Life of the Artist

“I tried to get a Christmas job at Walmart once,” he recounts, “and when I filled out the application, I had to put down, ‘Musician for 20 years.’ I could see in their eyes what they were thinking, ‘Musician, drugs, irresponsible.’ What they actually said was, ‘Thank you for the application, Mr. Mallonee, we’ll call if we’re interested.’ I realized, ‘If I can’t get a job at Walmart at Christmas, I can’t get a job anywhere.’ This is all I can do. On the other hand, this is what I really love, so I have to take the famine with the feast.”

—Bill Mallonee, quoted by Geoffrey Himes, in Paste Magazine.

My Writing Bucket List

Writers of the world, if you’ve got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it’ll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination. --Pat  Conroy, My Reading Life.

   Thanks, Pat. I will do my best. Although I don't think it will be a novel.

   That was (and still mostly is) always my wish. Much of that desire I do owe to Mr. Conroy, whose novels always inspire me, despite his being, in his own words, "showy with adjectives" and "overreliant on adverbs." Though I sometimes feel his lengthy and florid novels are death by a thousand paper cuts, it is nevertheless a sweet death. I can appreciate them all the more because I have been trying to write a novel for over six years. I have close to 80,000 words towards a story that is going nowhere currently, even in my mind. My characters are thoroughly unruly and disobedient, and the story arc has bent so tight I fear that like an overtorqued steel spring it may break and kill me.

   So, I have decided to look at other venues for writing. I have crafted a bucket list of writing goals I want to accomplish before I die (or my novel slays my ambition). My goal in each case is to have them published in some reputable (and perhaps even financially renumerative) fashion. Here they are:

   1. Write a short story. I do believe I can write a 5,000 to 10,000 word story that would be worth reading, although a shorter one would be harder. In fact, I like the notion of a story collection, where all the stories have a connection, probably implicit (five people who picked up a pack of hotel matches in 1968 Scottsdale, Arizona, for example).

   2. Publish a poem. It is true that "prose is words in their best order, poetry is the best words in the best order." While Eliot's The Wasteland doesn't bring to mind economy, it most certainly is. Of all the written arts, poetry comes closest to both painting and music, where in both you can be as realistic or as impressionist as you dare. Poetry slams sometimes have the same effect as strolling through a museum. Reading poetry aloud is just like listening to live music—there is joy in the silence between notes, and the decaying echo from the back wall. My poetry (two examples here and here) tends to be on the realistic side, but who knows? I would love to see my words in The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, but I must realistically think more towards regional poetry magazines and reviews.

   3.Publish an essay. I love researching. I love interviewing. I simply love observing. Put those three passions to pen and paper and I think an essay would probably be my best shot for my first publication. I have in mind a story from my home town about a supposedly true story of a grave that may, or may not, contain the person named on the tombstone. It's full of politics, family love and hillbilly justice.

   4. Write a song. In my late teens and early twenties I played guitar constantly, and wrote a few songs that I would perform at weddings or just for friends. I still remember a couple of them, and they were decent enough. And while I am becoming accustomed again to the guitar after a three decade estrangement, I think I could write a meaningful, appealing lyric and place it in a competent piece of music. My personal tastes lean towards singer-songwriters, like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, or contemporary songsmiths such as Pierce Pettis, Jason Mraz or Patty Griffin. I fear some of my production may even fall into the "country" category, but it's a hot market. I prefer the term "Americana," the songs of people and places and hopes and dreams. If I can ship off two or three songs a year to publishers, maybe one will find an ear.

   5. Write a screenplay. This fascinates me. And the only thing that encourages me in this venture is that I have seen many TV episodes and movies where I have been able to anticipate the next line, or the next scene, with uncanny accuracy. And there are times when I have obviously had an idea that I am sure would have worked better that what ended up in the script. I would probably feel most comfortable with drama; maybe some short morality tale, that ties up in the end with a few threads still loose.

   6. Write a novel. Again, it's a wish more than an obsession at present. I feel like the fellow who has sketched his dream home on the back of a napkin, and who knows how to use a hammer and a saw. The rest seems daunting to me.

   7. Write my obituary. I can almost assure myself that this might actually find itself published, if there are any local newspapers left.
—Wayne S.

Language as music

"In his entirely personal experience of them, English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music of the streets. Which is to say, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish."

