two for that cut index finger tip.  It's been slow to close and is tender when I type, but I've gotten to the point where I don't have to wear a bandage.  It does creep me out to look at it though.

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Miles' phrasing so sensitive, so nuanced.

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On the guitar I practice scales, rhythms and chords.  A few repetitive things.  Usually every day.  Usually at least 2 hours a day.  Progress is slow.  I'm 60, not 16.  But every once in awhile I surprise myself.  The beauty of the minor blues scale will never be exhausted for me.

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It's humid in advance of the promised storms.

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