Little Lizzie Learns to Bullsh*t
But also take a risk
My previous post about grades didn’t include two key scenes in which I BS-ed an assignment and yielded positive results.
First, it was senior year of high school. English class. Renown teacher. Best and the brightest all in the same room. Every class was brilliant and sparkling (just like in 90’s movies) and we read provocative, challenging books. But I was getting mediocre grades on my essays while my peers were doing better. I (over)valued my cleverness back then1 and righteously thought there was no way those normal, well-adjusted kids could write anything interesting.
I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner. It made me weep. Literally. In class. It was so intense. And yet, when the teacher asked why this one character was named Cash, it was the quiet kid who, half-joking, brilliantly said,
“Because he’s spent.”
I remember it because I hadn’t even thought about the importance of a name. I felt… ashamed? Maybe. Definitely incited to think more, read more actively.
Then there was Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which I wouldn’t be ready to understand for at least another decade. We had to do an in-class essay2 and I decided to let ‘er rip (what was there to lose?). I overlayed the characters and their histories to illustrate their parallels, but in terms of alternate realities.
I got a big fat A+ and “great work” sort of comment and wondered what might happen if I *gasp* actually questioned what I was reading.3 Could I… have my own opinions?
Many, may years later came graduate school. Masters of Music in music composition. I took a few years between undergrad and grad school and thought, when I went back, that I’d do better, be better. I also really wanted to make connections. I saw so many undergrad peers in tight-knit groups going off to live in big cities for ambition and adventure. I was (and still am) tremendously solitary.
After my first semester, my composition teacher gave me a B. I’d expected an A! I asked why. He explained how an A wasn’t automatic. It has to be earned not by doing what you’re told but by pushing past it. It was a good lesson. I hadn’t realized I assumed all students just started at an A and either maintained it or didn’t.4
The next semester I literally smashed my hands on the piano in my dusky, cold, upstate NY living room, angsty with frustration/boredom/curiosity.5 It gave me the idea for a chamber piece (cello, marimba, clarinet… piano?). I pushed to expand the idea and make the piece longer.6 I used some extended techniques, like jeté (bouncing the bow on the string) and tone clusters (a bunch of sequential notes—in a cluster—but no specific pitches, much like smashing your fist on a keyboard, wink).
The professor said I really pushed myself and I thought he was a total sucker. He was also right. I was not.
As with reading Faulkner and Morrison, so with this odd chamber piece. I shirked the non-committal/apathetic/comfortable/unquestioning route. I took a risk.7 I was totally insouciant. But it lead me on a new creative and critical path that was (and still is) worth exploring.
Honestly, I’m worried I still think this…
With real pencils on real paper!
I’ve got a list of books that have helped me with this along the way, which I hope to share with you in another post.
What are the implications here? I’ll have to think on it… What are your thoughts on starting automatically with an A?
Surely there’s a word for this in some other language, like Magyar or Hmong Daw…
I had been stalling at around 3-4 minute pieces and was *supposed to* be getting up to 8+ minutes. Would you want to hear more about about the world of academic music composition?
Something composer Joan Tower tried to teach me back at Bard College, at least 6 years prior. I was too young for so much for so long… I’m only just catching up to myself in my 40s… More on that another time, perhaps.
Len Fonte!