accommodations

If we don’t make accommodations for errors, we’ll be left with a press too timid to get the story.

– Jack Shafer ‘Should Journalists Have the Right to Be Wrong?‘ Politico Magazine

Craig Taborn’s friends often described him to me as a mystery, but this usually turned out to be a polite way of expressing their frustration that he has chosen not to be better known than he is, or ought to be. Many of them told me how relieved they were that someone, at last, was profiling him, as if he were being forced out of hiding.

…

Taborn’s habit of vanishing, both literally and figuratively, has perplexed, if not frustrated, some of his friends. They wonder why he still performs as a sideman and why he doesn’t take longer, or more fiery, solos; they fret over the long pauses between his recording projects as a leader.

-Adam Shatz ‘The Ethereal Genius of Craig Taborn‘ The New York Times Magazine

Here is a pithy summation of the special loneliness of genius. Great artists live in a world in which their own excellence does not exist. They are shut out, uniquely, from their defining achievements. In the same way that an apple can’t eat an apple and a sunset can’t admire a sunset and the Matterhorn can’t ski its own slopes, Michael Jackson could never watch himself dance, at least not the way everyone else on Earth did. Although Herman Melville wrote every word of “Moby-Dick,” he could never read it as a reader — could never unsee the origin of all those wild metaphors, never turn the page with true surprise. Artists may know when they’ve done something great, but they’ll never know what it’s like to experience it from the other end. It’s like how we can’t tickle our own feet.

This sentence comes from someone who is in a position to know.

-Sam Anderson ‘New Sentences: From ‘Infinite Tuesday,’ by Michael Nesmith’ The New York Times Magazine

 

‘Feeling of the actual life’

You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.

You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it.

Things aren’t that way…. So when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something. If I write an ugly story that might be hateful to you or to Mother the next one might be one that you would like exceedingly.

-Ernest Hemingway, letter to his father from March 20, 1925, quoted in David Bromwich ‘A Hemingway Surprise‘ The New York Review of Books

 ‘All I want to say is stay away from what the violin offers easily,’ (Christian Tetzlaff) says. ‘That was always the main preoccupation of the violin schools—Russian or American, for example—to make violin playing easier, to make it perfectly successful and safe, but—from my point of view—utterly uncommunicative.’

Not only do you need to have something to say, you also need the desire to communicate. In other words, you have to make yourself completely understood on an emotional level, though sometimes it looks like communication is not part of a musician’s concern. For Tetzlaff, it’s up to the teachers to believe more in the music than in the violin.

-Jacqueline Vanasse ‘Concert Violinist Christian Tetzlaff’s Advice: Live a Musical Life—Without Armor‘ Strings