in which I give too much credence to the History Channel

I’m taking a short break from what will hopefully be more posts on music and music-related matters to enter a piece of dismay toward a select population of human beings. I try not to dwell upon the foibles of my fellow sentient, carbon-based, hairless ape bipeds, but there is one in particular that is nothing more than irascible: the idea or suggestion that humans are not responsible for such things as the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, or other ancient wonders of the world, but alien beings, extraterrestrials, are.

On cable television and upon the lips of many a conspiracist there is spoken speculation rife with “proof” hailing from ancient texts that the technologies, drive, will, and inspiration to create early technological wonders and architectural feats of derring-do came from “above.” Prophets of old spoke of visions where they encountered “flying machines” or beautiful creatures that could not appear to be human upon first glance, and many a modern person has taken this out of the original contexts and decided that extraterrestrial visitors imbued us with the knowledge to break the surly bonds of earth. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens – but especially the Pyramids – were, say these modern charlatans of human ability, not just divinely-inspired but extraterrestrially-wrought, with beings from beyond Gaia and the Solar System instructing us how to cut stone blocks precisely, fit them precisely, and orient them precisely in order to serve some astrological or astronomical purpose and to simultaneously fill our fellow human beings with an awe and reverence at the might of rulers.

The bases the current speculators have for these extra-cosmic pedagogues are thin: primarily, the absence of proof of extraterrestrial intervention, in a coup of detournement, becomes the open door for proof that it could have happened. This is akin to stating that because Toronto did not burn to the ground in 1837 does not mean there is no proof that it did not burn down in 1837. Speculators also point to the continual reverence of Sky and Solar deities across early civilizations, be they Egyptian, Vedic, or Indian. The problem here is a lack of grounding in Jung and Campbell: every early civilization created and subsequently revered solar, lunar, and celestial deities. These are universals across Civilization for the very simple reasons that solar, lunar, and celestial cycles were less understood than other natural phenomena. It sounds daringly trite, but the sky was the last unexplored (in a sense) territory of the human condition only until Montgolfier and the Wright brothers: we as a human society could not conquer it, nor tame it, nor show dominion over the actions. As early civilizations slowly progressed, more was learned about the placement of stars, the movement and phases of the moon, and so on – early mystic and mythological associations were attached to Equinoxes and Solstices, to New Moons and Full Moons, and, especially, to eclipses – which, at least with the ancient Babylonians and Chinese, were eventually categorized and compiled into cyclical predictor charts which have proved largely correct. Otherwise, it is easy to understand the naïve logic of veneration for the celestial: to use Mongolian animism as an example, the Sky itself is the overlord deity – it is largely uniform in color, has a predictable cycle, and is the only natural entity that seems to be ever present, unchanging; the only deity from which a human cannot hide. Conflating, however, the mythical mystery of the sky with the notion that physical bodies came from beyond it to give us knowledge is a grotesque denial of our own shared humanity: ingenuity.

The Old Testament and Vedic Scriptures collectively discuss visions of chariots coming down from the sky with people of import on board, sharing ideas of flying machines or tools or prophecies to which humans must heed. The prophets who wrote down or communicated otherwise these visions, these incidents, must be questioned here as well: long before the days of the FDA and NIMH, food and drink were largely replete with toxins, and those with physical or mental medical problems were, if they were from important families or high breeding, treated as prophets or mystics or soothsayers. Today, we would know these conditions by name: dementia, epilepsy, food poisoning, toxemia, and otherwise. (If they were of low breeding or not of nobility, the result is the same as today: a perceived rambling madman occupying the streetcorners of society) The visions are highly figurative, lucid or quasi-lucid hallucinations brought on by poorly-cooked food, spoiled wine, rancid water, or cerebral degeneration, and, with the floridity of the bastardization of translation and reproduction, we cannot take any of this writing literally unless we too are prepared to subscribe to vindicating and verifying occurrences and conversations had on the brink of ephemeral or permanent insanity as utter and complete truth. Those speculators who search out the early Flying Machines in Vedic scriptures supposedly wrought from the gods (confused with Aliens in this case) are as dangerous, intellectually, as Fundamentalist Dogmatics following the Abrahamic traditions. Those speculators’ mission is not far off, either: convince as many nonbelievers through the use of skepticism applied to logic as a transformative means to permanently embrace and sanctify myth as proof. We have no room for that in the study of history, theology, or science.

As already mentioned, the primary source of irksomeness I see in all of this is the absolute denial of the capabilities for human ingenuity and advancement pro se. To state as though fact and believe it as such that Alien creatures visited human beings in order to instruct them in the ways of creating ancient, massive monuments both subtly and overtly points to a fundamental difference in how I and these speculators approach humanity. We are capable of detecting patterns – even domesticated and wild animals detect and sense patterns – and figuring out ways of prediction. We are capable of demonstrating mathematical and technological advances as means to improve our lot as societies. We are capable of creating a culture and lifeways that record and exhort our past and present. It took a few hundred thousand years, but humans eventually figured out how to create fire. It took tens of thousands of years after that, but after generational observations of growth rates of plants and water cycles, we began cultivating our own food and domesticating animals. It took a while, but we developed mathematics. It took a while, but we figured out how to shelter ourselves from the elements. It took a while, but we eventually started assigning mythical and mystical meanings to the world around us – only after we were able to come up with free time and grow to a critical mass that would allow for a creative class of human beings. To suggest that we as a Civilization would never have the ability to create architectural wonders, be they in total vanity or for sacredness, or make technological leaps, to sanctimoniously state that we needed help, has wide-ranging ramifications on our status as human beings now, providing us with an escape mechanism to blame esoteric entities for our perceived, short-term failures as a society, enabling us to think that we are not capable of discovery and innovation, and giving credence to a mental subjugation that has held back advancement and which allows human beings to settle for less. The centralized message, in a sense, is to be espied no differently from core messages of Organized Religions: you are powerless, and you are simply too stupid to solve your own problems and too naïve and cognitively bankrupt to create anew, because The Beyond is the only realm from which inspiration and safety come. The most disturbing and underlying thought here is that humans are not responsible for their own creations. The implications of this statement are all-encompassing, exempting us from any sort of obligation to ourselves, each other, or our own world. This is a powerful sentiment that allows a belief in the anarchic, an allowance for coldness and total detachment from our own actions, an allowance for complete and total disillusionment and despair in the capabilities of humanity.

