Saalon Muyo

I made some noise about this last February when my friend Denys was going through February Album Writing Month, but today I make it official.  I’m signing up for the madness that is National Novel Writing Month.

This is probably a really bad idea, because I’m already too busy.  But I want another novel, and I want it now, so I’m going to do it.  Somehow I’m writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November, and my hope is that it won’t suck.

I urge all of you reading this who write or dream of writing to join me.  Sign up, add me as a writing buddy, and let’s crank out a novel.  It’ll feel good to prove that you can.  And it’ll make sleeping for the entire first week of December feel really, really good.

Ikimasu!

I’m not sure how I’ve discussed it on this blog (and, at present, have no interest in looking), but in case I’ve been as coy as I intended, I’m working on a live-action, filmed web series.  If everything goes even close to plan it should debut in October.

Oh, and it’s called Speak for Yourself.

Anyway, I’ll talk more about the project creatively at another time.  For now, I want to talk licenses.  I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I think that since this project is going to be experimental in a number of ways, I intend to release this series under a far more open license than I’d normally consider.

My first thought is to use Creative Commons.  But I want your opinion.  I’ve copied the license information I generated below.  Do you think this is my best option?  I would like it to be:

• Free to share
• Free to be sampled, sliced or mutated into another project (thought I doubt this will ever happen)
• Not make anyone who isn’t me money unless I’m also making money off of it
• Not used without proper credit and linking being given back to me and my site
• Not used in a work that is distributed in a less free fashion than the license of the show itself.

This license seems to do that, but is there a better one?  Sound off.  Please.  I want to know what your thoughts on the wild world of more open content are.

Anyway, here’s that license:

Speak for Yourself by DSP Films is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at speak.dsp-films.com.

UPDATE 2: I’ve changed this to a license that allows commercial use, provided proper attribution is given and it’s released under the same license. I’ll let this sit and see how it feels.

UPDATE: In looking for music for Speak for Yourself, I’m seeing a lot of music that uses the same license, but without the Non-Commercial bit. Using this music in soundtrack would require the identical license without individual permission being given by the artist to use my license.

Here’s my secondary question: What do you think the downsides of not restricting commercial use would be. Am I opening myself up to, in the absolute, unrealistic, worst case scenario, it getting popular and someone selling it on a DVD and me getting cut out of the loop? Is this something I should even be concerned about?

A lot of ink has been spilled over open software licenses and the degree to which software should be free.

In my other geek world, the world of gaming, there’s been action in the past decade to open the base rules of a system to allow third party developers to design games using those rules.  Wizards of the Coast, most notabably, released the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons under the Open Gaming License (OGL), which I don’t know the technical details of but will classify as sucessful due to the glut of third party 3E books.  Wizards used the OGL as a marketing tool to revitalize D&D, and it worked.  D&D became the dominant gaming system again, largely on the backs of third party assistance.

Don’t believe me?  Go look at the RPG bookshelf in Barnes and Noble.  Look at how many D20 books there are by other companies.  Now think about this: every time someone learns the D20 system through, say, the A Game of Thrones RPG, they’re more likely to give straight D&D a try because they already know the rules.

With the release of 4E, Wizards has apparently decided that people making money off of their work sucks and need to be kept on a tighter leash.  4E was not released under the OGL, but instead under the Game System License (GSL).  Note the word “open” ain’t anywhere in there.  That’s not by accident.

A lot of publishers - ones that were successful in the days of the OGL - are saying they won’t be going into the 4E world because of the GSL, and I don’t blame them.  Wizards is playing a game very similar to Microsoft’s in the 1990’s.  They’re saying, essentially, “Now that we have a near monopoly on the market, we can make unreasonable demands of everyone involved with us and they’ll either have to play along, or they’ll make so much less money that they’ll eventually play along anyway.”

That they’ve put publishers into this position by hooking them with the more simple and permissive OGL makes me pretty angry.  I like 4E a lot as a gamer, but I agree with what I read on one publisher’s site.  Why not just keep the thing closed?

Only I know the answer to that question.  It’s because they still want the marketing benefits of the OGL without executives feeling that the permissiveness of it is knocking 1% off of their stock price.  It’s the same corporate nonsense that’s killing this country in a hundred ways, and I’ve had enough of it.

Let’s go over some of the scary and draconian rules of the GSL, shall we? Before we do, though, let me make one note: this is the Dungeons & Dragons GSL we’re discussing.  Wizards has not yet released the D20 GSL, and as such this license is restrictive about not allowing rule changes in a way that the D20 version will hopefully not be.  In any case, I’m going to stick to the ugly pieces that won’t likely change.

