thartic

Dissonance and Consonance - A Review

This is a review of Dr. Roy Kahn Johnston’s book Dissonance and Consonance to be published in April of 2009. Few people do I respect in so many ways as I respect this artist. Yet, think not that this review is a rush from the gush of respect to a biased revelation. I trust I got this review from the same well Dr. Johnston got his poetry.

Let me count the ways.

Let.

Not a Mendicant’s plea. A demand.

My favorite Jack Benny joke went something like this paraphrase except that Benny’s medium was money. On a dark night, an unseen, at first, robber arrested an artist’s attention with a mental provocation. “Your poetry or your life.” The artist was nonplussed. He stood, ostensibly frozen by fear. The robber, not a tyro, was accustomed to the freeze. He was unaccustomed, however, to the endurance of the target’s transfixation, a lack of thaw. The robber himself, began to fear for, as I said, he was not a tyro. He knew how long each stage in the transaction should take on average. Beyond the average time, things could begin to go wrong. This situation could even degenerate to a stand off. Rein it in.

The robber demanded again, clearly and distinctly, with a soupcon of easily discernible menace. “Your poetry or your life? What is it going to be?” Dr. Roy K. Johnston replied clearly and distinctly, with a soupcon of impatience. “Just hang on, I am thinking.”

Since I am fabricating this version of Benny’s very tangible joke, I am entitled to add to what would not so clearly be the intangible mental processes that comprised what the robber perceived as an inauspicious delay and what was going on in Roy Johnston’s head.

Who is to say how much time is required to recall and evaluate all or some of the artistic intersections of one’s life? Since I am writing the story, let me answer my question. It could take about the number of moments necessary to make a veteran robber begin to get impatient. It could take no time at all. It could seem like an eternity to one brought up short and hurled into a speed of light recollection of the creative quest, the longing for a soul based, intimate, skin tight, bone deep, love affair with art. What the robber might construe as too long might be just long enough to deal with the nature of the categorical imperative lying in the word ‘let’, in the two word sentence ‘let me’.

Let me play my stick.

Let me play my clarinet until I have heard all the harmonics of sound a clarinet is capable of producing. Let me play until I can hear the perfect chord on a ‘note at a time’ instrument. Until I can nod my head in perfect understanding of what Heimholz meant about stretching the triangle of the notes in the triad until the distance goes ‘beat’ . And beyond. Let me learn dissonance and consonance experientially and reach concord and use the proximity to the beat as the ear’s perfect measuring stick.

Let me play my stick, Dad.

When I come to apply the results of my quest in an academic setting, I will know when a student is applying the basics in his search for the beyond. I will know how to know when to convey what lessons, which encouragements.

Let me come around the bends of a creative career careening toward the moment when I will turn that stick sound into words. And someday I will write poetry with the fluid grace and timbre that I translate from music. I will write poetry books like Wandering Circle and Dissonance and Consonance and quote lines from a simple song by Kris Kristofferson “I ain’t saying I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing and then I stole his song.”

Hang on, Mr. Robber. Hang on Mr. Taker. I am thinking. I am thinking over your demand.

Imagine a living wandering circle. Let’s follow Dr. Johnston’s setting set forth in his book, Wandering Circle. Let’s move it a little. He knew we would do this. He knew we would not sail through his poems like we were sailing through a grave yard on an old convertible’s running board reading aloud the epitaphs from the head stones. He knew we would swirl the poem around in the mouth looking for that special little bite of of poetic redolence.

So, imagine a living wandering circle. Let’s say it is something in form akin to a one foot in diameter jelly fish such as are burped onto central coast shores. Assume its perimeter is constantly changing, moving outward and inward from an overlaid, dotted line that maintains the physical perfection of circularity. The mathematician worries about continuing to call it a circle lest it lose its geometric certainty and structural integrity. See how the edges wander from the dotted line, the mathematician says.

The mathematician is part of a wondering wandering circle encircling the wandering circle of our jelly fish. Floating in and out but roughly alongside the mathematician is a poet. The poet is amused by the knitted brow of the mathematician. Then he is amused by the metaphorical beauty of the term ‘knitted brow.’ Then he is amused by the mathematician’s concern. This poet in the wandering circle that encircles our original circle has now let his thoughts become a wandering circle.

In the heart of his mind and the mind of his heart the poet speaks to the mathematician. “Don’t fret. Don’t worry. Don’t knit. I see your dotted line. I raise you one comfort. I am not going to steal your dotted line. I am just going to play with it. Science is safe with me. Fret not, friend, we’re in cahoots.”