This is not to begrudge belief – or, rather, Belief. I do not deny the power of it: it is a powerful solace, one that allows us to seek momentary refuge from the antipode of human innovation and creation: destruction and misery wrought by ourselves against ourselves. No matter how rationally and logically grounded we may be, we encounter moments of pure, visceral, incomprehensible pain or worry or loss – our natural instinct is to find answers, to engineer explanations, to invent solace for ourselves during the darkest moments until we are settled enough to reunite with our cogency. But the dependence upon Belief outside of these austere confines promulgates the acceptance of an unseen, indiscriminate authority through which all our actions must be judged and all our movements monitored. Supplication to this perpetual surveillance in an unhealthy manner again permits us to bolt shut the doors of belief in other human beings, the notion that humans can (and do) work jointly in order to solve, engineer, create, and progress.

As such, it is important for those who yield to the blind authority of extraterrestrial speculation to understand that their common ancestry with irrational Religious Fanaticism is pernicious – both rationally and scientifically. To hear the statement “aliens did not teach the Egyptians how to build the Pyramids” and retort “who is to say they didn’t?” is the basest, lowest form of illogic, of creating proof out of the absence of proof. To elevate extrasolar interventionism as the means of our Civilization’s developmental grace is to adhere to statements precluding our ingenuity and reasoning, and is to allow philosophical bases of anti-humanism to take root. It denies our past as problem-solvers, and our future as problem-solvers.

But, then, maybe the little green men will come back and tell us how to fix all our current broken systems since we’re having a difficult time, collectively, correcting the errors and uniting Civilization to correct the errors, despite plenty of evidence pointing to eventual disasters regarding climate, politics, wealth, access to water, and so on. In the meantime, let’s kick back and wait for outside assistance.

in which I awkwardly tackle the awkward analogues of dating and academic job-hunting

Anyone who has found themselves in the befuddlement of dating a new person knows the sentiments too well: a racing mind, loss of verbal dexterity, awkward small gestures that seem to be ill-timed. We are at our most vulnerable, in a way: we are anxious to please, to impress, to flatter and be flattered. We put ourselves on display, unlike we would in everyday life. We speak either haphazardly or in gaseous bursts of verbosity, out of synchrony with the cadence of normal verbal relationships with everyone else in the universe. We festoon ourselves (metaphorically, one hopes) with every award and merit we have earned, and shrink and recoil in horror once the chink in the armour is found – when that happens (note that I did not say “if”), we launch into damage-control overdrive: deflection, denial, denunciation. We have to be the best. We tell ourselves so. We want to believe it. We neither want to be lugubrious nor overly garrulous on the date. We want to somehow, if things seem like they would work out well, continue this relationship. If we really covet the potential relationship, it makes interactions with others who share our interest in the objet d’amour difficult, if not awkward.

Some things happen before we get to that point, before we get to the BBQ restaurant only to learn they’re a vegetarian – or, worse, from Lexington. We try to learn about the person as much as possible from friends, family, Facebook, other web presences. The diaphanously fine line between “Stalking” and “Earnest Interest” haunts us. We want to know with whom we’re dealing, with whom we’re speaking, at this momentous (or, typically, not-so-much) event. We ask around. We submit ourselves for approval, beseeching all mutual acquaintances to promote us as fine candidates, as wonderful picks, as someone whose interests will match theirs.

When we encounter an announcement for a faculty position, we automatically start reading everything the institution displays about itself through its propaganda machine: FTE counts, mission, values, history, vision, master plans, sanitized student experiences. We also seek out – something we seem to rarely do leading up to a date, but should – the accounts of students and personnel who have a less rosy view of things, or, anyhow, a much more substantially thorough experience. We craft, or attempt to if this is the 90th letter of the cycle, a cover letter painting us in vibrant, glowing hues, lavishing praise upon the college or university and finding ways to paint, in subtle tints, our ways into the hearts of the search committee through how our mutual interests meet up. We create a CV specific to the position, highlighting as many successes as possible without looking like a peacock without feathers attempting colorful braggadocio. We try to strike a balance between looking like we have potential (if we aim for junior faculty positions), and showing some maturity and modesty (if we have 5 or more years of teaching behind us and are aiming more toward tenure-track). We submit samples of our work as a means to talk ourselves up to the committee – which, while it should be liberating, is often the most frustrating and panic-inducing part: our creative work reflects the deepest traits of ourselves, and to face rejection based upon that is a feeling none of us ever wants to experience (again) (for the 73rd time). We do not readily see our own faults unless we ardently seek them; those objective committee members – our courtship guardians – see the flaws immediately.

And, we do this multiple times a season if we are actively seeking a faculty position. At current, I have applied to 37 positions since September 2010. Thirty-seven times I have opened myself up to complete and total criticism, where, as in a crowded bar or rock show, the guy to my left has a just-slightly-nicer lantern jaw, and the guy to my right has slightly-more-piercing blue eyes. The guy behind me makes no secret of his love affair with his Bowflex and wastrel P90 workout videos; the guy in front of me has a just-so-slightly more loveable laugh and more richly modulated voice. I stand no chance with the adorable Tina Fey lookalike next to me. And, like the desperado for work that I am, I submit myself to the approval of dozens rather than one, with hopes that, honestly, one of them has some semblance of pity in me, or some sort of psychic connection takes hold before reality sets in.

