The Necessity of Art Work

Why should anyone read my poetry, when there is so much excellent poetry out there already? Why should anyone buy my painting, when there are so many brilliant paintings in the world already? Why should anyone listen to my music, etc. etc.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
True, some people are professional artists, and they continue to produce art because that's their profession, and, in some cases, they even make a living that way.
But most people, if they are artists at all, are aspiring, apprentice, or amateur, and, if they are professional, don't make their living from their art.
The only reason to produce art, to be engaged in art work, is because it's of vital importance to us, whether or not anyone else likes it, or whether or not we like it ourselves.
Recently I decided to publish a novel that I began writing in the 1980s: "Site Report," an Israeli novel: http://www.amazon.com/Site-Report-Jeffrey-M-Green/dp/1502300621.
The manuscript I produced back then was huge and ungainly, and I saw I had no chance of getting it published, so I shelved it. Then a few years later, I reread it and cut about 1/3 of it, but I still didn't have the heart to send it out to agents and face disappointment after Today I am lessdisappointment. A few years after that, I put the whole thing onto my hard disk (I began writing it before I had a computer, and then, when I had a computer, it was an Osborne, one of the first home computers marketed, which ran on CP/M, so I couldn't copy the diskettes over to a PC).
Years went by, and I kept fiddling with the MS, cutting it, revising it, and then forgetting about it. When I heard of the possibility of publishing it for free and having it available on Amazon, I decided to reread it and see whether it was worth publishing.
By that time, I barely remembered writing it, and I was very surprised at how decent it was, so I did publish it. But I didn't have the sense of necessity about it, the drive that had enabled me to write it in the first place. I let too much time go by. And I have changed too much.
The novel is, as I see it now, about a person (an American Jewish woman) whose life is more or less stalled. She is divorced and can't meet any man worth marrying. She has a good job, but not exactly one she is committed to. So she decides to take a Sabbatical year in Israel and study biblical archaeology. In Israel she meets all kinds of people who are committed to their paths in life (though all the paths are different), and most of these people try to recruit her: stay in Israel and be what I am.
When I wrote it, but to a lesser degree now, I saw living in Israel as a kind of mission that transcended personal ambition and self-interest. It's hard for me to see life in Israel that way today. The novel conveys what attracted me to Israel thirty years ago. I could never write a novel in a similar spirit today.

Discarding Ambition?

This year, as most people in the world are unlikely to know, is a Sabbatical year in the Land of Israel. The Torah says that every seven years all agricultural labor must cease, and whatever grows in fields, orchards, and vineyards can be picked by the poor.
Some scholars say that this impossible arrangement was actually observed during Second Temple times. Today the rabbinate has made the colossal error of reinstating the rule, only to find a way of getting around it.
I contend it was an error, because I imagine the rabbis could have said they had no idea when the cycle started and, consequently, couldn't determine which year was a Sabbatical year. But they attached great value to the fulfillment of a commandment, even if it was more or less impossible to do it right. So, from their point of view, it was not an error.
But I digress.
I have been studying the subject of the Sabbatical year with a group of adults at an unusual Israeli institution called Elul, a House of Study open to secular and religious men and women. At Elul we try to focus on the meaning of traditional texts for us in our lives, not in the sense of dictating details of Jewish law, but in the sense of implying values that we may or may not identify with.
In our discussion of the Sabbatical year, for which the Hebrew word is "shmita," from the verb "lishmot," meaning to drop, to let go, we have been discussing the ethical and spiritual value of abandoning things in our lives, to which we cling, the way property owners, according to the biblical law, had to forgo their crops, an aspect of their ownership. (If this smacks of Buddhism, let it smack!)
At Elul, as I said, we have been thinking and talking a lot about discarding, and I have just reached the age of seventy, an age when further acquisition doesn't make much sense - unless it is for the sake of my children and grandchildren.
To illustrate my attitude: our good china shows a good deal of attrition, but when my wife and I start thinking about spending another few hundred dollars to replace the broken and chipped plates, we say to ourselves - why bother? How long will we be using it? We've had most of it since we were married in 1970, we replaced some of it about 20 years ago, but what's the point of doing it again now?
Another seemingly unconnected thought that has been on my mind for a while is the matter of ambition. At this time, I happen to be translating a book by a very ambitious young man. Indeed, most of the work I do is for ambitious people who think their thoughts and words are so precious that they must be made available to the English speaking world. I'm not complaining. If no one was ambitious, no one would hire me.
I was once ambitious, I think. When I was young and thought I was very smart, I thought I wanted to be widely respected and influential, famous. I say, "I thought," because, as I look back at the decisions I made in my life, I see that I didn't really want to be famous, since I never strove for fame. I didn't have that drive. Fame never came to me, and I never sought it out. But I grew up with the idea that a person had to be ambitious, so I thought of myself as someone who hadn't lived up to expectations - whose expectations? Don't ask.
Ambition doesn't make a lot of sense when your seventy years old, and I'm not sure how much sense it ever makes. Success, recognition, should be thought of as a tool: if, say, as an artist, I gain recognition, then I can continue to be an artist. If I want to improve the world, I need to attain a certain status so that people will listen to me and do what I propose. But the status is instrumental, not essential.
Have I discarded ambition? I think I did so long ago and never noticed.
Just today I learned that an essay I entered in a creative non-fiction contest didn't even make it to the honorable mentions. I guess I care. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent $25 to enter the piece in the contest. But, when you come down to it, my satisfaction came from writing the piece, and if it isn't interesting enough to be published, so be it.

