What a sensuous relationship you describe-- bar none. I like this track you're on. You, Susan, are a steely-eyed fiction mave.

I once had a little black bug.
So little I couldn't give him a hug.
At night we'd watch reruns of Oprah.
He made a living from singing opera.

We'd watch movies, eat popcorn somemores.
My little black bug would fall asleep and snore.
On time he jumped off my lap, ran out the door.
I never saw him anymore.

Thanks for the links, mccn - it’s fun to be inspired. It reminds me of another challenge of the artist - the urge to fling oneself in many different, interesting directions. Each area of expertise could take a lifetime to develop, so it’s a good idea to stay focused rather than dabble here and there, unless that’s what a person’s after.

On the other hand, different creative experiences can feed the muse in one’s own area. And if you happen to be Cory Doctorow, you might have the intellect, discipline and stamina to pursue multiple passions with much success.

As for needing an audience, or financial success - these are measures of the capacity of an artist to create things that move others. A song may serve me well in the confines of my music room, but I also want to create songs of meaning and value to others.

Finding that elusive audience then becomes an important component of the art. So I guess what I’m really saying is that when I fail at sales (drawing listeners to my songs) I also fail at creating the essential feedback that fuels the art. Marketing, an art form in itself, swallows huge chunks of time, especially now, with endless social networking sites out there.

I’ve reserved ‘Just a Geek’ and look forward to reading. Gotta love Ensign Crusher!

In his recent post, Derik Sivers, offers tips on the dos and don'ts of music success.

• being in the middle of things increases your chances for opportunities
• everything great that happens in your career starts with someone you know
• when you hear of an opportunity you want, you have to go for it completely, over-the-top, not casual, and work your ass off to get it
• the tiniest detail can derail everything

You can love and love and love. You have to work and work and work. No guarantees whatsoever.

While looking up Oliver Sacks' book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which I highly recommend, I found The Library of Congress: Music and the Brain, a podcast series on the subject. I'm into 'podcast-while-walking' so the bounties of nature and I will have to check out episodes like 'Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music that Makes Them Weep?,''Your Brain on Jazz,' 'Dangerous Music,' 'The Mind of the Artist,' to name a few.

Interesting stuff for sure. I have to smile when you say 'didn't we already know this?' Music-while-walking might be just as enlightening.

Dill bread makes great toast.

I remember one of my college English professors saying that the poet Wystan Hugh Auden once remarked that when he wrote critical essays for literary journals, or delivered lectures before highminded audiences, he did it for the money. But he said that every line of poetry he ever wrote was done out of love, because he never made any real money from it.

Interesting thoughts. My immigrant roots are two generations past, but I think of myself in the company of Irish and American poets and artists, an "outside cousin" of those addressed by William Yeats in "Under Ben Bulben":

Irish poets learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All of out shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

Yeats.

His poems are like prayers to me, as I take pen or brush in this digital age -- but I also feel the breath and spirit of even more distant American cousins -- Black Elk, Langston Hughes, Mark Twain, Emily Dickenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Bob Dylan; and among the painters, Childe Hassam, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. As different as their work might be from mine, I feel a kinship with them, as I am their cousin of the brush and pen.

Call me Ishmael...

Thanks for the post, Susan. It makes us think about our art in a continuum.

How quaint, yet how true.

Good luck to the brothers with their Ipad App. I think they should take you out to dinner (in Italy or Greece) with their first big check.

I also enjoyed the Verb Ballet... and I totally can imagine you as a dancer. However, I would be nervous watching you standing on the shoulders of the other dancers. I held my applause at the ballet until they had all disembarked and were standing on solid ground. I guess I should have more faith and trust in their dance expertise.

And on a final note, it sounds like some indie musicians still have a lot to learn.

I’ve brought this question here because it has to do with words. By the time a politician rises to prominence, I assume her/his word choice is intentional, strategic even, and your explanation for the motivation makes sense.

What confounds me is how they square their vocabulary with their morality. They claim to offer security while riling up the masses. Words, metaphors, are powerful. This is leadership?

I read this article as well, and appreciated (from my liberal, feminist viewpoint) Gopnik's pointing out that people who produce works society values are often exempt from the standards that I believe we should demand of all (although I may not agree with the standards in this case - the requirement that people marry, be monogamous, and raise children, for example).

Your commentary is thought-provoking; I had always defined an artist, internally, as someone who felt an undeniable compulsion to say something, in a particular way - the question of audience didn't enter into my definition. But as I review the artists that have been most meaningful in my life, many of them are authors, who are writing with a purpose and an intent to challenge the minds of their readers. Certainly, there are no guarantees - the artist creates her audience just as an audience member may create his artist, and in each case, the imaginative creation may have little to do with reality. But I appreciate this reminder that art is not just one-sided, that it often is also a conversation and an interaction.

I know a few of those who are companions of your artist life, your work and music. Your album, Monet's Orbit, is full of amazing poetry and sublime music, and I consider myself honored to have been a companion in that masterpiece.

Re: Salinger, I just read that the Morgan Library in New York City has eleven letters he wrote to one of his closest literary friends, and they will be put on exhibit there very soon.

I was stationed in W. Germany '72-'75 while serving in the U.S.A.F. I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp. I didn't know anything about art then and this was as good a place as any to start learning. Stun guns had not been invented yet but I sort of felt like I had been hit by one. No matter how high the print quality of Van Gogh books, calendars, posters, etc., it is impossible to effectively reproduce the broad and thick brush strokes. The other thing that struck me was that the paint looks like it is still wet. He was a true genius.