PAYDAZE

posted by James Reel

    I wasn’t aware of this until an unhappy colleague pointed it out, but the Arizona Daily Star’s Eric Swedlund has posted a searchable online database of the salaries of University of Arizona employees (and those at the other state universities). There’s a small uproar in the comments section of Swedlund’s blog, with contributors complaining that it’s unseemly and divisive to make this information so easily available. Well, sure, there will always be people wondering why Employee A is paid $1,000 less than Employee B for similar work (Employee A will be especially curious), or why one person with substantial responsibilities gets paid less than someone with less to do, or why employees in one unit receive a bounteous paycheck every two weeks while workers in a related unit merely shake the crumbs from the cornucopia. Those are issues to be taken up between individual employees and their supervisors, and between department heads and their supervisors, and the university president and the Arizona Board of Regents. But the fact remains that this is all a matter of public record, because many of our positions (including mine) are funded entirely or in part by state funds—in effect, you, the taxpayer, sign my paycheck, and we state employees are accountable to you. So I can see why this sort of information will cause a lot of disgruntlement and infighting here at the university, but the posters at Swedlund’s blog are out of line, I think, in complaining about the salaries being made available to the general public.
    Besides, it isn’t as if the information hasn’t been available all along. Swedlund says that the Star assembled the database “through state public records requests,” as if the project were the result of some heroic use of the Freedom of Information Act. But the last I heard, anybody could find UA salaries already compiled in a document held in the Special Collections department of the UA library. Looks like the Star has been wasting its time reinventing the wheel … of fortune.

A DIVINE MADNESS

posted by James Reel

    For some reason, this week I haven’t been inspired to blog. What better time to dig into my archives and retrieve an essay I wrote about 10 years ago for a literary e-zine on the subject of inspiration?

LET ME SAVE YOU A FEW THOUSAND BUCKS and several years wasted in some MFA program. Here's how you become a writer: First, learn the basics of spelling, grammar and punctuation; second, sit down and await inspiration.
    That, at least, has been a popular notion of the writing process. Inspiration is the key, and its nature has been argued since the time of Plato. What people have overlooked during these past two milennia is that the mechanism of inspiration, if important to writers, is even more essential to good readers.
    Literary inspiration has always been held suspect, even though craft alone has been thought inadequate for the task of writing. Critics have argued the details at length, but many agree that the creative act seems not to be an entirely rational act. Indeed, "inspired" writing has long been considered a form of madness; a writer surrenders to a source other than rational thought and becomes possessed by ideas. Some critics call this madness divine; others dismiss it as specious, merely a mild psychological aberration. Whichever position may prevail at the moment, it always stands to reason that "irrational" writing demands an equally "irrational" response from the reader.
    According to Hesiod, ancient Greek practitioners of the various arts took their inspiration from specific Muses. Calliope, for example, was the Muse of heroic or epic poetry; Erato held sway over lyric and love poetry; Polymnia oversaw sacred poetry; Melpomene stood as the Muse of tragedy, while Thalia yukked it up in the field of comedy. Their mother was Mnemosyne, or Memory.
    These weren't good elves who slid down a moonbeam and did the poet's work for him overnight. They were spirits who took possession of the artist, and if there were no exorcist nearby, the poor poet would start spitting up dactylic hexameter.
    Plato, who never trusted them anyway, thought poets must be psychotic. He branded inspiration as such in the course of listing mental abnormalities in the Phaedrus: "There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity."
    And, again, in his swan song, the Laws (Book 4): "(When) a poet takes his seat on the Muse's tripod, his judgment takes leave of him. He is like a fountain which gives free course to the rush of its waters."
    Still, Plato considered inspiration to be essential to good poetry. Again, the Phaedrus: "But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found."
    Thomas Hobbes did his cantankerous best to belittle the role of inspiration, in his Answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650): "I can imagine no cause but a reasonless imitation of custom, of a foolish custom, by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a bagpipe."
    Yet Hobbes recognized the place for inspiration, or "Fancy," in a genealogy of creativity: "Time and education begets experience; experience begets memory; memory begets Judgment and Fancy: Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a poem."
    A first-century thinker known to us only as Pseudo-Longinus had already made this argument in On the Sublime: Poetic inspiration is not dangerous, as Plato maintained, but the generator of worthy, if raw, material that needs to be refined through the art of rhetoric. Rhetorical devices may be learned, Pseudo-Longinus maintained, but sublimity is inherent, the "echo of a great soul." Inspiration or sublimity is the rare thing, but it counts for little if not subjected to knowing craftsmanship.
    Poet Paul Valéry could have been picking up this very concept 18 centuries later, when he observed in Poetry and Abstract Thought (1939): "Well, every time I have worked as a poet, I have noticed that my work exacted of me not only that presence of the poetic universe..., but many reflections, decisions, choices, and combinations, without which all possible gifts of the Muses, or of Chance, would have remained like precious materials in a workshop without an architect."
    Percy Bysshe Shelley, the ultimate Romantic, naturally found inspiration to be a marvelous thing, but he would have none of this "gifts of the Muses" business. In his 1821 Defense of Poetry, he offered an interesting twist on Plato's conception of inspiration as a product of divine afflatus. According to Shelley, divinity does not drop in on the poet from some other realm; divinity seems to reside within the poet:
    "A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed..."
    Shelley is a bit inconsistent; just what is the source of that "inconstant wind," which he implies is internal? If not divine afflatus, perhaps divine flatulence?
    Carl Jung, as if putting a Shelleyan twist on Plato, found inspiration to be a sort of possession by the darker forces of one's own mind. Jung's On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry (1922) distinguishes between art that is strictly regulated by the artist's conscious decisions ("introverted" art) and art that springs from the unconscious, bypassing deliberate control ("extraverted" art).
    In the first type, "the poet appears to be the creative process itself, and to create of his own free will without the slightest feeling of compulsion." In the second type, the artist is almost a victim of the collective unconscious and its army of archetypes:
    "The unborn work in the psyche of (this) artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. ... We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the language of analytical psychology this living thing is an autonomous complex. It is a split-off portion of the psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness."
    This latter, "extraverted" category of artist is the one who feels possessed, and who often produces works characterized by "a strangeness of form and content, thoughts that can only be apprehended intuitively, a language pregnant with meanings..." In other words, works that seem rather mad—the unrefined sublimity of automatic writing.
    Pioneer psychologist William James, who really had the soul of a novelist, had his little flings with automatic writing under the influence of hallucinogens. But his brother Henry, the novelist who thought like a psychologist, took a far more practical view of inspiration. Henry James famously admonished young novelists to write from experience—and not let any details of experience slip by one's observation. A carefully contemplated experience, even something so fleeting as pausing before an open door on an apartment stairway to glimpse an unfamiliar family at dinner, could be elaborated and shaped into an entire novel.
    We come down to the contention that writing, however "inspired," is a process of perception and synthesis. And so, necessarily, is reading.
    Consider two dictionary definitions of inspiration: "1. a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation. 2. the act of drawing in; specif. the drawing of air into the lungs." What is reading, if not an act of drawing language into the mind? And don't most writers secretly regard themselves as communicating "sacred revelation" to their readers?
    A good reader becomes possessed by an effective writer. Characters, themes, even patterns of language find life within the reader, who attempts to suspend disbelief but constantly checks the written word against real experience and past readings, and then finds his or her prejudices challenged, fears confirmed, desires teased, imagination stimulated.
    The sterner creative writing faculties may reduce writing to a matter of observation and craft, but reading remains a pursuit of the truly inspired.

