The Old Q vs. Q Argument with a Lemony Fresh Twist

I haven't slept well the past few nights.  I think it's because of my unthinking untimely intake of tea (I can't help that I love tea and sometimes forget to go herbal after 3 pm) but it could also be due to my sudden enthusiasm for things that happen in my waking hours (a sort of new thing).  Whatever the cause, the effect is that my extended waking hours have, of late, potentially at my loopiest.

So, this afternoon, when I was in my car, driving home from lunch with some friends, and I heard a fascinating story on NPR, I maybe got a bit more excited than I would have on a regular, non-sleep-deprived-and-over-compensating-for-it Sunday.

Such a surplus of excitement, today, means a blogpost.

[End Intro]

The story was about a man who works very hard to make a living streaming music on Spotify.  If you know anything about how not-lucrative online music sales are for the artist, you're probably wondering how he does it.  Well, he does write about an average of 14,000 songs a year, so there's that.

Most of his songs are just catalogs of various nouns.  He's got an album about things he found in his house with a song about a door, and one hit about the hot water heater.  He's got an album of songs about transportation.  He's got a whole "band" dedicated to (ironically clean) songs about defecation.  The band's name is "The Toilet Bowl Cleaners" and "their" biggest hit is "The Poop Song" which...is exactly what you think it is.

Put the calculator down.  I'll do it for you.

An average of 14,000 songs a year, assuming he works 52 weeks a year, is about 269 songs a week.  On the radio program, someone mentioned that he records these songs in his basement 4 days a week, which makes an average of about 67 songs a day, which, assuming he works 8 hour days, is 8 or 9 songs in a work day.  That's written, recorded, mixed, and uploaded.

My brother is a musician who has been in the business for several years now, and he is just now putting together his second album.  I have a feeling he'd have a few choice words to say about Matt Farley and the quality of that music.

But I think both Dennis and Matt would say that two artists so different can hardly try to compare themselves to each other.  They don't have the same goals for their music, their outreach as musicians, or even their lifestyles and vocation, so why would their measurements of "success" be the same?

It's the old Quality versus Quantity argument...

...or is it?  Because, sure, Dennis works slower than Matt and his work is more fine tuned and probably has more longevity, and Matt has a volume that trumps Dennis' every time.  He writes songs four days a week.  He spends little if any time working on pre- or post-production stuff, he doesn't manage tour dates or book shows, and he never has to haul any of his equipment out of his basement.  All he does is just write, record, upload, repeat.

Artists--musicians, writers, painters, and all the rest--often talk about that process as a form of discipline.  Just write, just paint, just play: it's not about inspiration, it's about sitting down and working on your craft, not neglecting your skills, your voice, your practice.  It's about breaking through barriers like, "I don't know if I'm good enough," or "I have bad grammar," or "Am I tone deaf?  I mean seriously, have you heard me?" and just get anything down.

It feels to me sometimes like we feel we have to go through periods where all we're doing is Quantity in order to get to the moments of Quality that will sustain a career, legitimize our talent, and/or bring meaning into the world through our art.  It feels to me sometimes like we believe that the things we create in our periods of Quantity-Only are worthwhile only as part of a journey to the Quality we produce later.  They don't have inherent purpose.

But Matt Farley doesn't think that.  I mean, I guess I don't know what he does think.  But I know that PJ Vogt thinks that Matt Farley's 14,000 songs a year do have merit on their own.  They perform a service to the world beyond just getting Farley to a time where he can create fewer, but better overall work.

PJ tells the story about how he asked Matt to write a song for PJ's step-parents for a Christmas presents.  He gives Matt five bits of information about his stepmom, Nan, and PJ thinks about it for a minute, comes up with some chords, and, BAM, records a song right there.  PJ then takes that song around to his friends for the next few days and is clearly more excited than they are, and begins to worry whether his gift is going to flop.  But then he gives it to Nan on Christmas day and she is over the moon.  She listens to it multiple times, asks him twice to email it to her, and then sends PJ a note about how much she loved it, and how it touched her that he gave it to her.

PJ makes the connection that most of Farley's music does nothing more than acknowledge the existence of things--"This is a door," or "Poop is a thing," or "You're part of the family"--and step-parents often seek that simple acknowledgement without often receiving it.  "[The song Farley wrote for Nan] uncomplicated a complicated situation."  

It took seconds to write.  It was based off of extremely little knowledge of its own subject.  It made two people's Christmases.

If that's not Quality, What is it?

I wanted to write this post without sitting on it or editing it, in one swift action, in the spirit of Matt Farley.  When I was composing it in my head on the way from the curb where I parked my car, it sounded perfect and important.  The bit about Quantity-Only-creations having value all their own really spoke to me on a deep level as I danced out of my coat and skipped into my dining room to sit down and write this.

But as I try to round it out at the end here, I realize that the message is tried and true: quality is everywhere, and quality is what you make of it.  You don't have to be the next J.D. Salinger to write a novel that is great and American to someone.  You don't have to use your passions to pay your bills.  You can Just Write, or you can write sporadically.  There is no one, cookie-cutter right way.

