music

Rock me—publication day!

May 1, 2014 | 19 Comments

Otterbein University, in Westerville, Ohio, is chock-full of the nicest kids I’ve ever known. And Paige Schortgen and Haley Young, former writing students of mine, are two of the nicest. Which makes them, in fact, two of the nicest girls in the entire world. (Good writers, too.) Their geeked-out celebration selfie above is the best reaction my book has provoked so far. (Other readers, your mileage may vary.) Girls, you are funny, kind, and definitely keepers.

Though Amazon began selling the book on or about April 15, the official publication date of Shepherd: A Memoir is today, May 1, 2014.

I’m not sure I can send the treasured photo of my student friends to booksellers as proof they should stock my book. So Shepherd’s review in Kirkus carries a tad more weight in the book world.

With Shepherd’s dribs and drabs of attention, maybe independent bookstores and even Barnes & Noble will stock it. If so, look for it in the gardening or nature section. Although it’s a literary memoir and not how-to (more like how-don’t), it is categorized it on the back Nature and Animals / Horticulture / Memoir. Those are the labels that influence booksellers regarding where to shelve it. I asked my publisher to use such codes because I’ve noticed that memoirs come and go rather quickly in stores, and I believe it may sell if back-to-the-land types come across it.

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Art and suffering

February 6, 2014 | 14 Comments

One day in the winter of 2008 I fast-walked across a frozen landscape to our town’s art cinema on the edge of the campus where I worked. I snuggled down in my seat in the dark empty theatre, still wearing my black overcoat, having just finished teaching, and watched with growing amazement Synecdoche, New York. It had premiered at Cannes in May, and had made it finally to our wintry corner in Appalachian Ohio.

The script by Charlie Kaufman and the performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman were equally astounding—like nothing I’d ever seen on film or dreamed of seeing. The film’s plot is at first easy to follow. Hoffman plays a theatre director whose genius and ambition far outstrip his paltry achievements; his wife is an artist whose paintings are, in significant contrast, such miniaturized images that they require special glasses to view. Though he loses his wife, who takes his daughter to Berlin and becomes famous, he wins a MacArthur genius grant, and with it enough rope to hang himself. He pours his money and life into a vast warehouse set that’s peopled with actors who endlessly portray aspects of his past as he ages and disintegrates. The film gets weird and challenging—and achieves its freakish glory—as the lines blur between his artistic vision and his nonlinear inner life. The pair make a Jungian collage, or an incomprehensible mess, depending on how you experience it.

It took my breath away. After classes the next day, I ran right back and watched it again.

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Grading essays to the Beatles

October 4, 2013 | 7 Comments

The Beatles’ playfully creative upbeat tunes buoy my spirits as I grade student essays. Mostly I play late albums, usually Abbey Road or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sometimes The Beatles (aka The White Album) or Magical Mystery Tour. Since I’m a boomer, this choice is freighted with nostalgia. One of these days, I’ll burst into tears. I’m getting choked up right now, listening to John Lennon’s surreal reminiscence, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Oh, that tender musical intro by Paul McCartney . . . his Mellotron keyboard a ghostly calliope.

And how is it possible that McCartney follows “Strawberry Fields” on Magical Mystery Tour with his own masterpiece musical memoir, “Penny Lane”?

It’s not possible. But there it is.

So mostly my listening experience is characterized by my amazement of the band’s artistry and output. They became such sophisticated musicians (a nod here to their great teammate, producer George Martin), and as they grew they created songs of delicious musical complexity and thematic richness.

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The 10,000-hour rule of thumb

October 27, 2011 | 3 Comments

Listen, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Closer, let me whisper in your ear . . . —“Do You Want to Know a Secret,” from Please Please Me, 1963 By the time the Beatles brought the “British Invasion” to America, in February 1964, and my family watched them on the Ed Sullivan Show, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been playing together for seven years. By a fluke, in 1960, “when they were …

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The Beatles were all about this

October 22, 2011 | 9 Comments

I found Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland by way of a British blog, The Beatles Songwriting Academy, devoted to learning to write songs by studying the Liverpool lads. It’s not just a worshipful fan site: blogmaster Matt Blick rebukes them for lame songs (his “Hall of Shame” includes “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”) and for some stinky rhymes that mar great songs. But Blick has a “Be-atltudes” page, too, in which he enumerates virtues, especially the prolificacy of Paul McCartney and John Lennon:

“Between 1962 and 1970 Lennon & McCartney wrote close to 200 songs. Almost all were recorded and released. The majority were top 10 hits as singles or album tracks. Whereas most writers today would throw away a song that wasn’t good enough for their next album or didn’t fit stylistically, the boys always had a reason to finish that song. And because of their insane recording schedule they always had to come up with more songs.”

Mates and rivals, who happened also to be gifted, Lennon and McCartney inspired and goaded each other to craft new work. What’s ranked as one of the greatest songs ever written, and their masterpiece, “A Day in the Life,” which concludes Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, showcases their separate gifts being expressed together under the pressure to come up another tune. They melded utterly separate lyrical fragments each had written.

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Charlotte Roche, Mick Jagger, creativity

June 12, 2011 | 5 Comments

Charlotte Roche introduces her interview with Mick Jagger in German, then talks with him in English. Charlotte Roche is the author of Wetlands, a novel, according to The Guardian, that “makes the Vagina Monologues sound tame,” and which has been a big hit in Europe, especially in Germany, where the author lives. I’d heard about it and how disgusting it is, but hadn’t read it until recently, intrigued by a student’s struggle to review it on campus for a literary …

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B. Dylan meets A. MacLeish

March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments

How Archibald MacLeish courted Bob Dylan for a musical. Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) won three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for his play about Job, J.B, which also won a Tony Award. His collected poems won the National Book Award. Like some other famous writers of his generation, MacLeish served as an ambulance driver in World War I but also as an artillery officer. After the war he moved to Paris and knew many artists, including Gertrude Stein, John …

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