Imitations

At my therapist's office stands a desk made to look like fine furniture. Gustav Stickley's ghost is big around these parts. His factory still stands in a suburb nearby. Over a hundred years later, it houses a library instead of furniture and woodworkers. I'm carrying a book borrowed from that library. A slim collection of poetry I'm too anxious right now to read. The book is pure craft and rhythm. I am something else entirely. Stickley furniture is beautiful. Form, function, artistry, grace. Stickley pieces weren't made to look like anything else. They were exactly what they were built to be. Originals. The desk at my therapist's office, well, that's a pale imitation in every sense. A disappointment. I set the book of poems on its surface and open the top drawer. Inside, I find the Allen wrench and instruction booklet used to assemble it from whatever cardboard box in which it shipped. The instructions in English, Spanish, and maybe Japanese. I close the drawer, a flimsy thing, and consider a peek beneath the desktop where crude hardware and Phillips head screws have surely replaced craft. Instead, I go into the bathroom and close the door. A mirror shows my reflection, a flat imitation of a face crafted over half a century, resolved now in doubt. I stare, resisting the urge to reach into the reflection and comfort the man there, knowing I'll come up short, my hand pressed against cold glass, the distance between what I look like and what I wish terribly confirmed. Outside the bathroom door, the imitation desk, the poems I can't read, the appointment with my therapist perhaps to discuss what is and is not real.

The Year In Records

I like records. A lot. Listening to records beats streaming. The analog sound isn't quantitatively superior to digital, but I listen better to a record than to a stream. Put an album on and I'm there, really there, for the duration.

I picked up thirty-seven albums this year, mostly used, but a few are brand new pressings of brand new albums. Here's the 2019 rundown:

I've listened to Genesis since seventh grade and have almost completed the collection with Wind & Wuthering, Trespass, ...And Then There Were Three, Swelled And Spent (a bootleg of the The Lamb), Three Sides Live (Import) and Phil Collins' solo album, Face Value which works better as a whole record instead of individual songs.

My favorite albums in middle school were Supertramp's Even In The Quietest Moments... and Crime Of The Century, perfect examples of eighties pop. You don't get much better than "Fools Overture." Just handling these albums feels like the best kind of time travel.

I bought Steely Dan's Gold to have a vinyl copy "FM (No Static At All)" and "Babylon Sisters" on an album better than the one on which it originally appeared.

In high school, I avoided Bruce Springsteen because he was too popular, but I got over that and this year bought Nebraska, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and the brand new Western Stars which, to my ear, is one of his best.

I didn't even know that Lou Reed's New York, one of the best rock and roll albums ever, came out on vinyl, but there it was in the bin. You bet I snagged it.

I grabbed some oldies too. Paul McCartney's Tug Of War (which isn't all that old), Glen Campbell's Greatest Hits (which my wife forbids playing in her presence), Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Randy Newman's eponymous first album (both brilliant though very differently so).

There aren't many better songwriters than Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, and The Decemberists. Illinois, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, and The Hazards Of Love represent some of their best work.

I can't get enough of old jazz like Getz/Gilberto #2, Vince Guaraldi Trio's Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus, Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers_, and Cannonball Adderly's, Something' Else. I'm especially devoted to the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond, so I picked up the Quartet's _Time In, Brandenburg Gate: Revisited, Jazz Impressions Of The U.S.A., and Desmond's Bossa Antigua and First Place Again.

Jazz fusion such as Jean-Luc Ponty's Aurora, Andy Summers & Robert Fripp's I Advance Masked, and Al Di Meola's Casino reminds me of record shopping at Spectrum and Desert Shore on the Syracuse University Hill back before I could drive. That Centro bus ride home felt endless with new records in hand.

Brand new jazz this year included The Bad Plus' Activate Infinity and the absolutely spectacular Finding Gabriel by Brad Mehldau. Nonesuch released Mehldau's best solo piano performanceLive In Tokyo on vinyl and sent me a sampler album too. Sweet.

A pretty good year for records, but then, any analog year is pretty good. On to 2020!

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Without intending to buy any more records in 2019, on December 30, at Barnes & Noble I found The Decemberists' I'll Be Your Girl for fifty-percent off. I couldn't pass that up and so now it's thirty-eight albums for the year. That's one better than thirty-seven, in case you hadn't noticed.

Ghost Writer

The Least Supernatural Superhero of all!

I wonder if the creators of Ghost Rider were thinking of ghost writers and just got carried away. Probably not, but that would be a great origin story.

This week a friend asked me to look at a sales pitch they'd written for their new venture. They expected an edit, a touch-up, but I did a heavy rewrite, seeing what it needed and knowing they wanted it done rather than to me teaching them how to fix it. I did the rewrite and sent it back. When my friend thanked me, I said it was my pleasure and explained my strange affinity for ghost writing.

That same day a colleague asked me to review a piece they had written for one of our bosses, a technical document with legal ramifications that my colleague had written well and exhaustively. I thought about condensing it down to a page or two, but again, my colleague doesn't want writing instruction or the destruction of their writing, so I created a summary, in my colleagues language and tone, to attach to the report. They liked that and the boss will be grateful for the brevity of the summary and the ability to refer if needed to the thorough report.

