A Creative Life

After years of a relative creative drought, I suddenly find myself working on several creations at once.  How can this be?  Why can't my creativity be more evenly dispersed throughout my life, to give me a chance to be consistently productive?  Honestly, it feels almost as if I'm suddenly in a mild manic state (although that particular diagnosis has been officially ruled out, thank you very much!) and I'm just trying to keep up with all the ideas that are suddenly pouring out of me.  Where were these ideas 10 years ago, when I had more energy?

I really did think that I had become a boring slug who was destined to be an Art Appreciator for the remainder of my existence.  And, in most ways, I still am an Appreciator, because nothing I've done has seen the light of day yet.  But, this feeling of finally creating again, even if it's still just in private, is wonderful!  I feel useful and interesting and vibrant again.  It's my second wind.

I've always been curious about the creative processes of artists and how they work.  I remember hearing a writer say that he wrote every day for several hours, often in the nude. He said it took away distractions and obstacles to the creative process.  It seems to me that being naked at a computer would be more of a distraction than wearing clothes could ever be, but maybe it's a gender thing.  

Apparently, Jack Kerouac wrote most of On The Road in 20 days of writing, using multiple pieces of paper that were taped together and fed into the typewriter so that he wouldn't have to stop to change the paper.  His wife fed him pea soup and coffee to keep him going.  It took years, however, to get it published.  

Keith Richards has said that writing "Jumpin' Jack Flash" with Mick Jagger took about 30 minutes.  You could argue that they should have quit after that.  Instead, they've gone on for years, grinding out song after song of mediocrity.  

It took Alexander Calder about a year to create the Cirque Calder after starting the project by doing illustrations of the Ringling Brothers Circus.  He created miniature sculptures of animals, circus performers, and apparatuses from wire, wood, and found materials.  He carried them in suitcases and gave "performances" with narration (in French) while he was living in Paris.  After that, he had years of productivity, resulting in many sculptures, mobiles, drawings, and paintings.

Why are some artists creative throughout their lives, at a fairly even pace, while others have one or two spurts of creativity and long periods of producing very little? 

My Ideal Bookshelf

I just read a blurb about a new book called My Ideal Bookshelf.  It includes lists of famous people's favorite books with hand-made illustrations of what their bookshelves would look like.  So, naturally, I decided to try to list my favorite books.

I decided to include books that really affected me, along with books that inspired me to drive further down a road than I would have otherwise.  I tried not to pick books in order to impress anyone or with any other agenda.  Also, I can't draw, so there is no illustration.  I considered including a photograph of the books lined up on a bookshelf, but I discovered that I don't currently have a couple of them.  I guess I've moved too many times.  Anyway, here is my briefly annotated list:

1. The Catcher In The Rye:  A cliché, perhaps, but it had a great impact on me when I was 13.  The thoughts in Holden's head weren't that different from my own and I couldn't help but admire his commitment to his ideals, even as he went over the cliff. It also made me expect more from books than I had expected before.  
2. After You'd Gone:  Maggie O'Farrell's depiction of the love story and the grief of her protagonist is so real and so intense that I started to feel as if I had lost my fiancé.  
3. The Looming Tower:  Anyone who doesn't find this book as compelling as a bestselling thriller isn't alive.  This book made me want to learn more about the Middle East and led me to read more history of that part of the world.
4. The Last Mughal:  I was never really interested in India before I read this book.  I picked it up because I find details (human stories, political intrigues, economic impacts, etc.) of cultural collisions fascinating.  This history of the last days of the last Mughal in India made me want to pursue it further.  It led me to read more about India and to read more by the author, William Dalrymple.  (see #5)
5. White Mughals:  This is one of the most moving pieces of history I have ever read.  At its heart, it is a love story; but it is also the history of the actions and consequences of the East India Company.  Chronologically, the events detailed in this book took place before the events in The Last Mughal.  However, I listed them in the order in which I read them, because after I finished The Last Mughal I wanted more.
6. When Will There Be Good News?:  Kate Atkinson can write so well, it's breathtaking.  I think I've read all of her novels, and I've loved them all.  But, if I have to pick one, this one stands out for me.  
7. Savage Inequalities:  Public schools are my life.  So, it's not surprising that I have read a lot of books about them.  I can always count on Jonathan Kozol's books to remind me why I care so much about public education.
8. Amerika:  I discovered Kafka my freshman year of college, not because of any classes I was taking, but because I liked the cover of The Trial.  After I finished reading it, it stayed with me for days.  So, I went to the bookstore and bought The Castle and Amerika.  I finished Amerika in one day, on a Sunday that I spent in my room.  It actually made me laugh out loud at one point, which you might not expect from Kafka.  I loved it so much that I called my boyfriend to read parts of it to him.  Because he found it as funny as I did, I made him my husband.
9. Claudia:  I recognize that this is a children's book, but it's one of those books that I still re-read.  I love how independent Claudia is and how loyal she and Duffy are to each other.  I love that she has a secret diner that she visits once a week, and that she has a box that she locks her treasures in.  But what I love most about it is her relationship with her older brother.  I never had a brother, but Claudia's relationship with her brother always struck me as wonderful.
10. Young Men & Fire:  This is the horrific true story of the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 and the deaths of 13 Smokejumpers.  It's told with real feeling and loving dedication to details and truth.
11. The House of Mirth:  My husband recommended this book to me, and I was grateful that he did, even though it was the first time I ever cried while reading a book.  This was particularly embarrassing, because I finished it while on a flight from San Antonio to Chicago.  When I reached the description of Lily's death, I couldn't stop the tears.  You know how your throat hurts when you try really hard not to cry?  My throat hurt that way, and I still got the pages wet.
12. A Case of Curiosities:  My sister gave me this book.  She has given me several books that I have enjoyed, but this is the one she gave me that I enjoyed the most.  It reminds me of my mother's memory box, which her sister gave to her.  I also love this book because it is, in the end, a mystery.

Saving Songs from Themselves

There are some songs that I hear and think, "This is a really good song.  Why don't I love it?"  In nearly every case, I can eventually identify something (or some things) that, if done differently, would have pushed my opinion of it over the top.  Sometimes, it's the use of a particular instrument, other times it's the singer's voice or the production.  It's made me wish for a collection of cover versions by people who feel the same way I do.

Here are some of the songs that need to be saved from themselves:

1. "Still The One," by Orleans.  This is a good pop song that manages to make me feel good, in spite of the awful singer and the excessive backing harmonies.  If someone with a better voice would cover the song with the same basic arrangement (minus harmonies), I'd be a very happy camper.
2. "Best of You," by Foo Fighters.  Prince's version, during the Super Bowl halftime show, was the best.  I want a recording of that.
3. "Free Ride," by Edgar Winter.  If someone would record it in exactly the same way, but without the dorky synthesizer break in the middle, it would be awesome.
4. "Philadelphia Freedom," by Elton John.  The song is great, the arrangement is fabulous, the production is perfect.  But, Elton John has got to go.  His singing is so affected, he adds so many syllables to the words, that you can barely understand the lyrics.  Someone who can just sing, without going to such great lengths to sound soulful, could push this song into heaven.

I'm sure there are more, but that's all that comes to mind.

The REAL Lesson From Columbine

I heard a story on the radio that made me sad and angry at the same time.  It was an interview with a man, named Sam Granillo, who was a junior at Colombine High School on April 20, 1999.  He was in the cafeteria when Harris and Klebold started their rampage and he hid, along with many other students, in an inner office of the kitchen.  He lost a close friend that day and he was offered free counseling, which he tried.  As adolescents are wont to do, he felt that it wasn't working for him; but he remembers being told that, for the rest of his life, free counseling would be available to him.  This was in recognition of the fact that there are sometimes emotional scars that don't show up immediately after a traumatic event.

Unfortunately, Sam discovered that the services were not available to him when he wanted to return to counseling several years after the event.  He was struggling with some symptoms that are fairly typical of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  In his interactions with other survivors of Colombine, he found that counseling stopped being free for them about 2 years after April 20, 1999.  He also found that many of them had been told the counseling would be available for the rest of their lives.  