This is not to say I personally am without merits. My vita sports some high marks, both academically and professionally. My teaching record is solid and I can produce course evaluations, both quantitative and qualitative, that prove to some measure that I largely know my way around pedagogy. While in grad school and undergrad, I was a highly-decorated student. I’ve had unsolicited performances in three continents. My vita continues to expand, albeit slowly. But – and I can say this with certainty as this was the case with at least one position – there is always that one person just slightly more advanced in some way than I am, that one person who either exudes perfect confidence without besmirching decorum, or has just a little something more on their vita that makes them a little more attractive. Aviator glasses versus stylish RayBan frames; a pullover versus a cashmere sweater; two articles published versus three; someone without a firm dissertation defense date versus an ABD applicant with a defense looming near. One position for which I applied saw me rejected on the basis of having, precisely, one fewer publication than the ultimate candidate – other than that, our vitas at the time were identical.¹

Then there is awkwardness that comes from the elephant in the room: you and everyone else in your discipline, if they are end-stage PhD candidates or fresh doctors or unhappy in their current adjunct position, are applying for all the same positions. At the very least, the same 90% of them. Accosting this in conversation is delicate and recalls the discomfited stammering chat with a close friend on Monday morning: “Oh, so… you dated her, too? Are… are you going on a … you know, another? Because, well… you know…” We all know it. I completed my doctorate in the Spring of 2010, along with a host of colleagues and acquaintances. There are ABD students nipping at my heels who will leave the combine either this May or next December. Yet we act as though we all are applying for separate positions. The same Southern Ohio College position I apply for just can’t be the same one Bill or Jack is applying for. Just. Can’t. It is indeed a weird position of denial in which to find oneself, but it’s a very-much-true position. We don’t discuss it, either out of respect harvested from the fields of our own misgivings and notions of inferiority, or out of disinterest in yielding to a head-on onslaught of competition. I breathe a sigh of relief when I find out a colleague isn’t applying for the same position I am; I start muttering and figuring out how I’m going to survive the cut if a friend states they applied for a position I really covet. The worst awkwardness comes when one party reveals they’ve been advanced to the next round – a second date, another chance to wow and impress and charm – and the other party received a form letter wishing them well in their job search. It feels akin to betrayal, yet is a necessary betrayal, and, it goes without saying, not a betrayal upon which that person had any direct influence.

Then there’s the interview – if we get lucky. Without resorting to crassness, the interview is a chance at a form of intimacy, of being invited to the inner sanctum, the professional form of being invited up for coffee: seeing up close and personally the foibles, quirks, and inner workings of the institution, to really demonstrate one’s own individual talents and personality, and a chance to see just how dysfunctional and in need of therapy the institution, the department, and the other faculty are. One interview I had was, retrospectively, awful. It was as though Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon character was shepherding me through the department and meetings, neuroses and all – that is to say, I learned directly and indirectly far too many tiny flaws and oddities in the program, things that could have been prevented or better left unsaid or undone or rethought. I did not receive the full interview itinerary until the evening before the interview. My meetings with the department head kept getting rescheduled the day of the interview. My tour of the campus grounds was not led by a music faculty or staff or student, but by an adjunct Art professor. The department head could not have been less interested in my artistic vision. The division head – the department head’s dean – was outgoing at the end of the year (retiring, that is) and made no effort to mince his words about it, or about the realities and practicalities of the Tier 3 school. The position called for designing a new major and creating curriculum, but I learned in the interview that they already had curriculum created and a few courses in place. About the only thing that was done well on their end was the speedy travel reimbursement.

This is not to say I was without fault. I asked repeated questions about interdisciplinarity when the position was clearly a narrow-focus one. I misspelled a common word in a PowerPoint slide. My laptop lost battery charge partway through another presentation. My cat destroyed my valise a few days before the interview, so instead of looking dapper, I looked like a bedazzled hipster: a messenger bag and a Geoffrey Beene pinstripe suit. I had no handouts for the teaching portion of the interview (but, to be fair, I learned the night before that I’d be teaching). Even beforehand, the telephone interview was stock and lull, not shock and awe. From both sides.

Those lucky enough – or those with enough job-landing skills or friends in high places who can talk us up really well – eventually settle in to tenure-track positions. I’ve been on the hunt for three years, one post-doctorate. I’m slowly approaching 100 rejections since mid-2008. As a matter of course, I haven’t had an interview since May, 2010 – right around the same time, oddly, that I went on my last date. On my last date, the woman I was with thought that when I was referring to Michael Eric Dyson² I was talking about “the vacuum-cleaner guy.” Thus endeth my quest for love. Around the same time, I was hired verbally by a small college but a few weeks later given the grim budget news that no one at said college would be hired for the ’10-’11 term, and, in fact, positions were going to be lost. But those who stick with it, so I’m told, find love in the form of another human being, and find happiness in the form of job security, patronage, academic freedom, and the joy of teaching. Furthermore, from what I’ve been told, when either and/or both happen, the likelihood of a lasting, productive, well-matched relationship is at least 50%.

For the ages, I can state unequivocally that I’m not much to look at right now, but if we really like each other, and if we think mutually there’s a lot of potential for greatness, then I’ll be damned if I’m going to purposefully muck it up or leave unless things are completely unsalvageable or dysfunctional beyond any repair. So, colleges and universities: I am still available. Call me.

I'm desperate.³

***

1: I'm happy to report that my vita is now slightly more impressive than the other candidate's. Too late to help me now, though.
2: The first time it happened with a different significant other, I forgave it. The second time it happened, with an avowed civil rights activist, I couldn't forgive myself.
3: Relatively speaking. For instance, I still expect a paycheck and overtime for teaching an overload.

if it's all been done already, go do something else.

Perhaps one of my most ardent intellectual and artistic pet-peeves is the statement “everything that could possibly be done has been done.” It may surprise you to know that at one time I held court with this thought as an avid worshipper of the sentiment and its relatively shallow meanings on a daily basis. I called that the first year of graduate study, the daunting, rigorous clanging of hitherto unknown (or only in passing) innovations of the 20th Century reverberating in my ear, creating an inferiority complex that has taken a decade to mitigate, an inferiority complex rampant among many of the most talented – and perhaps least-“accomplished” – composers.