Everyone has said that sometime in the past fifteen years, though, so now this post feels incredibly less perfect and important, even if it still speaks to me in my crazy, sleep-deprived-and-trying-too-hard mental state.

But damn me if I don't post it anyway.

EDIT:

@PKsDancingGirl Thanks for writing about me! Well done. (But, it's 14,000 songs since '08, not yearly (though now I have a new goal!).
— Motern Media (@MoternMedia) January 22, 2014

@PKsDancingGirl I google my name all the time! Check out my movie sometime: https://t.co/AymNwP0bNf
— Motern Media (@MoternMedia) January 22, 2014

Reading Makes me Question Myself

I have, once again, written somewhere else instead of writing here.  I apologize (a little) and I hope you will check out the post instead of hating me forever.

Poetry of the Periodic

If you’ve read any works of English literature, especially fiction, and, perhaps especially old fiction, you know what a periodic sentence is.  You might not know that you know it, which is something delightful about grammar and linguistics that I’ll save to discuss another time. 

A periodic sentence, by definition, is a sentence in which the main clause—the one with the subject and the verb—comes at the end. 

For your pleasure, see these examples:

Having no where else to go and seeing no end to the long, cold, dark of the night around him, Sanjay shuffled into the dirty, dimly-lit place. 

The rain threatening to drown both players and spectators, the football game nevertheless continued.

 Living alone in a house with no one but a dog for company, Mary Margaret watched way too much Netflix.

You’ll notice that I have underlined the subject and bolded its predicate (or the verb and all other words that talk about the subject).  You’ll also notice that there is more to this syntactical construction than its definition.

Take, for instance, the first example sentence.  Think back to the first time you read it.  It was more than half over before you even knew whom you were reading about or what his seemingly dismal position would lead him to do.  Placing the other clause in front built the suspense for you, made you want to finish the sentence, made it so you couldn’t guess the end if you wanted to.  Moreover, once the sentence was over, you probably felt a strange sense of release.  “Ah, yes,” you may have thought to yourself, either consciously or subconsciously, “Sanjay and that dirty, dimly lit place.  Good, good.  It all makes sense now.” 

There’s probably some solid psychology that could be brought in here.  It seems to me that periodic sentences are like a puzzle that the brain longs to solve. Fluent English speakers are trained to look for the subject early and when we don’t find it, our brains just whirr and whirr like little wind up cars with the wheels held off the ground.  Once we find the subject, the sentence makes sense and our brains can slow down again.  But that extra little burst of effort flags that sentence as important, as something to remember, like a little trophy our brains can hang on a wall saying, “I solved that puzzle!”

Now that you know the basics of the periodic sentence, what do you want to do with the little gems?  You already see how they can be used to build suspense and create memorable moments out of otherwise mundane prose, but what other tricks do periodic sentences have at their disposal?

Well, art, for one thing.  Suspense is not something reserved for mystery novels or comedic writing with punch lines.  There is poetry in the periodic sentence.  A famous example of someone who saw a periodic opportunity and took it is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem, “Snowflakes.”

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow,
Descends the snow.

Oooh, do you feel the chill down your spine?  That’s what art feels like.  Certainly, the artistry in this little ditty is not contained solely in the delayed syntactical gratification of the subject and predicate, but surely we can all agree that

The snow descends
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow.

Is a very different—and somehow, inexplicably less spine-chill-inducing—poem.

Can a sentence can be too periodic to be useful?  Of course.  You throw too many clauses in front and they can get confusing to the point where even a puzzle-loving brain can’t keep it all together by the time the subject comes around to clear everything up.   Some critics of the periodic sentence will tell you that its construction in most literature is used primarily as a tool of pretention to make writing seem more intellectually elevated.  Others will say that it has no place in literature because it breaks up reading flow, or is so often written poorly.

One way to ruin a good periodic sentence is to dangle or misplace your modifiers.  People will joke about such things, but I hardly think some of these gaffs are laughable.

Stepping into the room, the light turned on.

Do you see what I’ve done?  Heinously, I’ve given a mere light enough physical control to not only step into a room, but also to turn itself on.  Let us hope that the light is of an age to use such control responsibly.

Walking to and fro, Michelangelo was the topic of conversation between Ke$ha and her mother.

We can set my excessive use of the passive voice aside for now when we see the atrocity I’ve committed at either zombifying a long-dead Michelangelo or sending Ke$ha and her mother back in time as time ambassadors.  These are puzzles no brain can solve.

However, I am of the mind that periodic sentences—when devoid of the atrocious modifier mistakes—can be so overdone, so overtly pretentious, and so useless, that it crosses that invisible barrier, does a U-turn, and returns to the realm of art.  If periodic sentences are puzzles, then, taken on their own, without the need for speed or ease of reading, they can actually be rather stimulating to read and decode. 

This whole post has been a ploy for me to be able to show you my own carefully constructed, prize-winning periodic sentence.  Earlier this year, it was vetted by a classroom full of undergraduate grammarians and their professors, and deemed worthy of the reward of a singing Lady Gaga toothbrush.

For your pleasure, read it below.