Thankfully, Sam works as a freelance camera assistant and production assistant, and he decided to put those skills to use in order to bring attention to the mental health needs of survivors of trauma.  Sam has been making a documentary about survivors of mass shootings, such as Colombine and Virginia Tech.  He calls it Columbine: Wounded Minds and he hopes it will lead to a foundation for free services for people who have been through major traumatic events, such as mass shootings or war.  It breaks my heart that he and the other survivors haven't had free counseling services available to them.  I don't understand why we don't take better care of each other.  I really don't.

Power to the People

I've been reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Given the current political climate, I've found the chapter called "Robber Barons and Rebels" particularly compelling.  Zinn describes the events of the second half of the 19th century, including the economic crises and the multitude of strikes and demonstrations by the nascent American labor movement. I find it very disturbing how many parallels there are between then and now, particularly the tight relationship between the extremely wealthy and government. I am not a fan of conspiracy theories and I try very hard not to be paranoid (which has not always been easy, trust me), but when I read about some of the Supreme Court's decisions from the 19th century, decisions that resulted in reversing or eliminating regulations on corporations, I feel that we have gone back in time. How is this different from our current Supreme Court? Maybe we're stuck in a perpetual tug of war between the very wealthy and the rest of us for control over the country. Can you say that we've made any progress at all when it was the Supreme Court of the late 19th century that decided that corporations were individuals, a decision reinforced by our current Court in recent rulings?

Whatever it is, it certainly isn't new and I'm not sure we've learned anything over the past 236 years. Honestly, I used to be a very positive person. I was optimistic and believed in the power of evidence to carry the day. But I just can't seem to sustain it anymore. There are so many people who refuse to be persuaded by facts and, I must admit, it makes me want to break things sometimes. I suppose I could blame FOX News, but isn't the real problem that there is an audience for FOX News? There will always be liars, but why are there so many people who want to believe these particular lies? And when I look at individuals I know who watch and believe FOX News, I'm deeply bothered. If they were all business owners, I would say that their primary priorities were de-regulation of industries and eliminating workers' rights. However, the people I'm thinking of are not all business owners. They work in a variety of jobs and they are not wealthy. But they don't seem able to see that the policies that are recommended by FOX News and the Republican Party are designed to benefit the wealthy and to harm the middle and lower classes, their own people. Would someone please explain this to me?

As someone who has worked her entire adult life in public education, I can't help but feel that this is the true failure of our schools -- our failure to instill in students a healthy respect for evidence and logic. I blame it on religion. 




  

Creativity and Schools

I recently attended a workshop on creativity. It was specifically designed for people who work in schools and the idea behind it was that teachers needed to be creative in order to provide instruction that is differentiated based on students' needs. There were also many elements included in the workshop that teachers could use to help their students develop their creativity. The nice thing about this workshop is that I didn't sit there thinking I was wasting my time and I didn't want to call out, "Bullshit!" at any point. This was a truly rare experience.


The longer I work in education, the more I want, and need, to yell, "Bullshit!" I am particularly inclined to feel this need when I think about what schools could do to help children discover their creativity versus what they actually are doing these days. The worst part of it is that the legislation under which we work (NCLB) and the more recent grant requirements (RttT) make it clear that the thing our governments (federal and state) want us to focus on the most is students' test scores.


Creativity is at the heart of things like innovation, art, entrepreneurship, research and development, and solving problems. Creativity is also difficult to quantify. Herein lies the irony of our current educational policies and "reform" efforts: we want better education for all students because we will need them to be entrepreneurs and inventors ("job creators" in election-season-speak) when they are adults; we want to measure this better education through test scores, like the PISA, in which we compare our students to students in other countries, with the goal that our students score at the top. I'm sorry to have to tell you all this, but you can't have both.