The initial reaction I have to the statement now is, “so, what?” What of it? Is there a quantifiable measure of techniques and harmonic styles and technical details and tedium down to the last sixteenth rest and string voicing that definitively proves that every single thing possible has been composed? And if, by some fiat of magic, we were to unequivocally receive an affirmative response to the query, what would that fundamentally change? Would that prevent artists from creating art, from attempting new techniques and finding new ways to connect – intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually – with themselves, their performers, and their audiences? Would ultimate intellectual knowledge that there can be, essentially, “nothing new under the sun,” preclude any sort of artistic work in any field?

In a sense, it did, as far as I was concerned. When I began graduate study, I would compose religiously and steadily, and in seminars and through peers I was quickly introduced to worlds of innovation and compositional techniques and abstractions of the sonic realm that initially supercharged me but rapidly made me shrink back into an intellectual corner. I would compose a piece or set out with some new ideas, thinking they were peerless (I blame this primarily on naïveté and lack of book-learnin’), and then be, for example, introduced to Giacinto Scelsi’s works of ultra-Klangfarbenmelodie, or to Berio’s collage works, or Lachenmann’s or Pape’s bizarre and successful takes on extended technical writing for strings. I would abandon the ideas I formulated, as – truthful or not, verifiable or not – I would see them not as personal innovations or simply additional techniques I could use, but as tawdry, juvenile carbon copies of the Masters. While I was in college, I had the opposite problem: when first exposed to Messiaen’s early period, all of my music took on an 8 pr 9-pitch modal harmonic language populated by tritones; when introduced to Sessions’s symphonies (and when I finally understood them) I wrote loosely dodecaphonic and unapologetically dissonant work; when studying Bartók’s middle period, all of my music appeared to have Hungarian and Romanian rhythmic elements for no apparent reason. And, clearly, I reveled in this – I relished the idea that I could write things approximating my idols, and, brazenly, thought I could improve on their techniques. Getting my hands on a copy of Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language one Christmas, for a hot minute, made me think I’d absorb all of Olivier’s secrets and become the next, better Messiaen. A fundamental shift occurred when I realized that the music I needed to be composing was supposed to be mine and not the legacy of others – the anecdote of when Roger Sessions was playing a student work of his on the piano for Ernest Bloch with the latter screaming at Sessions each of the influences heard is a constructed scene that started on an endless loop once I was thrown into the much larger, much more competitive world of actual professional composition. In order to compete, in order to thrive, in order to succeed and be above the fray, I would have to innovate and unleash my own voice.

The only problem, though, is that I had no idea what that was, no idea how to attain it through the current methods of loving mimicry, no external impetus to hunt for it. As a means to justify writing whatever I wanted as a student, which oddly enough centered around a relatively developed and mature rhythmic-harmonic language, I decided to make “everything has already been done” as a sort of mantra, and I’m sorry I ever did. Rather than allow knowledge of trends and ideas and styles inculcate my musical vernacular and inspire and challenge me, I allowed it to have dominion over me, to intimidate me. The end result was a young, tenuous composer purposefully trying to innovate, making a concerted effort to pioneer new sonic realms. What I had long feared, retrospectively, came true: with increased knowledge came increased sorrow, when, rather, the truth should have set me free.

Innovation rarely happens purposefully in the arts. Innovation seems to arise spontaneously in collective leaps forward while artists are merely attempting to solve critical problems through methods other than ones they have been taught or know very well. I will go so far that innovation in artistic technique is accidental, with intellectual leaps being more like sudden lurches after all the happy accidents. (Not to say none of us knows what we're doing - quite the contrary - rather, change comes like a snowfall, not lightning: gradual, silently, sometimes violently) Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Klee, Mondrian. Debussy, Stravinsky, George Antheil, Erik Satie. (Well, to an extent, Debussy purposefully attempted to be an innovator, but he had been composing for more than 25 years before he started to seriously refer to himself such) Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri. La Monte Young. They did not – so far as the historical record and their biographies show – wake up each morning with the words “I will change music and/or art today.” Their to-do lists did not include, after a light lunch and before afternoon tea, “Shake Up World With Groundbreaking New Timbres/Forms/Etc.” As a quietly terrified student, this was all to which I could cling. I did not realize – and only within the past few years have I finally accepted – that innovation of any sort in the arts comes slowly, unwittingly, and after much trial and error. Often, failures themselves become innovations long after the fact of their creation, long after their inception. Le Sacre flopped as a ballet, as a staged work; nearly 100 years later, both the choreographic and musical aspects are seen as hugely pivotal artistic developments, the disastrous premiere itself seen as the fulcrum upon which the weight of 20th Century art shifted away from the Weltschmerz and Wagnerian/Mahlerian ultra-Romanticism of the 19th Century.

Indeed, I was slow to realize this - a charade used to distance myself from questions of worth as I was coming of age. I abstractly knew this, certainly - but it was not a prevalence or truth that I breathed every morning.

For a growing number of currently-working and often largely successful composers, the standard of “there is nothing new under the sun” seems to be the words exhaled through a yawn both when they rise from slumber and when they end their day with drowsiness. This population believes this sentiment, if not reifies it as a daily maxim actively and nonchalantly brandished. My question to this is: why? Why do these composers continue composing? Why continue working? Why create art or attempt to create it if what one writes is nothing but mere, sheer mimeograph? Why, especially, are so many of these people engaged in teaching - and maintain these teaching positions in earnest? Patronage, but for what reason? Educating new composers and musicians, but to what end? The ramifications here are wide ranging: why perpetuate any artform of any sort? Why train performers? Why simply sit stationary? This thinking, this very insistence that Everything Is Done, is the primary intellectual rationale those suspicious of the Arts point to as a means of decrying art and support for its creation and performance; the tenet of Nothing New Can Happen is the very thinking that keeps young people and tenuous musicians and critics viewing the symphony hall as nothing more than a museum, a concertmaster or conductor nothing more than a docent. The statement is monochromatic and incontrovertible; those who adhere to it should, frankly, either eradicate adherence to the mantra and grudgingly create passionately and earnestly, or leave the business of art and music, the institutions to teach art and music, and the life of a creative artist and find a new profession immediately, else those persons who stay entrenched be labeled frauds, or worse. I cannot, honestly, see how one can entertain this notion that their art is, essentially, without intellectual and by extension artistic justification, while composing daily and honestly, thoroughly encouraging young composers and musicians. They are mutually exclusive. One can deride innovation, or be suspicious of artistic intent, in their own music, or in the music of others - but to outrightly deny that innovation can ever occur again and to imply that all music is dead is shortsighted and laughable.

