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ODY: 18/365. Consoled by Blues.

Posted by :James Howden On : September 7, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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The TVPI, before his departure for the Great (Not Quite) White North of Canada, had written out for his Old Dog Dad a guitar Tablature for Old Dog Dummies. It’s a blues riff. You know it. Everybody knows it. (I think Dave called it “A Blues Riff”.) It was one he enjoyed learning. It made him feel, at 14, like he was actually playing guitar, and he went on to improvise from it and generally make punkadelic mayhem.

I’ve been messing about with it some, but hadn’t quite figured out the rhythm of the resolution part that was supposed to take me back to the beginning of the thing. Tonight, I decided I wouldn’t do anything else until I did. And hey presto! I did!

Now listen. I have, up ‘til now, refused even to play for Calvin Junior and his stuffed and furry friends at night-night. (Point of order: Junior is my fourth six-year-old son. So where’s my Order of Canada?! Where’s my Presidential Medal of Freedom?) But tonight, I ran upstairs, dragged EcoWoman out of the bath, propped her up in an attentive and generally approving posture, and played A Blues Riff. Twice! It was, ah, humilerating. (Exhiliating?) Embarrassed pleasure, rueful excitement. Mid-life learning is a confusing business.  

ODY: 17/365

Posted by :James Howden On : September 6, 2006
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Yeah, but then there are potholes in the plateau, too, just in case an old dog thought that a stroll along the flats might be pleasant and restful. Potholes? Maybe not so much that as thick, sucking mud, the kind that slurps and holds on to your rubber boots with every step you try. Sucking muddy plateaus, anyhow!

ODY: 16/365. Life in the Flats.

Posted by :James Howden On : September 5, 2006
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Plateaus in the learning curve…

I learned about this concept in the Education Faculty at the University of Windsor (Ontario), and it has served me wonderfully ever since. Here’s the summary. Any sort of learning is an organic thing, and it does not happen in straight lines. In other words, if you put increasing knowledge or skill on the vertical axis of a graph and the passage of time on the horizontal one, progress is not a smooth upward line. In fact, even if you’re working hard to learn something, anything, there are flat spots in the graph. Plateaus. And it’s during these flat spots, when it seems like we’re not getting better/stronger/smarter, that we are likely to give up on learning French, developing a better jumpshot or staying on the midlife road to guitar glory (of the most feeble kind).

Especially as a basketball coach, but also while nursing kids through an especially difficult part of a novel or play — with Shakespeare, it was Act I — The Plateau was something I loved to explain to young learners. Those flat-line periods are not only frustrating “I ain’t gettin’ anywhere” times, but they are also necessary to the learning that comes after them. The brain (and the hand, and the eye) can’t learn continuously. It takes time to consolidate what has already been taken in before more can be added. Digestion.

Little was more encouraging to my students and players, and more likely to convince them to persevere, than understanding about plateaus. When they knew that the flat line was not a sign of death but a launch-pad to new learning, hard work didn’t seem, well, so deadly. And, as you’ve guessed, I’m only writing about this because Yea, though I walk the flats of the valley of pointlessness, I shall fear no guitar practice, for I am only on a plateau in the learning curve, and this comforts me…

ODY: Day 15

Posted by :James Howden On : September 4, 2006
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The work is paying off. I’m getting in a dullard’s half an hour every day, and the finger positions on the fret board come to me a little faster as the days pass. The only semi-smooth chord change I can make is from E to E minor, which is only slightly more difficult than lifting my forefinger from a hot stove. But I count everything. Old dogs trying new tricks should moderate their expectations and lower them at need. 

So I keep my 30-minute promise to myself, but the clock was slow tonight. Damn, but it’s true. I’m bored.  

ODY: Day 14

Posted by :James Howden On : September 3, 2006
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Two full weeks of the Old Dog Year are done. It is a perfect time to sit back and evaluate. How am I doing? What components of this self-indulgent midlife quest, this pale adventure, are effective and what parts need re-tooling?

Well, screw that. No nerdy analyses for me, at least not today. (I’m a natural at rumination.) I’m playing every day even when I’m lost. I make up stuff. I pretend. I turn off my critical ear and just make noises. Last night (yes, I’m cheating today: my after-midnight guitar churning was possible with eyes closed and a burnt brain, but I sure as hell couldn’t write), I tried to get a little smoother on the tunes I’m picking and the chords my fingers are trying to find.

Son Dave the TVPI has left town, and I may be forced to pay for lessons now. (He’ll still be a Teen Punk-rock Intellectual, perhaps the only one of his kind in Canada’s Nunavut territory, but a Vegan in the Arctic? Don’t think so. Pass the raw fish, please. And how would you like your caribou this morning?) Before we took him to the airport, the T(V)PI tuned the Dégas and pointed out that the E-major and A-minor chords that I’ve been practising are rather similar – the same fingering pattern, just one string higher – so that is a chord transition that I can learn to make. (Can a three-chord rock anthem be far behind?)

And since Dave was leaving, his brother Will had convinced a good buddy to drive him up for a visit: seven hours through the tail-end drowning of Hurricane Ernesto’s sorrows. Big Man Will (the only BMW I’ll ever have) and Little Jason are a Mutt and Jeff pair (see, I looked it up for you), an odd but loyal funship, a couple of guys who can yack and laugh without end. Jay was one of the funniest kids I ever tried to teach, funny/quirky and funny/ha-ha and an apparently hopeless student. He bobbed and floated like a drunken butterfly through a couple of my English classes, writing and reading what he had to. He showed up and passed ‘em, but somehow managed to flunk guitar class miserably.

