The craft

Last night I witnessed David Lang’s elevated at our local new music festival. The composer spoke to the audience prior to the performance. He is a professor at Yale University and speaks with passion and authority about his musical explorations, his willingness to take risks, his desire to be emotionally expressive but not to constrain a listener’s emotional terrain. The performance itself revealed more. Along with the theoretical understanding of composition and the emotional commitment in each project, there is also the craft. There could be little doubt that David Lang is in full command of his craft. An honour to hear his music and his own thoughts about his music.

I admire master crafstmen, men and women who toil long in acquiring the skills they bring to bear in the accomplishment of some act. Amongst writers I find the mastery of the craft is almost as admirable as the product itself. For example, I find Ian McEwan’s novels to be troubling but his evident control over each sentence, each phrase, each word choice is exhilarating. Craft. I see it to varying degrees in all of the writers I appreciate. My recent finds include Michael Chabon, Richard B. Wright, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Francine Prose. Learning the craft of writing, developing the skills, the habits, the understanding – this is my task.

Music games

Yesterday I did something that I haven’t done in 30 years. I attended a music festival, the Kitchener-Waterloo Music Festival. My niece was competing in a piano class and as the venue was just around the corner I decided to walk over and hear her.

I have very few pleasant memories of piano competitions and all of them are from before the age of 11 or 12. My sisters and I were usually entered in to as many classes in the festival as we could accommodate. I remember my first festival in London, Ontario, when I must have been 6 or 7 years old. I was in 6 classes in one day, an absurd feat of scheduling. I placed first in every one. It was the zenith of my career in competition. There were lots of other highlights over the next 5 or 6 years, but I never managed to fully dazzle in quite that way again.

In fact within a few years I found myself increasingly incapable of going on the stage. Perhaps I was unconsciously acknowledging a lack of preparation; my habits of practising did degenerate as I got older. It may have been something else entirely. I have not managed to ferret out precise causes. The experiences alone were bad enough. These days I think they might be described as panic attacks. Circumventing them required ever more extreme measures. By the age of 15 I was at an end and competed no more.

It has taken me almost 25 years to be able to even sit down with any degree of comfort at a piano keyboard. Thus the gifts we are given in our youth both bless and curse us.

So it was no small thing for me, though few might guess it to see me, to head over to the hall in which this present festival is taking place even though I was merely an audience member. My niece does not suffer from whatever hindered me. She acknowledges a flutter in her tummy but nothing more. She is lucky. Perhaps she will not need to set aside a formative aspect of her childhood and youth for the greater part of her life as I did. I hope not.

Memories – inchoate, unsavoury, uncertain. How do you turn them off, make them safe?

Water, water, everywhere

Yesterday I witnessed a phenomenon. Through a scheme offered by our district authority, the Region of Waterloo, I participated in the annual Rain Barrel Distribution day. Through this programme local residents may purchase a high-quality rain barrel for a modest sum (about 1/3rd the cost of what you would pay in Canadian Tire or Home Hardware). The region has a single distribution day annually and, yesterday, it had three locations across the region where you could go to get your rain barrel.

Over the years the region has placed more than 34,000 rain barrels. That’s got to be having an effect. It reduces the amount of water that the local authority needs to process and that saves the residents money as well since we pay for our water use here. But it is also better for all the flower and vegetable gardens in the area to use fresh rainwater rather than chemically enhanced and purified drinking water from the taps. So, good for the region, good for the pocket-book, and good for the environment.

And yet the phenomenon I witnessed and have referred to was something else which felt very Canadian to me but perhaps is not unique at all. The distribution of the rain barrels was to begin at 7:30 am. I duly ensured that I arrived in the parking lot of the big mall north of town exactly at 7:30. I am nothing if not punctual (usually). But I was already late. When I joined the queue there were more than 800 people ahead of me. At 7:30 in the morning! More than 800 people had arrived before 7:30 am for their chance at purchasing a rain barrel. Nor did it take long for another 500 or so people to join the queue after me. And that was it. Once all of the application forms were distributed (you need to verify your address to participate in the rain barrel scheme) the organisers closed the line. And so we formed an orderly and friendly queue winding back and forth across the large parking lot of the mall. Children were laughing, friends were spotting each other at different points of the queue and waving, the ubiquitous Tim’s coffees were in the hands of the lucky few who perhaps had anticipated a bit of a wait. I chatted with the young couple ahead of me in line and the elderly lady behind me. The queue moved forward at a regular pace. And within 90 minutes I was up at the front receiving my new rain barrel.

