Your business is not to clear your conscience,

But to learn how to bear the burdens of your conscience.

T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

I’ve been reading about Richard Diebenkorn, whom I’m thinking of adding to the Teachout Museum, and last night I ran across this wonderful list that was found among his papers after he died in 1993. The spelling is exactly as in the original:

Notes to myself on beginning a painting

1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued–except as a stimulus for further moves.

3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5. Dont “discover” a subject–of any kind.

6. Somehow don’t be bored–but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.

8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.

9. Tolerate chaos.

10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

A reader writes:

I find that iTunes and writing coexist uneasily here on my laptop. I often use iTunes while I am writing to set a mood or to block out ambient sound and focus my mind. But just as often the music becomes a distraction. I listen too much, write too little, and unproductive hours slip away before I catch myself.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject of music and writing. How do you use music in your actual writing process, if at all? Do you listen to music while you write, or are you the type who requires absolute silence? Do you program your music to suit the subject you are writing about? More abstractly, do you think that the growing popularity of iTunes and digitized music generally somehow changes the writing atmosphere, i.e. now that our music resides on the same hard drive as our work, do we listen differently, does music penetrate the workspace more than it used to?

Having at one time spent the better part of a decade working in a cubicle at the New York Daily News, I no longer need silence in order to write–which isn’t to say that I’d enjoy living across the street from a construction site! Fortunately, the windows of my apartment look down on a quiet, leafy side street, and the walls of the building are thick enough to screen out virtually all of the modest amounts of noise generated by my upstairs and downstairs neighbors.

As for music, I used to listen to it fairly regularly while writing, and on occasion I used it to set a mood. (I wrote parts of City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy, for example, while listening to Aaron Copland’s Letter from Home and Dave Frishberg’s Sweet Kentucky Ham.) But I always had to be careful about what pieces I chose, and I learned over time that there were certain kinds of music that interfered with the writing of first drafts. Songs sung in English tended to throw me off the track, as did any recording conducted by Arturo Toscanini, whose interpretations of the classics were simply too intense for me to relegate to the background of my consciousness.

Perhaps my powers of concentration have been diminished by advancing age, or maybe I’ve simply become more sensitive to the emotion-evoking power of music. (I cry more easily now than I did a decade ago.) Whatever the reason, I now find music more distracting than I used to, and I no longer listen to any kind of music while working on first drafts. Editing is different, and unless I’m doing battle with a tight deadline, in which case I prefer to struggle in silence, I sometimes listen to music when I’m polishing a piece, though I don’t really hear it. Sometimes I’ll put on a symphony or concerto, start chipping away at an unpolished draft, and emerge from a deep trough of concentration to realize–always with surprise–that the piece of music to which I was “listening” is almost over.

I suspect that my correspondent is right to think that the increased availability of digitized music is changing the atmosphere of the workplace, but I see iTunes less as a unique and separate source of distraction than as one of the myriad ways in which Web-enabled computers are capable of diverting us from the task at hand, whatever it may be. I’m a chronic procrastinator–if it weren’t for deadlines, I wouldn’t get anything done–and my iBook places an infinite number of distractions at my fingertips. I’m far more likely to waste time by surfing the Web than by playing with iTunes, though, possibly because it’s easier for me to pretend that I’m searching for some fact that’s relevant to the task at hand.

More generally, I’ve come to look upon my DSL-equipped iBook as an enemy of leisure, a malevolent magnet that pulls me out of the Teachout Museum and seduces me into working when I ought to be playing. It is this realization that finally taught me a lesson the rest of the world figured out long ago, which is that it is good to get out of town from time to time. The great danger of the digital workplace, of course, is that you can take it wherever you go, which is why I never, ever take my computer with me to the secure undisclosed location where I sit by the Hudson River and watch the sun set, nor do I bring it along when I review out-of-town plays. That way lies…well, maybe not madness, but definitely obsession. I may be a workaholic, but at least I’m not a degenerate workaholic.

Ann Althouse is soliciting suggestions of the best movies set in Paris. Terry will have some thoughts, no doubt. My own tastes lean to Irma Vep and Celine et Julie vont en bateau, which takes place half in Paris and half in a Henry James story, and whose first scene makes fantastic use of the Montmartre stairs (Quicktime required).

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I’m out of town and blissfully computer-free, but Our Girl has been kind enough to post it for me by remote control. I reviewed two shows today, one in New York (Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife) and one in New Jersey (Paper Mill Playhouse’s revival of Ragtime).

Here’s the scoop:

What makes “The Constant Wife” so peculiar is that it starts out as one kind of period piece, then turns unexpectedly into another. Everyone wears oh-so-’20s outfits, and a poker-faced butler (Denis Holmes) announces the arrival of each character in turn. Then, midway through the second act, Constance starts delivering stilted orations that might have been lifted from a very different sort of play: “So long as John provides me with all the necessities of existence I wouldn’t be unfaithful. It all comes down to the economic situation. He has bought my fidelity and I should be worse than a harlot if I took the price he paid and did not deliver the goods.” Imagine Henrik Ibsen rewritten by Oscar Wilde and you’ll get some idea of what “The Constant Wife” sounds like….

I loved Paper Mill Playhouse’s revival of “Ragtime,” the stage version of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, in which Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens got right everything they got wrong earlier this season at Lincoln Center with “Dessa Rose.” Directed by Stafford Arima along the lines of his 2003 London production, Paper Mill’s “Ragtime” is a small-scale rethinking of a large-scale pageant, one that strips away all visual superfluities to concentrate on Mr. Flaherty’s magnificent score. The result is little short of revelatory….

No link. Have you bought a Friday Journal lately? You can read all of me there, plus lots of other great stuff–or you can go here and subscribe to the Online Journal, which is ever so much hipper.

“So things are all right after all, and I shall wind up my defense of criticism by observing that excessively kind notices, coming from all sides and lasting a career, can sterilize an artist more effectively than the cold shower that wakes one up to real life. That must have been what Jean Paulhan had in mind when he wrote, ‘Bad reviews preserve an author better than alcohol preserves a piece of fruit.'”

Fran

A few stray notes and observations from last night’s Bloomsday reading, which I blogged about in a more official capacity at the site linked below:

– I freely admitted to everyone I spoke to that I’ve never read the damn thing. This made for some fun–in a room full of devotees and proselytizers, I was a cause! But the best argument on the book’s behalf were the readings themselves, some of them rip-roaringly funny.

– Because of my background and interests, I tend to think of Ulysses first as a monument of literary modernism and second as one of Irish literature. Last night went some way toward changing this habit, especially hearing the wonderful performances of Charles Sheehan and Rory Childers.

– My favorite sort of enthusiast is an enthusiast with a cocktail.

– What a view! Not only in the obvious ways–the 22-story birds-eye on Millennium Park, the Art Institute, Buckingham Fountain et al.–but also the cool sights at eye-level. To the south was the sign on D.H. Burnham’s Santa Fe Building, the letters large as life. The sculpted lion heads decorating whatever building sits to the north seemed close enough to pat, and more ferocious than you could know from any other perspective.

I’ve done a bit of it here.