And somewhere in the four years since, Little Jay Forbes picked up the guitar again, along with a pencil, some chords and a million burning ideas. He walks through malls and hears riffs and runs for his guitar. He writes like a mad thing at 4 a.m., sings in local restaurants and Legion halls and just had a professional pressing of his first CD of original songs. He sang for his spaghetti last night in my basement, a tune too new for the album, and it was full of clear-voiced feeling and melody and solid guitar playing. It makes no sense at all, this development in his life, which is why I love it. Jay Forbes, the six-string dropout and English class lounge act, made interesting music come out of my broke-neck guitar. If I can’t find inspiration there, I ain’t lookin’ for it.   

ODY: Duller by the Day (13)

Posted by :James Howden On : September 2, 2006
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As one writer put it, “I hate writing. I love having written.” I feel the same way about running, although once upon a more youthful time moving these limbs could be its own reward. But I’ve long known, as athletes told themselves in advance of Barcelona, “No pain, no Spain.” I’ve proved it to myself as a writer, too, although the pain is something different, some intrinsic clumsiness in the dance between inspiration and monotony. That’s where “the dullard” I referred to yesterday comes in.

The Canadian writer David Carpenter put the writer’s need for blazingly bland routine like this: “Most writers must learn to make a pact with dullness. Not boredom, or lack of imagination or passion, but dullness of routine. Keep your daily appointment with the computer screen and keep your ass on the chair until you’ve reached your daily quota. However rich your inner life may be, seek also the dullard within.” The pact with dullness, once the initial excitement of cradling a curvy beauty in one’s arms begins to fade, is exactly what the novice guitarist needs to cultivate. This midlife strummer does, anyway. (My curvy flesh and blood beauty, now, that never gets old, though rumour has it that we might.)

They say, whoever “they” might be, that any habit requires about 21 days of faithful performance to establish. As this Old Dog marches forward on a planned year of daily strumming and picking, I have tiny shivers of embarrassed joy at the things I can (nearly) do on the guitar. Mostly, though, I’m glad to have made Carpenter’s “pact with dullness”. Getting the arse in front of the screen, or under the echoing hollows of the guitar, is a fine though very private victory. Nearly two weeks in.

ODY: Day 12. The Dullard Within.

Posted by :James Howden On : September 1, 2006
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Just because there are weights I haven’t lifted recently, and long-cherished books I haven’t yet read, it doesn’t mean that my ten-by-twelve home library cum sleepover chamber is where temporary enthusiasms go to die. (I can’t believe that.) That would just be a superstitious and silly way to think when I’m on the verge of two straight weeks of daily guitar practice! But I’m tending to jam it in at the end of long middle-aged evenings, sometimes playing at eleven o’clock, and that may not be a sustainable development.

I am trying to “encourage the dullard within”. Remind me to tell you about that one sometime.

ODY: Day 11

Posted by :James Howden On : August 31, 2006
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In the hierarchy of pick-replacement technologies, even my non-musician bride – who was, it must be said, a professional dancer and actor – knows that the little plastic closures for milk and bread bags reign supreme. (My experience is that an off-beige tag from a light rye bread is outstanding.) So many tricks for this ol’ guitar dog.

Bar chords kill me, though. I’m having to move my fret fingers into position manually – literally, that is, by tugging at them with my right hand. I can either get my index finger to sit down evenly across the strings, or force fingers two through four to stay put, but not both at the same time. It’s like training several puppies simultaneously. But I can play six or seven straight notes of my little blues riff without having to look back at the cheat sheet to see where I’m going next. I also began to find the first few notes of the second part of the Bonanza theme, the part after the two dun da da dun da da da da da da dun dun DA DAs are over. Still no clue what the notes are, though.

And I now have a dedicated guitar corner down in my tiny basement library (with its lovely lilac walls). It’s right next to the dusty dumb-bells that I haven’t lifted in two months. Uh-oh.   

ODY: Day 10

Posted by :James Howden On : August 30, 2006
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Today, another milestone in the epic journey of musical (and personal) discovery that is my midlife dream of guitar glory: I lost my first pick. I think the TVPI, who seemed so innocently to pick up my guitar and show off while we talked, slickly pocketed my little black shark fin. Now I know why real players have picks planted all over themselves and their digs.

Today’s exercise in strumming determined conclusively that when it comes to substitute picking, a yellow paperclip beats a polished, pointy black rock. (I was cheering for the rock. It was a sleek little implement with a high Funksmanship quotient. I had promised to make it my professional trademark – you can see what a subtle bit of marketing coolness it is – until I realized it didn’t work worth a butterfly fart. Pick shopping tomorrow.

ODY: Day 9

Posted by :James Howden On : August 29, 2006
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Gary Larsen once had a superb cartoon captioned “Great Moments in Evolution”. It was spun from all the solemn tributes to major passages in the world of sport, like those of NFL Films. (In Canada, we also have the mocked and adored “Heritage Minutes”, tiny slices of historical Canadiana that punctuate CBC television). Larsen’s one-panel “great moments” gag looked like this: near the shore, two innovative underwater creatures – one carrying a bat, one carrying a glove – consider emerging onto dry land where, you guessed it, lies a baseball. (Rim shot!)

I had my moment of (miniscule) transformation today, my little shiver of possibility. I discovered that the blues riff that the TVPI, my guide toward mid-life guitary glory, had scribbled out on paper was actually not that hard! Oh, I’m slow and clumsy, but I can read his little Tabs for Dummies nomenclature and I can, with tortoise-like determination, play ‘dem blues! Quite suddenly, I can imagine getting good enough to play that oh-so-clichéd riff with a little style and pace. Yes, and bar chords really confuse and abuse my fret fingers, but I know where the fingers go. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of this Old Dog Year, and I will dwell in the House of Blues forever. (No sacrilege intended. I plead giddiness, with intent to self-parody.)