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Bricklaying
Svevo on art:
One decisive proof that Carla was an artist was the way she went on perfecting her songs without letting go of what was best in her first conception. […] Like a true artist she added a small stone to the building daily, without destroying what was there already. The song was not stereotyped, only the sentiment that inspired it.
I understand these sentiments: I was a musician once, and say it that way only because I associate the act of being a musician with the toil of practice, several hours a day, with physical consequences of pain, in my fingertips, tendons and spine. After seven years I left jazz for scholarship, and try to do this; and not eight hours a day. There are no drills now, and for that reason I cannot fully identify with what I do. Zeno’s mistress demonstrates the most available analogy of the artist that I know — the physical analogy — where work is more or less the arbiter of progress. The memory of hard work as an artist is tough to grapple with when performing in less arduous, but no less creative, fields.
How does the writer practice? (There is a Barthes quote somewhere, which I could find. But his presence here is enough.) Can I consider myself a writer because I spend many waking hours considering text, or must I engage exercises of composition to be “working”? There are problems here that are brutally basic, maybe in that of the role of the scholar, or the intellectual or critic, differing significantly from that of the artist; if I could flatten my perspective — what I’d prefer to do — and consider them on similar planes, I am still left with some philosophical discrepancy. However simplistic and avoidant it is, I prefer to see craft as craft, and the architecture of my scholarship a similar design of that of my former musicianship. We as writers, novelists, poets, critics, published or unpublished, are in a position as torturous as that of musicians, or painters, or dancers: work is inflammation. We think about, and dread, the things we do.
And then there are such terrifying statements as this, by Clive Fisher in the Summer 2007 Bookforum:
As every published writer learns, the regrets of authorship come to matter more: Time’s passage qualifies the enormity of our misdeeds, but our misjudgments, enshrined in print, assume a treacherous immortality, testifying to our fallibility not simply after we are silent but in theory until the day mankind is engulfed in alphabetic extinction. All it takes is one blatant rhyme to betray the elliptical poet, one cheap anachronism to corrupt convincing historical fiction — and one alluring but unsubstantiated anecdote to compromise eternally the scrupulous reconstructions of the biographer.
Despite earth-shaking finality there are elegant truths there that makes me queasy and aware of my literary misconduct; errors swim to the surface days, and sometimes weeks, later. (A good and scrupulously vicious editor is one of the finest luxuries.) Musical performances can be forgotten, or whisked away in auditory fracture, and even paintings can burnt, but text, once published, and in our day permanently tagged and shellacked in the zones of the Internet, is there forever. As digital information does not age, textural crimes are as plausibly representative as good deeds. And so, are writers the most doomed of artists today? As any city-dweller knows, an hour spent among coffeehouse freelancers proves this to be true. The platitude of the doomed and terrible abstract painter has been swept away by postmodernity and replaced with that of the nastily boisterous, overexposed food blogger. Mario Batali:
My broader point is that the casual and serious reader alike cannot possibly hold the anonymous blogosphere accountable. I think, in fact, many of the readers know this and enjoy the fun. But the blog is now a new partner, and this bit of shoddy journalism will be picked up and promulgated by the rest of the gray zone and march its merry way toward the center of the road. Eventually these blog posts become factual information lost in the sauce.
Are my frustrations, or those of countless others, to be blamed then, between fears of blogs and the digital permanence of bad text, on the postmodern nature of writing today? No, or not exactly — we should be writing less. Musicians today practice just as they did two hundred years ago: in a mode almost medieval, where progress can be metered by hours, and goals are clearly delineated achievements. And so, as writers, can we only progress by following such an ethic, working intelligently or not at all?