• Wizards of the Coast can change the license at any time, and changes are retroactive. Not only can they change the license without notice, at any time.  Not only do any changes made affect already published products.  Not only does the simple act of continued publication constitute acceptance of the license changes.  It’s also the licensee’s responsibility to keep checking the website to see if it’s updated!  And if you forget, and keep publishing after it’s been changed?  You accepted it, of course!
• If you’ve published a line under the OGL, and come out with a GSL/4E conversion, you can no longer sell the OGL version, ever again. This means even if you convert your wildly popular 3E line into 4E and the rules don’t match well anymore and your line bombs, you can no longer make any money on the popular 3E version of your product. This isn’t saying you can’t come out with new OGL/3E products in that line.  It’s saying you cannot sell any previously published work ever again except to clear out your remaining stock in those items.
• Wizards can terminate the license entirely. Not only can they change the license, but they can terminate it outright simply by saying so on their website.  You could have just published a book only to have the license yanked out from under you before you recoup your costs..  Oops!
• That part about not being able to publish your old OGL stuff survives termination of the GSL, though. This license is so friendly to third parties it almost hurts.
• Your Licensed Product can not include a website. It also can’t include miniatures, “interactive products” or “character creators.”  If you’re wondering what “include a website” means, you’re not alone.  Your license does include a single-download PDF, which implies being able to have a website about your product, but where the line between having a website and including a website is drawn is extremely unclear.

It’s not that this is the worst license ever, and if Wizards had come out with this for 3E without ever having the OGL it would feel a lot less odious.  But considering they spent 10 years building and benefiting from the third party publishing community the OGL had formed, this is an awful lot like a kick to the croch for a lot of people. The conversion rules, in particular, are just plain ugly, punishing publishers for wanting to participate in 4E without commiting their entire business to the new system.

It’s sad, too, because I was really looking forward to what third parties would do in this new space.  Now I’m just hoping the ones that decide to play don’t end up getting their hand bitten off for their trouble.

A couple years ago I shot a short film to be shown before a play called “Life and Other One Man Shows” by Joanna’s Cup-A-Jo productions.  In anticipation of starting a new project, I’ve created an account on Vimeo, and posted “Tomorrow” as a test.  Since it’s up, I give it now to you.

Let me know if there’s anything off about the video, and if this seems like an acceptable way to watch a web series.

Tomorrow from Eric Sipple on Vimeo.

I’m finding that my writing process and coding process is more similar than previously imagined. This shouldn’t be a surprise. I’m not the only one that’s gone on and on about the similarities between artistic and design processes. Maybe it isn’t really a surprise, or a revelation, but an unexpected clarification.

When I write, I spend most of my time thinking and not writing. My actual time spent putting words onto electronic paper is minimal compared to how long I spend pacing around my office moving pieces around inside my head. In fact, when I do it right, the actual writing part of writing is as close to effortless as work can get. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like to write before knowing what I’m writing; when I do, it feels too much like work. The other reason is that I hate editing. I’ll talk about that later.

I’ve now worked on a handful of end to end projects in my engineering job, which is enough to start noticing patterns. I’m finding (shock) that I spend a very long time organizing the overall picture of what I’m doing in my head (or sometimes in a notebook) before writing more than a few liens of code or defining a few empty methods. It leaves me feeling unproductive for the early part of my project, as well as afraid I wouldn’t finish on time. How was I going to get the coding done with half of my time already spent?

Yet in every case, once I had a good model of what it was I was doing, the actual coding part of the project only hit a snag if I needed to figure out how to technically implement something. Like this: I know I want to find this part of an XML document, but I don’t know the correct method to accomplish it. I also was spending much less time than expected having to debug what I had built, both because I had worked out a number of the logic problems before coding, and because the time spent thinking had produced relatively clean code that was easy to fix.

I doubt I’m the only person who uses a long Thought Before Code spin-up process, or even that I’m in the minority. At least, I doubt this is a rare practice amongst successful programmers. The unsuccessful ones rarely have consistent processes, which is probably what makes them unsuccessful. Still, I wasn’t expecting such a clean similarity between how I write stories and how I write code.

Then I thought about it further, and it makes a kind of sense I should have seen before. When I go through my writing spin-up, it’s not the language or the flow of a conversation that I work out before writing. It’s the way the larger, more abstract pieces are going to interact. It’s how the motivations of a character are going to bounce them into or off of other characters, how all of those characters are aligned in such a way that what results is a clean, smooth narrative.

What I’m working out are all of the pieces that must exist behind the story for it to be the thing that I see in my head. The delicate connections between this strand and that, between event and response, between motivation and action. It’s a kind of architecture, really.

When I was in my first photography class, my teacher described the most important part of taking any picture: pre-visualization. Don’t press the button, he said, until you can see the picture that will result in your head. This wasn’t just looking through the viewfinder and lining up the framing or pulling focus or deciding how far to zoom. It was more than that. It was visualizing the way you wanted the picture to look by understanding how the camera would see the scene.

A photographer needed to put himself inside of his camera. They needed to internalize how light levels and shutter speed and aperture size and framing and zoom and depth of field and all of that would interact to produce an actual, physical photograph. More, they also needed to internalize how another person would then see that photograph, to know how, once that photograph was set, the elements of it would draw the eye to one place or another.

They needed to think through the entire photograph, from how they saw the scene, to how the camera would see the scene to how that final picture would give to the audience exactly the sense the photographer had before depressing the button.