Later this week I made a presentation about the community center in which I have my office. It's anonymous writing showing the organization instead of the writer. Pretty much the opposite of what I do here which is all too much about me.

(I'm reminded of a Clarkson chemistry teacher who told my class, "you'd have an ego too if you were as good as me." I like that line a little too much.)

Ghost writing is a practice in humility, empathy, and compassion. It deemphasizes the self. And it turns out that ghost writing is most of what I do in revising my own work.

Last night I typed yesterday's Morning Pages. The process was ghost writing because by evening I had made of myself a different person than I was that morning. I felt compassion for the morning writer and was delicate with his feelings as I deleted sections and transformed his piece. I worried about changing the direction he'd chosen but trusted I was doing right by him, the piece, the process, and the audience.

In that piece I said writing is and isn't magic. Ghost writing is the same. The handwritten draft was nearly 1,200 words. Typed, it was 1,061, many of which had not appeared in the handwriting. Then I revised to make it shorter. Two and a half passes later it was 867 words, each pass done by the ghost writer I had become by evening by separating the words on the page from my self and hearing them as an audience might.

Writing manuals mark a division between writer and editor, but I like thinking of it as neophyte and ghost writer. The neophyte has passion and but lacks the skill to translate the passion to artful words on a page. The ghost writer has those skills and works to disappear, to make it seem as if the neophyte wrote every word in the final draft. The ghost writer feels devotion to the neophyte and to the craft.

In this way the writing, the writer, and the ghost writer are all transformed for the better. It's no flaming skull and burning motorcycle, and Nicholas Cage is unlikely to play me in the movie, but as origin stories go, it's not bad. It needs maybe a touch of revision. I'll get on that.

Morning Pages: A River Of Words

Wednesday morning I wrote three Morning Pages like always. Wednesday night I typed them, omitting one section, reshaping the syntax of each line I typed. Then I read it, counting each word I cut. There's magic in writing and no magic at all. Magic in that the thoughts didn't exist until I wrote them, no magic because I crafted it through a simple process.

Magic and craft. Art and effort. Feeling and thinking. Morning and night.

I'd go on, but the rhythm leads me straight to, "pressure and time; that and a big goddamn poster," and only Morgan Freeman should say such things. I'll just get on with this morning's pages:

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It is a mornings when I resist the pen and open space of the three blank Morning Pages. I have no doubt I'll fill them — I've already filled the first three lines — but it seems too much trouble. Sometimes beginnings are like that for me (maybe for you too), but then I see I've filled this much of the page just because I started. It's that much easier once I begin. I'm not even a third through the first page, but already the feelings of impossibility or even difficulty have melted away. Doing is the way out of feeling overwhelmed.

I'm helped by the steady flow of 1,964 days of Morning Pages. This 1,965^th day in a row is nearly inevitable as I'm carried along on the river of finished pages, 5,892 of them so far, 5,895 by the time I'm done today. The flood of all that pushes through any dam trying to hold me back. The routine of awakening with a pen and filling three pages every day for over five years gets me through most hesitation and barriers. The fatigue of last week, the sickness this past weekend, and all my feelings of being overwhelmed give way to the habit of Morning Pages which, so far, has proven an unstoppable surge.

It's not just a matter of my obligation to the streak. Writing Morning Pages turns out to be the best way I can start the day. All this week good has come from them — good pieces, good thinking, good realizations, and good feelings. Even as sluggish as I felt this morning, I began the writing in a small hand, ten to twelve words per line, some hidden part of me wanting room to write long, some big idea springing through the movement of my pen. I'm on track for a thousand words in three pages and have lost care for the time enough not have even looked at the clock. I'm happy to let the words lead me to whatever it is I need, however long it takes to get there.

I woke tired, needing something. More sleep? A warmer house? Light in the dark sky? I turned to another comfort, my thoughts springing mysteriously and trickling out one word at a time onto the dry plain of the blank page. Sometimes the thoughts come out well, other times they spill out ugly. Mostly it's not any one good thought or moment of enlightenment I'm after so much as the rhythm of following the flow of the thinking. I've filled two-thirds of this morning's pages and still I happily don't know into what other thoughts these will flow or how today's last line today will end.

I've now been carried onto the third line of page three by the steady current of a deep river. I'm in no hurry to reach the end nor do I imagine what the last line will have to say. These words simply flow between the boundaries of the margins of these pages and I follow.

I can't recommend this enough but know how difficult it can be to create such a torrent of habit. The first morning, July 5, 2014, I wasn't pulled along by any river. I sat at my desk in a dry wash and tangle of dead brush. I hacked at that brush for three quarters of an hour and made just enough room to stand. Sweat enough to leave a damp spot. I wondered if I'd ever do another day's pages. I couldn't imagine that dry, barren ground as the bed of a river, couldn't imagine a source, not even a trickle.

In the beginning, one stroke of the pen follows another and there is a letter on the page, followed by others which become a word that lived until then only in my mind. The word leads to another and another, forming a thought that began within me but finished out in the world and led to the next idea until half a page became a page and a half, two, and then three pages. The next day another three followed and the next day after that.

Drops of water, enough of them over time, become the river.

Too soon each morning I arrive at this last blank line. It's not nearly long enough for all I have left to say. More pages tomorrow. More words all day long. The river rolls on and on.