I have nothing much to say - at this moment. I will, however, attempt to make a more concerted effort to update this regularly and actually - gasp! - write more. Ideally, I'd like to shape this more toward writing about - gasp! - music, in a fairly cross-disciplinary manner, but that doesn't necessarily preclude me prattling on about other matters in which I take either ephemeral or lasting interest. Never has, really. So, fundamentally, nothing much will change, with the hopeful exception of actually putting more words to digital paper here. And, cynics, take heart: this isn't some New Year's resolution, but rather a longtime peripheral to-do on some to-do list of mine somewhere. Maybe.

Maybe.

For whatever I do put here, though, I ask you to engage me. Comment. Challenge me. Agree with me. Help me see something beyond my limited perspective, even if it's evident I am trying to see beyond my vision. Tell me what I'm missing; tell me what I'm discussing too much. Hell, tell me when I have typos. I'm just one guy, you know? Trying to make my way in this crazy world, etc...

my love for you...

Some of these are new. Some are not. All of them are words. I like to eat words.

These are about how my love is like a various item of food. I hope you enjoy it.

And, if not, then I suppose you've failed. Not me, you.

My love for you is like a frozen carrot: bold, vivid, unbreakable, and full of vitamin A.

My love for you is like an apple: subtle, shiny, tender, and quick to become discolored if exposed to oxygen for too long.

My love for you is like a pumpkin: big, cumbersome, warm, hearty, and a favorite object of bat-wielding drunk teenagers.

My love for you is like a peanut: tough to crack, efficient, versatile, and occasionally highly toxic to the wrong people.

My love for you is like a banana: mushy, fragrant, easily digestible, and on the brink of extinction.

My love for you is like a papaya: exotic, robust, seedy, thin-skinned, and incapable of sitting on a shelf more than a few days.

My love for you is like high fructose corn syrup: mildly sweet, borderline addictive, and in every damned thing everywhere.

My love for you is like canned beets: easy to slice, little nutritional value, and stains everything in your house.

My love for you is like a potato: nondescript but widely varied, turns purple from iodine, and will break windows if thrown hard enough.

My love for you is like a milkshake: cold and stodgy at first, but yields with warmth, and is drunk to the full by Daniel Day Lewis.

My love for you is like a piece of bread: not the heel - no, not that one either - yeah, that one, sort of in the middle of the loaf.

My love for you is like a thin-crust pizza: smothered in greasy things under the illusion that because part of it is thin that it isn’t quite so deleterious.

My love for you is like an orange: sweet, sticky, pulpy, an inspiration for two out of five of Neruda’s poetic images, and doubles as the base for a detergent.

My love for you is like a pork chop: surrounded by fluff, robustly textured, and not at all kosher.

My love for you is like hummous: simple, basic, incredibly filling, but gets in the way of your baba ghanouj.

My love for you is like cheese: fuck patriarchy.

My love for you is like milk: nourishing, mixes well with chocolate, leaves a thin film on things, and goes bad after seven to ten days.

My love for you is like canned tuna: watery, compressed and ready to spring into action, and a favorite of feral cats.

My love for you is like a burrito: fill it with damn near everything and get away with it.

My love for you is like fried rice: peppery, tinges of color, and loaded with enough MSG to take out the 51st Manitoban Cavalry.

My love for you is like a cup of pudding: smooth, silky, can be thrown in the pantry and forgotten for weeks on end, and develops an alien skin once exposed to sunlight.

My love for you is like uncooked pasta: filled with dog hair once you spill it all over the floor.

My love for you is like avocado ice cream: trust me, buddy, it will knock you on your ass with how good it is.

My love for you is like four loko: addictive, generically fruit-flavored, and will land 82 partygoers in the ICU after two cans.

My love for you is like a raisin: small, lonely, delicately sweet, but will show up in foods you least expect and make you shriek with terror.

My love for you is like tofu: blanched, bland but takes up any flavoring you give it, soaked in its own juices, and makes a terrible pillow.

My love for you is like a watermelon: filled with boiling rage.

My love for you is like a three-layered cake: excruciating in terms of effort in creating it, the true measure of its wonder comes only when it has been completely devoured.

My love for you is like a glass of water: cool, clear, a staple of life, and easily thrown into the face of a hussy.

My love for you is like caviar: basically pointless, but schmucks place artificially high monetary values on it and fish its producers to extinction.

My love for you is like a cup of coffee: damn good coffee.

My love for you is like a bottle of imitation vanilla: overpriced, smells terrific, and tastes terrifyingly grotesque.

My love for you is like a box of crackers: square, occasionally perforated, salty, but can be covered with any variety of substances.

My love for you is like a glass of Chimay: I really enjoy beer.

My love for you is like a taco salad: someone said “let’s figure out how to combine everything we have left in the fridge and slap some salsa on it and call it ‘Mexican.’”

My love for you is like a sack of flour: ground out by massive stones and veritably useless unless combined with other things, like pestilence, fear, or loathing.

My love for you is like a cup of lentils: earthy, crunchy before cooked, and typically filled with small stones that will break your teeth.

My love for you is like a Gummi worm: amazing elasticity, psychotropic translucence, but created from Gummi Bear slave labor, destroying the surrounding countryside in the maddening hunt for the highly prized worms.

