burning and learning

What Helen Radice said:

As I've argued before, you have to make music matter enough for people to decide to invest in it, not expect it to pay. If you want a classical CD, you have to fund it, just as if you want a music lesson, or a nice harp. If you are poor, hopefully a civilised society that cares about the arts has sponsorship opportunities for you, but the need for money remains.

To make people care about any music, recorded or otherwise, you have to communicate - in concert, on disc, in books and magazines, through education and by what you create in the first place. You have to reach out to others. It never ceases to amaze me how many so-called artists think their self-interest self-expression is the only thing that counts, but music (to me) is too widely human, too gloriously infinite. Just as someone who only talks about themselves is a crushing bore, all creative endeavours that are only masturbatory acts of self-love fail. Some initial charisma might carry the artist for a while, but there is no lyricism, no tenderness, no angry drive to make things better for others, no love: only an arid and deluded pride that ultimately burns itself away, for it has no other fuel.

Applies to writing, too, and getting paid for it.

From what Helen wrote earlier:

As with anything where you must deeply think and feel, the more you know, the more you know how little you know.

And, in a post I revisit from time to time, she quotes Sarah Bullen: "you can get better and learn, or get bitter and decline. The choice is yours."

---

Today's French phrase: c'est la fin des haricots

Deak: "That's the limit! can you beat that!"
Harrap's: "the bloody limit!"
[haricot literally means "bean"]

More from Harrap's:

des haricots! = "not a sausage!"
courir sur le haricot à quelqu'un = "to pester someone"
[literal translation: "to run on [with?] the bean to someone"]

some children's literature links

Mem Fox's "apology" for her non-Australian accent cracks me up.

From her page on writing picture books:

The most important quality in writers is the ability to be dissatisfied with what we have written. Dissatisfaction creates the essential discomfort that will eventually lead us back to the manuscript to attempt yet again to craft our work to perfection. The least effective writers are the most immediately satisfied writers. They do not understand the need for dissatisfaction nor do they know what to be dissatisfied about.

[Applies to other types of writing, natch.]
ETA: And here's Fox on her struggles with Where Is the Green Sheep? Heh.

Her do's and don't's -- I don't agree with all of them, but they're interesting.

Madame Esme -- I've put Hanukkah Shmanukkah on my to-read list, and the Planet Esme Book Room on my maybe-to-visit list.


And, of course, dissatisfaction doesn't equate to effectiveness. Back to thumping at the albatross. *grits teeth, brews more tea*