Do Artists and Musicians and Writers Have More Fun?

Concert poster

Our weekend got off to the best possible start on Friday, with the annual Madrigal Christmas concert by the Leelanau Children's Choir and Youth Ensemble. I didn't take my camera to the concert this year, so all you get to see (if you weren't there) is the poster at left. The costumes and staging are beautiful, too. But of course the focus is on the singing. All hearts in the audience were lifted by the young voices. The Christmas concert is director Margaret Bell's "skill-building set" for her singers, with largely the same traditional English and French carols every year, solos and ensembles with different personnel, of course, from one season to the next. With what they learn from preparing this concert, they go on in the spring to put together a new program each year. (I'll let you know in plenty of time, so if you're close enough to Northport you won't miss it.) If musicians do have more fun, they certainly work hard for it.

Saturday evening I spent baking cookies with a friend. One kind of dough, chocolate added to some portions, colored sugar and sprinkles to a few -- and here is the result, all ready on Sunday for our bookstore event:

I told you there would be cookies!

Here's what I was thinking off and on during Glenn Wolff's book signing. Glenn is an artist. He's also a musician. We had many other artists and writers in the room today. So do these people have more fun? Artists' and writers' work is often solitary, but they seem to enjoy getting together and comparing notes, and their appreciation of each other's work is heart-warming. I wonder if you can tell from the pictures below which people are artists, which are writers, which are musicians, and which are fortunate benefactors of the work of the artists, writers, and musicians.

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We all had fun at Dog Ears on Sunday! Thank you, Glenn!

Thoughts, Life -- Brief, Ephemeral

Bulletin board reader in bookcase window reflection

I’ll start today by transcribing a few lines written on Sunday afternoon:

Sunday, 16 June 2013:

Writing with pen on slightly porous paper of a yellow legal pad is a meditative practice. The letters are not preformed but flow from the pen guided by movements of my hand. This is the way I compose letters to friends.

‘Way’ is a friendly word, bucolic and summery, its sound and associations nothing like those attached to the word ‘method.’ The latter, analytical in tone, suggests procedure, perhaps scientific procedure in a laboratory, the former a rambling country path bordered by wildflowers, perhaps also a low stone wall and grazing cattle or sheep beyond. ‘Method’ constrains, ‘way’ invites.

My yellow paper and black pen invite discursive thoughts. They also invite lists. Or poems. – Or at least fragments and phrases that give hope of turning into poems.

The poet who was at the bookstore on Friday last held the small assembly enthralled. If I could go back in time, I would have a camera person and equipment there to capture the entire presentation and conversation. One attendee, himself an accomplished poet, took copious notes. Is there any chance, I wonder, that he would write up his notes for me? Because I can’t remember – what exactly did Mary Ann Samyn give as the reason she forbids her students rhyme in their work? I remember the sense but not the clear, succinct, one-sentence expression she used.

Novels and book-length nonfiction still reel me in on a regular basis, but something about June turns me oftener to poetry and short stories. These forms successfully realized –

Here the lines stop, the thought unfinished, the moment past.

When two poet friends came all the way from Eastport – we have no ferry across Grand Traverse Bay, so they had to drive south and through Traverse City and then back up along the shore to Northport – I was struck once again with the generosity of writers in supporting other writers and supporting bookstores. This was in addition to the generosity of guest poet Mary Ann Samyn in giving her time, attention, encouragement, and insights to a roomful of strangers. It is the greatest privilege of my bookseller life, meeting these lovely people. I only wish more bookstore friends, especially my writer friends, could have been with us.

Dog Ears Books is not the only Leelanau entity celebrating a 20-year anniversary in 2013. After a last round of thanks and good-byes on Waukazoo Street, David and I made our way up to the NCAC (Northport Community Arts Center) for the 20^th anniversary concert of the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Leelanau Youth Ensemble. When director Margaret Bell first started this group, she had fewer than a dozen young singers – and only a single boy in the ensemble. I only took this one shot of the younger group onstage – I was there to enjoy and celebrate, not to document – but other numbers crowded the stage with all ages, in more fantastic costumes, and the singing was simply wonderful. “I enjoyed every minute,” David said afterward. What a gift to the community Margaret Bell has given all these years! She, being Margaret, gives all the credit to the students, their parents, their accompanist, the board, costumers, and everyone else who contributes to the success of the productions. And it’s true that many people play a part.

It was a long day, and then Mary Ann was gone, and the concert was over. Two events long awaited, slipped from future to brief, shining present to past.

Iris are blooming in gardens. In meadows it is the time of composite flowers – daisies, hawkweed, goat’s-beard and such. Baby birds are leaving the nests. Non-native but beautiful black locust is in bloom, right now, today, but only for a brief time.

Last night, as what I like to call “our intrepid Ulysses group” celebrated Bloomsday, orioles fluttered around the hummingbird feeder just outside the window. Near the end of our discussion of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, someone made the point that James Joyce, in choosing the name Dedalus for his protagonist and in addressing the mythic Dedalus at the end of the book, has chosen a new father for himself and announced his ambition to soar. We all know what happened in the myth -- Icarus flew too high, too near the sun, with his fabricated wings; the wax melted, and he fell to earth. 

The myth of Icarus is almost always taken as a metaphor for overweening ambition, but it struck me for the first time as I listened that -- well, perhaps I can make it an Aristotelian point. Many things for Aristotle, actions or even emotions, are not right or wrong except in context. And so perhaps Icarus was not wrong in being ambitious but wrong in what he wanted to achieve. And maybe what was wrong was his wanting to leave the earth. Our home, our only home, I thought as I watched the orioles. It is so lovely here!

Life is short, and we like to say that art is long. How long will be the life of the earth? No matter. We’re here now. We’re here now. We're here now.