Once again, there’s an element of architecture there. When you’re building something, you need to understand how the stresses and supports and elements of your final work are going to interact. Like when kids who are good with Legos are about to build: What pieces do I have? What colors? How can those pieces connect in such a way to become the castle I have in my head? If you just start chucking Legos onto the base - like I did - you’d end up ripping up half of the thing to get it working, and even then, you might not have the time and energy to get through it.

A lot of people talk about how programming is an art, but not enough people talk about how art is a science. The art is the detail, it’s the delicate hows that make up your work. The art of a photograph is the specific way your eye follows the curve of a railing and the shadow it casts towards the face of your subject, and more specifically, how that image is crafted to make you feel. The science of it is internalizing how light exposes on silver nitrate, and how the settings on your lens will leave one part in focus but another pleasantly blurred. You can shoot from the hip with art, and a lot of the time you probably should. But the science? Spending some time working that out may be for the best.

Or perhaps I just feel unproductive in those early days and need to justify it. If so, consider this bit of writing a resounding success.

You have a hero love and a villain we hate. The hero has kicked many asses on his way to the villain, and the villain has kicked even more. If you’ve done your job properly, the fight between the hero and the villain is - at best - evenly matched. Better yet, the hero is outmatched enough that we don’t see how he can win this one. Now it’s time for the throwdown.

You’ve done most of the heavy lifting. Nearly all of the really difficult work is behind you. Yet even though this fight is the payoff you’ve worked so hard to earn, you can’t get cocky. One trial remains: the resolution of your final battle. Step lightly. Disaster awaits the unwary.

Today, I come to warn you of one of the most dangerous traps. A resolution to battle that is sure to leave your audience bitter and dissatisfied. They may not recognize which misstep is responsible, but they will not be pleased. This pitfall is a combat technique which properly executed cannot be defeated.

Look back to an earlier point in your story. At any point does either your hero’s mentor or the villain demonstrate something that when properly executed cannot be defeated? Did you insert this scene so that either:

1. Your hero can catch the villain in it to finally succeed?
2. Your villain or hero can use it, only to see it miraculously defeated before their eyes?

If so, repent while there is still time. There are few reasons for any technique that properly executed cannot be defeated to exist in your story. There are even fewer reasons for them to serve as a plot device in your final battle. The first reason may seem more incorrect than the second. After all, we’ve all seen too many battles where a hero is pounded only to suddenly win with a well timed Crane Kick to not cringe a little at it.The second, though? What’s so bad about that?

The only thing worse than inserting a Super Move into your story and using it is inserting a Super Move and then running kryptonite over it it in a cheap attempt to create tension. If you’ve decided a move that properly executed cannot be defeated has a place in your story, go all the way with it. Make the move as cool as it is unstoppable and make us cheer when the villain is pounded into the ground with it. Using it at all is a bad idea in most situations, but is still superior to showing us a BFG in Act One only to have the villain laugh it off in Act Three. Trust me, our tension has not increased. Only our frustration.

If your hero is unable to defeat the villain without something that properly executed cannot be defeated, perhaps your story was meant to be a tragedy.

This is the third article in a series inspired by Paul Lockhart’s essay “A Mathematician’s Lament.” It is a meditation on Art, Mathematics and Education. The first part, “Why Them Kids Don’t Learn Nothing,” is primarily about education. The second part, “If Triangles Could Fly,” talks about art as a process of discovery, and this third part is a story of my first experiences with poetry.

The impression we are given is of something very cold and highly technical, that no one could possibly understand— a self-fulfilling prophesy if there ever was one.

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

It wasn’t the only time this happened, but it was the most absurd. I was somewhere in the middle of 11th grade, sitting in my advanced track English class. We were reading and discussing poetry. By this point, poetry was already the bane of my existence, and what was passing for discussion in class was the biggest reason. The poem under the microscope at the point this story gets interesting was some Sylvia Plath thing that talked about a gargoyle and may have had some “slick with rain” imagery going on as well. I can’t remember.

The way it worked was simple. Someone was called upon to read the poem. They did, in that halting, uncomfortable way someone reads something they don’t understand. Then the teacher asked the, “What did that poem mean?” question. No one would answer it, so the teacher would narrow down the question, aiming for the answer she already had written down on her lesson plan. “When she talked about the rain-slick gargoyle, what was she saying?”

No one in the class had given a single reaction to this poem yet. No one had even shown much interest in it. Yet here we were, being asked to pick out a single metaphor from the work as a whole. Some students reached into the clouds and pulled out a few random answers, until the teacher got bored with it all and just told us what the damned gargoyle in the damned rain meant and tried to move on.

Of course, I didn’t let her. “How do you know that’s what it means?” I asked. There’s probably one of me in every English class, laying in wait with our subjective viewpoint and our theories of literary relativity. In her defense, my teacher was genial about these interruptions, and for a few minutes we went back and forth, her telling me she just knew and me saying she couldn’t, unless she was hiding the author’s notebook back there somewhere.