A precision of the wandering of the edges of the circle away from the dotted line lives within the poet. A precision that is as secure as Einstein stoned on Bach.

Now the poet’s wandering circle has wandered into watching the jelly fish pretend it is an animation of the harmonics of Roy Kahn Johnston’s clarinet. “Ahhhhhhhh,” says the jelly fish. “I am floating so far beyond my dotted line. I am floating so far inside my dotted line. So far beyond myself. So far into myself. I can almost see certainty from here. Almost. Almost. Whoa, watch that beat frequency, man!”

Actually, jelly fish cannot talk. Actually, beater reader, that ain’t no jelly fish. Shhhh! Don’t tell Roy. He is busy watching two sound waves dance along the circumference. The sound waves have a thing, I mean a consonance, going on. Oops, a third wave. Ooh, the timbre in that concord. No, not the airplane. The consonance of the chord. Wow, the three waves are playing it so close to the edge. No, not the edge of the circle. The edge of the chord. If any two of the three notes wander into dissonance, a beat results and a concord is lost. No, not the airplane. The chord. Careful, if a beat gets loose, an entire cultural generation can warble wobble into existence and be named after it.

It is OK, Mr. Mathematician. Go ahead and knit your brow into a musical staff. It is dope for the fret base.

Vagary - an erratic, unpredictable, or extravagant manifestation, action, or notion.

Joan Baez wrote a song for Bob Dylan that contained these words.
“Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now”

I suspect one of the haunting questions about art and the artist is double tined. Or trifurcated or greater. How much does the artist control vagary? Is it a shotgun thing? Is it rifled? Is the ammo carefully chosen for the target response? Is the artist shooting or fishing? What’s the hit rate? How big a factor is vagary to an artist in general? To a poet in particular? Where’s the beat?

In short, Dr. Johnston, I trust you expected the misconstruing, the misconstruction I have laid out with regard to the vagary of your precise “Wandering Circle” poem? I surmise you did even if you did not know it. A strong reason exists for “Wandering Circle” to appear as the first poem of the book following the book for which “Wandering Circle” was the book’s title poem. Fittingly so. So befitting. Aren’t dissonance and consonance both very vague to the ear until they wander around inside themselves enough to show us what they are? One last question then. Is the foregoing related to the reality that the words ‘dissonance’ and ‘consonance’ do not appear anywhere in the table of contents of the book, “Dissonance and Consonance”, yet are on every page?

Let me count.

Oh, let’s do take the double entendre. Let me MATTER. A book’s worth there but, a different book. And the other entendre is waiting. Does it bother anyone that Wallace Stevens, the author of the superlatively blatant and superlatively vague “There’s a Jar in Tennessee”, was an insurance accountant? Oh, don’t all poets always lean heavily toward the imagination end of the seesaw instead of the focus end? Undear me! Don’t fools fuel folly with assumption? Not all. Not always.

Let me count the ways.

Something one observes about Roy Johnston. He is unassuming. In the true sense of the term. He is focused. He is a project manager’s project manager. Noooohhh. I do not think he is related to Wallace Stevens. Still, without digressing too far backwards, it takes me longer to read Roy’s poems than to read most other poets. That all right, Martha. That’s a good thing. Truths that shriek are probably predigested.

So, what’s with the imagination and focus thing? Well, normally they seem bipolar. The most natural approach to resolving bipolar, if bipolar needs to be resolved, is to head for the equator. The Earth does that, Coriolus. In short, the imagination tilted poet writes some beautiful stuff but, then can’t find it later. Roy Johnston is a tropical delight. He is a hound dog. Master of a million scented encyclopedium.

Finally, a simple shift even a shift of metaphorical venue. Difficulty hounds the determination of leadership quality in a quarterback when that perfect quarterback can rely on a solid wall of impenetrable linemen. Much easier is it, certainly quicker, to determine leadership quality when the line falls down, the quarterback is exposed, and decisions have be made quickly and accurately and the appropriate action executed dynamically. Your art or your life? What’s it going to be?

Let’s see, then. Tell them what you told them. I told you the clarinet is the most timbre-ific instrument in the world (yes, Yo-Yo Ma, more timbre-ific than the cello). I told you a young man said something like “with all due respect, Dad, I might find lawyering interesting but I absolutely must find the far away harmonics in my stick.” I told you that judging by his ability to improvise with that stick in consonance with a poet and with the most devilishly timed redolence of dissonance, Roy Kahn Johnston knows the difference between concord and discord and what goes where and what to do about it.

Penultimately, I told you that Roy is a thoroughbred hound dog project manager whether operating in the music of academia or consulting about paintings.