Flies in the Ointment

Is there a method of critical analysis that can explain and demonstrate why a work of art is great, or one that enables someone to distinguish between great art, good art, and mediocre art?
From high school through graduate school I attended many classes on works of literature, and, in my experience, the teachers always chose to teach works that were acknowledged to be excellent, or at least historically important. We never, so far as I can remember, took a bad story and picked it apart to show why it was bad. Nor were we ever given a poem to read, for example, and asked to judge it.
Much later in life I took courses in musicology, including a rather advanced method of musical analysis, which essentially showed that Mozart's sonatas followed certain harmonic rules, but which didn't show why they remain interesting musically after more than 200 years, while so much of the music of Mozart's contemporaries is never played.
Sometimes I think there is a kind of circularity at work. Certain people are trained as arbiters of taste, and they train acolytes, and these experts assert that certain art is good. Having made that assertion, one can rather easily dissect the work and point out the things one likes in it. Indeed, most likely these experts are right, though they can be blind to the excellencies of certain kinds of art, and there are matters of taste. I can acknowledge that Verdi's operas are great music, but I'm not on opera fan, and I don't enjoy them.
At the moment, an album of Clark Terry's, "Serenade to a Bus Seat," is playing and totally distracting me from writing. In addition to Terry on Trumpet, the other musicians are outstanding: Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. You could hardly think of five greater jazz musicians. But I don't know how I could persuade someone who doesn't like jazz that this music is beyond superb. What could I say? Just listen!
Obviously there's a matter of skill. You can hear that these musicians are masters of their instruments and that they play together with precision - but skill is no guarantee of artistic excellence.
What about the other direction: can MFA programs teach people how to become excellent artists? Or at least to become the best artists they can be? I admit to ignorance. I suspect that the answer is no, but I'm not well enough informed.
Food for thought in any event.

Fear of Playing Well?

My music guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, used to say: Play great! You know what it sounds like, so play that way!
If it were only so easy, every musician (and artists of all kinds) would be great, and we're not.
Arnie wasn't dumb. He knew that. So what did he mean?
Once I brought my clarinet to his workshop, and he said, "Play like Barney Bigard," Duke Ellington's clarinet player. If I could have played like Barney Bigard, I would have been giving Arnie's workshops, not attending them.
My natural response to Arnie's manic encouragement was to shrink: Man, I can't play clarinet like Barney Bigard.
But my response was self-defeating.
Why tell myself that I could never be great? That I can never even come close to playing like a really great musician?
Why not say: That's the way I want to play, and, damn it, I'm going to go for that!
My new music guru - and I only use the term tongue in cheek, here and above - Raanan Eylon, who is teaching me how to play the flute, has been working with me for nearly two years on my sound, on getting a focused sound on the flute, and on vibrato. It takes a long time for a man my age to catch on.,
I didn't really have to put myself through the hard work I've been doing to meet Raanan's demands. I could have accepted the crummy sound I had figured out how to make by myself, with the help of some Youtube lessons, and let it be at that. But I said to myself, if I'm going to play the flute, I'm going to play it as well as I can. Otherwise, why go for it at all?
So I've gone back to the basics of long tones, scales, arpeggios - a long warmup before I even try to play music. It's had an amazing (good) effect on my saxophone playing, on my ear, and on my awareness of sound - a kind of remedial musical education. Better late than never, eh?
Recently, I've been coming much closer to producing a decent sound on the flute, and I realized that somewhere inside me there was actually fear of sounding too good. I don't know what that is about (or, maybe I do, but I'm not going to post that kind of thing on a blog).
Raanan has frequently said - and it's kind of astonishing that a man who could hardly be more different from Arnie Lawrence, should be saying many of the same kind of things - that when we play music, we are free to do and be what we are unable to do and be in ordinary, life. But you have to want that freedom and enjoy it.
In ordinary life, I'm not interested in impressing people, but I have to remember that when people listen to music, they want to be impressed. Why else would they listen to music, to say, "That wasn't so interesting"?