We weren’t alone. My 11th grade advanced English class occasionally joined forces with the senior, AP level English class to talk poetry together. The 12th grade teacher, who to this point had been sitting at one of the desks quietly, suddenly stood up, berated me for being disrespectful to my teacher, and stormed out.

Later, I was called to that 12th grade teacher’s class where I was told that she was sick of people acting like literature wasn’t a science, and that there weren’t right and wrong answers in the field. I had joined the ranks of those troublemakers who wanted to discuss writing, and from that point forward my grades in that class dropped from A’s and B’s to C’s and D’s.

This was how I learned to hate writing.

If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing of excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students?

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

Only, I didn’t.

What happened in my mind through high school was a form of literary schizophrenia. I loved to read, and nothing in school ever got me to stop. Reading was something I learned from my family, not school, and so school had no power over it. I also really enjoyed writing, but the only kind of writing I was asked to do in school I was bad at. If you had asked me at any point during school what I thought of writing, I’d have said I hated it and I was going to become a programmer. At the same time, I was starting my school’s first literary magazine and writing for it. What those English classes did, I think, was convince me I wasn’t any good at it. For most people, that eventually leads to “I don’t want to do it,” too. It may have with me, if I hadn’t gotten lucky.

The casualty of my high school English education was poetry. I never really read it prior to having it assigned in class, and nothing about the way it was taught to me gave me a taste for it. Unlike prose, which I loved independently from school, poetry was ripe for the I’m No Good=I Don’t Like It equation. I didn’t understand it, and while I was sure my teachers weren’t right about the meaning of the stuff they were putting in front of me, I didn’t have the tools to find my own meaning. I also didn’t have the interest. Thus, poetry sucked.

Why aren’t we giving our students a chance to even hear about these things, let alone giving them an opportunity to opinions, and reactions?

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

When Paul Lockhart discusses the failure of our mathematics program, he talks a lot about how we don’t give our kids the chance to discuss the problems, to react to the solutions and to offer their own opinions. The rote transmission of information, the memorization of that information and then the regurgitation of it onto tests is what convinces people that they don’t like something because they don’t understand it.

I didn’t like poetry because I never learned an appreciation for it. I was never allowed to react to it, or to wrestle with its own particular intersections of form and intent. Being a good reader isn’t really something you can teach, per se. Neither is being a good writer. Learning to express yourself in a specific form, and how to understand someone else’s work in that same form, is a constant process. You get better at it the more you do it, and in my experience you never get best at it. There’s always a higher rung on the ladder. The only way to find it is to read and write more. And the only way you’re ever going to do that is to first learn how to enjoy it.

I never really read a poem in high school, and the only time I wrote one was when I was told “Write a sonnet.” Knowing nothing about sonnets save their meter, I produced what I can only imagine was a lifeless, awful piece of verse. The only thing I knew to do with a sonnet was to look at the number of lines and pick out that the analogy in that specific poem was the flower being the man’s lover.

Yet, when I went home and finished the fourth book of The Wheel of Time, I spent hours tearing it apart, talking about the scenes I thought were powerful and about what I thought would happen next. I didn’t talk about plot structure or chart out that stupid narrative pyramid, nor did I always use words like foreshadowing and dramatic irony, but I knew what worked in that story and, more importantly, I knew why. Because I called up my friends and I debated about it.

‘No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!’

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

The trick, I learned much later, was to realize that the teaching had been flawed and not my ability. I shouldn’t even call it a trick, because it took me almost a decade to really understand that. In fact, long after I decided my English teachers were full of it and that I could write if I damned well wanted to, I still let the lingering anger at verse stick with me. I had my own, personal feelings on prose that overrode the reduction of it a formula containing metaphor, symbolism, man vs. nature conflict and third person omniscient viewpoint. I had nothing of the kind for poetry, so the trivialization of it became what the form was, to me. I knew they were full of it, yet I still bought into their crap when it came to verse.

Finally, after years of prodding by my friends who hadn’t been so tainted, I’m coming around. I’m reading Bukowski and liking it. I’m even thinking about what it means. That makes me lucky. Most people never challenge their school-borne assumptions of a subject, and I can’t blame them. What stimuli do we have outside of school that would cause us to reexamine something and see if the reason we didn’t like it was because it wasn’t for us, or because we had been never been allowed to learn what it was?

That’s got me thinking. Have we reached a point when we need to teach our children not to care what their teachers say? I had a lot of good teachers, so that can’t be true, yet I only learned to love poetry after I stripped what my English instructors taught me of any authority. School makes noise about wanting to teach critical thinking skills for the Real World, and in that they have have inadvertently succeeded. If kids are going to come out of school having learned something, it’s going to have to start with more students able to look at a D on their Literature paper and decide if it was because they didn’t understand the assignment, or because they did.

This is the second article in a series inspired by Paul Lockhart’s essay “A Mathematician’s Lament.” It is a meditation on Art, Mathematics and Education. The first part, “Why Them Kids Don’t Learn Nothing,” is primarily about education. This second part talks about art as a process of discovery, and the third part, “How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love the Verse” is a story of my first experiences with poetry.

