Week 13, 4/1

4/1
In the course of doing anything like this, you winnow and pare as you go. I’m quickly losing interest in some aspects of this project—of this work—and growing new interest in other parts.

One part fading is my desire to report—what music I’m into this week, what texts, what interviews in the works, what the state of the work is. It’s all there, but it’s starting to feel like I’m digging up seeds to see how they’re coming along. So I’ll let that be.

My impulse to do such reporting at all here was part of the experiment of doing my research work online. I’m feeling my way along with it; it seemed a fresh and fun thing to try, in theory... and it may yet turn into that at a later stage...if interviews do pile up and interact, and draw more heat and light online thereby...but at this point I feel I’ve created and fallen into an even darker hole of cloistered monkery as a result of trying to be more collaborative and interactive than when I did it all in the usual private way.

That dark hole isn’t necessarily a bad thing; indeed, it may be necessarily a good thing, as it’s shaping up. I’m self-reflecting here in the internet’s version of big-city anonymity. Maybe I’ll run into some friends at some point in some neighborhood, have a chat about this or that, before going back to ground in the solitude of a single life...but the chat’s the froth, the margins; the solitude is the core, all the more so when it’s the result of gestures and attempts to connect.

These thoughts pertain to the writing itself. One thing that is growing in the work, and in my interest as some other things fall away—things such as the published journalist’s-cum-scholar’s role as the music/ian’s publicity agent, the colleague of other journalists/scholars—is the new way I’m beginning to write about the music. In two words: more interdisciplinarily (more in the context of and relation to everything else that exists), and more novelistically (more poetically and narratively both). I can see it in my listening notes on CD after CD, and can see how it is growing from the soil of the fiction part of the book as that also grows.

All of this—the internet, at home alone with me, as sufficient field of research; and my own increasing intro-spection/version is having me dream of shifting my methodology entirely away from depending on the input from others at all for the best results. The doors will remain open throughout the project to anyone, musician or colleague, who wants to talk to me about it, for whatever reason. But I may find that, stripped to the essence of the real creative core of it all, I and my work are irrelevant or worse to theirs, and all current loose connections will drop away. They and their work will then become relevant to me for reasons peculiar and confined to me, and will feed mine like the sunflowers or the starry night fed Van Gogh’s—totally oblivious to him and what he was doing.