Italics are mine

An Honest Musician

I was over-analyzing again the prospects of my novel yesterday when I happened to notice the two-volume biography of Adolf Busch ("The Life of an Honest Musician") lined along the wall with my other books. It matters to understand what follows that the biography is 1,200 pages long and my records show I paid $91 for it on Amazon.com. Yes, $91, based on a glowing review I read in Opera News (without which I would never have heard about it, which reminded me of Joseph Brodsky's bio and The New Yorker - see this post of mine for details).

Adolf Busch (1891-1952) was a German musician who, although he was not Jewish, left Germany in the late 1920s because he was sickened by the rise of the Third Reich. He went on to fund the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and also gave the Busch Quartet its name. He is briefly mentioned in my novel, and might serve as inspiration for future work too. Even if I don't write about him again, I feel he is one of the most remarkable figures of the Nazi period, since he left his native country so early at what must have been great personal cost.   

Anyway, I happened to look at those two enormous volumes I haven't had a chance to open yet, and it occurred to me there aren't too many people out there willing to go through 1200 pages on Adolf Busch, all famous that he was in his heyday. The book is currently ranked 913,607th on Amazon.com. Think about the time and the research that must have gone into a book like that. The painstaking scholarship. The double-checking and the triple-checking of facts.

And for what? Certainly not to make the best-seller lists. I imagine a few hundred readers might ever read this labor of love by Tully Potter, who does not appear to have ever published anything else beside a book of poems in 1975. If he had cared about wide readership, the world would not have this biography of Adolf Busch - this portrait in courage by a man who said no to Hitler and left an amazing legacy in classical music, as a violinist, as a composer and as a supporter of chamber music - and we would all be the poorer for it.

The 27 Club

Amy Winehouse's death at age 27 has led a number of media outlets to write about the so-called "27 Club" of artists who died at the same age, suggesting there is something special about being 27 that makes musicians self-destruct. (You can read for instance this Wikipedia page and this NPR article.) Others have dismissed this alleged statistical anomaly as complete nonsense. I think the truth is somewhere in-between.

After all, it is well-accepted that, when it comes to electrical equipment, a lot of items fail either early or toward the end of the life range, but much less in the middle - the failure rate looks like a bathtub. Maybe musicians face a similar phenomenon - for the non-math types, the only thing you want to know is that, once you've made it above the hump, things begin to look up. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin did not make it that far. Bob Dylan did.

I do think that the late 20s and early 30s are very challenging for creative people - in my case, my 30s especially so, because I spent so little of my 20s in the real world (if you can call academia the real world - but well, I am not a student any more). Having a job brings along all sorts of time constraints and responsibilities that force you to take a good look at your dreams and decide whether you want to continue pursuing them or whether it is time to move on. The time pressure of a full-time job when you want to write is very difficult to endure, and I place myself among the lucky ones, because of my position's flexibility.

This being said, finding the time to write and more generally to do the things that bring me the most joy and peace is a permanent struggle. During the academic year I routinely do yoga at 2am because that's the only time I can find for it. I drink too much coffee. I don't touch my acrylics paints for weeks - until I make myself start a painting and realize how much I need that sort of things. So it is a fight, always. I assume a lot of people are in the same situation, whether they have kids or simply a side interest they truly love. The fact that you'll see your dreams squashed if you ever stop fighting because of the pressures of the real world closing in on you is something I find terrifying. 

In e e cummings's words: "To be nobody but yourself in a world  which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." (Story of my life. I should probably transfer the quote onto a painting or collage and have it framed.)

Letting go of lofty goals that are no longer meaningful is certainly a part of growing up. Letting go of cherished dreams because the dreary daily grind is getting the better of you is a whole other story. If I had any advice for college graduates, it would be to use the excitement that comes from being unleashed in the real world to create some real momentum toward the achievement of their goals, while they can still function on four hours of sleep and don't yet feel they're running out of time to fulfill their dreams. That might not mean they will realize their dreams now - sometimes you do need to accumulate experience, or wisdom, or go through many intermediary steps. But having momentum is important. It'll get them over the 27-year-old hump.

On a singer who died too young

So I've been thinking about Amy Winehouse's death. (Why do I put this on my writing blog? I'm not sure. But she was an artist. And we all watched her very public descent into self-destruction.)

I didn't listen to Winehouse's music (although I'll give it a try, because people have described it as soulful and jazz-like with a nod to the 1960s) so I can't tell whether she was half as good as the music critics on NPR and PBS say she was. I do have, unfortunately, experience in witnessing addiction, and so I do feel qualified to say, in the light of some nasty online comments published about Winehouse's death, that a lot of people don't understand addiction at all.

I'll simplify it for you: people do bad things because they find something positive in them, in spite of the consequences. Drugs and alcohol in particular can numb feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy that are common in so many artists. They also alter decision-making. People say that Winehouse chose to do drugs. The thing is, after a while, the part of your brain that controls decisions is so damaged that you don't really decide much of anything anymore, to the annoyance of people around you. (The great, great annoyance of people around you.) The drugs control you instead.

I'm not trying to excuse addicts. They can put the rest of society at risk, either directly (robbing others to buy drugs, driving drunk) or indirectly (enticing healthy people to try drugs). On the other hand, the situation is eerily similar to the one in the fable about the frog in the hot water: if you put a frog straight into boiling water, it will hop out, probably thinking the mere idea of staying put in the boiling water is complete craziness. If you place a frog in cold water and progressively increase the temperature, though, the frog will get used to situations that, from outside, don't make sense at all - situations that healthy people would run away from immediately. And yet the frog doesn't hop out of the hot water and is ultimately boiled, turning into someone's meal.