One of the things that always fascinated me about J.R.R. Tolkien’s work on Lord of the Rings was his attitude that he was not the creator of his stories, but the discoverer of them. He often attributed inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his works to this fact. The story was not inconsistent, he had just misunderstood what he was unearthing. This isn’t an uncommon view amongst artists. “The greatest artist has no single concept which a rough marble block does not contain already in its core,” Michelangelo wrote above sculpture, and J. Michael Straczynski has compared his writing to unearthing artifacts.

The idea that the artist’s work is more about discovering and communicating patterns and ideas already out there, somewhere, in the ether is one I share. Writing, to me, has always involved two major steps. The first is abstract, a sort of reaching out blindly and feeling out the overall shape of the story. When I describe this part I talk a lot about themes and scope and pace, but it’s really not that technical. By the end, the most I have is closer to a probability cloud than an outline. I can see the shape, and I can sense the feeling it gives me, but that’s about it. From there, it feels a lot like passing questions and ideas through the cloud and seeing how they fit. If they fit. If I’ve “created” anything at all, it was the initial cloud. After that, the only things I can take credit for are discovering the correct pieces. The things I create whole-cloth from that point are the ideas that are dead wrong and have no place in the story.

Trust me, I get that this is a hokey, dippy way of discussing the creative process, and it likely sounds as if I’m wearing a tin hat, waiting for the otherworldly transmissions to get through. That’s not what I mean, and this is exactly why talking about a creative process - any creative process - is either superficial and incorrect, or slightly less incorrect but sounds batshit insane.

I do believe that there’s an important, powerful process of discovery present in any artistic creation. It’s about finding something that vibrates at that perfect frequency. The one that, when someone else reads or views what you’ve made, comes across as more true than truth. Doing that is, I think, more alchemical than just making things up and slapping them down on the page.

But if art is just discovery, why are some people successful at it and others not? Are they just worse archaeologists? No, because it’s not just discovery. It’s only part of the process. The other part is communicating that idea. That’s where things get ugly.

The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant.

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

Before Paul Lockhart starts talking about how poorly we teach mathematics, he talks passionately about what mathematics is. It’s not, he states, about adding numbers together. It’s about finding patterns, the communicating them. As he says, the art of mathematics is not the fact itself, but how that fact is expressed. Two equations can express the same fact, but one can be superior by expressing it more beautifully.

The first thing I wrote about after taking in “Lockhart’s Lament” was a bunch of stuff about education, but it wasn’t the first thing that grabbed me while reading. What hit me like one of those Japanese war clubs you see Oni carrying in woodblock carvings was how similar Lockhart’s description of mathematics was to my own creative process. Is mathematics a purer art than the others? Maybe. For the moment, I don’t care. Better, purer, whatever - I finally got why people became mathematicians. The art of mathematics holds the same lure as the art of writing or painting: The siren call of bringing into the world a unique and beautiful argument about the very nature of the world.

This is a major theme in mathematics: things are what you want them to be. You have endless choices; there is no reality to get in your way.

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

When I look with skepticism upon stories whose primary objective is realism, I do so partly because I can’t understand why someone would part with the freedom the form has given them. Much as Lockhart decries the boiling of mathematics education down to a series of complicated but rote “proofs” of obvious things (like the angles of symmetrically crossed lines being equal), I chafe at the notion of writing’s primary function to be journalistic. While the chronicling of actual things is a noble pursuit, in writing - like mathematics - you have endless choices. As Lockhart points out about math classes: there are cases where 1 + 1 != 2.

And yet, even with complete freedom, there are rules. The trick with art, any art, is twofold. You must be boldly creative while conforming to the physics of your chosen playground. The real beauty of creating something is the duality of the process. Your imagination must run wild while your express the fruits of your imagination in a way that rings true. At its core, mathematics plays by sets of rules that cannot be ignored. Writing is the same way. So is painting. But those physics, those rules, change depending on where your imagination takes you. “Everything is relative and relational,” is how Lockhart puts it. Indeed.

Look at Michelangelo. Within his art, the art of creating images, his choices were limitless. All that mattered was the intended effect it would have on its audience. The hard work begins once he took his first step. Deciding to communicate through sculpture put certain boundaries, certain rules on how he could work. Everything is possible in art, perhaps, but stone carries certain, immutable properties. So does fresco, but those properties are almost entirely different than those of stone. Everything is relative and relational.

Doing mathematics should always mean discovering patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

I wish I could have described my own art form as beautifully as Lockhart describes his. The best I can do is take his statement and change “doing mathematics” to “writing.” The patterns we find as writers are different than those found by mathematicians, but no less important. They serve a different purpose to their audiences, but are no less in need of people to craft beautiful and meaningful explanations for them.

Until reading Lockhart’s essay, I never truly understood mathematics. It seemed to me a powerful and important scientific tool. I was wrong. Mathematics is no mere tool to express scientific fact just as writing is not simply a means of transmitting factual information. These are applications of wide and versatile art forms. That a writer can use his craft to record history as easily as he tells a faerie tale is a testament to its power. For the first time, I understand that math’s role in physics and chemistry is no different. We’re both finding our own patterns and struggling to master the means of expressing them.