Yong Zhao recently wrote an article for Education Week in which he gives a very clear explanation of this problem and even provides data(!) which show that countries in which students perform very well on the PISA are usually those with the lowest levels of entrepreneurship. But we've known this for a while. Why haven't we stopped the big push for higher test scores?


Well, I think there are several reasons. First, I think many actual entrepreneurs have made quite a bit of money from our obsession with testing and from our politicians' insistence that our schools are terrible. The cynical side of me sees this as the real intention of the politicians who have made the most hay of our so-called failure. People like Joel Klein and  Michelle Rhee have made a lot of money. They are very friendly with some politicians who are quite vocal in their disapproval of our public schools and of teachers' unions. This brings me to the second reason we're still being pushed by test scores: to crush teachers' unions. Republicans (primarily, though not exclusively) have found that they have been very successful in discrediting teachers' unions when they have focused relentlessly on standardized test scores.  


I also think that there is a general insecurity that permeates the teaching profession which prevents teachers from arguing, publicly, with leaders of all kinds. And, there hasn't really been a venue for them because they have been completely excluded from the conversation. But why do they accept this exclusion? Why aren't they organizing national strikes and demonstrations to force their leaders to listen to what they have to say? I'm not sure why the unions and those politicians who can see the bigger educational picture haven't been more insistent on refocusing the conversation about public schools away from test scores. But, teachers -- why have you bought into this mindset? If we must think of our students as future employees (which I think is the wrong way to think about them), we should remember this: when we ask business leaders what qualities they look for in employees, they never say, "high scores on the PISA." They identify things like problem-solving ability, collaborative skills, creativity, ambition. We used to be good at turning out graduates from our public schools who had those traits. If we keep down this idiotic path, I'm afraid we'll end up with a bunch of job candidates who are looking for employers who phrase everything as a multiple-choice question.

The Greatest

Several months ago, I got Rhett Miller's The Interpreter: Live at Largo.  It's an album of him covering a bunch of songs that probably are particular favorites of his.  The recording is live, so you get a bit of concert banter introducing some of the songs.  I have no idea what Largo is/was, but based on the banter, it sounds like this sort of performance was typical: established musicians performing covers.


What I find interesting about it, apart from Rhett's gorgeous, lovely voice, is the songs that he chose.  I had no idea, until I listened to it, that he's a Bowie fan.  (Recently, he wrote a piece in Salon in which he explains to his children why Bowie's Hunky Dory is a great album: Trust me on this: David Bowie's "Hunky Dory")  The Bowie song he covers is "The Bewlay Brothers" and, having never heard it before, I assumed it was a Dan Bejar song.  Rhett also performs songs written by Tom Petty, Elliott Smith, Elvis Costello, The Pixies, The Ramones, Roddy Frame, The Beatles, Dylan, and Robyn Hitchcock.  


I will forever be grateful to Rhett Miller for this album because it introduced me to the song "California Stars."  This is a song that was on Mermaid Avenue, a collaboration (of sorts) among Wilco, Billy Bragg, and Woody Guthrie.  Apparently, Guthrie left behind many lyrics without music and Wilco and Bragg put them to music.  "California Stars" is simply beautiful and, even though I am a mild fan of Wilco and I loved Billy Bragg's Talking With the Taxman About Poetry, I probably wouldn't ever have heard it if it weren't for Rhett Miller.  Thank you, Rhett!  


I was surprised to hear him say, in his intro to "Waterloo Sunset," that it was "the greatest song ever written by a human being."  It is a great song, but I wouldn't call it the greatest song ever written.


This got me wondering what song I would call the greatest song.  This is really such an impossible and pointless exercise that I must try it.  Here is a list of contenders, in no particular order:

• "Every Line of a Long Moment"
• "God Only Knows"
• "Caribbean Wind"
• "Thunder Road"  (I do love a big gesture.)
• "The Whole of the Moon" 
• "Care of Cell 44"
• "A Fond Farewell"
• "Wild Horses"  (I prefer the version by The Flying Burrito Brothers.)
• "Walk Away Renee"
• "The Bleeding Heart Show"
• "Freeze the Saints"
• "Thousands Are Sailing"