Finally, I reviewed Roy’s upcoming book “Dissonance and Consonance.” Oh, yes, I did too! Go back and read the part about concord, the beat (umhn, what a marvelous word) generation, the wandering circle, buy the book, take two antecedents and call me in the morning. And when you finish the book, tell me whether I packed your bags for a most fascinating journey.

Thanks to Elizabeth Barret Browning for organizational and inspirational assistance. Thanks to Jack Benny for the humor. Wallace Stevens, the check is in the dead letter box. Apologies to Yo-Yo Ma - I love you. Thanks, Mr. Tressman for guiding me to and selling me my Selmer Centered Tone clarinet, made in Depose France, which has outlived you considerably and may you RIP and find the edge of the beat in timelessness. Thanks, Roy, for inspiring musical frontiersmanship and a need to know Consonance Concord and Dissonance Beat who remind me of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Wild Night.”

by jack mothershed, all rights reserved

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folly

from Robinson Jeffers’s “Beaks of Eagles”

“Humanity’s … powers and their follies have become fantastic,
The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly. …

while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and

is never tired; dreams the same dreams,
And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats

of these living mountains.

It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and

anguish, not to go down the dinosaur’s way
Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact

in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles. ”

—-

When the folly of futile freaked out humanity goes on stage,
“debating” politician strutting like a banty rooster,
eyes moving constantly,
seeing nothing,
Charlie McCarthy
mouth flapping,
the psalmist’s
“vanity of vanities — all is vanity”
comes to mind,
and I hie to Jeffers
and he points me to
the eagle
above

jack luna MOTH

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Open Studios in San Luis Obispo County

In October my reminiscence focus turns to the artists of SLO County. I think I was with the Arts Council four years. Normally, when you are deep in the operation of a project, the content of the project subject may not be as easy to discern as when you are visiting the entities that comprise the subject.

Or, if your purpose is connected primarily to a particular group of those comprising entities, the focus is too precisely on those entities to extend the time you would love to have to devote to just cruising the remainder of the enterprise. So, I am grateful that this is Open Studios month for the Arts Council and the constituent artists of our very own homeland.

And you knew this was coming, if you know me. We do have a homeland security. Art. Probably my most repeated phrase, adage, aphorism is this. It is difficult to build a bomb while creating art.

Artist are opening their studios all over the county this month to visitors. This is a grand opportunity to meet, meet again, the artists and art of this county. I recommend you increase your security by getting out and there to visit artists.

Take a friend. Try this experiment. Take a friend with whom you bicker a lot. Observe that the twenty four hours after your Open Studios tour the bickering disappears or becomes more constructive.

Check back on this post often.

I am asking the artists of Open Studios to place comments here. Let the comments be as long as you want. If your comment is voluminous or you signal, I will move the comment to its own post. Say what you have always wanted to say to people about your approach to your work, what your goal is, what drives you, and so on.

Now, visitors and roosters of thartic.com, you can come back here and have a GOP, that is correct, a Grand Old Party bathing and frolicking and dining on the good things catered here by local artists, whether you are here in SLO County, in San Francisco, in WashDC, in Granda, Munich, Copenhagen, Malaysia, Bali … OK, stop, that’s far enough. Just kidding.

DO YOU SEE WHAT I AM ASKING, ARTISTS AND ART LOVERS? HELP ME HELP YOU!

Now, to enter a comment, you will need to log in with a valid email address which you have to trust me will not be abused. However, if in your comment (the part that I do not expose) you say you want to get my network news letter on all my sites, I will add you to that list.

Now turn off the computer and go visit an artist studio.

- jack

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Book Review
Author: Robert Pavlik
Book: Norman Clyde: Legendary Mountaineer of
California’s Sierra Nevada

About the Author
Robert C. Pavlik is an environmental planner and historian with the California Department of Transportation. He is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, but was raised in the San Fernando Valley and grew up in the mountains of California, hiking, climbing, and enjoying the remote places of quiet beauty throughout the state. He lives in San Luis Obispo.

Please hit the more button for more on Bob Pavlik’s book: (more…)

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Karl Kempton on Martin Koppany

Admin says:
*
I get emails. Some of them are not even junk. Some of them are jewels, I mean really precious stones.
*
The email I have included in this post upon receiving an OK from the originator is an agate.
*
Not to deviate without letting you go along but allowing you the opportunity to play with why I relate an email to an agate, skip the next paragraph or come on along.
*
(more…)

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ART IN NATURE SLIDESHOW

An ongoing theme will be art in nature and nature in art.

What artistic motif is not represented in nature?

We will be exploring fractals, numbers, self similarity, Goethe’s Phenomenology and Thoreau’s appreciation of it.

