Neil Young: "When I Write A Song"

"When I write a song, it starts with a feeling.  I can hear something in my head or feel it in my heart.  It may be that I just picked up the guitar and mindlessly started playing.  That's the way a lot of songs begin.  When you do that, you are not thinking.  Thinking is the worst thing for writing a song.  So you just start playing and something new comes out.  Where does it come from?  Who cares?  Just keep it and go with it.  That's what I do.  I never judge it.  I believe it.  It came as a gift when I picked up my musical instrument and it came through me playing with the instrument.  The chords and melody just appeared.  Now is not the time for interrogation or analysis.  Now is the time to get to know the song, not change it before you even know it.  It is like a wild animal, a living thing.  Be careful not to scare it away.  That's my method, or one of my methods, at least."

--Neil Young,

from page 158 of Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream,
A Plume Book, New York: 2012.

William Gibson: "A Walking Shadow"

At the moment, there are two particularly resonating pieces in William Gibson's 1999 cyberpunk novel All Tomorrow's Parties that I would like to share.  I'm also thinking -- or feeling, perhaps, as Laney might -- there's an echo of a few famous lines* from Shakespeare's Macbeth in Gibson's title.  Maybe that's just me.

In the first passage that I'd like to quote, I think Gibson provides a somewhat humorous self-portrait in his description of this particular character, a very adept killer.  I haven't done any kind of research to see if such is common knowledge, at least among those who know, but when I look at the author photo from 1999 (and consider Gibson's look over the years), I do see something a bit autobiographical in the passage.  Consider:

     But he does not draw [the knife] now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial, in a goat of grayish green, the color of certain lichens, who blinks behind the fine gold rims of his small round glasses and raises his hand to halt a passing cab.  Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own, and the man steps past them, his cheeks seamed vertically in deep parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile.  They do not see him smile.


In the second passage, we get what I would consider an apt insight into tools, whether a knife (as in the novel) or in the handouts and prompts I make more or less everyday.   (I'm not eschewing focus or direction or precise utility for the students, not at all; still, the "handles" -- the ways I may manipulate and use those handouts and prompts -- ought to be "simple" to afford "the greatest range of possibilities".)  Imagine the handle of a knife from the kitchen: plain, streamlined, straight in design, I'm guessing.  Now imagine one of those knife handles shaped specifically with finger grooves, shaped to be held in only one way; that second knife affords a very firm grip, but only in one position, yes?  And therefore, the utility of the knife is limited, prescibed, overly-shaped.  Not the kitchen knife, though, as you can shift your grip to suit the particular job at hand.  All that's part of the meaning I find in the passage from Gibson below.

I love finding the truth in as many disparate places as possible. Consider:

     The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. 
     That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

--from William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties


*Those lines from Macbeth, from the character Macbeth himself in the last act just after he hears that his wife, the queen, has died:

She should have died hereafter,
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Roots

Mom never had pink hair that I recall, however.

(In case there's any confusion, that's a mermaid-duck on the left. My earliest memory of my mother involves her swimming with me on her shoulder at the Richmond Plunge. I think I was two-and-a-half or three years old.)

Annotations: Lynne Cox, Swimmer

Cox, Lynne. Grayson. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2006.

I underestimated this book when it first came out, annoyed and distracted by the childishness (I thought) of the cover; also, I had thought the book a fictional fantasy of human-cetacean bonding. In fact, Grayson is a true account, well described, of the 17-year-old Cox's encounter with a seemingly lost baby whale during one of her usual training swims at Seal Beach, California, and of her efforts to swim with the whale, leading it away from the beach and the possibility of a fatal grounding, and to find the whale's mother . . . all while swimming. No boat, no jetski, no kayak, no surfboard, no airplane, no helicopter--and no wetsuit. Cox swims and swims and swims with the baby gray whale. As she describes all that water-time, we get vividly rendered scenes of swimming amidst schools of anchovies, with grunion, with tuna, with bat rays, with dolphins, and whales. Yes, the mother whale arrives to collect her errant offspring, and Cox heads for shore after about three hours in those rather chilly waters off Seal Beach. A well-told tale: I am glad that I have now read it, and I will give copies to family and friends as presents in the future.

This book could be a good English 90 or 92 text.

---. Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer. New York: Harcourt, 2005.

I discovered Cox's aquatic autobiography late in 2008, though I don't know how I had overlooked it before that. I love stories of open water swimming and of the strength of body, mind and spirit that such a pursuit demands. Jenifer Levin's novel Water Dancer has been a favorite novel on this topic for the last 25 or so years of my life--and I still love and prefer that novel to this book--but Swimming to Antarctica has the definite advantage of being non-fiction, of being a set of true tales. (I say "advantage" because students often prefer the non-fiction, the documentary, over stories that are merely made up. Fiction has its own advantages.) Cox is a very determined individual, more positive thinking than anyone I know, and with the life experiences and adversity to back up her positive modeling.

I recommend this book, and I started recommending it before I even finished it, as I read through that first chapter. I am now recalling the chapter in which Lynne Cox sets a record for crossing the English Channel at age 16, and I am wanting to know more; I want to reread now. Where's my copy of Swimming to Antarctica?

(Isn't that the best response to any book?)

Annotations: Eugenie Clark

Clark, Eugenie. Lady with a Spear. New York: Harper & Bros., 1953.

When I was a boy, I'm fairly sure I had a crush on Eugenie Clark, photogenic female star of many underwater science segments. After reading her autobiography, I can also appreciate what a ground-breaking scientist she was--as a female, one of the lone females, in the very masculine world of marine biology. Her book presents her scientific research through the lens of adventure in the South Pacific. The many photographs of Eugenie Clark reminded me of that old schoolboy infatuation.