Grasping a little of what makes math an art, I’m looking back to my own playground and understanding it a little better. As Lockhart and Tolkien and Michelangelo and Straczynski have explained in their own words, art is exploration and creation and discovery and communication all at once. If we talk about it like archaeologists unearthing artifacts, it’s not only because we’re crazy. It’s because we’re looking for a way to make you believe triangles can fly.

This is the first article in a series inspired by Paul Lockhart’s essay “A Mathematician’s Lament.” It is a meditation on Art, Mathematics and Education. This first part is primarily about education. The second part, “If Triangles Could Fly” talks about art as a process of discovery and the third part, “How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love the Verse” is a story of my first experiences with poetry.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but there are a lot of people who think our system of education is fundamentally broken. In fact, gallons of ink and billions of pixels have been conscripted to communicate how much danger we think we’re in and solutions we will never implement. It helps that every one of these thinkers and nearly everyone in the audience went through some version of the same story, giving us all common ground on which to debate. If nothing else proves the theory that we have educational problems, that everyone can read an article damning our system and nod their heads for most of it should do the trick. Unfortunately, a lot of those people nodding will suggest or support solutions that only escalate the problem. So it goes.

I’m one of the many who look back on my trip through school with cynicism, not just because of my own experienced, but because of what I watched the system do to my friends. I was lucky, too. I attended a well funded, middle-class public school. We didn’t have serious problems with violence to deal with, and we had enough money in the budget to keep our textbooks less than 10 years behind the times. I was able to join a marching band that provided school-owned instruments to the students going without, and the students in art class had, you know, art supplies. I could have had it a lot worse, yet most of the problems endemic in my school system were the same as those both above and below my school’s means. The blow was softened by economic factors, but we still got bludgeoned a bit.

Paul Lockhart’s excellent essay “Lockhart’s Lament” goes into (25 page) detail on the problem of our mathematics education in our school system, and he gets everything right except his assertion that our mathematics curriculum is more onerous than the rest. I understand why he thinks this; I would have said the same about my own art of choice while saying that at least in math, there’s occasionally a verifiable right or wrong answer to keep mean spirited teachers at bay. As Lockhart notes, though, the facade of absolute correctness in mathematics makes it that much easier to teach incorrectly. So it seems we’re both right; our subjects of interest are taught in the wrong way. The logical conclusion can only lead to depression: we aren’t teaching much of anything correctly.

What other subject shuns its primary sources— beautiful works of art by some of the most creative minds in history— in favor of third-rate textbook bastardizations?

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

The answer is: all of them. Much as I thought that forcing the Pythagorean Theorum on kids at least taught a true thing, Lockhart believes forcing every high school student to progress through the same three Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet) at least does not shun some of the most important literature written. He’s correct in a way, but much as requiring the memorization of the Pythagorean Theorum is inferior to allowing children to explore why triangles work the way they do, memorizing facts about a work they must agree is good before they’ve read it is inferior to allowing children to discover what makes art great - and to define greatness on their own terms.

The same can be said for every discipline we teach, save for, perhaps, graphic arts and music. These subjects are not on a standardized test and have not been reduced to a series of educational milestones, and so the teachers of them have more latitude. The flip side is that these are the first subjects to lose their funding for precisely the same reasons. The people who went through band or chorus or art got something out of it. It’s just not available to kids in every school.

English teachers know that spelling and pronunciation are best learned in a context of reading and writing. History teachers know that names and dates are uninteresting when removed from the unfolding backstory of events. Why does mathematics education remain stuck in the nineteenth century?

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

I wish to God Lockhart was right. The problems in our curriculum run as deep as they can, corrupting every subject the demons of standardization can get their hands on. If teachers knew that spelling and pronunciation were learned in the context of reading and writing, multiple years would not have been spent diagramming sentences. If history teachers knew that names and dates were uninteresting when removed from their narrative context, there would have been something on my history tests beyond names and dates. If social studies teachers cared about producing civil-minded students, we would have discussed the Declaration of Independence and not memorized it. Our entire educational system is stuck in the 19th century, and shows no sign of getting out.

When the No Child Left Behind act was passed, in all its Orwellian name-reversing glory, it calcified a system that puts plain facts above context, creativity and analysis. Encoding a silly, memorized equation within a poorly written word problem actually makes it more insidious than the initial trauma of memorization because it pretends to be about something other than rote fact-cramming. Beyond all arguments about how best to make students interested in subjects, and how to build context for them, fact-cramming simply does not work. Years ago on Saturday Night live, Father Guido Sarducci advertised his Five Minute University that would teach only the things you’re going to remember: Supply and Demand, “¿Como está usted?” and “Where is God?”. That’s it. And that’s about all people remember from a curriculum composed of fact-cramming.