All this to say, don't pass judgment on Winehouse because none of us can really understand how she got to where she was when she died. Addiction is not something people choose. Obviously it would be better if people realized drugs are outlawed for a reason instead of succumbing to the "allure" of doing something illegal. (Alcohol is trickier since it's not outlawed as long as you're above 21 [in the US] and get drunk at home, so people may deny having a problem for a long time. But I digress.) Some beat the addiction because they find a healthier way to deal with their inner demons before it's too late, and some keep down that road because, somehow, they find benefits in it - usually related about feeling better, if only for a brief moment.

It is a pity Winehouse stayed on that road. 

Tough Weekend

This has been one of those weekends where I fear what I am writing is complete garbage and I should put my time to better use. So I did what I always do in situations like this: I got in my car. If I'd still been living in Cambridge, MA I would've walked to Harvard Square, but since walking isn't an option anymore (unless I want to walk for an hour and/or get hit by a car), I just grabbed my car keys and headed to Panera. And if my book ever gets published I probably should send a thank-you note to the manager of the store off Route 78 for the lattes and chicken cobb salads, which have pulled me through many moments of doubt. Then I headed out to B&N next door, which deserves its own thank-you note, and got Dashielle Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

At some point I began to feel better, as always. I felt at peace and I know it was my cue to go. As I was driving back on Route 78 (which I find very soothing, at least in that area and at that time of the day) I thought: even if the book doesn't sell, I can self-publish, I can write another one, I'll be alright. I remembered what a student had written for my evaluation as a Teaching Assistant, back at MIT in 2002: "she's a tough cookie". And I probably am. It's all going to be fine.

On the New Yorker and Joseph Brodsky

Life is funny sometimes. I recently subscribed again to The New Yorker - I used to subscribe, and then let my subscription lapse some years ago because I couldn't keep up with the stream of issues flowing into my mailbox before I had time to read the previous ones. For years I didn't miss it, until I bought a copy at a newsstand earlier this spring. Suddenly I couldn't believe I had stopped subscribing to such a gem lapse. I guess what happened is that, back when I decided i didn't care for the magazine, I hadn't yet become starved for the sort of smart news coverage and commentary that The New Yorker provides (that was only my second or third year in the Lehigh Valley and my time in Harvard Square had provided me with enough cultural analysis to last a while). A few more years have made me change my mind: The New Yorker definitely fills a void in my life now, especially when I'm not in the city.

So here I am, all proud of myself for having subscribed again, which granted me immediate access to the digital edition, and access to the print edition about ten days later. Lo and behold: for my very first print edition, I get this issue with a really ugly cover in black and green, which seems to portray a scene in a dark forest with statues that look like sphinxes. (Uh, what?) The word that came through my mind had two letters: N-O. I had already read the profile of Thomas Drake online (an important and stunning read, by the way), and the cover was so unappealing that I postponed opening the magazine for a while, after having been so excited by my new subscription.

When I finally did open that May 23 issue, I was in for a surprise. That surprise was called "Joseph Brodsky and the Fortunes of Misfortune", by Keith Gessen, and I loved the article so much - about poet and Nobel Prize winner Brodsky, and the biography of him that was recently published by Yale University Press - that I reread it from the beginning as soon as I was done. In high school I was fascinated by the Russian intellectuals who bravely stood up against Communism, and often paid a heavy price for criticizing the regime. I think the fight against oppression and dictatorship resonates with me because my family's experience and also because of my own personality. What can I say, I like loners with a (good) cause. I don't do mainstream well.

We in my family have always been outsiders, at least in my lifetime, and when I read that portrait I realized I had lost touch with something really important that used to ground me and that I had let fall to the wayside. I have never been good at "fitting in", I dislike the idea of behaving with the crowds (if everybody is doing something, I usually want to do the opposite) and I put a high value to taking stances I believe in regardless of their popularity. (This sounds all good and nice, until you upset the powers that be. When that happens, you'd better have grown some backbone while you were making lofty statements.) I'm not saying everyone should be like me. On the contrary: it is good that there are people out there who find their strength from being part of a team. We need people like that in many areas, from corporations to the military; this is just not a setting I would thrive in. If dead people count, Russian intellectuals are definitely part of my tribe.

I'm the sort of person who refuse to celebrate Valentine's Day because I think it is only a pretense to make people feel they *have* to do something with their significant other on that day, which just so happens to benefit big business enormously - I won't do anything because a marketing whiz tells me I should. I also haven't seen the Harry Potter movies and only read the first book; I wouldn't have been caught at the midnight premieres even if you had paid me. Following trends just isn't who I am. It doesn't mean others shouldn't do it - a lot of people thrive when they feel they are part of a large group because it gives them a sense of community. Community is good. Members of my own community, though, are a bit more atypical than most.

So why have I spent so much time recently trying to make myself compromise? convincing myself to give second chances to people and situations that I knew deep inside weren't worth it? I find my strength in walking the less traveled road, and the people I truly connect with are those on their own lonely paths. I had known it for a while, but the article in The New Yorker helped me articulate all that.

So I headed to McNally-Jackson in SoHo and got Brodsky's biography, which I would never had heard about if I hadn't read the article in The New Yorker; the book was a bit dry and overpriced but truly excellent. Later in June I also got books about Dmitri Shostakovich - this one, outstanding, and that one, which I haven't read yet - and a book about European musicians exiled in Southern California during World War II which, being published by the same academic house as Brodsky's biography, is just as overpriced, but promises to be a phenomenal read. I feel at home again.