I am left wondering what the motivating factor is that gets 1500 varied people out of bed to stand in a line early on a Saturday morning. It goes without saying that Canadians just love a bargain. So maybe that was it. Or maybe while I was out of the country living in England the environmental consciousness simply took hold. I hope that was it. But I have this feeling that we just love joining a queue.

Last night it rained. Just 11mm. But it’s a start.

A whole new desktop

What, me upgrade? I don’t think so. These days when I want the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu (today it is 9.04, the Jaunty Jacalope) I wipe my entire Linux partition and start from scratch. From a clean disk to full installation takes about 30 minutes. (I’m doing this on a dual boot laptop with 2GB of RAM and plenty of disk space.) After that it takes me probably another hour or more spread over a few days to get my new system almost exactly like my old one. The bottleneck in the process for me is downloading the .iso file and burning the image. It can easily take 3 or 4 hours even with a high-speed home connection such as I have. And I am much more aware now (after recent visits to Nepal, Mali, and Malawi) than I ever was before how that number multiplies in other parts of the world, enough to make it implausible to undertake on a whim. I know that in future I will always travel with my latest Ubuntu cd so that I can share it with friends and colleagues.

I have installed new versions of Ubuntu now every 6 months for 3 or 4 years. It always makes my day. I put the date of the new release in my calendar and look forward to it with pleasure. When the day finally arrives it is always a challenge to hold off from rushing out and getting the .iso file immediately. Pragmatically I think to myself that the servers around the world will be getting hammered that first day, but equally pressing is the delight in extending the anticipation. Soon enough my will weakens and in what seems like no time I have it, a whole new desktop.

Starting over and afresh appeals to me.

It is also a lot less painful these days since I now live half my life in the clouds, so to speak. I have been letting Google look after my email for some time. More recently I started testing a service that supports syncing of files across multiple computers called Dropbox. I install it on my new clean desktop and within minutes I have all the key document files that I have on my other operating system readily available to me without the issues involved in mounting or writing to NTFS partitions. Very convenient. (It is sort of like using Subversion for version control.) After that there isn’t much more needed for my new desktop to be fully operational given that Ubuntu, out of the box, comes with virtually everything I need. I also need to install a Java JRE so that I can continue using jMemorize and I add a French keyboard layout as well for my input of French text for that. I’ll have a bit of fiddling at some point to get the drivers installed for my wireless printer, but merely because I’ve only done that once before and I don’t recall precisely what I did, although I don’t remember it being too hard. And lastly I have to get Skype up and running because that is what is used for communication in my work.

A clean slate to fully operational. And then 6 months of letting it fall into a messy state as I install software I don’t fully understand in order to play with it and learn something. And then another whole new desktop.

If I could organise my life the same way, I would.

Starting a new blog – setting out the initial goals

I have actually had this blog for some time. At least I’ve had the title for this blog for a while. I simply haven’t done anything with it. The time has come to get started on this project. The project itself is, I suppose in one way or another, my life. And thus Transformative Explications could be a way of hinting at how these bits of prose might, just maybe, be part of a larger transformation. Well, that’s a good enough story to tell for now. I’ll think of something more clever later.

Prose pieces. Yes, that pretty much covers what you can expect to find in this blog as I go along. Snippets of ideas. Tentative meanderings of thought. Descriptions. Dialogues. Flights of fancy. Enthusiasms. Nothing too long, unless writing something long is what I am playing with that day. But also no content implications or constraints. Just the writerly explorations of writing.

I am not looking for readers. I am looking for the writer that I once imagined I might have been.