No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a “mixed number,” while 5/2 is an “improper fraction.” They’re equal for crying out loud. They are the same exact numbers, and have the same exact properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

I’m reminded of my middle-school English classes, where we were tested on the definition of words like “gerund”, “participle” and “transitive verb” on a weekly basis. Outside of school - hell, outside of middle-school - no one proofreads a friend or colleague’s work and writes about their use of a dangling participle. They comment on words and punctuation that decrease its readability. That’s how we approach writing: how well does it express what it means to say? No one diagrams a sentence during proofreading, and the time spent diagramming sentences in fifth grade does not produce more readable work. The word “gerund” will likely never pass the lips of 90% of the people out of school.

Much as Lockhart is disturbed by the redundant nomenclature in math curriculum, I look back at my time in English classes and shudder at how they nearly destroyed the curiosity and love I had for language. 2 1/2 and 5/2 are equal in the same way “John watched as his soup boiled over.” and “John watched the pot as soup boiled over the edge.” mean the same thing. That one uses a transitive and one uses an intransitive verb is unimportant. The differences lie in clarity and impact, just as they do when you choose to write a fraction as 2 1/2 or 5/2. Learning names for the differences before discussing how they read is counterintuitive.

High School Geometry: Instrument of the Devil

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

Why is our education system failing? Every subject in our curriculum reaches some point analogous to High School Geometry. Literature has Composition, Social Studies gives us Civics and Science teaches us Physics. Each of these classes take a core idea in its discipline and strip away everything save for rules without context that must be memorized and applied across the same sequence of homework problems, over and over again.

Composition is the damned art of putting words on paper, yet the class does little save forcing students to work through predefined style templates on a limited list of topics. Physics is the study of how the universe functions, but is taught the same way as Lockhart describes Geometry: lots of symbology, little crashing objects into one another. And as for Civics, a class which purports to cover the implications of the American Experiment, it can’t bother to do more than require its students memorize the names of our court systems. My civics class could be passed using nothing other than the Awesome Notebook passed down from classes past. Yours could as well, I’d wager.

I wish Lockhart was right. I wish that only mathematics was so corrupted as to teach its students effectively nothing. He’s not, and it’s not. Our system of education is built on principles so faulty that it should have collapsed years ago. We condemn buildings this unsafe and then we implode the things so that they won’t accidentally crush their occupants. Until we do the same to our schools, students will continue to emerge with their curiosity and creativity left as little more than splatters on the Chemistry Lab floor.

It’s been two weeks since our last talk.  Welcome back to the spotlight.

thanks, eric … yikes, two weeks already?

Scary, isn’t it?  We’re almost to the finish line.  I’d like to talk a little about your interaction with the community this time.  But first, the important question: Are you going to make it to 14 and a half?

that’s looking grim, man…. on the plus side, i got the half-song done last night. but i’m cutting it really close. i have only 8 completed songs, and there are just 5 days and change left before official event cut-off… ok, let’s say YES. yes, i will make it to 14. but take that with a big grain of “i hope.”

I have faith in you.  Your writing, to me, seems to be getting stronger and more confident as the month goes on.  Is that just my perception?

well it’s interesting that you should say so, cause any changes you might see in my writing over the course of this month stem from a complete deficit of confidence.

i keep having ideas that are about 10 x more ambitious than my skill on any given instrument, and end up feeling so awful about the whole thing that i’m really stripping it down to basics. of the last 5 songs i posted, 4 have had simpler arrangements than anything i’ve done before

that might come across as me being more confident in the songs themselves, or my voice, or whatever, but in the spirit of full disclosure, i’m arranging within my instrumental prowess.

that being said, i’m becoming more enamored with the stripped down isaac sound, and i just may carry on in that vein after this torturous month is over.

It’s funny you should mention the simpler stylings.  I challenged you earlier this month to produce a stripped-down song, and was surprised to see not 1, but 3 far simpler arrangements.  Did I cross a journalistic line?

hahah i’m so totally your bitch

well as you saw on the site, i originally wrote a piano and vocal piece based on your challenge, although i did put in some sound effects. after that, i found that things just seemed to work better with the bare-bones instrumentation. i do have a song in progress that’s in-your-face loud and elaborate, so i haven’t given up on that aesthetic…. but yeah, i’d say your challenge opened me up to what i’ve been doing over the last week for sure.

but you were my friend and an artistic inspiration long before you became my interviewer anyway. if anything, this journalism gig is crossing a friendship line.

Touche, and thanks for the segue to community involvement.  What effect does the feedback from the community have on your writing?  In such a compressed time frame with such a small social circle it must carry a different impact than normal critique.

indeed it does.

comments on one’s early FAWM songs can really inform the creation of future ones.

last year, i set out to make a bunch of pop songs, and it was people’s response to my branching out that led to fawm 2007’s output being a mishmash of genres and mood experiments.

this year, i’ve found that the feedback has influenced me in slightly different ways.

i’m not so much striving to capture more sounds or more styles…. but rather i want to write more honestly.

i never noticed how many people comment primarily on lyrics.

obviously lyrics hold a place of supreme importance in music, and have differing value to every music listener.

but it’s almost like i didn’t discover until fawm 2008 that i could use lyrics to actually move people, instead of just making them laugh or roll their eyes or whatever.

some people in the community picked up on the poignancy behind some lines in my first few songs, so that kind of drove me off that cliff of “too much information”

and i posted this ridiculously revealing song about my relationship with my father. well there was no turning back from there. i’ve still been posting a mixture of fictional songs with autobiographical songs, but i feel like everything has been more raw and emotional.