—Yann Martel in Beatrice and Virgil

In any language

My wife and I just returned from 10 days in Hawaii--three on Oahu and seven on Kauai. I am resisting the temptation to show you my 700 or so photos (of which maybe 25 are very good). But I would like to tell you of two observations:

God does His best work in small places: The island of Kauai, at 552 square miles, is smaller than the metropolitan Atlanta area where I live. It is only 25 percent inhabited. Some of it is only accessible by helicopter. Yet in such a small place there is variety in geography, ethnicity, climate, altitude and flora and fauna unmatched anywhere else. Beauty and surprises await around every corner.

God loves to astound and delight His Children. One of our dear friends, who along with his wife accompanied us on the trip, made this comment: "When I see this, I can't help but think 'My Father made this.'" Amen. On the last night of our stay, we went to a luau at the next-door Hyatt resort. The Hyatt is a monument to conspicuous consumption (suites go for $4500 a night), and the luau was no exception. Liquor flowed freely, the food was mountainous in volume, and the mood was festive. That why it came as a surprise to us when the emcee announced to the crowd that, before we ate, he would like to offer a traditional Hawaiian blessing for the meal, as most Hawaiians do. What we heard, in a rich, baritone voice, quieted the crowd to silence, and lifted our hearts.

Here is a version performed by the Kamehameha Schools Children's Chorus, along with just a few pictures of my Father's work. Enjoy and be blessed. --Wayne S.

An amazing choir

A choral work performed by over 200 singers, each sitting at their own computer.

"A novel is a symphony"

The best novels are not autobiography. They're more analogous to work of art like a symphony, or a thick collection of poems, or a group of twenty-five or thirty paintings. Nobody expects a symphony to be anything but what it is: an imaginative work made of rhythm and tones. A novel is much closer to that than people realize. It is strange to me when people want me to be the protagonist of my books, want the events and the novel to be true in a physical, literal way. This approach misses the point. A novel is a symphony. The author is the composer and the reader is the conductor. And the imagination --- of both the composer and the conductor --- is the symphony orchestra.

-- David James Duncan*, quoted in  Conversations With American Writers: The Doubt, the Faith, the In-Between by Dale Brown.



*Duncan is the author of many books, including The River Why and Brothers K.

The Gospel According to my iPod

I love music.



Way back when (and I mean way back, in the early 70s) I even played music, dragging my guitar and my own songs (as well as Cat Stevens's and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s) all around.



I like all kinds of music. I know, that sort of comment usually prompts a rolling of the eyes, and a suspicion that whoever is speaking really doesn’t know all that much about music. But my Ipod has over 14,500 songs, from over 5200 albums, representing over 3800 artists (from ABBA to Zappa, as I like to say), and I can tell you something about each one of them. I have songs in Latin, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian. as well as a lot of jazz and classical, which have no words. I think music is the soundtrack of life, and a world without music would be far less rich.



One of the nice things about portable music players is the ability to shuffle music. In shuffle mode, the player simply plays the songs in random order. For someone with a lot of music, this affords me the chance to hear tracks that I haven’t chosen lately. It’s always a treat to hear something that I haven’t heard in a while.



Occasionally, there is a sublime juxtaposition of two songs which, taken separately, might say one thing but, taken together, say something else altogether. Recently, I heard something like that.

Suzanne Vega, an English major turned pop storyteller, has many interesting songs to her credit, some bright and optimistic, but many dark and mysterious. One that falls in-between is the song Caramel, from her album Nine Objects of Desire.



The song is pretty straightforward. The singer is telling someone that, for reasons unknown, she must refuse a love relationship.

It won't do

to dream of caramel,

to think of cinnamon

and long for you.



It won't do

to stir a deep desire,

to fan a hidden fire

that can never burn true.

I like how the reason for her decision is never revealed. What is it? Race? Religion? Age? Most likely, most people’s thought goes to adultery—either she, the other person or both are married to someone else.



But whatever the story, she has made a decision, although the song’s tone seems to give the listener reason to believe her resolve is perhaps not exactly rock-solid. Nevertheless, she has made a good choice—for now at least—although it was obviously a hard one.

I like Suzanne Vega’s voice. I like the song, too, so it was a treat to hear it. No less a treat was the next song in the shuffle. Lari White is the daughter of a rock-and-roll guitarist and the granddaughter of a Primitive Baptist preacher (which curiously, allowed no musical instruments in church) and she draws deeply upon both men with her gutsy, gospel-choir powered version of There is Power in the Blood from the soundtrack of the movie The Apostle. You know the words:

Would you be free

from the burden of sin?

