First, some housekeeping: I forgot to mention it in my post from last week, but Joel Cuthbertson and I released a new episode of our big-books podcast, this one about Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep. You can listen to it here. I think it was a good time!
Also, Joel has a piece out in the LARB about MFA programs that I think is worth reading. I don’t exactly have a dog in any fights about MFA programs myself, but I appreciate Joel’s thesis nonetheless. I also read it the same day I read Dan Walden writing about the worrying future of Classics departments; the two pieces don’t really have much in common but I felt some ineffable synchronicity between them which I won’t try to pick apart here.
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Over Labor Day Weekend I hauled my piano1 all the way up to upstate New York to jam with some friends. We had a good time! But it did cause me to think a bit about my relationship with the piano (both in general and this specific instrument), so here are those scattered thoughts.
I started taking piano lessons when I was five, continued doing so until I was 13, when I stopped (preferring the cello and singing and also, crucially, playing Final Fantasy X). Other than a few lessons in college, I have not had formal piano training since. I rarely played the piano from about 2010 until 2017, when I purchased my Yamaha as a reward for taking the bar exam. In the six years since, I have gone through cycles. Some months I play the piano obsessively every day, and some months I don’t play it at all. Right now I would say I play the piano maybe twice a week for about half an hour each time.
What this all adds up to is a man who has been playing the piano for 30 years, but who is not very good at the piano.
This is not, in the abstract, a problem. Most people are not very good at the piano, and I am not a young Victorian lady who is called upon to entertain groups of useless aristocrats in between rounds of whist. There would be nothing wrong with simply having an instrument I enjoy playing, and which I rarely-if-ever attempt to perform with. One is allowed to have hobbies, after all. Yet because I am a ridiculous person, I feel as though my relative incompetence at tickling the ivories is a deep flaw in who I am; some sort of shameful secret that one should not talk about in polite company; I feel I should hide the thing up in the attic like Mr. Rochester.
Which makes it awkward when, as I did last weekend, I elect to put the thing in the car and drive to upstate New York to jam with some friends.
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