I SEE THE LIGHT

posted by James Reel

    It’s a little disorienting, after two and a half years of leaving home at 4:30 a.m. to start my KUAT-FM shift at 5, to wake up an hour later, leave the house at 5:30 in actual daylight, and arrive by 6. This was my first day under the new routine (although back in the 1970s and ’80s the morning shift always started at 6, so this isn’t exactly a novel experience). The traffic was just a bit heavier at 5:30 than at 4:30, and when I arrived I felt that I was already an hour behind on my various tasks. No doubt I’ll settle into the new schedule soon enough, and it’s nice to be able to get eight hours of sleep now rather than the seven I’d been surviving on.
    From now on, I’m here until noon, at which time David Harrington takes over until 7 p.m. Then, we’ll have a new program (new to KUAT, anyway): Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin. Bill, of course, is the host of St. Paul Sunday, and back in the 1980s he was the music director of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. You can get the lowdown here on what Bill will be doing weeknights at 7.

BEACH BLANKET ADO

posted by James Reel

    Last Friday, before I skipped town for the weekend, I forgot to post a notice about this year's Tucson Parks and Recreation Shakespeare Under the Stars production, Much Ado About Nothing. So here's a reminder that this is the final weekend for the show. Last year, I attended Parks & Rec's Taming of the Shew, expecting it to be a very uneven amateur effort, but I was surprised, impressed and delighted by how fine the acting was, top to bottom. I haven't attended Much Ado, and probably won't make it this weekend, but one of my spies, a deep Shakespeare admirer who doesn't put up with badly-done Bard, reports that this is a very entertaining and well-done effort, despite or maybe because of its setting in a Southern California beach town. The final performances are tonight, tomorrow and Sunday (June 29-30 and July 1) at the DeMeester Outdoor Performance Center in Reid Park. In public radio, we have to go through several linguistic convolutions to avoid announcing that something is free, so I won't even bother to try.

VIBRATO AGAIN

posted by James Reel

    Back in February I drew your attention to an essay by David Hurwitz, of Classics Today, demolishing the HIP argument that vibrato was largely absent from orchestral playing before World War II. I approved of most of Hurwitz’s contentions, but wondered why he drew most of his conclusions from markings in scores—which are open to a high degree of interpretation—instead of bolstering his points with reference to pre-War recordings. Well, Hurwitz now has issued Part 2 of what is looking like a nascent book on vibrato, and he does now examine several recordings.
    If you were intimidated by the large number of examples of printed music in the first installment, give this new chapter a try. There are far fewer score excepts, and Hurwitz repeats and extends his arguments, so you won’t be missing much if you skipped Part 1. The thing does stretch over 75 or so pages, though. I had copied several excerpts to post here, hoping that might inspire you to read the full essay, but the juicy bits I chose look, out of context, more like sheer provocation than elements of a reasoned argument. So set aside an hour or so and dive into a smart and thoroughly researched examination of an issue that’s a lot more interesting than you might expect.

THEY'VE GOT A SECRET

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I condescend to approve of the latest romp at Gaslight Theatre:

    Before Austin Powers, before Johnny English, before Top Secret!, and just before Our Man Flint, there was Bond, James Bond, the spy who launched a thousand spoofs. And why not? The early Bond movies (as opposed to the original novels) weren't outright takeoffs, but they had an insouciance, a nudge and a wink that let us know we needn't take the girls, the gadgets and the supervillains too terribly seriously. So why shouldn't others join the spy game and push the silliness a bit further?
    Well, the silliness has been pushed right over the edge in the Gaslight Theatre's latest show, Secret Agent Man, or Gangsters Away! Let's just say that writer-director Peter Van Slyke's priority is not to, as they say in the espionage biz, gather intelligence. Applying much brain power to this show, or even trying to connect the plot points, would spoil the fun.