How timely then was the arrival of the slide show which I have of the slides and pics page.

Please enjoy.

The Beau Weaver Web Works folks will be contributing some game / learning material related to the slide show very shortly. Check back for that.

Look forward to articles on the subject described above.

Thanks.

Be Cool,
Thartic Circle

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Poetry and Me - Starting with Landis Everson

Poetry and Me
and the way I see
Do not let it be
more than that,
I say to me.

And you say to you. Unless you do not want to.

But when you do not want to, I suggest to you, you have not gone through the little village of poetry.

What I say to you is what escapes me.

This book is the tall tale of one madman’s maunder with the psychotic paraclete named poetry. Where we have gone together, what we have flung against the wall on the way to R. D. Laing’s “other side” is individual, undividual, dividends not withstanding.

I have so much to tell you, how poetry and I fell in love, fought over the silliest things, shrieked with eurekas on the word found, how it wound itself around itself and fortuitously fell into itself, its own structure, its own attempt to meet other words and paragraph itself into a long time love or a tryst, for a stanza or two, should it come to that, fall into a stupor of ability or inability to express the unknown until the unknown helplessly falls into the eternal triangle, perhaps managing to trample all ten commandments, raging, ranting “you cannot command a poet any more than you can command a poem.”

But let me begin at the beginning, which is now, and work my way forward into the past.

Now is the time to leave me for a moment to consider another poet for I am not alone. I am that I am. I am the pantheist product of every poet that ever broke through these walls as well as I am the scion of those who did not stand a chance.

I am the bastard son of Homer. I am the post-humus son of Wallace Stevens. I am Lorca’s left hand. My poetry is my own sword of Damocles, my own golden ring by which I may brachiate among the stars or tumble into the duff of my own jungle.

Landis Everson ever and forever landed on this son who did not know or care that he is award material. Who would memorialize and eulogize a poet had he not blown his brains out with a ward in hand?

To the man. To the poet. Of the moment.

Who would say, who could say,

“The hot sun of Spain
sweats the poem.”

without forsaking the strand of Catalan for Extremadura for a spell?

without leaving Lorca to his own bludgeoning.

He who said “they would not shoot a poet” forgot that they might just beat him to death.

The “authorities.” The “protect and to serve.” The makers of laureates. The manufacturers of award processes.

Poets are often ignorant. Never stupid. The poet IS the award process. The poet is an award giver. Awe shucks, render unto Awards the things that are Awards’s. Render unto poets the things that are poet’s.

“The poem is wary”

Be wary the poem.

Be prepared to leave town quickly should the sheriff get too close.

Mrs. Dalloway said “I will get the flowers myself.”

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Finally, a Thart

I just have to start with no thart. Just a thought. When I first thought about creating all the sites I could blog, all the blogs my personalities could muster, I thought of thartic. A year later Thartic finally gets a kick off edition, I mean a kick on edition.

It took this long for the Irish part of me to realize that all my Irish friends will may not visit this site because they have trouble saying words that begin with the letters ‘TH’ … Well, James Joyce for one. Ever notice how you are just cruising along through Finnegan’s Wake for the umpteenth time and suddenly you notice how Joyce hies away from words that begin with ‘th’. Not just Joyce but, let me think. I hear a voice that I heard through more than five years of more than five countries. Ah, yes, my friend from Cork. Michael McGrath. Michael had a brother named Michael. A great guy. They called him Mick. And both might say if they weren’t particularly concentrating like maybe while reading Joyce, Michael might say “What day is today? I tink it is Tursday.”

I do not have any idea why tinking or tursday of Mick or Michael should come to mind but now that it has tharted its way into this post I lift it up as an example of the kind of thoughtic artistry, unhackneyed though it might be, that this blog will be made of.

We might even tink, I mean think, about how an Irish writer who just bubbles babble like a book in a brook is surrounded by countryment who have trouble incorpusing the letter ‘h’ in ‘th’ words.

OK, I had a little fun reJoycing and we will probably take another look and listen to Joyce in some future edition when we tink about including a thousand page post but not that often and certainly not with the thigh thumping and sophisticated humor that the superlative semioticist, Umberto Eco, put into his thin, ethereal, yet mind thawing, howbeit theatrical, thicket like, thumping good thirty page tome, Talking of Joyce.

Mostly, though, we will be asking important questions of ourselves like why do we keep returning to Leonard Shlain’s book whose cover image keeps us tinking about Magritte mostly, that book named Art and Physics or why I get lost for days in Rosey Rosenthal’s fantasy figures.

I hope Thartic becomes an a locus for you to locust through our cyber pages of issues.

tink you,

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