Goofing Around
George Saunders and his wife Paula in 1986. A great photograph.
Author George Saunders has given me a lot to think about and try this year. I first heard about him as the sage-like, cold-water plunging cohort of Jeff Tweedy and Nick Offerman in Offerman's Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The pastoral observations of one ignorant American who loves to walk outside (public library). I became SOLD on him as a the guide to a new world of things that I had no idea I'd love through his approachable breakdown of Russian short stories with his own A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (public library)(which I wrote about here). Right now George's "Story Club" is the four newsletters I subscribe to and actually make time to read and think about during the week. A recent edition shared George's experience "goofing around" in a different domain than his usual profession; in this case composing and playing vignettes on guitar for the mood music in one of his audio books. George's time spent creating the short pieces with his music producer in the studio was FUN:
“What I found electrifying about this experience was the way it shot me back to the early days of my writing life. Instead of having an intention and trying to execute it, we were just, truly, messing around. I’d come in with some little composed nuggets, and we’d record these and then Peter (a master engineer) would chop them up, and/or treat them with effects, and then we’d listen to that bit, and just…mess with it further. And then…repeat. It was truly a collaboration. It was all for fun, with some sense of a ticking clock – we had just one day to record and mix the piece.
Neither of us had any “intention.” We were just reacting, over and over, in real time, to what we’d just done, to see what we might want to do next.”
Most of my daily time over the summer has been spent hanging out with my family at home, not doing professional music things. I very often forget that music doesn't have to be a professional thing that exists in a certain space EVEN THOUGH one of the most core activities in the IfCM ecosystem is doing experimental musicing with people of all abilities in different community spaces so this was a good reminder to think outside the buttoned-up norm. I happened to be hanging out with my 6-year old daughter Beatrice and she had requested to play recorder, guitar, and drums. I fell into familiar teaching habits at first and tried to practice stuff like posture, getting a clean tone on the instruments, and learning repeatable patterns. That was not the direction that we needed to go on that particular day. Fortunately at that point of uncertainty and frustration I heard George's brilliantly mustachioed chin dribble the following charm in my ears: Start goofing around... Game on! Beatrice and I had much more fun picking different animals to imitate on the drum set. Have you ever heard what a 6-year old playing drums like an aardvark sounds like? Check it out. Fool around. Don't overthink it. Don't even think it. I've felt much more musically refreshed since our musical mucking around and I bet you would too.