My love for you is like cold beef stew: disgusting.

Golden Bowl recollections...

I wrote this over six years ago. I have no idea if it's still funny in the least.

---

One of the more entertaining facets of Chinese take-out would be, sans debate, the fortune cookie. In this case, Little Chinatown provided me with three of their better Golden Bowl confections. I have chewed and swallowed only one -- today after my Galaxy of Faux-Prawns Fried Rice, and I decided to make a purport.

"Romance comes into your life this year in a very unusual way." Hmm. Seems innocuous enough. And ambivalent enough to pass as a commonplace fortune. And while I know these brief missives of mystery slipped into the cookie mean nothing, I shall make a list of how I expect romance to enter my life in "unusual" ways.

--At a side-show, someone gets shot out of a cannon and collides with my abdomen. I wind up with severe internal bleeding and a crushed pancreas. In the pancreas trauma ward, I meet the future love of my life, a person who lost their pancreas when, in a bizarre bowling accident, they became trapped in the frame and got reset as a 4-pin. The hollow feelings in our guts are replaced with long nighttime conversations about the various flavors of jello and the pace of the intravenous drip.
--I witness a burning building on my way to work and decide to be a hero. Instead of finding people, I find a voodoo priestess in the back room sacrificing the structure to cleanse her family's spirits. Noticing my unscrupulous entrance into her life-sized altar, she casts upon me a spell, turning me into an anteater and casting me off the the Faeroe Islands where a confused seal becomes enamored with me.
--Due to circumstances beyond my control, I get forced out of my apartment and have to live in a stairwell. This stairwell is located in a building below a bluff. One fine day, a busload of Zen nuns flies off the bluff into the stairwell. I run for my life and run into a real estate broker who, because of circumstances beyond hir control, is faced with living in the stairwell in the opposite end of the building. Various puns about staircases ensue and true love doth blossom.
--I get reincarnated as a rabbit. Let the good times roll!
--Returning to my seat at a hockey game, I notice a large, brooding man has taken my seat. I decide to fight fire with uncomfortable gestures and I sit on his lap against his protestations. He flings me headfirst into the lower rows where I end up with my head stuck in a bucket of popcorn. I wander around for a while and realize I'm on the ice. I get viciously attacked by Per Sven Østergård, a very angry Nordic man thinking I was the opposing team's mascot. After he destroys my ability to feel things below my neck, he shows remorse by introducing me to his sister, Helga Svenska Østergård, who happens to also be a very angry Nordic man. But her daughter is neither angry nor a man.
--Working at the 7-11, I get held captive by a team of bitter sea lions wearing headsets. I flee and they chase me into the desert. I trip over a rock and prepare for a nasty tumble. A giant pteradon swoops me up and attempts to devour me whole, but after a struggle it drops me through the roof of a bowling alley where I land in the kids' ball crawl. Since the ball crawl is infested with scorpions, I make a break for it, noticing the sea lions are still closing in. I jump the fence around the bowling alley and end up in the backyard of one Renee Zellweger, who pumps my guts full of lead. I wake up three days later in the pancreas trauma ward where I meet the wardmate who was involved in a serious bowling accident the night before.

Here are 100 additional Hobo Names you did not request

In Honor of John Hodgman's 700 Hobo Names, I bring you 701-800. I guess.