Paying for Punishment

No, I'm not a masochist, and I'm hard enough on myself in general, that I don't need to pay anyone to make things more painful.
I'm talking about my flute teacher, who is holding me to the highest of standards, even though we both know I'll never reach them.
Actually, my ceramics teacher is equally demanding, but in a warm and cordial way. She believes in encouraging her students with great enthusiasm for what they do, but she also won't let us be satisfied with a pot that's too thick or poorly trimmed.
My flute teacher is also encouraging, but not as much fun (in general men aren't as much fun as women). Sometimes I get pissed off at him (though I don't express it) for being so hard on my playing. But that's an immature reaction. What's the point of paying a teacher to tell me that everything is fine?
My progress in flute has been much slower than I expected, considering that I've been playing wind instruments all my life. Partly I lay it to my advanced age. A fairly talented kid who has been playing flute as long as I have would be way ahead of me, I think. But partly it's because my teacher won't let me be satisfied with less than the best I can do now, knowing that it's not good enough! Next week I must have a better best!
I still have no goal for my flute playing beyond flute playing. There are a million flautists around, and if I want to play in another orchestra, I'm in more demand as a baritone sax player than I would be as a flautist.
It's a bit analogous to what my teacher says about communication. He has told me more times than I can count (which doesn't mean that I've internalized the message) that vibrato is the key to expressive playing on the flute. Expressive of what? Not of anything specific: I feel sad because X. Music communicates itself, and whatever resonates in the musician when she plays and the listener when she hears is not communicated by the music but aroused by it.

A Reading Project

I downloaded the complete works of Shakespeare to my tablet, and I have been making my way through them. I started with the Sonnets, which I had studied very thoroughly when I was a graduate student, and The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, which I'd never read.
As for the plays, I just finished reading Hamlet (for at least the twentieth time, I imagine), after going through some plays I never had read: As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. I had read the Comedy of Errors once and vaguely remembered it, and I read A Midsummer Night's Dream out of sequence, because a production of it appeared in Jerusalem this summer.
Except for As You Like It, I don't think anyone who read the other plays would imagine that Shakespeare could have produced a work of such high genius as Hamlet. Even though I was very familiar with it (not that I had read it very recently), I was bowled over by it, noticing things in it that I didn't remember at all.
The main thing I noticed this time was the change in Hamlet's character in the fifth and final act. His near brush with death on the ship, when he discovers that he is going to be executed as soon as he reaches England, and then his capture by pirates, which proves to be his rescue -- a far-fetched plot device typical of romances -- transforms and empowers him. We suddenly learn that he is a skilled fencer, he proudly calls himself "Hamlet the Dane," when he leaps into Ophelia's grave after Laertes, and he no longer feigns madness (of course one never knows how mad he really was).

Why have I undertaken this project?
Partly to enrich my English. After all, writing/translating is my profession, and I have to keep my English alive.
Partly out of a sense of self-respect. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature, and one of my fields was English literature of the Renaissance, and I haven't read all of the greatest English author of all. That's a failing that called for a remedy.
But mainly, because it's simply superb.
Even the bad plays, the ones that are mainly of historical interest, are full of glorious poetry. I've also been noticing the political dimensions of the plays, which I hadn't paid attention to before. I'm not reading any explanatory notes, and when I don't understand a passage, after wrestling with it for a while, I just go on. The occasional obscure bits don't interfere with understanding of the plays.

Excited Exhaustion

Some time after midnight last night I returned from the rehearsal of the big band where I have played baritone saxophone for the past ten years or more, and, as usual, I was too keyed up to go to sleep. I ate some cheese and crackers and read the newspaper till about a quarter to one. And even then I didn't fall asleep right away. When you play with a big band, you absorb energy.
I have to concentrate hard on the music to play it even close to right. I still find it challenging to master the parts and play them tight with the other musicians. My early musical training was in classical clarinet, and the rhythms of classical music, as they are written out, still are easier for me to play than jazz or Latin rhythms, as they are written out. You have to hear them and imitate them. (I believe that's because standard Western musical notation evolved with Western music, the way the Roman alphabet we use was invented by the Romans to write Latin, and it doesn't work all that well even with English, though we're so used to the anomalies we don't notice them.)
Our conductor, Eli Benacot is a fine musician, and playing in his band has been like taking a group music lesson every week. The baritone saxophone part in big bands is challenging, though they're not always technically difficult. Sometimes the baritone plays in rhythmical unison with the other four saxes, sometimes it plays with the trombones, usually the bass trombone, sometimes it plays with the string bass, and sometimes it plays on its own. So I have to know whom to listen to in every part of every piece, so I can play together with them.
Incidentally, when we perform, we often sit in an arrangement different from the one we rehearse in, and the band sounds different. Suddenly I can't hear the bass trombone very well. That's another challenge.
The music is exhilarating because the sound of the band is so intense, and the rhythms have so much drive. Last night we were practicing with our vocalist, Noa Anava, which calls for more sensitivity than we show when we're blasting out an arrangement by Gordon Goodwin. But even when we're playing behind a vocalist, where are moments when we have to roar. When it works, when the band plays tight and swings, there's nothing like it!