End Notes

Beginning with Beethoven (arguably) and extending through the Romantic period, the codas to symphonic compositions become longer and longer, and more elaborate, as if there's a kind of desperate desire to affirm something before the last note must fade into the air. This, maybe, is the 376 blog's equivalent, as I will probably now find myself writing a series of "final" postings. It seems fitting, though, that we also have a last posting about music. In noting the passing of the great album cover art designer, Strom Thorgersen (think Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon), a few weeks, NPR queried their readers with the question "What are your Top 5 album covers?" I was pleased to see that the article's author, Robin Hilton, included Shearwater's Rook among his choices. I know album art is less prominent now with the confining dimensions of cds (not to mention the immateriality of mp3s), but what might make your list?

I hope things are going well with the multigenre essays. There was a great article about writing, by the way, in a recent issue (April 29) of The New Yorker: John McPhee's "Draft No. 4." You might check it out if you get a chance, especially since he writes so well about the agonies all of us endure anytime we sit down to write something. Here's a brief teaser: "You are working on a first draft and small wonder you're unhappy. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. If you say you see things differently and describe your efforts positively, if you tell people that you 'just love to write,' you may be delusional.... First drafts are slow and develop clumsily, because every single sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow.... There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum.... For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something -- anything -- out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something -- anything -- as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit again -- top to bottom. The chances are that about now you'll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time.... Without the drafted version -- if it did not exist -- you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day -- yes, while you sleep -- but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun." Unfortunately, because of the pressures and compacted time of the semester, we don't often enough get to pursue this process of "drafts." It's like Kundera's "unbearable lightness of being" that comes from the awareness that there is no dress rehearsal for our lives: we just have to go on stage cold. Well, anyway, I will look forward to reading your essays when the time comes.

Well, there it is: "Now my charms are all o'erthrown," lamented Prospero (which is not to say I won't return to post again!). Thank you for all of your hard work, good cheer, and many contributions to the course. As I noted on Wednesday, I feel like I've lived the material in many ways during the semester (in good ways and, lately, in unwanted ways); as we head into the graduation, and into the summer and beyond, perhaps we can all remember Charlie Parker's advice that "if you don't live it, it won't come out your horn." After I've had the chance to recover, to "sleep like a rock or a man that's dead," I'm assuming the "thump, thump, thump" will start kicking in again, and I'll start looking towards the next iteration of the class. You and your contributions will be an important part of it when I do. And maybe someday we'll meet again under the tamarind tree! All the best ...