#701: Edamame Jones, the Human Soybean
#702: Timothy the Jellyfish Chiropractor
#703: Homeostasis McGillicuddy
#704: Alvin “Tijuana Nights” Spencer
#704: Flashlight Burleson, of the Burning Burlesons
#705: Nadia the Backgammon Cheater
#706: Skipper Sanders, the No-Pocketed
#707: Hush Puppy Alaijuwon
#708: Salmon Patty Douglas
#709: Esperanto Davison, the Babbler
#710: Toothpick Ramirez, the Fingerless
#711: Big Gulp
#712: Dmitri Burleson, the One-Eyed Dentist, no relation to the Burning Burlesons
#713: Deep-Sea Diving Irma of the Fish People
#714: Pressure-Valve Tcherepnin, or the Whistling Wozniak
#715: Viva Camels Horseback Tourism Service
#716: Hakim “No Trans Fat” Mendez
#717: Irish Steve, the Bearded
#718: “Pancake Fighter” Norris of Mapleton Falls
#719: Ahab, the Hooks-for-Eyes and Hooks-for-Teeth Reference Librarian
#720: Dual Exhaust Burleson, of the Burning Burlesons
#721: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#722: Saltpeter McAdams, the Catholic Civil War Re-enactor
#723: Isabella Rosselini Cozick, or the Fake Italian
#724: Mariela Azkenazy, or The Little Bedazzler
#725: Bald Pete
#726: Hirsute Pete
#726: Mortician Pete
#727: Herbert “Adrianople” Left-Arm, or The Last Cappadocian
#728: Frank McCourt’s Eyebrows
#729: Jeff Gort, the Moderately Medium-Heighted
#730: Boxcar Nathan Burleson, the Pyromaniac
#731: Your Mother, So Named Because What Else Can You Call a 59-Year-Old Hobo from Platteville, NY
#732: The Tigress Ethan Hawke
#733: Nebuchadnezzar Gleeson, The Rapscallion Onion Cooker
#734: Santa Monica Freeway After Dark
#735: Concho “Crow’s Feet” Randall, the Shark Tester
#736: Papyrus Franz, the Banal Scrawler
#737: Boxcar Danforth, the Lackluster Scrabble Player
#738: Tetsuo
#739: Boxcar Ianuzzi, Electronics Dealer
#740: A Ladle Once Having Belonged to Henry David Thoreau’s Grist Mill Operator
#741: Tina Fey, Or Someone Who Resembles Her Greatly, But Bearded and Paunchy and Most Likely Not Tina Fey
#742: Bus-Stop Oliver Wendell Sherlock Holmes the Fourth
#743: Gooey Gooey Cocoa Beans, The Bitter
#744: Napalm Burleson, Father of the Burning Burlesons
#745: Alistair Go-Lightly McLean, the Footless Ghost
#746: Nebulous Nelly, the Hazy Actuary
#747: Jumbo Jameson, Designer of Flightless Liquor Bottle Birds
#748: Heavy Metal Delacroix , The Gumbo Queen of Kansas
#749: Ivor Darnetchka, the Three-Fingered Knitter
#750: Sullivan O’Sullivan, the Surly Jew
#751: Queen Anne Wearing Nothing But Lace
#752: “Uvula” Utley, The Silent Killer
#752: Humbert Humbert
#753: Wade Philips, the Dolt
#754: Nine-Ring Paul, the Electrician Who Once Successfully Mixed the Worlds of Sweet and Salty Breakfast Bars, As Evidence By His True Name, Oscar the Gastronome
#755: Oscar the Gastronome the Second
#756: Felipe Calderon
#757: “Jet-Pack” Travers, He of the Scalded Back
#758: Mister Blisters
#759: Eye-Teeth Frida
#760: Marvin Gleeson, the Dilettante Actuary, not to be confused with…
#761: Garvin Meason, the Actuarial Dilettante
#762: Yasmin Bleeth(e)
#763: Horatio Snowbottom Leahy, or Permafrost Pelvis
#764: Legless “Clusterbomb” Neely, Second Cousin Once Removed of Jet-Pack Travers
#765: “Normalized Relations” Weisenstein
#766: “Airport” Stevens, or The Man Who Leads At Least Three Double Lives Between Visits to His Loves at Various Airports Within Jet-Pack Distance of The Railyard
#767: “Airplane” Stevens, “Airport” Stevens’ Former Spouse
#768: Rusty Kelvin, The Frigid
#769: Busty Melvin, The Frigidaire
#770: Napalm Claxson, the Catnip Farmer
#771: “Burnt Toast” Nixon, The Naughty Ex-Girlfriend So Named for Depilating a Chihuahua Near a Toaster
#772: Harold Mouth-Eyes, the Food-Watcher
#773: Tabasco Marlin, or a Cooked Fish
#774: Renal-Failure Sanford, the Lipless
#775: Aldous “The Bulbous” Malikonious
#776: Kaneda
#777: Reena Burleson, or Spicy Curry Steve
#778: Mohawk Albritton, the Saddest Hobo Not In A Joy Division Cover Band
#779: Fauxhawk Albritton, Mother of Mohawk
#780: “Remote-Control” Randy Riles, the Living Nickel-Cadmium Battery Pack
#781: Snow-Angel Jimenez, the Rowdiest Cobbler
#782: Key-Lime Krista of the Secret Anti-Jet-Pack Hobo League, or the Baking Beauty
#783: Arista Records
#784: Kurt the Opalescent Turtle
#785: Shiny Shiny Shiny Knees, the Legless
#786: Noriko Fuji, the Displaced Shinto
#787: Birth-Sign Helman, the Birthday-less
#788: King Lear
#789: Ignatius Josephus Centurion, the Belt-Eater
#790: Ignatius Barnabus Kleptos, the Belt-Stealer
#791: Little Argonaut Boskiewicz
#792: The Ghost of Juan Williams Present
#793: Mara Liasson, The Ghost of Juan Williams' Future
#794: Little Cranky Keith, the Disappointed Father
#795: Large-Eared Ernest, the Deaf
#796: Crabcake Dawson the Kosher
#797: Hidalgo Burleson the Tarantula Masseuse, no relation to the Burning Burlesons, except through marriage to…
#798: Wanda Ford, Secret Taxidermist
#799: Jose Guiterrez Lancaster, the Third-Most-Sought-After Tennessee Ernie Ford Impersonator
#800: “Habeas Corpus” the Silent Azerbaijani, or Klaus Peck the Loudmouth

(reposted here for those who aren't affiliated with That Particular Social Network)

conundrum, or dilemma, or crisis?

I find myself now in a bit of a (large) crisis. At present time, I have sketches for about a dozen pieces. Only two have any sort of firm deadline - two that have guaranteed performances - and neither has received much attention from me lately, owing to the fact that their deadlines aren't until the early spring.

I've halted reworking gravity express (despite my claim that it's basically finished, I'm not satisfied with the form and pacing), and I'm staring down:
- violin, clarinet, piano work sketches;
- bassoon quartet sketches;
- string quartet sketches;
- two orchestral works in various states of completion (or, sketches);
- a Pierrot ensemble sketch;
- a piano/string quintet sketch;
- various wind ensemble sketches.

That's not all of them, obviously. It feels as though all this music wants to escape at once and it's all getting caught in the threshold. I'll fizzle out working on one thing and try to flit over to another; I'll lose patience on that and focus on yet something else. The cycle perpetuates. Of all the sketches, the work for which I have the clearest vision is an orchestra piece, but I can't logically justify letting that take precedence over many of the chamber works. Each of the chamber works I can easily see being an entry into some prize or contest - if I could finish them. They would also, theoretically, be easier to get performed - if I can find performers for them.

This has been a perennial problem for me. I have no problem working with multiple canvases, but when I have more than two or three set up, my world becomes disarrayed and harried pretty quickly. I'm not finding outside encouragement to write a lot of these pieces (read: been getting more rejections than usual, not having performers lined up for the pieces, etc), so that erodes my due care and focus pretty sharply and quickly. In the back of my mind, there's a "don't bother" attitude promulgated by the very same long string of prize/commission/contest rejections of late, but I know this isn't a healthy sentiment to have. I've been disappointed with my slow progress on all of my projects of late, and my dolefully tendentious brain is always caught between simply writing and stepping back and asking whether what I'm writing is imaginative enough, or challenging enough, or too banal, or too tonal, or too uninteresting.