(hopefully without being trite or cloying…. feedback thusfar looks like i pulled it off, knock on wood)

How about other people’s music?  Do you find that’s an important influence as the month stretches on?

in some ways it is. to be completely honest, commenting slows to a crawl at this time of the month. basically, you have hundreds of fawmers desperately hurrying to reach the quota of 14.5 songs, and the total number of streamable demos has grown so large (2,428 as i type this) that every individual song starts receiving less and less attention.

but up until that turning point where people stop listening as much and focus primarily on writing (usually mid-week 3), people take tons of inspiration from others’ music.

i know that for me, hearing another person do something unexpected is the most inspirational for me.

i mean, there are lots of amazing songs posted by some very talented people… but when someone breaks free from their creative comfort zone and does something risky or reckless, that’s when i look over at jackie t (that’s my electric) and start wanting to write.

Do you have a tight circle within the community who you keep in contact with?

i wouldn’t say it’s tight. you see the same names recur on the same FAWMers’ songs a lot, mostly because of the way they have the site set up with a “watchlist” of your favourite songwriters.

there’s a few people on there whose music i appreciate so much (and it seems to be mutual) that we interact a bit more personally than with others. and a handful of FAWMers have ended up on my chat software.

your question actually shines a light on the biggest thing i would want to tell an outsider about FAWM… and that is, the community will give back to you whatever you put into the community. someone who joins FAWM, posts a bunch of songs but never comments on other people’s songs, and the only time they post on the forum is to put up a whiny message like, “how come [name]’s songs have 20 comments apiece, but nobody’s even listened to mine?” well, that guy isn’t going to be too welcome.

but if you’re there to have fun, and you’re sharing your thoughts on other people’s ideas and music, they’ll listen to yours. it all sounds very obvious, but every year i’m surprised to see that some people just don’t get it.

You mentioned you were planning on collaborating this time.  Has that happened?

it has! i had a collaboration planned out with elaine dimasi, the FAWMer from new york who covered my “nisku” song. but i ended up begging off until next month because of the tight deadlines, etc.

then last night, i received an IM from burr, the guy who runs the site (the “founding FAWMer”), and he invited me to contribute to a song he’d written.

it’s interesting, i’m actually quite self-conscious about the creation process itself. i very rarely let anybody hear anything until it’s in a state i consider presentable… so for my very first collaboration to be so spontaneous, and for it to be with the guy who runs this whole shebang… well, i’m impressed that i didn’t get all flustered or flake out.

it’s a good song! he had a killer riff to begin with, and after i added my verses, he went back and put the whole thing together. so while my contribution was minimal, it was a great introduction to the world of collaboration.

now i’m itchin’ to do more…. after FAWM, of course.

Does a collaboration count for both of you?  How does that work?

only one person is supposed to put a collaboration up (so it only counts towards one person’s “total” ticker), but they put the collaborator’s name in the song title so it comes up in searches.

so our collab shows under burr’s songs, as “talking in code (with Isaac Quatorze)”

but we can both count it as our half song

How about your non-FAWM life?  Is it surviving the month?

it’s surviving. i can’t remember if this came up during our last interview, but there’s a term on the site for the spouses / significant others of those participating in the event: FAWM widows. it’s sadly appropriate. i’ve been seeing my honey for brief 3-hour visits on saturdays, and i can barely focus on work these days.

Are the loved ones understanding of what the month does to your relationship?  Any tension?

well my family has been annoyed but they put up with it. and my very own best beloved FAWM widow has been nothing but supportive through it all, even offering to play any instruments for me while i carry on to writing the next song.

the biggest tension would be with work.

the timing is just so unfortunate. i was put on a new special project from february to april, which is very brain-intensive and requires frequent interruptions to meet with the group and share information, so i constantly have to fight the urge to start writing lyrics at work, and if i do fall into that trap, then my work suffers as a result.

Is it worse this year than last?

it is worse… much worse, for some reason. last year i had days and nights where i could sit at the piano or guitar for hours without anything coming to me. this year, i’ve had 3-4 day periods where i didn’t even want to see an instrument. it’s strange, i made a conscious effort not to let myself feel pressured by FAWM this year, and instead i’ve probably felt more pressure than i did in ‘07. AND i’m further behind by far.

I don’t want to keep you from your final sprint, so let’s wrap things up with this:  How bad is he last week of February going to be?

only time will tell…. i did, however, have the foresight to book off work on the 28th and 29th, so those will be two long days of the mad sprint. thanks for your encouragement eric, and for these thought-provoking interviews

And thank you for humoring me. Good luck!