There's power in the blood,

power in the blood;

Would you o'er evil

a victory win?

There's wonderful

power in the blood.

It occurred to me the proximity of these two songs was providential. Every day, we make choices. Some are easy. Some, like the one described by Ms. Vega, are harder. Some seem impossible. It is then that followers of Christ have something extra. The power of the blood. Simply put, it is a power, a gift given of God and within us, that lifts us higher than we can go on our own, and allows us to do, or do without. And to discover that a hard choice can be more than loss, but gain.

It's grace. It's growing. It's being saved all over again every day (not positionally, but practically). And it's part of the real, warty you in this real, rocky world. Grace is not needed in a sinless world.

Here are performances of the two songs. I would encourage you, if you like them, to buy the studio versions.

Remastered

I've spent the last two days listening to my favorite Beatles songs, for the first time.

Just released are newly remastered versions of the Beatles catalog. The difference, even between previous CD versions and these, is stunning. The new masters are so alive, so nuanced and so full of presence that they are truly better than the originals. If you are a Beatles fan, you owe yourself to spend the money. And please, listen to them on something other than Ipod earbuds. (I bought my first Beatles album, Rubber Soul, in 1965, and listened to it on a small portable record player with a 3" speaker. While I appreciated the musicianship, I could not appreciate the recording until decades later when I listened to the CD on a high-end stereo system).

Concurrent with the Beatles releases, a newly remastered version of The Wizard of Oz has just been released. Available in Blu-Ray and standard DVD, it promises the same sort of experience as listening to The Beatles. One benefit I am looking forward to: the new version has 6.1 surround sound; all the previous releases were monophonic, since that was what movie theaters were equipped to play in 1939. (Trivia: What was the first multi-channel movie soundtrack?  Walt Disney's Fantasia, in 1940. When did the Abbey Road recording studios, made famous by The Beatles, open? 1931.)



And in other remastering news, God is continuing to improve on Wayne S, model 1. As the song says, 

I've got to admit it's getting better

A little better all the time

It can't get no worse

I have to admit it's getting better, it's getting better

Since you've been mine.

(Lennon-McCartney, 1967)

Goodbye, Mary

 

Mary Travers 1936-2009

We lost an amazing voice today. Mary Travers was the beautiful alto voice of Peter, Paul and Mary. She was my first crush as a singer (the second, Linda Ronstadt), and she has remained a favorite all my adult life. With long, bright blonde hair and bangs, she was modishly beautiful, yet sang decidedly un-modish folk music. She was not only a voice in music, but in social justice as well who, along with her bandmates, worked tirelessly for civil rights in the 1960s and beyond. She was also an accomplished and published poet. On her post-PPM solo album, entitled Mary, she read one of her poems:

Erika with the windy yellow hair

Dancing through the day or moping by the stair

My joy to know my Erika with the windy yellow hair



Yesterday I met her running home from school

Her face was tear stained, she didn't know I knew

But I do, I do



But today she had a song to sing and a poem she knew

And with a kiss and a hug she just dashed away, she had things to do

I do too, I do too



Lithesome child, I turn with care

When viewing you on step or stair

All my hope and love for you,

My Erika of the windy yellow hair 

 

 

You will be missed, Mary. All my hope and love for you, our Mary, with the windy yellow hair.--W.S.

Music: "Chess drenched in perfume."

Plenty of genuine ideas exist in music, of course; they're just not what we mean by "ideas" in any non-musical sense. They express musical techniques and music's root mathematical structure, and exactly what they have to do with what we experience while listening is something no one has ever satisfactorily explained... .
But these [techniques and mathematical structures] are ideas like the ideas in chess or math. They don't mean anything and have no purpose in and of themselves. It's no accident that child prodigies—with the skill of adults and the experience of children—appear in music, chess and math but never in poetry or philosophy... .
What we experience in music is something else. Music stands, at last, as "evocative" — a word whose only other use is in advertisements for expensive perfume. Music is chess drenched with perfume.
J. Bottum, "The Soundtracking of America," Atlantic Monthly, March 2000.

On what we think we hear

If a person plays dissonance long enough it will sound like consonance. --Keith Jarrett

On the Challenge of Living

Dying is easy. It's living that scares me to death. —Annie Lennox, from the song Cold, on the album Diva