This all leads to a bit of a devastating thought. I know I have the talent to be a composer, and perhaps a good one, but where is the focus, the determination? Where are my connections? Why is it that I know so many people - software engineers, law professors, teachers, academics - but so few performers? I feel as though I've largely exhausted my list, and I am loathe to keep pestering the same dozen people for performances of existing pieces or about asking them to perform newer or not-yet-composed works. I seem to have the mind for it, most of the time, but little else. And with my bizarre desire to get so much written - seemingly at once - the situation is just compounded...

from one

Apologies in advance. Been composing and doing other things, but here's a quick break from that. I'm known to occasionally write haphazard poems. Here is one. Yay.

“from one to zero”

There is the waiting, and the waiting,
and the waiting.
Days drag on, a mouldering fire
exhaling in slow, whiskered gasps,
unable to lift their heads, ears
of cloud sharpened by lancet winds.

I lose myself among the counted weeks,
the soft-soled march drumming
uneven, pale rhythms;
I lost count of the untold seconds

(must be tens of millions by now)

That seem to count backward from
one, to another zero, one, to
another zero.

There is the waiting, the pendulous
shadow green as copper. There is
the waiting.

(I swear this all looks familiar.)

Desiccated days with raspy voices,
coughing through acrid smoke, the
nostrils flared, caked with ash, eyes
unable to open ---
the nights wet with worry, gurgling
sobs stifled by a silence, melting
eyebrows and cheeks flushed, as
though beat counterclockwise.

Then there is the waiting.

The worlds traversed, occasionally
crossing orbits: tenuous words in
maudlin capes, a mock Saint George
with blood-drained fingers; coffee
spoons unfurled in florid bells of
porcelain’s clamor, closing up shop
for winter, trellises as hands grasping
at brittle noon haystalks and clover.

(I really don’t want to leave here.)

Words meant to suture seem
to nurture the wound back to health,
a rapier upending the papier-mache
scar tissue, a gnarled claw digging at
flimsy beer-coated armor;
a footless ghost, wizened, drifting
among the corridors and catacombs,
neither lost nor grey with discomfiture.

(From one to zero, there must be
tens of millions, tens of millions)

There is yet the waiting; it will always be there.

To see the ember fall up into
its wood, to see back into ash cascading
into solid boughs, into the conflagration
and the void of light before it;
To view a brittle brown oval of
an elm denude itself of brittleness
and drink back the tenderness with
which it clung to the spindly branch;
to watch with zeal the cinnamon strands
of pine needles scattered among the
dirt and dogshit rethread the air and touch
a piquant green, and then a wilder
green, and then disappear into the
scales completely:

There is the waiting

And there is the waiting.

something old-ish

"volant"

The dial face of the sun takes its hands and scrubs my scalp, chestnut filaments burning into hot wisps of gray, indistinguishable from a fog that tumbled out of trees one morning that stumbled and choked in the haze as it caused a luscious trainwreck, lathered in oil and rendered fat from weary travelers.

They were all fine. They stood up and shook their britches off and dusted off their shirts. Took their wallets out, from pockets they forgot they had, extra purses they packed for such an occasion, and dumped the contents out on the gravel, reclaiming only their cash and a business card for an attorney.

Without too many words other than cranky “that’s mine”s and “oh, beg pardon”s, they took their slimmed down lives and wandered into birchtree groves; shirakaba, said a foreign traveler, who then decided to make that his new name.

They all left their shoes behind, which I thought just a trifle odd.

The sun beat down on the groves as Rinzai would a pupil all too clever; I watched from a cell a mile or so up the line, a clear direct path illuminated for me, but not for me. The roof had been sold back to the monastery, you see, so I then had an obstructed view of a ceiling by looking at some haze-smitten sky, endless, terrifying.

The cycle of humidity has taken to putting dental floss impressions in my forehead. I never remembered it being such an object of topographic interest to the authorities. My eyes look like pale cinders trapped behind folds of leather; my nose pitted and getting more lopsided with each UV burst. My hearing is starting to wane. It’s getting fuzzy, so the expression goes, probably from the fibrous shellac, tangled kitten hairs, covering my pinnae.

So this room sees me sitting, looking, pausing. Over what, I couldn’t tell you. I asked to be placed here. Not precisely: I asked others about where I ought to go, where I ought to go, where I ought to go; what I ought to do, what I ought to do, what I ought to do: I ended up here.

I’m probably 135 feet up. I started at 820 millimeters, then worked my way to 831 inches. I made it as high as 167 feet or so, but those damned beavers. I should mention I reside in a well-crafted cell, with no ceiling, a plexiglass floor, and a wide window overlooking the railway. I built it myself, for the most part, with some help from some key personages. Too bad none of us know what we’re doing with a power drill.

I spit into some clay, let it harden. Try to build it up too quickly. Snap down young red pines and complain (forever) when they leave me with far less than the constructive result I’m seeking. The non-union crew showed up whenever it felt like it, which was part of the problem. We’d have planks and 2x4s, made out of tapioca, frozen. We’d have nails and woodscrews, made out of dried arteries and sparkplugs, respectively. We’d wrap the thing in Styrofoam coffee cups and aspirin bottles, try to balance heavy loads on Warsteiner bottles, half-broken from a contractor we never remembered meeting.

We left a debris field right under the window. Miraculously, this spindly trestle stands on its own piers, although it isn’t quite so aerodynamic as to withstand mighty blows or gusts in the shape of a cat. I look down over the pile of ragged, jagged tin cups and soap wrappers and broken clocks, ringed and flanked by tarnished silvery-gold hubcaps, and soiled once-diamond-bright knives, all at attention, Marines on parade. I pretend to know what it’s like to fall 12 storeys, survive, and do it all over again.

I only wish I could convince someone to jump with me, or four, or nine; I’d rather have someone break my fall in case I ended up in the birch grove, emptying my wallet, seeking a new realm, footless as a slug.

According to the skywatch, it’s nearly evening. Any leaping, caressing of gelatinous air, tender embrace of the soil at 25 meters per second only to splash through a mud puddle and emerge a vagrant somewhere in Newark, to be thrown into something else, fused into the gearworks of another name, will have to wait until I can see precisely where I’m going.