Nearly every weekday morning for the last two weeks, I talked with Joe from Uganda about a different aspect of sleep. We were fellow early risers. and often breakfast would be just us, staff ("Morgen!") and whatever random friend that day had lucked into the sunrise.
For me, how could I have slept in? Every morning there was a palace, a lake and a mountain outside. I never closed my room windows and slept half the nights on top of the sheets. For Joe, as he put it, sleep and he were not friends. We talked about sleep hours, sleeping and meals, dream diaries, life-stage sleep, the trouble with napping, REM tracking, and shared hopes of one day participating in sleep studies.
Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, or one's bed partner shifting position on the remarkably noisy sheets. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams' uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unraveling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. The brain, circling in the cell of wakefulness, panics at the poverty of its domain — these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow which yet loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous. Life itself, that agitation of electrified molecules, becomes a captivity, a hellish endless churning, in which one is as alone as Satan, twisting and turning and boring a conical hole in the darkness, while on every side the wide world gently, blessedly snores.
Slovakians taught me the phrase. Our translation? A canard. The origin of "canard" is the French phase "vendre un canard à moitié," meaning to half-sell a duck — a swindle. (I can see the Simpsons episode now.) "Newspaper duck" comes from the French slang of "canard" to mean "newspaper," derived from the Paris-based paper Le Canard enchaîné.
Between walking 10k yesterday afternoon, dancing for hours last night and flying for 11 hours today, my legs aren't sure just what to do with themselves anymore. Well, I know what they want to do. They want to fall asleep this instant. To battle jetlag, I'm making them stay awake.
Wake-up came near midnight ET, and within the hour my Salzburg taxi driver and I were discussing his plan to ride a horse from Sacramento to San Antonio. He wanted to have a ranch in Montana some day. In the meantime, if I was ever back in Salzburg, he would get his guitar and we would sing Johnny Cash together. We traded business cards.
At Mozart airport, the most annoying bearded American in history was teasing his friend. "She said you're gonna die on this flight." "Take that back." "That's what she said. She said you're gonna die on this flight." "Take that back!" Moving, I tracked down a fresh croissant, spent my last Euros, regained good karma in the buttery goodness, and cracked open the three and a half New Yorkers that karma really wanted to go.
The day on Austrian Airlines went quickly, but aside from the sex store next to Vienna passport lines and the flight crew's weird-but-loveable desire to keep giving everyone hot rolls, the Austrians have a ways to go on airline entertainment. In-flight movies in loops, not on demand? What do the Austrians have against plot exposition? Too Western?
I did love Austria, though. I miss it right now and all the good people I met there. As successful as the Academy session was, I've felt more and more today like we just scratched the surface of each individual's possibilities. We could walk down the list of students today and name an excitingly real promise for every one. Guess that's what time is for.
I'm glad to be home. Happy to see the fam, to drive past the Shiny, to find the house keys, to do laundry, to dial digits, to unpack and relax.
Sun's just come up. Goodbye to Schloss, goodbye to Meierhof. Time to fly from Salzburg to Frankfurt to home. Many pictures still to come. See you all (students, faculty, Knight friends, palace ghosts, city) very soon.
Updated at 7:16 p.m. ET: Correction, flew through Vienna today, not Frankfurt. Realized during check in. Home again now, tired, more later.
Students are presenting their lesson plans this morning [Thursday], and I'm happy to see how the plans have developed. Concepts that began life weeks ago as rambles, agendas or overly broad theses are now two-min elevator pitches. Like or dislike points, but they're tight.
Hagy penned her art about start-ups in the business world, but the students had operated similarly in their work. Through their initial visions, critical vetting, collaborative discussions, increasing focus, and concluding deadlines, their lesson plans had become products.
One challenge for the students: After finishing a product (or while finishing it), the next issue is always the next product. A question the students repeatedly didn't answer well this morning was what lessons they had learned and what shifts they had made during their work.
Comparing their early rambling to their current concision, some shifts certainly occurred. But vocalizing the changes today appeared harder. As the students depart from this experience, they should look to bring scrutiny and find continued value in their work. Lessons here are going to be key — often unexpectedly so — in future plans and products.
A student last week was wondering how to blog, and I didn't expect the best answer to come behind a piano. But when Russia's Tatiana Aleksandrova played a concert for the Academy class Tuesday night in Salzburg, you only had to watch her hands to understand blogging.
The moment came during Maurice Ravel's impressionistic Ondine. The composer based the piece on a mermaid poem of Aloysious Bertand's, and being no Bertand scholar, this blogger was happy to learn Disney and The Little Mermaid had generally covered the plot.
The plot — for blogging purposes — was beside the point.
What mattered more were the hands.
To play Ondine, the pianist's hands started close together, practically curled over each other in a small, intense focus, then began to push outward as necessary. The hands explored notes around the focus, running occasionally to distant keys, but they always returned together, to the focus, to the apparent kernel of inspiration.
As in the painting style, impressionist music uses tone and color to create portrayal and breaks from earlier romantic approaches that thrived on completeness. What's knowable becomes a question of perspective and perception. What's communicable of this knowledge becomes a matter of focus, impression descriptions and conveyance. The work assumes the only direct knowledge is personal.
Blogging — like a host of new media approaches — fits the style.
Introductory sources serve us well for evidence. Wikipedia notes: "Characteristics … include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles."
Or take pre-Wiki heavyweight Encarta: "Rejecting these standards, impressionists painted outside, choosing landscapes, street scenes, and figures from everyday life. Impressionists were concerned more with the effects of light on an object than with exact depiction of form. Using short brushstrokes, they juxtaposed primary and complementary colors, which blended in brilliant hues and luminous tones when viewed from a distance."
Even criticisms of blogging and impressionism run close.
Today's lunch at the Academy brought a discussion about the news uses of Twitter and other micro content formats, including blogging. The knock on the formats from some corners of the table was their incompleteness, their exposure, their dependence on perception, and their multidirectional skews from self to audience.
"Wallpaper in its embryonic state," said an 1874 review ripping a Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (unknowingly coining the term "impressionism" mid-review), "is more finished than that seascape."
To the Academy student trying a new medium, take it from the pianist, the composer, the painters, the ancient critics, and the new ones. Nobody ever said blogging was easy.
…
A performance of Ondine, not Aleksandrova's, but you can see hands:
The line in the front of The New Yorkerwas always the same. At the Iridium, in the listings, every issue, without fail, "Mondays belong to electric-guitar innovator Les Paul." Until recent issues. Obsessively if not punctually reading from cover to cover, I read the last issue I received before I left the country, and the line wasn't there.
I wondered why it was gone, and now Les Paul is dead. Googling, "Mondays belong to electric-guitar innovator Les Paul" dates back to 1997, word for word. Before that, the lines varied — "Mondays belong to Les Paul," "Mondays belong to great Les Paul," "Now and for the forseeable future, Mondays belong to Les Paul," "The great Les Paul holds court on Mondays," "Les Paul holds down the fort every Monday," "Les Paul entertains on Mondays," "Les Paul is your man every Monday," "Les Paul owns the joint every Monday." In 1994 and 1995, "On Mondays, electric-guitar innovator Les Paul leads a trio." From 1989 to 1993, they called him "the Thomas Edison of reverb." Archive searching traced Monday nights in Paul's possession to 1984.
